Join Jack, Jack, Andrew, Blake, and Tyler as they discuss the Epstein case, and what it means for the future of the Epstein scandal and the Trump administration's response to it. The Epstein case has been in the news for a few days now, and it's only escalating. President Trump has called for a special prosecutor to look into it, and the White House has invited members of the media to a White House meeting to discuss the matter.
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00:02:08.000And then, you know, one day a bunch of us get invited to the White House and we get told that there's going to be a phased release.
00:02:14.000And then we get told there is no release, et cetera, et cetera.
00:02:18.000That's kind of where things are at, though.
00:02:20.000Interestingly enough, and so as we are live right now, and there is an interview that was pre-recorded between President Trump and John Solomon that's going to come out later, I think in about two hours time for where we are right now.
00:02:34.000And in that, President Trump, and I've spoken to John Solomon about this, that President Trump is going to come out and embrace a special prosecutor, not just for sort of the Russiagate stuff and the various hoaxes related to that, but also one that he wants to have on Epstein.
00:02:54.000And this is something that is going to come out in just a few hours.
00:02:58.000So one special prosecutor for really looking into all of this stuff that goes back, you know, even probably before 2016.
00:03:23.000And kind of what's, you know, you can see below the subhead, the Epstein hoax.
00:03:27.000And that is the label that has currently been given to the entire story by the President of the United States himself.
00:03:33.000He said on Truth Social this morning, he says it is the Epstein hoax.
00:03:38.000And he says it's in a lineage with the Russia hoax, the Hunter Biden hoax, or really the Hunter Biden narrative that it was a hoax or double hoaxes within hoaxes here.
00:03:49.000But he basically says it's into this whole stream, you know, Jack Smith stuff.
00:03:54.000All of these come together and that the Epstein case is one of these things.
00:03:57.000And he actually says, if you are a supporter of mine, you will reject all of this and stop talking about it and have it all go away.
00:04:06.000I think we can all say, having talked to various members of the base, there are certainly a lot of people who are not going to let this go away.
00:04:14.000I do think that it is probably an issue that resonates the most with highly online, highly engaged, like people who are really wrapped up in the media narrative of things.
00:04:26.000I don't think it matters as much to probably, like, I don't imagine my parents are closely following this, for example, and they're big Trump supporters, of course.
00:04:37.000But I do think more people care about it than the president said in his truth post.
00:04:42.000Hey, Blake, do you think, do you think, actually, let me throw that out?
00:04:47.000Is this one of those issues as well where it's sort of, there's a split?
00:04:50.000And I'll open this up for everyone, where there's sort of a split based on where you get your news from, where your primary source of news is.
00:04:57.000Whereas, so for people who are on social media, people who are tracking that, you know, this is a huge issue.
00:05:03.000This has obviously been dominating, what, like almost the, has it been two weeks?
00:05:07.000I think it's almost been two weeks since the, uh, that memo came out on the 4th of July weekend, or I guess a week and a half at this point.
00:05:15.000And in a way that it's just not really penetrated until just now cable news.
00:05:25.000So, I mean, as somebody who interacts with the media as part of my day job, they basically told me that there was no there there.
00:05:34.000And so they're not going to ask a question about something that they consider to be a conspiracy theory.
00:05:38.000But they quickly betrayed the pat answer that I was receiving when they saw that MAGA and the base was upset about this issue and they wanted more transparency and answers.
00:05:50.000So they are giddily covering the fact that there is discontent in the MAGA base and that Trump is at odds with his base or whatever.
00:05:59.000So while they won't cover the actual substance of the story to any degree, they will cover that there is a split between the base and the president, seemingly tonally at the top.
00:06:12.000Yeah, it seems like that's the story that's built on the story.
00:06:14.000So it's now it's more of a story talking about the infighting than it is about actually the substance like Andrew's alluding to with Epstein.
00:06:24.000But I thought it was really interesting.
00:06:25.000I think CNN came out with a poll that said like 97% of Americans care about Epstein.
00:06:30.000So if they say that, I think I'm going to, so this is going to be the hour where I just make all the people watching really angry because, you know, I'm going to be what?
00:06:48.000Well, I do have an ancient king, yeah, maybe.
00:06:50.000Blake, before we dig into that, you know, let's, let's, so this, this Quinnipiac poll just dropped, and I think we're all looking at it right now.
00:07:00.000It says 63% of voters disapprove of the Trump administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
00:07:05.000Quinnipec University national poll finds nearly half of voters would consider joining a third party, not just one created by Musk.
00:07:14.000And it said only 17% of voters say that they approve of the way Trump is handling his the Epstein files.
00:07:25.000And there's just a comment from the analyst, and he says, Epstein has been dead and gone for years, but his tawdry legacy looms large in a country wanting to know more about who he knew and whether secrets have been buried with him.
00:07:39.000It also gets into Pam Bondi, Dan Bongino, and Cash Patel.
00:07:46.000Blake, when you look at stuff like this, let's talk about not just the case itself, because I feel like the story has become even bigger than that.
00:08:00.000Obviously, I disapprove of the handling of it, but because in the way that I've been wrapped up in all of this and the way that the focus has become on binders and influencers and meetings and all this nonsense rather than actually getting to the facts.
00:08:15.000But Blake, what is your sense of all this?
00:08:17.000And has the handling of this been what's riled this up?
00:08:21.000Yeah, so let's go back to what the original assertion is in the leaked memo and in subsequent statements.
00:08:29.000The statement is basically, Epstein did kill himself.
00:08:36.000There's no file of like who he was blackmailing.
00:08:39.000And basically, we don't have additional crimes we can prosecute.
00:08:43.000All we have is the stuff that was committed by Epstein and by Maxwell, which like they had, they had illegal, you know, child videos, but it was just normal.
00:09:13.000And I think where they erred is that they didn't appreciate that this was going to, for lack of a better term, like it's going to disappoint people.
00:09:24.000There's a good portion of people out there, especially the ones who follow it most avidly, who they really believe that there is something to the Epstein story that could be exposed, that there are important individuals, whether in intelligence or in finance or in politics,
00:09:45.000Hollywood, who were involved in this sort of like sordid elite sex ring, and they were either just enthusiastic participants or they were kind of entrapped and then blackmailed by Epstein.
00:09:57.000And there's something that could be revealed here and that it's not being revealed as sort of emblematic of like how powerful people can be protected in America.
00:10:04.000So I'll just go with, let's assume that Cash Patel and Dan Bongino and Pam Bondi and the president, of course, are all correct in telling the truth.
00:10:13.000And I think we generally do trust these people, that there actually isn't anything to this.
00:10:18.000They had to appreciate this was going to disappoint people and sort of let them down easily.
00:10:24.000And the way you do that is you have to kind of come in and say, all right, guys, we're going to lay it all out for you here.
00:11:11.000And getting angry when people ask about it.
00:11:14.000That is, to the people who care about this, that is the polar opposite of what you want to do.
00:11:19.000That is essentially aggressively shouting like you have something to hide, even if you don't.
00:11:25.000It's just, it's a pure strategy thing here.
00:11:28.000You should have handled this in terms of communication strategy differently if you wanted to make sure people wouldn't get upset about it.
00:11:36.000Yeah, I think the problem that most people I'm seeing have with everything is, again, this is similar to the way that the media is handling it, is the way that the administration is handling it and then the rings that are around the administration.
00:11:50.000So right now you kind of have laid out the situation where it's, you know, there's clearly something there that the general public doesn't know about.
00:11:59.000So like, let's start from the baseline position.
00:12:02.000And I don't know where Jack wants to jump in on this, but there's a, there is a nucleus of information that exists with Epstein that people don't know about.
00:12:12.000And the fact that everybody doesn't know about it and the jump to conclusions is like, well, there's a bunch of fake stuff and there's a bunch of things that are hoaxes and there's a bunch of there's hoaxes on hoaxes, right?
00:12:24.000I think that's what's bothering people so much.
00:12:25.000It's like, well, okay, well, explain what, what the heck is going on then if there are problems that exist, right?
