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00:01:44.000Two of the major indices suffered their worst day since 2020, as the latest set of disappointing earnings from large retailers raised investors' fears of a recession.
00:01:53.000Dow Jones Industrial Average closed Wednesday down 1,164.52 points or 3.6% to 31,490, its lowest closing level since March of 2021.
00:02:02.000The S&P 500 dropped 4% or 165 points to 3,923.
00:02:11.000The Dow and S&P recorded their worst percentage declines since June of 2020, which was like dead center of the summer swing of the pandemic.
00:02:18.000The moves marked a U-turn from a day earlier when technology shares led a rebound in markets.
00:02:22.000Major retailers said their profits were hurt by rising costs, sluggish sales, and supply chain disruptions.
00:02:26.000Shares of Target sank 25%, or $53.67 to $161 after the company posted quarterly earnings that missed analysts' expectations.
00:02:35.000Shares of Dollar Tree, Dollar General, Costco Wholesale recorded their largest single-day percentage declines in years in Costco's case since 2003.
00:02:43.000That, of course, is very scary for all the folks who are relying on the hot demand to continue to support an inflated economy.
00:02:50.000The results are prompting Wall Street to wrestle anew with the idea that the global economy could be headed for recession.
00:02:54.000Though that debate is far from settled, it has rattled stocks and other risky assets throughout the year, with the latest data illustrating the degree to which inflation has hit U.S.
00:03:02.000A couple of weeks ago, you had the economic experts estimating that about 28% shot there'd be a recession in the next six months.
00:03:09.000And I said at the time, it seems more like 50-50 to me.
00:03:11.000Well, it's been a couple of weeks and now it's looking a lot more than 50-50 at this point.
00:03:15.000Nick Giacomicus, president and founder of NIRG Wealth Management said inflation is hitting every aspect of an earnings report, whether it be the transportation side or supply chain disruption.
00:03:25.000Customers are no longer buying the more expensive items they would typically buy.
00:03:28.000All this trickles through to an earnings report.
00:03:30.000Consumer discretionary consumer staples were the worst performing sectors in the S&P 500 on Wednesday.
00:03:35.000Both recorded their largest single day percentage losses since March of 2020.
00:03:38.000As it turns out, when you just pay people to stay home for a very, very long time.
00:03:42.000And then eventually they have to go get jobs and inflation.
00:03:46.000Because of that fire hosing of the money has outpaced wages, you end up with people shopping less.
00:03:50.000That is not a particular shock at this point.
00:03:52.000And yet everybody is treating it as though it is a shock.
00:03:55.000And you're starting to see more and more sources openly stating that we are on the road to a recession.
00:04:00.000Goldman Sachs' CEO, for example, he came out yesterday and he said the recession is coming and there's pretty much no way to stop this.
00:04:14.000Well, the House view is slowing economic activity, higher rates, and probably a 30% chance of recession as you look forward over the next 12 to 24 months.
00:04:25.000Okay, but just because when he says recession, recession has a technical definition, that means two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.
00:04:31.000That is what a recession technically means in econ speak.
00:04:34.000So you can have a really slow, sluggish, bad economy without it being a full-scale recessionary economy.
00:04:40.000A 30% shot of, like, two straight quarters of negative GDP growth is really, really, really bad, considering the fact that, again, we had a historically good economy before COVID, and then governments all over the world decided to basically anesthetize the economy.
00:04:53.000And then the coma was supposed to be ended about January of 2021, and instead what we've got is inflation running unbelievably hot, and now all the consumer demand is starting to drop off.
00:05:04.000Wells Fargo is now seeing an end-of-the-year U.S.
00:05:20.000Goldman Sachs calculated the odds of recession, as you just heard, at perhaps 15% for this year and 35% for the next two years.
00:05:27.000Morgan Stanley says 25% probability for recession starting in the next 12 months.
00:05:31.000Bank of America most recently said it sees recession risks as low for now but elevated for 2023, which of course would be a disaster for Joe Biden.
00:05:37.000In his reelection efforts, Wells Fargo's research arm cut its year-end 2022 GDP growth targets to 1.5%, which is extraordinarily weak, from 2.2%.
00:05:46.000It cut its year-end 2023 target to a decline of 0.5% from its previous expectation for GDP growth of 0.4%.
00:05:54.000That is a full percentage point dip on their 2023 target growth.
