Well, there are some politicians who say they're going to do the thing, and then there are some politicians who actually do the thing.
Well, Ron DeSantis continues to do the thing, at least where he has the ability to, in the state of Florida.
In yet another headline that is going to make the New York Times go nuts, the headline today, DeSantis suspends second elected prosecutor in Florida.
So what exactly happened here?
Well, the governor has the ability to suspend certain public officials for failing to do their job.
And yesterday, Governor DeSantis suspended the top state prosecutor in Orlando He accused her of incompetence and neglect of duty for what he characterized as lenience against violent criminals.
There's a 40-page report from the governor's office demonstrating her lack of prosecuting crime.
She, of course, is a George Soros-backed prosecutor.
She is somebody who is in favor of essentially decriminalizing crime.
And here was the governor announcing her suspension yesterday.
Monique Worrell's administration of criminal justice in the Ninth Circuit has been clearly and fundamentally derelict so as to constitute both neglect of duty and incompetence.
Policies or practices listed in our executive order suspending her, that constitutes the grounds of suspension, are as follows.
One, a pattern or practice to avoid minimum mandatory sentences for gun crimes.
Pattern or practice to avoid minimum mandatory sentences for drug trafficking offenses.
Pattern or practice allowing juvenile offenders to avoid serious charges and incarceration altogether.
Pattern or practice to avoid valid and applicable sentencing enhancements.
Pattern or practice limiting charges for child pornography.
Pattern or practice for seeking withholding of adjudication in situations not permitted.
under Florida law. Now, super boring, right? Except this is the stuff that actually moves
the ball forward in terms of making people's lives better in places like Orlando, because
the fact is that the place where she presided, which would be the Ninth Circuit in Florida,
had a percentage dropped of cases, like non-prosecution cases. 42% of the referrals
that were made to her office were then dropped by her office.
42%!
4 in 10.
And so Governor DeSantis says, well, that's literally not doing your job.
Your job is to prosecute crime.
Now, the way the media play this is, of course, that it's a partisan hit job.
Quote, the move was the governor's latest aggressive use of executive power against local officials of the opposing political party.
So just to be clear, it's really bad when Governor DeSantis decides to fire a prosecutor in Orlando for failing to prosecute crime.
That's a misuse of executive power to go after an opposing political official.
When you are the President of the United States and your Department of Justice goes after the person who is currently leading the primaries in the opposing party over crimes that, when done by members of your own party, were completely exonerated and whitewashed, when that happens, that's just good law enforcement.
So when Merrick Garland goes after Donald Trump, good law enforcement.
When Ron DeSantis fires a prosecutor for not doing her job, political hit job, according to our wonderful media.
DeSantis suspended Monique Worrell, the elected state attorney of Florida's Ninth Judicial Circuit, which includes Orange and Osceola counties, and cited as reasons for handling of three cases and a low overall incarceration rate, among other things.
This is the second time in a year that DeSantis has done this.
But to be fair, this also happens to be a period in which a bunch of prosecutors got put in place who don't prosecute.
In fact, things have gotten so bad on crime.
That hilariously enough, a D.C.
council person yesterday literally suggested that the National Guard be called into Washington, D.C.
to stop crime.
Which is hilarious because you'll remember that Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote an op-ed in the middle of Riot Summer 2020, suggesting that maybe the National Guard needed to be called in to quell riots.
And this ended with the firing of the op-ed editor of the New York Times for even daring to run a piece suggesting that thing.
Now you have D.C.
council members who are suggesting the same thing about Washington, D.C.
itself.
DeSantis said that they had charged cases in this particular district in ways that would avoid all of the mandatory minimum sentences for both gun and drug trafficking crimes.
They allowed juveniles to avoid serious charges or incarceration.
He said prosecutors have a certain amount of discretion about which cases to bring and which not to bring.
This state attorney has abused that discretion and has effectively nullified certain laws in the state of Florida.
The governor then appointed Andrew Bain, a judge from the same judicial circuit, to take Worrell's place.
Worrell can appeal her suspension to the Republican-controlled State Senate or go to the Florida Supreme Court.
Unlikely that she is going to win that case.
She will be the new MSNBC Hero of the Day, because that is the way that this works.
If you do not perform your job, or if you disrupt the system, like a Tennessee state legislator who just decides to lead a quasi-riot into the middle of the Tennessee state legislature, then MSNBC will make you a hero if then you are stripped of certain legislative privileges.
Here was the Orlando state attorney deposed, suggesting that the big problem here is that the cops gave DeSantis the info.
The cops are the problem because the cops actually went to the governor's office and like, you know, we're referring all these crimes and none of them are getting prosecuted.
The cops are the bad guys.
See, where normal people come from, the cops are the good guys and the criminals are the bad guys.
I also want to point out that law enforcement has played a big role in giving the governor the information that he is tasked for to support a suspension.
Why?
Well, I'll tell you why.
Because when I ran, I promised law enforcement accountability.
And since I have become state attorney, we prosecuted Jonathan Mills, a serial terrorist on the paramour community.
And he went to jail under my administration, and the Florida Order of Police was pissed about it.
Okay, the chorus of mm-hmms in the background, I can only assume, are her political allies.
It is worth noting here that she let out of jail people who went on to commit violent crimes.
One was Dayton Veal, a 28-year-old man killed by Orlando police officers Saturday after he had shot and critically injured two other officers on Friday night.
Veal had posted bond earlier this year after being charged with sexual battery of a 14-year-old girl.
This is the kind of person that Worrell was letting out of prison.
The other cases involved a man who shot and killed his pregnant girlfriend after having been released while facing charges including carrying a concealed firearm on school property and a man who's convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 51 weeks in jail as a youthful offender.
Warrell then went on in this press conference to talk about how Ron DeSantis was destroying democracy because democracy is where you get elected to a prosecution position and then refuse to prosecute.
He needed to get back in the media in some positive way that would be red meat for his base, and he will have accomplished that today.
He will be in the news nationally and internationally for the individual who has single-handedly destroyed democracy in the state of Florida.
