A new poll shows that support for gay marriage in the United Kingdom is in decline, and a new survey shows that Americans are starting to question their support for same-sex marriage. Also, Andrew Wilkow explains why Jeff Bezos is probably the lawnmower man and a little on the U.S. Soccer team. And finally, author Philip K. Howard explains why Iran seems to be begging for war.
00:00:00.000Hey, podcasters, welcome to Thursday's podcast. We affectionately entitle it, Nobody Wants War.
00:00:07.980And we look at what is happening with Iran. There seem to be begging for war and what you need to know about that.
00:00:16.520Also, there's a new poll out from the United Kingdom that says that says gay wokeness is fading.
00:00:23.560And another Harris poll that you probably didn't hear because it came out the day before Independence Day last week.
00:00:29.620And it shows that Americans, millennials, are starting to say, no, not so much with the LGBT thing.
00:00:38.320Why is this happening? The media is perplexed. I think it's pretty clear.
00:00:43.560I talk about that. Also, Andrew Wilkow is joining us, telling us how Jeff Bezos is probably the lawnmower man.
00:00:50.860And a little on the U.S. soccer team. The real scandal here that nobody's talking about.
00:01:00.620And finally, Philip K. Howard. He's the author of a book called Try Common Sense.
00:01:05.840Everybody says burn the system down or reboot it or hope and change.
00:01:11.000But nobody's telling us change to what, except the socialists.
00:01:15.900This thing is going to have to be rebooted.
00:01:18.660So after we unplug it or turn it off and on and reboot it, how do we reboot it?
00:01:25.960This guy seems to have the answer, the beginnings of one.
00:01:29.280He's fascinating. From the book Try Common Sense, all on today's podcast.
00:01:34.040There is a really there's something happening with the acceptance of gay sex.
00:01:55.940It's in decline in the UK. That is the big story today.
00:01:59.760But there was another story that came out in a study in the United States over the holiday weekend that I also want to share with you.
00:02:06.760It's a new Harris poll. Something has changed. And I think I know what it is.
00:02:13.160And to me, it makes total sense. The left is like, what is happening? Those polls can't be right.
00:02:19.620I think it makes total sense. And I'll give it to you here in just a second.
00:02:23.540What doesn't make sense to me today, unless Iran wants war, is what's happening with Iran.
00:02:30.800In the last few weeks, they have shot down a U.S. drone.
00:02:35.240We almost had war on that. Thank goodness Donald Trump changed his mind at the last minute.
00:02:40.900Then before that, they had mined two oil tankers.
00:02:48.760So they blew up two oil tankers. Last night, the British went and boarded a ship, took a ship that they said was was full of Iranian oil, which is illegal to ship it to Syria.
00:03:05.540So it's in the Strait of Hormuz. The British, I think they had a frigate or was it a frigate that that or or battleship that came and and blocked it.
00:03:17.56030 Royal Marines boarded, took over the ship. Iran said they're going to pay a heavy price for this.
00:03:57.880General McMaster said said it the best.
00:03:59.900He said there's two ways to fight the United States military, nonconventionally and stupidly.
00:04:05.620Nobody is going into a conventional war with the United States, not the United States Navy and not in that area.
00:04:11.600And Iran knows this. The IRGC knows this.
00:04:13.940What they do want to do, the nonconventional things they do want to do is they want to use elements like the IRGC or Hezbollah or all the little Shia militias to harass,
00:04:22.360to do whatever they can to make it so economically painful in that area that they want to force us to the negotiating table.
00:04:30.640It's no coincidence that, you know, the the Iran, they collaborated with the North Koreans to get their nuclear program up to speed.
00:04:38.160Now they are using the exact same strategy of I'm the crazy guy.
00:05:51.720What they're trying to do is they're trying to drive up the insurance costs of oil tankers going through that strait so incredibly high that the companies, that the world, that governments will say, look, Trump, please go to the negotiating table.
00:07:06.280And then at the same time, we were helping the people on the streets of Poland through the church.
00:07:14.080And also because we had a great ally in Margaret Thatcher, our our operatives were also in helping those people organize and try to overthrow the government, which they did.
00:07:29.580And for speaking of food prices, and that's the one of the biggest things that always brings people out into the streets in Iran, the jump in food staples is absolutely insane.
00:07:38.340Eighty five percent increase since May.
00:07:44.700That's why you're seeing all this aggression from Iran right now.
00:07:47.340And I tell you what, it's going to get worse.
00:07:49.200And the key thing for us is to be not hyperbolic about it.
00:07:53.020The Trump administration needs to not respond overly aggressive.