00:12:32.000Because that's not the way that it's been framed this entire time.
00:12:35.000And everyone from the president to people within the administration to the rings again around the president, because there's layers to the president.
00:12:43.000There are organizations, there are, you know, people who have supported the president.
00:12:49.000There are people who work in the administration, people outside the administration who have all said the same things for many years now.
00:12:54.000And there just needs to be a really strongly curated PR Layout of absolutely everything.
00:13:05.000Why, what did happen, what didn't happen, why they think it is, right?
00:13:09.000And the president's team could do that, right?
00:13:12.000They could come out and say, here are all the things that we thought were true that we don't know or are not, because this is what we have access to now.
00:13:21.000I think that's probably what's driving most of the issue.
00:13:23.000And now the fight that is occurring are people that are kind of in those layers having to say, well, I'm defending what I don't know or I'm arguing against what I don't know.
00:13:35.000And the problem is right now is that it's like everybody's fighting each other.
00:13:41.000It's like they're going to battle without really knowing what jersey they're wearing when they show up.
00:13:47.000And then they don't even know what weapons the other guys are going to bring.
00:13:49.000And so they're fighting battles with, you know, bringing knives to gunfights and guns to knife fights and bazookas to knife fights, right?
00:13:56.000So like that's kind of what Twitter is in general.
00:14:00.000And that's kind of where we are in real life now.
00:14:02.000And the problem is, is like someone's got to clean all that up.
00:14:05.000So like, again, when you have the, you know, when you have BLM burn down Minneapolis, like someone still has to go clean up Minneapolis and rebuild it.
00:14:14.000Like that's kind of where we're at right now is where we have like some bazookas and knife fights type situation.
00:14:20.000Now someone's got to clean that up at some point.
00:14:35.000We need some really thoughtful leaders.
00:14:37.000I think Charlie's trying to be one of those people that's in the room that's like, hey, we need some answers.
00:14:42.000But, you know, whatever the answer is, we need to be prepared that it's not going to be maybe the answer that we were hoping for or that we may not have all the information that's laid out in front of us.
00:14:51.000Anyways, Jack, I don't know if you, what your thoughts are with that.
00:14:56.000Yeah, no, I mean, I think we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves here, too, because let's keep in mind that, you know, this was a situation where Trump's Department of Justice, so the DOJ came out and said that there would be a phased release of Epstein files starting with phase one back in February, and that there would be others that followed.
00:15:23.000So there's two things here, I think, going on.
00:15:27.000Number one is this, you know, people saying, hey, we want prosecutions.
00:15:37.000Number two is the statement that there is nothing else to be released, especially at a time when JFK files, they released them all, threw them up.
00:16:01.000And then anyone can go and look at the PDFs.
00:16:02.000And I believe they're searchable in one way, shape, or form.
00:16:06.000RFK as well, RFK Sr., I mean, his assassination.
00:16:09.000They've talked about doing other stuff with files.
00:16:12.000So those are examples of the way to do accountability right.
00:16:17.000But when it comes to this, rather than saying, okay, here's the link, everyone can go and look at the Epstein files, which really would have diluted, I think, all of this anger.
00:16:26.000Instead, it's there are no Epstein files.
00:16:29.000And that was the initial response, which I think has kind of been, it has kind of been driven over in the past nine, 10 days or so, because obviously if they're talking about who's in the Epstein files, then that means there are files.
00:16:40.000And so there was this strange unsigned memo that came out on a Sunday night saying there are no Epstein files.
00:16:47.000And that's just to everyone's, you know, to everyone's response is just ridiculous because people are sitting there going, well, wait a minute.
00:16:56.000If you're conducting an investigation, obviously there are going to be files.
00:17:00.000They're going to be FBI 302 forms, et cetera, et cetera.
00:17:03.000And then trying to hide behind this idea of, oh, well, there's child sexual abuse.
00:17:08.000Nobody wants the child sexual abuse material to come out, obviously.
00:17:11.000They want the children, if at all possible, as much as possible, to be protected and if at all possible, to get the justice that they really were deprived of when this guy, when he died in that cell.
00:17:26.000And so when people are really looking at all this, they're saying, why isn't there any information that you can just put up?
00:17:33.000Where are the emails from the investigation?
00:17:39.000Where are any of these things that anyone could release?
00:17:43.000Go back to like Julian Assange, when those tranches of emails came out, people could go and search them.
00:17:48.000You can still go to WikiLeaks and search them right now.
00:17:50.000And I think that is the second bucket of things that people are looking for.
00:17:54.000So the first one, yes, prosecutions, absolutely, if possible, we know that this interview is supposedly coming out in about 90 minutes or so with President Trump and John Solomon.
00:18:04.000But then also troves of documents for people to be able to look through and people be able to research on their own to find out what's actually in there.
00:18:13.000I think the statement that there's no files at all is really what was driving a lot of this.
00:18:19.000And Jack, the way that it was released is problematic as well.
00:18:26.000It was a Sunday night on a holiday weekend.
00:18:32.000And by the way, when this is a base issue and you're going to send it to Axios, what exactly do you think the base is going to respond to at that point?
00:18:40.000But ultimately, I mean, I think that the comm strategy, you're 100% right.
00:18:44.000It should have been very, very straightforward.
00:18:47.000Here's our WikiLeaks style document, everything we have.
00:19:23.000He was, they describe him as having a motor of a curious brain, like he, and He would fly just to go have dinner with professors and scientists and Nobel laureates and all of these things, right?
00:19:36.000So there's going to be a lot of people that he was interacting with that probably had nothing to do with any of the seedier parts of his activities.
00:19:45.000And that could potentially sort of ruin their lives, right?
00:19:49.000And so that's one of the things that they have been working against and kind of trying to deal with.
00:19:55.000I don't think that they should give too much credence to that.
00:19:58.000That shouldn't be the top priority list because it's been so butchered now, Jack, that we're starting to see this reflected in the polling, right?
00:20:07.000We're seeing it reflected in the polling when it comes to 18 to 29-year-olds.
00:20:11.000We're seeing, and by the way, that slide with 18 to 29-year-olds has been happening since the Iran situation, which I would have expected had things gone normally to go back up.
00:20:21.000But I think when you tack on Iran onto the Epstein thing, which again is very online, which 18 to 29-year-olds are very online, this is becoming a compounding effect.
00:20:39.000I actually have something of an in-between view of Epstein.
00:20:42.000I don't think that we're going to, I don't think of him as the skeleton key that's going to unlock all the mysteries of the previous decades and the intel corruption.
00:20:52.000I don't think it's going to unravel all of them.
00:20:54.000I don't give Epstein that much credit.
00:20:57.000But the fire alarm here is that when you handle this thing in such a way where people are so pissed about it, that you're going to have a compounding effect that shows up in the polling, which then means it's going to have an impact in the midterms.
00:21:10.000So if you want to get impeached again, this is the way you do it, is you just keep ignoring it.
00:21:15.000So we have to address it and you have to just sort of say, hey, listen, you guys are going to be disappointed.
00:22:47.000Epstein actually had like crimes with underage girls.
00:22:51.000I don't know the full extent of them, but here's the deal, though, Blake.
00:22:56.000I have people who are down at the U.S. Virgin Islands and the follow-up to that, I mean, they've gone in and out of that place.
00:23:04.000Tyler, walk through this for people because I've been meaning to sort of ask you offline about this, but if you're bringing it up, bring it up because I know that you know more about the U.S. Virgin Islands connection.
00:23:17.000Keep in mind, folks, this is where the Epstein island was, and people don't even remember that one of that that they remember the two cases, the Florida case against Epstein, and then also the New York case, but there was a third case in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
00:23:34.000So just for everyone's understanding at home, there is some really sketchy stuff just in general that goes on down at the U.S. Virgin Islands.
00:23:42.000And so the political parties that are established, which are American political parties, both Republican and Democrat, operate down there and operate as holding companies for so much political dollars.
00:24:01.000Isn't a lot of that just that the Virgin Islands are kind of a dump, though?
00:24:04.000Like, his island is nice, but it's otherwise like, it's kind of a slum.
