There's been a lot of speculation for a very long time that the economy was going to soften and now it has finally begun.
According to the Wall Street Journal, earnings for the nation's biggest companies are poised to fall for the third straight quarter, hurt in part by the decline in energy prices.
So why exactly aren't we technically in a recession?
Presumably because consumer spending remains pretty high because of all the inflation in the economy, because of all the extra dollars that Joe Biden blew into the economy because of the easy money policies of the Federal Reserve.
It takes a while for that to wash its way out of the economy.
But as that happens, consumers are not going to be able to outpace producers. Producers
are starting to cut back. They are seeing the writing on the wall. They're starting to
consolidate their gains. And they're starting to realize that if they continue to expand their actual
manufacturing, their actual production, then they are going to undercut themselves. And so you're
starting to see earnings declines for virtually every major company. The members of the S&P 500,
according to the Wall Street Journal, on pace to collectively report a 5.2% decline in earnings,
their worst performance since 2020.
Revenue is on track to rise 0.6% from a year ago, but that's largely due to inflation
at this point. Some of this is due to the decline in oil prices.
For example, the energy sector is taking it right on the chin.
But it's also happening in materials and it's also happening in tech.
Apple sales fell for the third consecutive quarter amid softening demand for consumer devices.
The only areas that continue to have quarterly revenue growth are areas of healthcare, communication services, real estate is continuing to sort of hold steady at this point.
But we are about to see more of these companies report bad earnings, and that means that the economy is likely to see a downturn in the coming quarters.
Employment numbers came out on Friday.
They're weaker than expected.
That, of course, is not greatly a shock because, as we've been saying for months here on this program, what goes up must come down.
The idea that an overheated economy was not going to crash off of a cliff was always a rather specious presumption.
Meanwhile, on foreign policy, the Ukraine war continues apace.
According to the New York Times, Ukrainian forces struck two bridges connecting Russian-occupied Crimea to the rest of Ukraine on Sunday, part of a broader pattern of attacks on and around the peninsula that has sought to scramble critical supply routes for the Kremlin and push the scope of the war into fresh territory.
This is all part of the Ukrainian offensive.
They're hoping that they will push the Russians back so much that the Russians will come to the negotiating table.
The question at this point is, what exactly the Russians are asking for?
Because everybody knows the lines of the negotiation here, and they also recognize that there's a misalignment of incentives.
The West keeps saying that Zelensky gets to make the deals.
Zelensky keeps saying there will be no deal until the Russians are off of all of Russian territory, and the Russians keep saying there will be no deal if they're being pushed out of what they consider now to be formal Russian territory, namely in Crimea and the Donbass region.
Sunday's attacks injured a driver and closed traffic on a second bridge to the east of Chonhar, near the small town of Henechesk.
According to the governor of the region, Vladimir Zahaldo, who's a Russian guy, one of the strikes tore three holes in another roadway as well.
Ukraine's armed forces took credit for both strikes on Sunday and another departure from their typically coy approach, as Zelensky and other top officials emphasized their new aim is to force ordinary Russians to face up to the Kremlin's wars.
Things are likely to get worse before they get better.
Meanwhile, the American public do not have their heart in this anymore.
By polls, a plurality of Americans are not interested in an endless level of support for the Ukraine war or really for much more support than has already been given At this point.
And Russian and Chinese forces are also upping the ante.
Over the weekend, a combined Russian and Chinese naval force patrolled near the coast of Alaska in what U.S.
experts said appeared to be the largest such flotilla to approach American shores.
Apparently, 11 Russian and Chinese ships steamed close to the Aleutian Islands, according to U.S.
officials.
The ships never entered U.S.
territorial waters.
They were shadowed by four U.S.
destroyers and a P-8 Poseidon aircraft.
It's a historical first, said Bren Sadler, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Given the context of the war in Ukraine and tensions around Taiwan, this move is highly provocative.
A spokesman for the U.S.
Northern Command confirmed Russia and China had carried out a combined naval patrol in their Alaska and didn't specify the number of ships or their precise location.
So Russia and China are upping the ante.
And meanwhile, the Biden administration really has no plan because while they're asking for concessions from China and while they continue to fund the war in Ukraine, there's no off-ramp with regard to the war in Ukraine to allow us to shift focus to China.
And meanwhile, China is realizing that it's going to be boxed in both demographically and economically in very short order, all of which spells the possibility of future conflict.
Now, let's recognize something.
It is the unpredictability In change in America's foreign policy from weak and passive to aggressive that really throws people off kilter.
And the fact is that Russia never would have invaded Ukraine if it had not been for the sins of the former Biden administration, one which was vice president of the United States.
You'll remember that Russia actually invaded Ukraine originally in 2014.
That is when Barack Obama was president of the United States.
Over the weekend, Obama did another fawning interview with the glowing media in which he claimed that they did all of the right things.
Here's Christiane Amanpour, one of the worst Pseudo-journalist in the business, asking Barack Obama about American foreign policy when Russia first invaded Crimea.
And part of what happened was both myself, but also Merkel, who I give enormous credit for, had to pull in a lot of other Europeans kicking and screaming to impose the sanctions that we did and to prevent Putin from continuing through the Donbas into the rest of Ukraine.
So I actually think that given both where Ukraine was at the time and where the European mindset was at the time, we held the line.
Okay, let's be clear.
They did not hold the line.
And the entire attempt to hand over Crimea to Russia in the first place was deeply tied to Barack Obama's pathetically intransigent approach with regard to Iran.
He was trying to cut a deal with Iran, a nuclear deal with Iran.
He wanted Russia to help broker that deal.
And so he was willing to hand Crimea to the Russians in order to make sure that that happened.
And then when there's another Russian advance in Ukraine, this time Joe Biden is president of the United States.
You can see why Russia thought they were going to get away with it.
Again, it is confusion in foreign policy that leads to all of these problems, and all of them are starting to stack up with regard to Joe Biden's administration.
The polling numbers show that he's really, really weak right now.
He's polling even with Donald Trump in Michigan.
In most of the major national polls right now, Donald Trump is running about even with Joe Biden.
The latest national polls have Joe Biden up one according to Insider Advantage, tied according to New York Times-Siena, up three according to the Morning Consult, and Trump up four according to Messenger-HarrisX.