00:07:56.020The Iranians are being very, very careful, but it's going to get worse.
00:07:59.800There's they're going to use people like Hezbollah, groups like all their different militias in Iraq, for instance, that are going to get very, very close to, let's say, the U.S. embassy, the green zone in Baghdad.
00:08:10.680They're going to get very, very close to U.S. troops in Syria.
00:08:13.200But if there's ever a this is where it could change.
00:08:15.740If they mess up, if there is a loss of life between U.S. personnel, allied personnel, that's when this thing could escalate.
00:08:24.040They're playing a very, very dangerous game with this escalation.
00:08:27.080But as long as it doesn't, if it stays like it is now, like drones getting knocked out.
00:10:13.620I haven't heard him say anything publicly on it lately, but I think John Bolton plays perfectly into if this really is a strategy by by by President Trump.
00:10:24.160But I think it's genius to put a guy like John Bolton at the head of the Pentagon.
00:10:29.540It's absolutely genius because it plays into that unpredictability.
00:10:33.780Now, if it has no weight, if you have I don't know, you know, if you have a pacifist up in there, you can't play the doctrine of look, you don't know what I'm going to do.
00:12:59.440Do you remember when John Bolton had that supposed slip up when he had written, when they were talking about Venezuela and it was written on the back, like 5,000 U.S. troops or whatever?
00:16:09.120Then the next year it was at 45 percent.
00:16:14.560Today, 36 percent of millennials are not comfortable when they learn a family member is homosexual.
00:16:22.200That's up from 29 percent just a year ago.
00:16:26.800Forty two percent of millennial males are uncomfortable learning their child has had a lesson on LGBT history at school or as a homosexual teacher.
00:17:27.960Not because they're homosexual, but because you don't know what their agenda is anymore.
00:17:34.280When we have when we have trans people coming in to the library and, as we have seen recently, are laying on top of these trans people and reading them stories, you kind of say, what the hell is going on?
00:17:51.680Why does my six year old or seven year old have to go through this?
00:20:50.860And one of the first things he did as attorney general, he formed a special unit dedicated to combating human trafficking in Texas, which we're on the border.
00:21:02.940If we have time, I want to talk to him a little bit about that.
00:21:05.240But I really want to understand, Ken, if you can explain, Texas is arguing for an end of Obamacare, and the White House now has joined, and I think there's another state involved, and it actually could take the ACA and throw the entire law out.
00:21:32.540We filed shortly after Congress passed the Tax Reform Act at the end of 2017.
00:21:38.700The argument being when they passed that, they eliminated the penalty associated with the individual mandate.
00:21:45.840If you'll remember what Justice Roberts said, he joined the four conservatives and said, yes, the individual mandate, it orders you, Glenn, and every one of us to have health insurance.
00:21:53.480And it orders you to participate in commerce was unconstitutional.
00:21:58.380However, he switched sides, joined the four liberals, and said, but because this is a penalty associated with that, that's a tax.
00:22:06.620And under the taxing power of Congress, they can do this whole individual mandate thing.
00:22:12.160So they eliminated the penalty in 2017.
00:22:15.560We filed a lawsuit and said, hey, the penalty is gone.
00:23:13.000That's the amazing thing is that Roberts took the stance.
00:23:18.860And while Congress was saying it wasn't a tax, he went and he made sure that it was known as a tax because he knew that constitutionally that's the only way it could work.
00:23:31.980There's no doubt legal contortions to get to this result is where Roberts went, and that's why it was so disappointing that he made this decision.
00:23:40.180But we've now stripped that away from him, and we're going to put it back on his plate and say, hey, your rationale for the case, your only rationale is gone.
00:24:23.920The rest of it, some of it stays in place.
00:24:26.180We'd still have vestiges of Obamacare running around.
00:24:30.640It doesn't make any sense to keep it in place because, one, Congress didn't put a severability clause in there.
00:24:36.360What that means is typically if Congress wants a law to stay in place, if some part of it struck down, they put a clause in that says, hey, if part of it struck down, that doesn't mean the whole law struck down.
00:24:59.660So if you strip out the individual mandate, why would you leave the rest of it alone?
00:25:02.920We're arguing the whole thing should fall.
00:25:04.160California is saying, no, keep it, keep the rest of it in place.
00:25:07.720It would be great if we could do this.
00:25:11.280And the insurance company, I'm not sure the insurance companies are on the side of the free market.
00:25:15.660But if we could get the Republicans to say, now let's strengthen the free market with this, we are going to remove the barriers where you could you could buy insurance across state lines.
