On today's show: All the updates on this terrible shooting in New York City, plus a massive controversy, over Sidney Sweeney's cleavage, and we'll bring you all the foreign policy and economics updates. Also, we're 35 days out from the release of my brand new book, Lions and Scavengers, coming September 2nd. It lays out the defining battle of our time between those who build and those who wish to tear everything down via resentment and envy. I expose how the scavengers are undermining the west, and why the Lions have to fight back.
00:00:00.000All righty, folks, tons coming up on today's show.
00:00:02.000All the updates on this terrible shooting in New York City, plus massive controversy, internet cleavage over Sidney Sweeney's cleavage, among other things.
00:00:11.000And we'll bring you all the foreign policy and economics updates.
00:00:13.000But first, we're 35 days out from the release of my brand new book, Lions and Scavengers, coming September 2nd.
00:00:47.000So yesterday afternoon, horrific shooting in Midtown Manhattan.
00:00:51.000According to the Associated Press, a man stalked through a Manhattan office tower, firing a rifle, killing four people, including a New York City police officer, wounding a fifth person before shooting himself.
00:01:01.000That shooting took place at a skyscraper that is home to both the headquarters of the NFL as well as Blackstone.
00:01:07.000It appears that the shooter was attempting to target the NFL headquarters, got off at the wrong floor, and just started shooting people.
00:01:14.000The gunman was identified as a person with a documented mental health history.
00:01:18.000We don't use the names of mass shooters on the program because we don't wish to give them the sort of glory and attention that they so desperately seek.
00:01:27.000The motive was supposedly unknown, although there was apparently a note on the body that suggested that this person, who apparently had a history when he was in high school, being a pretty good football player, he said he had CTE.
00:01:39.000The short note was scribbled according to CNN over three pages and found by investigators after the shooting.
00:01:44.000It apparently expressed grievances with the NFL and suggested that he suffered from some sort of brain damage and had mental illness.
00:01:52.000And that is why he was doing all of this.
00:01:54.000Surveillance videos showed the man exiting a double park BMW just before 6.30 p.m., carrying an M4 rifle and then marching across a public plaza into the building.
00:02:03.000Apparently, he killed a police officer who was off duty working a corporate security detail and then also hit a woman who tried to take cover as he sprayed the lobby with gunfire.
00:02:11.000He then went to an elevator bank, shot a guard at the security desk, and then shot another man in the lobby, then went all the way up to the 33rd floor offices of the company that owned the building.
00:02:20.000Now, again, that's probably not on purpose.
00:02:22.000Probably what happened is that someone summoned the elevator because when you go into these big office buildings in New York, you usually have to have a key card to get into the level that you are seeking to go to.
00:02:31.000Probably this person just got into the elevator, went up to wherever it was going, got off and started shooting people.
00:02:36.000He shot and killed one person on that floor, and then he shot and killed himself.
00:02:41.000The officer killed was a man named Didarul Islam, an immigrant from Bangladesh who had served as a police officer in New York City for three and a half years.
00:02:48.000Mayor Eric Adams said that officials are still unraveling what took place.
00:02:54.000There is a rifle case, revolver, magazines, and ammo in the car, and as well as medication that belonged apparently to the shooter.
00:03:00.000The vehicle traveled all the way across the country.
00:03:02.000It went through Colorado, then Nebraska and Iowa, and then went through New Jersey on Monday and drove into York City thereafter.
00:03:11.000Well, I mean, obviously, the media continued to get this sort of stuff wrong in early reporting, and this is why it is worthwhile to wait for a little bit before you make a judgment as to the motivations or the identity of the shooter.
00:03:21.000Here is CNN in real time getting it wrong, suggesting this person was quote unquote possibly white.
00:04:05.000CNN is always quick to jump to a particular racial narrative.
00:04:08.000And because this was not a white person shooting up an office building, presumably it will be out of the news within about five minutes.
00:04:15.000With that said, CNN tends to get things wrong, just as most networks tend to get things wrong in the early minutes of any reportage.
00:04:22.000The bigger point here about the city of New York is that you really should not be electing a mayor of the city who hates the cops, regardless of the motivation of the shooter.
00:04:31.000And we can talk about the NFL and CTE and the damage that is done to brains by the repeated concussions that football players suffer.
00:04:38.000But the real story here is that if you're a resident of New York City, forget about CTE and the motivations of the shooter.
00:04:44.000Why would you elect as mayor a person who obviously does not like the police?
00:04:47.000Flashback, November 7th, 2020, Zoran Mamdani, now the frontrunner for New York mayor, quote, nature is healing.
00:04:54.000He tweeted that in response to a person writing, I just saw a cop crying in his car, L-M-A-O.
00:05:00.000Nature is healing, says Zoran Mamdani.
00:05:03.000And there's a person who obviously has animus for the police department.
00:05:06.000He's also somebody who believes in defunding the police, and now he's attempting to walk that back as he runs for New York mayor.
00:05:12.000If New York decides they wish to embrace a person who hates the cops, who wish to undermine the cops, who wishes to destroy the ability of the cops to police the city, you will end up with more violence, period, of all sorts, people being thrown in front of subways, people engaging in mass shootings, people engaging in stabbings.
00:05:28.000Now, all of that will go up because the cops are indeed the barrier between chaos and normalcy in the city of New York.
00:05:35.000So if you're in New York City this morning and you're thinking of voting for the socialist idiot who is Zarn Mamzani, you might want to think twice because honestly, every incidence of violence just underscores that you need a virile and powerful police department in order to ensure safety in a major city like New York.
