Glenn Beck asks if we are being set up for war with Russia because something is wrong with this 60 Minutes story that ran on Sunday about a death ray and I m not sure we should believe that. Also, we talk to Carol Roth who is fantastic on the economy. We also talk to Steve Friend about a bill in Tennessee that is giving the power back to the people, and so much more.
00:05:55.780It has been the broad conclusion of the intelligence community since March 2023 that it's unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible for these anomalous health incidents.
00:06:07.220It's something that the intelligence community has investigated extensively and continues to look at.
00:06:12.820We will look at new information as it comes in and make assessments inside the State Department and with our intelligence community.
00:06:20.220But you can't confirm whether INR agrees with that in this building?
00:06:31.540This is from the Washington Post a year ago.
00:06:34.020The mysterious ailment known as Havana Syndrome did not result from the actions of a foreign adversary, according to an intelligence report that shatters a long-disputed theory that hundreds of U.S. personnel were targeted and sickened by a clandestine enemy wielding energy waves as a weapon.
00:06:52.600The new intelligence assessment caps a years-long effort by the CIA and several other U.S. intelligence agencies to explain why career diplomats, intelligence officers, and others serving in U.S. missions around the world experience what they describe as strange and painful acoustic sensations.
00:07:12.960Many of the afflicted personnel say that they were victims of a deliberate attack, possibly in the hands of Russia or another adversarial government.
00:07:20.420A claim that the report contradicts in nearly every respect, according to two intelligence officials who are familiar with the assessment described to the Washington Post.
00:07:31.320Seven intelligence agencies participated in a review of approximately 1,000 cases of health incidences, the term the government uses to describe a constellation of physical symptoms, including ringing in the ears, followed by pressure in the head, and nausea.
00:07:48.800Five of those agents determined it was very unlikely that a foreign adversary was responsible for the symptoms, either as a result of purposeful actions, such as directed energy weapons, or a byproduct of some other activity, including electronic surveillance that made people sick.
00:08:06.700They spoke on the condition of anonymity.
00:08:08.820One agency, which the officials did not name, determined that it was unlikely that a foreign actor was at fault, a slightly less emphatic finding that did not appreciably change the consensus.
00:08:23.420One agency abstained in its conclusion regarding a foreign actor.
00:08:28.460But when asked, no agency dissented from the conclusion that a foreign actor did not cause the symptoms, one of the intelligence officials said.
00:09:05.360Like everyone, for years and years and years, we were told about the Savannah syndrome, very suspicious and strange, but no one really knew.
00:09:13.100And then they came out with this report, and it was, okay, this is our conclusion.
00:09:58.620Remember what he just said, our top five or 10% performing officers.
00:10:04.020So let's look at those who were targeted.
00:10:09.400The investigative journalist also claimed to have obtained an accounting document linked to a top-secret Russian intelligence unit called 29-155,
00:10:20.960which outlines a bonus payment for an officer who worked on a project concerning potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons.
00:10:29.780When I saw it, I literally had tears in my eyes because it was spelling out what they had been doing, said one of the victims.
00:10:39.680It's not definitive proof of Havana syndrome cause.
00:10:43.280It's the closest to a receipt you can have, however, for this.
00:11:06.620Let's look at what's happening with CBS report.
00:11:13.360CBS doesn't have, and neither does the FBI, have any interest in protecting one of the main sources there that is supposed to be high-level intelligence.
00:11:32.680Nobody seems to care about hiding her identity.
00:11:35.400Moreover, CBS acknowledges on multiple occasions that the FBI has been in the loop regarding her appearance and talking points on CBS.
00:11:47.000This means that CBS and the FBI have been working in concert on this story,
00:11:52.660which leads to a variety of questions about the independence of 60 Minutes in reporting the story accurately without any bias.
00:12:00.780Remember, the deep state, they keep going to the same sources that have lied to them over and over and over again.
00:12:09.140Throughout the piece, there's a stunning lack of real evidence that delivers a direct link between the Russian agents,
00:12:16.440directed energy weapons, and the variety of claimed injuries.
00:13:06.800Well, one of them is retired from the CIA in 2019, currently an MSNBC contributor.
00:13:13.040He was one of the many former government agents who claimed that Hunter Biden's laptop was disinformation.
00:13:21.180Miles Taylor, another one, wrote the infamous anonymous anti-Trump letter, made a career of leveraging his government credentials to write bestselling Trump bashing fan fiction.
00:13:36.020Olivia Troy, she's a former advisor to Mike Pence, she's followed a similar path to Mr. Taylor.
00:13:44.160And the last one, waged the campaign to get social media to censor critics, falsely accused several people of being Russian-controlled accounts.
00:13:53.800Seems like we have the same kind of people running around.
