BREAKING: Trump’s FOURTH Indictment Hits In Georgia
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So they did it!
They finally did it!
It has long awaited.
Fannie Willis is the DA in Fulton County for a couple of years.
This has been coming.
She's very fond of charging RICO cases.
She's now going to charge Donald Trump and 18 alleged co-conspirators in a giant RICO case.
According to the Associated Press, Donald Trump and 18 allies were indicted in Georgia on Monday over their efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state, with prosecutors using a statute normally associated with mobsters to accuse the former president, lawyers, and other aides of a criminal enterprise to keep him in power.
It's a nearly 100-page indictment.
It's 98 pages.
It details dozens of acts by Trump or his allies to undo his defeat, including beseeching Georgia's Republican Secretary of State to find enough votes for him to win the battleground state, harassing an election worker who faced false claims of fraud, and attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new slate of Electoral College electors favorable to Donald Trump.
In one particularly brazen episode, it also outlines a plot involving one of Donald Trump's lawyers in accessing voting machines in rural Georgia County to steal data from the voting machine company, supposedly.
Although, of course, the question there is whether they were looking for evidence of the possibility that the voting machines had been hacked or something.
Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis announced the charges last night.
Today, based on information developed by that investigation, a Fulton County grand jury returned a true bill of indictment, charging 19 individuals with violations of Georgia law arising from a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in this state.
The indictment includes 41 felony counts and is 97 pages long.
Every individual charged in the indictment is charged with one count of violating Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act Through participation in a criminal enterprise in Fulton County, Georgia and elsewhere to accomplish the illegal goal of allowing Donald J. Trump
To seize the presidential term of office beginning on January 20th, 21.
So yesterday was a complete mess at the Georgia courthouse.
Apparently, there was a brief but mysterious incident in which the county website put up a list of criminal charges to be brought against the former president.
Those were taken down pretty quickly.
And then, of course, something very, very similar went up very late last night.
Trump's legal team says the events that have unfolded today have been shocking and absurd, starting with a leak of the presumed and premature indictment before the witnesses had even testified.
That's sort of how the indictment reads.
It's very long, it's very detailed, and it sort of goes over a lot of territory that has already been trod.
They accuse Trump and his alleged co-conspirators of 161 acts.
you in fourth grade attempting to write a very long five paragraph essay in the hope
the teacher would give you an A even though the essay wasn't very good.
That's sort of how the indictment reads.
It's very long, it's very detailed, and it sort of goes over a lot of territory that
has already been trod.
They accuse Trump and his alleged co-conspirators of 161 acts.
Many of these acts are things as simple as like retweeting things.
So if you look at the actual indictment, it actually says that, for example, it accuses
act 28 on or about the third day of December 2020, Donald Trump met with the Speaker of
the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in the Oval Office and discussed holding a
special session of the Pennsylvania General Assembly.
This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
So meetings are apparently now illegal, but he called Brian Kemp.
He retweeted something from OANN.
There are people who are suggesting that those sorts of acts are now illegal.
That's not really how this works.
So to understand how these charges work, you first have to understand what RICO is, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, how that actually works.
It's a very controversial law that was passed in 1970.
Originally, it was aimed at the mafia.
And again, the basic predicate for the law is that it's very difficult to charge people who are upper-level gangsters with the crimes of their subordinates.
This is why Rico was passed.
Originally, you'd have a low-level hitman, and he would get charged with murder, and then he would refuse to rat on his boss, and there was no way to actually try the boss.
And so what they did, is they started wrapping together the entire criminal organization in an effort to get the low-level hitman to flip on his superior, and to get that guy to flip on the boss.
That was the basic idea.
If you indict everybody altogether, it is easier to flip all of the associates by threatening them with the highest-level charges.
That's sort of the goal, right?
You charge the accountant with murder, and therefore, because the accountant is now wrapped into the giant conspiracy, the accountant doesn't want to go to jail for murder.
The accountant doesn't want to go to jail at all, and so the accountant flips on the boss.
That's what racketeering originally was.
It comes from the term racket, which meant an organized illegal activity.
All it requires, the violation of RICO, at least on the federal level, and the Georgia RICO statute, which is the one that's being charged, and it does make a large-scale difference, by the way, this is a state case and not a federal case, because what it means is that even if Donald Trump were elected president, he could not pardon himself of any charge for which he was found guilty in the state of Georgia.
He could not free himself from that.
By the way, any accusation that the Georgia governor, who's a Republican, Brian Kemp, that Brian Kemp could pardon Donald Trump for this is not correct.
There's a panel in Georgia that would actually have to sit and decide whether or not he would receive a pardon.
He also does not have the power to summarily dismiss DAs in the state of Georgia, Brian Kemp.
So all of the jabber.
It is amazing that every time Donald Trump gets in trouble, there's always a lot of talk about how other Republicans have a responsibility to rescue him.
And very often, that responsibility is not even within their power.
I mean, this goes all the way back to January 6th itself, when Donald Trump suggested openly that Mike Pence had the ability to simply toss out electoral college votes that had been state-certified already.
He did not.
It's not the responsibility of any of these other people to bail Donald Trump out when they don't have the legal power to do so.
If they had the legal power to do so, at least you can make the argument.
But Brian Kemp doesn't even have that legal power in any way.
Anyways, when it comes to the state RICO Act, which is very, very similar to the federal RICO Act, the way that racketeering basically works is racketeering is broadly defined as requiring at least a couple of acts of racketeering activity committed within 10 years of each other.
And it also requires that there be a criminal conspiracy in furtherance of a crime.
Criminal conspiracy in furtherance of a crime.
Okay, what that means is that, let's say you and I, we decide that we're gonna conspire to go to the Walmart together.
Not a crime, because that's a conspiracy without actual furtherance of a crime.
You and I decide we're gonna rob a bank together.
That means that if we go to Walmart to buy a shotgun, and we buy the shotgun at the local Walmart or something, normally that wouldn't be illegal.
It becomes illegal because you and I are now planning to use that shotgun in the robbing of the bank.
So many of the acts that Trump and his associates are being accused of are acts, quote unquote, in furtherance of the crime.
So the real question in this case is not whether Donald Trump did all the things that the indictment alleges.
Most of that is undisputed.
The real question in this case is whether it was in furtherance of a criminal activity.
In other words, is it a criminal activity for Donald Trump to pursue a bunch of legal means to forestall his election loss?
Is that stuff illegal?
Now, if he had gotten together with a bunch of his friends and he said, let's actually overthrow the federal government, it would look illegal.
But then Jack Smith would be charging that on the federal level, right?
He'd be charging him with actual insurrection, which he did not.
He would also be charging him with incitement of riot, which he did not.
When it comes to Georgia, the accusation is that Donald Trump essentially wanted to overturn the results of the Georgia election through illegal means.
And he was pressuring people to do it through illegal means.
And this is a pretty serious charge.
Again, I think that it is doubtful that this could be proved in court, but it's also happening in Atlanta.
So just like the Washington DC case, this means that you have a local jury that is not going to be friendly to President Trump.
As I say, I think it's a doubtful charge because, for example, some of the things that are being charged here and some of the people being charged are some of the quote-unquote false electors, right?
These are people who signed a document saying that they were the duly elected electors of the state of Georgia when they were not.
But there's a problem with that, which is that if you go all the way back to 1960, for example, Hawaii Democrats actually did the same thing.
Hawaii, believe it or not, was a very sort of razor's edge state between Republicans and Democrats in the 1960 election.
So Democrats created an alternative slate of electors who signed a document claiming that they were actually the alternative slate of electors.
That was not illegal at the time.
So if you sign onto a document saying, I'm a member of the duly elected slate of electors, and then the state rejects that, is that illegal?