So that says that Joe Biden is running extremely weak right now, and he should be, because his policies are absolutely awful.
And when you link that with the fact that the Hunter Biden scandal is not nearly over and could easily break into the mainstream over the course of the next year and a half, Democrats should be running scared.
In fact, you're starting to see a few cracks in the base for the Democratic Party.
Representative Jake Auchincloss, Democrat of Massachusetts, he finally admitted on national TV that if Hunter committed crimes, he should face penalties for that.
If Hunter Biden committed crimes, Hunter Biden should face justice and accountability for those crimes.
Which, by the way, is a sentence that I've heard very few Republicans say about Donald Trump for much more massive crimes.
This focus, this obsession, I would say, on Hunter Biden is really just a whopper of whataboutism.
Because the Republicans are trying to deflect, to diminish, to defend Donald Trump from the grave crime of conspiracy against the Constitution of the United States.
Okay, and this is going to be the great misdirect by the Democrats is going to be to Donald Trump.
And the question as to whether Republicans can take advantage of Joe Biden's weakness rests almost entirely on whether the Republican base is going to nominate a person who's going to make the entire subject of the next election about his various foibles and legal peccadilloes.
We'll get to that momentarily first.
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Okay, so, The question for Republicans is going to be whether they actually believe that the rest of the country believes like they believe about Donald Trump.
If you listen to Republicans in the base talk about what's going on with Donald Trump and the myriad trials that have been brought against him.
The trial in Manhattan, the trial in Florida, the trial now in Washington, D.C.
When Republicans talk about this, they say that the subject of the next election should be the corruption of the DOJ.
And I agree that in an ideal world, we'd be talking Endlessly with independence about the corruption of the DOJ and the weaponization of law enforcement and the use of the FBI to go after Donald Trump beginning in 2015 at the behest of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Now all of that, all that should be highly relevant.
Is that going to be the topic?
The bread and butter topic upon which Americans vote?
Or are they simply going to make the general decision they always make in every election, which is, do I like this guy?
Do I trust this guy?
Do I think this person is likely to lead to a more stable America where I can send my kid to school knowing they'll be safe and where I can have bread on the table?
Those are the real big questions.
And Republicans can win on those questions because Democrats have made the country less safe with regard to crime because Democrats are threatening your kids in terms of the values they are promulgating at schools.
All those questions are questions Republicans can win, but not if they never talk about it again.
If the center issue in 2024 is whether the DOJ is being mean to Donald Trump for political purposes, Or whether Donald Trump is in fact committing criminal acts.
That is not going to be a winning formula for Republicans in 2024.
It just isn't.
The only way that's a winning formula is if so many Democrats stay home because they are just unhappy with Joe Biden that Donald Trump squeaks by.
But that is not a recipe for a sort of broad-based electoral victory.
That is a recipe that relies on luck.
And, you know, when we started our business, one of the things we said at the very beginning of Daily Wire was luck is not a business strategy.
Well, luck is not a political strategy either.
And the idea that you're just going to luck into 2016, again, that basically Joe Biden won't visit Wisconsin or he won't visit Michigan.
That he'll just go absent in the election?
Or that Democrats are going to stay home again?
There are a couple factors that militate against that.
One of them is the factor that a lot of Democrats remember 2016, and they remember that when they thought Hillary Clinton was a 99% lock to win, they didn't show up until Donald Trump became president.
Number two, Hillary Clinton in the polls is running well ahead of where Joe Biden is running right now.
So if you're a Democrat, you understand there's a very real risk that Donald Trump is going to get back in the White House, which means you're very motivated to go and vote.
Again, when it comes to the message of the campaign, Democrats are going to be able to basically shy away from whatever is the supposed corruption in the DOJ, the alleged corruption.
Corruption, I think, is very real and very partisan.
They're going to be able to shy away from that and just talk endlessly about Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump loves to talk about Donald Trump.
And the entire election will be about Donald Trump.
If the election is about Donald Trump, he's going to lose.
If the election is about Joe Biden, he is going to lose.
This is not a particularly hard math.
Again, whichever candidate is the subject of the referendum will lose.
Nobody likes Joe Biden, so if they're thinking about Joe Biden at the time they pull the lever, they're gonna vote for his opponent.
And if they're thinking about Donald Trump at the time they vote, they're probably going to vote for Joe Biden.
So what exactly has Trump been doing?
Well, just what you would think he's been doing.
Sure, he's, you know, handling his legal troubles and sure he's talking about that stuff, but he is spending zero focus at all on his actual political opponent.
All of his focus right now, and again, you can't blame him for this, because if you were hit with 87 charges or whatever it is, You would also spend all of your mental energy thinking about that sort of stuff and presumably truth socialing about that sort of stuff at all hours of the day.
Now, Trump does that even on a good day, but on a bad day, he's for sure going to do that.
But the problem is, again, that where Donald Trump puts his spotlight is also where the media are happy to put their spotlight and where Democrats are happy to put their spotlight.
If every waking hour is spent on Donald Trump's truth social talking about how much he hates Nancy Pelosi and Jack Smith and Mike Pence, that is not a recipe for electoral success.
And here's the thing.
I want Joe Biden not to be president of the United States anymore.
I think he is a terrible president.
By the way, I don't even think Joe Biden is really in control of his own administration.
I think that the staff, people have been asking this for a while, who actually runs the Biden administration?
And the answer is basically everybody who's staffed for Barack Obama.
It's a really fascinating interview over a tablet magazine with David Garrow, who's a biographer of Barack Obama.
He wrote a biography in 2017 of Barack Obama that was largely ignored by the media because it was not complimentary.
That biography of Barack Obama included the fact that Barack Obama in his younger days was pretty rabidly anti-Semitic.
Which is not a shock.
He sat in Jeremiah Wright's church for 20 years, as we all know, that he wrote love letters to his girlfriends in which he talked about fantasies of gay sex.
He did all sorts of really salacious and ugly material in that biography by David Garrow, who's a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, by the way.
And David Garrow says in an interview with Tablet Magazine that Joe Biden is not running large parts of his administration.
Obama is.
He doesn't even have to pick up the phone because all of his people are already in the White House.
They hold the Iran file.