00:25:28.100Because that would that would actually be a real boom for the American people.
00:25:32.960We would be able to we'd be able to shop around and get good, better prices.
00:25:40.080This is exactly part of the solution to making health care work is eliminating these.
00:25:45.180Because every state has individual insurance rules that make it hard for, you know, insurance across state lines.
00:25:51.100Because, you know, you have to have different products for every state.
00:25:53.880So if we could eliminate those, if Congress wanted to eliminate those, I think that would be great.
00:25:58.280It would open up the market and we would move away from this government control that drives up cost, you know, pushes doctors out of the market and offers less choice to consumers to a more of an American model, which is free enterprise, competition, lower cost.
00:26:42.580Is Texas doing enough to stop this themselves?
00:26:46.460So Texas, from what I can see, you know, we have a legislature that has put, I think, over 600 million every biennium into border control, border security.
00:26:57.820However, we can only do so much with that.
00:27:02.240We can stop people from violating our state laws.
00:27:04.960But when it comes to violating federal law, if they're crossing the border illegally and it's just a violation of federal law, there's nothing we can do.
00:27:11.140There's a case called Arizona v. U.S. in which Arizona tried to step in the place of the federal government and do some of this stuff.
00:27:19.020And they were told, no, you can't do that, even if the federal government advocates their responsibility.
00:27:23.560So it's really frustrating because the federal government can create laws, not enforce them, and then push the states out of doing what they otherwise would have done.
00:27:32.200But they are also dropping these people into our communities.
00:27:35.920And many of our border towns are on the verge of collapse.
00:27:38.900Our churches are on the verge of collapse.
00:27:40.960And nobody's talking about all of the kids that we're trying to save from being sex trafficked.
00:27:48.040And that sex trafficking has gotten much, much worse.
00:27:51.520Only 40 seconds to answer, if you can.
00:29:11.580You were killing me with the thing about the deplatforming and the Patriot Mobile and all that.
00:29:18.100Because, you know, we've been doing this forever.
00:29:20.920And I think these companies and the activist groups they work with know that we go on the air every day and say, you know, private companies and capitalism.
00:31:29.920The minute you start editing content, you're a publisher, which means you're going to have to deal with all the lawsuits and the litigation that come your way.
00:31:40.300As a platform, you're protected from all of that.
00:31:44.040Their stock price would go to about three bucks overnight if the government took their platform status away from them and charged them with, you are now a publisher.
00:31:56.840And you get all of the fun stuff that comes along with that.
00:32:01.320That would change their dynamics overnight.
00:32:35.920We hung out with Glenn Beck for an hour.
00:32:37.540It really – what's scary to me about this is the more they do it, the more they try to convince us they're not doing it, right?
00:32:47.420Like it's – the more they are manipulating the algorithms, deciding what we see, deciding who we don't see, claiming that it's just a glitch in the system when a video magically disappears that was supposed to be monetized.
00:33:01.100And it's got to kill some of these companies to hand over money, to conservative, upstart filmmakers, and even established personalities.
00:33:10.520And the more they try to give off the impression that they're neutral, the more we know they are putting their thumbs on it.
00:33:24.140I gave him the benefit of the doubt because he was – he seemed so genuine in person, and he makes good business cases for why it would be crazy for it to happen.
00:33:40.900And I know somebody who's in the conservative movement who just had a private meeting with him, one of the smartest guys I know in our business.
00:33:49.260And he called me right after, and he said – I said, how'd that go?
00:33:54.140And he said, you know, he's really surprising.
00:34:15.360Either that or he has absolutely no control of his own company.
00:34:18.520Well, and that's the second layer of this because we did a whole episode on Blaze TV of all the tech sector money going to the very candidates that want to break them up.
00:34:27.900So they're giving money to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
00:34:31.640Bernie's out there on the stump telling you that if he gets elected, he's going to break these companies up, and yet their employees, the people they pay, are giving those people money.
00:34:40.660But you know history well enough to know that's exactly what GM, that's exactly what Ford, that's exactly what BF Goodrich and Goodyear Tire did during the FDR administration.
00:35:15.260Let's say we've got a peer-reviewed study here by a bunch of other people who are trying to get their stuff peer-reviewed who don't like oil companies.
00:35:21.860So we say it's nice when people have actual experience, and there's another trap that we just fell right into, our principles.
00:35:29.120That's why we just have to enforce the laws that we have and make it an even, I mean, they're going to, right now, they are so big, they're gobbling up any competition.
00:35:39.740Something that Ray Kurzweil said, that would never happen.
