Conservatives CAN Win, and Target’s Earnings Prove It
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So, there's a lot of talk these days about whether conservatives can win anymore.
And that's serious talk, considering that Republicans haven't won the popular vote in any presidential election since 2004, and before that, since 1988.
It's been a very long time since Republicans regularly won popular votes in the presidential election.
And when you look at how Republicans ran in the latest round of Senate races, they really underran where their numbers should have been.
In the latest House races, they should have walked away with a far broader House majority.
So there's always this serious question about whether conservatives can win.
And the answer is yes.
But in order to win, conservatives have to really follow the rules of Saul Alinsky.
Because those rules work.
Saul Alinsky, of course, was the community activist in Chicago who basically provided the ideological foundation for people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
He wrote a book called Rules for Radicals in 1971, talking about how you go after your political opposition.
And one of the things that he said is you have to personalize every issue, and you have to polarize every issue, and you have to put your enemy on the wrong side of that polarization.
That is basically the goal.
What you don't want to do is make it easy for your enemy to polarize you.
What you want to do is make it hard for your enemy to make you the target and make it really easy for your enemy to be the target.
That is the way you actually win.
And Republicans, conservatives, have shown that they can win when they actually follow that rule, when they actually personalize and polarize.
And that's what they did with, for example, Target.
So, fascinating report out from the Wall Street Journal.
Title, Target, much like Bud Light, is stung by culture wars.
Target discovered the cost of getting caught in the middle of hot button social issues in a politically divided United States.
Sales at both businesses, from Target to Bud Light, suffered over marketing efforts that backfired and caused shoppers on both sides of the topics to call for boycotts.
Anheuser-Busch came under fire for a social media promotion with a transgender influencer.
Target was criticized for store displays of merchandise for Pride Month that included gender-neutral swimsuits.
Then, when each company sort of backed off its original point, the LGBTQ plus-divided-by-sign community decided that they were going to boycott.
In return, Target said chopper backlash over its Pride Month collection as well as cautious consumers pushed sales sharply lower in the most recent quarter.
The retailer said it expects sales to decline again in the current quarter and lowered its profit goal for the full year.
Executives said they would still mark Pride Month next year but with a more focused assortment of merchandise.
So that would be a conservative win.
That is a major corporation that is backing off of much of its social push for wild leftism.
Again, if you look at Target's sales change year over year, what you find is in first quarter of 2022, they had about a 3% increase in sales over the prior year.
In second quarter of 2022, about 2%.
Third quarter, over 2%.
Fourth quarter, they were down to about 0.5%.
First quarter of 2023, they were about 0%, pretty much flat.
And then, second quarter, absolute collapse.
You see an almost negative 6% growth rate.
Over the prior year, which means a massive sales drop-off.
The stock had fallen about 16% this year through Tuesday's close.
Backlash surrounding the Pride collection aided sales, particularly in June after Target started selling the annual collection.
Sales recovered steadily in July, according to Brian Cornell, who's Target's longtime chief executive.
He said multiple economic cross-currents are putting pressure on consumers.
At Target, shoppers continue to spend less on apparel, home goods, and other discretionary items in the midst of high prices for food and other essentials.
So part of this is Joe Biden's inflationary economy, but a lot of this actually is politics.
And the way that you can tell that is because retail rival TJX, which owns TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods, actually saw a 6% jump in comparable sales in the same quarter and raised its sales growth at profit targets for the year.
So in other words, a bunch of people who were going to Target instead went to TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods.
By the way, my family is one of those families.
We used to go to Target almost every Sunday to pick up, you know, necessary household items.
We stopped going there and went to Walmart instead.
In May, Target offered Pride products for sales it has for the past 10 years.
But this time, they decided to go with a very aggressive Pride display that was targeting children.
And consumers reacted.
And that consumer reaction tanked their sales.
And here is the thing.
In politics, in markets, it doesn't take a mass movement in order to effectuate change.
All it requires is a concerted core of people who are willing to take a hard stand And a bunch of people who are kind of wavering.
That's all it really takes.
And this should be a lesson going forward for Republicans.
Pick particularly popular causes and then polarize those causes.
Make clear what the left's perspective on those causes is and wrong-foot the left.
And the left is perfectly willing to step into it because the left is right now engorged by its own power.
The left actually believes that it can do pretty much anything in the United States specifically because they've won so many elections in a row or done better than expected in so many elections in a row.
But the thing that Republicans can't do is make it hard for the center person, for the independent, for even maybe the slightly left-leaning person to even look at them and think about voting for them or think about backing their cause.
And one of the things that Governor Ron DeSantis did in Florida that he hasn't been doing in the national race so far.
In Florida, there are a bunch of DeSantis Democrats.
Those are people who are very happy with the way he ran the state because he took a really common sense driven perspective with regard to COVID, with regard to education.
These are all popular issues in the state of Florida.
Now, on the national level, he kind of ran as Trump-lite.
He took many of the most polarizing social issues, and he decided that he was going to run almost solely on those, as opposed to the solid governance in the state of Florida that actually made him quite popular with Democrats in the state of Florida.
There was no need for that.
And now it looks like DeSantis may be shifting his campaign away from the sort of Trump-lite approach, which is a little late, but necessary, obviously.
It's why you're also seeing some popular upswing among some Republicans for people like Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, or Brian Kemp in Georgia.
And a lot of this has to do with the idea that if Republicans and conservatives wish to win, they need to pick issues that are popular, and then they need to run on those issues.