00:14:00.720You ever find yourself taking a long look around your house and think, gosh, we've got to sell this place and move.
00:14:05.760But then having the follow-up thought, yeah, but that's a lot of trouble because it is a lot of trouble.
00:14:12.800One of the most important things I learned along the way in my life is you need a really good, competent real estate agent, somebody that you can trust, somebody that understands what you're looking for, somebody who listens to you.
00:14:28.580But also somebody that has a Rolodex full of the right people that it's going to take, the inspectors, the appraisers, the home repair contractors, the photographers, all of it.
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00:15:15.720And Carol, I sent you a story a couple of days ago about how we are now paying more in interest than we are in, I think, Pentagon spending and Social Security.
00:15:29.920I have heard that this time was coming for a long time.
00:15:50.140And this is projections that I believe came out of Bank of America.
00:15:53.900So a Wall Street analyst came up with these projections and basically said that if we continue with interest rates where they're at, the Fed doesn't cut interest rates this year, and we continue on the spending trajectory, he modeled that out to the end of the year and said this year we will pay $1.6 trillion in interest if nothing changes.
00:16:16.760And if we were to hit that point, then yes, then it would become the biggest item in the budget, far exceeding what was paid for the military, and then even exceeding all of those other expenses, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the like.
00:16:34.340So this is the trajectory that we're moving into, and is a very scary one that we've been warning you about because of what is something called fiscal dominance that you guys, you and I have talked about before.
00:16:48.060Basically, we are in a scenario where we have high debts, and we have high deficits, and we have inflation that is too high.
00:16:56.020And so when the Fed tries to do this monetary policy and to raise rates in order to bring down that inflation, it ends up being dominated by that horrible fiscal position of the United States.
00:17:09.820It means that the interest on the debt explodes.
00:17:12.860It means that the deficit, because that interest is bigger, widens.
00:17:16.660It means that we have to then finance those bigger deficits, and that puts us into a vicious cycle.
00:17:22.940And it's something that many of us have been warning about, and it really looks like we're sitting right in the middle of it.
00:17:29.420And it begs the question, why didn't the Fed reset all of the loans when we were at zero?
00:17:37.060Why didn't we take out all these loans and lock them in long-term at zero?
00:17:45.440Now we have all of these loans that are starting every month.
00:17:48.920They come in, and we have to reset the loans, and our interest rate is high.
00:17:56.400And that, like you said, I just really want people to understand that because we have all of the $34 trillion,
00:18:06.400and it is resetting all the time, different parts of it, we're paying that high interest rate.
00:18:14.460So what's happening with you and your credit cards is now happening with the government.
00:18:19.000Yeah, and I actually have an answer for that, Glenn, because this was something that I was very curious about too.
00:18:25.280You know, to me, we had near 15 years of zero interest rate or almost zero interest rate policy.
00:18:31.900And so it would say to you, why wouldn't you go ahead and lock that zero interest rate in forever?
00:18:37.860And there has been some really great research that I'm following that I will probably reference several times today from Luke Grauman at FFTT.
00:18:46.680And he went back and he looked at, you know, central bank holdings of treasuries versus how much debt we have increased.
00:18:55.480And over the last, I think it's 10 years, we have increased, you know, more than $16 trillion in debt.
00:19:04.100But at the same time, central banks have actually lightened up their reserves.
00:19:37.620And that's an important piece of the discussion that we're having today is that, you know, the federal government, even though everybody else may say, well, I can still get a loan or I can still do this.
00:19:47.520Because the federal government is having a very difficult time getting long-term loans, in particular, at a interest rate that is anywhere near acceptable and that would keep the treasury market from going into mass chaos.
00:20:35.860Yeah, this is why I have been saying and still believe that the Fed is going to be forced to pivot.
00:20:43.360They want to keep these interest rates high in an effort to try to control inflation.
00:20:48.640But the U.S. government and their rampant spending, their dereliction and their financial duty to be responsible has created that as an impossibility and is now meaning that if you keep interest rates high, that in and of itself will also stoke inflation.
00:21:07.040So the Fed has been doing a lot of things in its toolkit to become more accommodative.
00:21:12.640When you talk about lowering rates, it's more accommodative or looser fiscal policy.
00:21:19.080And while they haven't come out to do that quantitative easing, the straight up buying of the bonds that we saw that brought their balance sheet from a couple trillion dollars up to almost nine trillion dollars, they've been doing a lot of things that look and taste and feel a lot like that.
00:21:34.820In Jerome Powell's last press conference, he's basically said, our policy of letting the assets on the balance sheet run off, we're going to slow that down.
00:21:46.200So now they're going to still be in the market buying a little bit more.
00:21:49.460And the last thing that they're holding out on, because remember, it's an election year, is lowering that interest rate.