If you take bad legal advice, is that illegal?
Because it turns out that many of the people who are now being indicted are Donald Trump's lawyers.
And so the idea here is that Donald Trump would have to show, it would have to be shown that Donald Trump knew for a fact that he lost the Georgia election, and that he then pursued a bunch of means in order to overturn that election.
So you come back to the same thing that you have in the Jack Smith federal case, which is, what did Donald Trump know, and when did he know it?
Do you think that he actively believed that he won the Georgia election and he was pursuing a bunch of legal strategies in order to assure that win, or did he know that he lost and he didn't care, and because he knew he lost, he was attempting to overthrow the election?
That's going to be the open question.
Now Donald Trump has done himself no favors along these lines.
Let's be clear about this.
Donald Trump actively retweeted an article after David Perdue who lost in a Senate race in 2021 largely because Donald Trump told everybody not to vote in 2021 in a runoff.
After he lost, Donald Trump tried to prop him up to run against Brian Kemp for governor because Brian Kemp did not go along with Donald Trump's Georgia shenanigans.
David Perdue got his ass kicked by like 50 points in the primary against Brian Kemp and Donald Trump then proceeded to tweet out an article suggesting that David Perdue had lost because of voter fraud.
So it again, the case that Fannie Willis and company are going to make just to be totally legally fair here.
The case they're going to attempt to make is that Donald Trump doesn't actually care at all whether he wins or loses an election.
He's going to claim that he won and then he's going to attempt to overthrow the illegitimate results of the election.
But Donald Trump also could legitimately believe that he won the Georgia election.
Even if that's not true.
And by the way, it is not true.
The Secretary of State of Georgia has actually attempted to pry out information from True the Vote, which is the organization behind 2,000 Mules.
And True the Vote has refused to turn over the information they say supports the idea of widespread voter fraud in the state of Georgia.
But that doesn't matter.
The real question is intent.
Is it a criminal act to listen to bad legal advice?
Is it a criminal act to call up the Georgia Secretary of State and say, I want you to find me 11,870 votes?
Is that a thing that is criminal?
Or is that just you being an idiot?
You being an idiot, not a crime.
A conspiracy to be an idiot, also not a crime.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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So, two things can be true at once.
One, this can be a fairly serious charge that Donald Trump is facing down, particularly in an unfriendly jurisdiction.
It can also be true that Donald Trump is being targeted by Fannie Willis in highly political fashion.
It's the exact same thing as Jack Smith going after him in Washington, D.C.
Although, I will say that the Georgia case, just based on statute, is stronger than the Washington, D.C.
case.
The Washington, D.C.
case has a bunch of twisting and turning to try to fit what Donald Trump did into a bunch of statutes that don't quite fit.
This one, you can at least make the argument, legally speaking, that Donald Trump fits within the purview of these statutes.
In a way that he doesn't in sort of the D.C.
case.
But with all of that said, why is it that four cases have now come down in five months leading up to the election?
Why?
That's a little bit suspicious.
You have four major criminal cases that have come down in the last five months against the leading Republican contender for the presidency.
That looks an awful lot like election interference just to any outside observer, obviously.
Now, as I say, this particular case is extremely broad.
Fannie Willis, Has now given Donald Trump a deadline to turn himself in.
And people at the courthouse- I mean, it's all political.
People at the courthouse are already saying that he's going to take a mugshot, which will easily be the most trafficked photo in human history.
You can imagine that Donald Trump will smile for the photo.
Because when you smile for your mugshot, you look cool.
And Donald Trump knows that.
Here's Fannie Willis explaining the deadline.
I am giving the defendants the opportunity to voluntarily surrender no later than noon on Friday, the 25th day of August 2023.
Okay, so Donald Trump is going to have to turn himself in probably next week.
It is worthwhile noting here that Donald Trump is going to have one defense, which is that the grand jury was essentially preset.
That the bias in the grand jury was essentially preset.
You'll recall that there was a crazy lady who was the foreperson of the grand jury in this particular case.
Her name was Emily Kors, and she was the witch?
I believe.
Who then went on a national media tour talking about the grand jury workings and was extremely weird.
So Donald Trump's legal team is going to have something to hang their hat on here.
Here is a flashback of Emily Kors, the grand jury foreperson who again is a weirdo.
personally want to hear from the phone i want to hear from the former president
but honestly i kind of wanted to subpoena the former president because i got to swear everybody
in and so i thought it'd be really cool to get 60 seconds with president trump of me looking at him
and being like do you solemnly swear and me getting to swear him in i just i kind of just
thought that would be an awesome moment jury duty man It's the place where twelve people too dumb to get out of jury duty get to decide your fate.
So, um, yeah, Donald Trump's team is gonna have something to say about all of that as well.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, so as I say, this criminal indictment, here are the people who are named.
Trump, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, who is the lawyer, Mark Meadows, who is his chief of staff.
John Chisbrough, who is one of his lawyers as well.
Jeffrey Clark, who is a member of the DOJ.
Jenna Ellis, one of his lawyers.
And then there are a bunch of more local officials, including a bunch of people who signed on to the Alternative Elector Scheme.
Okay, now, how is this going to play out?
It is very likely that he faces, apparently he faces 13 charges and up to 71 years in jail.
He's now facing, we are talking, 13 charges there.
He's facing, I believe, 14 charges in Washington, D.C.
He's facing a bevy of charges in the classified documents case.
So, I mean, Trump is in serious jeopardy of going to jail.
And as we say, because this is a state case, he cannot pardon himself.
So the argument that Donald Trump must be elected president so that he can escape jail, which is an argument I'm seeing made right now, I don't see how that works.
I don't see exactly how that argument is even operative.
In terms of which of these cases poses the largest-scale legal threat to Donald Trump, this is the case that obviously poses the largest-scale legal threat to Donald Trump.
The reason being, it is broad.
It is all-encompassing.
It allows Fannie Willis to tell this overarching story, linking together his activities in Pennsylvania, and his activities in Washington, D.C., and his activities in Georgia, in this broad-based conspiracy in which she can connect all of these dots.
So it's smart of her to charge under the RICO Act.
To be simple about this, it is not a stupid charge for her to do this.
You can say that it's corrupt.
You can say that it is politically motivated.
I think there's some truth to that.
It also happens to be the case that just from a legal perspective, what she's doing here is not unintelligent.
What she's doing here is a weapon designed to take down Trump.
No call, no question.
Trump calls her an out-of-control and very corrupt district attorney.
He declares the charges are part of a witch hunt.
The case, again, is the fourth, targeting Trump just this year alone.
The, the, this case probably will run all the way through the election because it is very large scale.
Now she says, and this, this part, this part is crazy.
She says she wants to try all of the defendants at once, like put them all in a room together and try them at once.
Sort of like that scene where Harvey Dent tries everybody all together in the dark night You remember that scene where he brings in all of the corrupt mobsters and he puts them all in a room together and all of their lawyers are protesting and all of the rest of this?
And he does this to throw a scare into them?
That's part of it.
What Rico is designed to do, as I suggested earlier, is to get the accountant to flip on the hitman who flips on the headman.
Part of this is going to be an attempt to get people who are around Trump to flip on Trump to avoid criminal charges.
So, when is this actually going to take place?
That is still up in the air.
Willis did not say whether she has spoken with Special Prosecutor Jack Smith at this point, which probably means that she has.
She said she doesn't care whether this goes first or last, which means that it will go all the way through the election, without a doubt.
Trump wrote on Truth Social, so the witch hunt continues.
19 people indicted tonight, including the former president of the United States, me, by an out-of-control and very corrupt district attorney who campaigned and raised money on I Will Get Trump.