All of this raises the serious question as to what Republicans are going to do in the 2024 race.
Because if they decide to once again hitch their wagon to the 2020 election horse, that does not seem like a particularly smart strategy.
Whatever sympathy you have for President Trump as a human being who's been put under pressure by dozens of indictments, virtually all of them on specious charges, You can feel that sympathy and you can still understand that talking about that endlessly for the next couple of years is not going to result in victory for Republicans.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Now again, I feel the sympathy for Trump the same that you do, and I particularly feel that sympathy when you can feel Democrats trolling.
Hillary Clinton was on with Rachel Maddow the other night and she did a full-scale 2016 elections in aisle routine.
This sort of stuff, it's this sort of stuff that really gets the goat of conservatives and leads them to want to throw the orange middle finger.
I totally get it.
Here is Hillary Clinton last night.
He certainly interfered in our election.
And it was clear he interfered to hurt me and to help my opponent.
Unprecedented interference.
I was on the way to winning.
We know that Putin was intent upon helping Trump.
That's no longer subject to debate.
The interference with the election.
Virginia just stopped using touchscreen computer voting because it's so vulnerable.
You can run the best campaign You can even become the nominee.
And you can have the election stolen from you.
He knows that he's an illegitimate president.
Election denial after election denial after election denial from Hillary Clinton for literally years on end.
And no one seemed to care about that.
That was perfectly legitimate.
Not only was it legitimate, it launched a thousand legal cases against Donald Trump.
The Mueller report was specifically based on the idea that Democrats could not handle the idea that Hillary Clinton had lost the election.
There's a perfectly plausible solution as to why Hillary lost in 2016.
She was one of the worst candidates in American history.
The proof is that she lost to Donald Trump, who is the second least popular candidate in America at that point.
Hillary was the least popular and Trump was the second least popular.
I mean, that's how bad she was, but they decided instead she must not have lost, and so they launched a bunch of legal cases against Trump and investigations based on specious nonsense.
And now, of course, Trump is facing serious charges across a wide range of jurisdictions, and those are going to bog him down for legitimately the entirety of the election cycle.
I mean, when you look at the slate of cases that he is facing, it's gonna be a full-scale disaster area for him.
I mean, forget about whether he goes to jail or not.
Just in terms of the politics, just in terms of the money.
Think about the legal bills here.
And here is his current calendar.
Right now, here are the cases that are calendared.
He has the New York Manhattan nonsense case about hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
That trial is scheduled to begin March 25th, 2024.
Meanwhile, the classified documents case is slated to begin May 20th, 2024, right in the middle of the election cycle.
We still don't have a date on the Washington DC case regarding January 6th and the lead up to January 6th from Jack Smith, but he has proposed January 2nd, 2024, which is just two weeks before the Iowa presidential caucuses.
And Fannie Willis wants to launch her case presumably within six months of the indictment, she says, which would put it smack dab in February of 2024.
So just to look at his calendar, that is a stacked 2024 calendar for the presidents of the United States.
That is a calendar that starts with a legal case In DC in January, a legal case in Georgia in February, a legal case in New York in March, and a legal case in Florida in May.
That's going to be the entirety of the year.
Each one of those cases is going to take months at a minimum.
Donald Trump is going to be consumed with that day and night.
He's consumed with it right now and they haven't even launched the trials yet.
So here is the question.
What is the evidence that this is going to benefit Republicans?
Again, you can have as much sympathy as you want for President Trump, and I feel a lot of the same sympathy.
I just don't understand why that is the case for nominating him for the presidency, given the data that we do have.
There's a poll out today, and it shows that, again, Donald Trump is soaring among Republicans.
63% of Republicans now say they want the former president to run again, according to new polling from the AP.
That is up slightly from 55% who said the same in April when Trump began facing a series of criminal charges.
7 in 10 Republicans now have a favorable opinion of Trump, an uptick from the 60% who said so two months ago.
By the way, those numbers are not enough to win re-election.
If only 7 in 10 Republicans actually like you, that is a major problem.
That is a major red flag.
If Joe Biden were facing an approval rating among Democrats of 60 or 70%, which is what Trump is looking at right now, that would be a disaster area for him.
But here is the problem.
Once you get to the general election, The vote, it's not just a matter of getting out the base.
The base isn't large enough for Donald Trump.
The base for Donald Trump is maybe 40% of the population at its height.
You can get all those people out to vote.
They can only vote once.
You're still gonna need another 5 or 6% of voters, minimum, to even get you in competitive range.
That gets you in competitive range in the Electoral College.
If he's at 46%, that is competitive in the Electoral College, maybe.
To win, he really needs more like 48%.
So where's that other 8% gonna come from?
It would have to theoretically come from independents or Democrats dissatisfied with Joe Biden.
But here is the problem.
Look at those poll numbers.
74% of Republicans say they would support him in November 2024.
That number itself is way too low.
That means a full quarter of Republicans would sit it out rather than vote for Trump in 2024.
53% of Americans say they would definitely not support him if he is the nominee, which means the election is over if that stat is real.
If a pure majority of Americans say they will never vote for you under any circumstances, how do you win?
You can't lose 53% of the vote and win a national election.
Another 11% said they probably would not support him in November of 2024, which leads to 64% of Americans saying that they certainly would not or probably would not vote for Donald Trump in November 2024.
So what is the case that this is suddenly going to turn based on the indictments?
