There is an apocryphal ancient Chinese curse that says, "There is no such thing as a Chinese curse unless it's actually written by a Chinese man." President Trump has doubled the tariffs he s imposing on China, and China says it s ready for a trade war.
00:03:41.560President Trump has levied tariffs on China.
00:03:44.300There are 10% tariffs on Chinese imports.
00:03:46.920Trump has doubled those tariffs to 20%.
00:03:51.460Worth pointing out, that's still lower than the tariffs that Trump is putting on Canada and Mexico, which are 25% tariffs.
00:03:59.980So the Chinese foreign ministry was asked about this.
00:04:02.280The spokesman said, if war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we are ready to fight till the end.
00:04:15.480We urge the United States to stop being domineering and return to the right track of dialogue and cooperation at an early date.
00:05:01.480That's why we're reestablishing deterrence in the warrior ethos is because we live in a dangerous world with powerful ascendant countries with very different ideologies.
00:05:44.860I know he was already president once, but he's an historical anomaly.
00:05:49.920Him and Grover Cleveland, those are the only two non-consecutively serving presidents, non-consecutively elected presidents.
00:05:56.680So it's kind of a new administration, and there are some new people around him.
00:06:00.060And there does seem to be a new focus.
00:06:01.760Many people have lauded Trump in the last six weeks because his administration this time around seems more focused, more effective even than it was the first time.
00:06:12.780But the thing you got to remember is these tariffs on China are also a test from Trump, a test by the president of his foe that he was previously engaging in a little bit of a trade war in the first time around.
00:06:29.100How worried will China be about a 10% to 20% tariff?
00:06:34.880So they levy the tariffs, then they double the tariffs.
00:06:39.120So now we're talking about a 20% tariff on Chinese goods, which have flooded the American market over the last 30 years.
00:06:44.520It seems like everything we buy practically comes from China, usually from labor that is underpaid or even slave labor.
00:06:58.460China is very, very reliant on the United States.
00:07:01.980It's 15% of China's exports go to the United States.
00:07:05.240And China is a big country that we're talking about half a trillion dollars a year.
00:07:10.200Okay, only 7.5% of U.S. exports go to China.
00:07:15.200So half the proportion of exports that China sends to the U.S. is what we send to China.
00:07:21.820And that's only worth about $154 billion.
00:07:26.240So we're talking about a major imbalance here.
00:07:28.940China is very, very reliant on access to the U.S. market.
00:07:33.700China was able to grow its trade because 20, 25 years ago now, the United States decided to play nice with China and decided to welcome China into the World Trade Organization.
00:07:45.840And then as China was cheating on its World Trade Organization responsibilities and obligations, the U.S. would just kind of look the other way.
00:07:53.340And so when China was illegally subsidizing steel and aluminum, when China was devaluing its currency, when China was dumping certain products and commodities, the U.S. would just kind of look the other way and not hold them accountable.
00:08:05.400And that had severe economic consequences in the United States.
00:08:09.620And one of the big issues that President Trump was elected on was reshoring American manufacturing, was rebuilding America's industrial base, was making sure in the wake of COVID, which cut off our supply chains, that the U.S. could take care of itself if another global conflict or even just a global flu broke out.
00:09:15.100Now, speaking of wars, this ties directly into the main war that people have been talking about.
00:09:19.800You know, Vladimir Zelensky has come around.
00:09:24.120Horrible, tragic, chaotic meeting in the Oval Office just on last Friday.
00:09:31.220Zelensky gets tossed out of the Oval Office.
00:09:33.240The White House staff eats the lunch prepared for the Ukrainian delegation.
00:09:36.860The Democrats are licking their chops.
00:09:40.420There were some reports that top Democrat officials and operatives were actually meeting with Zelensky and coaching him on how to handle that Oval Office meeting.
00:11:30.860Really, it's been over 10 years now because the war really kicked off in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea with the Maidan Revolution, the change in regime in Ukraine, which the United States has admitted to being involved in.
00:11:43.040It might just ā I'm not going to relitigate the last 11 years.
00:11:45.900I'm just saying we might want to wrap it all up in Ukraine because we have bigger fish to fry.
00:11:52.360I'm reminded of Henry Kissinger during the Cold War.
00:11:55.000Remember when Nixon goes to China and they're all playing ping pong and Kissinger is working on diplomacy with China?
00:12:04.420To counter Russia, to counter the Soviet Union.
00:12:09.420You have two communist powers right there.
00:12:11.240The United States recognizes we're going to be in a much better position if we can split them apart, make friends with one of them, and use that against the other one.
00:12:18.840Well, here, where does the threat come from?
00:12:20.260Where does the actual threat to our security come from?
00:15:11.100It's a policy that Trump floated, that they then stole and campaigned on, and that Trump said he was going to implement, and the Democrats wouldn't even applaud their own policy.
00:15:20.160The one thing they stood up for and clapped for was Ukraine.
00:28:33.960I don't know that anyāif you disagree with me, then you probably think weāthen you necessarily actually would think that we need to put, you know, squirrels on trial for ripping up my courtyard chair as they did last year, two years ago.
00:28:49.680But I won't do that because the squirrels don't have a rational nature.
00:28:52.040So that would be an incarnate creature with that irrational nature.
00:28:55.180Or, conversely, if you're of a religious bent and you take theology seriously, you could point to the angels who have a rational nature, but they're not incarnate creatures.
00:29:03.600A human being is distinguished in his humanity by the fact that he is an incarnate creature with a rational nature.
