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Aug. 22, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

46:49

Joe Biden’s Hawaiian Crocodile Tears

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	Well, folks, before we jump into the show, I want to let you know that the full, unedited, non-censored version of this show is available over at DailyWirePlus.
	Head on over to DailyWirePlus.com right now and get yourself a subscription so you can watch the whole thing.
	So you can check your calendar, as you will see.
	Today is August 22nd.
	The fires in Lahaina that actually wiped out the entire town, it may have killed a thousand people.
	Those wildfires, well, you know, they happened on August 8th.
	So it is currently almost two weeks beyond the wildfires.
	I don't know.
	I wish I knew the answer.
	I wish I knew the answer to that.
	I would be happy to answer that.
	You have no estimate as to how many children are missing?
	Nothing?
	he says he has no idea how many kids actually died in these wildfires in Lahaina. Here he was.
	I don't know. I wish I knew the answer. Yes you do. How many children are missing?
	You know. If I knew the answer to that, I would be happy to answer that. You have no
	estimate as to how many children are missing? Nothing? I guess we can end this right now.
	This is one of the biggest questions that the people of Lahaina have.
	But you don't want to answer.
	It always takes one or two to ruin it for everybody.
	Well, we could say that about you.
	No idea how many kids are missing.
	The president of the United States, though, he was on vacation.
	He was in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
	And here's how the rules of politics work, gang.
	If you're the president, and a major natural disaster happens on your watch, and you are apparently not within eyeshot of the thing, then we say that you don't have empathy and that you are very, very bad.
	This was true of George W. Bush when it came to Hurricane Katrina.
	It was true of Ted Cruz when it came to freezing temperatures in Texas.
	And apparently it is not true if you're a Democrat.
	If you're a Democrat, you can do whatever the hell you want.
	So Joe Biden went on vacation to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
	He was asked specifically about the death toll in Lahaina.
	And he said no comment.
	And then he rode around on his bike and he had some ice cream and he sat on the beach for like a week.
	And then he went to Lake Tahoe in Nevada.
	And he sat there at the mansion of a major donor.
	And then he took the trouble to finally fly to Maui.
	Now you would imagine this is when the famed Joe Biden empathy would make its appearance.
	See, here's the thing about Joe Biden.
	He's not empathetic.
	Joe Biden is a very selfish creature.
	If you look at Joe Biden's entire life history, what you see is that Joe Biden cares chiefly about himself and also about people in his immediate familial circle.
	He's always been willing to use his power in order to corruptly enrich all of those people, including himself.
	He does not see political power as a way to, quote-unquote, help the little guy, as he pretends.
	He sees it as a way to help him and his family and the people he is most close to.
	And if that means denying the family name to, like, a four-year-old, he'll do that too.
	But he's been able to get ahead because the media have been able to shield him based on this faux, supposedly roguish charm that Joe Biden once had.
	Now, I've never seen it.
	I don't understand why anyone would find Joe Biden charming.
	But this was the lie about Joe Biden for four decades when, in reality, he's just layers filled with I mean, that is what Joe Biden is.
	The problem is that as he gets older, all of the layers of charm are worn away.
	There's nothing left, except a bunch of false old family stories that he trots out in lieu of empathy.
	It's really quite ugly.
	When you see it, it's really ugly.
	The first time, he went to somebody's house and the person had died, a soldier had died, and he talked about Bo.
	The first time he did that, he got a little bit of sympathy for him.
	And then, after he did it, time and time and time again, the sympathy started to wear away.
	Well, this time, he was visiting Lahaina, and he proceeded to tell a story about how he knows what it is like.
	to lose a home.
	He knows what it is like.
	So first of all, let me just, as I've said before, explain how mourning works.
	In the Jewish community, we have very formalized rituals for mourning.
	I'm an Orthodox Jew, so we do something called Shiva.
	Shiva means seven.
	Seven days after somebody dies, for that seven days, you literally just bring people food, you do all of the minyanim, all of the Jewish prayers that you have to do are done in the home of the mourners, The mourners don't leave their home for a full week.
	Everybody just comes and visits them.
	They talk about the person who died.
	And the first rule if you are a person who is visiting the house of mourning is keep your mouth shut.
	You don't go and talk about all of your personal experiences because that's awful and selfish.
	It's actually not empathetic.
	If you walk into the house of somebody who has died and you start talking about how you know exactly what it's like, how they feel because you also had somebody who died.
	That is an incredibly arrogant and selfish thing to do.
	It's like the first rule of visiting a house in mourning.
	Literally the first rule.
	Joe Biden breaks that rule.
	He does it early, he does it often, and then not only does he break the rule, he does it with stories that aren't even related.
	So, he visits Lahaina, and people had their relatives burned to a crisp in Lahaina.
	People literally, like, the worst wildfire disaster in modern American history, by a long shot.
	And Joe Biden's first response is, what if I tell a story about how my house burned down?
	Now, to understand this story in proper context, what you have to understand is his house didn't burn down.