That the more we talk about the indictments and the injustice of the indictments, which is true, the more we talk about that, the more people will rally to Donald Trump's cause.
That seems like echo chamber kind of stuff to me.
And there are some people who are in my industry who are going to fib to you and tell you that the more you talk about this, the more popular Donald Trump will become.
I do not see the evidence of that.
If that were the evidence, I would tell you.
I promise you.
Because I would like to see a Republican replace Joe Biden, and if that Republican is Donald Trump, that's fine.
But the problem that I have is that I don't see that in the data.
And I think it's very easy for people to blind themselves to reality because their feelings on these topics are so strong.
By the way, this is going to have serious down-ballot effects too.
Okay, lest we forget, Donald Trump didn't just lose the 2020 election.
He also led to additional losses in places like Georgia in 2021.
Georgia is a red state.
It is a red state.
How do I know?
Because Brian Kemp crushed Stacey Abrams in his last gubernatorial run.
The legislature in Georgia is red.
And yet it has two Democratic senators.
Why?
Because Donald Trump was a drag on the senatorial ballot.
He was a massive drag, not just in 2021, but also in 2022.
When he handpicked Herschel Walker and then Herschel Walker ran basically on 2020.
And it turns out people don't like that sort of stuff.
It also turns out that the people of Georgia are not particularly interested in hearing that the election was stolen, and that they don't know how to run an election in Georgia.
So, I understand why people are angry at Mike Pence, because they believe that Pence should be standing stronger with Trump against legal indictments.
I also understand Mike Pence's view on some of this stuff, which is, well, I was the one that Donald Trump was saying could stop the election from actually being certified, which is false, and then people were threatening to kill me, so I'm not super hot on that.
But when Mike Pence says the Georgia election was not stolen, He happens to be correct.
The evidence is not there.
Now Donald Trump says he's going to present a slate of new evidence on Monday.
Now as I think, I don't think he actually is going to present a slate of brand new evidence that totally shakes things up.
I think he's going to present an awful lot of speculation and rewarmed sort of microwavable leftovers that have already been examined.
None of these things have been filed in court.
What that really is more about is establishing that he doesn't have requisite intent to commit the crime that he is being charged with in the state of Georgia.
He's gonna say, I legitimately believed I was deprived of the election, even if I'm wrong, it's what I legitimately believe, right?
That's really what Monday, I think, is more about.
Suffice it to say, I'm not sure that you can win Georgia as a presidential candidate after saying over and over and over that every election in the state of Georgia is rigged against you.
And ripping on the popular governor of the state of Georgia in the process, trying to primary him with David Perdue, who then got wiped out by like 40 points in the primaries.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, so Mike Pence yesterday came out and he suggested that the Georgia election was
not stolen.
This should not be a matter of massive public controversy at this point.
I'm sorry, it really should not.
In fact, the Georgia Secretary of State literally went and asked, through the vote, which are the people behind 2,000 mules, they asked them for the evidence of the charges that they had been constantly making, and through the vote asked them to stop asking.
Okay, so here's Mike Pence saying the thing that you're not supposed to say, apparently.
Despite what the former president and his allies have said for now more than two and a half years, the Georgia election was not stolen, and I had no right to overturn the election on January 6th.
He happens to be correct about that.
But here's the even more important thing.
A president who keeps saying over and over that Georgia steals elections is not likely to do amazing in elections, especially because Republican voters in Georgia may say, well, if the election is going to get stolen anyway, why do I bother going to the polls?
Again, the one question that Trump really has not answered to, I think, anyone's satisfaction if they're watching is, you say the last election was stolen.
You won, but it was stolen from you.
How do you plan on preventing that this time?
Every candidate you put up for Secretary of State in the various states lost.
So, how do you actually plan on stopping the steal this time if it's about stopping the steal?
Trump just says, we'll stop it.
But at some point, if you make a claim that the election was stolen, you should have a plan to stop all of that.
The problem is that these sorts of claims are not just RIPPING APART THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AT A NATIONAL LEVEL IN TERMS OF WHO THEY NOMINATE.
THEY'RE RIPPING APART STATE PARTIES.
SO IF YOU LOOK AT THE ARIZONA STATE REPUBLICAN PARTY, IT'S IN A STATE OF DISARRAY.
BECAUSE HALF OF THE ARIZONA STATE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS ALWAYS TRUMP.
THE OTHER HALF IS NOT SO HOT ON TRUMP.
VIRTUALLY ALL OF THE SORT OF POLITICOS IN ARIZONA LOOK AT THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN NOMINATED FOR VARIOUS POSITIONS IN ARIZONA, AND THEY SAY, WHAT THE HELL ARE WE DOING?
ARIZONA, JUST A FEW YEARS AGO, WAS A STATE WITH A REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR AND TWO REPUBL That's not evidence of victory.
That is not picking the issues that matter to the people of Arizona and focusing in on those issues like a laser beam.
That's focusing in on Maricopa County audits, which by the way, that audit resulted in more votes for Joe Biden than it did for votes added for Donald Trump.
Is focusing in on Carrie Lake's bizarre, quixotic quest to reclaim the governorship of Arizona on the basis of presumably no evidence that she can actually present in court and win with?
Is that what they want to run on?
What is the plan here?
And when you talk to people in Arizona or in the Arizona GOP, they're tearing their hair out because their money, their money raising is gone.
Their fundraising is gone.
A lot of their ground game is gone because it's been dedicated to this sort of stuff.