00:05:52.000All righty, folks, coming up, a commercial features Sydney Sweeney and everybody goes crazy because of Nazism or something.
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00:08:13.000Okay, meanwhile, in significantly lighter cultural news, the big controversy of the day, believe it or not, surrounds Sidney Sweeney's chest.
00:08:19.000Now, I know Sidney Sweeney, very famous actress.
00:08:23.000She's been doing a number of movies lately, but she's mostly famous because she, when she's on TV, when she's, when she's doing SNL, she shows a lot of cleavage.
00:08:31.000That is mostly what she is famous for.
00:08:33.000Listen, she's a very attractive woman, of course, of course.
00:10:15.000Okay, so she shuts the hood on one Mustang, get a tight shot of her rear, and then she gets into another Mustang.
00:10:22.000You know, this is sort of supposed to be classic Americana.
00:10:25.000Okay, and when we say classic Americana, we mean that it's a cheesecake shot.
00:10:29.000So this has resulted in people going absolutely insane, like totally crazy.
00:10:35.000And I think first, it's important to note that people who are characterizing American Eagle as some sort of bizarre right-wing company are missing the boat.
00:10:41.000American Eagle is not a right-wing company.
00:10:42.000American Eagle is a jeans company that follows whatever it thinks are the prevailing trends of the time.
00:10:47.000So here, for example, is an ad that they cut in 2019.
00:10:52.000You can see in this ad, it is a bunch of people who are variously abled, who are of various body types.
00:11:03.000In any case, American Eagle is not a right-wing company is the point here.
00:11:06.000So the real question is, what is the zeitgeist?
00:11:08.000And this is being read in fascinating ways by the left and by the right.
00:11:12.000So the left is breaking down into sort of three categories over the Sydney Sweeney ad.
00:11:15.000And again, it is amazing that we are now having a controversy over what would have been in about 2005, a perfectly normal ad on your television.
00:11:24.000We'll get to the right in a second, because I'm old enough to remember when the right would have objected to such an ad.
00:11:28.000And some of us who are traditionally minded still object to the overt sexualization of women in advertising, as well as the sort of sexualization that is being done to our culture, right?
00:11:41.000Some of us are old enough to remember when Paris Hilton was grinding on cars for a Carls Jr. commercial back in 2005 and objecting to that as being too raunchy and problematic.
00:11:51.000And we say problematic, I don't mean like problematic in a left-wing sense, mean morally problematic to put scantily clad, attractive women in advertising specifically to get people to buy product.
00:12:02.000That poses a moral problem for the right.
00:12:04.000For the left, the left has gone completely insane.
00:12:06.000And so they've broken down into sort of two categories, both of them objecting to the ad.
00:12:12.000One is the sort of feminist line that this is the oversight.
00:12:33.000That does not mean that men should ogle women.
00:12:35.000But if we are going to pretend that beauty does not exist and that men don't appreciate it, then you are just ignoring the realities of life.
00:12:47.000They're very angry that, quote unquote, the male gaze exists, which is really, really silly.
00:12:54.000But that is really not the angle that they are taking most of all.
00:12:58.000What they're really taking most of all is the angle That there is something peculiarly Nazi about all of this.
00:13:06.000There's a piece in the Washington Post titled How American Eagle Sidney Sweeney Good Jeans ad Went Wrong.
00:13:11.000Well, it's hard to say that it went wrong when it is the most talked about ad of the last five years.
00:13:16.000For American Eagle, it's a very good ad.
00:13:18.000According to a conversation between fashion critic of the Washington Post, Rachel Toshjian and style memo newsletter writer Shane O'Neill, according to that particular discussion, the biggest problem with the ad is the genetic component.
00:13:33.000Quote, the most provocative part of the campaign is when she's talking about offspring and genes.
00:13:38.000That's a message about mutable identity there.
00:13:40.000And that could be extended into a vision of America as a place where you're not bound by who you are at birth, but they went the full opposite of that.
00:13:48.000To be honest, I think the ad campaign didn't exactly know what it wanted to be.
00:13:52.000I think what's getting people talking is how regressive the ads seem, says Tosh Jinn.
00:13:57.000The line about her having great genes.
00:13:58.000Several people are suggesting in the comments on Instagram and TikTok, this is a pro-eugenics ad.
00:14:03.000Whether or not that's the case, it is part of a wave of imagery of influencer pop stars and musicians that feel tethers to the value of another time.
00:14:09.000Do you mean, again, this is where you're going to see a right-wing backlash building?
00:14:13.000The values of another time would be men think attractive women are attractive because attractive women are attractive.
00:14:20.000Good-looking people are better looking than not good-looking people.
00:14:23.000Like, if that's tethered to the values of another time, that would be tethered to the values of all time.
00:14:35.000Okay, but the left is now trying to turn this into a sort of take on Volkish German Nazi-esque imagery.
00:14:44.000There is in this piece a reference to this idea.
00:14:47.000One of the writers, the newsletter writer for the Washington Post says, the first thing I thought of when I heard the tagline, Sidney Sweeney has great jeans, was the DHS Instagram account, which posted a subtly racist painting a few weeks ago and an explicitly racist painting last week.
00:15:00.000The latter depicted a gigantic blonde, buxom woman chasing away Native people to make way for white settlers.
00:15:04.000When this is the imagery being promoted by our government, a pun about jeans hits differently.
00:15:09.000And then the Washington Post style critic wrote, we're being fed a lot of images of thinness, whiteness, and unapologetic wealth porn.