	In fact, Joe Biden He's told this story before, and this story is false.
	What actually happened is that one time there was a small kitchen fire caused by a lightning strike in his home.
	It was under control in 20 minutes.
	His house didn't burn down.
	Nobody was hurt.
	Nobody died.
	But to Joe Biden, empathy means pretending that he cares about you while talking about himself.
	That is the nature of who Joe Biden is.
	So here was Joe Biden in Lahaina yesterday.
	I don't want to compare difficulties, but we have a little sense, Jill and I, what it's like to lose a home.
	Years ago, now 15 years ago, I was in Washington doing Meet the Press.
	It was a sunny Sunday, and lightning struck at home on a little lake that's outside of our home, not a lake, a big pond, and hit a wire and came up underneath our home into the heating duct, the air conditioning duct.
	Just like this?
	To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my 67 Corvette, and my cat.
	But all kidding aside, I watched the firefighters, the way they responded.
	You know, there's an old expression.
	I grew up right across the street from a fire hall in Claremont, Delaware.
	The hell's wrong with this guy?
	Seriously, what the hell's wrong with him?
	I mean, aside from his senility.
	What is wrong with him as a human being?
	This is not the first time he's trotted this out in the middle of talking about fires.
	He apparently did it in 2013 also.
	He also did it apparently in 2022 when he was talking about another wildfire.
	He's constantly trotting out this story.
	Okay, a few weeks back, my family, there's a lot of lightning here in the state of Florida, some lightning got grounded near our house and it set a small fire outside of our kitchen.
	This is a true story.
	And then it was put out and the firefighters came.
	We left our house for like an hour.
	We came back.
	How's that relevant to Lahaina?
	It's not.
	It's not relevant at all because you know what didn't happen?
	Anything tragic or horrifying.
	It's not like good story, dude.
	It's like, what is wrong with you?
	What is wrong with you?
	And the reality is that old age strips away all the pretensions.
	Joe Biden cares about Joe Biden.
	Everything is refracted through the prism of Joe Biden.
	He's a person who owns only one surface and it is a mirror, apparently.
	Because all he cares about is how it affects him, how it affects his family, and what does he have to do so he can go back to vacation to Lake Tahoe?
	Let's be real about this.
	What does he really have to do?
	It's an amazing, amazing clip.
	And the fact that, like, imagine for a second, I know we play this game all the time, but it's true because the media are corrupt.
	Imagine if Donald Trump had gone to the site of a wildfire that killed a thousand people, maybe, and talked about how one time he almost lost his car because there was a small kitchen fire in his home.
	Can you imagine?
	Now, Joe Biden has done this repeatedly, like over and over and over.
	And everybody in the media keeps trying to treat him as empathetic old Uncle Joe.
	He's not empathetic.
	He's never been empathetic.
	Joe Biden has always and forever and will forever be about Joe Biden, which is why he has used his personal power for the corrupt purpose of enriching his own family.
	That is who he is.
	I mean, beyond that, obviously the guy is ailing.
	We'll get to that momentarily.
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	Joe Biden also, you know, obviously is no longer with us.
	This clip is pretty insane.
	Here's Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz.
	He's standing next to Joe Biden as Joe Biden concludes his speech.
	Joe Biden doesn't know where he is.
	Joe Biden looks as though he's about to keel over.
	Here is Brian Schatz gently trying to guide the elderly gentleman away from the podium while offering him water.
	He is a very kind gentleman.
	Look at this.
	My goodness, my goodness.
	What a country we've created for ourselves.
	Man, we make great political choices in this country.
	We really, really do.
	Well, meanwhile, the Democrats and the media, they have found their angle on the Hawaii wildfire.
	It is not the incompetence of all the local officials.
	They're Democrats.
	We can't talk about their wild incompetence.
	This, by the way, is true every time there's a natural disaster that strikes a left-wing area of the country.
	If Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans and the mayor there is just absolutely, if it's Ray Nagin and he's the worst mayor in modern American history, And 10,000 people die because he's a crappy mayor.
	And the governor is also a Democrat.
	Well, then you blame the president of the United States and FEMA, obviously.
	If you are a governor in a northeastern state and a hurricane wipes through your state and floods the place, then you blame climate change.
	And if you're in Hawaii, you don't blame the emergency management chief who apparently did not sound emergency sirens as wildfires neared Lahaina.
	We don't blame him.
	We don't blame any of the people who are in charge of water management and conservation in Hawaii.
	We don't blame any of the public officials who left a bunch of dry grass out there to burn at extraordinary heat and speed.
	We don't blame any of those people.
	Of course we blame climate change.
	Now, the reality is, in virtually all of these circumstances, when it comes to wildfires, when it comes to hurricanes, when it comes to virtually any natural disaster, There are two issues.
	One is the actual natural disaster, the size and scope of it.
	And the other is how the public officials built the place.
	How public officials exacerbated or mitigated the problem.
	This is true pretty much everywhere.
	This is why an earthquake of five magnitude will hit Iran and 10,000 people will die, but an earthquake of five magnitude will hit California and nobody will die because the buildings in California are built better than the buildings in Iran.