00:24:07.000Yeah, so that's the question you should ask yourself is why does every major candidate that runs for office go down and do massive, huge fundraisers down in the Virgin Islands, like right in the shadows of Epstein Island?
00:24:20.000So that's a question and that's legitimately a big question.
00:24:26.000There's lots of shady stuff that goes through the U.S. Virgin Islands.
00:24:28.000There are a lot of shady characters who show up that are super involved all of a sudden with the political parties down there, including the Republican Party, including the Democrat Party.
00:24:37.000And the people that have been down there, that live down there, have witnessed, the citizens of the Virgin Islands that have been there for generations, that live there, have watched as the government has gone in numerous times, cleared out.
00:24:57.000They will absolutely take out people that try to get anywhere near the island.
00:25:02.000They have watched as items, documents, things have been carried out at later times, months after Epstein had died, had killed himself.
00:25:14.000So you have, or allegedly killed himself, I should say.
00:25:20.000These are all things that are part of the questions that should be answered that all revolve around Epstein, right?
00:25:28.000So if there isn't an explanation, this is something that people should be looking at.
00:25:33.000Well, then explain what has been going on there and why so many federal agents have gone in and out of that place.
00:25:47.000That is the big problem that the administration is caught in is to the, if it is true that a ton of people care about this, because his claim is no one cares about it.
00:25:58.000We'll see how passionate people Care about that, but like the catch-22 they're caught in is there's like really any evidence they give, unless it is like, oh, here's the list, here's the 57 people that actually were like blackmailed by Epstein, and now they will all have to resign in disgrace and the system has come crashing down.
00:26:20.000They'll say anything you release is just, it's actually perpetuating the cover-up.
00:26:24.000Like ever, more and more people get in on the cover-up.
00:26:27.000It's like, does anything they ever release about Kennedy kill the JFK conspiracies?
00:26:37.000Like, if they were to release everyone, like, let's say it's grand jury testimony and it's all the guilt by association stuff.
00:26:43.000Here's everyone who ever basically shook Jeffrey Epstein's hand over a 25-year period.
00:26:48.000And then all these people are tarred by association because they met Epstein, went to some social event that he was at, knew him, exchanged emails with him.
00:26:58.000No proof of any actual crimes that they were involved in.
00:27:02.000And then people will just say, well, why aren't you releasing all the stuff that shows they're guilty of all those crimes too?
00:27:06.000There will always be new things they will demand.
00:27:09.000And I think it actually probably does behoove us to pause and like look at the evidence that we might be massively outrunning ourselves here.
00:27:20.000Like let's take a core part of the Epstein Mythos.
00:27:24.000A core part of the Epstein Mythos, like part of the proof that he is an intelligence asset, is that supposedly Alex Acosta, who was the prosecutor, the federal prosecutor involved in negotiating that plea deal he did in Florida back in the 2000s.
00:28:26.000And also, since then, Acosta actually went, we have an on-the-record statement from Acosta in 2020, and he said he doesn't think that.
00:28:37.000I think he said the answer is no, he doesn't think that he was an intelligence agent.
00:28:41.000And Vicki Ward, the author of that 2019 Daily Beast article that had that citation, she says today she doesn't believe Epstein was a spy or working for any government.
00:28:53.000In fact, I think we have a tape of her saying that recently.
00:28:59.000Well, I mean, that's the other now theory doing the rounds, right, among, you know, that the reason no one's going to release the real data that they have is because he must have been some sort of agent or spy.
00:29:16.000I don't think he was working for a particular government.
00:29:19.000I don't know what your take on that is.
00:29:21.000People of power, people of influence, who enjoyed his company.
00:29:29.000I mean, I think we're mesmerized by him in so many ways.
00:29:34.000And part of what was mesmerizing is that everybody came away with knowing things they did not know.
00:29:41.000I mean, Jeffrey Epstein was certainly a conduit of all kinds of information.
00:29:49.000So I guess based off of what you're saying then is that they could just give Ghislaine Maxwell immunity and just let her talk freely then.
00:30:05.000I was surprised that because there were no cameras.
00:30:09.000So back then, not a lot of people were covering it live.
00:30:11.000But we were doing on my show, we were doing pretty much daily updates when that thing was coming out.
00:30:17.000It was, believe it or not, it was four years ago when she was on trial, which is crazy to even think about.
00:30:22.000It's been six years, by the way, since he was found dead in his cell.
00:30:26.000So, I mean, this has been, it's just crazy when you think about how long it's been that people have really been asking this.
00:30:33.000And I agree, though, that it's a fever pitch now because people are being told, because of the way it's been handled, because people are being told you can't have any information as a, and, and this is totally, you know, on whoever put together that memo from a week and a half ago.
00:31:08.000Well, one thing on what you just said, Jack, like whoever signed off on that memo, I mean, don't we know now that it was like Dan, Cash, and Pam?
00:31:48.000So when they were getting jurors for the trial, they asked on the jury questionnaire, were you a victim of sexual abuse or someone close to you a victim of sexual abuse?
00:32:01.000And then it turned out that was not true.
00:32:04.000He claims to have been a sexual abuse victim himself.
00:32:07.000And his testimony to other members of the jury about his own abuse, which was not at issue in the trial, like helped them overcome their doubts.
00:32:17.000And he was explaining how actually what the process of abuse is like and how the fact that their stories are inconsistent or have holes doesn't disprove them.
00:32:27.000It was like totally the Me Too narrative that we've Heard before where, like, oh, if their story doesn't make sense, that's just, that's because the abuse affected them so badly.
00:32:36.000And then, like, afterwards, he was just straight up, like, celebrating with one of the alleged victims about like helping achieve this verdict outcome.
00:32:46.000Like, it was not, it was very odd behavior from a juror.
00:32:49.000Also, one of the acute, one of like the four core victims in the case was like a schizophrenic who said that she had voices warning her that people were, like, agents were going to come and kidnap her children and take them away for sex trafficking.
00:33:03.000Like, there's a lot of weird stuff around the case.
00:33:08.000And I think it's worth remembering that Epstein getting arrested the second time, leading to his suicide, that was happening at the height of Me Too.
00:33:17.000It followed, like, a series of articles from the Miami Herald that basically laid out, you know, all these people who said they'd been abused by Epstein.
00:33:28.000I just think it's worth pausing to think like how much do we truly 100% ironclad know in this case versus like the mythology, the mythos that people have built up around this for years because I feel like I often have You could, but it's also why there wouldn't be nearly as much as people think.
00:33:53.000And I've heard stuff like the great mystery of why Jeffrey Epstein had so much money.
00:33:58.000Like, this is just a 100% thing that can't be explained.
00:34:01.000So I finally, I just went and I read biography, like articles about Epstein from 2002, before he'd even been arrested or anything.
00:34:08.000And he was a math teacher, and then he was super smart and incredibly good at math.
00:34:50.000Well, so he's this guy, like, he's, he's, he basically, he's a guy who was insanely talented at money.
00:34:57.000Like, I think when people say, how did this math teacher get so rich?
00:35:01.000It often carries this implication, like, he was this nobody until he's 30 or 35 or something, and then he suddenly plucked up and becomes incredibly rich really quickly.
00:35:10.000When it's actually, he was a math teacher when he was like 20 to 22.
00:35:15.000Then he goes and works on Wall Street at the age you would work on Wall Street as a young adult, even today.
00:35:38.000And he's working with billionaire clients, supposedly with his own firm, from like 1983 onwards.
00:35:45.000And if you're employing billionaires, if you have billionaire clients paying you millions of dollars as a flat fee for money management from the mid-80s, you could absolutely be insanely rich by the 90s.
00:35:57.000But Blake, you're skipping over an important point because you've put that article in our chat and I read it.
00:36:03.000The question that I had instantly reading that jump from working on Wall Street and Bear Stearns, then all of a sudden he launches his own firm.
00:36:12.000It basically paints, and I don't remember the author.
00:36:15.000Blake, there's some mystique around the author too that you brought up.
00:36:18.000But the author goes, well, he instantly only was accepting billionaire clients, like almost instantly.