Okay, and then she continued by suggesting, of course, that DeSantis is what she called a weak dictator, which is weird since he just fired... So either he's a strong dictator who just fired you, or he's a weak guy who didn't fire you.
It's kind of weird to be a weak dictator.
By the way, she finished this press conference by putting up her fist, like Antifa Power, which is just a great way for a prosecutor to go.
I am your duly elected state attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit.
And nothing done by a weak dictator can change that.
Well, I mean, it did change that.
You're no longer the state prosecutor.
So, I mean, there is that.
So, again, Ron DeSantis doing the things in Florida that are necessary for people in Florida to live a better life.
This is the part of the DeSantis campaign that has been so far kind of lacking, is the fact that DeSantis is actually very good at, like, the basics of governing in the state of Florida.
Meaning when a bridge gets taken out by a hurricane, that thing is back up within days.
Like the highways work here.
The police are able to do their jobs here.
When a prosecutor fails to do her job, she gets fired in the state of Florida.
And that bread and butter kind of stuff is the reason that DeSantis is very popular in the state of Florida.
All of the fighting of wokeness, all of the sort of controversial policy positions that DeSantis has taken on top of that, That's sort of the icing on the cake.
But the cake is that DeSantis is actually very good at governing.
And this is something that Republican voters ought to think about going forward when it comes time to vote in primaries.
Is Donald Trump going to learn the lessons of his first presidency?
And is he then going to be good at the bread and butter kind of stuff?
Or is it just going to be a repeat of the first presidency in which he actually didn't do any of the bread and butter kind of stuff?
It was kind of the people around him doing all of that.
And he tweeted a lot.
Because if you actually wish to see the left lose, the thing that you actually need is for the right to be good at the actual business of governing.
Know how to wield power in effective ways.
DeSantis is doing that in the state of Florida.
He's not the only one.
Brian Kemp in Georgia is very good at the effective use of power.
Glenn Youngkin in Virginia seems to be using power well.
But DeSantis is using it in a very powerful way in the state of Florida.
That's something, again, that should factor into how Republicans consider voting in a primary.
Because it turns out being president isn't just about what you say, it is about what you are able to do.
And very often, Donald Trump's defense to misstaffing his administration is that he was betrayed.
Well, you know what's a great way to not be betrayed?
It's to staff your administration properly in the first place, in the way that you see fit.
So either you think that Trump learns and he's going to get better on the job the second time around, or you have doubts.
We'll get to more on this in just one second because Disney is now paying the price for the woke cultural battles they've been fighting.
We'll get to that momentarily first.
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Okay, meanwhile, Disney is taking it directly in the teeth.
The New York Times, of course, is attributing this to larger market forces, but the reality is that Disney has completely blown out a large segment of its user base.
I can tell you that Disney has lost thousands of dollars from my family alone.
And normally, in a given year, I would take my family to Disneyland over here at Disney World over here in Florida.
I would take them there at least three times, probably, over the course of the year.
And I have a fairly large family with, like, cousins and everything.
So we're talking, like, thousands of dollars that Disney has lost just for my family.
And obviously, they're a massive, multi-billion-dollar corporation.
But there are a lot of people who are like me.
There are a lot of people who are not subscribing to Disney+, even though I otherwise would just to watch the Star Wars content, because Disney has decided to spit in the eye of its consumer base.
And obviously that was highlighted by their conflict for no reason whatsoever with the state of Florida over the question of sexual indoctrination of children.
Well now, the New York Times is reporting that Robert Iger's urgent need to overhaul Disney came into sharp relief on Wednesday.
Disney's streaming operation lost $512 million in the most recent quarter, bringing total streaming losses since 2019, when Disney Plus was introduced, to more than $11 billion.
Disney Plus lost roughly 11.7 million subscribers worldwide in the three months that ended July 1st, for a new total of 146.1 million.
All the decline came from a low-priced version of Disney Plus in India.
So they basically inflated their numbers by getting a bunch of people to sign up for, you know, the Star Package in India, and then everybody Basically dropped off because Disney lost a bid to renew the expensive rights to Indian Premier League cricket matches, excluding India.
Disney Plus gained 800,000 subscribers, primarily overseas, but that rate of growth is not going to make up for the kind of costs that they have been experiencing due to streaming.
So IGOR is now shifting the focus of Disney Plus away from brisk subscriber growth, which requires those big marketing campaigns.
Instead, Disney has been trying to make more money from Disney Plus subscribers it already has by increasing the price.
Another hefty price increase is on the way.
Starting on October 12th, the ad-free version will cost $14.
Hulu, which is controlled by Disney, will begin charging $18 for ad-free access.
That's up from $15.
As an incentive, Disney will begin selling a new streaming package, ad-free access to both Disney+, and Hulu, for $20 a month, starting on September 6th.
Now, again, one of the things that's happening here is that a lot of prospective customers, people like me, have been dropping off.
So it's really lowering their growth curve.
An 11% increase in profitability at Disney's theme park divisions, despite weakness at Walt Disney World in Florida, allowed the company to salvage the quarter to a degree, but they're really getting clocked.
And other theme park operators in Florida have seen attendance declines.
Historically, when budgets get tight, families cut back on expensive trips to Disney World, but it's not just that.
Again, there is a political aspect to this.
And here's the thing.
A marginal move on a major company makes a big difference.
Everybody assumes that giant, giant companies run extraordinary profit margins, and that's not true.
It's not true.
The profit margins, particularly in the media business, can be extremely slim.
And so, if you ding the profit margin by a certain percentage, if you alienate a certain percentage of your core customer base, that has really outsized ramifications for the broader market.
Because remember, valuation, when it comes to public markets, is always a multiple of the actual cash flow or the actual EBITDA of the company.
What that means is that if a company, say, has a gross income, the gross that they take in is a billion dollars a year, that company's not valued at a billion dollars on the public market, it's gonna get valued at like 10 billion, 15 billion dollars on the public markets depending on what industry and sector the company is in.
So that means that if you ding that company, And I say $50 million.
And it goes down from a billion to $950 million.
If you do that, then the multiple, let's say it's at a 10 level, is going to go down concomitantly.
That $50 million is going to end up looking more like $500 million when it comes to the actual market cap of the company.