	So public officials actually matter an awful lot in terms of the regulations, in terms of the response.
	All that stuff matters extraordinarily when it comes to particularly natural disasters.
	Like this is the one thing they have to be pretty good at.
	In Hawaii, they were really bad at it, which is why a thousand people died.
	The chief, Herman Andaya, submitted his resignation citing health reasons, according to county officials.
	A day earlier at a news conference, Andaya defended the decision not to activate the sirens, saying the outdoor alarms are used primarily for tsunamis and would not have helped people because people are trained to seek higher ground when they hear the siren.
	Well, I mean, everybody would have at least looked around and gone, oh crap, a giant fire coming down the hill.
	So, his resignation was accepted.
	Again, this follows hard on the fact that we now know that the water was not released into the area until too late.
	But, as we say, when it comes to media narrative, somebody else has to be blamed.
	It can't be the local Democratic officials.
	That cannot be allowed.
	And it can't be the president for a lackluster response or no comment while he sits on Rehoboth Beach.
	It can't be that.
	It must be climate change.
	So, this is the narrative they're going to go with.
	Hawaii Governor Josh Green, who is the governor of the state where this occurred, he says climate change is the real problem here.
	When you're talking about global warming, are you saying that climate change amplified the cost of human error?
	Yes, it did.
	There's always going to be incredible things that people do to save lives from the firefighters, from citizens, and there's always going to be decisions that are made that I'm sure aren't perfect in the moment.
	But when you have fire that moved more than a mile a minute, And what happened, I'm told by some of the survivors, they were at the initial fire.
	It was put out sometime late in the afternoon in Lahaina.
	And then the firefighters had to go to three other fires that had started because of the conditions.
	When they left, the fire stirred up again.
	And then when the storm winds from Dora, which were that strong, swept it out, it just destroyed everything.
	It was the climate change, you see.
	It was all about the climate change.
	You can expect the Earth gradually warming over the course of the next hundred years or so.
	Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, he did the same exact stuff.
	This is the new normal.
	The new normal is a thousand people dying in Lahaina, apparently.
	Senator, what do you think the most important specific lessons are that can be learned from this to make sure a tragedy of this level does not happen again?
	Well, I think we all have to understand that severe weather events are going to get more frequent and more severe.
	Hawaii is a place that has experienced volcanic eruptions and tsunamis and hurricanes and tropical storms, and we've had a few wildfires, but nothing This is the new normal, guys.
	It's just cities getting flattened by wildfires.
	And I just think this is the new normal for not just the state of Hawaii,
	but for the whole planet, for the whole country. So.
	This is the new normal, guys. It's just cities getting flattened by wildfires. Jay Inslee,
	the governor of Washington, who's been big on the carbon limitation bandwagon for years now, he did the exact same
	thing. He said, well, the big issue is we need to decarbonize. Yeah, you need to
	stop driving that car of yours is the real. There's a giant wildfire that killed a thousand
	people in a high note because you have been using your car too much, guys, your fault. Because the
	fact of the matter is there's a beast at our door and that's the beast of climate change.
	It seems like the whole world is on fire.
	We need to defend ourselves from climate change.
	We need to decarbonize our economy so these fires don't ravage us.
	There's not enough fire trucks in the world to protect us if we don't stop climate change.
	Oh.
	It's all climate change.
	Okay, there's only one problem.
	It's not climate change.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so.
	Is climate change causing all of this?
	The answer is no.
	It is not.
	You know who says that?
	The Washington Post.
	Even the Washington Post is like, no, this is actually not climate change.
	Jeff Masters, meteorologist for Yale Climate Connection says, if you add together a whole bunch of influences, that's how you get a disaster.
	No one thing makes it happen.
	The links between human-caused climate change and fires are well established because global warming means plants can more easily dry out.
	But there's one other issue, which is that in Hawaii, it's also meant more rain.
	One of the things that's happened is increased humidity in Hawaii.
	Some immediate analysis of the winds observed in Hawaii have found Dora's presence may have only increased the gust speed by about five miles per hour, which is not sufficient to explain what exactly happened here.
	The hurricane and its intensity were certainly not the main effect fueling the fires.
	As for the drought conditions that covered more than a third of Maui County, where the most destructive fires burn, there's no direct sign they're a product of climate change, said Abby Frazier, an affiliate faculty member at University of Hawaii.
	While there's a long-term trend of declining precipitation in Hawaii, there isn't enough evidence to suggest this is the product of anything besides normal climate patterns and fluctuations in the Pacific, she said.
	Precipitation patterns that are heavily influenced by El Nino, which returned in June, and by a longer-term pattern known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
	El Nino is known for bringing drier winters, but its arrival doesn't explain the current conditions, said Fraser.
	In the summer, it can bring more precipitation than normal.
	So natural variability is just really strong in Hawaii.
	So what exactly caused it?
	Well, I mean, part of it is the fire-prone grasses and invasive species that have been brought onto the island in order to allow for grazing.