00:35:41.920I said, Ray, let's just play this out.
00:35:45.380Why would a company that is putting together AI, knowing that whoever has AI, real AI, when they have that, they rule the world.
00:35:57.480If you are collecting information on me, and you know everything about me, and I happen to be a scientist that's working on AI, and I'm going to beat Google, you're telling me Google would never do anything?
00:36:13.840They would never manipulate anything on me?
00:36:54.520I think it's a Stephen King book where he becomes like electricity.
00:36:58.360Like he just – Jeff Fahey is this slow kind of dim-witted guy, and Pierce Brosnan runs these experiments on him by trying to use this like nascent – it's before we called it the internet.
00:37:10.480It's like 1992, and all of this brain power starts going into the Jeff Fahey character, and he becomes this like electrical, like non-human entity person who can like travel through computers and stuff.
00:37:24.700And I feel like Bezos is just going to be some like Bond villain in like a giant armor suit that we can't stop.
00:37:30.680You know, he's just going to go around, you know.
00:37:33.280I will tell you the guy who would do that is Ray Kurzweil.
00:37:37.140I mean, Ray Kurzweil, I mean, he's on the cutting edge of all of it.
00:38:09.280They're on the winning side of the equation, and there's very few progressive voices.
00:38:14.900I'm sure there are some that are saying, hey, are we sure we like this?
00:38:19.380You know, you do see a little bit of liberals saying how the anti-free speech sort of heretic movement is illiberal, right, that we don't have to like these people, but let's be smarter than them.
00:38:46.740I'm waiting for them to recognize that when this is bad for us, it's going to be bad for everyone.
00:38:52.700It's not going to be – they're not going to stop and go, we've defeated the conservatives, we've defeated Trump, we've got our little utopia, everybody's riding on Google trains to Amazon Jobs, right?
00:42:10.940And the story that he told us was that ever since speaking out about these gangs of men who have given over to the belief that non-Muslims are the kafir, they are the non-believers, they are the infidels,
00:42:29.180that they have begun to take liberties with young women, mostly in small towns.
00:42:35.880This makes Jeffrey Epstein look like he's a great guy.
00:42:40.620I mean, what's happening over in England with the Muslims and what they're doing to young girls, it makes him look like he's done nothing.
00:42:52.860What he has said is that it's not the threats that are coming from the gangs.
00:42:58.180It's the fact that he is making these judges and police officials look really bad.
00:43:04.940And one of the questions I had for him was when these sexual assaults occur, as they've been – we've read about them in Germany since the migrant crisis.
00:43:12.660It's been – this has been plaguing Europe for quite some time.
00:43:14.840I said, has any member of government or upper echelon of the police department had any of their daughters subjected to this?
00:43:23.160It's almost as if they know to target lower working class – right?
00:43:27.860So this is something that's being done to working class British citizens with the government kind of looking the other way.
00:43:40.420So he got in trouble for Facebook living, a court case where some of these men were being released on very – you want to talk about the Epstein?
00:43:53.080So now his fear is not the threat, the death threats that he's getting from these gangs, which he says he was informed that six of them were on the way to his house to murder him at one point with bombs and guns and knives.
00:44:06.620He says, we can't even buy guns for ourselves, but they got them.
00:44:09.980He says, I genuinely believe my government wants me to go away, that I am the problem with the politically correct society that we have built in Europe.
00:44:21.280And he said, I'm begging America to see this, that my life is in danger from both these gangs and my own government at this point.
00:44:31.440I said, you are lucky we have a Republican president because there's no way a Democrat president would insult your government that way.
00:44:37.840Because if we give him asylum, it's like we're acknowledging, we're saying – and when we think of asylum, we think of really terrible places on earth, right?
00:44:46.580We think of dissidents and activists and religious minorities in the Middle East, if we actually acknowledge that Tommy Robinson's life is a threat from the British government, we are saying to the British government, we're going to give someone asylum because we don't think you are going to protect him.
00:45:01.440I think things might change, though, if Boris Johnson becomes the prime minister.
00:45:48.280I didn't know this until after we decided to book him, but he is – he was the chairperson of the tribute in light for the 9-11 memorial that is – I was here at the time.
00:46:04.220It was one of the most stunning things and moving things I have ever seen.
00:46:58.820They think that their job is to protect people, in many cases, from themselves or whoever they deem as the bad guy, where, wait, they're making us all into bad guys in many ways.
00:47:28.220And the whole point of that is to make everybody feel more free and to define the field of freedom where people can get along or not, have disagreements, and follow their star on a field of freedom.