00:15:17.000Well, with this cover, influencers like Alex Earle and Sabrina Carpenter's album cover.
00:15:22.000So again, they continue to promote the idea that there's something terribly evil and eugenic about the Sydney Sweeney ad.
00:15:30.000And here's a bunch of crazy ladies on TikTok saying the same thing.
00:15:33.000Those Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ads are weird.
00:17:54.000Nonetheless, the left is pushing forward with this nonsense.
00:17:56.000Advertising expert Robin Landa, a professor at Michael Graves College at Keene University, told Newsweek, quote, the campaign's punt isn't just tone deaf.
00:18:04.000Landa said the phrase good genes was once central to American eugenics ideology, which promoted white genetic superiority and enabled the forced sterilization of marginalized groups.
00:18:13.000Yeah, that's what's going to happen here.
00:18:14.000This is going to lead to forced sterilization.
00:18:24.000Because earned media is in fact, we wouldn't be talking about American Eagle on this program if the left hadn't gone totally insane over an innocuously stupid ad.
00:18:33.000And now to the response from the right.
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00:21:28.000So you're seeing a lot of people in the online space who are anti-left, who look at the insane reaction of the left to this, calling it Nazi propaganda, suggesting that it is all about the male gays and the evils of the male gays tethered to another time and all this crap.
00:21:43.000And you see a bunch of people on the right who are like, this ad is great.
00:21:57.000The left can be perfectly insane, stupid, and wrong.
00:22:01.000And also, this ad is effectively no different from when Brooks Shields back in the 1980s was saying, nobody gets between me and Mike Calvins.
00:22:09.000This ad can both be a rejection of the sort of post-gender insanity pushed by the left.
00:22:16.000And also, it can just be a piece of very softcore pornography.
00:22:19.000I say very softcore because, of course, it's not pornography quite, but it is certainly more in that arena than it is in the arena of art.
00:22:26.000Clearly, it is attempting to use sex to sell genes.
00:22:28.000That is literally the purpose of the commercial.
00:22:31.000And so being a moral traditionalist, I do not actually believe that commercials like this are amazing for America.
00:22:38.000I think it's good to expose the left for being totally insane.
00:22:41.000And I think it is worthwhile noting that the left is totally crazy.
00:22:44.000But if you're a traditionally moral person, if you're somebody who's a church goer, a synagogue goer, for example, and you look at this ad, you're saying, okay, what this looks like is a way to get a bunch of young people to buy jeans by showing Sidney Sweeney's button and breasts, basically.
00:22:57.000Is that like good for, is that good for culture?
00:22:59.000Is that good for male-female relations?
00:23:02.000Is the over-sexualization of our society, has that been a generally good thing or is that a generally bad thing?
00:23:08.000And so what you see is the reactionary nature of the anti-left, which is correct in slapping down the left, but then goes too far by suggesting that what we need, what America needs is more TNA.
00:23:19.000That TNA is the only solution to what ails us.
00:23:22.000Okay, well, actually, no, two things can be true at once.
00:23:36.000We live in an era in which Zendaya is in every movie that has been made for the past 10 years.
00:23:42.000So I don't think that we are in danger of like a whites-only Hollywood here or a whites-only advertising industry.
00:23:48.000So the anti-left is right to mock the left for being totally insipid and insane.
00:23:53.000But the right is also split between people who don't actually hold any sort of traditional values and people who do hold those traditional values.
00:24:00.000And they exist in a sort of uneasy coalition.
00:24:03.000It'll be fascinating to see how that coalition works moving forward.
00:24:06.000By the way, you're going to start to see this coalition fray, just politically speaking, once it's in power, because then there are divisions over how to actually handle policy.
00:24:14.000And you're seeing that happen actually in real time, right?
00:24:17.000You are seeing many of these so-called podcast bros who endorsed President Trump mainly out of ire at the left for being totally crazy are starting to revert to type.
00:24:25.000And now they're very critical of President Trump's actual conservative policies.
00:24:28.000Among these people would be, say, Andrew Schultz, the podcast bro who sort of endorsed Trump out of ire at the left and then turned around and talked about how the only honest people in America are the actual Democratic socialists of America.
00:24:38.000I think you'll see some of this from Joe Rogan, who is never on the right.
00:24:41.000It's always been amusing to me, like I'm friends with Joe.
00:24:43.000It's always been amusing to me when the left says the left needs its own Joe Rogan.
00:24:46.000It's like, guys, Joe Rogan would have voted for Bernie Sanders were he on the ballot.
00:24:54.000And so what you will see is as President Trump pursues conservative policies on everything from tax to foreign policy, that a lot of these podcast bros will be angry at President Trump because they're not actually conservative.
00:25:05.000A lot of the Manosphere guys are not actually conservative.
00:25:08.000They are more in line with the TNA is good for America, as opposed to the traditionally conservative position, which is modesty is good for America.
00:25:17.000Traditional male-female relationships are good for America and the left is insane.
00:25:21.000And so as we move forward in time, what you will see is a split inside the right over this issue.
00:25:26.000There is no split on the left, really.
00:25:29.000It's hard to find anybody on the left who's defending this ad today because they've all lost their minds.
00:25:33.000And so as long as the left is completely crazy, any splits on the right are going to look mild by comparison.
00:25:37.000But it's important to note that there is, in fact, a split on the right between the people who just don't like the left and the people who actually do hold traditional conservative values on a wide variety of issues.
00:25:47.000And you should keep your eye on that because a lot of those people who are basically joining the right-wing coalition as a response to the left will start infusing that right-wing coalition with left-wing values if given half a chance.