It's not just Arizona, by the way.
Michigan is getting torn apart right now because of all of this.
According to the Wall Street Journal, When a fight broke out at a closed-door meeting of the Michigan GOP State Committee, a kick to the groin and broken dentures interrupted discussion of the dismal finances of the state Republican Party.
The altercation last month at the Dougherty Hotel in Clare, Michigan made clear the Michigan Republican Party, now dominated by its right flank staunchly aligned with former President Trump, has descended into chaos.
It can barely fundraise.
It has all but gone broke.
State lawmakers have taken to raising money on their own, unable to rely on the party at a time when Republicans are seeking to reclaim a majority in the state legislature and prepare for the 2024 election in Michigan, a crucial presidential swing state.
Michigan GOP's infighting is an extreme example of the dysfunction in many states, as the Chamber of Commerce Republicans who used to define the party gave way to populists who are deeply skeptical of elites and institutions of power.
Now, you could make common cause between those two things.
The so-called Chamber of Commerce, you know, people who actually care about business climate in states?
They don't have to be at odds with the so-called populists.
But what you do need to do is pick issues that your candidates can win on and then run the parties in order to win the elections.
What I don't understand is the party Political parties, believe it or not, are not supposed to be repositories of principle principally.
That's really not what they're about.
Political parties are supposed to be about victory.
They are vehicles for victory.
I'll explain in just one second.
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Okay, so, political parties used to be vehicles for victory.
What that meant is that, yeah, there were a set of party bosses and those party bosses focused in very heavily on who could win elections.
Then, in a populist move, a lot of these parties, Democrat and Republican, decided to devolve more authority to the voting population inside the parties.
And what that meant is that the best organized positions inside those parties were likely to win.
The best organized positions were often held by the people who had very, very strong positions.
All of that is fine if there is a counterbalance which asks the question of who can win.
However, when the party becomes a non-profit, Then you got a problem.
Okay, in the non-profit world, here's the way the non-profit world works in general.
I know, I used to work for a conservative non-profit.
Non-profits work to lose.
Okay, this is very often the case.
Not for everybody, there are a lot of non-profits doing amazing work, but the general non-profit model, the metric of success is what?
Well, it isn't profit, it's a non-profit, right?
The metric of success for Daily Wire in terms of marks we have to hit is audience size and money earned, because we are a business and we have to employ people.
That is the milieu in which we work.
Non-profits are designed not to make money.
So how do they actually make their money?
The way that they make their money is by magnifying the problem.
What happens to a non-profit if the problem it is designed to fight goes away?
Like what happens?
Like what happens if you are a non-profit?
Let's say a non-profit that is dedicated to school vouchers.
And let's say the school vouchers actually get done.
Like the school vouchers actually work.
You get them.
Well then presumably you just kind of go back to your day job.
So nonprofits very often are interested in the problem of magnifying the size of the problem and presenting it as the most important problem in human history.
Well, if you are the Republican Party, your goal is to win elections.
That should be your goal, right?
That was your metric of success.
But what if the metric for success changes?
And the metric of success is no longer winning, which would be actually measurable.
And if it were measurable, you'd be punished for not hitting those metrics, right?
When people at Daily Wire don't do their job, they get fired.
When people in non-profit don't do their job, very often they just stick around and claim that the problem they're fighting has gotten worse.
Okay, the Republican Party is supposed to work more like an LLC than a non-profit.
In other words, it either delivers victory or everybody gets their ass booted out the door.
But lately, that's not the way that it's working.
If you lose, you stick around and you claim that you have to stay and that you lost because the problem is just so big.
In fact, every time you lose, the problem gets even bigger, which is why you're even more necessary.
But then you lose.
But that's because the problem is getting even bigger and you're even more necessary.
But that's just because the problem is getting even bigger, which is why you lose.
You see, it's an endless cycle of uselessness.
And that's a real problem because, again, meanwhile, Democrats are winning.
The Democratic Party is a party that is dedicated to victory, which is why they have been winning consistently.
Now, you could design a party with an apparatus that actually is oriented toward victory.
That's happened in the state of Florida, where the party is oriented toward taking political positions that are victorious across a broad swath of the population, for example.
There are other states that do this, too.
It's not just Florida.
The New York Republican Party actually outdid itself in the last election cycle by nominating a series of pretty good candidates in swing seats and also pursuing redistricting.
That was very helpful.
But if you have state Republican parties that have basically decided that their goal is to just yell at the problem a lot, and the louder they yell, the more they lose, which means they have to yell even louder, which means they lose, then how exactly do they plan to achieve victory here?
I don't see the plan.
Give me the plan and maybe I'll side with you.
But I'm not seeing the plan right now.
All I'm seeing is people who believe But the louder they yell, the more the problem gets solved.
That is not how any problem in your life has ever been solved.
It's not how any political problem gets solved either.
That doesn't mean you can't have a populist grassroots movement in favor of a position on a topic that is popular.
That is how you win.
The Parents Movement is a very conservative position.
It's super conservative.
It's how you end up with the Republican governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin.
That was a very conservative movement, but why?
It was driven at a parent population that just did not want sexual indoctrination of kids.
They picked an issue, and they polarized it.
I'll tell you the one issue that if Republicans run on it, they will get skunked in 2024, and that is the election of 2020.
If the election of 2020 is what they choose to run on in 2024 in all of these states, and everything becomes a loyalty test to President Trump, as opposed to about getting rid of Joe Biden, Republicans will lose, and they will not lose it.