00:36:25.000Like if you had 500 or 800 million dollar portfolios and you were saying, hey, manage my money, he'd say, it's not big enough.
00:37:57.000Like, if you, he was basically running this guy's money and he self-enriched himself to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:38:05.000So maybe the narrative is as simple as he had one or two very rich people get really, like, become extremely close with him and he essentially exploited them.
00:38:16.000Certainly would not be the first such arrangement to exist in American finance or anywhere else.
00:38:22.000And so I only bring all of that up to say there actually are mundane explanations of, comparatively mundane explanations.
00:38:31.000So you don't have this thing where only, oh, he's an intelligence asset explains what he was able to do.
00:38:39.000I think he's a smart and extremely like charismatic individual who was in Wall Street during this massive boom time can explain a lot of things.
00:38:49.000And I think for the later stuff, like there was a sort of like mythology around him that encouraged wild accusations, wild beliefs.
00:38:59.000And we're sort of now Coming to terms with that, and people are finding it difficult to extricate themselves from these many, many years of like mythology building around Epstein.
00:39:11.000Yeah, but Blake, there's things like how did he get possession of the largest mansion estate in Manhattan that was owned by the State Department via these like.
00:39:28.000Yeah, so Wexner had it, and then he sold it.
00:39:30.000And there's some claims he may have sold it to him for a dollar, which would also explain if he was able to get it before he would have otherwise been able to afford it.
00:39:37.000But he may have also just bought it normally because he made a ton of money.
00:39:43.000By the way, I think that, you know, I was looking at this former prime minister, Naftali, or whatever, Israeli prime minister, because, you know, post-Tucker being at SAS, then the entire Israeli Jewish community was, you know, pretty up in arms that Tucker was suggesting that the tie only went between Israel, Mossad, and Epstein.
00:40:05.000And so then you have, you know, you have former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett firmly denies it.
00:40:12.000So we asked Mike Bence about that on the show, and Mike was like, hey, I look at this as like, you know, really an artfully written letter, essentially saying, yeah, we're not denying any ties.
00:40:24.000Okay, well, what does working for you mean versus having ties?
00:40:27.000And I tend to, the way I look at this, and Blake, I think you would probably resonate with this at some level, is this is a guy that's fooling around with, you know, hot women and then underage women.
00:40:39.000He claims, you know, at the time that he didn't know any of them were underage.
00:40:42.000I think he, I think we all can ignore that.
00:41:35.000And it is probable that he was doing titillating things because he found it intriguing working with Intel agencies, right?
00:41:43.000So doing these offshore, you know, complicated tax shelters or layering of different businesses.
00:41:51.000Like this was, he had a particular set of skills that he could sell out to the highest bidder, but it didn't necessarily mean he was married to any of them, right?
00:41:58.000So he might have been involved in different projects within the Intel community that were seedy or unseemly, but that was, it's almost like he might have been drawn to that because it was, this is the type of person he, like, what do you call him, Blake, a fabulist?
00:42:12.000I think that's a fairly compelling way to look at his psychological makeup.
00:42:17.000He would do things that increased his mystique, that got his kicks off, that, that, you know, and that sort of pattern holds in each different area of his life.
00:42:28.000Yeah, there are other articles about him that say basically in the 80s he told people he was an intelligence agent.
00:42:35.000I feel like, you know, the greatest Intel asset of all time would not do that.
00:42:40.000But there are definitely fabulous who tell people all the time that they're intelligence assets, and a lot of people even believe them.
00:42:46.000This actually works with a ton of people.
00:42:48.000You just tell someone you work for the CIA, and if they don't get it disproven otherwise, they sometimes just believe it.
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00:44:40.000I guess like getting back to the core thing is are we able to does this like damage the administration or are they going to be able to extricate themselves?
00:44:55.000Look, I think it's already showing up in polling.
00:44:58.000I think it's going to be something that, and by the way, let's keep in mind too that the effect of the tariffs is now starting to come in where we are, you know, CPI was down, which was good.
00:45:10.000But at the same time, you know, the effect of the tariffs is starting to be seen a little bit here and there with price increases around the board.
00:45:18.000You know, July usually is a very, very like, it's the doldrums of summer.
00:45:58.000The admin has a lot of wins that they can directly point to.
00:46:01.000They're also going to have to be spending political capital on various things here and there as things come up, you know, ICE raids, et cetera, et cetera, tariffs.
00:46:12.000Who knows, something kicks off with Ukraine or not, this new arms deal that's going through.
00:46:16.000And so this thing has turned into this massive, I think, umbrella in the sense that it's blocking out everything else that's going on.
00:46:28.000And for people to think that it's just, it's a mistake to think that it'll just go away on its own.
00:46:33.000And it's a mistake to think that people will just stop caring about it because they're told to.
00:47:05.000But of course, the question is, are we going to actually get one?
00:47:08.000No, I have heard that there is a serious effort underway to appoint a special prosecutor and that names are being listed already.
00:47:18.000So there's a list of names that's being brought together of potential, you know, potential individuals who could be that special prosecutor.
00:47:30.000So it's going to be kind of like over all this, including Epstein, but it's going to be like.
00:47:35.000Yeah, so it's, you put it together, right?
00:47:38.000So it's a deep state prosecutor, but you add Epstein to the scope memo of this broader conspiracy that they were looking at already with Russiagate, Comey, Clapper, Brennan, et cetera.
00:47:50.000But you add Epstein essentially to that as well to see if there's any nexus or be able to go.
00:47:57.000And so for people to understand this, by the way, when you look at Mueller, right, the special counsel's office isn't just, it's not just like one person is going over and reviewing this stuff.
00:48:10.000So you can easily have dual tracks of investigations and different buckets that they're looking into underneath the office of the special counsel, if that is the route that they end up going under.
00:48:23.000And by the way, there's also a question of whether or not this person needs to be Senate confirmed.
00:48:27.000That's something that with some of these Supreme Court orders that came down.
00:48:31.000Actually, Blake, that would be, that's an interesting question for you.
00:48:33.000I know I'm kind of throwing you for, you know, didn't ask this beforehand, but is it true that with some of the court rulings on Jack Smith that a special counsel would need to be Senate confirmed?
00:48:46.000So it's unclear because I think the court ruling was specifically about his, correct?
00:48:52.000Or I haven't closely looked at this, but I think.
00:48:55.000But you know what I'm talking about, right?
00:49:03.000Currently, I think they could still do it.
00:49:04.000In theory, I know Clarence Thomas basically said in like one of his concurrences that he would really like the Supreme Court to look at this, but I don't think the Supreme Court has explicitly ruled that basically special counsels of that sort are actually not allowed anymore.
00:49:21.000But you are putting me on the spot, so I don't know for sure the answer.
00:50:01.000And so for folks who are there, you know, I want to, you know, in the chat, you know, send us your stuff as well.
00:50:08.000You know, freedom of charliefurk.com or 1776 at humanevents.com.
00:50:15.000Send us your comments because there's a ton out there on this.
00:50:18.000We've spent now about 47 minutes talking about it, way longer than certainly we intended to.
00:50:24.000But honestly, we could go even further because, you know, at the end of the day, I think this is a situation where people want answers.
00:50:31.000You're starting to see, by the way, when you look at the polling, this is something where the left and the right are actually in agreement on.
00:50:35.000They want more answers to come out on this or at least something to be done in this situation.
00:50:41.000So it's sort of becoming a self-perpetuating prophecy here where, you know, it's or self-fulfilling prophecy, I should say, where the absence of a story has created a story rather than the other way around.
00:50:54.000And that goes back to the way it was handled.
00:50:57.000That goes back to the way that it was set up.
00:50:59.000Do you guys want to get into the Somali mayors?
00:51:24.000It's super common in Turkey because it refers to the Islamic conquest of the Christian Empire.
00:51:31.000But anyway, we'll have a different Islamic conquest going on in Minneapolis.
00:51:36.000And I'm sure it will work out equally as well for the inhabitants.