	Some of it is failures of local public officials.
	But here is the beauty.
	When you're a Democratic local official, you can always have the media available to explain away your problems by blaming, you know, the Earth.
	What a wonderful, what a wonderful privilege to be a Democrat.
	It's the sun.
	It's the Earth.
	It's carbon.
	It's life, man.
	It's not you sucking at your job.
	Ever, ever, ever.
	Okay, meanwhile, speaking of people who are sucking at their job, the President of the United States continues to preside over an economy that is really, really on the verge of something quite bad.
	Treasury yields continue to climb, meaning the price of bonds is going down.
	That's how you end up with a higher treasury yield, right?
	Because the way that a yield works is that it is the difference between the facial price of the bond and the return on the bond.
	So that means that people are still investing in the stock market, but it's kind of weird because the so-called inverted yield curve continues to predominate.
	The 10-year yield closed at 4.339%, above the nearly 16-year high it set last Thursday.
	Rising yields have weighed on stocks, with all three major indices logging losses last week.
	The route in bonds has been led by longer-term treasuries.
	In other words, people are not trusting that the government may be able to pay back those bonds, or they are very doubtful about the state of the long-term economy.
	Meanwhile, car prices are about to take a nosedive.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, five years ago, there were a dozen models of new cars selling for less than $20,000.
	In 2023, there was only one.
	For the average American, paying off a new car at current prices demands 42 weeks of income.
	And so you're about to see the prices nosedive when it comes to cars.
	You're also seeing hiring slow down pretty significantly.
	Pay for new hires is declining significantly.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, pay for new hires is starting to shrivel after years of hefty salary bumps requiring workers to reset while financial gains to expect from switching to a new job.
	Again, the red lights are all blinking at this point.
	The only question is when the economy is going to tip.
	You have to feel, if you watch the economy on a daily basis, that what goes up must come down.
	And the effects of an inflationary economy and a stagnating economy with little innovation, with little investment, Those wages are going to come due pretty fast right here.
	Which means, as I've said 1,000 times, Joe Biden is a very, very vulnerable incumbent.
	He's not with us.
	He's unempathetic.
	He's a nasty, corrupt person.
	And he's presiding over a bad economy.
	What does that mean?
	Well, we'll find out what Republicans do this week when they have their first debate.
	We'll get to that momentarily first.
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	Okay.
	So, the big Republican debate is supposed to happen on Wednesday.
	By polling data, Americans, particularly Republicans, would love Trump to participate in the debate.
	He's not going to.
	According to the latest polling data, some 73% of Americans in the Republican Party would like to see Trump join the debate.
	27% agreed with Trump that he should sit it out.
	But only 9% of voters said they would like Trump's opponents to place an emphasis on making the case against Donald Trump.
	So very few people are going to be watching that debate hoping that somebody attacks Donald Trump.
	That basically is going to be Chris Christie's job, right?
	This is his designated lane in the Republican primary, whatever that exists.
	Now, he is showing in polls in New Hampshire, by the way.
	Now, Christie is running very weak in Iowa.
	But right now, according to the latest poll I've seen from New Hampshire, he's showing at 14% in New Hampshire, which is his best poll showing yet.
	Christie, for his part, is attacking Trump with alacrity, suggesting that Trump is a coward.
	He's a coward.
	There's no other conclusion to come to that he's both afraid of me and he's afraid of defending his record.
	And if I had his record, I'd be nervous about showing up, too.
	I mean, let's face it, guys.
	By Wednesday, he's going to be out on bail in four different jurisdictions.
	That really?
	When are we going to stop thinking that's normal?
	What if we allow our country to understand again that nominating someone who's out on bail in four jurisdictions is not a winning formula?
	Okay, so, Christie presumably will make that case at the debate.
	And it'll be interesting to see how people on the stage respond to all that.
	Meanwhile, Democrats are just rooting for casualties on the stage, according to the New York Times.
	After a year of fretting about President Biden's political standing and their electoral chances in 2024, Democrats are at a moment of high confidence.
	As Republicans prepare for their first presidential debate on Wednesday, they'll be watching with bated breath in the hopes that the Republican candidates embrace the likely-to-be-absent Donald J. Trump, defend him over his four criminal indictments, endorse national restrictions on abortion, and call for cuts to Social Security and Medicare in Democrats' dream scenario.
	Even without Trump on stage, Democrats see the Republican White House hopefuls as avatars for what they describe as a party enthrall to its extreme elements.
	Nobody is rooting for the debate to go off the rails more than Democrats praying for Mr. Biden's re-election.
	Well, because they are rooting for casualties, it is worthwhile noting how many of them are pushing rivals to Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida.
	The polls right now show that DeSantis is trailing Trump by a lot.
	continue to double down on a six week abortion ban, that'd be wonderful.
	Thank you for doing this.
	Well, because they are rooting for casualties, it is worthwhile noting how many of them
	are pushing rivals to governor Ron DeSantis in Florida.
	The polls right now show that DeSantis is trailing Trump by a lot.