00:06:01.000While the first quarter 2022 economic contraction was due primarily to strong imports and inventory changes, Wells Fargo notes that consumer activity has weakened since then.
00:06:09.000It cited the development of all three major risks identified in its December 2021 outlook, including new COVID-19 outbreaks and restrictions, higher for longer inflation, and a much stronger dollar.
00:06:18.000It said these issues were due to Russia-Ukraine war and aggressive Federal Reserve policy, said these shocks are taking an economic toll.
00:06:24.000The Biden administration has no answer for all of this.
00:06:27.000Karine Jean-Pierre, the Incompetent new White House press secretary.
00:06:31.000What you can say about Jen Psaki is Jen Psaki was a good liar.
00:06:34.000Karine Jean-Pierre happens to be a bad liar, which may say more for her character, frankly.
00:06:37.000Here's Karine Jean-Pierre trying to answer the stock market dump that has been happening.
00:06:44.000The Fed chair, you know, the Federal Reserve is independent.
00:06:47.000We leave them to make their own policy decisions.
00:07:03.000Or alternatively, they're lying and they know that the stock market is really bad and that it's an indicator that this administration is doing a particularly terrible job.
00:07:34.000stock returns of around 9.8%, a $10,000 investment would grow to about $50,000 in 10 years instead of $25,000.
00:07:41.000But even stocks more restrained long-run returns seem aspirational now.
00:07:44.000Investors' optimism is easier to understand if one looks at the 10 years through the end of 2021, during which the compound annual return of the benchmark S&P 500 was a very good 16.6%, not so far from what those surveyed extrapolated.
00:07:57.000Pundits like to talk about earnings growth, but it hardly accounted for the excellent decade that ended last December.
00:08:01.000S&P 500 earnings per share grew at an average of 7.7% per year, according to figures from Semper Augustus Investments Group.
00:08:07.000That rapid pace was achieved when corporate profit margins went from an already respectable 9.2% to a nosebleed 13.4%.
00:08:13.000Returns would have been about 4 percentage points lower if margins hadn't expanded.
00:08:18.000In other words, businesses seemed to get more efficient.
00:08:21.000And there was earnings growth, so there was more spending over the course of time.
00:08:24.000But with labor and material costs rising and the Trump administration's corporate tax cuts behind us, it is not unreasonable to expect that margins will boost, stall, or reverse.
00:08:33.000That margin boost may stall or reverse.
00:08:36.000Even during tech and housing booms, it was unusual for S&P 500 operating profit margins to exceed 9%.
00:08:41.000So you might start to see those margins come down.
00:08:43.000Plus, if people have less money to invest in the stock market generally, then they're just not going to be spreading that money around as quickly in the stock market.
00:08:50.000And that means that the increase in the stock market price is not going to be nearly as fast.
00:08:55.000The Fed has a perfect record popping bubbles.
00:08:57.000They aren't likely to fail this time, according to Christopher Bloomstrand, a value investing veteran who's president of Semper Augustus.
00:09:03.000Another prominent value investor, Jeremy Grantham, co-founder of the asset manager GMO, wrote in January, U.S.
00:09:08.000stocks had entered their fourth super bubble of the past hundred years.
00:09:13.000In addition to quantitative reasons, such as statistical deviation from long-term trends, he cited a more subjective, historical cue akin to ringing a bell near the top.
00:09:20.000Crazy speculation, this time in meme stocks, EV makers, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs.
00:09:25.000As sour as the mood has seemed lately, the S&P 500 would drop by another 45% if both margins and price earnings multiples reverted to their long-run averages, which is what Grantham has been suggesting, taking the benchmark back to a level it first crossed five years ago.
00:09:38.000That sounds alarmist, but stocks' level in 2031 could be the same, whether Grantham is right or not about a sharper bear market.
00:09:45.000The alternative could be a milder selloff and recoveries along the line of what we've experienced recently.
00:09:48.000So in other words, you don't have to be a catastrophist to see that the stock market could be in really, really dire trouble here over the course of time.
00:09:57.000And that, of course, would contribute to lack of liquidity in the markets.
00:10:00.000That'd make it much harder to do IPOs.
00:10:02.000It would mean that lenders are less sanguine about giving out money for businesses to start.
00:10:07.000And it means that your pension fund is worth a lot less.
00:10:11.000Again, Arthur Laffer is warning that we may see a full lost decade here.
00:10:17.000We read about this at the beginning of May.