00:51:39.000So yeah, this guy, Omar Fateh, he is a Somali born in the United States, but he has clips of him referring to Somalia as our country, much like Ilhan Omar also has clips of her doing that.
00:52:44.000I understand that our Somali communities are all connected to each other here in Minnesota and back home and ask for your support.
00:52:53.000There's always been a link between our community here as well as back home.
00:52:59.000And I'm running to bridge that gap and unite all of us and represent all of us because when we succeed here, we're going to succeed everywhere.
00:53:06.000And I'm hoping to do that just like Abderzak, inshallah.
00:53:29.000I said the same thing about Zora Mamdani.
00:53:32.000And what I'm getting at is we have at some point, this is a broader debate.
00:53:38.000And it's honestly something that I think is one of the most pressing issues in America today, because we now have these foreign enclaves inside the United States, which are completely, as you can hear from their own words, that they bear allegiance to the homeland, the motherland.
00:53:58.000This is something, by the way, that our founding fathers were very directly worried about and very directly concerned about, the idea of allegiance to foreign powers.
00:54:07.000It's something that all of them spoke at great length about.
00:54:11.000But then when you combine that with new factors such as the internet and social media, which allow for this direct communication, direct consumption of media from that area, news from that area, FaceTime, group chats, et cetera, you really don't even need to assimilate at all within the home country anymore, the Western country, the host country, if you will.
00:54:34.000And they can grow and grow exponentially in many cases, particularly Somalia.
00:54:41.000But then there's also this question of birthright citizenship.
00:54:46.000So this individual, Omar Fatah, which, by the way, I looked this up before the show.
00:54:51.000I wasn't able to get a definitive answer as to whether or not his parents ever attained U.S. citizenship at all.
00:54:57.000I think it said that they came when they were younger as students, and yet I have no information as to whether or not they ever obtained U.S. citizenship.
00:55:10.000He's a U.S. citizen, and yet he bears allegiance to Somalia.
00:55:14.000You saw the same thing with Zora Mondami, who is someone who just became a citizen a couple of years ago and is now running and probably will be the next mayor of New York, although I believe the polling has tightened up a little bit in that race, where it's, I think it just bears, you know, and for everybody, you know, I'll open it up.
00:55:33.000It just bears this bigger question of, you know, does a piece of paper make you an American?
00:55:40.000Does a piece of paper mean, oh, well, here you go, you're an American now because this piece of paper, this stamp says you're American.
00:55:46.000And I would argue that that's not what a nation is.
00:55:49.000And I would argue that these ethnic enclaves and mass immigration absolutely do dilute our national character and our national identity.
00:56:00.000And a nation is a breathing, living, organic thing.
00:56:05.000And every other nation around the world and all throughout history would agree with us in this aspect.
00:56:12.000And it's this belief in this weird 1960s version of the country that, oh, that like anybody can just automatically become an American has led to some really, really bad outcomes.
00:56:24.000So a kind of fact that's interesting regarding whether his parents became citizens.
00:56:28.000So I'm reading here, this is from migrationpolicy.org, but Somalia.
00:56:33.000Did you know that of all immigrants from any country that we have like a sizable number of, Somalis have the highest naturalization rate of actually going through the process of becoming citizens?
00:56:43.00068% of all immigrants from Somali have gone all the way and become citizens, whereas the average overall is just 52%.
00:56:55.000And I think it's worth confronting that.
00:56:58.000It's worth talking about that because I would hazard to say that Somalis are probably among the groups with the highest rate of like probably going on state support, receiving welfare in various ways.
00:57:11.000They probably have lower employment rates than a large number of immigrant groups.
00:57:16.000And we've seen it play out multiple times where you have, frankly, insane feeding frenzies on government money that route through the Somali community.
00:57:28.000Anyone who's unfamiliar with it should look up the Feeding Our Future scandal.
00:57:33.000That was a COVID era program where they basically were receiving money to provide meals to children during COVID.
00:57:43.000And they took hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:57:46.000And if you look at the indictment for this, every single person involved has a Muslim name, except for the one white Lutheran woman who's at the very top of the organization.
00:58:00.000It's like her and then everyone else below it.
00:58:02.000And they're basically just taking cash and shipping it directly to Somalia that they got through this thing.
00:58:08.000Everything about it from top to bottom was fake.
00:58:13.000There's just a clear-cut difference in my view from one guy maybe embezzling money from a company he works at or someone robbing a store or something and this like real like hundreds or dozens of people possibly hundreds participating in this Systematic plundering of the government so they can route money to their like ethnic subgroup.
00:58:36.000And then when they were trying to prosecute this, people were offered like multiple, like tens of thousands of dollar bribes.
00:58:43.000Like we had jurors who were just offered bribes.
00:58:48.000It's like absolutely insane what has happened because they've built up this large sub-national community in Minneapolis.
00:58:58.000And I think, you know, Matt Walsh went viral the other day for just asking, I challenge anyone, he said, to provide a single way America has benefited from Somali immigration.
00:59:10.000And the simple answer is, but no, it's no, no, that's not true, Blake.
00:59:16.000That's not true because I was able to answer and rise to the occasion of Matt Walsh's challenge.
00:59:24.000Because does anyone remember Sports Illustrated a couple years ago, the Burkini?
01:00:15.000So it's the Democratic Farmers and Labor Party there.
01:00:19.000There was a merger that happened, I think it was pre-World War II, somewhere in the early 1900s, that they merged together and it was the farmer, the farmers, mostly farmers, but farmer and labor party merged together with the Democrat Party.
01:00:32.000And now you have today this circumstance where it's like you've got a complete takeover of outsiders coming into the state of Minnesota and people finally that are Democrats are waking up.
01:00:49.000And we see this now happening in the outskirts and again, where the DFL really dominated for the better part of a century, which was in the more rural parts of Minnesota that have now gone Republican.
01:01:01.000Now you have Republican congressmen that are there.
01:01:03.000And that, for the first time in a long time, the western part of the state went Republican a few years ago.
01:01:10.000And so you are seeing a shift and a change.
01:01:13.000And this is becoming right down lines.
01:01:16.000And so I do think that the outcomes of having such radicalized foreign nationals come in is for certainly driving Democrat proper rural areas more Republican.
01:01:34.000The question is, is that going to be fast enough and enough votes to offset the growth that we're seeing with the invitation of all these foreign nationals coming into cities like Minneapolis, where you have to ultimately abandon your state and just the entire rural area basically just has to live underneath a Somalian empire that has been created within your state.
01:02:28.000So this is the same issue with New York City that's going on right now.
01:02:31.000It's like there is like letting them hang themselves a little bit is that you're going to have this shift as these things continue to happen.
01:02:40.000I would much rather, and this is a thought crimey subject here because people will debate me and say I'm stupid all day long for saying this, but I would much rather have a foreign national get elected incidentally as mayor of a big city that we've already lost anyways to commie Dems who are constantly brokering deals in the background because it's going to actually have a net positive rightward shift outcome when people don't like what they see.
01:03:08.000I just think, yeah, I mean, I've been, I went kind of viral for talking about this at SAS.
01:03:25.000The whole thing has just gone too far.
01:03:27.000And I think that's why the average American is like, I don't want to hear any of these flowery arguments about, oh, this is why we need this.
01:03:35.000And this is why we need the Mall of America to be overrun by Somalians anymore.
01:04:47.000And when I see guys like Fatah, Omar Fatah, or Zoram Amdani, or this is some guy in Detroit that's running for Senate in Michigan, I forget his name, I just instantly think, immigration moratorium.
01:05:03.000I want less legal immigration because it's obviously getting gamed.
01:05:06.000It's chain migration crap where they just bring all their nephews and nieces and their aunties and their uncles over and they say, oh, look, we've got this United States and we can just fleece the system.
01:05:18.000And, oh, yeah, we happen to be Muslim, which means we're called to politically dominate the host country like a parasite.
01:05:26.000And we're going to play into their sympathies and their weaknesses because all these white people are scared of being called racist.
01:05:35.000And so we're going to use their rules against them.
01:05:38.000And then you get this red-green alliance where they're all sort of race Marxists and socialists.