So you can actually seriously ding a company in the public markets simply by alienating a certain segment of your customer base.
And that's exactly what Disney has done by getting into this bleep fight with Governor DeSantis, the state of Florida, and more broadly, parents across the country.
And they're only gonna get worse, by the way.
I mean, the fact that they are now doing, like, Woke Snow White is so absurd.
I don't know what they're thinking over there or why they think that this is a growth area.
Who are they catering to?
Seriously, are they catering to the Chinese market?
It used to be that Disney's, the big rap against Disney is that they were catering to the Chinese market by filming, like, Mulan in Shenzhen and ignoring the slave labor of Muslims.
And at least you could make the case on a market level that they were trying to appeal to, you know, the giant Chinese market.
But when they're deciding to make Woke Snow White, With like non-dwarves as the dwarves?
Who exactly are they appealing to?
It's not the Chinese market.
What exactly are they doing?
And the answer is that they have been victims of institutional capture by their own people.
And I assume that as the market starts to decline, we'll talk about the economy momentarily, that as the market starts to decline, Disney's gonna have to do what every other company is doing and they're gonna have to get rid of their loss leaders.
And guess what?
Wokeness is a loss leader.
It is a massive loss leader.
We're gonna get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, meanwhile, again, the economic lights here are blinking red.
Things are not going to be, everyone is very sanguine about the state of the economy.
I'm significantly less sanguine about the state of the economy.
I know too many investors who are holding their money in abeyance, knowing that the economy is on razor's edge.
Everyone I talk to, right, in investment circles, and I do a fair share of investing, Everyone I'm talking to is holding their money out of the market right now, because they don't know which way it's going to go.
Well, today, the Consumer Price Index came out again, and it showed that prices rose 3.2% in July from a year ago.
So June, you'll recall, was down to 3%, which is still 50% higher than the Fed seeks, right?
The Fed wants a 2% rate of increase year on year.
That is sort of the Milton Friedman Chicago School idea that if you constantly inflate the currency and deflate value, that if you do that it's going to spur a certain level of consumer spending and this is going to keep the wheels churning and all the rest of this.
I'm sort of a Vienna School guy in the sense that I don't actually believe in 2% inflation rate sought by the Fed.
I think we should seek a 0% inflation rate from the Fed and money should be worth what money was worth 10 years ago or 20 years ago and we should stop inflating away people's savings.
But, call me a classicist, the fact is that 2% is what we have aimed at for years and years and years.
Last month, year on year, I came in at 3%.
Yeah, that is 50, that is a full 50% higher.
Now I know that our minds have now been warped by the fact that we had like 10% inflation for a while there, thanks to supply chain, thanks to COVID, and thanks to Joe Biden's inflationary monetary and fiscal policies.
But 3% still way too high.
Literally 50% too high.
Supposed to be 2, it is 3.
That was last month, and we were told that was awesome.
Well now, it's 3.2% year on year, which means that the rate of increase continues to be too high.
Okay, now they're bringing down the rate of increase from 9%, but it's still at 3.2%, which by my calculation is still more than 50% too high.
On a monthly basis, prices ticked up 0.2% between June and July.
Economists say that the bump is linked to temporary factors, including rebounding airline, hotel, and energy prices that are not likely to erode longer-term progress.
But I don't know what that means.
Erode longer?
Like, we're not going to jump back up to 7%, but are we getting back down to 2%?
The overall number was also higher because prices are being compared at the rates of increase last July, the first month when inflation began to fall after a long climb.
But again, that is still a price increase.
Again, if the curve looks sort of like this, That doesn't mean that here is somehow lower than here.
That's not correct.
And for those who can't see what I'm doing with my hand here, essentially I'm drawing a curve that at the very beginning looks very steep and then starts to shallow out but is still increasing.
We are now at the shallowed out but still increasing rate of inflation in the United States.
And it's still, again, 50% too high.
Pooja Sriram, a U.S.
economist at Barclays, says, in the grand scheme, we are seeing disinflation and things are moving in the right direction.
If you look past the volatile categories, underlying momentum has not changed.
However, are we back to where we need to be?
Obviously not.
This is spurring talk that the Federal Reserve is basically going to try to hold out here and not increase the interest rates again.
But I don't see evidence that the rate is dropping down to 2% without any further action by the Federal Reserve.
And this is why it seems like the stock market is really volatile right now.
It's kind of going up.
It's going down.
It's kind of sticking around the same generalized level.
The reason for that is deep uncertainty about the impact of the policies that are being pursued right now.
Again, when you look at overall measures of economic health, what you're seeing is business disinvestment.
You're seeing mortgage lending dry up.
You're seeing those rates of interest on new mortgages go way, way, way up.
And eventually, eventually, when people start losing jobs because the money dries up, that's going to be a lot of people who start defaulting on debts.
And when they start defaulting on debts, banks are going to take the hit.
And when those banks are invested in bonds, that's going to have some pretty significant bleed-over effects for the broader economy.
If Silicon Valley Bank invested too heavily in government bonds at low interest-bearing rates, and then they got blown out because of the higher interest rates that the federal government was offering on its new bonds, but that's because the margins, in terms of bonds, they just had too many bonds in their portfolio.
Well, as banks actually start to experience significant default, then those bonds that they have in their portfolio are going to look worse and worse.
Right now, they're operating.
We'll see how that works out for them.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is out there still touting Bidenomics as though it's a big win, despite the fact the American people really, really hate Bidenomics.
We'll get to more on that in a second.
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Okay, meanwhile...
Joe Biden continues to be out there pushing Bidenomics.
Bidenomics is another name for failure.
So here was Joe Biden trying to push it yesterday.
It is just, it remains incredible to me that this person, who as Matt Taibbi says, cannot be trusted not to walk into an airplane propeller or carry a child into a forest, is President of the United States.
The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal have started to call my plan Bidenomics.
Initially, I don't think they meant it with a great deal of respect.
With all due respect to them, our plan is working.
It's working.
The economy has grown since I took office.
It grew faster in the last quarter than anyone expected.
And you know, we've created over 13 million brand new jobs since I took office.