Tony Blinken doesn't.
Rob Malley is just one person.
Brett McGurk, Dan Shapiro in Israel, Lisa Monaco in Justice, Susan Rice running domestic policy.
It's turtles all the way down.
There are obviously large parts of the White House policymaking that belong to Barack Obama because they're staffed by his people who work for him and no doubt report back to him.
Personnel is policy, as they say in Washington.
Again, this is a biographer of Barack Obama.
David Gary says, to me this is very odd and kind of a spooky arrangement.
Spooky because it's happening outside the constitutional framework of the United States
government and yet somehow it's been placed off the list of permitted subjects to report on,
which is a pretty good indicator of the extent to which the information we get and public reaction
to that information is being successfully controlled. That of course is exactly right.
But one of the things that's happening here is that we're not talking about any of that stuff.
The only thing that we are spending our time talking about, presumably, is Donald Trump's legal troubles, which we'll get to in just one second.
We'll get to the latest on that first.
The economy is really on sort of a razor's edge, unclear which way it's going to go.
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Meanwhile, the Trump team is getting ready to go to court, and they have a bunch of different defenses that they've been putting forward.
One of Donald Trump's lawyers, named John Lauro, he's been all over the news making defenses of President Trump.
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Meanwhile, the Trump team is getting ready to go to court and they have a bunch of different defenses that they've
been putting forward.
One of Donald Trump's lawyers named John Lauro, he's been all over the news making defenses of President
Trump.
He points out that President Trump's expressions of concern over election irregularities,
that's all First Amendment protected material.
He's pointing out also that the actual statutes that have been brought in the indictment against Donald Trump are not actually properly formulated.
So, very likely there may even be a preemptive appeal to the Supreme Court to try to get this thing stopped ASAP, as fast as possible.
That has been encouraged by people ranging from Mark Levin to Senator Mike Lee in Utah.
A flurry of interviews and statements on Sunday from Trump and his legal team previewed how they might seek to defend the former president against federal conspiracy charges.
According to Laurel, Sunday an ABC said the government will never be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump had corrupt or criminal intent.
That's what this case is about.
Now, that is, again, that's the legal issue, and whether it's true or whether it's false, we're going to find out.
Donald Trump has the deck stacked against him, no question, because the judge in this case, number one, is a dedicated Democrat who actually served at the same law firm as Hunter Biden, apparently, because this is taking place in Washington, D.C., which is a very unfriendly area for jury selection.
Apparently, Team Trump wants to get this thing moved to Virginia because they believe that Washington, D.C.
is a place where Trump can't get a fair trial.
And of course, this is only one of three trials that Trump is currently undergoing, and we're expecting the Georgia DA to drop an indictment on Donald Trump any moment.
So it'll be four different trials over the course of the next year.
Well, all of that is true.
And again, all of that is, it really is outrageous.
Just to go through each case once more, the Manhattan DA's case is absolutely specious.
It's garbage.
This is the one about Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump supposedly taking personal money and spending it on Stormy Daniels to silence her as opposed to campaign money.
It's all ridiculous.
It's well beyond the scope of the Manhattan DA.
He did it anyway because he wants to be famous.
It's a ridiculous case.
That one should be thrown out summarily.
But it's in Manhattan, so it could get convicted.
The one down in Florida, About classified documents, a pretty serious case because Donald Trump did the criming on tape.
Don't do criming on tape.
First rule of law.
With that said, should it be prosecuted?
The political case is it shouldn't be prosecuted because Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted for essentially the exact same crime.
But in a court of law, could Donald Trump be prosecuted?
Sure, but it's also in Florida, which is a much more friendly territory for Donald Trump since he won the state twice.
And then you head on up to Washington, D.C.
You have an incredibly weak case brought by Jack Smith on the January 6th matters.
Again, if he wanted to bring a charge of indictment that is an actual criminal charge, he didn't bother to bring that charge because he couldn't prove it.
So instead, he brought a bunch of ancillary charges ranging from obstruction of justice to fraud.
None of those statutes really seem to apply.
So all of that can be true.
And at the very same time, on a political level, all Donald Trump did over the weekend, all he did over and over and over is just tweet about this.
And that's all this election is going to be.
So the question for you, kind of normal conservative or normal independent is, is this top of mind for you?
Is this the thing you wake up every morning outraged about?
For a certain percentage of the population, sure.
Is that population larger than 25-30%?
I have serious doubts that that's the case.
Considering again, that a solid majority of independents think Trump should be indicted and they don't really care about what the charge is.
It's gonna be very hard to convince those independents.
Not only should Trump not be indicted, he should be elected because he's being indicted.
That is a very, very heavy lift.
And again, I encourage Republicans to think pretty seriously about who they think is likely to beat Joe Biden, not just about who they think it feels good to nominate.
Those are not the same thing.
So over the weekend, Donald Trump started going after the judge in this particular case.
He said, there's all caps.
There is no way I can get a fair trial with the judge assigned to the ridiculous freedom of speech fair elections case.
Everybody knows this.
And so does she.
We'll be immediately asking for accusal of this judge on very powerful grounds and likewise for venue change out of D.C.
Judge Chutkan, of course, is an appointee of former President Barack Obama.
And again, I'm not saying that Trump's concern here is not well predicated.
I think that it is.
As MSNBC legal analyst David Henderson says, this judge is Trump's worst nightmare.
I mean, that's true.
This is a very left-wing judge, obviously.
In Frank Tern's Amen, she is Trump's worst nightmare and she's his legal team's worst nightmare.
I'm just going to be real when I say it.
A black woman with a law degree is a virtual unstoppable force when it comes to the justice system.
Here's the reason why.
You're taking someone who's been subjected to two different forms of discrimination,
discrimination based on gender, discrimination based on race, then you're extracting them
on the law in terms of how things are actually supposed to work.
Then you put them in an environment where they see people get mistreated based on who
they are every single day of their career.
Now you've got somebody walking into her courtroom saying, well, hang on a second.
I deserve to be treated differently because I used to be a super powerful person and I
expect to become a super powerful person again.
That is not going to work on her.
Okay.
The fact that the left is so excited about this judge demonstrates that Trump is exactly
Again, the case that this person is making is that because of her identity as a black woman, this will make her Trump's worst nightmare, which is the opposite of being a good judge.