01:05:43.000And they want to extract the wealth of hardworking Americans to give it away to all these people we just imported because we're all racist, apparently.
01:05:53.000And so the whole thing is a ball of wax.
01:06:15.000But with Somalis, you got, it's the Muslim portion of it where I'm sorry, you're not going to assimilate the same way that a Christian nation will assimilate.
01:06:27.000And these people, I'm sorry, of all the countries on planet Earth where you could make an argument that, oh, they bring some sort of like good aspects of their culture.
01:07:14.000And by the way, there is, and Blake, you know this better than me, but there is data to support when we look at our fertility rates across the West.
01:07:23.000When you start importing the third world, if fertility rates, maybe they were already low to begin with, that might just be a factor of modernity.
01:07:31.000I'm not saying there's only one variable here, but when you start importing the third world and you are growing up and you become of age to start having kids and you think, you don't necessarily feel tied to the culture that you're inhabiting anymore.
01:07:44.000You don't look around and go like, I want my kids to inherit my country because it's my country.
01:07:49.000There's like some weird psychological pattern that unfolds and you don't, you don't, that doesn't trigger when you feel like your country doesn't belong to you anymore.
01:07:58.000And I'm sorry, I'm old enough to remember an America that looked dramatically different than this.
01:08:07.000It was more singing from the same song sheet.
01:08:10.000And, you know, so point is, Blake, make, I don't know what, Blake, you sent some research paper on basically declining birth rates and high immigration zones.
01:08:22.000High immigration of like of other groups, like it suppresses, it lowers like the fertility rate of the actual like natives of the country.
01:08:30.000And that also can just exacerbate what people, I think so much of this just happens because people are bad at math.
01:08:37.000Like every time mass immigration projects have been started, it always starts with someone saying this won't like fundamentally change the nature of the country.
01:08:45.000And it always fundamentally changes the nature of the country.
01:09:42.000The government did an internal report that one, actually, they're not really in any danger from the Taliban, and this is probably not necessary.
01:09:48.000And two, by the way, a lot of these migrants will probably be radicalized because the UK is a dump and they're going to decide that it sucks and they're going to become terrorists.
01:10:39.000I don't know what that means, but it's two abortions per DFL member.
01:10:47.000Anyways, make sure that's stacked outside.
01:10:50.000But Blake, to your point, when you bring over 24,000 Afghans or whatever, I don't know their birth rate off the top of my head, but I'm assuming it's higher than your average Western woman.
01:11:04.000You're bringing over probably sex pests.
01:11:07.000And we've seen this throughout Europe.
01:11:09.000And you're bringing over all of their increased birth rates.
01:11:15.000So when you're talking about math and you go to like Somalia, the Somalians going into Minneapolis, if you start doing the charts of how one population is going to keep growing, plus, and the other one shrinking, plus you talk about chain migration, like this problem may have already become too big to solve in a place like Minnesota.
01:11:41.000And also, this is part of what they'll do.
01:11:44.000One, they'll say, like, we need this to keep our birth rate high enough to avoid our pensions becoming collapsing, or like, we need them to fill like all the holes in our employment system.
01:11:53.000But it's literally a scam from top to bottom because, especially if they're coming from Afghanistan or Somalia, these groups have vastly higher rates of unemployment, vastly higher rates of going on every form of welfare.
01:12:06.000And like, multi-generationally, you'll just have a huge share of them be not in the workforce.
01:12:12.000Again, let's say, it's worse than that.
01:12:15.000During the Biden years, our tax dollars were going to fund NGOs to help them understand how to game the system.
01:12:23.000So then they would get here and then we paid to help them fleece us.
01:12:26.000So you want to know what the scariest part is?
01:12:28.000In most of these states where they bring in Middle Easterners or Africans from these countries, most of the places that they go to work now, they are coached through the healthcare system and social work.
01:12:46.000So a lot of the individuals, this is why you're seeing this, is you'll have, and again, this is just a scary fact.
01:12:54.000You have international migrants coming here with absolutely no skills whatsoever.
01:13:01.000They're put through things that we pay for to put them through school for healthcare working, like nursing, long, like end-of-life care type stuff, senior care type stuff, social work type stuff.
01:13:17.000And that's who's now taking care of our elderly here in America.
01:13:22.000People who are brand new here to this country, don't even speak the language.
01:13:27.000And now we're sticking them in just basically, you know, change diapers on seniors and feed them and get them up and out of bed.
01:13:40.000And that to me is just like a very scary thing as well when you think about it is that, you know, when we talk about how society has changed so much with young people not getting jobs and doing the tasks that we expect now foreigners to do, we're outsourcing foreign labor to take care of our seniors.
01:14:01.000So they're taking over jobs that young people should have.
01:14:05.000They're also taking jobs that you should probably be doing as a family.
01:14:10.000We're talking about the complete disruption of American societal values, top to bottom, all because they want to institute foreign labor into the U.S. And this is like a very common thing.
01:14:23.000Like in Minnesota, it says the number one job that Somalis have is social work.
01:14:32.000The main job they end up being qualified for is like managing how much assistance their community needs to function.
01:15:29.000Number two in Minnesota is healthcare and servicing, which isn't like real health care.
01:15:34.000It's like senior care like we're talking about.
01:15:36.000Number three is teachers of Somali heritage and Somali bilingual teachers bilingual educators you need in the public schools because there's so many kids who don't speak English.
01:15:52.000So this is what I want to, this is my point though, right?
01:15:55.000When we create these ethnic enclaves, what we're doing is you're not making someone a hyphenated American.
01:16:01.000You're not even making someone a little bit American.
01:18:44.000By noon, the two parking ramps were filled with 13,000 cars and that sent the mall's war room into action.
01:18:53.000We were able to divert the upside parking properly and efficiently and effectively within five minutes.
01:18:59.000There was congestion on the road, but the plan seemed to work.
01:19:03.000Meanwhile, the traffic jam continued inside the mall.
01:19:08.000It took almost an hour to get on some of the most popular amusement roads, and the wait continued in the food line.
01:19:15.000They're just talking about how fun it is to be there, you know, how excited they are to be there.
01:19:21.000You also get into these sort of like, I don't know, there's sort of like 90s American archetypes that just don't quite exist anymore.
01:19:28.000Like there's a guy who's like a collector.
01:19:30.000There's a guy who's there to just sort of, it's towards the end, where he's just, he just visits American landmarks and likes to take pictures of them.
01:19:38.000So it's sort of like a precursor to selfie culture, I guess, where he's just sort of sitting there and it's amazing because he's just sort of enjoying the moment saying, yep, I really love this mall of America and I'm really excited to be here.
01:19:51.000You could tell he's just so genuine about it, where he's not posting it to some blog or he's not posting it to some social media account, where he's just enjoying it because it's part of America and that's what he loves.
01:20:05.000I'm being told by Priestra Faz in the chat that it is the home of the first Nitro, WCW Nitro.
01:20:11.000So a ton of, yeah, just a ton of, you know, a ton of history that's gone through there.
01:20:23.000I follow Dead Malls on Reddit and just like you could, they show up the pictures of before and after, like the malls when they opened or like in the 90s and then like what they look like today.
01:20:35.000And people like take video cameras in there.
01:20:37.000And I think one of the saddest things for me, it's just like, it is what it is.
01:20:42.000And I talk about this with like my grandparents who we talk all the time about driving movie theaters and stuff like that.
01:20:50.000And just like the entire, the lore of like how America used to be.
01:20:56.000And just to see that, and I forget, you forget, you haven't been in a mall in like a long time.
01:21:01.000And there's some malls that are still open and you'll go in every once in a while.
01:21:04.000Like here in Arizona, we still have Scottsdale Fashion Square.
01:21:06.000They're still open, but it's not the same as what it used to be.
01:21:11.000And where it was like, you just had a mall in every big city and you would go and it was such a big deal.
01:21:17.000And there were like kids would go and hang out all day long and you would see this stuff and it's just gone.
01:21:23.000Like the culture of America shifted, I think, with cell phones, like the pretty much when the iPhone was developed and you just don't, and then obviously like Amazon and everything else, but you just don't have any of that anymore.