00:10:18.000At the beginning of May, it was Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore suggesting that we might see a full decade in which the Dow is basically stuck at maybe 29,500.
00:10:27.000They wrote, again this is just a few weeks ago, if Biden does not change course and the bear market cycle from the late 60s through the early 80s returns, the DJIA would fall from its recent peak of $36,800 to less than $29,500 in 2038.
00:10:38.000Adjusting for inflation, the index would drop even further.
00:10:43.000Right now, by the way, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is hovering around $31,500.
00:10:48.000I mean, these again are really, really bad directional numbers.
00:10:52.000And Joe Biden was foreseeing that his own economic policies would create a big boost at the beginning.
00:10:57.000And then within like three, four years, you were going to get 1.5% GDP growth, 1.6% GDP growth.
00:11:02.000Nothing really blow the doors off good.
00:11:05.000Regulation, higher taxes, a massive deficit that requires debt servicing.
00:11:10.000All of that would be really bad for the long-term and mid-term U.S.
00:11:18.000They are just going to keep talking happy talk.
00:11:21.000So you got Jennifer Granholm, the Secretary of Energy, saying that if Americans are worried about gas prices right now, the solution is electric vehicles.
00:11:27.000I mean, listen, I can afford an electric vehicle.
00:11:29.000The vast majority of Americans cannot afford an electric vehicle because a good electric vehicle is going to cost you at a minimum $35,000 and a great electric vehicle could cost you $100,000, $120,000.
00:11:40.000Is that going to make up for the fact that gas is $5 a gallon?
00:12:20.000That is like saying, you know, the solution in 150 years to the gas prices right now, somebody will finally discover the secret of cold fusion.
00:12:29.000That ain't going to solve the problem.
00:12:31.000So Democrats can't talk about the economy because then people might notice the economy is bad and not vote for them.
00:12:35.000So they're going to talk about a lot of other stuff, including...
00:14:30.000Let's talk about the Great Replacement Theory.
00:14:32.000Let's talk about race, which is always the go-to for the Democratic Party because, again, their entire electoral strategy is based on extraordinarily high minority turnout in communities they think are very supportive of them and college-educated white women.
00:14:46.000They've been banking on this since about 2012, and they're just going to continue to double down on this.
00:14:51.000And so you're seeing them focus in laser beam-like on the argument that America is discriminatory, that half of your neighbors hate your guts because of your race or your sex.
00:14:59.000Kamala Harris, Racism is real in America.
00:15:00.000at this out there yesterday, making this case, talking about racism and sexism, which, by the way, if these were the dominant forces in American life, it would be very hard for a black woman to be the vice president of the United States.
00:15:12.000But here is a person who is the vice president of the United States, specifically because she is a black woman, talking about how America is rife with racism and sexism.
00:15:42.000But the Democratic Party platform is basically that everyone I don't like falls into those categories, which is why you should continue to give power to me, despite the fact that I'm really bad at my job.
00:15:50.000Not only should you give power, as it turns out, we should also crack down on dissemination of any ideas that we don't like by labeling them racist and sexist and demanding top-down control of those ideas.
00:16:01.000Yesterday, the governor of New York, I mean this is really ugly stuff, the governor of New York saying that there are no protections for hate speech in America, which is just not true.
00:16:08.000There is no technical category called hate speech in law in the United States.
00:16:13.000It is protected under the First Amendment, hate speech, because again, these are terms that have no content.
00:16:18.000The left calls it hate speech when you say that Caitlyn Jenner is a man.
00:16:21.000Caitlyn Jenner is a man, that's not hate speech, that's biological fact.
00:16:24.000There's Kathy Hochul saying it shouldn't be allowed to be said, these sorts of things.
00:16:28.000I'll protect the First Amendment any day of the week, but you don't protect hate speech.
00:16:47.000Second of all, when she says that there are no protections, she's a defender of the First Amendment, there are no protections for hate speech.
00:16:52.000Definitionally, this means you are not a protector of the First Amendment.
00:16:54.000Definitionally, that is what that means.
00:16:57.000And this, of course, has been the agenda for the Democratic Party and for this White House for a while, which is why it is heartening to see that the White House had to pull back from its plans for the Department of Homeland Security to have a Ministry of Truth.
00:17:08.000According to CNN yesterday, the disinformation expert hired to run the Department of Homeland Security's newly created disinformation board has resigned after the department paused the board.