00:21:55.320At some point, that's going to be the only thing that they have left other than just a wholesale buying of bonds program.
00:22:02.140And they're going to have to do that. And what that's going to do, boys and girls, this is the important thing, is that is going to restoke inflation.
00:22:10.560Anybody who is an asset holder is going to see their assets melt up, continue to rise in value.
00:22:16.580And the middle class, the working class, is going to continue to get crushed, because this is the basically one of the only things that they have available to them, or certainly the only one that they're going to be willing to enact, is to inflate the debt away.
00:22:46.700It's one that I have multiple times on a daily basis.
00:22:50.380And, you know, it's a horrible scenario that we have to be in this discussion and worry about the American dream slipping away, because we know asset prices have already increased.
00:23:02.440And so I do think that if you are in the middle and working class and you're worried, you've got to do everything you can to try to get your expenses down and to live with as much austerity as you can to have some money to put them into a diverse portfolio of assets.
00:23:19.880You know, things like hard metals, you know, the gold and the silver, some stocks, you know, real estate to the extent you can.
00:23:28.700And I know that I can just hear right now, Glenn, people are yelling and saying, but Carol, I can barely afford my rent or my mortgage or my groceries.
00:23:37.860And I understand this is a horrible, horrible position that the government and the Federal Reserve has put every American into.
00:23:46.220And we just have to do the best that we can to try to hold on to to something to preserve some level of wealth, because this is what we are facing, because we don't have the fortitude of politicians who are willing to do the hard work.
00:24:02.700They weren't willing in the Biden administration to go through a small, you know, a longer term recession.
00:24:08.640We had a tiny recession, but to make that a little bit longer term to help normalize us, normalize things and get some breathing room.
00:24:14.860And I think that politicians are going to continue to act like politicians.
00:24:20.620So Art Laffer told me years ago when we were we were talking about the interest rates and I said, if we keep just printing money like this, there's going to come a time where you have to raise the interest rates.
00:24:34.980And, you know, I said, Art, when you did it, it was, you know, 18, 19 percent interest rates.
00:24:40.780And I said, you can't do that to the economy in this scenario, can you?
00:24:45.800And he said, no, it will stop the heart of the economy.
00:24:48.900It just collapses at that point because it's too weak.
00:24:58.380This is what people need to understand, because they're going to go back and look historically at other periods in the United States and say, well, this is what we did then.
00:25:08.760We don't have that luxury because we have debt to GDP that exceeds one hundred and twenty percent.
00:25:14.460We have the balance sheet of basically an emerging market in crisis that would have put it, you know, a while ago if we didn't have the world's reserve currency, which we know that a lot of folks are trying to get away from.
00:25:26.660We didn't have thirty four trillion dollars in debt and a massive deficit that just kept running and running.
00:25:32.320We didn't have all of these interest payments that we're going to pay for things that we've already bought and not new spending.
00:25:38.420So we are in a different world here today.
00:25:41.900And as we've talked about before, you get close to that cliff and eventually you come off and you never know that exact point in time.
00:25:50.380Just look at how fast the debt, the deficits, the interest, how fast this is growing.
00:25:55.680It is starting to spiral away from us.
00:25:58.600Stu, do you remember when we had when we were talking about Obamacare?
00:26:05.600And I think the government at that point, if they took Obamacare, they would they would rule about 30, 25 to 30 percent of the of the economy.
00:27:02.640Well, California historically has had strong property rights protections.
00:27:07.000We have this Proposition 13 that was passed by the voters in the late 70s.
00:27:10.840And it did really two things that limited how much your property taxes could go up based on appreciation.
00:27:17.580It caps it at no more than, I believe, two percent a year.
00:27:20.760And what that did is it's kept property taxes historically low in California, because when property values go up very quickly, the state would love to reassess the value and tax it.
00:27:33.480So that has historically kept us with lower than usual property tax.
00:27:38.760The other thing Prop 13 did, and this is what's really under attack right now, it said to the government that if you want to raise taxes on the people of the state of California, you need to submit, you need to get a two-thirds approval, either through the legislature or through the voters, to raise taxes.
00:27:56.000And we've had this high bar now forever.
00:27:58.560What happens, though, and this is what the left does, they never stop, and they look for loopholes.
00:28:06.020Well, the court gave them a loophole and said, oh, but that's a tax initiated or sponsored by the government.
00:28:12.300If there's a tax proposed by a private person or a union goon, that's not subject to the two-thirds requirement.
00:28:21.680How does the union goon have standing to propose taxes?
00:28:26.800Private citizens in California, we have the initiative process.
00:28:30.960We're a direct democracy in some sense under our constitution.
00:28:34.660So citizens have the ability to place measures on the ballot.
00:28:38.460So the Howard Jarvis Association, who initially wrote Prop 13, has now come back with a new initiative and says, no, no, no, we're going to close that loophole.