What it means to be a good judge is that you impartially decide the case in front of you, not that you look deep within the wells of your own soul and then come up with some sort of jerry-rigged explanation for why the bad orange man has to go to jail.
That's exactly what the MSNBC analyst is saying.
So again, Trump's complaints are well predicated here about the judge.
I think there's very little doubt about that.
The question for Republicans is, should that be the basis on which the elections run?
It doesn't stop there, of course, because the posts just keep coming and coming and coming over the weekend.
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Okay, so this was not Donald Trump's only complaint over the weekend.
So Donald Trump also sent out a missive saying in all capital letters,
if you go after me, I'm coming after you.
Totally unclear who exactly he is talking about here.
The implication seems to be that the DOJ is coming after him.
So if he's president of the United States afterward, that he's going to go after corrupt members of the DOJ,
which is entirely within his purview.
That however, sent Jack Smith spiraling.
Jack Smith is the prosecutor, in this case, the special counsel.
He filed a motion.
In the motion, he said all the proposed order seeks to prevent is the improper dissemination or use of discovery materials including to the public.
Such a restriction is particularly important in this case because the defendant has previously issued public statements on social media regarding witnesses, judges, attorneys, and others associated with legal matters pending against him.
In recent days regarding this case, the defendant has issued multiple posts either specifically or by implication including the following.
If you go after me, I'm coming after you.
Trump later defended the claim.
He said it wasn't about potential witnesses.
It wasn't him threatening people.
grand jury transcripts obtained in discovery here, it could have a harmful chilling effect
on witnesses or adversely affect the fair administration of justice in this case.
Trump later defended the claim. He said it wasn't about potential witnesses. It wasn't
him threatening people. He said that it was for quote, the rhino China loving dishonest
special interest groups and super PACs like the ones funded by the Koch brothers and club for no
growth, which may very well be the case.
But again, this is just how things are going to get litigated all the way until all of this is over.
He didn't stop there.
He went off about his civil rights being violated.
Again, I'm not saying that Donald Trump is wrong about any of this.
I'm just asking whether this is an electoral strategy that seems to be worthwhile.
Here was Donald Trump going off on his civil rights being violated at a Montgomery, Alabama rally on Friday.
The only civil rights that have been violated in this matter are my civil rights and those of the countless people that Biden and the communists have been persecuting.
And they are communists, and they're Marxists, and they're people that don't get it.
They get it.
You know?
They're vicious, and they're smart.
But we're smarter, and we're tougher than they are.
Now, again, all of this may be fine and well and good.
Is it the subject of the election?
I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but the horse ain't dead yet in the sense that people keep saying over and over that if the election is run on this basis, Donald Trump will win.
And I just don't see the evidence of that.
Over the weekend, he also went after variously Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence.
On Truth Social, he went off on Nancy Pelosi because Nancy Pelosi suggested that he looked like a scared puppy, which is definitely getting his goat.
and Trump put out on Truth Social, I purposely didn't comment on Nancy Pelosi's
very weird story concerning her husband.
But now I can because she said something about me with glee that was really quite vicious.
I saw a scared puppy, she said, as she watched me on television like millions of others
that didn't see that.
I wasn't scared.
Nevertheless, how mean a thing to say.
She is a wicked witch whose husband's journey from hell starts and finishes with her.
She is a sick and demented psycho who will someday live in hell, all capital letters.
Woo!
So.
Again, I ask you.
Who does this win over?
Wisconsin?
Michigan?
Pennsylvania?
Georgia?
Arizona?
Who are the voters who are like, well now that he did say that she has a sick and demented cycle, will someday live in hell, and that her husband's journey to hell starts and finishes with her, now I'm totally in.
This would be one thing if you're running for re-election.
He is now running after an election that he lost.
So he's going to have to win some additional votes.
Who does he win over with this?
And meanwhile, he's going after Mike Pence.
So Pence, who has said that he has no plans to testify against Trump over the weekend.
So Mike Pence, he said that.
And then Trump came back at him and said, wow, it's finally happened.
Little Mike Pence.
He's running out of nicknames.
He's starting to cycle through the same nicknames over.
Remember, there was Little Marco, Little Marco Ruby, and then there was Crooked Hillary, who's now Crooked Joe.
He's now recycling them.
Which is good for the environment.
He says, Little Mike Pence, a man who was about to be ousted as governor of Indiana until I came along and made him VP, has gone to the dark side.
Don't know the power of the dark side.
I'd never told a newly emboldened, not based on his 2% numbers, Pence to put me above the Constitution or that Mike was too honest.
He's delusional.
And now he wants to show he's a tough guy.
I once read a major magazine article on Mike.
It said he was not a very good person.
I was surprised, but the article was right.
Sad.
How many people has Donald Trump selected for positions of power who turn out not to be very good people?
Is it pretty much everyone?
So either the man has the worst selection in personnel in human history, or it turns out that he crosses swords with a lot of the people who end up working for him because he doesn't do the right thing very often with those people.
He also ranted about fellow Republicans over the weekend.
Here he was suggesting that it's other Republicans' fault that he's being indicted right now, which again is weird considering that it's really his own.
Okay, it's Democrats' fault, and it's his fault.
But it's hard to blame, say, Ron DeSantis or Marco Rubio or Chris Christie or Mike Pence for what Donald Trump did.
Two things can be true at once.
He can be unfairly targeted, and also, In some of these cases, particularly classified documents cases, dude made his bed.
And now he's having to lie in it.
And it's not pleasant.
And he shouldn't be given differential treatment from Hillary Clinton, but blaming other Republicans for his own failings.
At some point, won't Republican voters look at him and say, you're a little responsible for your own actions here?
No?
Like a little?
But when they indicted their political opponent, And they did that.
I said, now that gloves are off, he's a crooked, incompetent thief.
And he shouldn't be allowed to be the president.
And the Republicans better get tough, and they better get smart, because most of them look like a bunch of weak jerks right now.
And you got to get tough and smart, and you have to fight fire with fire.
You can't allow this to go on.
It's other Republicans' fault.
So the guy was president for four long years, and he allowed his entire Justice Department, apparently, to be completely run through with people who hated his guts and did nothing.