Okay, I love these stats where he just ignores that COVID happened.
It's one of my favorite things.
Also, if Bidenomics is windmills, we're talking about some of the least productive things on planet Earth.
These giant windmills that are spinning behind him.
Yeah, Bidenomics is a giant metal fan that chops up eagles.
That's pretty much correct.
Meanwhile, what does Bidenomics mean?
It means wasting money on a bunch of pie-in-the-sky nonsense, including, for example, pushing to block drilling in the United States.
So you have an economy where he's constantly talking about blue-collar workers taking it on the chin.
And here he is basically saying, what if I put all the oil workers out of business on behalf of the climate while Russia, China, India are not cooperating?
By the way, China is by far the world's largest producer of carbon emissions.
There's an enormous opportunity.
We're growing the economy.
We're in fact, but it's not enough for us to do.
We have to change the whole world's attitude.
Right now, Russia and China are very, very difficult partners.
Since you've been in office, you promised no new drilling on federal land or offshore.
Can you tell Gen Z that you haven't broken your promise?
Yes, because the courts overruled me.
The court said I couldn't do it.
I want to stop all drilling in the East Coast, and the West Coast, and in the Gulf.
But I lost in court.
But we're still pushing.
If he had his way, he would shut down all that drilling.
All of it.
So all those workers, out of jobs.
Gas prices up.
But don't worry, it wouldn't be his fault.
It would be the fault of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine if the gas prices go up.
That's Bidenomics.
When asked, by the way, about concerns that the electric vehicle push that he is making right now will actually kill jobs in sort of the traditional car industry or in the oil industry, he says, don't worry.
Out of everything bad comes something good, which is cold comfort to people who lose their jobs because he's pushing economically inefficient policies.
Labor has been always opposed to environmental changes.
He's holding the card with the questions on it.
It's the future.
They're going to build 550,000 electric chargers.
They're not even trying to hide it this way.
My mom used to say, out of everything bad, something good will come if you look hard enough for it.
There's an enormous opportunity.
Oh, goodness gracious.
They're not even trying to hide the fact that he's senile.
I mean, he literally holds cards with, like, little tips on them, going into easy press conferences with friendly reporters.
There's a reason why this guy is failing in the polls.
By the way, I know that there are a lot of people who are like, you know, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are running even, which shows Donald Trump's strength.
No, it shows Donald Trump's weakness.
Any Republican should be beating Joe Biden at this point.
And that includes all the Republicans, OK?
It's not just Trump.
It should scare Republicans on a generalized level that there is no poll showing a generic Republican up on this tendentious, senile old fool.
How?
How is that like that?
That shows Republican weakness, not Republican strength.
This guy is a terrible president.
He's horrible at his job.
He wanders into the ocean.
He's like this is a person who can barely stand upright.
And not only that, he happens to be deeply corrupt, as we'll get to in a moment, and a terrible person to boot.
And Republicans can't run.
They can't find anybody who will beat this guy regularly in polls.
That's kind of amazing to me and shows the state of dissatisfaction inside the country for both Republicans and for Joe Biden personally.
Karine Jean-Pierre, by the way, is now forced to trot out there and pretend that polls don't count anymore, so I love this.
Here's Karine Jean-Pierre pretending that everybody actually likes Joe Biden's economic plan, despite the fact that, um, on the economy, 37% of voters actually approve of Joe Biden's handling of the economy.
From the White House perspective, why is there a disparity between the good story, the narrative you think you have to tell, and how it's received by the American people?
So a couple of things, Victor.
Look, as we know, polls don't show everything.
They don't tell the full story, as you just stated.
And we have to remember, if you look at where we were back in the fall of 2022, during the midterm elections, when the president delivered a historic midterms for Democrats when we think about how as a
Democratic president he delivered a victory that we hadn't seen in decades, right? And he led that
messaging throughout those months going into November. Okay, so here is the thing.
Nobody likes Joe Biden, and the corruption problems surrounding Joe Biden are going to get significantly worse.
Okay, so yesterday, the House Oversight Committee released a memo showing how much money the Biden family cleared while Joe Biden was Vice President of the United States.
The answer, grand total answer, $20 million.
$20 million.
That is a lot of money, my friends.
Like, that is not piker money.
That is serious cash.
$8.1 million of those dollars came from China.
According to the New York Post summing up the memo, State Energy HK is affiliated with Chinese state-linked CEFC China Energy, which partnered with first son Hunter Biden and first brother James Biden.
Big guy Joe Biden was supposed to get a 10% cut of the venture.
In a July 2017 WhatsApp message, Hunter threatened a Chinese associate with his dad's wrath if the deal was aborted.
Within 10 days, CEFC transferred 100 grand and then 5 million bucks to Biden-linked accounts.
According to a 2020 report by Senate committees, the CEFC relationship is still believed to have started in 2015 when Joe Biden was VP.
That $3 million from State Energy HK was then divided three ways, between Hunter Biden, James Biden, and Beau Biden's widow, Haley Biden, receiving a combined $1 million.
The remainder went to Hunter's business partners, Rob Walker and James Gillier.
The latter $5.1 million passed mostly into Hunter's own entity called AWOSCO, according to the 2020 Senate report.
It hasn't yet been documented in bank records obtained by the house.
We have no idea where exactly that money went.
Plus, Hunter got a 3.16 carat diamond from the CEFC founder, Ye Jin Ming, in 2017.
6.5 million bucks came from Ukraine.
Joe Biden visited Ukraine six times as VP, five of them after Hunter joined Burisma's board in April 2014.
He publicly claimed credit for using a billion dollars in USAID to get the prosecutor Victor Shokin fired.
Joe Biden met with Burisma officials at dinners.
He participated in a phone call with them, according to Hunter Biden's business partner, Devin Archer, and bank records document $3.3 million transferred from Burisma to Hunter Biden and Devin Archer from April 14, 2014 to October 2015.
IRS whistleblowers testified Hunter and Archer earned $6.5 million total from Burisma through 2019.
Russia passed $3.5 million to the Biden family.