Cheap.
It will be very, very costly.
By the way, I should remind everybody at this point that because of the intervention of Donald Trump in those Georgia Senate races, if you worry about Biden inflation, if you're at $7 trillion spending packages, that is because Democrats had control of the Senate, which they never should have had.
And again, we should be focused on Joe Biden's record because it absolutely sucks.
By the way, Joe Biden is now in the consistent cover your ass mode.
So Joe Biden has now announced that he is going to be visiting Maui.
on Monday. That was after he spent the entire week vacationing and ignoring questions about it.
This is the way that Joe Biden's shtick actually works. The way that Joe Biden's shtick actually
works is that he makes a boo-boo, and then the boo-boo starts to get worse and worse and worse.
And then finally, he slaps a band-aid on the boo-boo. And as the gangrenous wound sets in,
leading to possible amputation, the media declared that the problem has now been fixed.
So Joe Biden and First Lady Jill will travel to Hawaii on Monday. The President and First Lady
will travel to Maui on Monday, according to the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre,
to meet with first responders, survivors, and federal, state, and local officials in
the wake of deadly wildfires on the island.
Maybe he'll vacation there.
Maybe he'll go on a bike ride and have some ice cream while he's there as well.
Have some Kona ice or something.
He'll really enjoy himself, because that's what Joe Biden, of course, is best at.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden and his team, they continue to promote the idea that he's doing a wonderful job.
So you are paying like $700 more a month in basic expenses now, thanks to Joe Biden.
But at least Joe Biden and team have spent trillions of dollars on useless climate policies.
That's exciting.
So the White House is now celebrating year one of the Inflation Reduction Act.
One of the largest-scale boondoggles in American history.
A ginormous bill largely dedicated not to reducing inflation, but to passing along subsidies to green energy companies.
Here's Corinne Jean-Pierre pushing the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
As you all know, today is the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Most one-year-olds can barely walk, but this one-year-old is up and running.
I couldn't help myself, sorry.
Up and running.
So that's very exciting.
We're very excited about the Inflation Reduction Act and everything that it's doing.
This one-year-old has run directly into a wall and is bleeding on the floor, and you're standing there cheering.
It's absolutely insane.
Meanwhile, the Deputy NEC Director, Bharat Ramamurthy, he showed up and explained that the Inflation Reduction Act is actually a green investment.
Remember when we said that and we were told that that's not true?
Because it was called, after all, the Inflation Reduction Act, and every act that is named after a thing is that thing.
So it reduced inflation, even if it didn't reduce inflation.
Well, now they're finally admitting that it was just, you know, a climate boondoggle.
Hey, Beran, it was reported that the president said at a fundraiser the other day that it probably wasn't the best named legislation, and I'm wondering what the White House would want to call it if it were fresh today.
Maybe you could call it the Economic Growth Inflation Reduction Deficit Reduction Cost Savings Act, Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction Bill.
It did a lot.
It accomplished a lot of really important priorities for this country.
It is putting us in a position to lead on clean energy production.
Remember, this is going to be a multi-trillion dollar global market for clean energy.
Wow, how exciting, guys.
I mean, they lied and everybody laughs about it because this is the way this White House works.
I mean, they lied.
They said it was about inflation reduction and that's how they passed it.
And Joe Manchin said it would reduce inflation, all the rest.
And then it was just, you know, a bunch of giveaways to the friends of the Biden administration, which is how this place works.
Meanwhile, John Podesta, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, another Obama holdover and Hillary Clinton holdover, he says people across the spectrum support Joe Biden's green mandates, which is weird because I don't see any data to that effect.
Across the political spectrum, they support the movement to cleaner forms of energy, cleaner forms of transportation, and the other processes I mentioned, industrial processes as well, because it has enormous benefits to the economy, to job creation, to business investment, To public health?
To everything, guys.
So, how do you feel about the Biden administration spending, you know, a trillion dollars of your money on random crap while you can't pay the bills?
Do you feel good about that?
Because I feel like you probably shouldn't feel that good about that.
I don't think many people do feel that good about that.
You know what would be great is if the Republican candidates were talking about that.
Have you seen any of them talking about that?
Mueller?
Bueller.
It would also be amazing if the Republican candidates continued to talk about the corruption inside the Biden family.
So, as we'll talk about a little bit later on in the show, this stuff has been well known for a very long time.
The level of corruption in the Biden family is extraordinary.
It's absolutely extraordinary.
It extends to his brothers, Jim and Frank.
It extends to his sister.
It extends to his kids.
I mean, Joe Biden has basically been the piggy bank for this entire family for 40 years.
Closing deals, getting people hired, all on the back of the influence that he could wield in Washington D.C.
And he's not been shy about it for any amount of time at all.
Again, I mean, Hunter Biden literally sent a text to his own daughter saying that he paid his dad's bills.
I don't know what else you need here.
But apparently the Biden administration is just going to try and get away with it.
So here is Karine Jean-Pierre saying that the real thing about Joe Biden and Hunter is that Joe is just really proud of how Hunter is rebuilding his life.
That's really the story here.
As it relates to Hunter Biden, we've been very clear.
We refer everyone to his representatives.
The president loves his son.
He is proud of how his son is rebuilding his life.
And as far as anything specific about any investigation, any criminal investigation, we just are going to be consistent and just not comment.
Okay, so here is the problem, of course.
Well, Joe Biden tries to pass this off as just, you know, an interior family notion.