And what about those indictment documents put out today, long before the grand jury even voted and then quickly withdrawn?
Sounds rigged to me.
Why didn't they indict 2.5 years ago?
Because they wanted to do it right in the middle of my political campaign.
Witch hunt.
And again, that may very well be the case.
That does not mean he is not in legal danger.
Two things can be true at once, as always, as always.
He can be in legal danger.
It can be a witch hunt.
It can be an attempt to take him out in the election.
The real question for Republicans is whether they're going to go along with the bait here.
And the obvious bait is nominate Trump so that he can take his revenge.
As I said before, I don't see how that worked even legally speaking.
If he goes to jail in Georgia, he will still be in jail in Georgia as President of the United States.
There's a civil suit that was filed against Bill Clinton when he was President of the United States by Paula Jones.
It went forward.
It's why the Monica Lewinsky scandal happened.
We've never had a case where a state criminal charge is filed against the sitting president of the United States before he became president of the United States.
I don't even know how that would work.
I'm not sure anybody knows how that would work.
Let's say that you get hit with a murder charge and you run for the presidency from jail.
Are you automatically freed from jail on the murder charge?
Like, let's say that Ted Kennedy I've actually gotten hit with a murder charge, or at least a manslaughter charge, as he should have been in the case of Mary Jo Kopechny in Massachusetts, and then he had continued to serve in the United States Senate.
Presumably, he still would have gone to jail.
So, I don't know how any of this works.
I'm not sure anybody knows how any of this works.
Georgia represents probably the most serious threat to Trump's liberty, according to a wide variety of legal analysts, including Andy McCarthy.
It is highly likely at this point, as I say, it is hard to imagine that Trump escapes all legal consequence for all of these charges.
I'm not sure how he escapes what's going to happen to him in Washington, D.C.
or Georgia.
And when we say that it's outrageous, it is.
It also means that the glass has now been broken.
So what we're about to see next is what truly what we're about to see next is Republican DAs all over the country start to indict people like Joe Biden for things like racketeering and corruption as Vice President of the United States.
Once the glass has been broken, it cannot be unbroken.
The glass has now been broken.
The predictable result of this is not that Donald Trump gets elected president.
The predictable result of this is that lawfare now becomes the way that political opponents go after each other on the regular in the United States.
And that's going to be a really, really dangerous thing.
Remember, Donald Trump was considered wildly out of the bounds of propriety when Donald Trump said to Hillary Clinton that if he was elected president, she would be in jail.
You remember he said this during a debate.
She said, well, what would you even do if you're president?
If I were president, you'd be in jail.
And then he didn't do anything about it.
And a lot of people, myself included, thought, well that's probably good.
We actually don't want people persecuting their political opponents.
Well now we clearly have Democrats all over the country.
From Manhattan, to now Georgia, to Washington D.C., to Florida, going after their political opponents.
That is not a bell that can be unrung.
Get ready for Republicans to do the exact same thing as soon as they have the power and the grounds to do so.
That is where we stand as a country.
So things are about to get worse, not better.
All those people on the left who think that this is restoring rule of law and all that nonsense.
Nonsense.
All this is going to do is going to achieve a race to the bottom.
Because again, once the law can be used as a weapon directly against your political opponents, why exactly would you allow the other side to use that weapon and to avoid culpability for their use of that weapon?
It's hard to see exactly how this doesn't end poorly for pretty much everybody.
We'll get to more on this in one second.
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Then there are the co-conspirators.
Again, the real question here is whether Rudy Giuliani or Mark Meadows decide to flip on Donald Trump.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, a lot of these people are well-known co-defendants, and they're all legal advisors.
Now, we already know that some of these people are, like Rudy Giuliani, is highly likely to get convicted in this case.
The reason that Rudy Giuliani is highly likely to get convicted in this case is because he has openly had to apologize to a particular poll worker for suggesting and implying that she was corruptly bringing in empty ballots to the Fulton County vote counting location.
Knowing, presumably, that she was not, in fact, doing that.
Well, once you have people who are caught in false statements, it shouldn't be that hard to flip them.
Sidney Powell, like, the question is, how strong is their loyalty going to be?
So, Donald Trump has had the loyalty of subordinates for a very, very long time.
In the Classified Documents case, for example, he has Walt Mata and a bunch of low-level aides who are maintaining their unwillingness to basically flip on him.
Is that going to hold with somebody like Sidney Powell?
Does it seem like Sidney Powell is somebody who is going to, you know, stick by her word here and hold by President Trump?
Hard to see that.
Five of the co-defendants, Giuliani pal John Eastman, Kenneth Chesbrough, and Jeffrey Clark are identifiable though unnamed as co-conspirators in a separate federal indictment from Jack Smith.
Some of the people who are gonna be called in this case, and again, it will be televised.
Some of the people who are gonna be called in this case will include, I assume, the current Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, in Georgia.
Brian Kemp, because he was called by Donald Trump, could actually be called to testify in this particular case.
It will be televised, it will be a spectacle, and it will be an electoral disaster for Republicans if this thing runs all the way through the election.
I know there are a lot of Republicans who are in love with the idea that this is gonna backfire on Democrats, and that the attempt to quote-unquote, get Trump, is going to lead to a revenge play by Trump, That ends with a Republican in the White House?
I'd love to see the poll data supporting that.
I've yet to see one iota of data supporting that.
There's a lot of data to suggest that the targeting of Trump has helped him in the primaries.
I've yet to see one piece, like one, a single piece of data suggesting that the American people are going to react to all this lawfare against Trump by voting for Trump.
There's not one poll showing it.
Seriously, not one.
Even the most Trump-friendly polls don't show that.
What they show is that a majority of the American public believes Trump should be indicted on something, which is a very bad indicator.
I think they're wrong, but it doesn't matter what I think.
It matters what the American public thinks because they're the ones who are going to be voting.
Also, is Trump likely to win Georgia in the 2024 election if the entire case in Georgia is about how he was basically pressuring people into changing votes or into finding votes or whatever it is?
Is that going to help his case in the state of Georgia?
Remember, Brian Kemp Do you think Georgians are really fond of this sort of stuff?
I have doubts.
If Donald Trump loses Georgia, all the rest of these states don't even matter.
And by the way, the Arizona Republican Party continues to keep doubling down on this sort of stuff.
Do you think that's going to help them?
It certainly didn't help them in 2022.
How about in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan?
Is any of this going to help?
I say this because, again, Whatever sympathy I have for President Trump being targeted, and I have sympathy for President Trump being targeted for sure.
The question for me, as a conservative, is who stops Biden?
Who stops the bad policy that affects me and my family and you?
Who stops all of those bad policies?
You can have sympathy for somebody while still recognizing that the thing that shapes your life as an American is who is the President of the United States.
And yes, it shapes your life that the DOJ is going after political opponents because those political opponents could be you.
But the only way to stop that is power.
The only way to stop that is to put someone in the White House who can actually clean out the DOJ.
If Donald Trump can't make it, it does no one any favors to run him.
This is a really serious question.
This is going to linger over the entire election cycle.
Right now, the court dates are spread out all over 2024.
We already know that the classified documents case is likely to begin sometime in May.
Right in the middle of the election cycle, like just before the conventions.
This case is likely to begin, you would imagine, August-September, right before the election.
There's every possibility that the Jack Smith indictment in D.C.
is going to start even before the primaries.
This thing is going to lurk over the entirety of the election.
Now you have all of these other people who, as I say, could flip, including people like Ray Stallings Smith, who's an Atlanta-area lawyer who filed an unsuccessful lawsuit challenging Biden's Georgia victory.
He was the subject of a complaint from a legal watchdog group to the state bar seeking disciplinary measures.