	There is some evidence that in Iowa, there's life left in DeSantis.
	According to the latest polling data in Iowa, the Trump campaign is doing slightly worse in Iowa
	than theoretically they should be.
	Jay Ann Selzer, the famed Iowa pollster who put out some new numbers in Iowa, it shows that Trump right now is at 43%.
	Meanwhile, DeSantis is at 19%.
	Selzer says that the findings indicate the race is closer than it may first seem.
	That's because in the Iowa caucuses, a voter's second place choice matters.
	So let's say that you are Ron DeSantis, you're the first choice of 19% of the people, and then you vote for Tim Scott, and Tim Scott is not one of the top two.
	And that means that you are going to now get a boost, right?
	Because let's say that you chose Tim Scott and then DeSantis, and then Scott's vote gets tossed out, it's ranked choice voting, and then that second choice vote goes to DeSantis.
	So theoretically, DeSantis could be the winner in Iowa.
	The Des Moines Register notes 63% of likely GOP caucus goers say they support Trump as their first or second choice.
	That footprint is on par with 61% who say the same for DeSantis.
	Also, half of Republicans in that Iowa poll are saying their minds are not yet made up.
	So, what do the media have an interest in?
	They have an interest in fragmenting the field, obviously.
	The more the field is fragmented, if they believe that Trump is the best person for them to run against, which seems pretty evident, then their interest is in propping up other people who are not DeSantis.
	Well, right now, the candidate of the moment who is not DeSantis is Vivek Ramaswamy.
	This presumably is why Kevin Madden, no friend to Republicans, he's a former senior advisor to Mitt Romney, who appears on MSNBC regularly, he says that Vivek is the person with the highest potential on the stage on Wednesday.
	Who are you watching, Kevin?
	I mean, you have a fine-tuned eye to all these different candidates and who has potential people aren't paying attention to.
	You know, I think the greatest potential for this debate comes from Vivek Ramaswamy because if you look at his rapid-fire approach and you look at how he really crystallizes his message in all of his cable TV interviews, at the end of the day these debates are television performances.
	And so his ability to really crystallize his message and deliver that message and make people think, wow, this is a fighter.
	This is somebody who is going to take the fight to the Democrats and the perceived excesses of the left as hard as anybody up there.
	That, I think, probably has the greatest potential for tomorrow night.
	And meanwhile, David Axelrod is also propping up Vivek Ramaswamy.
	Let's be real about this.
	Vivek is not going to be president of the United States this election cycle.
	In fact, there's an article out today suggesting that Vivek basically ran in order to act as a stalking horse for Trump.
	This is according to a report from ABC News.
	Ramaswamy, two donors, pitched himself as a candidate who could make serious waves in the Republican primary meeting.
	When met with some skepticism, Ramaswamy argued his candidacy could also dissuade Governor Sanchez from entering the race.
	In the lead up to his announcement, Ramaswamy would tell several other conservative activists he believed that if he ran, it could stop DeSantis from running or impact his viability as a candidate if he did enter the race.
	It is worth noting that if Vivek really were gaining in the polls, like against Donald Trump, you'd imagine Donald Trump would have nicknamed him already, right?
	Donald Trump has never been shy about going after people he considers to be rivals.
	Instead, all he has is warm words for Vivek.
	So do Democrats.
	Which, again, I know Vivek.
	I'm friends with Vivek.
	Very nice guy.
	Has a lot of interesting ideas.
	But it says something when David Axelrod is praising you to the skies.
	Interesting thing about that to me was the reference to Ramaswamy, who started off as an unknown and has proven himself to be a much more effective culture warrior than DeSantis himself.
	And, you know, going after the woke and so on.
	He's just been much more compelling at it.
	Yeah, just again, Democrats are propping up the vague.
	Meanwhile, by the way, the vague is, you know, he's stepped on his toes a few times here, but it's not getting the sort of national attention that his positive spin is getting right now.
	For example, the Washington Examiner has an entire article about the vague's flip flops on a wide variety of issues.
	According to the writer Gabe Kaminsky, he says Ramaswamy, an ex-pharmaceutical executive who rose to prominence following the publication of his 2021 book Woke Inc.
	Inside Corporate America's Social Justice, is pulling in third place in the GOP primary behind DeSantis, who himself is clocking in at double digits behind former President Donald Trump.
	Ramaswamy has sought to position himself as an outsider, but the reality is that, again, he has been on all sides of a variety of issues.
	The Republican told the New York Post in mid-August he'd be open to evaluating pardons for members of the Biden family in the interest of moving the nation forward if you're elected president.
	And then he declared, no, I don't have any plans to pardon Hunter Biden.
	It's planted trash.
	When you strike the swamp, the swamp strikes back.
	When Fox News ran a story two days later in August with the headline, Ramaswamy breaks with GOP on decriminalization of hard drugs, quote, I'm in that direction.
	Or he said, quote, I think in the long run, I'm talking about over the long run period of time, decriminalization seriously is an important part of the long run solution here.