David Weiss, the special counsel, who's now been given special counsel status after having tried to cut a sweetheart deal that completely blew up in his face.
Well, now, theoretically, he could be going after Hunter Biden, as he should, for Foreign Agents Registration Act violations, FARA violations.
Will he do that?
We'll find out, but we are very far from done.
We are very, very far from done with all the Hunter Biden stuff.
So why are Republicans still talking about, you know, other things?
Focusing on Ancelot?
If you follow the shiny object, you lose.
If you follow the shiny object, you lose.
And again, the biggest non-shiny object, the thing that, the massive elephant in the room is the failure of the Joe Biden economy.
We'll get to all the news on that in just one second.
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Also, Candace Owens has just wrapped the 10-part series Convicting a Murderer.
You're not going to want to miss it.
It's one of our most ambitious projects yet here at DailyWirePlus.
You might think you're familiar with the Stephen Avery case and everything that actually happened in Manitowoc County.
This is especially true if you actually watch Making a Murderer, which is the Netflix hit series.
Well, coming soon, Candace will unveil the shocking parts of Avery's story that were omitted in the Netflix series.
I'm excited to present the Convicting a Murderer trailer.
Check it out.
This is a collect call from an inmate at the Calumet County Jail.
The man served 18 years in prison until DNA evidence cleared his name.
The Two Rivers man was convicted of sexual assault in 1985 but exonerated with DNA evidence in 2003.
So this is the infamous Avery lot.
Now, two years later, he again finds himself tied to a police investigation.
Accused of murdering Teresa Hallbuck on the Avery property.
Stephen Avery's 16-year-old nephew admitted his involvement in the rape and murder of Teresa Hallbuck.
The car is discovered just around the bend.
It was just this worldwide phenomenon.
I think they framed this guy.
I think he intended to crush the vehicle, but ran out of time.
Avery thinks the 36 million dollar lawsuit he filed is why he's being targeted in this investigation.
Netflix made millions of dollars from making a murderer.
But the filmmakers left out very important details.
Mountains of evidence that you have not yet seen.
The blood vial.
The most egregious manipulation from the movie.
Interrogations.
That's when he started beating me because I told him that he's sick.
Cell phones.
And I saw melted plastic parts of a cell phone.
Interviews.
Her arms were pinned behind her head.
They made Steven Avery look like a victim.
Do you believe your brother's guilty?
I don't know if I'm a suspect.
I got an eye.
I'm getting sick and tired of media deception.
description.
Evidence piling up.
Why would they omit so many different things?
Why are you editing my testimony?
I am not going to make the same mistake that the filmmakers did.
Rearranging the testimony.
They delete a portion of it at the end.
How could they claim to care about the truth?
They all know that Stephen Avery committed this crime.
911, what is your emergency?
The evidence forces me to conclude that you are the most dangerous individual ever to
set foot in this courtroom.
To get the rest of this story, you have to watch Convicting a Murderer.
It comes to you this September.
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Meanwhile, again, the biggest issue here is Joe Biden's economy, which is failing for the vast majority of the American public who have experienced mass inflation under Joe Biden.
And Democrats keep trying to happy talk this thing.
They will end August 19th at 1159 p.m. Eastern Time.
Okay, meanwhile, again, the biggest issue here is Joe Biden's economy, which is failing
for the vast majority of the American public, who have experienced mass inflation under
Joe Biden.
And Democrats keep trying to happy talk this thing.
Chuck Schumer, who is inexplicably the Senate majority leader, he said today that our economy
is doing just fantastically well.
As of yesterday, most economists fear the most in the future.
And it's two things.
One, that China's economy is weakening too quickly, and that will have impact on exports, imports.
And two, that the United States economy is too strong.
It is.
Our economy is doing so well, and it's in good part because of the work we in the Senate and the President did over the last summer.
The infrastructure bill, the chips and science bill, and today we're celebrating the one-year anniversary of the IRA.
Probably the most significant pieces of legislation that's been passed since the Great Society.
Well, he keeps talking about how wonderful the economy is, which is weird since the U.S.
mortgage rate is now 7.16%.
This matches the highest rate for mortgages since 2001.
It is crimping both sales and refinancing activity.
The contract rate on a 30-year fixed rose 7 basis points to 7.16% in the week ending August 11th.
The latest jump in borrowing costs presents a fresh headwind for the housing market, just as the sector had been showing signs of finding its footing.
So we have credit card debt that is stacking up.
We have people who are not going to be able to buy new homes, which means that the prices eventually are going to drop because the market is going to drop, which means there will be people who are underwater on their own homes, which sets us up for another real estate problem.
Meanwhile, there's a rising risk of bank downgrades, according to The Hill.
That's a serious problem as well, obviously.
Fitch Ratings Analyst Chris Wolf has warned that dozens of U.S.
banks, including JPMorgan Chase, could face downgrades if the rating agency's assessment of the industry's health declines a little bit further.
Wolf was the lead author on Fitch's commentary when the rating agency lowered its operating environment score for U.S.
banks from a AA to a AA- in June.
If Fitch downgrades the industry score even further from AA- to A+, the agency would then be forced to reevaluate ratings on each of the more than 70 banks it actually covers.
And then, if institutions like J.P.
Morgan are cut, Fitch would have to at least consider downgrades on all of its peers' ratings.
So, what we are looking at is the real possibility of a massive economic problem coming.
And meanwhile, Joe Biden just keeps talking about how wonderful you have it.