Or Robert Cheeley, who's been hit with 10 counts.
He's a personal injury lawyer.
He presented Georgia state senators with video clips he claimed showed election workers at a downtown Atlanta precinct double and triple counting votes.
And it turns out that that wasn't actually the case.
And so the question is whether he knew that or not.
Do you think these low-level officials want to go to jail for years on end?
For Donald Trump?
Do you think that's a thing that they want to do?
And this is why what Fannie Willis is doing, you know, corrupt as it may be, bad as it may be for the country, it is smart legally because the chances of flipping somebody are pretty significant.
So this is gonna be wild.
And by wild, I mean really, really horrific for the country on pretty much every single level.
Okay, in just a second, we'll get to Joe Biden.
He's supposed to be Captain Sympathy, and yet he remains a person who is oddly unsympathetic to everybody who does not have the last name Biden.
We'll get to that momentarily.
First, let's talk about Joe Biden's economy.
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So Joe Biden's appeal back in 2020, whatever appeal it was, is that he was supposedly a big contrast with Donald Trump.
If you look at the latest polls from Gallup just before the election, they looked at character dimensions for the various candidates.
And what they found is that 66% of American voters thought that Joe Biden was likable, as
opposed to 36% who thought that Donald Trump was likable. 52% thought that Joe Biden was
trustworthy, as opposed to 40% who thought that Trump was honest and trustworthy. But most
importantly, 54% of Americans said that Joe Biden cared about people like them, as opposed to only
45% who said that Donald Trump cared about people like them. Well, this has always been the lie about
Joe Biden. He's not honest and trustworthy.
He's not particularly likable.
And he does not care about anyone outside of his immediate circle.
This is why everybody who is a member of the Biden family is rich.
If you are inside the circle, he makes you rich.
If you are outside the circle, he does not care about you.
And he has put this on display a multiplicity of times.
From Afghanistan to, most recently, this Lahaina fire that killed at least 100 people.
So according to Bloomberg, this Maui fire is the deadliest fire in the United States in 105 years.
93 people at least have been killed.
We still have hundreds of people missing.
The number of fatalities expected to climb further as authorities continue search and rescue efforts.
According to the Hawaii governor, Josh Green, only 3% of the area has been searched.
They're still bringing in 12 more cadaver dogs to help with the efforts.
That death toll is definitely going to go up.
So what is Joe Biden doing during all of this?
Now, remember, we have a history in the United States of holding the president of the United States or even senators from a given state accountable for natural disasters where they are not Really hands-on, like right in the middle of it, just involved.
You'll recall, of course, when George W. Bush was perceived as disconnected from the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Here, for example, is a montage of media coverage talking about the evils of George W. Bush when it came to his supposed dereliction of duty during Hurricane Katrina.
This is a quote from an editorial.
A better leader would have flown straight to the disaster zone and announced the immediate mobilization of every available resource.
The cool, confident, intuitive leadership Bush exhibited in his first term, particularly in the months following 9-11, has vanished.
The New York Times, not unexpectedly, kind of chimed in.
They said the president showed up a day later than he was needed, and they excoriated him for appearing casual to the point of carelessness.
Harsh words coming from FEMA's former disaster response chief, Eric Tolbert, who says the government was not ready and shifted its attention from natural disasters to fighting the war on terror.
Well, George W. Bush did a terrible leadership job during that crisis.
He kind of acted like nothing was happening wrong for the first days.
He had been in San Diego where he played air guitar, and then he did the famous flyover, being very detached From the devastation and that photograph that damaged his presidency immensely of him just peering down at the abyss.
But it was also seen in our correspondent just referred to it, President W. Bush, George W. Bush flying over in Air Force One, not landing.
And it was peculiar, wasn't it?
Because we thought back to 9-11, we see George W. Bush with a bullhorn addressing the firefighters.
This was a man who got the crises when it comes to the public relations and he lost the touch when it came to Katrina.
What happened?
Well, I think it was, again, a breakdown at all levels.
And in that particular case, the pilots were instructed not to come in.
It would have been more of a complication to bring the airplane in than to land.
I think, in retrospect, it would have been better just to figure out how to get that plane on the ground there.
So he could have been the Commander-in-Chief.
You remember all of this.
You remember when Ted Cruz was in Cancun for a vacation and a freeze hit Texas.
And supposedly the senator from Texas had to be on site suffering through the freeze despite the fact that really this was a state-level issue.
Now again, Hurricane Katrina was a state-level issue.
It was the governor's issue, really.
It was the mayor's issue when it came to New Orleans.
And when it came to what was going on in Texas that really had very little to do with a senator who has very little power over any of that.
But this is the standard to which we hold our presidents of the United States.
It's why Barack Obama got big plaudits during Hurricane Sandy when he showed up in New Jersey and got a big ol' hug from Chris Christie.
Remember this?
And it's why, of course, George W. Bush got ripped up and down.
Well, so how is Joe Biden responding to crises?
The answer is he just ignores them.
And again, this is not the first time.
Remember that time he said he was going to visit East Palestine, Ohio?
Remember a train blew up and sent a bunch of toxic waste into the air?
And his own Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, did not show up for quite a while.
In fact, Donald Trump beat him there.
And remember how Joe Biden said he was going to visit East Palestine, Ohio?
Well, it has now been months and months and months.
No sign of President Joe Biden.
Remember that time where we had a giant crisis on our southern border?
You know, like now because it continues and Joe Biden still has not made a serious visit to the southern border.
This, in fact, is the way that Joe Biden governs.
He governs in a way that if there were any other president, it would be treated as the sort of dereliction that it is treated as when it's just not Joe Biden.
But as soon as it's Joe Biden, we're all supposed to ignore it.
And it really is quite incredible.
So a couple of hours.
He spent a couple of hours on Rehoboth Beach.
And he was asked about the rising death toll in Hawaii.
This is after he took a 14-day vacation, and then he went back for another four-day vacation to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he sits on the beach basically by himself, being an old man.
And here's a picture of the President of the United States, hundreds of feet away from the photographers, sitting there, enjoying his life.
He was asked about the rising death toll in Hawaii, and he said, no comment.
Then he went bicycling.
Which is really important for the President of the United States to be a bicycling, obviously.
And he was asked about a potential visit to Maui.
And he said the same thing that he said about East Palestine, Ohio.
He said, we're looking at it.
Here was Joe Biden saying, oh, you know, well, no comment.
We're looking at it.
Good morning.
Will you be going to Maui?
Good morning, Madam First Lady.
Can you come talk about Maui, Mr. President?
And bye.
Catch you later.
Now, if it's heartless for everybody else, why would it not be heartless for Joe Biden?
The answer is, it is heartless for Joe Biden.
In fact, Joe Biden is now planning to travel to Lake Tahoe, Nevada on Friday, and he's going to spend a week there, leaving the following Thursday.
So 14-day vacation, followed by a four-day vacation in Delaware, followed by like a week-long vacation in Lake Tahoe.
You wouldn't want to break up his vacation, folks.
You wouldn't want him to worry too much about what's going on in Maui.
This is not a caring individual.
This is a guy who cares only about himself.
And this has been true his entire political career.
It's why he's a congenital liar.
It's why he says things that are untrue on the regular.
It's why he lied when he suggested that a drunk driver killed his wife and his daughter in a car crash and the guy wasn't drunk.
It is why he goes to veterans houses and then he tells them like wounded veterans houses or gold star parents or gold star spouses and he tells them that his son Bo died in battle in Iraq or some such nonsense.
All Joe Biden cares about is Joe Biden.
He is a mean son of a gun.
Joe Biden is not in fact a caring president.
When he says no comment or when he says we're looking at a visit Or when he says, again, no comment.