00:26:01.000It won't be the crazed full version left-wing values, but many of the left-wing values will migrate over to the right because of the nature of the coalition that has been created against the left right here.
00:26:10.000Okay, meanwhile, in other news, going to be a lot of big economic announcements this week, ranging from announcements about the interest rates, those are probably going to stay stable, to a bunch of earnings announcements that are supposed to come out over the course of this week.
00:26:22.000The biggest announcement, economically, of course, is President Trump and the EU coming together over the weekend to create a trade deal.
00:26:31.000The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece titled How Trump Got the Upper Hand Over the EU on Tariffs.
00:26:35.000Quote, soon after he sat down to negotiate Sunday with European officials on a potential tariff agreement at one of his Scotland Gulf resorts, President Trump said he wanted assurances that Europe would follow through on its pledges to increase investment in the United States.
00:26:47.000Trump questioned how the U.S. could be certain European companies wouldn't shrug off their plans after a deal was agreed upon, according to people familiar with the matter.
00:26:54.000After EU leaders assured him the investment plans were real, Trump responded, prove it.
00:26:58.000EU officials then rattled off the names of companies they said were already prepared to invest with a trade deal in place.
00:27:03.000Planned investments of almost $200 billion would grow by even more, they told Trump.
00:27:07.000At the end of the talks, Trump said he would impose 15% baseline tariffs on the block, and he said the EU would now be investing $600 billion in the United States under the deal.
00:27:15.000Now, unclear exactly whether it's going to be $600 billion or something less.
00:27:20.000Bottom line is President Trump used tremendous leverage in order to get the EU to accept essentially zero tariff barriers on American goods coming into the European market and 15% tariffs on European goods coming into the American market.
00:27:35.000Basically, President Trump made the bet, a correct bet, that the EU is more interested in the United States being able to shop in Europe and Europe still being able to ship goods to the United States than they are in a big trade war with the United States, that we essentially have more leverage than they do.
00:27:50.000And not only that, the EU is recognizing that if they don't make some sort of economic deal with President Trump, that could have security implications as well, which is why they've also been increasing their GDP spend on defense.
00:28:03.000So the bloc, the European bloc, had been making threats, and then they shifted their approach.
00:28:07.000They presented U.S. trade officials, according to the Wall Street Journal, with a proposal that included plans to increase purchases of American energy products and an offer to lower tariffs for certain U.S. imports.
00:28:17.000And then President Trump threatened again.
00:28:19.000And then the EU negotiators upped the ante.
00:28:23.000So again, President Trump used leverage.
00:28:26.000Howard Luttnick, his commerce secretary, very triumphant yesterday going around on Fox explaining.
00:28:31.000If the European Union is going to pay 15% and they sell us $600 billion worth of goods, that's $90 billion for America.
00:28:40.000And they agreed for the first time ever to cut all their tariffs, cut their barriers, and let American businesses and farmers and ranchers and fishermen finally sell into the European Union.
00:28:57.000Okay, so it is yet to be seen how huge it will be for America, because again, the EU is now saying that they're not sure how much they're going to buy.
00:29:04.000They're always going to buy a lot of American energy, by the way, because as they shift away from Russian supply, they're going to need to buy American LNG.
00:29:10.000As far as European investments in America, sure, they're going to try to build some stuff in America, presumably to avoid tariff barriers entering the United States, make their products more competitive.
00:29:20.000At the same time, American consumers are going to be paying higher prices on things they normally would have bought from Europe with the lower tariffs.
00:29:27.000Overall, the tariffs on Americans, which is what tariffs are there, attacks on Americans, because we're the ones who actually pay the bill when the prices go up.
00:29:35.000Those tariff rates are now at, on average, 15% across the board, which is the highest since the 1930s.
00:29:42.000And yet, the economy seems to be on relatively even footing right now.
00:29:45.000Bill Maher of HBO, he says, listen, I thought the tariffs were going to sink the economy.
00:30:49.000And a lot of people are wondering what the hell is going on.
00:30:51.000CNN's Jeff Zelany, he says Trump has been reshaping the global trading order, which obviously is true.
00:30:57.000This is the biggest trade deal in President Trump's effort to effectively reshape the global trading order that has been one of his central priorities since taking office in January.
00:31:09.000He's been issuing many threats of tariffs, but they clearly have been working in terms of bringing other countries' allies and adversaries alike in some cases to the negotiating table.
00:31:22.000Okay, so the big question is many people, including me, are anti-tariff.
00:31:26.000As a general rule, tariffs are not good for economies.
00:31:39.000However, the one thing I will say about tariffs and tariff wars is we heard the same sorts of talk about modern monetary theory for a couple of years before inflation exploded.
00:31:51.000This is something retailed by Elizabeth Warren.
00:31:53.000It was retailed by the Obama administration back in the day.
00:31:55.000The idea that you could endlessly spend money and you'd never hit an inflationary cycle because people would essentially just keep buying our debt because the American dollar was still the best bet.
00:32:12.000Gerard Baker lays out three possible theories.
00:32:15.000He says, first, theory, it's too early to tell.
00:32:19.000Most of the tariffs announced haven't been in place for long.
00:32:21.000Strangely enough, the uncertainty from Mr. Trump's dizzying policy changes that was expected to have been especially destabilizing maybe help softening the blow.
00:32:28.000If importers aren't sure Whether announced duties will stay or change, they may be holding off on big price increases until they have clarity.