00:29:09.780Meaning, I can learn English, as I did as a boy.
00:29:19.980A Hispanic person, any human being, can, in principle, learn English.
00:29:24.540So you can't call it racist or anything like that.
00:29:28.940It just gets to a basic point that no nation can survive if citizens don't speak the same language.
00:29:33.800In fact, what dismantled the Tower of Babel?
00:29:38.000It was good to dismantle the Tower of Babel because they were trying to build a tower to heaven, but what dismantled it was when God confused their language.
00:29:44.760You can't have a polity if you don't speak the same language.
00:29:47.560We don't want to become the Tower of Babel, but we do want to have a functioning polity.
00:29:51.180180 out of 195 countries in the world have an official language.
00:30:04.280Unlike every other country throughout history, diversity is our strength and we don't have a language and we don't need to speak the same language.
00:30:11.740Trump, totally right here, drawing on great wellsprings of classical philosophy, classical politics, and common sense in America until about 25 years ago.
00:30:22.760Now, speaking of the English language and not speaking the same language, Dylan Mulvaney, the second most prominent trans-identifying person in the country.
00:30:32.880First, I think you got to give to Bruce Jenner.
00:30:36.400He was an actor, a kind of minor actor, Broadway actor, who decided he was going to pretend to be a woman one day and then he made a big nuisance of himself and a lot of women were offended by it.
00:30:47.520And he rolled on that outrage for a little while.
00:30:50.380He actually put yours truly in his Rockefeller Center musical.
00:30:54.300I made my Rockefeller Center debut because of Dylan Mulvaney.
00:33:35.080He's a grown man, and I'm sorry that he had problems as a kid, and I'm sorry that some of the consequences of those problems were predictable.
00:33:42.020But he's a grown man, and he has no right to go into women's spaces, and he has no right to pretend to be a woman.
00:33:47.080And he just needs to grow up a little bit, okay?
00:33:49.700And he needs to get right with reality.
00:36:28.780These studies come out and they affirm common sense, but everyone's really relieved.
00:36:34.780Because in our decayed and shallow modern intellectual life, we need some stupid study from some guy with a PhD to tell us things that statistically everyone is known for all of human history.
00:36:49.240It's an important one because a lot of people actually don't understand it these days.
00:36:52.020How the pursuit of happiness ends up sending people on a path to misery.
00:36:57.960This is a study published in Applied Psychology, Health, and Well-Being.
00:37:03.520And it points out that the pursuit of happiness is like a snowball effect.
00:37:09.980This is from Sam Malio, marketing professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough in the Rotman School of Management.
00:37:15.640Pursuit of happiness is a bit like a snowball effect.
00:37:18.020You decide to try making yourself feel happier, but then that effort depletes your ability to do the kinds of things that make you happier.
00:39:24.880You know, I do happiness, and you can, too, kind of all these modern stupid books, how to be happy, how to, you know, 10 rules for staying positive or whatever.
00:39:36.820There's a great one called the Nicomachean Ethics that goes back to Aristotle, who comes up on this show every so often because he was right about basically everything.
00:43:08.380It's probably most of you know who they are.
00:43:09.860They're these guys who are best known for stating their opinions on the internet, like so many people do.
00:43:17.080Like, some of my best friends state their opinions on the internet.
00:43:19.280And they are generally more right-wing, though in a kind of odd way.
00:43:25.320You know, they say things that are not merely offensive to certain women because they're true, but demeaning to certain women because they're not true.
00:43:35.720You know, they don't promote traditional conservative values like getting married or, you know, having children in wedlock or, you know, curtailing their base passions or, you know, living in accord with virtue or these kinds of certain virtues, but a lot of them not.
00:43:55.280They're a little bit more ā they're not the classical or Christian right.
00:43:59.100They're a little bit more the Nietzschean right or the individualist right or the, you know, I don't know, this other kind of right.
00:44:06.060But they're not libs, that's for sure.
00:44:08.320They wouldn't be called on the left at least.
00:44:10.060Anyway, they're charged with crimes, pretty serious crimes in Romania.
00:44:15.140They've spent time in the UK and they've admitted variously to pulling girls, seducing girls, including at pretty young ages, into doing pornography and that they made a lot of pornography on it.
00:44:29.240They've gotten women to put their names, you know, on their bodies and tattoos as a kind of harem or a symbol of property.
00:44:36.900One of the Tates was ā I think he videotaped himself on camera, like beating a woman, and his argument was it's consensual.
00:44:44.220Most conservatives wouldn't care if it's consensual, and I think at least one of the Tates is a Muslim, says he's a Muslim.
00:44:49.520So anyway, I don't know, but all of that is just background to the story here that the Florida attorney general has opened a criminal probe into the Tate brothers.
00:44:58.740And the Tate brothers have said, hold on, we haven't been accused really of committing any crimes in the United States.
00:45:04.740This is a political witch hunt because we're on the political right.
00:45:07.360And now there's all this argument over the rights of American citizens and innocent until proven guilty, and I think it's all kind of missing the point.
00:45:15.880The people, certainly the people who are rabidly defending the Tate brothers, I think are missing the point.
00:45:21.200But even the people who are attacking the Tate brothers and really going to the wall, there's one question that they're not asking.
00:45:31.440And I think to me, this is the crucial question of the whole Tate saga, and I'm going to save it until tomorrow.
00:45:40.360Because, speaking of morality, well, speaking of theology, speaking of Christianity, we have a theologian coming on to clear up some questions that I have personally, and I think many people have, about the canon of the Bible.