Then-VP Biden allegedly met a First Lady of Moscow named Yelena Baturina at a D.C.
restaurant in spring 2014 and April 2015, while Hunter Biden and Archer were helping her invest in American real estate.
On March 11, 2014, three-quarters of a million dollars was transferred to Archer.
The rest was transferred to a joint account held by Archer and Hunter Biden.
Unclear exactly where that money went.
$3.1 million came from Romania.
Hunter referred a person named Gabriel Popovichu to a former FBI director, Louis Freeh, to challenge a corruption case against him.
About three million bucks ended up transferred by Popovichu to Hunter Biden's partner, Rob Walker.
And $142,000 came from Kazakhstan.
VP Biden met with a guy named Kenesh Rakhishev and his associates at a DC Cafe Milano in spring 2014 and April 2015.
And then Hunter got a $142,000 car out of it.
So naturally, Joe Biden, when asked about this sort of corruption, scolded the reporter asking.
So here's Peter Doocy asking about all of this.
You know, your son's business dealings.
You said you knew nothing about them.
Your son's business dealings.
You said that you were not involved.
You said your son never made any money from China.
You said all these things are all lies.
What do you have to say?
There's this testimony now where one of your son's former business associates is claiming that you were on speakerphone a lot with them, talking business.
Is that what... I've never talked business with anyone.
I knew you'd have a lousy question.
Well, why is that a lousy question?
Because it's not true.
Thank you, Mr. President.
What an a-hole.
I mean, honestly, he's such a bad person.
That's a lousy question? That's not an answer.
Why is it? And when Peter Doocy says, like, what's lousy about the question, he says it's not true.
Which part is not true?
Which part is not true?
All of it?
Because we have testimony from Hunter Biden's business partner that it is true.
And we know that you are squaring around Hunter Biden.
By the way, this whole lie that Joe Biden does this sort of stuff because he loves his son so all-fired much, I'm just wondering why, if you're a father who loves his drug-addled son who's addicted to crack cocaine and whores, you're giving him access to millions of dollars.
Literally, rule number one of having a crack-addicted son would be, don't give him access to the credit card, because he's addicted to crack.
I know this is really complex, but it doesn't seem all that complex, actually.
It's absolutely insane to me that Joe Biden gets away with the, it's all about the family routine, when pretty clearly, dude benefited.
And I'm just wondering how he didn't benefit at this point.
According to the New York Post's Jonathan Turley, he points out that of course Joe Biden benefited from all of Hunter's foreign business dealings.
How could he not?
He says, the president's denial of any knowledge of his son's foreign business dealings have finally been exposed as a total lie.
The final line of defense is now that Hunter Biden was selling access to Joe, but it was an illusion.
But there's nothing illusory about tens of millions moving to Hunter and other family members.
Also, all of these claims ignore emails discussing the fact that Hunter and his father used joint accounts to pay for expenses, including how one account was used to pay Joe's taxes.
There's Hunter's complaint that he was using half his earnings to support Dad.
One trusted FBI informant said, in planning a bribe, one foreign figure was told to avoid direct payments to Joe.
Today, that is as amateurish as an envelope of cash, and the Bidens have been in the business of influence peddling for decades.
So, apparently, if Hunter gets luxury cars and millions of dollars and $20 million goes into the entire family bank account, Joe didn't benefit or receive a bribe.
So, apparently, only if the money went directly into his bank account would that actually amount to- That's actually the White House's defense at this point, believe it or not.
That is right.
That is what they're saying.
Now, we also know that Joe Biden is apparently worth an estimated $8 million at this point, and that he earned $17.3 million over the four years he was out of office.
So how is enriching all of your family members not a form of bribery?
I'm just wondering.
If somebody came to me and they're like, I want to pay you to say untruth, like truly untrue things on your show that you don't actually believe.
I want to pay you to do that.
The way I'm going to pay you is I'm putting your kids trust fund.
Is that not a form?
My kids are young.
Even if they were of majority, would that not be a form of bribery?
I'm confused as to how it's not.
The White House is resting.
It's like, notice how the goalposts are now, as we say, being punted into the ocean.
The goalposts were, Hunter did nothing wrong.
Then it was, Joe didn't know that Hunter had done anything wrong.
Then it was, well, Joe may have known that Hunter did something wrong, but he wasn't involved.
Then it was, well, Joe might have been involved, but no money directly went into his personal wallet in his back pocket.
I mean, you've moved pretty dramatically here, I noticed.
So the White House put out a memo setting their final goalpost, quote, Well, but I mean, there is.
He was on the phone calls.
He was taking Hunter, his drug addled derelict of a son, one of the most immoral people in American public life, on a plane with him to China to close deals.
Biden. Well, but I mean, there is. He was on the phone calls. He was taking Hunter, his drug-addled
derelict of a son, one of the most immoral people in American public life, on a plane with him to
China to close deals. What the hell? Says the White House.
House Republicans can't prove President Biden did anything wrong, but they are proving every day
they have no vision, no agenda to actually help the American people. OK, all of this is tiresome
and ridiculous in the extreme.
Everyone knows it, and it is not going to play in this election cycle.
It's just not going to play in this election cycle, especially given the fact the American people don't actually believe that Joe Biden is a kindly old gentleman of great character.
They don't.
That is largely true since Afghanistan.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
First, I gotta tell you, obviously I'm short on sleep.
As I mentioned yesterday on the show, our baby had RSV over the weekend, which meant that we were at the hospital over the weekend.
So, I'm tired.
A lot of kids.
Dog.
A lot going on.
And there's one thing I hate about all things, and that of course is vegetables.
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Also, Are you planning to send your kid off to college this year?
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Okay, meanwhile.
Well, if Joe Biden's entire re-elect campaign is going to be run on the same basis as his election campaign in 2020, which is his high character and great level of care for the American people, he's just a man who cares about you.
Remember, this was the big pitch in 2020.
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Okay, meanwhile, well, if Joe Biden's entire re-elect campaign is going to be run on the
same basis as his election campaign in 2020, which is his high character and great level
of care for the American people, he's just a man who cares about you.
Remember, this was the big pitch in 2020.
This is a man who's experienced pain.
And because he's experienced pain in his life, he understands your pain.