But now, it's the fault of a rando congressperson from, like, Iowa.
Again, is this a winning electoral strategy?
I ask you this over and over and over.
I'm not going to stop asking you because the only thing that matters to me, the only thing that matters to me is what the policy of the United States looks like going forward.
Donald Trump's personal peccadillos and his myriad foibles, I was willing to put those aside when he was doing good stuff for the country.
The question is, is he going to have a chance to do those things again by being reelected president on the basis of those things?
And Donald Trump's campaign for re-election is actually very simple.
Things were better when I was president.
Joe Biden has been a terrible president.
You want to focus on my legal stuff?
I'll take care of it in court because I'm big and brave and strong and stoic, and I'll just take care of all of it in court.
And if they come after me, it's because they're corrupt.
But the real issue here is that Joe Biden is a terrible president.
And so every day from now until the election, I'm going to talk about what a terrible president Joe Biden is.
I'm not going to look at the sort of victimization narrative here.
I'm not going to focus in on how the biggest story in America is how people are being mean to me.
Legally speaking, I can handle that.
I'm a big boy.
I'm a very rich person.
I've gone through these battles before.
I'll continue to go through these battles.
But the real issue here is Joe Biden.
But Joe Biden doesn't ever seem to leave President Trump's lips.
And that's going to be a problem with him in a general election.
And if Trump fans and Republicans decide that the chief factor in terms of conservative loyalty is somehow following Trump down the primrose path to losing, I don't see that here.
I don't see how that works.
It seems like there is a certain number of people who are very into this sort of thing.
They're like the Rock'em Sock'em Robots of it, more than they like the idea of actually taking Joe Biden out of the presidency.
I saw my father-in-law today.
I saw him on the way to the plane.
I saw him get off the plane.
I think the whole world saw it.
about how Trump is stoic and he's standing up to the bad guys.
And she got a big hand for this from a Republican crowd on Hannity.
I saw my father-in-law today. I saw him on the way to the plane. I saw him get off the plane.
I think the whole world saw it.
The whole world saw it.
Donald Trump.
By the way, that's a pretty nice plane, huh?
I will say that.
It's not bad.
It's not bad.
I believe that Donald Trump was made for such a time as this because any other person would have crumbled.
Any other person would have cracked, would have given up by now.
But he is in the fight.
And Sean, he's not just fighting for himself.
He is fighting for every single American.
Okay, so I just have a question.
What would it mean to crumble?
Wait, what?
Cut a plea deal?
What would it mean to crumble at this point?
Just purely on a factual level.
He's being indicted and now he's defending.
Which is usually what happens when someone gets indicted and then defends.
And again, when it comes to the D.C.
indictment, it's complete bullcrap that Jack Smith is putting forward.
When it comes to the Florida indictment, that's his own fault.
He did not have to keep those documents.
He could have given the documents back to the National Archives.
And as I say, unjust prosecution, sure, because it's politically motivated.
At the same time, You know what would have been a smart thing is not to keep the documents and not to step on the rake in the first place.
But are Republicans going to run on that basis?
I want to see the data that shows that the indictments actually make him stronger in general.
I keep hearing this.
I see no data to this effect.
I see a lot of data that suggests that Trump is stronger in a primary because of the indictments.
Because again, a lot of Republicans emotionally are resonating to him being unjustly persecuted.
I feel it too.
I get it.
When a Republican is being targeted by his political opposition to be put in jail for crimes that any Democrat could commit and get away with, that is political prosecution.
We all know it.
And it's terrible.
Does that mean he'll win a general election?
I keep asking the question over and over because apparently no one else will.
I've yet to see President Trump articulate a plan for how he wins re-election.
How?
What is his plan?
He's spending all of his money, literally all of it, on legal bills right now.
He's spending none of it on building up the voting base necessary to actually win an election.
He's not spending it on ballot harvesting.
He's not spending it on door knocking.
He's not messaging with regard to President Biden at all.
And you know what the predictable effect of this is?
The data I'm seeing is that it could be a really, really rough year for Republicans in 2024.
Why?
Well, there are some early special elections.
Special elections can be a bellwether for how the actual elections of 2024 go.
The 2023 special elections I've been going horribly for Republicans so far.
I wonder why.
Could it have something to do with the fact that instead of focusing in on Joe Biden and his terrible governance that everyone hates according to the polls, we are not focusing one iota on that?
According to FiveThirtyEight, they did the numbers crunching.
They found in 38 special elections held so far this year, Democrats have outperformed the partisan lean by an average of 10% Romping in parts of the country that typically support the party and cutting down on GOP margins in red cities and counties, too.
For example, the Democratic candidate in a Wisconsin State Assembly special election last month lost by just seven points in an area where Republicans have a 22-point edge and where Trump beat Biden by almost 17 points in 2020.
In a New Hampshire special election in May for a state house seat, the Democrat won by 43 points.
That's far beyond the 23-point edge in the district.
And these are not good numbers for Republicans.
And for comparison, according to FiveThirtyEight, Democrats outperformed the weighted partisan lean by about 4% in special elections held between 2018 midterms and 2020 elections.
When Biden won the White House by 4.5%, but Democrats underperformed in House races.
So now they're up by like 10% in these special elections.
Does that mean that necessarily nothing can change?
No, it's still really, really early.
But there's no question at this point that if Donald Trump runs an election campaign that is based solely on his indictments, that is probably not going to redound to the benefit of Republicans.
And so I ask once again, what's the plan for victory here?
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Meanwhile, the media seem absolutely determined to knock Ron DeSantis down.
The idea here is that if you can knock DeSantis down, then Trump ends up the nominee and you get the race, presumably, that you want.
This is why Newsweek is promoting the idea that Ron DeSantis was met with a large number of empty seats at a meet and greet event in Iowa.
He went to Cedar Falls before eating breakfast at the Vinton Family Restaurant before heading to a meet and greet at a livestock auction in Tampa.
But then there was a viral photo showed on social media that shows that there weren't a lot of people who showed up at this point.
The journalist Tim Miller, who is very much a sort of bulwark type left winger, a quasi
conservative, a supposed conservative, he added a caveat saying, for what it's worth,
DeSantis is doing a bunch of events this week and not all have been this sparse.