00:32:35.000And as we saw with the outcome of the U.S.-Japan deal last week, when the actual tariff levels come in lower than the worst fears, the psychological effect can be a positive.
00:32:42.000That odd feeling of contentment you get when you discover the $100 bill you thought you had dropped on the sidewalk was only a 20%.
00:32:48.000But still, for all the unclarity, the average tariff paid by importers has indeed risen sharply to more than 15%, up from less than 3% a year ago so far with limited adverse consequences.
00:32:58.000So possibility number one is that we just haven't had time.
00:33:00.000The President Trump is announcing these trade deals in real time, that the tariffs have applied for a couple of months, and you have to wait for people to really adjust to that.
00:33:09.000Then there's the second possibility, which is that the tariffs aren't actually big enough to create the sort of adverse effects that many economists thought that they would.
00:33:17.000The U.S. is a relatively closed economy, says Gerard Baker, with imports accounting for less than 15% of GDP.
00:33:23.000Perhaps the U.S. economy is simply resilient enough to withstand even bad policy, more capable of withstanding a moderate tariff shock.
00:33:32.000The average 15% tariff rate is now historically large, five times the level that prevailed previously, as close to the average rate of around 20% on all imports under smooth Holly.
00:33:42.000So there's the third possibility, what I would call the MMT possibility, which is that the conventional wisdom is just wrong.
00:33:49.000Perhaps economists have overlooked the countervailing forces at work with tariffs.
00:33:52.000The redistribution of the burden of duties between foreign exporters, U.S. importers, and consumers may be reordering the balance of benefit between domestic and foreign businesses and between companies and consumers.
00:34:02.000Federal tariff revenue up to $300 billion a year will produce gains for Americans.
00:34:05.000The relative advantage of doing business in the United States may be, as promised, start to be reflected in stronger inward investment flows.
00:34:12.000The strikingly one-sided deal Trump just thinks with the EU certainly suggests the sheer economic muscle of the U.S. has been previously underutilized in opening up markets overseas.
00:34:21.000Okay, so he's saying probably not the second that the tariffs shouldn't have any impact because they're too small.
00:34:26.000So that leaves you with really two possibilities.
00:34:28.000One is we don't know yet and it's going to be bad.
00:34:30.000And two is we got it wrong and it'll be fine.
00:34:33.000I don't know the answer to this question.
00:34:34.000I'm not sure that anybody knows the answer to this question.
00:34:37.000I would lean more toward the former because again, when you are trying to fix quote unquote trade deficits by essentially creating an import tax that hits Americans in their pocketbook, what you're doing is not only making Americans pay more for the products that they would normally buy, you are also preventing people in other countries, presumably, from seeing the benefit of their sales in the United States.
00:35:00.000You don't have a capital account surplus.
00:35:02.000A capital account surplus is where you have a bunch of people abroad who essentially owe you money, and then they have to use that money in American markets.
00:35:09.000So you're going to get less investment because less capital is flowing from the United States to other countries.
00:35:15.000When you have a trade deficit in terms of goods, very often that means a capital accounts, I think inherently it means a capital account surplus for other countries, right?
00:35:34.000For the moment, it's a big win for President Trump, at least politically, to be able to say that he forced the EU to pay their fair share, that he's forcing them to invest in the United States.
00:35:45.000And we'll have to see how all of this plays out.
00:35:48.000And when you combine that with the idea that there may already be a market bubble, again, I tend to be more skeptical than the average about the next couple of years in American economics.
00:35:58.000And I desperately hope that I am wrong because I hope the American economy soars.
00:36:01.000I think the consequences of a stagnant American economy or some sort of recession are devastatingly bad for the United States because the next thing that will happen is a reversion to left-wing orthodoxy on economic issues.
00:36:13.000And that means maybe President Deosi, which is a full-scale disaster area for the country.
00:36:17.000So I am praying that I am wrong and that actually traditional economics is wrong and that tariffs work out just fine.
00:36:23.000I tend to be more in the first camp, however, saying that let's wait.
00:36:28.000Now, if it turns out that the tariffs are having a bad impact, I think President Trump, again, he shifts and he moves.
00:36:34.000He's not wedded to any sort of real ideology.
00:36:37.000And so if the impact turns out to be bad, I think that he will move on that as well.
00:36:41.000But as the Wall Street Journal points out, stocks are doing crazy things again.
00:36:45.000The share price of online house flipper open door technologies has catapulted 377% in the past month, despite a stagnant U.S. housing market.
00:36:53.000One of the biggest stock gainers Tuesday was Kohl's, an apartment store that has been losing ground to competitors for some time.
00:36:57.000On Wednesday, the crowd favorites were GoPro and Krispy Kreme, with both the camera company and Donut Maker notching eye-popping gains over the week.
00:37:05.000Some investors say the action is the latest phase in what has turned into a near-euphoric rebound from April's tariff turmoil.
00:37:11.000There's been a stampede into risky assets like meme stocks, cryptocurrencies, and shares of smaller companies that have yet to turn a profit.
00:37:20.000And certainly you're seeing some signs of a bubble.
00:37:22.000One of the big tactics that many companies are using right now is they are taking all of their assets, their cash, for example, and they are turning those into crypto.
00:37:29.000And they are now seeing a multiple on their trades, which is kind of weird because you could just buy the underlying crypto if you want exposure to crypto.
00:37:36.000But people instead are buying companies that buy crypto, which is very strange.
00:37:40.000Speculative stocks are doing really well.
00:37:50.000I hope that the fundamentals of the economy remain sound.