It was a really weak Bill Clinton type pitch, but it won because, again, Donald Trump is not somebody who tends to feel pain, at least not on his surface.
The truth is that Trump, when it comes to sort of the common man, actually does feel a lot more for those people than Joe Biden does, like without a doubt.
But that was Biden's pitch.
That all disappeared with Afghanistan.
Yesterday, the State Department continued to double down on the idea that Joe Biden had done a stellar job in Afghanistan.
Here was the State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, saying that actually it was a phenomenal choice to leave Afghanistan in the way we did.
With respect to the decision making that went into the withdrawal from Afghanistan, that's something that we've spoken to a number of times.
But what about, do you still believe that this was a success?
Because they have a real hard time when the administration calls this withdrawal a success.
Do you still believe it was a success?
We believe it was the correct policy choice.
Was it a success?
We believe it was the correct policy choice, but again, I would never want to quibble with a family member who has suffered such an enormous tragedy.
But I think it's, I think that word is...
I'm gonna move, I'm gonna move on to someone else.
Oh, I'm not gonna quibble with the family member.
Don't want to hear about the family anymore.
Gonna move on.
Moving on.
Just moving on.
This person also said that actually they've been incredibly transparent about how all
of this went down, which is weird since they haven't.
Do you think that you've fulfilled your obligations or your commitments to, you know, being transparent
I believe we've been incredibly transparent about the actions this department has taken.
But with respect to requests from the committee, I've seen a number of requests come in.
I know we've been in discussions with them, but I don't want to characterize those, given that I'm just not sure where we are.
Congress is in recess right now.
Discussions have obviously slowed down over the recess, so I don't want to comment on detail.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I want to talk for a second about transparency and about the fact that no one trusts the government right now because not only is the government not transparent with you, but the media, who are supposed to be the watchdog, are not transparent with you so long as the Democrat is in the Oval Office.
If a Democrat is in the Oval Office, they're not transparent with you.
If a Republican is in the Oval Office, not only are they not transparent with you about the Republican, they're fully non-transparent about all investigations into the Republican.
When did all of this happen?
It's impossible to think that there was not a ground shift in the way Americans think about their institutions that was coincident with the rise of Barack Obama.
I've talked about this a little bit over the course of the past week.
There's a massively important interview over at Tablet Magazine, which is a great website that's worth a read.
They did an interview with a historian named David Garrow, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King.
And then in 2017, he had a biography of Barack Obama in his early years, and it was called Rising Stars.
By all rights, it should have been like a massive hit, this book, because it actually uncovered a bunch of stuff about Obama that the media never would have covered.
Like, for example, the fact that in Dreams for My Father, which is almost entirely fictionalized, apparently, according to David Garrow, that when Barack Obama wrote his first memoir, Dreams for My Father, he has an incident where he broke up with a white girlfriend supposedly because she couldn't understand why he wanted to get in touch with his black identity.
And what actually happened is that she broke up with him because he was covering for raving black anti-Semites.
That's what David Garrow uncovered.
Media never checked into it.
They never found the girlfriend.
They never dug into anything remotely related to Barack Obama.
By the way, other revelations included in this book were actual handwritten letters from Barack Obama to one of his girlfriends talking about his, and this is a direct quote, repeatedly fantasizing about making love to men.
I mean, that's pretty bombshell kind of stuff, no?
I mean, pretty wild and salacious.
None of it received virtually any coverage at the time.
But why?
And the answer is because the media, when Barack Obama rose to the presidency, and as he made that rise, the media decided that they were now the actual Praetorian Guard.
They were always biased to the left, but there's certainly a level of baseline honesty that required them to still report on things.
And then Barack Obama rose to the level of the presidency, and every institution was weaponized on behalf of this man personally.
That's actually what happened.
The entire comedic institutional structure, for example, said it is forbidden to make jokes about Obama.
You cannot make jokes about this absolutely self-obsessed, ridiculous man because he is actually a messianic figure.
You remember that Chris Rock said that he's like the country's dad.
This is the kind of... So comedy, out.
Entertainment, out.
They were all worshipping at the altar.
The media, out.
And our public institutions also started reflecting everything with regard to Obama.
David Samuels of Tablet, who's interviewing Gerald, he said, Rising Star highlights a remarkable lack of curiosity on
the part of mainstream reporters and institutions about a man who almost instantaneously was
treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.
And it's true, like the entire tech world revolved around Barack Obama.
He became like the center of the political universe.
Everybody thinks the center of the political universe is Donald Trump, but that's not actually right.
The center of the political universe since 2008 has been Barack Obama.
Donald Trump is a reaction to Barack Obama.
Joe Biden is a reaction to Donald Trump and happens to be the third term of Barack Obama since every person in position of major staffing power is a Barack Obama acolyte.
Barack Obama, by the way, still resides most of the year in Washington, D.C., and it's amazing to me that nobody's actually attempted to track down how much does Barack Obama actually talk with all the people who used to work with him and shape policy inside the Biden administration.
And again, the corruption of all of our institutions On the back of Barack Obama's personal self-obsession is truly an amazing thing.
So David Garrow, this biographer of Obama, he says in this interview,
he has no interest in building the Democratic Party as an institution.
I think that's obvious.
I don't think he had any truly deep, meaningful policy commitments
other than the need to feel and to be perceived as victorious, as triumphant.
But because all the institutions went into defend Obama mode,
that has carried forward to Joe Biden.
And here's the thing, they could get away with it when it actually was Barack Obama, because Barack Obama had this sort of messianic quality to him.
He was actually a really good speaker.
He was actually a celebrity type.
But Joe Biden isn't.
And so as that mask has stripped away, and as the media have just been demonstrably proved to be members of that inter-elite cult, Of course faith in them has absolutely plummeted, and of course the country has polarized, because the institutions that at least used to have sort of a baseline goal and purpose they had to fulfill, even if there was political bias involved, everyone distrusts those institutions now, and for absolutely good reason.
And what that also means is it's very easy when an institution fails to immediately attribute it to this sort of inter-elite cult status.
Is it failure or is it malice?