How incredible things are.
Republicans should be talking about the economy nearly full time at this point.
Again, that is where the public does not approve of Joe Biden's economic performance.
I mean, again, if you look at Joe Biden's approval rating right now, topic by topic on the economy, he is getting absolutely skunked.
It is a massive problem for him.
And yet somehow Republicans are not focusing in on that, which I don't understand.
They're focusing on everything else.
Again, at a certain point, you have to wonder about that, given the fact that the economy remains, according to Ipstos, the number one issue, with a bullet.
Like, 20% of Americans count the economy, unemployment, and jobs as the number one issue facing the country, followed by crime and corruption.
Those are issues that Republicans should be hammering.
The third issue, they say, is environment and climate, but the fourth is immigration.
Republicans, Democrats, and Independents all say that the economy is the top issue.
And by the way, all Americans, 69% of Americans say that the country is headed in the wrong direction.
That we're on the wrong track.
Wouldn't that be evidence that Republicans can win if they refocus a little bit here?
The question is whether they actually will or whether they will not.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party continues to prop up, you know, elderly, senile people.
Here I'm speaking specifically about Dianne Feinstein.
In fact, there's a brand new court filing out from the daughter of Dianne Feinstein alleging that she is actually the victim of elder abuse.
According to sanfranciscogate.com, the co-trustees of a trust in the name of Richard Bloom, the deceased wealthy husband of Dianne Feinstein, have now been accused of elder abuse against Feinstein in a recent court filing submitted by her daughter Catherine, who has limited power of attorney over the senator.
The filing, submitted August 8th, partially confirmed what had previously been reported by other outlets that Catherine Feinstein, a former San Francisco County Superior Court judge and current San Francisco Fire Commissioner, has limited power of attorney over her mom, which the senator signed over to her July 23rd, 2023.
The recent court filing notes this entitles Catherine to make legal decisions for her mother in certain civil-related matters.
Well, in the August 8th filing, Catherine Feinstein made the striking allegation that Michael Klein, Mark Shulvick, and Verit Mems, who control the Disputed Trust, are committing financial elder abuse against the 90-year-old senator.
In the filing, Catherine alleges the co-trustees didn't fund a trust her mother is the sole income beneficiary of, and they've not made required distributions to the senator since Blum's death in 2022.
Catherine, who's Feinstein's daughter from a previous marriage, also alleges that the co-trustees are purposefully slow-rolling payments to the senator because they intend to benefit Richard Blum's biological daughters, who stand to inherit millions of dollars that should go to Senator Feinstein if the trustees never make the required distributions to her.
Among other asks, Catherine wants the courts to suspend the co-trustees pending a decision on whether to remove them.
Now all of this suggests that perhaps this should not be, you know, a sitting United States Senator, given the fact that basically all of her financial decisions are now being made for her.
So her vote is making your financial decisions for you, but she is having all of her financial decisions made by trustees at this point.
These are the people that we have appointed to the highest positions of power in America.
Meanwhile, next week is going to be the first Republican debate.
President Trump is putting the RNC in a bit of a bind.
He has refused to sign the RNC Loyalty Pledge.
He said that last week.
He's expected to announce in the coming days whether or not he's going to attend the event.
It's very unlikely, I think, that he's going to attend the event.
According to The Hill, RNC Chairwoman Ron Romney McDaniel must now navigate the thorny situation of appeasing Trump while maintaining her control as head of the party.
Brian Sychik, a Republican strategist and Trump campaign alum, says it's a distinct possibility the Republican nominee for president could simply decide to shun the RNC itself.
When a candidate refuses to play by the rules, it obviously weakens the RNC's position.
But here's the reality.
Donald Trump was never going to sign an agreement like this.
And frankly, I think it's kind of a dumb thing.
Because no matter what Donald Trump says, can he be held to it?
What are the consequences if he doesn't?
If he signs the pledge and later he's like, I meant everybody but Chris Christie, then what is anybody going to do about it?
Like the answer is nothing.
McDaniel told CNN's Chris Wallace recently, it's beat Biden pledge.
And what we're saying, and the debate committee has met for over two years, people from Alaska to Illinois to Tennessee, is if you're going to stand on the RNC debate stage, you should be able to support the nominee and beat Biden.
Everybody has to sign the beat Biden pledge.
Everybody.
It's across the board.
The pledge states the candidate will support the eventual nominee of the party primary, and the candidate will not participate in any debate the RNC has not sanctioned.
The pledge is part of a criteria Republican candidates must meet to qualify for that presidential debate.
But again, in August 2015, then-candidate Trump was the only candidate on stage at one of the debates who wouldn't raise his hand to show that he would support the eventual nominee in the 2016 primary.
And there's something kind of wrong with this, you know, it's just a general rule.
If what you're about is Republicans winning, like you'd like to see Joe Biden not be in office, the fact That loyalty only runs one way.
That there is just expected loyalty from everybody to Trump.
But the minute that Trump is asked whether he'll support another nominee, if that person beats him, he refuses to raise his hand.
It kind of shows you where things stand right now.
The only reason there was a need to do a loyalty pledge was because of Donald Trump, said Alex Stroman, a Republican strategist and RNC alum.
But that's not true, obviously.
Because Trump himself has sort of refused to sign on the dotted line right now.
I mean, it's Trump that everybody is afraid of here.
It's not that other Republicans are going to have to pledge to support Trump.
They did in 2020.