00:17:17.000Nina Jankiewicz, a disinformation expert with experience working on Ukraine and Russia issues, was tapped to helm the Disinformation Governance Board earlier this month.
00:17:24.000The interagency team was meant to coordinate department activities related to disinformation aimed at the U.S.
00:17:30.000The problem, of course, is that they hadn't properly defined disinformation because the left has spent the last several years conflating disinformation, meaning like actual Russian propaganda, from misinformation, meaning stuff I don't like.
00:17:42.000And in fact, Nina Tchenkovich had basically trafficking both disinformation and misinformation when she suggested that Hunter Biden's laptop was actually just a Russian plant with no evidence whatsoever.
00:17:53.000According to CNN, Jankiewicz's appointment quickly drew condemnation from GOP lawmakers and right-wing media, who pointed to her past tweets and statements regarding Hunter Biden's laptop and Christopher Steele, the author of the so-called Steele dossier.
00:18:03.000Jankiewicz told CNN Wednesday evening she resigned because the board's future was uncertain.
00:18:07.000Quote, I had hoped we would be more transparent about how the board was going to operate, what it was going to do.
00:18:11.000For whatever reason, that didn't happen.
00:18:14.000I think the information vacuum kind of directed a lot of the attacks and digging around in my personal life.
00:18:19.000By the way, the digging around in her personal life was mainly relegated to looking at her old tweets and videos of her singing about disinformation, like Mary Poppins.
00:18:31.000I mean, it was very weird theater kid kind of stuff.
00:18:35.000Ultimately, she said that she had resigned because she wasn't sure whether the board had a future after the debacle of the last few weeks.
00:18:41.000She said she was deeply disappointed by the administration's announcement it would conduct a review of the board.
00:18:45.000She thinks it should continue even in her absence.
00:18:47.000She said the board was simple and anodyne and largely revolved around coordinating efforts within DHS to combat misinformation related to threats to public safety, like natural disasters.
00:18:55.000Okay, but that's not what you actually said.
00:18:59.000Despite her expertise, critics argued she held biases on certain issues.
00:19:02.000For example, in a TikTok video posted prior to her appointment to lead the board, Shankwood singled out Rudy Giuliani and TikTok influencers to a Mary Poppins jingle.
00:19:09.000They didn't quote her, of course, because if they quoted her, it would demonstrate that she shouldn't have been in charge of this office and that the office never really should have existed in the first place.
00:19:18.000The White House, for its part, tried to defend Jankiewicz and simultaneously explain why it was getting rid of the Ministry of Truth.
00:19:24.000So, Corinne Jean-Pierre, again, not good at her job.
00:19:58.000Well then, uh, Kareem Jean-Pierre was asked a very awkward question, which is, okay, so, you're saying, and you guys have been saying, that the reason you are disbanding this Ministry of Truth is because it's not a Ministry of Truth at all, it's actually a disinformation board, and so, you're basically just caving to what you call a bunch of conservative-oriented lies.
00:20:16.000So, you're ditching the disinformation board because of disinformation?
00:20:22.000So if it's pausing because you think the board was mischaracterized, then the disinformation board is being shut down because of disinformation?
00:20:45.000There's been a mischaracterization from outside forces.
00:20:50.000And so now what we're going to do is we're going to pause it and we're going to do an assessment.
00:20:58.000The Washington Post trotted out the world's worst journalist, Taylor Lorenz.
00:21:01.000Jankowitz goes away because she was awkward.
00:21:02.000And we just sort of quietly bring this thing back and start targeting political opponents.
00:21:06.000The media for its part is doing its best to spin on behalf of the administration and on behalf of the Ministry of Truth.
00:21:12.000The Washington Post trotted out the world's worst journalist, Taylor Lorenz.
00:21:16.000She's not a journalist, she's an activist who specializes mainly in digging up old tweets of people she doesn't like and also whining an extraordinary amount about how rough her life is.
00:21:24.000And then crying on MSNBC about how everyone is mean to her by digging up her old tweets and by pointing out that she's really bad at her job.
00:21:30.000That is sort of her job at the Washington Post.
00:21:32.000And the editors of the Washington Post like to frame everything They allow her to frame every story through the prism of how does it affect Taylor Lorenz and why is Taylor Lorenz the most important person on planet Earth.
00:21:42.000She sort of replaced Jim Acosta in the pantheon of journalists who have actual shrines to themselves, surrounded by seven different mirrors.
00:21:49.000There's infinities of Taylor Lorenzes in every direction.