	Ramaswamy also labeled that planted trash.
	Again, he has flip-flopped on foreign policy.
	Two months ago, he denied to the Washington Free Beacon he was open to ending military financial support to Israel after the outlet cited footage from the campaign trail where he reportedly expressed a contrary view.
	And then he said that it was false reporting in June.
	And then it was reported that it was a misunderstanding.
	And then he told the outlet on Saturday that he now supports phasing out most aid to Israel by 2028.
	He has said that he is open to basically moving microchip production out of Taiwan, semiconductor independence.
	He said, after that, our commitments to Taiwan, our commitments to be willing to go to military conflict will change because that's rationally in our self-interest.
	So again, Vivek is a super smart guy, Vivek, no question.
	But the notion that he's running a fully consistent campaign, not so much.
	And of course, he's been flirting a little bit with some interesting theories.
	Shall we say?
	So he did an interview with The Atlantic.
	Now, listen, full credit to Vivek for going into unfriendly media spaces and speaking to people who other candidates will not speak to.
	I mean, he gets full credit for this.
	Vivek also did say, apparently, to The Atlantic, he said, quote,
	I think it's legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that
	hit the Twin Towers. Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no
	reason to think there's anything other than zero. But if we're doing a comprehensive assessment of
	what happened on 9-11, we have a 9-11 commission.
	Absolutely, that should be an answer. The public knows the answer, too. Well, if we are doing a January 6th
	commission, absolutely, those should be questions we should get to the bottom of.
	Here are the people who are armed.
	Here are the people who are unarmed.
	What percentage of people who are armed were federal law enforcement officers?
	I think it was probably high, actually, right?
	And then he said, I would take the truth on 9-11.
	I'm not questioning.
	It's not something I'm staking out anything on.
	I want the truth about 9-11.
	Which is, again, very kind of weird take.
	I don't know what he means by this.
	In any case, these would be gaffes where if DeSantis said it, it would be a major media story, Vivek is saying it and it's sort of kind of flying under the radar.
	Because the media have a stake in a very competitive primary that does not include Trump.
	They have a stake in Trump running at 50% and everyone else being at like 14 or 15%.
	I am glad to see that in the run-up to the RNC debate, Now, finally, the Fox News has informed the Trump campaign that surrogates for Trump will not be allowed to attend the first Republican debate.
	The barring of Trump's surrogates, according to the New York Post from Wednesday's debate, comes one day after Trump confirmed he would not participate in the event.
	The Post has confirmed surrogates for any candidate who did not make the stage will not be allowed at the debate or at least in the spin room.
	It's not a Trump-specific ban.
	The ex-commander-in-chief's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said he'd be attending the showdown as a surrogate for his father.
	Kimberly Guilfoyle was also expected to show up at the event and run media for the former president.
	So, too, were Carrie Lake, Byron Donald, Matt Gaetz.
	They'd all been planning to attend, apparently.
	Apparently, they're still going to go to the event.
	They're working on a resolution with Fox News and the RNC to be allowed in the post-debate spin room.
	But the truth is, they shouldn't be allowed in the spin room, either.
	I mean, the only people allowed in the spin room should be surrogates for the people who actually did the debate.
	Pretty obviously.
	Because otherwise, why would anyone go to a bait?
	It seems like a mistake to go to any debate.
	Just don't go to a bait.
	Send a couple of your surrogates to like rip on everybody in the spin room.
	That's the easiest way out.
	So hopefully Fox News and the RNC find some testicles and deny Trump's surrogates the ability to get in the spin room.
	Because again, the spin room is for the people who play the game.
	It's very bizarre to have surrogates for a person who is explicitly denying the importance of the debate in the spin room to just crap all over all the other candidates.
	And meanwhile, speaking of President Trump, he is slated to turn himself in in Fulton County, Georgia on these Fannie Willis RICO charges.
	He's expected to do that the day after the debate.
	Again, the timing is impeccable.
	We'll get to that momentarily first.
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	Okay, meanwhile, Well, if you're Donald Trump and there's a great way for you to, you know, quash all talk about a debate where you're not going to be, here's a great way.
	Show up for your arrest in Fulton County, Georgia.
	So, again, dude has impeccable timing.
	You have to say that Donald Trump knows how to work a camera.
	That is for damn sure.
	So according to CNN, Donald Trump plans to turn himself in and be processed at the Fulton County Jail on Thursday following his agreement earlier Monday to a $200,000 bond and other release conditions.
	I'll be going to Atlanta, Georgia on Thursday to be arrested, Trump wrote on Truth Social.
	So apparently, several co-defendants in the Georgia racketeering case have also agreed to the terms of their bond agreements with the DA's office.
	Trump's lawyers, Jennifer Little, Drew Feining, and Marissa Goldberg, met with the DA's office on Monday before the details of the bond agreement were released.
	Other Trump lawyers have been working behind the scenes on the approach to the bond.
	The release conditions outlined in Trump's bond order are more extensive than those laid out in the others approved earlier Monday in the case.