00:37:53.000I think one of the things that's happening here is a sort of emotional response to the idea, as Gerard Baker suggested, that we're going to get hit with $100 tariff and it's a $20 tariff, combined with the idea that maybe we weren't going to get a solidification of the Trump tax cuts and those got solidified.
00:38:36.000John Nolte has a really good piece on this over at Breitbart, pointing out that during the 2012 presidential election, President Obama's Republican appointment, Romney, ran a campaign ad, pointing out that Obama did not visit Israel during his first term.
00:38:47.000Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler called Romney a liar, despite the fact that actually Barack Obama did not visit Israel.
00:38:56.000He wrote yesterday, quote, after more than 27 years of the Washington Post, Including almost 15 as the fact-checker.
00:39:01.000I will be leaving July 31st, having taken a buyout.
00:39:04.000Much as I would have liked to keep scrutinizing politicians in Washington, especially in this era, the financial considerations were impossible to dismiss.
00:39:11.000And again, many times his fact-checking columns were just a disaster area.
00:39:19.000Under Kessler's management of the post-fact-checking column, when then-Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina stated with 100% accuracy she began her amazing business career as secretary, she was ridiculed as a liar with three out of four Pinocchios, even though the fact-check agreed she started out as a secretary.
00:39:36.000Kessler's audaciously dishonest defense of Hillary's criminal mishandling of Benghazi was legendary.
00:39:41.000It took him 532 days to admit that Hunter Biden's laptop from hell was the real deal.
00:39:46.000During the 2016 presidential election, Republicans were fact-checked two to one compared to Democrats.
00:39:58.000And the fact that he is gone is a good thing for journalism and a good thing for fact as it currently stands.
00:40:05.000Meanwhile, in bad news, I got to say, there are many judges now that are just out of control, truly out of control.
00:40:11.000A federal judge named Indira Talwani, who I believe is an Obama appointee, has now issued an order to block the Trump administration from enforcing a policy that would prevent Planned Parenthood clinics from receiving federal Medicaid reimbursements if they offer abortion services, according to the New York Times.
00:40:27.000Now, again, this is not an action taken by a judge against the Trump administration.
00:40:32.000This is an action taken by a judge against a congressional bill that is not the same thing.
00:40:36.000She's not saying that Trump is exceeding his executive authority.
00:40:39.000She's saying Congress cannot cut off funding to Planned Parenthood on the state level via Medicaid, which is nuts.
00:40:46.000There is no legal basis for any of this.
00:40:49.000The lawsuit came in response to a provision introduced in the One Big Beautiful bill.
00:40:53.000That bill imposed a one-year ban on state Medicaid payments to any healthcare nonprofit that offers abortions and received more than $800,000 in Medicaid funding in 2023.
00:41:02.000Many clinics affiliated with Planned Parenthood faced a choice between altering their operations and retaining millions of dollars in funding or facing a potentially catastrophic loss of revenue.
00:41:12.000Judge Tawani found this was easily ascertainable that it was targeting Planned Parenthood.
00:41:21.000Okay, so the idea here is that federal tax dollars should not go to reimburse abortion care because dollars are fungible.
00:41:26.000If you send them to a clinic and then that clinic performs abortions, the dollars that would have been spent on abortions are now being spent elsewhere.
00:41:34.000Federal dollars coming in, free up dollars to be spent on abortion.
00:41:40.000Pretending that there's like a line item.
00:41:42.000And as long as the federal government isn't directly subsidizing abortion, if you sign a federal check to Planned Parenthood, that doesn't mean more abortions.
00:41:50.000Federal law already prohibits the use of federal Medicaid funds for paying for abortions.
00:41:55.000Judge Tawani found the provision was designed to indirectly squeeze clinics into dropping such services using Medicaid payments as leverage.
00:42:01.000Well, no, actually, it's just saying you cannot perform abortions and receive federal taxpayer dollars.
00:42:07.000She also then claimed that this was, in fact, a violation of the First Amendment because Planned Parenthood's umbrella organization does political organizing.
00:42:19.000You know, if the Democratic Party comes into power and they fund a bunch of organizations that are basically just blue front groups, those must be funded for the rest of time.
00:42:29.000Otherwise, it's a violation of the First Amendment.
00:43:26.000And a violation of the First Amendment because Planned Parenthood engages in advocacy and that advocacy is now being restricted.
00:43:33.000I mean, it is crazy, possibly the craziest district court order I've seen.
00:43:40.000Again, not against the Trump administration, against the government, against a duly enacted law in quite some time.
00:43:45.000I think this is going to be reversed pretty quickly.
00:43:49.000I mean, I'm kind of astonished by the ruling itself.
00:43:52.000I can't even see what the patina of law would be to justify these particular claims.
00:43:58.000I mean, the result of a claim that the judge is making like this is that literally any organization cannot be defunded because they all have free speech rights.
00:44:05.000They all have the ability to speak on things.
00:44:07.000And so you can't name a single organization funded by federal taxpayer dollars that could not make a First Amendment claim under the rubric created by this judge, could you?
00:44:48.000So many of the complaints, rightly so by the Trump administration of lawfare by district court judges, injunctions and all these things have been about executive orders.
00:45:16.000The judge is questioning Congress's policy judgments saying, well, Congress can be anti-abortion, but this actually doesn't help that goal because if you don't have Planned Parenthood, more people will get pregnant.
00:45:28.000Things like that because of contraception.
00:45:31.000Just weird policy arguments that aren't relevant to the legal decision.
00:45:38.000Yeah, Ilya, one of the things that probably should be done here is somebody should consider impeaching this judge.