I've said many times that I try to attribute as much as I can to stupidity rather than malice, but the problem is when malice has been pursued over and over and over again against a particular point of view, at a certain point you start to see that maybe it's not stupidity, maybe it is malice.
It doesn't mean all of it's malice, but it means it's easy to over-attribute to malice rather than to stupidity, which leads to further political polarization.
And that seems to be what's been happening all over the place, institutionally speaking, in the United States.
To really grave effect, by the way.
Because what it means is that each side is now bouncing off the other.
Republicans are reacting to anything Democrats say by saying that if Democrats hate it, we must love it, which is a bad idea.
And Democrats are reacting to anything the Republicans say by saying that if Republicans like it, we must hate it.
All of that was created by the Barack Obama era.
This is not Donald Trump's era.
This is still Barack Obama's era.
We're just living in the aftermath of that era.
As I've said many times about Donald Trump, people say that he killed American politics, destroyed American politics.
Donald Trump was not the murderer.
Barack Obama was the murderer.
Donald Trump is the coroner who stumbled on the body and declared it dead.
Okay, meanwhile, we are still experiencing fallout from this Ohio vote.
So there is a vote in Ohio to essentially change the state constitution to enshrine amendments in the state constitution to require more than a 60% approval to change the state constitution.
That was meant to prevent a sort of walk back with regard to abortion law on behalf of those who are pro-abortion in the state of Ohio.
That measure failed pretty dramatically.
And once again, this demonstrates that Republicans have to pursue victory incrementally very often.
There's this tendency to feel like you just got to go for broke all the time.
Going for broke is probably not going to be a successful tactic.
What's hilarious is the Democrats, of course, are about to blow it.
So Democrats have decided that actually this is a model for trans issues.
There are a bunch of articles today suggesting that Democrats look at what happened in Ohio, which was the rejection of what effectively was sort of a pro-life ballot initiative.
They look at that and they say, well, this means that suddenly the people of Ohio are socially left-wing.
No, it means there's a status quo bias.
And it means that whenever there is a muscular attempt to enshrine in state law via referendum more pro-life positions, people don't like it because their status quo biased.
And if you're going to do it, you have to do it gradually.
You have to do it over time.
But both sides, because of that polarization, they're no longer seeking gradual.
So you either have New York, which is seeking to legalize abortion until you're 85 years old, or you have people on the right who are seeking to ban all abortion in the state.
Now, obviously, I have a lot of sympathy for that second position.
That's the position that I hold.
But it's not going to work if you can't actually win.
Victory is a necessity here, and Republicans should be smart about how they pursue it.
Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So there's this crazy case in Stockton, California, where two Stockton 7-Eleven clerks attacked a would-be thief with sticks.
Video of that July 29th assault has gained national attention.
It's a five-minute clip.
This guy is emptying shelves of cigarettes and other products just into a bag, because he's about to steal it.
And one of the clerks pins the man down, and another beats him with a pole.
To which I say, yes, more of this.
Stockton police said they were investigating what police called a suspected assault and suspected robberies at the 7-Eleven.
Here's what the tape looked like.
The beating seen in this now viral video is under investigation by the Stockton Police Department.
The more than five minute clip shows a man emptying shelves of cigarettes from a Stockton 7-Eleven store into a trash can.
And I tell him, no, there's nothing we can do.
There's nothing you can do.
There's nothing, you know, we just let him take and just go.
And store clerks stepping in.
And the store clerks say, nope, none of that.
And that guy's going to town.
You know what?
Dude deserved it.
Good on the Stockton clerks.
Honest to God.
I'm tired of this nonsense where we have to pretend sensitivity for people who are stealing product and walking out of stores with trash bags filled with stolen product.
You deserve to get your ass kicked.
And this store clerk who gives him a beating?
A few more beatings like this and there will be a lot less thievery in places like Stockton.
The pathetic fact of course is that now it's now it's seen as so normalized to steal that like it used to be when I was a kid that if somebody's gonna shoplift it was like a pack of gum in your pocket and now they're just walking with giant trash bags and filling them up with things and walking out like it's the price is right or something.
It's wild.
So good for the store clerks.
They're not going to be charged, as they should not be, because of course that is ridiculous.
Okay, time for a Rare Things I Like.
Okay, there's a very, very, very rare thing I like.
You ready?
I'm going to say that Joe Biden is doing a correct thing now.
So for those who say I never say that Joe Biden has done a correct thing, Joe Biden is doing a correct thing.
Here's the thing that Joe Biden is doing that is correct.
He signed an executive order on Wednesday aimed at curbing the flow of American investment and management know-how into a limited range of Chinese firms the administration fears could fuel Beijing's military ambitions.
It's an initial step that will not take effect until next year, but it is a signal to China's
leadership that Washington is going to continue to impose restrictions on Beijing's access to
critical technology that is in fact necessary. China is building up its military. They are
seeking more and more sophisticated microchips and superconductors in order to build up that
military for a possible takeover of Taiwan. Chinese officials are mad, which is always a
good indicator that actually we're doing something right.
The U.S. habitually politicizes tech and trade issues and uses them as a tool and weapon in the name
of national security, said Chinese embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu in a statement to
the Washington Post.
But, China hawks on both sides of the aisle, um, are, um, they, they're, they're, they're
They say the proposal, while good, does not go far enough.
So the praise is qualified in the sense that I agree with this.
Obviously, it's a very, very limited step by the Biden administration, but it is a step in the right direction.
Mike McCaul, Republican of Texas, says the administration scaling back at a time when aggressive action is needed more than ever continues the trend of appeasing industry at the cost of national security.
But again, the fact that Biden is doing anything at all is better than nothing, I suppose.
So you can see it is glass half full, glass half empty.
So I choose at this point to see at least this as somewhat glass quarter full.
So let's put it that way.
OK, time for a thing that I hate.
So our hearts go out to everybody in Lahaina, Maui today.
Just horrifying.
Apparently, death toll from fast-moving wildfires has now increased to 36, Maui County officials said on Wednesday night.
The blazes have been raging across at least three of Hawaii's islands because of strong winds linked to Hurricane Dora.
a bunch of sort of historic stuff on Maui got destroyed.