This is the reality when you reboot and have to do grind it and have to grind out lots
of small events, let Ron be Ron deal.
OK, but again, it is pictures like this that the media are promoting.
Meanwhile, you have Politico with an entire article today, DeSantis' conservative populism
has left some donors chafing.
When Ron DeSantis unveiled his economic platform last week, he presented himself as a conservative
populist, a skeptic of corporations inside a party often allied with them.
But DeSantis' rhetoric hasn't always matched his record as governor.
He's done his share to support corporations.
As a presidential candidate, he has relied on contribution from titans of the business world.
The tension between these two impulses was kept at bay for months, as DeSantis looked well positioned to challenge Donald Trump for his party's nomination.
But as he stumbled and continued warring with select corporations like Disney and Bud Light, big business is starting to show signs of irritation.
So again, The new narrative that's going to come out, it's not new, is that DeSantis is already done for, that the campaign is already over.
And the reason that you're seeing the media mirror that is because despite the fact that it is only August, there's not been a single debate yet, and we are still six months off from a primary, if they can kill DeSantis in the cradle right now, there really ain't anybody in the wings.
The only other candidates right now in the Republican Party who are already in the race are polling in single digits.
If you look at the RealClearPolitics polling average right now, Donald Trump is at 53.7, DeSantis at 15.7, which is a drop of like three to five points over the last two months.
Vivek Ramaswamy has jumped into third at 6%, and Mike Pence is at 5%.
In Iowa, by contrast, Trump is running about 27 points ahead of DeSantis.
In New Hampshire, he's running about 24 points ahead of DeSantis.
DeSantis is in second place in both of those nominating contests right now.
None of the other candidates are clocking more than single digits in any of those races right now.
So if the media can knock DeSantis down to size, then the idea would be that Trump waltzes to the nomination, which at this point is apparently sort of the plan.
Now, is that going to be?
Again, it doesn't have to be DeSantis, but it can be Trump, but Trump is going to have to shift his campaign away from everybody.
Jump to my defense, because that's how I'm going to protect myself too.
Here is what I'm going to do to stop Joe Biden.
Here's what I'm going to do to stop Joe Biden.
Name the thing, please.
Like, I'm waiting for it.
Okay, meanwhile, just demonstrating the insanity of our racial moment.
I gotta say, the media are absolute garbage at pretty much everything on matters of race.
This is particularly true.
So the way that this works apparently is that I suppose black people all over the world can be as racist and anti-semitic as they want to be according to the mainstream media.
Racism and anti-semitism are bad except depending on who's performing them.
The reason I say this, there's an amazing headline in the New York Times, this is from a few days ago, about a song that was sung at a giant political rally at a leftist South African party rally.
That party, the EFF, is run by a person named Julius Malema, who has been challenged in court before for racism, and he started chanting, A Kill the Boer, B-O-E-R, is a reference to killing white people, particularly farmers, in South Africa.
According to the New York Times, a video clip of that moment shot across the internet and was seized upon by some Americans on the far right, who said it was a call to violence.
That notion really took off when Elon Musk, the South African-born billionaire who left the country as a teenager, chimed in.
in. He said they're openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa. Well, I mean, yes.
I mean, clearly, if this had been a white party in South Africa saying, kill the black people.
I mean, I don't know. It's not super subtle what's going on right here.
Here is the headline from the New York Times, however.
Oh, it's the backlash that's the story.
It's not that you have full-scale political parties in South Africa calling for the extermination of white people.
The story is the backlash.
Oh, we don't take that literally, you see.
Kill the white people, we don't take literally.
What we do take literally, obviously, is like when a NASCAR driver retweets a George Floyd meme.
That's when we take things super literally and we destroy his career.
So over the weekend, NASCAR suspended a driver named Noah Gragson.
Why?
Well, because he appeared to have liked an insensitive meme with a photo of George Floyd on social media.
Legacy Motor Club announced Gregson's suspension, saying his actions do not represent the values of our team.
NASCAR said Gregson violated the stock car racing member conduct section of its rules, which says in part members should not publicly disparage people based on their backgrounds.
So, um, Gregson did not address the alleged meme but acknowledged his actions.
He said, I'm disappointed in myself for lack of attention and actions on social media.
Apparently, the post shows a photo of Floyd's face and includes a reference to his death.
The immediate response is that he must have been racist to repost the meme.
Which, again, not sure why that would be racist as opposed to just gauche.
Not quite the same thing.
So the same media who will declare that this NASCAR driver is a racist and must be extirpated from American society and his job, they're the same people who are like, kill the boar is actually a subtle message about the evils of white supremacy.
According to the New York Times, the channel was born at a time when black South Africans were fighting a violent racist regime and was made popular in the early 1990s by Piper Mokoba, a former youth leader in the African National Congress.
But in 2012, the ANC, they distanced themselves from the song, and they expelled Mr. Malema for his incendiary statement.
Apparently, this is all not a big deal, according to the New York Times, despite the fact that, again, this song was actually banned, I believe.
It has been declared a hate speech song in South Africa for years and years.
But now, we have to kind of go back on that, because the minute that the right-wing Americans recognized that perhaps there are, in fact, people who are black who are racist against whites in a place like South Africa, Uh, if we notice that, then the song apparently is good again.
That's the way that this works.
Meanwhile, in other aspects of race that are terrible for people everywhere, the Chicago mayor, Brandon Johnson, is focused laser-like on crime problems in his city.
So there's been mass looting all over the city of Chicago in recent past, and the new mayor, That's not appropriate.
We're not talking about mob actions.
I didn't say that.
Hold on a second, okay?
a reporter for calling a mass looting a mob saying this was racist language. So again,
the way that this works in the media and on the left is if you say that a mob ransacked a place,
that's racist. If you say kill the boer, that's not racist.
That's subtle political messaging.
That's not appropriate. We're not talking about mob actions.
I didn't say that.
Okay, what I'm hold on a second. Okay, respectfully, these large gatherings,
these large gatherings, just hold on a second, y'all.
I promise you, we have time to talk.
It's important that we speak of these dynamics in an appropriate way.
This is not to obfuscate what is actually taking place.
This was the scene near Roosevelt and Canal Sunday night.