00:45:43.000I mean, really, like this is such a bizarre sort of interpretation of law that is beyond anything that either you or I have seen from the judiciary.
00:45:51.000Again, there's not really even an attempt to read this into the law.
00:45:54.000It's a political op-ed that takes the form of a judicial opinion.
00:45:58.000I mean, when do opinions, if they do, ever rise to the level of this judge should just not be on the bench anymore?
00:46:04.000Well, we've been careful in our history not to impeach judges because we disagree with their opinions.
00:46:10.000In the early Republic, there wasn't even an attempt to impeach a Supreme Court justice, which ultimately failed in the Senate by one vote.
00:46:19.000So I'm cautious about the impeachment process, but just yesterday, there was a bar complaint filed, a judicial complaint filed by the Justice Department against a different judge, Jim Bozberg, of Jed Boseberg, of the DC District Court.
00:46:37.000The same sort of thing probably should be done here.
00:46:40.000And let those authorities, let the judicial conference do its work.
00:46:45.000Perhaps ultimately the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court will slap down the judge in certain ways.
00:46:49.000So there are certain steps that need to be taken before just going for impeachment right away.
00:46:54.000But I agree, this is just, this goes beyond a simple disagreement over the law, and it's pure judicial civil disobedience, if you will.
00:47:13.000Meanwhile, on the foreign policy front, it is amazing, despite all of the criticism of President Trump on foreign policy, President Trump is coming around to the right solutions the vast majority of the time.
00:47:24.000This is why Harry Enton at CNN is pointing out that Republicans actually are trusted on foreign policy, which is kind of a rarity in this day and age.
00:47:31.000The bottom line is Democrats in the American voters' minds cannot hack it.
00:47:56.000Despite everything that's going on in the world right now, Republicans are more trusted on Democrats when it comes to foreign policy and the world at large.
00:48:06.000By the way, there is a reason for that, and that is because Joe Biden ran an awful foreign policy.
00:48:09.000President Trump is coming around to the right solutions.
00:48:12.000Yesterday, he said he would give Russian President Vladimir Putin 10 or 12 days to reach a ceasefire with Ukraine or face more economic pressure from the United States.
00:48:19.000Here was President Trump pointing out that Putin has made no moves toward peace.
00:48:25.000I'm going to make a new deadline of about 10 or 12 days from today.
00:48:45.000Again, President Trump responding to reality.
00:48:47.000He said, quote, we thought we had settled numerous times.
00:48:50.000He was very disappointed, he said, with Putin, quote, and then President Putin goes out and starts launching rockets into some city, bodies lying all over the street.
00:48:58.000He said, you know, this has happened on too many occasions and I don't like it.
00:49:01.000He said he was not so interested in talking to Putin anymore.
00:49:22.000Numerous people were killed, and I was dealing with two countries that we get along with very well, very different countries from certain standpoints.
00:49:30.000They've been fighting for 500 years intermittently, and we solved that war.
00:49:37.000You probably saw it just came out over the wire, so we solved it through trade.
00:49:41.000I said, I don't want to trade with anybody that's killing each other.
00:49:48.000Meanwhile, there's an enormous controversy, obviously, surrounding the distribution of food aid in Gaza.
00:49:54.000Understand that this is being created by Hamas and its allies over at the UN and its allies in the media.
00:49:59.000That does not mean that there's no starvation in Gaza.
00:50:01.000The media do a horrible job of coverage.
00:50:03.000They take all their information from the Gaza Ministry of Health.
00:50:06.000There are widely variant videos between Gaza markets, which seem to be filled with food, and then pictures of people who seem to be very hungry.
00:50:15.000Mati Friedman, who is a reporter from Israel, writes for the free press that, frankly, there's not really a great way of knowing exactly what's going on in Gaza.
00:50:24.000He said, in an attempt to understand the truth of the reports, I called several trusted colleagues, veteran Israeli journalists, intimately involved in covering events here and concerned both with the health of our society and that of innocent Palestinians.
00:50:33.000It was clear in speaking to them that our plight as journalists is only marginally better than that of the average citizen.
00:50:38.000The consensus was that there were nearly no trustworthy sources regarding reality in Gaza.
00:50:42.000Certainly not the Gaza Health Ministry, which answers to Hamas, or Palestinian reporters intimidated by Hamas, or the international organizations like the UN refugee agency UNRWA embroiled in various forms of collaboration with Hamas.
00:50:54.000The international press isn't the answer either.
00:50:57.000During my years as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press, I saw coverage altered by Hamas' threats to our staff, while this fact was concealed from readers.
00:51:04.000But neither can Israelis trust their own government, which has regularly misled the public about the wars of progress, about the shifting goals of the campaign, etc.
00:51:13.000So, again, you know, the sort of informational gap is quite real.
00:51:18.000It is difficult to tell what exactly is going on or not.
00:51:22.000There is one study that came out that suggests that the food prices in Gaza have skyrocketed, which, again, may be true.
00:51:28.000It is also difficult to tell whether that's true given the fact that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been shipping literally millions of meals into Gaza.
00:51:38.000What we do know is that Hamas, their top demand in the negotiations right now, their number one demand is a restoration of UN-driven food aid.
00:52:16.000The real solution to any hunger crisis in Gaza is to set up a humanitarian safe zone in the south of Gaza, run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, protected by the IDF and funded by other neighbors in the region, including the UAE, Saudi, Qatar, Bahrain, and all the rest.
00:52:33.000Jordan, Egypt, that would be the actual solution.