	According to the judge, quote, the defendant shall perform no act to intimidate any person known to him or her to be a co-defendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.
	The above shall include but are not limited to posts on social media or repost of posts made by another individual on social media.
	So in other words.
	If Donald Trump retweets something threatening Rudy Giuliani or ripping on Rudy Giuliani or something, then theoretically they could haul him back to jail.
	They could say you have violated your bond.
	So his team is saying this is a violation of free speech.
	I should be allowed to say basically what I want because your interpretation of intimidation of witness might just be my open and honest take on what's going on with co-defendants.
	That seems like fairly reasonable actually.
	This is the highest bond of any of the defendants, which again is sort of strange, given the fact that Donald Trump is the least likely person in human history to abscond from justice.
	I don't know.
	I don't even understand the logic that Donald Trump is going to be running away from the country.
	What is it?
	What is even happening?
	It's so funny.
	And so Donald Trump actually put out what was a very, very funny statement on this.
	He said, The failed District Attorney of Fulton County, Fannie Willis, insisted on a $200,000 bond from me.
	I assume, therefore, she thought I was a flight risk.
	I'd fly far, far away.
	Maybe to Russia, Russia, Russia.
	Share a gold-domed suite with Vladimir.
	Never to be seen or heard from again.
	Would I be able to take my very understated airplane with the gold Trump affixed for all to see?
	Probably not.
	I'd be much better offline commercial.
	I'm sure nobody would recognize me.
	I will admit, dude's funny.
	I mean, you gotta say this, Donald Trump is a funny, funny man.
	That is some funny stuff right there.
	So, you know, Donald Trump, obviously him showing up in court in Atlanta is going to be the coverage of the day.
	So it almost doesn't matter what happens in the Republican debate, barring some sort of cataclysmic circumstance.
	Meanwhile, as we say in the polls, Trump continues to lead by leaps and bounds.
	The latest South Carolina poll has, from Trafalgar, has Trump up 34 percentage points on the rest of the field.
	He's still leading by some 20-some percentage points in Iowa.
	He's still leading the rest of the field in New Hampshire by 20-some percentage points.
	Dude has a big lead.
	Now, that's not stopping Trump from attacking other Republicans.
	I don't even mean like other candidates.
	I mean just other Republicans generally, right?
	Right now, he's attacking Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia, which he's tried this before.
	Kemp got re-elected over Stacey Abrams, the true governor of Georgia.
	He got reelected over her by crushing her.
	To Trump's great dismay, by the way, I mean, Trump tried to actually primary Brian Kemp.
	Well, now he's attacking Brian Kemp for not firing Fannie Willis, which again, like he doesn't have the power to do.
	He says, Governor Kemp of Georgia is fighting hard against the impeachment of the crooked, incompetent, highly partisan DA of Fulton County, Fannie Willis, who has allowed murder and other violent crime to massively escalate.
	Crime in Atlanta is worst in nation.
	She should be impeached for many reasons, not just the witch hunt.
	I did nothing wrong!
	Willis should focus on out-of-control murder, not I will get Trump over a perfect phone call.
	Georgia does not deserve this giant murder wave.
	Um, so, I don't understand why that's Brian Kemp's fault.
	There's not even a majority support in the state legislature to impeach Fannie Willis at this point.
	But, yeah, again, it's free fire in every direction from President Trump, as always.
	Now, one of the things that the multiple indictments of Trump continue to underscore is that Joe Biden gets away with pretty much anything.
	Like, anything and everything, all the time.
	It's pretty incredible.
	And the media continued to cover him.
	Bakari Sellers, he says, you know, there's no evidence that Joe had anything to do with Hunter's business.
	Obviously untrue.
	How much more evidence do you need?
	Hunter literally says it.
	We have a secret email address of Joe's to Hunter on Ukraine Matters.
	We have partners of Hunter Biden openly testifying that Joe was involved in Hunter's business to the extent that he would stop by meetings and phone into them.
	I don't understand.
	What nature of evidence would you require at this point?
	Democrats are saying if Hunter Biden committed a crime, hold him accountable.
	But to addiction touches every single family in this country or the overwhelming majority thereof.
	And this is a very interesting needle that Republicans are trying to thread.
	By persecuting someone with an addiction.
	If while having this addiction he committed crimes, then punish him.
	But there's literally no evidence that this ties back to the President of the United States.
	And I think that whataboutism is going to fall flat as we head into this election.
	Persecuting a man with an addiction?
	Persecuting a man with, like, is it?
	Did you know that Hunter Biden is a victim?
	Do you know he's a lifelong victim, Hunter Biden?
	I mean, sure, every job he's ever held is because his daddy was either a senator or vice president of the United States or president of the United States.
	Sure, he's made millions of dollars being a useless, derelict, drug addict piece of crap, but he's a victim, guys.
	He's a drug addict, and we should all feel super duper duper bad for him.
	It's amazing how the words white privilege that Bakari Sellers is eager to utter under virtually every circumstance.
	Let's just go absent when we talk about the greatest scion of white privilege in modern American history, Hunter Biden.