Groups looted a convenience store.
More than three dozen teenagers were arrested.
Not a mob.
Large gathering, guys.
And at least one 20-year-old.
How many teenagers?
How many teenagers are that?
That's a lot of teenagers!
Not a mob, according to the Chicago mayor.
That's just great.
So, yeah, it turns out that the soft bigotry of low expectations leads to increased racism.
It also leads to increased crime.
Okay, meanwhile, when you talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations, the level of antisemitism that is tolerated so long as it comes from black leftists is truly astonishing.
It really is an amazing, amazing thing.
And the way that anti-Semitism is treated in the press is if it's a white fan of Donald Trump or a white non-fan of Donald Trump who's a white supremacist, then anti-Semitism is a true deep scourge.
If it's coming from Hamas, Hezbollah, if it's coming from any of the radical Middle Eastern Muslim groups that seek to destroy the state of Israel, then it's more a political question than, you know, wiping the Jews off the planet.
And if it's coming from prominent black people, then it's pretty much not a problem at all.
We just ignore it completely.
By the way, this extends all the way to the very top of how the media treat people.
So, I mentioned earlier in the day this interview with a historian, David Garrow, about Barack Obama.
Okay, so the fact that Barack Obama's anti-Semitism was overlooked for literally years is an amazing, amazing indicator of just how easy people on the left go when it comes to anti-Semitism coming from members of the black community.
Tablet Magazine covering this, David Samuels is the author.
He writes, quote, In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African-American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of black racial consciousness against his girlfriend's white-identified liberal universalism.
As readers, we know the stakes of this decision will become more than simply personal.
The black American man Obama wills into being in this scene would go on to marry a black woman from the south side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson and, after a meteoric rise, win election as the first black president of the United States.
Yet what Garrow documented, after tracking down and interviewing Sheila Miyoshi-Ager, was an explosive fight over a very different subject.
In Yeager's telling, the quarrel that ended the couple's relationship was not about Obama's self-identification as a black man.
The impetus was not a play about the American black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago's Spiritus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.
At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spiritus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a black mayoral aide named Steve Coakley, when a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans.
The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city's power echelons, with some prominent black officials supporting Coakley, others calling for his firing.
In Yeager's recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple's relationship was Obama's stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit and in the swirl of the Coakley affair, to condemn black racism.
While acknowledging that Obama's embrace of a black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted what upset her that day was Obama's inability to condemn Coakley's comments.
It was not Obama's blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn anti-Semitism.
Well, I mean, yeah.
That, again, is not a shock.
Remember that Barack Obama sat in Jeremiah Wright's church for full-on 20 years.
Full-on 20 years.
So is it any shock that he would not condemn anti-Semitism back In his younger days?
Well, the latest example of Black anti-Semitism, one is being ignored, one is not being ignored as much.
Jamie Foxx over the weekend wrote a post on Instagram saying, quote,
they killed this dude named Jesus. What do you think they'll do to you?
Followed by the hashtags fake friends and fake love.
The actor later deleted the post, not before being accused of anti-Semitism on social media.
Because, of course, they killed this dude named Jesus.
Very often that is used by people who don't like Jews very much to refer to Jews.
Jennifer Aniston liked the post before it was deleted, and then she, uh, she unliked it.
And she said, I didn't like this post on purpose or by accident.
So apparently it was miraculous.
More importantly, I want to be clear to my friends and anyone hurt by showing up in their feeds.
I do not support any form of antisemitism.
I truly don't hate, tolerate hate of any kind, period.
Now, Fox posted an apology.
He said, I want to apologize to the Jewish community and everyone who's offended by my post.
I know my choice of words has caused offense, and I'm sorry, that was never my intent.
He said, instead, he was referring to a fake friend who had betrayed him.
Apparently, there was also speculation that this sort of phraseology is used frequently in the black community, suggesting they killed Jesus, which sometimes is an imprecation with regard to Jews.
So Jamie Foxx backs off that one.
Meanwhile, Cardi B just gets away with sort of the most outrageous Jewish stereotyping available.
So Cardi B, and again, as a person who is not a connoisseur of her entire oeuvre, Cardi B, who is a deeply unintelligent human being, she tweeted out the other day a picture of two Hasidic Jews.
And these Jews are in like the full Hasidic garb, probably in Brooklyn.
One is wearing a strimal, which is the kind of furry round hat that you see sometimes.
The other is wearing a black hat and is also wearing a bekasha, which is kind of a long
black jacket.
These the etymology of these things, they go back to Poland and various typical stereotypical
picture of like ultra Orthodox Jews.
And she says, remember, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
What exactly is she referring to?
Apparently, she's referring to a line in her Shakespearean song, Bikkenhead.
In which she says this.
OK, so lawyer is a Jew is the line, right?
Lawyer is a Jew, he gonna get my money, right?
And this, the idea being that because, so there is a typical Jewish stereotype that Jews are disproportionately lawyers.
It's not a stereotype, that's true.
Jews are disproportionately lawyers, doctors, accountants.
There are a lot of different industries in which Jews represent a disproportionate share of members of the industry.
What is actually stereotypical and antisemitic is the implication that if you take a picture of two very Hasidic Jews, that this is somehow representative of, like, her Jewish lawyers.
Now, we actually have pictures of her Jewish lawyers.
Okay, her Jewish lawyers look like secular reform Jews at the very, very best.
Do these look like the Jews that you just saw on the streets of New York?
And the idea that all Jews are the same is a hell of a stereotype.
If I was like, wow, rappers, and then I just posted a picture of Barack Obama and Eric Holder, you'd be like, that's a little racist, isn't it?
That seemed like a little racist.
Cardi B, however, says this kind of stuff on the routine and no problem whatsoever.
And this is true throughout, unfortunately, rap culture.
This stuff is posted routinely by people ranging from like Ice Cube to Cardi B. And everybody just goes, eh, whatever.
Is that really a big deal?
Well, I mean, it would be if we were talking about any other race attacking members of any other race.
This is, the fact that this is let off the hook is astonishing to me, but again, it shows that when racial preference and racial hierarchy is created in the name of intersectionality, ugly things then occur.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So, over the weekend, I had a lot of time to read since I was in the hospital watching my child breathe.