00:28:46.940It's a taxpayer protection ballot initiative.
00:29:08.200They're putting a competing ballot initiative that says, if you put anything on the ballot that raises the threshold to vote, so from majority to two-thirds, your initiative has to pass by two-thirds vote.
00:29:24.100And that's what the legislature has put on the ballot now.
00:29:26.280So they put that on to try to kill it.
00:29:28.980So it's very difficult to pass a constitutional amendment on two-thirds, which is what this is.
00:29:33.880And at the same time, Glenn, they've gone to the California Supreme Court.
00:29:37.560They've made some – they're not even coherent arguments to get the court to take off our ballot – our taxpayer protection initiative off the ballot.
00:29:45.480That's what the left does here in the state of California.
00:32:42.720And so now the people who need help, Glenn, are the renters, the poor renters who are being taken advantage of by the mean, greedy landlords who keep raising rent.
00:32:52.940And so they've built in all these protections that make it very impossible to kick people off property who are not paying rent or let alone they're just squatters.
00:33:01.120They're people who showed up and moved in, and the police will not lift a finger because the laws are written in such a sense that you have to go to court to evict even a squatter.
00:33:11.760It takes months to go through the court system.
00:33:13.520And for a while, during COVID, we had an eviction moratorium.
00:33:16.340For over two years, you couldn't even go to court to get an eviction.
00:33:21.100And it all, you know, there's two ways to seize property, Glenn.
00:33:24.140It's either through force to the government, or in this way, they're letting the people that they deem to be oppressed to seize the property of other people.
00:33:39.940They just formed, and it's embarrassing, they formed the Renters' Caucus because they're proud of how many legislators in the state are renters.
00:34:05.980Okay, BART on Friday, this is for Northern California, Bay Area, Rapid Transit.
00:34:11.820BART on Friday posted instructions on Ask for these new cards.
00:34:17.760You can ask any station agent for BART's free bystander intervention cards, which you can use if you're experiencing or witnessing harassment in stations or trains.
00:34:30.720Apparently, the post includes a video featuring two female college students who ride BART and explain how the cards work.
00:34:38.800When the writers are being harassed, they hand out the you got me cards as a request to help.
00:34:46.260When writers believe they're witnessing others being harassed, they can hand out the I've got you card to the perceived victim.
00:34:54.260Now, I don't know exactly what these cards are supposed to do, and I don't know.
00:35:00.120If I'm being beaten up, I don't know if I can reach into my pocket to get my stack of do-you-have-me cards.
00:35:09.700I mean, the people in California have gone insane.
00:35:14.000I've said it, Glenn, they have unserious people up here running the legislature.
00:35:20.440Most of them are former union activists.
00:35:51.660I will not vote for the budget because it is not balanced.
00:35:54.560And I'm one of the few Republicans who votes no down the line on the entire budget.
00:35:59.200And the others, you know, they're afraid of being called names because there might be a nice program in there that, you know, helps people.
00:36:07.500But we need serious people in office to take control back of our government.
00:36:11.000It is the senior staff and these activists are running the joint here in California.
00:36:16.540So what is the plan for these people who don't want to cut the budget when you have a balanced budget amendment?
00:36:23.380You know, Glenn, this is a good question.
00:36:24.980I don't know what they're going to do because, like I said, we have a deadline in June and they're going to have to make tough cuts.
00:36:29.380Now, one thing that came on my radar is when Senator Paul introduced an amendment in the Senate that did not pass, but it really raised alarm flags for me.
00:36:37.440And he had an amendment to ban the feds from buying up state debt.
00:36:42.040So can the feds intervene and buy up the state's debt?
00:36:50.980Because I'll tell you, the people up here do not walk around with any concern.
00:36:55.860But, you know, in 2008, we learned an important lesson, Glenn, and there were some entities are too big to fail.
00:37:01.820And if we bailed out the banks, do we really think they're not going to bail out the states?
00:37:07.740So I don't know, to answer your question, but I'm very suspicious.
00:37:12.380If they bail California out, I think you're going to hear voices from all over the country.
00:37:22.780I mean, I've always wanted to live in California, but the people there are so insane that they wrecked living there because of all of their stupid, impossible schemes.
00:37:38.580And I just couldn't live there because I'm not paying that kind of tax for things that are not going to work.
00:37:44.160And if you guys pass on your debt to us, oh, my gosh, I'm going to have a really hard time paying my taxes.
00:38:07.120But I can't, I don't have any direct knowledge.
00:38:09.520They don't include me in any serious conversation in the super majority.
00:38:13.280But this is the symptom when you have a super majority government, a party that is totally out of control, the Democrat Party here in California, and they serve one thing, their own power and their own party.