And then when he goes on more vacations.
And we're all supposed to believe this is a person who has wells of empathy.
You know, honestly, this is his entire pitch in 2020.
He felt your pain.
Now, he wasn't a good actor, so he couldn't do it like Bill Clinton.
But people wanted to believe.
Because they believed that Donald Trump didn't feel their pain.
Donald Trump, of course, being selfish and narcissistic and all the rest, supposedly.
Well, Joe Biden is far more selfish and narcissistic than Donald Trump.
He's just quieter about it.
This is why he has no problem plagiarizing and getting thrown out of his own presidential campaign for it.
I mean, this was Joe Biden's shtick for years and years and years.
And it just remains an object of enormous astonishment to me that the media were willing to go along with this narrative that Joe Biden was a decent elderly fellow who truly cares about people like you.
What is the evidence of any of this?
By the way, when people are truly dishonest with other people, like on a routine basis, that is a sign of narcissism.
It means they don't care about you.
This is true in personal relationships and it's true in politics.
When people lie to you regularly, it means they don't respect you.
It means they don't treat you as a normal human being.
Because if they treated you as they would wish to be treated, presumably they wouldn't want to be lied to.
But Joe Biden doesn't care about that.
Later yesterday morning, Joe Biden tried to walk all of this back.
He tweeted out, as residents of Hawaii mourn the loss of life and devastation taking place across their beautiful home, we mourn with them.
Like I've said, not only our prayers are with those impacted, but every asset we have will be available to them.
Here's the latest.
And then he says that FEMA temporary sheltering assistance is now available for residents who are displaced from their homes by the wildfires, allowing survivors to shelter in motels or motels temporarily as they develop a long-term housing plan.
And then, guys, they're laser focused on getting aid to the survivors, including Critical needs assistance.
A one-time $700 payment per household offering relief during an unimaginably difficult time.
$700 per household?
Now, far be it from me to suggest that we should just throw bags of cash at people, but if the idea here is that you have a federal crisis that necessitates a federal response, $700 a household?
That's not even going to pay for like two weeks of groceries for your family in Joe Biden's America.
$700 is not going to do it.
You know the amount of property damage that was done to Lahaina?
$5.6 billion in property damage done to Lahaina.
$700?
It doesn't even begin to scratch the surface.
We sent like $115 billion to Ukraine.
And even if you think that's a good expenditure of defense money, you gotta start asking yourself, why $115 billion of aid to Ukraine and like less than $2 million to the people of Lahaina?
Which is what that would amount to because there aren't that many households in Lahaina.
And then Biden says, we're making sure all residents receive critical information so they can take steps forward to move forward in their recovery.
This includes translating materials into the most common languages spoken in the- Oh my god, you mean they're actually gonna translate government materials into foreign languages?
Wow.
Oh, the sacrifice.
Oh, the amazing on-the-ground nature of all of this.
I mean, he's lounging at the beach, and we're supposed to believe that he gives two damns about this?
Of course he doesn't.
Joe Biden, as always, cares only about Joe Biden.
Which, of course, is why the Hunter Biden situation continues its ongoing cover-up.
So Hunter Biden's team is now very, very angry at prosecutors.
They're very angry at the DOJ.
And they have a right to be angry at the DOJ because Joe Biden's DOJ cut a sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden.
Well, now, as it turns out, the defense team is really ticked off at the DOJ.
Why?
Well, because that plea deal blew up in open court.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Hunter Biden's legal team said late Sunday the Justice Department had decided to renege on the previously agreed-upon plea agreement, escalating a dispute that is threatening to become a factor in the 2024 presidential race as President Biden seeks re-election.
A major part of the botched deal, Hunter Biden's agreement to enroll in a diversion program for gun offenders, should stand, the lawyers argued.
Prosecutors had agreed not to pursue a separate felony gun possession charge against the younger Biden as long as he remains drug-free and agrees to never own a firearm again.
His attorney said he intends to abide by the terms of the agreement and expects prosecutors to do the same, but that's actually not what was in there.
Part of that diversion program for gun offenders plea deal said that anything tangentially related to the tax charges would also be taken off the board.
Prosecutors on Friday disclosed the plea talks with the president's son had broken down.
AG Merrick Garland then named Delaware U.S.
Attorney David Weiss as a special counsel, which of course, as we talked about yesterday, is completely insane.
You're not supposed to take the person who was not a special counsel and was the investigating person and then make him the special counsel the minute that he gets called out for the sweetheart deal.
That is obviously a cover-up designed at preventing testimony from that person in front of Congress.
It's pretty impressive.
And meanwhile, Democrats continue to kick those goalposts into the ocean.
Representative Jared Moskowitz, he says, there's no evidence that any of this links back to Joe.
Well, isn't that a far cry from Hunter Biden never did anything wrong?
And Joe never knew anything about this.
And Joe was never connected in any way.
There's no evidence to link anything back to Joe was true about Al Capone with regard to murder.
They had to get him on a tax charge just because there's no evidence.
That Joe Biden took, like, money directly into his bank account doesn't mean he didn't benefit from Hunter taking tens of millions of dollars into the Biden family bank account.
That's a wild statement.
Here's Representative Jared Moskowitz hanging his hat on a very, very slim hook.
Republicans, the modern Republicans in the House know they can't save Donald Trump, right?
He has the triple crown of indictments right now.
He's going for the final four.
I mean, he's batting a thousand on every indictment we thought he was going to get.
And so they know they can't save him.
So the whole idea is they want to make Joe Biden just like him.
You know, the head of the Biden Graham family, like somehow Joe Biden all of a sudden is Tony Soprano.
But there is not a single shred of evidence that has anything to do with Joe Biden.
Okay, this is what they're going to hang their hat on.
If we're talking about things you don't have evidence for, how about evidence that Donald Trump colluded with Russia?
You went after that for four years.
How about evidence that Donald Trump committed major campaign finance violations?
You don't have evidence of that and you're charging him criminally in Manhattan.
How about evidence for the charges that you're bringing against him in Washington, D.C.
with regard to January 6th?
The evidence there is real slim.
I don't see you guys stopping your roll for half a second.
But Jamie Raskin is doing the same routine.
So they've not even laid a glove on Joe.
Oh, the hackery.
Oh, the unbelievable hackery here.
And we're going to release a report about all of the foreign government emoluments, millions of dollars we can document that Donald Trump pocketed at the hotels, at the golf courses, through business deals when he was president and that his family got.
But they've not laid a glove on Joe Biden.
As president, they haven't been able to show any criminal corruption on his part.
As president, they haven't been able to show any criminal corruption.
As president.
Those aren't even the allegations.
The allegation is that there's criminal corruption when he was vice president.
So you're not even naming the same period.
By the way, the evidence of criminal corruption is that his own AG tried to keep the Hunter Biden scandal with a lid on it.
That's the actual evidence.
And we have testimony from IRS whistleblowers to exactly that effect.
Again, I think the House of Cards that is Joe Biden's reputation is crumbling.
I think it's going to materialize if Republicans have the brains to, you know, run somebody who's able to make that the issue.
Democrats, in order to distract, are of course going to now apparently indict President Trump every day of this week, every day of next week, and every week to come.
And that's precisely what Joe Biden wants.
Because again, when you focus in on Joe Biden, what you see is a corrupt elderly man who does not care about anyone except him and his immediate family.
And if you focus on Donald Trump, Donald Trump is likely to lose.
That is the simple math here.
And Donald Trump makes it easy for his opponents when he praises people like Laura Loomer.
Laura Loomer is pretty obviously a crazy person.
And Donald Trump on Friday apparently praised her pretty fulsomely in a video clip posted to social media.
She flattered him and then he did a pose with her.