00:47:39.320And what happened beginning about 50 years ago is they got the idea that they would tell people how to do everything correctly.
00:47:46.440And so they reached like vines reaching in from the outside.
00:47:49.960They started wrapping around our toes and our necks telling us how to teach a classroom and what forms to fill out even though nobody read them for making clean apples at the orchard or whatever.
00:48:04.940And it drives people nuts, and it doesn't work.
00:48:07.600So which is the chicken and which is the egg?
00:48:12.000Because part of it, when you have, you know, when you buy a lawnmower and it says on the lawnmower, do not use on roof, you know that's because somebody used it up on the roof and then tried to sue them.
00:48:26.460So is it, was it the, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, I want those people who see a lawnmower and go, I could use that on my roof.
00:48:33.600I want you to use it on the roof because it's just survival of the fittest in some ways.
00:48:38.760But is it, was it the government or was it the attorneys going and suing everybody?
00:48:44.820It's, well, basically, if you have the idea that you want to warn or prohibit against anything that might go wrong, you have some dweeb in a back office somewhere writing every rule and writing every warning.
00:49:02.960Not realizing that if you have too many warnings, it's like crying wolf.
00:49:08.640There's no, it's like no warning at all.
00:51:14.340So I wrote an essay, and I'm arguing this in tri-common sense.
00:51:17.740The civil service system, federal civil services, without any question, violates Article II of the Constitution because Congress subjected the president to collective bargaining in the law in 1978, which means he can't fire anybody, basically.
00:51:32.380Well, there's a lot of learning, a lot of discussion by Madison early on.
00:53:17.680I mean, we have so bureaucratized public schools.
00:53:20.480People have over 20 states now have more non-instructional personnel than teachers.
00:53:26.800So there are a bunch of people filling out forms.
00:53:28.780That's where your tax dollars are going.
00:53:30.460They're filling out forms instead of teaching the kids.
00:53:33.140I mean, it's literally, combine that with special ed, and you've basically probably wasted about a third or more of the money of the budget.
00:53:42.300But there's no reason in the world why local communities can't run their local schools the way they want to do it.
00:53:55.600Well, the Department of Education needs to go.
00:53:57.440And actually, the Trump administration has proposed merging it with the Labor Department, which I think actually makes a lot of sense.
00:54:02.760But even if you have any role for the federal government, it ought to be as a distant trustee making sure they don't discriminate or something.
00:54:11.460It shouldn't be getting involved in daily choices where the principal of one school in Brooklyn told me last year she spends all Friday afternoon filling out forms saying that they did things they didn't do in order to protect the teachers from having to worry about all this bureaucracy.
00:54:32.400So her job as an effective principal is to lie to the bureaucracy.
00:54:38.580You know, I have a collection of items from history.
00:54:45.280And one of my favorites is a shooting target of a teddy bear that was put out by Theodore Roosevelt.
00:54:53.500And it's a it's a it's an engraving of a teddy bear and it's got targets all over him.
00:55:01.140And he used this as a way to try to convince the schools all across America he wanted to have a shooting range in every school.
00:55:11.960Now, to show you how much America has changed, they were not upset about the government saying you should have a shooting range and we should teach kids how to use guns.
00:55:23.640They were outraged that the federal government thought that they had a role to tell them anything that they should be doing in their local community.
00:55:32.920Can you imagine how much better people would feel about their local communities if they had actual input into how the schools ran and where bad teachers could be fired?
00:55:46.920There was a teacher there was a teacher just this week that was said, you know, I can't tell you that the Holocaust is even factual or real history.
00:55:59.040They were just transferred to another job.
00:56:02.200You know, can we talk about accountability for one second?
00:56:06.340Accountability in an organization, people think of it and we naturally think of it as let's get rid of the bad people.
00:56:12.240Right. And you do want to get rid of the bad people.
00:56:14.220But the reason you need accountability in government and in schools and such is for a positive reason,
00:56:20.500which is that it's only when you know everybody else is in your group, your school or whatever, it's going to be trying hard that you feel good about trying hard yourself,
00:56:29.820that you have pride in your school, that you have the energy.
00:56:33.800And if you know that job performance doesn't matter in government or in the school or stuff, what does that do to the energy?
00:56:42.800It's like putting a hole in a balloon.
00:56:45.060Every every American has worked at a job where we have said, I don't know if that person has pictures of the boss with sheep or what it is,
00:56:53.440but they should have been fired long ago.
00:56:55.660And when they're not, morale goes down and you never accomplish anything.
00:57:01.440We're going to come back in just a second.