00:52:35.000I mean, listen, a better solution would be for Egypt to open up its well-fortified border where it will allow zero Palestinians in, even temporarily, to set up a sort of way station on the other side of the Gaza border in the largely unoccupied Sinai desert.
00:52:47.000And all these things are eminently doable.
00:52:49.000And then if you don't get down to Rafah within a certain period of time and be screened for terrorism, moving all the Gaza Hamas into jail or exile, if that doesn't happen, then the rest of the strip should be essentially declared a zone of uninhabitedness because the rest of the strip, again, is rife with Hamas using civilians as cover.
00:53:15.000So move all the civilians to, this is how counterinsurgency is typically done, by the way.
00:53:18.000Clear and hold is a typical counterinsurgency strategy.
00:53:21.000Moving everybody into a safe area where they are protected so they can receive aid from an organization not linked to Hamas would be the proper solution because the alternative is Hamas continues to run the food aid, continues to terrorize the population, continues to shoot anyone who gets in his way.
00:53:37.000The one thing that we know for a fact is that Hamas is stealing the food aid.
00:53:40.000Here is video from yesterday of Hamas stealing food aid because Israel relented under gigantic public scrutiny and allowed UN trucks to go in.
00:54:07.000We have another video of Hamas riding trucks stolen.
00:54:11.000You can see the Khmer's fighters on top of the A-Trogs.
00:54:21.000Literally firing their guns in triumph from the top of the trucks as those trucks are stacked with aid.
00:54:27.000So Hamas fighters are like all over these convoys.
00:54:30.000This is a gigantic media propaganda operation run by Hamas, mirrored by the United Nations and all of its allies to maintain Hamas's dominance of the Gaza Strip.
00:54:49.000There's never been a situation in which one party attacks another party and the attacked party has a responsibility to feed the civilian population of the party that attacked.
00:54:59.000That has never happened before in wartime in any way of which I am aware.
00:55:04.000So again, could things be done better?
00:55:06.000Sure, but that involves an actual plan.
00:55:09.000That plan, I assume, will be some sort of safe harbor zone in the south of Gaza, run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, not run by the United Nations.
00:55:17.000President Trump, by the way, is suggesting something very similar.
00:55:30.000But it is the Gaza Strip, and it's amazing that it's not being handled a little bit differently.
00:55:39.000We're going to set up food centers, and we're going to do it in conjunction with some very good people, and we're going to supply funds.
00:55:49.000And we just took in trillions of dollars.
00:55:52.000We're getting a lot of money, and we're going to spend a little money on some food.
00:55:59.000Okay, so again, the idea would be, presumably, that that money should be funneled through an organization that is not simply handing it over to Hamas.
00:56:06.000And meanwhile, as you can see, President Trump is in Scotland with the Prime Minister of the UK, Kira Starmer.
00:56:13.000It is kind of amusing that President Trump made the Prime Minister of the UK, he didn't meet him in London, he had him come to his golf club, Turnbury, in Scotland.
00:56:21.000And there he proceeded to berate him about the mayor of London, the awful Sidiq Khan, whose apparently main concern in London is Islamophobia.
00:56:29.000Here is President Trump slamming Sidi Khan in front of Kira Starmer.
00:56:34.000Will you visit London during the state visit?
00:58:57.000There are honest questions about Jeffrey Epstein, about informational flow, honest questions about why members of the Trump administration, particularly the attorney general, retailed certain things that didn't end up materializing.
00:59:08.000Those are all open and honest and decent questions.
00:59:10.000They're open questions about where Jeffrey Epstein got his money and all the rest.
00:59:12.000All of that, those are fine questions.
00:59:15.000The people who are suggesting that President Trump is somehow engaging in a cover-up, not only of Jeffrey Epstein's pedophilia, but of some sort of blackmail sex ring targeting the most powerful and rich people on earth.
00:59:26.000And Trump is then covering that up for some nefarious purpose.
00:59:29.000Bad partisan op designed to actually undermine the president of the United States.
00:59:34.000And the people who are implying it without saying it should be asked really if that's what they believe.
00:59:38.000Here's President Trump saying his polls are up, which is true.
00:59:42.000You know, when you talk about files, I just keep going back.
00:59:46.000And other people, too, even the enemy says this thing is not correct because if we had it, we would have used it on the guy.
01:01:43.000You know, earlier on in the program, I said that there is a gap that's emerging now between the anti-left and the actual traditional right in the Republican Party.
01:01:53.000And that gap is very much emerging over things like Epstein, where a lot of people who have bought into the idea that the systems are corrupt, which many of them are, or that they've been defaced, many of them have been, or that the institutions have been eaten from within, which is largely true.
01:02:08.000Many of those people are not interested in an actual restoration of many of those institutions.
01:02:13.000They're sort of in love with a narrative whereby everything in America is corrupt.
01:02:25.000Name a particular issue, and we can talk about whether that issue is soluble or not.
01:02:30.000Name a particular issue or a particular bad guy.
01:02:33.000We can discuss whether that person is engaging in the thing you're saying they're engaging in.
01:02:36.000Use empty words like they without any antecedent or suggest a conspiracy without any actual conspirators or make an allegation without any actual content.
01:02:47.000Makes it very difficult to determine what is true and what is false, which again is why I think that some of that is the point designed to undermine President Trump.
01:02:54.000All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.
01:02:57.000We'll get to some actual impending problems, perhaps, for Republicans in the Senate.
01:03:01.000Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.
01:03:03.000If you're not a member, become a member.