He said, it's great to have you.
You work hard.
You're a very opinionated lady.
I have to tell you that in my opinion, I like that.
And then she praised him, and he praised her, and all of the rest.
Trump had actually offered to hire Loomer a little while ago.
Loomer, of course, has done things like suggest that Casey DeSantis didn't actually have cancer, that she faked or exaggerated her cancer.
She said that Marjorie Taylor Greene is a B-word who says she's spreading all this truth, but she's just spreading her legs.
Laura Loomer is a delight.
Donald Trump, once again, associating with, you know, people who flatter him.
But is that a great way to staff?
Is that a great way to run a campaign?
I have some doubts.
Okay, meanwhile, the craziest judicial ruling of the day.
According to the New York Times, a group of young people in Montana won a landmark lawsuit on Monday when a judge ruled that the state's failure to consider climate change when approving fossil fuel projects was unconstitutional.
The decision in the suit, Held v. Montana, coming during a summer of record heat and deadly wildfires, marks a victory in the expanding fight against government support for oil, gas, and coal, the burning of which has rapidly warmed the planet.
Julia Olson, the founder of Our Children's Trust, which is a legal nonprofit group that brought the case on behalf of minors, said, quote, As fires rage in the West, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today's ruling in Montana is a game-changer.
It marks a turning point in this generation's efforts to save the planet.
The ruling means that Montana must consider climate change when deciding whether to approve or to renew fossil fuel projects.
Now, it's an absurd ruling because normally, in order to sue, you have to have standing.
Standing means that you are damaged by the thing.
And it's not enough to have general standing.
If you don't like a law and the law damages you, you can't just sue based on general standing that you don't like the law.
For example, they increase taxes.
You're a person who pays taxes.
That does not give you standing to sue.
That's a political question.
In order to have standing, it's gotta be like, I hit you with my car, now you have standing to sue me.
But in this particular case, the court suggested that the mental anguish undergone by children because of climate change gave them standing to sue Montana for not considering climate change when determining whether or not to drill for oil.
Emily Flower, spokeswoman for the Attorney General, said, The ruling is absurd, not surprising from a judge who let the plaintiff's attorney put on a week-long taxpayer-funded publicity stunt that was supposed to be a trial.
It's a bizarre, bizarre case for sure.
Michael Berger, who's the executive director of the Saban Center for Climate Change Litigation in Columbia, said, quote, this was climate science on trial.
And what the court has found, as a matter of fact, is that the science is right.
So now we have courts suggesting the science is right.
And by the science is right, that means that if Montana drills for oil, then indubitably, this is going to create massive climate change that will kill your kids.
Because now it is the job of courts, presumably, to decide the science.
Pretty incredible ruling.
So first of all, not the purview of courts, actually.
And you know what else is not the purview of courts?
You simply give standing to plaintiffs who don't have it in the first place.
The Montana case revolves around language in the state constitution that guarantees residents the right to a clean and healthful environment and stipulates the state and individuals are responsible for maintaining and improving the environment for present and future generations.
But the right to a clean and healthful environment doesn't mean that the state doesn't have to do a balancing routine and figure out whether or not it is worthwhile for the citizens to, say, drill.
So now, apparently, all these young people are going to sue in states ranging from Hawaii to Utah to Virginia.
This is the first kind of case like this to go to trial in the United States.
The state contended that Montana's emissions are minuscule when compared against the rest of the globe.
The plaintiffs argued the state has to do more to consider how emissions are contributing to droughts, wildfires, and other growing risks.
It's an insane ruling, obviously.
Many of the youngsters testified about the effects they had witnessed.
So now we have 15-year-olds testifying about how they saw that it was really hot outside, and this is now the ground to shut down drilling in the state of Montana, thanks to this idiot judge.
Now, I have a question.
I have a question.
Why is it, exactly, that young people could not sue to stop, for example, pretty much every government program because they all take on debt?
Really, why not?
Why don't they say that the government has a responsibility to make sure that those who cannot vote are not burdened with the cost of policies that are undertaken now?
That seems like a violation of equal protection, for example.
You could theoretically make a crazy argument that the Equal Protection Clause, which says that every citizen is entitled to equal protection of the law, should protect people who are not able to vote yet in their interests.
So, for example, if you saddle the country with, say, $32 trillion in national debt, that's going to hit my kids and my kids' kids.
So shouldn't the A.B.
be able to sue?
And say that the federal government shouldn't be able to pass laws that raise debt.
That if they're actually going to, you know, actually spend money, then maybe people who are above the age of 18 should have to pay for that thing.
Is that the direction that we're going to now have judges going?
I highly doubt the left wants to go down this path.
First of all, it's gonna get struck down at the Supreme Court level because it's obviously specious and stupid.
But the fact that this is how the left would love courts to rule just demonstrates, once again, the left has no limits when it comes to power.
They truly don't.
They'll suggest that the right is power-hungry when the Supreme Court says, we will not step into the abortion debate.
We will instead kick it back to the state and federal level.
That apparently is an egregious usurpation of power by the Supreme Court.
But it is a protection of rights When a local judge says that an entire state now has to stop drilling because a bunch of 15-year-olds are mad, which is literally what this decision is.
Pretty incredible stuff.
Well, all of this ties into a really fascinating piece by David Brooks today over at The Atlantic.
It's called, How America Got Mean.
Here's what David Brooks says, he says, over the past eight years or so, I've been obsessed with two questions.
The first is, why have Americans become so sad?
The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide, but other statistics are similarly troubling.
My second related question is, why have Americans become so mean?
I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said he has to eject a customer from his restaurant from rude or cruel behavior once a week, something that never used to happen.
A head nurse at a hospital told me many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive.
At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years.
Social trust is plummeting.
In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity.
In 2018, fewer than half did.
The words that define our age, reek of menace, conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.
We're enmeshed in some sort of emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis.
What exactly is going on?
So David Brooks has a theory as to what exactly is going on here.
So David Brooks says that there are a few different stories.
One, the technology story.
Social media is driving us all crazy.
Second, the sociology story.
We've stopped participating in community organizations and are more isolated.
Third, the demography story.
America, long a white-dominated nation, is becoming a much more diverse country, a change that has millions of white Americans in a panic.
And fourth, the economy story.
High levels of economic inequality and insecurity have left people afraid, alienated, and pessimistic.
He says that he agrees to a certain extent with all of these stories, but I don't think any of them is the deepest one.
He says, the most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest.
We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration.
Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free reign.
The story I'm going to tell is about morals.
In a healthy society, a web of institutions, family schools, religious groups, community organizations, workplaces, helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another.
We live in a society that's terrible at moral formation.
He says the moral formation comprises three things.
First, helping people to learn to restrain their selfishness.
He says that America used to be good at this.
Second, teaching basic social and ethical skills.
And third, helping people find a purpose in life.
Now, he's right about all of this.
But he is missing why exactly all of this fell apart.
Now, part of it was the increasing atomization of American society that we've talked about.
And this ties back into the decline of church attendance, for example.
It ties back into the rise of social media.
You know, the sort of move toward individual expression, as opposed to a communal obligation, that led to this sort of breakdown, obviously.
He says schools began to abandon moral formation in the 1940s and 50s.
He says the post-war period saw similar changes at the college level.
He says questions like, what is the meaning of life?
How do you live a good life?
Lost all purchase?
In sphere after sphere, people decided that moral reasoning was not really relevant.
Psychology's purview grew, especially in family and educational matters.
It's vocabulary framing virtually all public discussion of the moral life of children.
This would be the privatizing morality, the attempt to get away from the idea of a common good.
He says the moral instincts Most of us who noticed the process of demoralization as it was occurring thought a bland moral relativism and empty consumerism would be the result.