00:21:52.000So the Washington Post runs a piece by Taylor Lorenz today called How the Biden Administration Let Right-Wing Attacks Derail Its Disinformation Efforts.
00:23:08.000Get 15% off your first order by going to CuttsClothing.com slash Ben.
00:23:11.000That's C-U-T-S Clothing dot com slash Ben.
00:23:15.000Here's what Taylor Lorenz writes today, quote, On the morning of April 27, the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of the first Disinformation Governance Board with the stated goal to coordinate countering misinformation related to Homeland Security.
00:23:27.000The Biden administration tapped Nina Jankiewicz, a well-known figure in the field of fighting disinformation and extremism, as the board's executive director.
00:23:33.000In naming the 33-year-old Jankiewicz to run the newly created board, the administration chose someone with extensive experience in the field of disinformation, which has emerged as an urgent an important issue.
00:23:43.000The author of the books, How to Be a Woman Online and How to Lose the Information War, her career also featured since in multiple nonpartisan think tanks and nonprofits, and included work that focused on strengthening democratic institutions.
00:23:54.000But within hours of the news of her appointment, Janklitz was thrust into the spotlight by the very forces she dedicated her career to combating.
00:24:02.000The board itself and DHS received criticism for both its somewhat ominous name and scant details of specific mission.
00:24:08.000Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorca said it could have done a better job of communicating what it is and what it isn't.
00:24:12.000But Jenkiewicz was on the receiving end of the harshest attacks, with her role mischaracterized as she became a primary target on the right-wing internet.
00:24:20.000She has been subject to an unrelenting barrage of harassment and abuse, while unchecked misrepresentations of her work continue to go viral.
00:24:26.000By unchecked misrepresentations of her work, do you mean that we played actual clips of her talking on shows like this one?
00:24:31.000And that people just brought up her old tweets?
00:24:34.000Which is literally what Taylor Lorenz does for a living?
00:24:38.000Taylor Lorenz, for a woman who's obsessed with herself, apparently she has an unbelievable capacity never to actually see what she is in a mirror.
00:24:47.000She sees herself, but she doesn't quite see herself, you know?
00:24:50.000According to Taylor Lorenz, just three weeks after its announcement, the Disinformation Governance Board is being paused, according to multiple employees at DHS, capping a back-and-forth week of decisions that changed during the course of reporting this story.
00:25:01.000On Monday, DHS decided to shut down the board.
00:25:03.000By Tuesday morning, Jankiewicz had drafted a resignation letter.
00:25:05.000By Tuesday night, Jankiewicz was pulled into an urgent call with DHS officials, who gave her the choice to stay on, even as the department's work was put on hold because of the backlash it faced, according to multiple people with knowledge of the call.
00:25:16.000Nina Jankiewicz has been subjected to unjustified and vile personal attacks and physical threats, a DHS spokesperson told the Washington Post, in congressional hearings and in media interviews The secretary has repeatedly defended her as eminently qualified and underscored the importance of the department's disinformation work, and he will continue to do so.
00:25:30.000So basically what happened here is that it became clear that Jankowicz was going to get thrown under the bus, and then it was clear that the administration was going to get flack for that.
00:25:38.000So now the administration is wildly backtracking and pretending that they actually had Jankowicz's back after throwing her out there.
00:25:44.000Chankowitz's experience, says Taylor Lorenz, is a prime example of how the right-wing internet apparatus operates, where far-right influencers attempt to identify a target, present a narrative, and then repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them.
00:26:27.000Just hours after Jenkins tweeted about her new job.
00:26:29.000Far-right influencer Jack Posobiec, says Taylor Lorenz, posted tweets accusing the Biden administration of creating a ministry of truth.
00:26:35.000You mean people questioned the establishment of a government agency with no clear agenda that called itself a disinformation governance board?
00:26:43.000I mean, that is scandalous that people noticed.
00:26:45.000You mean people questioned the establishment of a government agency with no clear agenda that called itself a disinformation governance board? Wow, I mean that is scandalous that people noticed it's bad. Unlike the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984 that became a derogatory comparison point, neither the board nor Jankowicz had any power or ability to declare what is true or false or compel internet providers, social media platforms, or public schools to take action against certain types of speech.
00:27:10.000In fact, the board itself had no power or authority to make any operational decisions.
00:27:14.000So then what exactly was the point of the board?
00:27:17.000The board's purpose has been grossly mischaracterized.