01:21:37.000And the personal interaction that exists, the human interaction, the going there, getting excited about it, being there.
01:21:43.000And like a big part of that was like you went with like your family, like you went with your mom or your dad and like they would, they would like give you like five bucks.
01:21:50.000They'd be like, don't spend that everywhere.
01:21:53.000Like, and you would go like, you know, to like, you know, Dairy Queen or whatever it was or like hot dog on a stick and you eat whatever Wetzel's pretzels and eat whatever you had there.
01:22:03.000And it was like, that was like such a, like a mentally different time.
01:22:07.000And now it's like nothing like that exists.
01:22:10.000And now I'm looking up, so remember when that kid got thrown off the balcony at the Mall of America by, was it a Somali migrant who did it?
01:22:30.000But he probably shouldn't have been thrown off the balcony in the first place.
01:22:33.000I think that was avoidable and lamentable.
01:22:35.000So the biggest difference between outside of no longer having malls everywhere and normal Americans walking through them is now we have no malls and just like a bunch of mentally ill people and a bunch of foreign migrants running around most of our cities.
01:23:03.000We call it a Pizza Hut nationalism, where even though a Pizza Hut wouldn't necessarily count as a third space, but it was sort of like third spaces were places that you were going to that it wasn't work, it wasn't school, and it also wasn't home.
01:23:19.000And it was just a place that you would go to that you would exist in, where you would commune with people, where you would meet people, and you'd sort of bump into people from in, you know, in the real world.
01:23:33.000And you weren't, you weren't just there to like pick up something and leave, or you would actually spend time.
01:23:39.000And churches are a great example of third spaces.
01:23:42.000So churches are sort of one of the only ones left.
01:23:44.000But with the death of malls, you really lost this communal gathering place.
01:23:51.000It used to be just sort of your community center.
01:23:55.000And we've totally lost that in real life.
01:23:58.000I mean, these were places where you could go on a date.
01:24:00.000It's where you could meet your girlfriend or boyfriend.
01:24:04.000It's where you could spend time without mom and dad, like totally looking over your shoulder when you were, you know, a teenager, but you were still in a generally, you know, controlled, safe environment.
01:24:15.000And to be sure, you know, part of there's a lot of factors at play here in all these things.
01:24:22.000The death of malls, the internet certainly played a huge role in that.
01:24:25.000Financialization played a huge role in that.
01:24:27.000The rise of crime has played a massive role.
01:24:30.000but specifically for the mall of America.
01:24:33.000I just don't think that you can accurately tell that story if you don't include the massive influx of Somali migrants that took place over the last 15, 20 years.
01:24:46.000You just can't talk about the story of the mall.
01:24:48.000And this, in a sense, is sort of a microcosm of America writ large, that, you know, there it was, this incredible, you know, and just play those, play the B-roll again, guys, as we're talking about it.
01:25:01.000This was in our lifetime that places like this existed and they were great and they were fun and you could go there and go shopping and get a book to read and go pick up something and meet some people and eat some food, do whatever.
01:25:18.000And you didn't have to worry about crime.
01:25:20.000You didn't have to worry about getting your children thrown off of the top railing.
01:25:25.000It's just stories like that were just completely unheard of.
01:25:28.000I should correct before it gets clicked by somebody.
01:26:23.000Those were actually a part of American life and they kind of don't really exist anymore.
01:26:28.000Like, you know, the fast food, like, especially post-COVID, one of the things, the horrifying things is like they've opened up all these restaurants now, including Chick-fil-As, that they don't even have a dining.
01:26:41.000They want you to drive through or pick up or get it delivered on apps.
01:26:45.000And, you know, this goes back to kind of the very, you know, 1984 stuff that we talk about, which is, you know, what is the ultimate goal of some of the overlords that are out there?
01:26:57.000And it's like human interaction actually turns out to be really bad for people who want to control you.
01:27:47.000Yeah, if you're watching two hours of TikToks a day, you are just watching two hours of television, except like even dumber than usual television.
01:27:55.000And you can't even talk about it because you have nothing to talk about.
01:27:57.000Yeah, then there's nothing to talk about.
01:27:59.000And people are like choosing to DoorDash their food rather than go eat it in a place.
01:28:04.000And I think it's too simple to just say like, oh, like mass migration or whatever killed them all.
01:28:10.000I think it played a role in killing a lot of them.
01:28:13.000But a lot of it is just people are kind of, they're retreating from living lives out in public.
01:28:20.000And they're retreating from socialization.
01:28:23.000And that is an unfortunate reality we have to reckon with.
01:28:30.000But you can't just say that's happening because, and I agree, there are more distractions online, but that's also because the public spaces have absolutely deteriorated.
01:28:41.000And in places like the mall of America.
01:28:44.000You know, it's definitely migration plays a huge role.
01:28:51.000When you go out and you subconsciously don't recognize or feel like you're part of that community, when you think you're third places, like your parks and your public spaces and your public pools and your malls, they don't feel comfortable anymore.
01:29:08.000It's probably a slight change of behavior of degrees over years.
01:29:12.000And then before you know it, enough people are feeling the same thing that they've retreated from those spots, at least in a place that's to a level that then becomes really obvious.
01:29:23.000And then there's a degradation of like normal, hardworking, law-abiding, normal people in those places.
01:29:38.000But then you start seeing this effect that everything starts costing more because our free stuff is no longer palatable for a large part of the population.
01:29:46.000You could call those people racist if you want, or you could just get to the point where, guess what?
01:29:51.000It's called cultural displacement and it's real.
01:29:54.000Now, this is a point I made before, but when you talk about the urban core and all of a sudden it starts gentrifying and money starts pouring in and you get all these Atlantic articles or New Yorker articles about the cultural displacement of the urban poor and how they can't afford their home anymore, well, you get sympathy for those people.
01:30:14.000But when you have however many tens of millions of immigrants that have come in through the third world over the last three or four decades, and all of a sudden people that grew up in this country no longer recognize their neighbors, and you just call them racist, well, you know, they've been culturally displaced too.
01:30:32.000So don't be surprised when their public places are no longer frequented by native-born Americans.
01:31:35.000Yeah, that book, there was a book, Bowling Alone, that came out, I think, in 2000 or 2001 that talks about Robert Putnam that really gets into this.
01:31:45.000And it talked about how it just mentioned, you know, it started about talking about bowling, but it used bowling as a sort of a linchpin for or a microcosm of civic societies.
01:32:00.000And so communities had civic societies and civic societies like the PTA or the Federation of Women's Voters, Boy Scouts, Red Cross, like all these different things.
01:32:10.000And that as, and one of those was bowling leagues.
01:32:15.000And one of the things they pointed out that more and more Americans from the 1960s on were not joining bowling leagues.
01:32:23.000And the teams and club, which is funny because I remember my mom and my dad used to have a bowling night.
01:32:29.000And I've talked before about how I lived in a town that was completely destroyed by illegal immigration when they became a sanctuary city.
01:32:36.000And my mom and my dad used to have their own bowling balls and were on a bowling team.
01:32:42.000And that bowling alley is now getting shot up because people from Philly are coming out there and gangs are settling beefs because they know people are there.
01:32:52.000And so people don't really show up for the bowling league anymore.
01:32:55.000And what it ends up them, what they end up doing is that they are bowling alone.
01:33:00.000So people will go out and then it's, you know, to do bowling, but you're either bowling alone or just with a couple of friends.
01:33:06.000But this idea of the broader civic life just isn't existing anymore to the extent where, you know, these third places like a bowling alley can only be sustained through entertainment or adding non-bowling features.
01:33:22.000But the idea of the bowling league just isn't something that exists anymore in the same way.
01:33:29.000And this is, I mean, I have conversations with my friends that are all, you know, everyone's in their mid-30s at this point, mid to late 30s, and they're all talking about, you know, things that they remember even their parents used to do.
01:33:44.000And it's like, they're starting to have those conversations like, why don't we go do things?
01:33:48.000Why aren't there, I mean, there used to be like men's and women's clubs that like adults used to be part of that were very prevalent.