You do you and I'll do me.
Which of course is what we've talked about.
Most of us who noticed the process of demoralization as it was occurring,
thought a bland moral relativism and empty consumerism would be the result.
You do you and I'll do me.
That's not what happened.
Jonathan Haidt says, when you're raised in a culture without ethical structure,
you become internally fragile.
You don't have a moral compass to give you direction, no permanent ideals to which you can swear ultimate allegiance, and so people start to suffer from what Emile Durkheim has called anime.
This is true.
I mean, all of this is true.
There's something else that's happened though, and that is an attack on all these institutions, a motivated attack.
And a reliance on the niceness of the American public to tolerate the attack.
So it's not just... I mean, this is true.
A lot of the moral education went away.
That undergirding niceness is kindness.
And kindness and niceness are not the same thing.
Being nice to someone means that you just are inoffensive to them.
Being kind to someone very often means you're looking out for them.
It means that you're going to tell them a thing that maybe they don't want to hear.
If you have a friend who's a drug abuser, and you simply say, you do you, that may be nice, but it's not kind.
If you have a child who does bad things on the regular, And you just let them do it?
That may be nice, but it's not actually kind.
But what's happened is over- but kindness is undergirded by a belief in some sort of higher good.
Because what it means is that you do have to use judgment.
You do have to be judgmental.
You have to know that not being a drug addict is actually morally preferable to being a drug addict.
Or you actually have to say that certain behavior is better than other behavior.
It is an act of kindness to chide your fellow when he goes astray.
But niceness says that that's mean.
Niceness says that that is actually something you should not do.
And so when you have an entire moral system that is based not on kindness, but on niceness, when you wipe away the moral framework and all you're left with is niceness, of course niceness is going to fall apart.
Because what ends up happening is that people take advantage of the niceness.
Niceness lasts only so long as someone's fist doesn't touch your face.
But it turns out that doesn't last very long.
It turns out that when you don't have a shared moral framework, kindness devolves into niceness, and then niceness is taken advantage of by people who have no care about you at all.
And the people who actually don't abide by niceness are the beneficiaries initially.
Then you have an actual prisoner's dilemma, a game theory prisoner's dilemma, in which the person who benefits the most is the person who is not nice, who violates all the rules.
Because while you're playing by the nice rules, they're doing what they want, and they're getting ahead, and they're winning.
And so you say, well, hold up a second.
I don't want to play by those rules.
I'm not going to play by those rules either.
And then it's just a race to the bottom.
And you can see this, by the way, in the polling data.
Democrats, for example, in the 1990s, by the late 1990s, Democrats thought that most Republicans were actually bad people.
And Republicans still thought that most Democrats were just wrong.
And then around 2013, 2014, the stats change and Republicans start to say, oh, maybe Democrats are also bad people.
And so both sides now think the other side is bad people.
Why?
Well, because again, Democrats were relying on the niceness of Republicans while at the same time taking advantage of the lack of kindness in the system.
So David Brooks is right when he says that lack of moral education is the problem.
That, of course, is true.
But it's also people being aggressive in taking advantage of the niceness of others.
And that means social radicalism that is designed to tear down the institutions.
That is what this is really about.
An actual attempt at dissolving the institutions themselves.
This is where David Brooks goes wrong because David Brooks, you know, he cites, for example, Ted Lasso.
right, as an example of a restoration of niceness.
He says, in the summer of 2020, the series Ted Lasso premiered. When Lasso describes his goals
as a soccer coach, he could mention the championships he hopes to win or some other
conventional metric of success. But he says, for me, success is not about the wins and losses.
It's about helping these young fellows be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.
He says that's a two-sentence description of moral formation.
But as it turns out, what Tad Lasso really ends up being is a moral relativist.
He basically, in the series, whatever floats your boat is the morality of the series by the end.
There are no actual real expectations other than sort of a generic niceness to everybody else.
You can't build a society on niceness.
No society functions on niceness.
Niceness is a byproduct of kindness.
When you kill kindness, niceness will not remain.
Meanwhile, the economy looks like it is about to turn bad.
I don't understand people who say that basically what goes up is just going to stay up and never come down.
It's like modern monetary theory, this idea that you can just inflate the currency and nothing will ever happen about that, so you get 40-year high in inflation.
Right now, a lot of leds are blinking red.
That's particularly true in China.
By the way, China is an incipient, looming disaster area.
I have an entire episode of my new series, Facts, available on YouTube, where it really is seeing a lot of light, and also over on X slash Twitter, where it has hundreds of thousands of views, so it's probably at about a million views total at this point on various platforms.
Talking about the various problems that China is experiencing.
But China is in serious trouble.
They're demographically completely upside down.
They have way more old people than they have young people, so no one's going to be able to pay the bills.
They've got a serious debt problem, like a really serious systemic debt problem.
And they're now pursuing autarkic economic policies that cut them off from the rest of the world market, which means they can't even use their comparative advantage properly.
So they're really in a bleep load of trouble here.
Right now, according to the Wall Street Journal, China's latest property crisis is threatening to spill over into the broader economy, worrying investors and causing a broad market sell-off.
Chinese stocks fell in Hong Kong and mainland China on Monday, with real estate developers, electric vehicle manufacturers, and other companies in economically sensitive sectors declining the most.
The Hang Seng Index, which is loaded with Chinese companies, dropped 1.6 percent, taking its year-to-date loss to 5.1 percent.
The financial struggles of Country Garden Holdings, China's top surviving and privately run developer, have been front and center since it missed interest payments on two U.S.
dollar bonds a week ago.
The property giant said that over the weekend, trading in 11 yuan-dominated domestic bonds has been suspended and intends to discuss repayment plans with investors.
The property sector has gone from being a massive contributor to the country's overall growth to a massive drag on the economy.
That is because China basically had a giant pyramid scheme going.
Where they would take retirement funds from the people who lived in China, and they would tell them that if they invested in empty shell apartments in ghost cities, that this would eventually turn into real money because those ghost cities would then be populated and you'd make a bunch of money on those shell apartments.
And it turns out that there was no one picking up rental on those shell apartments on the other end.
So that money just disappeared into these vast cities that are completely empty at this point, all built around debt.
New home sales increased in the first few months of 2023 providing a glimmer of hope.
But the market then turned in April and nationwide sales of China's top developers have slumped ever since.
China is now dropping into deflation.
Households are now borrowing less because they racked up high levels of saving.
Chinese banks extended the equivalent of $47.8 billion in new loans in July that is down nearly half from the same month one year ago.
Their currency is depreciating pretty significantly at this point.
Again, if China's economy takes a serious dip, that's going to have a major impact on American markets.
It's not going to be all roses for us because we are so intertwined with the Chinese economy.
Again, thanks to a lot of bad foreign policy decision making over the course of the last few decades, particularly the decision to suggest that if we intertwined our economy with China, that magically China would liberalize, which of course they did not.
Meanwhile, those higher costs, which are going to be brought on the American economy, thanks to the collapse of the Chinese economy, those higher costs are going to be exacerbated by a new model in the West of subsidization and attenuated trade links.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the world's biggest economies are offering huge subsidies and a cutthroat ways to win the industry of the futures.
The losers are all the countries that can't pay up.
But the reality is that the losers are also the industries that aren't subsidized.
That money comes from somewhere.
Subsidies, you just take money from someone and you give it to another person in the hopes that that second person is going to use the money better.
But why is the government picking winners and losers?
How do they choose who gets to win and who gets to lose?
Subsidized industries, by the way, over time tend to become fat.
They tend to become lazy.
They tend to have high rates of unionization, which drives up labor costs, and then eventually they get undercut.