It was really a terrible weekend, but I did read what was a phenomenal book.
This is a book by Amor Towles called A Gentleman in Moscow, and it is the best novel that I've read in five to ten years.
It's terrific.
It's really good.
So it centers on a guy named Count Rostov, who's sort of an old-school Russian member of the upper class.
And he ends up being taken by the Red Soviets in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and tried and then confined to a hotel.
And he's now stuck in the Hotel Metropole for literally the rest of his life.
That is his sentence.
That he's going to be sentenced to live in a fairly small room in this hotel for the rest of his life.
And he's not allowed to leave, ever.
And so the entire novel is about what happens to him in this hotel, and the people that he meets, and how he finds meaning there.
And it is a beautiful novel.
It's truly beautiful.
Not just because the writing is terrific, because it really, really is, but also because of the generalized take, which is that, yes, there are things that are worth preserving from the old world, and those things are worthy of care.
And that perfectionism and how you approach everyday tasks actually matters.
And that you have to open yourself up to experiences of family and childbearing in order to find your most purposeful self.
And also, of course, it exposes the tremendous evils of the Soviet Union, but it does so in a really subtle and amazing way.
It's truly a masterpiece, A Gentleman in Moscow, highly recommended by M.R.
Tolles.
This one was recommended to me by a friend, Andrew Clavin, who has interesting taste in literature.
He has a hit rate with me of about like 75%.
This one is like one of his best picks.
He referred me to this book, really worth the read, A Gentleman in Moscow by M.R.
Tolles.
Go pick it up today.
Okay, other things that I like.
So, I ask you, which way, Western man, This is a picture of the Prime Minister of Canada who is now getting divorced.
And it is a picture of him with his son at the Barbie movie.
And I just have to say, are the Chinese quaking in their boots at this point?
He had tweeted out, we're team Barbie.
And there's a picture of him in a pink sweatshirt that says, love you more.
And his son Who is wearing a pink t-shirt and star shorts and they are gazing bizarrely and creepily into the camera right in front of the Margot Robbie Ryan Gosling poster from Barbie.
So, here are your choices.
The people who are team Barbie or the people who are not team Barbie.
Yes, you know where I stand on this, but where do you stand on this?
And I ask you, Does this speak well of the future of the Western world?
Is this where things are going?
Are they going amazingly well?
Russia and China just did a joint military exercise near Alaska.
And meanwhile, the head of Canada is tweeting out bizarre photos of himself with his son from the Barbie movie and saying he is Team Barbie.
Ah, the future is in the best of hands.
But I love it when people expose themselves for who they are and Justin Trudeau.
Can you imagine?
Man, Fidel Castro must be turning over in his grave to see his son acting this way.
way. Okay, time for some things that I hate.
Alrighty, so, Megan Rapinoe, one of the most irritating people on planet Earth, she had
an opportunity to push the United States women's national soccer team into the next round.
Bye.
Now, she's most famous for having blue hair, and also for really hating America.
I mean, the national anthem is bad, and America's a deeply sexist and racist place, even though they're paying her way too much money to play a sport no one has ever watched except once every four years when we all pretend to be interested in women's soccer and all the rest of it.
Well, Rapinoe apparently had a penalty shot and she missed.
And the United States lost and they got booted by Sweden.
And bizarrely enough, she started kind of laughing and smiling after she missed the shot.
And she didn't miss by a little.
She missed by, like, a lot.
Rapinoe rifles it over the bar!
Now, to be fair to Megan Rapinoe, there are all these pictures that are going around of her laughing and smiling and all the rest of it.
She, uh, you know, people react in bizarre ways to terrible things happening to them, so I'm not going to blame her for, like, laughing and then crying.
People do react in weird ways to bad situations.
If you've ever had to tell somebody truly horrible news, you kind of don't know what to do.
So, I get that.
The part about Megan Rapinoe that is, you know, annoying is that she's Megan Rapinoe.
And so, she was asked, after blowing this game, she was asked about, you know, the most important things to her, her best memories from her career, and her best memories from her career are absolutely obviously political.
Is there a memory that stands out to you right now in this moment?
I mean, probably equal pay chance after the final.
And I think, you know, they were saying equal pay, but could have been saying a lot of things.
I think this team has always fought for so much more.
And that's been the most rewarding part for me, of course, playing in World Cups and winning championships and doing all that.
But, you know, to know that we've used our really special talent To do something, you know, that's really like changed the world forever I think that means the most to me and you know the players in this locker room here They're just getting started and you know to all the players that I played with obviously You know who know what it's like to be in the grind That's the best part
Meanwhile, President Biden tweeted out, It's the worst performance in years.
President Biden, of course, had to sign in because he's big fans of Megan Rapinoe, where we all pretend that the women's soccer team is even remotely similar to the men's soccer team.
It's a completely different sport.
on and off the field.
It's the worst performance in years.
President Biden, of course, had to sign in because he's big fans of Megan Rapinoe, where
we all pretend that the women's soccer team is even remotely similar to the men's soccer
team.
It's a completely different sport.
It earns way less revenue on a four-year basis.
Doesn't matter.
Megan Rapinoe continued to be hailed by the left as a heroine.
Again, the problem with Megan Rapinoe is not that she missed a penalty shot.
Lots of people miss penalty shots.
And the problem is not that she reacted weirdly when that happens.
When bad stuff happens, bad stuff happens.
The problem with Megan Rapinoe is that she's kind of a terrible person and that she has spent her entire career pressing forward the idea that America is a terrible, horrible place that has made her extraordinarily wealthy and famous for playing a sport that no one cares about worldwide.
You want to know the evidence that no one cares about this sport worldwide?
That the United States wins every year.
That's how you know that no one cares about this sport worldwide.
Because there are like seven people in the United States who take soccer seriously compared to, you know, the rest of the human population.
So if we're winning at that sport, that means that half the population in the rest of the world doesn't even compete in that sport.
That's that's just the way it is.
But we have to pretend that America is a terrible, no good, very bad place.
So that's that's that's that.
And we bid a not particularly fond farewell to Megan Rapinoe.
Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
All right, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We will be getting into media coverage suggesting that actually Sexual assault cover-ups in Virginia are okay.
The real problem is that we notice.
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