Lahaina, which is one of the most beautiful places in all of America, was utterly ravaged.
My wife and I used to vacation in Maui pretty regularly with the kids,
and Lahaina was like the stop.
It was the place that you went on a beautiful evening to go shopping.
It's just a series of shops, like ice cream stores and jewelry stores and art stores,
and it's really fun and really kooky, and it was basically burned to the ground.
This is truly a horrifying situation.
11,000 people were evacuated from Maui on Wednesday alone.
So, all of that is terrible.
There are a bunch of links to places that you can go to help people who have been affected by the wildfires ranging from the American Red Cross to the Maui Relief Fund.
So, people should go and give generously because that is a terrible situation.
Okay.
Time for our latest episode of Deconstructing the Culture.
This is where I go viral for pointing out that pop culture absolutely blows and is terrible for you.
So, let's do it.
Today's Deconstructing the Culture comes courtesy of Doja Cat.
Given name, obviously.
She came out of her mother and her mother said, I shall call this one Doja Cat.
And I'll be honest, I have no idea what Doja Cat's background is.
I don't know why this person is famous because she doesn't seem to be like a particularly talented human.
But apparently she is perceived as talented by our vast unwashed, the same people who have made Barbie a billion dollar movie.
And Doja Cat, apparently she gained her stage name from one of her cats, as well as her favorite strain of marijuana.
I just looked that up right now.
So, that's definitely a way to name yourself, is after one of your cats, whose apparently name was Cat, and also your favorite strain of marijuana.
Obviously, that's solid style.
That's just fan-freaking-tastic.
So, Doja Cat has now Put out a song titled Paint the Town Red.
So the left in culture has gone so far now that there's literally no place left to go except to just get directly in bed with Satan.
And this has become kind of the common meme these days.
So it used to be a little more subtle.
Honestly, when you're talking about Madonna in the early 80s as subtle, that's how far we've come.
Madonna in the early 80s writhing around wearing Catholic imagery, doing the kind of saint-sinner routine, that was considered brazen then.
Now it's the height of subtlety because you now have Lil Nas X having sex with Satan, having gay sex with Satan in his videos.
Or you have Sam Smith dressing up as fat, ugly Satan while doing a routine with a man who says that he is a woman.
And now we have Doja Cat who has jumped in on this.
Just open satanic imagery.
Satan apparently is now the good- Satan is great!
Satan is great.
Okay, well, I guess I'm glad you're saying the quiet part out loud.
Here it is.
Paint the town red by a woman who named herself after her cat and a marijuana strain.
Yes, folks.
There used to be a Western civilization.
Here we go.
Now she's dressed up as Satan, naked.
With like, creepy imagery.
Ain't no sign I can't smoke here, uh, give me the chance and I'll go there.
I said what I said, I'd rather be famous than stay.
I let all that get to my head. I don't care, I paint the town red.
I said what I said, I'd rather be famous than stay.
I let all that get to my head. I don't care, I paint the town red.
Mmm, she the devil, she the baddest.
I let all that get to my head. I said what I said, I'd rather be famous than stay.
I let all that get to my head. I don't care, I paint the town red.
I let all that get to my head. I don't care, I paint the town red.
I don't know what is supposed to be happening here other than it's kind of horrifying and terrible.
The lyrics for this, which I will now read for purposes of media matters, they can clip it out of context and then claim that I'm trying to rap the song as opposed to cynically reading the song.
So now I'm going to read the lyrics to this piece of crap and I'm going to point out how bad this is by juxtaposing it with one of the great pieces of music ever written so that you can tell kind of how we have declined here.
Because obviously this is great art.
We've been told that this is great art because people apparently like this.
I don't know why.
But then again, I don't understand the tastes of the American people, obviously.
Because, I mean, who wouldn't love a song featuring a woman dressed in nothing but body paint, bald, wearing devil horns, and cutting the umbilical cord of an alien creature?
Who wouldn't love this?
So, here are the lyrics to Paint the Town Red to the strains of Bach's First Brandenburg Concerto.
Let's do this thing.
Walk on by.
Walk on by.
Walk on by, walk on by.
Yeah, b**ch.
I said what I said.
I'd rather be famous instead.
I let all that get to my head.
I don't care.
I paint the town red.
B**ch.
I said what I said.
I'd rather be famous instead.
I let all that get to my head.
I don't care.
I paint the town red.
Mmm.
She the devil.
She a bad, low b**ch.
She a rebel.
She put her foot to the pedal.
It'll take a whole lot for me to settle.
Mmm.
She the devil.
Also, said my happiness is all of your misery.
I put good d**k in all my kidneys.
So, okay, you can stop the music.
Um, so, yeah, I mean, I don't see what's bad about this.
So, what's bad?
So, Bach used to write music as a tribute to God.
That's literally why he would write music.
He was a church organist.
And so he would write his music with an eye toward the divine.
And so that is the result.
And even Beethoven, who is much more of a secularist in his religious outlook, wrote with an eye toward sort of a secular humanist version of a higher morality.
That's what the Ode to Joy is at the end of the Ninth Symphony.
Brahms, whose music I love, was essentially a secular humanist, but very religiously tolerant.
None of them would have said, you know who's great?
The devil.
Love the devil.
It turns out when you worship the devil and when you worship the pagan, the place you end up is here.
Now when satanists start creating actual art that beautifies the world and makes the world a better place, maybe they'll start taking their philosophy a little seriously.
Why?
Because it turns out that the products of a philosophy very often are tied to the philosophy itself.
But it makes my argument super easy that our satanic pagan current pop culture is garbage when what they produce is actual sh**.
Like that's, it makes my argument super, so I appreciate you doing that.
I appreciate you making the argument super easy for me.
I don't even have to make the argument anymore.
All I have to do is just show clips of Doja Cat, a person who named herself once again, after a cat and a marijuana strain, dressed up as Satan and wrapping that garbage.
That's all I have to do.
You made my argument for me, so I appreciate it.
All righty, guys.
The rest of the show continues right now.
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We'll be joined on the line by Clay Travis, founder of Outkick, to discuss his brand new book, American Playbook.
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