00:27:26.000And most people, it turns out, didn't believe you.
00:27:30.000Dozens of websites, including Breitbart, the Post Millennial, and Daily Caller, and New York Post began mining Jankiewicz's past social media posts and publishing articles to generate controversy.
00:27:37.000Some were simply mocking, making fun of her for parodying a song from Mary Poppins to talk about misinformation.
00:27:42.000In another instance, a performance where Jankiewicz sings a popular musical theater song about a person's desire to become rich and powerful was misrepresented to imply that Jankiewicz herself was after money and power and would sleep with men to get it.
00:27:55.000As this online campaign played out, DHS and the Biden administration struggled to counter the repeated attacks.
00:27:59.000And by the way, there are a bunch of sort of libertarian and civil rights-oriented groups, ranging from the ACLU to Reason Magazine, with some pretty serious questions about this Disinformation Governance Board and what it was going to do.
00:28:09.000None of this gets mentioned by Taylor Lorenz.
00:28:11.000It was all just Jack Posobiak and the Postmillennial and the Daily Caller and the Daily Wire, etc.
00:28:17.000It was all just about how everyone is mean.
00:28:19.000A textbook disinformation campaign, says Taylor Lorenz.
00:28:22.000Experts say that right-wing disinformation and smear campaigns regularly follow the same playbook, and it's crucial that the public and leaders of institutions, especially in the government, the media and educational bodies, understand more fully how these cycle operates.
00:28:34.000The campaigns invariably start with identifying a person to characterize as a villain.
00:28:38.000Attacking faceless institutions is difficult.
00:28:40.000So a figurehead, almost always a woman or a person of color, is found to serve as its face.
00:29:19.000Amazing solid stuff there from Taylor Lorenz demonstrative once again of the fact that what the left really would like to do is police speech.
00:29:25.000And they'd like to police speech because when they are losing, this is what they do.
00:29:28.000One of the ways they would like to police speech is by going after corporations.
00:29:32.000Corporate wokeness is their newest and most Powerful tool.
00:29:34.000This is the new thing they've come up with over the course of the last 20 years, and that is seize the governing boards of major American corporations and then twist them to your own political design, whether it is Disney or whether it is Target.
00:29:45.000Take a major corporation, get it to buy into pretty much all of your priorities, and then say the free market has spoken.
00:29:53.000Now, the free market hasn't really spoken because, of course, you're intimidating all of these corporations into getting involved in ultra crepedarian pursuits, pursuits that are outside of their purview.
00:30:02.000You're basically saying to them via the power of anti-discrimination law or through sexual harassment law or through laws in the state of California telling you how you have to compose the board of your company.
00:30:12.000You're doing all of this and saying to them, if you do the things that we want you to do, we will leave you alone.
00:30:16.000If you don't do the things we want you to do, we won't leave you alone.
00:30:19.000We will initiate media coverage of you.
00:30:22.000We will try to astroturf boycotts of you.
00:30:24.000We might mobilize governmentally against you.
00:30:26.000We'll structure laws in order to change the incentive structure for you as a company.
00:31:11.000Their goal is to act as sort of a Henry II Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest attitude toward corporations?
00:31:20.000If you do our dirty work, then we don't have to do our dirty work.
00:31:23.000And if you don't do our dirty work, then we will cudgel you in some way, shape, or form.
00:31:26.000So, according to Mediaite, senior White House aides are now suggesting that Fox News host Tucker Carlson's advertisers would be more effective than Joe Biden at pushing him over the racist great replacement theory that inspired the Buffalo mass murder.
00:31:38.000Politico's Jonathan Lemire and Eugene Daniels performed a deep dive on the president's decision not to name and shame people like Carlson and Republican Representative Elise Stefanik and others who espoused Replacement Theory.
00:31:46.000Now again, this has just become now a truism in the media, including mediaite, that this is what Republicans do.
00:31:54.000There is a radical difference, as we've talked about in depth, between Replacement Theory, which suggests the racial stock of a country is being perverted and lessened somehow by Jewish Elites bringing in brown people versus the idea that demographics matter when it comes to voting patterns, which again, the left is the one that initiated that conversation in the first place.
00:32:15.000The White House has given a series of explanations for not naming names, including a tantalizing notion from unidentified senior aides who put the onus on Carlson's advertisers.
00:32:22.000quote is from Politico, senior aides have felt that pressure from fellow Republicans and importantly advertisers would be more effective in pushing individuals like Fox News host Tucker Carlson to distance themselves from replacement theory.