This is the story of the American car market, by the way, from the 1950s through the 1970s.
In the 1950s, it was American cars all over the world.
By the 1970s, Toyota was eating America's lunch.
There's a reason for that.
When you subsidize industries to the point where those industries don't really have to worry about their cost structure, they charge too much, their labor starts to cost too much, their parts start to cost too much, and eventually somebody undercuts them.
Right now the level of subsidization is really, really high in major developed countries.
I'm not sure why people think that this is a particularly good idea, particularly when you're talking about totally inefficient industries like clean energy.
The US is now offering $369 billion in incentives and funding for clean energy as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.
They're starting to see a few people who are building here, but mainly because they know that the United States government is going to pony up for a bunch of this.
This is also combined with the downfall of globalization.
Now, there are a lot of people who talk about globalism as a bad idea.
I agree.
They'll say the globalists are bad.
If you're talking about international governance, Americans giving up their power to international organizations, I agree.
If what you're saying is that international trade is a bad thing, Let me remind you that if it were not for international trade, if you don't like the inflation now, wait until international trade gets cut off.
The reality is we all benefit from those wide open shipping lanes the United States has been insuring essentially since World War II.
When those start to fall apart, when trade goes down, the cost on everything that you currently pay for is going to go up radically.
It is not just a matter of globalization helping low-income countries.
Or once poor countries like South Korea or Taiwan.
It is also that the standard of living in the United States is way better now than it was in 1980.
And if you don't believe me, go look at the crap people had in their house in 1980.
Seriously, like pick up a product from 1980.
They suck.
They're terrible.
I understand everyone wants to believe that the middle class hasn't gotten any richer since 1980 based on false pictures of the wage stats.
But that is not true.
The stuff that the average middle class person has now is better than pretty much anything that a rich person had in 1980.
That's because what real world economics is about is the creation of new goods and services that are better and cheaper.
And that is in effect of globalization.
So as we unwind globalization, And as we direct money into subsidization, we are going to get a slower economy.
That is going to be the end result in all of this.
And if you're one of the lucky few in one of these subsidized industries, you'll feel real good about yourself.
But if you're not, your costs are going to go up pretty much everywhere else.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So, it turns out that terrible economic policy has some after effects.
This is why Republicans in the United States should take heart in the fact that eventually Joe Biden should pay for His economic crimes here.
If Republicans have the brains to run somebody who actually has a shot at winning, that would be the big one.
Not saying that Donald Trump couldn't win.
He could, but his campaign would actually have to be about the issues, not about whatever the legal issue he has today is about.
The reason I say this is because right now, Argentina is showing this is a possibility, which is kind of wild.
So according to the New York Times, a far-right libertarian candidate won Argentina's open presidential primary election on Sunday, a surprise showing for a politician who wants to adopt the American dollar as Argentina's official currency and embraces comparisons to Donald Trump.
Xavier Millet, 52, a congressman, economist, and former TV pundit, secured 30% of the vote, with 96% of the ballots counted, making him the frontrunner for the presidency in the fall general elections.
He now has a clear shot at leading Argentina.
Argentina's general election in October, which could go to a November runoff, will now become a new tested strength of the far-right across the world.
Again, the way that this works is that if you are anywhere to the right of Karl Marx, according to the New York Times, you are far-right.
Although hard-right forces have gained new influence in several powerful nations in recent years, including the U.S., Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, and Finland, they've suffered some defeats, including in Spain and Brazil.
Millet has pitched himself as the radical change the collapsing Argentine economy needs.
It could be a shock to the system if elected.
Besides his ideas about the currency and central bank, he's proposed drastically lowering taxes, cutting public health spending, closing or privatizing all state-owned enterprises, and eliminating the health, education, and environment ministries.
Sergio Massa, the Argentine center-left finance minister, finished second in the primary with just 21% of the vote.
The third place finisher, Patricia Bullrich, is a conservative, and she's in third place at 17, which means the two out of the top three are conservatives, and nearly the top two.
The Sunday results showed that Argentina's three separate coalitions have similar levels of support, making it unlikely that anyone will actually win in the first round.
The center-right coalition's candidates received a combined 28% of the vote on Sunday.
The center-left received 27%, both slightly less than Millet's total as well.
Millet said, we're not only going to end Kirchnerism, that is a reference to former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, we're also going to end the useless, parasitic, criminal political cast that is sinking this country.
He also thanks his sister and all of his dogs who are each named after a conservative economist.
Which is awesome.
Yeah, and this is the result of bad left-wing policy.
See, this is the way politics works.
When left-run things and they do a bad job, people swivel to the right.
If you give them someone who is capable of talking about the issues people actually want to hear about.
Okay, other things that I like.
So, YouTube had to apparently reverse course after they attempted to throttle a video that we did for our new series, Facts.
We did a video on YouTube about The organization GARM, which is essentially a consortium of advertisers that work to shut down all advertising on controversial platforms.
By controversial, they just mean basically right-wing platforms, even if they're very mainstream.
Well, YouTube then demonetized the video, claiming that it was conspiratorial.
Media Research Center pressed YouTube about why monetization was suppressed.
Apparently, YouTube effectively refused to acknowledge the platform had limited the video in the first place.
A YouTube spokesperson said, in order for a video to monetize on YouTube, it must comply with our advertiser-friendly guidelines, which are publicly accessible and apply to all creators.
Upon review, the video in question is currently monetizing, so they reversed themselves.
Which is funny, because they didn't tell that to us.
Again, they claimed that we discussed the New World Order, which is a non-monetizable conspiracy theory.
But there's nothing that is conspiratorial about the actual episode, which simply names the various subjective guidelines put in place By these advertising collusive regimes.
So I'm glad that YouTube backed down.
Elon Musk did see the video and he actually suggested that maybe the way to solve this would be to have a basket of safe content and a basket of unsafe content.
That of course is not right because the problem is who gets to decide what is safe and what is unsafe?
The same exact groups are currently using exactly those guises in order to push censorship.
What we actually need to do is blow up these collusive enterprises entirely, and then advertisers get to decide on their own what they want to put their advertising on.
If they did that, that would be a normal market mechanism as opposed to the sort of collusion that we're seeing right now.
Okay, time for a thing that I hate.
So Michael Orr, you remember him?
He was popularized, he's a former NFL player, he was popularized by the pic The Blind Side with Sandra Bullock.
He has now petitioned a Tennessee court with allegations that a key element of the 2009 film was a lie created by the Tohey family to profit off of his expense.
According to ProTalk, in the film, Orr is adopted by the Twi family to protect him from living on the streets.
Orr says he was never adopted by the family.
Instead, he says the Twis tricked him into signing a document making them his conservators.
This agreement allowed the Twis to make business deals and profit off of Orr's name.
The legal filing says the lie of Michael's adoption is one upon which co-conservatives Lee Antuhi and Sean Tuohy have enriched themselves at the expense of their ward, the undersigned Michael Orr.
Michael Orr discovered this lie to his chagrin and embarrassment in February of 2023 when he learned that the conservatorship to which he consented on the basis of doing so would make him a member of the Tuohy family, provided him no familial relationship with the Tuohys.
Orr says the Tuohy family used their power to turn his story into the blind side and then they allegedly received millions in royalties from the movie.
Orr says he didn't get any money from any of that.
Or his attorney says that he's deeply hurt by the situation with the Thuy family.
We haven't heard a response from the Thuy family so far, but pretty ugly stuff, no matter what.
I mean, the fact is that he was basically living on the streets when the Thuy family took him in.
If they took advantage of him by having him sign a conservatorship agreement, but they didn't adopt him, and that gave them financial power over him, Even when he reached majority?
That'd be a serious problem.
We'll keep an eye on that case.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
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