01:34:32.000And that's like where, again, people have just kind of just brain numbed everybody.
01:34:36.000It's closing those third spaces that you mentioned, Jack, where they just don't really exist anymore.
01:34:43.000You know, and like, again, like bring up COVID.
01:34:45.000COVID, I think, you know, killed and changed a lot of, you know, I don't know if we've like totally embraced it or recognized it, like how much of society changed post-COVID.
01:34:55.000COVID changed dramatically so many things that we forgot.
01:34:59.000All the time, like I'll be talking with my wife.
01:35:00.000I'll be like, oh my gosh, yeah, we used to do that.
01:35:04.000It took like three years for people to start going to movies again and it still hasn't recovered.
01:35:09.000So like, there just is a world today that has to be, like, there has to be a pretty well-defined decision by, I think, conservative millennials and Gen Z that are going to say, hey, we have to recreate a society that integrates all of this.
01:35:26.000And you have to participate in it and want to participate with it.
01:35:28.000And to Blake's point, I don't know if they will.
01:35:30.000Like, I don't know if people will, if they'll decide to or not.
01:35:35.000You're going to have to edge up to it.
01:35:36.000I think we're actually effectively going through like a selection mechanism that we're just living through.
01:35:40.000And we'll just have to come out the other end.
01:35:42.000Like, everyone used to sort of just have kids by default.
01:35:45.000We are now selecting for people who actively want kids because they're the only ones who are going to have them.
01:35:51.000And I think we're probably going to also like select for people who actually create community because if you don't, you're just going to kind of isolate and like die off.
01:36:04.000I want to reinstitute a lot of things that like modern versions of a lot of these like third places that exist.
01:36:11.000But, you know, they're just, it's just going to be interesting to see if it's, if it, if it's plausible, possible.
01:36:18.000But one of the places like I talked with my grandparents, my parents at length, and I even remember when I was growing up, it still existed was, again, those drive-in movie theaters, things like that, like where it was just like a place to be seen, the things that you do, like the aura that was kind of around all of that.
01:36:36.000None of those places really exist anymore.
01:36:38.000Like I literally, like there's so few places that exist where, you know, people get excited about those things or they're just like the known go-to places in your community, in your neighborhood.
01:37:05.000Those, you know, places that were once kind of the places of community have kind of turned into worlds like, is this a third world country?
01:37:13.000Is this, you know, I don't even, I don't even recognize someone speaking English here anymore.
01:37:18.000And that's problematic, especially when you look at a society.
01:37:21.000It's like, where are all these displaced people going?
01:37:48.000That's a big difference with how society looked just a couple decades ago to where it is today.
01:37:54.000Well, let's not be so black pilled because you can still do it.
01:37:59.000By the way, listen, I think economic growth, getting serious about enforcing crime, you know, penalties on crime, accountability, these things can turn around communities, make them safe again.
01:38:12.000We saw this with the revitalization of Times Square.
01:38:16.000And Plague, to some of your points you've made, it's like, listen, we went through a crime wave in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and early 90s that got corrected with a country that we all are talking about in glowing terms.
01:38:30.000And maybe there's a little rose-colored glasses here.
01:38:33.000But we went through a crime wave during those decades that wasn't turned around until the policing surge of the mid-90s.
01:38:39.000And you saw that in LA, you saw that in New York, and you saw that in metropolises all across the country.
01:38:48.000And then you saw this flood of investment that poured into the cities and you saw them turn around.
01:38:54.000And then it became, you know, then we went through a reverse cycle that started in 2014 a little bit, maybe before that, but really 2014 with the Ferguson and then George Floyd 2020 and then a spike in urban crime.
01:39:08.000And so these things do tend to fluctuate.
01:39:09.000People forget the lessons of the past and they go back and they repeat the same mistakes.
01:39:14.000And then you have to learn the old lessons again.
01:39:17.000So, you know, I'm a big fan of lots of police and that can really change and turn things around.
01:39:24.000Which is what they did in New York City, which is exactly what they did in New York City to make it so safe as it is now, which was absolutely the right answer.
01:39:33.000And I really do think that America is under policed.
01:39:38.000And beyond that, it's not just underpoliced, but it's also with this situation.
01:39:43.000You add the migrants on top of that, the massive invasion.
01:39:56.000Or, you know, you get sent right back out on the street with the, you know, revolving door prosecutions and homelessness all over the street.
01:40:23.000So that used to be called, that's called KNA and the Kensington and Allegheny corners.
01:40:30.000And that used to be like a shopping area that you could go.
01:40:34.000And I can remember in my lifetime going there with my parents on like, you know, Sunday or whatever and just going shopping like after church.
01:40:43.000Like that, that was just a normal place to go out and get some water ice.
01:41:15.000If you're going to look at the macro trends, is it just because parents have become paranoid because of social media and they see one bad story and then they sort of overreact and they helicopter parent their kids?
01:41:26.000Or is there this growing sentiment that like you can't trust your community anymore?
01:43:59.000Follow home break-ins and stuff like that.
01:44:01.000Those happen today, but those happened then too, in various ways.
01:44:07.000There was just a lot more crime back then, and people kind of got along, and there were more random crimes in your own community.
01:44:15.000A big reason crime has actually dropped so much.
01:44:18.000It's like, yes, the black crime rate went down, but like the white crime rate also went down, like actually quite a lot from 1990 to today.
01:44:26.000So like safe suburbs, like the safe middle-class suburb got safer and middler classer from 1990 until like the present.
01:44:36.000And like in general, there's a lot of that.
01:44:38.000And people like, you know, murder, you know, if it bleeds, it leads.
01:44:42.000People see crime on television and they react to it.
01:44:45.000And there have been moments where we have had terrifying spikes.
01:45:54.000If anything, I suspect crime is probably more specifically centered on a handful of places.
01:46:00.000And that includes like the spillover, like crazy stuff in San Francisco where like you're like homeless junkies.
01:46:06.000But in general, it's like crime kind of collapsed in areas that are not like major crime hotspots in the United States.
01:46:14.000So for example, like the bad parts of Baltimore have actually, I think, a higher murder rate today than they even had in the 90s.
01:46:21.000The bad parts of like, I think New Orleans actually broke records for its murder rate during the Floyd surge, broke records that existed in the 90s.
01:46:29.000But overall, like the national crime rate remained a lot lower.
01:46:33.000And so I think a lot of that is the passive crime rate in your random middle class areas went from like pretty low to like extremely low.
01:46:41.000It's definitely true today that you can like avoid the bad parts of America with trivial ease.
01:46:48.000I don't think any of like frankly, I don't think any of us live in fear that we'll like be victims of random crime.
01:46:55.000And I even go to the Arizona Mills Mall that's near here that everyone like claims is relatively dangerous.
01:47:02.000I'm like, nothing ever happens at this mall.
01:47:06.000And maybe I'm missing it or something.
01:47:39.000This will be the, yeah, I come up with shows all the time that Blake should do.
01:47:42.000This show should be Blake at Arizona Mills Mall.
01:47:46.000We should do like a Mr. Pete style thing.
01:47:48.000Like I get, like, pay me like $1,000 a day for how long I can live in the Arizona Mills Mall.
01:47:55.000You get a certain amount of money per hour until you see a crime, until someone spots a crime on your body.
01:48:01.000What if the body starts occurring, but I just totally don't notice it because I'm on my phone.
01:48:05.000I'm just looking at my phone too intently and I don't see the mugging or the shooting that's happening right in front of me.
01:48:10.000I just want, they'll have one of those like mall food court meltdowns and there's like hundreds of people throwing punches and I'm just kind of like walking through not noticing.
01:51:03.000Well, that could be the other show that we do is we could send you the body cameras to the strip club.
01:51:08.000You're just coming up like, I'm just going to need a whole show of like, like a live stream of Tyler generates like weird experiences to inflict on me.
01:51:18.000I just think you're a really interesting person and we could create a channel around you.
01:51:22.000I feel like nothing would dispel the idea that I'm interesting faster than putting a camera on my body or something.