00:32:32.000As one senior aide put it, there's no desire to give Carlson a clip of a presidential attack that the host could use in his A block every night.
00:32:38.000We totally understand the desire to call people out who have been pushing this disgusting rhetoric, but I also think it's worth remembering that many of these demagogues would love nothing more than the oxygen and attention that come from the president blasting them.
00:32:48.000A person familiar with the White House's thinking said, And in turn, that attention and notoriety may help them further spread those lies.
00:32:54.000It doesn't mean you never call them out, but I think it means you need to be judicious about doing so and cognizant it may have unintended consequences.
00:33:00.000So instead, the White House is trying to create a groundswell of pressure on Carlson's advertisers.
00:33:11.000I mean, the White House openly now pressuring advertisers to drop media members they don't like is a demonstration, once again, that trusting these folks with the basics of free markets and free speech is a very, very bad move.
00:33:27.000And one other area in which this is cropping up is, of course, in the attempt to target Elon Musk.
00:33:32.000So the latest attempt to do this is the attempt to remove Tesla from the S&P 500 ESG index.
00:33:39.000So ESG is Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance index.
00:33:42.000The ESG index is basically just a proxy for leftism.
00:33:45.000If your corporation is not a leftist corporation, that doesn't mimic all of the stakeholder interests of the left.
00:33:52.000So we'll give you a cookie if you're a good little corporation and you do exactly what we want you to do.
00:33:57.000So just to get that straight, the world's leading manufacturer of electric vehicles, Tesla, has now been removed from the Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance Index.
00:34:08.000Environmental, the world's lead... No, don't worry guys, it's not a leftist proxy group.
00:34:14.000They have real principles about environmentalism and all this.
00:34:18.000As Elon Musk pointed out, Exxon is rated top 10 best in the world for environment, social, and governance by S&P 500.
00:34:49.000They're targeting Tesla because Elon Musk came out the other day as a Republican and explained why he was going to vote Republican and because he has gone after Twitter.
00:34:58.000He tweeted the other day, Yeah, well, the first step on that is remove the leading manufacturer of electric vehicles on planet Earth from the ESG index.
00:35:02.000the party of division and hate so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.
00:35:05.000Now watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.
00:35:08.000Yeah well the first step on that is remove the leading manufacturer of electric vehicles on planet Earth from the ESG index.
00:35:18.000I'm a big fan of what my friend Vivek Ramaswamy is doing and trying to challenge woke capitalism by providing counter incentives here.
00:35:24.000But it just demonstrates, again, the reason you don't trust the government with things like a ministry of truth is because those same people are very interested in using governmental power to pressure and cudgel all these corporations into doing what they want and getting their allies in the media and the corporate sphere to do exactly the same.
00:35:40.000Alrighty, in just one second, we'll get to another topic that Democrats used to want to talk about, now they don't want to talk about so much anymore because it's super awkward for them, namely killing the unborn.
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00:38:38.000♪♪ Now, speaking of narratives, the Democrats have attempted to weaponize.
00:38:47.000They did the racism narrative, and they've also tried to do the sexism narrative You notice how fast abortion has sort of disappeared from the headlines?
00:38:53.000There's this Buffalo shooting and the entire media swiveled into place in unison, as a unit, because that is what they are.
00:38:59.000They are just an adjunct of the Democratic Party.
00:39:02.000And they all started talking about Great Replacement Theory and how the entire Republican Party was racist.
00:39:05.000Well, that was after having swiveled in unison to call the entire Republican Party sexist.
00:39:09.000Well, that abortion Narrative, it sort of just disappeared.
00:39:13.000Like, people just aren't talking about it anymore.
00:39:14.000It seems like that would have had more legs, right?
00:39:16.000I mean, if you were going to cover the overturning of a half-century Supreme Court world-shaking precedent in Roe versus Wade, you would imagine it might have more legs than like a week and a half of news coverage, but apparently not.
00:39:28.000Well, maybe one of the reasons for that is because every time Democrats talk about this issue for more than 32 seconds, it gets extremely ugly.
00:40:16.000And she's asked if men can give birth.
00:40:19.000Hard to make the case that this is a sexist issue if you're saying that men can give birth.
00:40:22.000Also, she fails to understand apparently basic biology because men don't have those parts.
00:40:28.000I know this is really difficult for Democrats.