It's whether Donald Trump is willing to support the party if he's not the person who's in charge.
Jennifer Horne, who is a spokesperson for Trump, she says the RNC needs Trump a lot more than Trump needs the RNC.
If they lose Trump, they lose the support of the Trump voters and their base for the Senate candidates, their House candidates, their state candidates.
Horne also said that if Trump decides to debate without signing the pledge, the other candidates should be given the same treatment.
So, we'll see where this heads.
Honestly, a debate without Trump on the stage is very likely to benefit some of the fringeier candidates because, again, those candidates are going to be able to free wheel, and they're not going to be the target of attacks.
If Trump were on the stage, presumably some of the other candidates would go after Trump, and that would turn into a brawl.
If he's not, then it'll turn into the lobster pot, right?
The crab pot.
It's going to be a bunch of people trying to drag down the nearest competitor.
Presumably, that means Ron DeSantis will take the brunt of the incoming in the debate next week.
So we'll continue to bring you the latest on all of that.
Again, in the national polling, DeSantis is still running second, but his numbers have declined relatively markedly.
Although, according to Quinnipiac, he's still up at about 18%, which puts him 39% percentage points behind Trump.
In Iowa, for what it's worth, he is trailing right now in the RealPolitics polling average by 27 points, 44 to 17.
So we'll continue to bring you the latest on all of that.
Alrighty, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So things I like today.
I said earlier, the Biden family is deeply corrupt and has been for 40 years.
The best book on this?
It's a book by a reporter named Ben Schreckinger called The Bidens, Inside the First Family's 50 Year Rise to Power.
He goes through the details of the entire business relationship between Joe and Hunter, Joe and Frank, Joe and Jim, basically how since the earliest days of Joe Biden's rise to power, he was using that power in ways that benefited members of his family.
And his members of his family were using Joe Biden's name in order to get ahead.
I mean, it is a consistent pattern.
And it's always the same.
I mean, it's literally the same story over and over.
Joe Biden is a shadowy background figure being used by members of his family in order to obtain benefits for themselves.
And then him denying that he ever knew anything about it.
And this ranges from everything to fundraising to the kind of jobs that he was able to get Hunter coming out of college and law school.
It includes Things like how he presumably helped his brother obtain financing for some of his businesses, even though his brother is a complete ne'er-do-well, Jim is a complete ne'er-do-well.
Somehow, this family has been clearing tens of millions of dollars over the course of the past few decades, and none of it has to do with Joe, despite the fact that none of them have any real qualifications for literally anything.
The book is definitely worth the read.
Again, the Bidens inside the first family's 50-year rise to power.
One of the things that's pretty amazing, actually, is that if you search for biographies of Joe Biden, they don't really exist.
You see his memoirs?
There's like a couple of biographies that are maybe 200 pages of Joe Biden.
But for a man who's been in politics for 50 years, there really should be more there.
There really isn't because no one wants to do a deep dive on the guy.
Why?
Well, number one, he's really boring.
But number two, he's like old school, just corrupt.
He's just an old school, normal, corrupt politician who cares much more about his own personal benefit than he does about anything remotely resembling a policy agenda or the country.
The fact that he's been able to get away with it for all of these years is, again, just an homage to the media's ability to whitewash somebody who's been obviously dirty for decades on end.
Okay, time for some quick things that I hate.
So this has to be, you know, the dumbest story of the day.
So there's a Republican congressperson named Max Miller, Republican from Ohio, and he stepped in it after he told a Christian Republican activist to delete a quote-unquote bigoted post That's really stupid.
That's super, super stupid.
Truly.
Christians believe in Jesus.
They also believe that Jesus is the way, the path, and the light.
This is what they believe, obviously.
They are Christian.
to former President Trump before he was elected to Congress in 2022, then said it.
This is one of the most bigoted tweets I've ever seen.
Delete it, Lizzie.
Religious freedom in the United States applies to every religion you've gone too far.
That's really stupid.
That's super, super stupid.
Truly.
Wait, Christians believe in Jesus.
They also believe that Jesus is the way, the path and the light, right?
This is what they believe.
Obviously, they are Christian.
I'm not asking them to believe what I believe.
They can believe what they want to believe.
So long as they are not attempting to forcibly convert me, we don't have a problem here.
You can believe I'm going to hell.
Many people do.
I don't care.
That's fine.
We'll find out afterward.
The fact that anybody would say to a Christian, how dare you?
This is offensive to say that your faith suggests that there's no hope outside of Jesus.
Well, I mean, I believe that there's no hope outside of, say, the seven mitzvot b'nei Noach.
I'm like, I think that you are destined for a rough afterlife if you do not perform certain basic commandments.
That's true of pretty much every religion.
So I'm relatively confused as to why exactly it's bigoted.
It really is not bigoted.
Miller said, Well, again, that is a Jewish perspective, but you can't tell Christians what to believe.
That is a very strange take.
He ended up actually walking it back.
As he should have.
He ended up apologizing for it, actually.
Again, as he should have.
He says, I posted something earlier that conveyed a message I did not intend.
I will not try to hide from my mistake or run from it.
And then he added, I sincerely apologize to Lizzie and everyone who read my post.
And that is, you know, that is the way you do an apology, at least.
So at least there's that.
But let me just make it clear that religious freedom means a bunch of people can believe stuff about religion that you don't yourself believe.
That is totally fine.
Okay.
Coming up, we're going to be jumping into the mailbag, so stick around for that.
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