00:40:30.000Somehow, I gotta tell you, it's amazing.
00:40:32.000I can ask my two-year-old daughter, and invariably she can tell the difference between boys and girls, but you can ask sophisticated pro-abortion witnesses in front of Congress what a girl is and they can't explain it.
00:40:43.000Truly, these people are either the greatest sophisticates the world has ever seen, uncovering new truths day by day, or they are some of the biggest morons that have ever been capable of performing basic breathing functions on this planet.
00:40:56.000Anyway, she also had some other words to say that were quite ugly.
00:41:00.000So she was asked by a congressman named Johnson, She was asked about abortion, and when abortion is appropriate, and can you make any logical distinction between aborting a two-year-old child who's already been born, or a nine-month-old child, or a baby who is just about to be born?
00:41:17.000So abortion should be allowed then, by your definition, for any reason, for any purpose, at any stage, right?
00:41:23.000I trust people to make decisions about their body, and then when relevant, I think that they need to consult their medical Listen, let me just ask you this question.
00:41:33.000If it is not lawful and morally acceptable to take the life of a ten-year-old child, I assume you agree with that, right?
00:41:45.000Then what is the principal distinction between the human being that is two years old, or nine months old, or one week old, or an hour old, than one that is eight inches further up the birth canal in the utero?
00:42:12.000These people have not thought through the issues.
00:42:14.000There is this really funny moment in that clip where he asks, you know, I assume that you think killing 10 year olds is wrong.
00:42:19.000And she actually has to pause for a second because she's trying to figure out where he's going with this and now it's going to be awkward for her.
00:42:25.000It's like, so killing 10 year olds is wrong, right?
00:42:36.000Because when you've been brought up to believe that every dumb sentence that comes out of your mouth is some sort of pearl of wisdom, this is how you get there.
00:42:42.000Of course, this is not a shock because there is a quick indicator, honestly, there's a quick indicator as to people that you should trust when it comes to science.
00:42:51.000And that is whether they list their pronouns in their Twitter bio.
00:42:54.000If you do this, if you're a pronoun lister in your Twitter bio, And you don't happen to be a transgender person who's attempting to get people to call them by biologically inappropriate and inappropriate pronouns.
00:43:05.000You're just a cisgender person who does this, and this means that you've bought into a completely non-scientific ideology that has nothing to do with reality.
00:43:12.000And so, I don't think we should trust you on these issues.
00:43:15.000When you lead off your congressional testimony by announcing your pronouns, things get awkward.
00:43:24.000I use she, her pronouns, and I'm a We Testify abortion storyteller.
00:43:28.000and the Executive Director of Avow, an organization that strives for unrestricted abortion care and reproductive rights for all Texans through community building, education, and political I don't know why she identifies as she-her.
00:43:41.000I mean, pronouns are just descriptors of nothing, apparently, because you can just determine what you wish to be called at any given time.
00:43:56.000Speaking of bad witnesses, the Democrats also called a witness to testify as to when there should be abortion restrictions.
00:44:03.000And this witness is like, never, ever, at all, for any reason, ever, What point in pregnancy should having an abortion no longer be an option?
00:44:12.000As a medical doctor, I understand that every pregnancy is unique and different.
00:44:18.000I also understand that patients need to have access to care, pregnant people, as the pregnancy progresses, and that may be for various reasons.
00:44:26.000Okay, so that is Dr. Yoshiko Robinson explaining that you should be able to abort a baby, like, forever.
00:45:52.000They're annoyed by it because it's usually predicated on basic lies about the nature of your neighbors.
00:45:57.000Most Americans don't actually believe that their neighbors are vicious, horrible racists.
00:46:00.000What they do believe is that their money is going less far.
00:46:03.000So Democrats, they're cruising for a bruising.
00:46:04.000All of these misdirect tactics are not going to work, and they are beginning to realize it, which means things are going to get a lot uglier before they get better in this country pre-election.
00:46:12.000All righty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
00:46:14.000In the meantime, go check out The Michael Nolan Show that's available right now.
00:46:18.000The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Bradford Carrington, Executive Producer Jeremy Boren, Supervising Producer Mathis Glover, Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky, Associate Producer Savannah Dominguez-Morris, Editor Adam Sajevitz, Audio Mixer Mike Karamina, Hair and Makeup Artist in Wardrobe Fabiola Christina, Production Coordinator Jessica Kranz.
00:46:43.000The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.