	Meanwhile, by the way, Hunter Biden's legal team is targeting, wait for it, the IRS whistleblowers.
	Remember the IRS whistleblowers who blew up his sweetheart deal?
	Well now, apparently, according to the New York Times, while Mr. Biden's legal team agrees that IRS agents affected the deal, his lawyers have contended to the Justice Department that by disclosing details about the investigation to Congress, they broke the law and it should be prosecuted.
	A team of lawyers for one of the IRS agents said in a statement, it appears that if it weren't for the courageous actions of these whistleblowers, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, Hunter Biden never would have been charged at all.
	So Hunter Biden's lawyers, obviously, in revenge, are now attempting to go after the whistleblowers.
	That's pretty great.
	Meanwhile, other legal problems surrounding Joe Biden's campaign.
	According to the Washington Free Beacon and Andrew Kerr, President Joe Biden's favorite super PAC has a $12 million gap in its financial disclosures, according to a Washington Free Beacon investigation, prompting legal experts to call for immediate investigations into the troubling discrepancy.
	Future Forward, which the Biden White House has endorsed as the preeminent super PAC supporting the president's reelection bid, in 2021 claimed it received just $3.4 million in cash from its affiliated dark money group.
	But that group, non-profit Future Forward USA Action, reported in its 2021 IRS tax return it provided $15.3 million to the Super PAC that year.
	That's missing $12 million.
	That should start a federal probe, you would imagine.
	The group is led by former Obama campaign officials.
	It has quietly raised nearly $400 million in the past five years to run ads supporting Biden and Democrats in battleground states.
	So we will see where all of that money went.
	Again, more corruption associated with the Biden campaign, for sure.
	And as we say, Joe Biden, an unsympathetic elderly gentleman, following up on the fact that he goes to Hawaii and talks about how one time his kitchen got set on fire and his Corvette almost got burned.
	Apparently, a Gold Star mom who met President Biden on the Memorial Day following her son's death from the terrorist attack at Kabul Airport, according to Daily Wire, said that Biden responded by suggesting she take a photo with him when she wept during their meeting.
	That is, um, the most empathetic thing I've ever heard, I think.
	She said, there's been a lot of grief.
	There's nothing like watching your child's eye in front of you, in front of the world.
	She recalled when she met Biden, he said, I can understand if you're angry.
	I stood face to face with him, eyeball to eyeball, and began to weep.
	She added, saying, it should never have happened this way.
	He stood there stoically, she remembered, nothing out of his mouth except, well, would you like to get a photo with me?
	Apparently, she told Biden the only picture she would take with him is if he stood with her at her son's tombstone at Arlington National Cemetery.
	Biden said, I can't do that because Secret Service won't let me.
	Ah, Joe Biden.
	He is just the best.
	He is just the best.
	Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
	So, things that I like.
	So, Richman, north of Richman, has now debuted at number one at the top of the Billboard charts, despite the media's rage over an unknown musician becoming a very, very famous person for writing a song that is very critical of the governmental left.
	It's doing really, really well.
	Now, again, it is amazing how everybody's in favor of a rags-to-riches story in music, so long as it's not, you know, an out-of-work minor.
	If it's an out-of-work minor, like a person who mines the earth, then that person's bad, and we should have no sympathy for this person.
	According to the New York Times, Richmond, north of Richmond, an independently released track by a little-known performer billed as Oliver Anthony Music, became the number one song in the United States to top hits by superstars like Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, and Olivia Rodrigo.
	The song was uploaded to YouTube just two weeks ago.
	It caught fire with conservative commentators, including Matt Walsh and Laura Ingraham, who described it as an authentic expression of working class struggle.
	Though some critics winced at anti-welfare sentiment that seemed to hark back to the Reagan era.
	Oh my God, you're not allowed to be anti-welfare, guys.
	Stop being anti-welfare or we're not going to allow you...
	A working-class person to have a successful song.
	You have to be pro-welfare in order for this to work.
	Or, presumably, you have to cut a song about the magic of transgenderism or something.
	That is the best way to get a song to hit number one and be feeded by the New York Times at the same time.
	Rich Men shoots to the top of Billboard's Hot 100 single chart with 17.5 million streams and 147,000 downloads according to Tracking Service Illuminate.
	After Jason Aldean's Try That in a Small Town, it is the second country song in less than a month to reach number one after stirring political controversy and sparking download sales.
	It's also the first time that an artist has ever made a debut at number one on the Hot 100 without any prior chart history in any form.
	So that is, again, it shows that when conservatives and people who are not in the cultural mainstream flex their market power, they are able to make an outsized cultural influence.
	The song is certainly worth the listen.
	If you recall back to the early days of Trumpism, it's really kind of fascinating.
	Think back to like 2015, 2016, when Trump was really gaining a lot of street credence and credibility and he was picking up huge support.
	There were all these pieces after Trump won in 2017 about like, who are these people who voted for Trump?
	Reporters from big cities into the wilds of like Iowa to discuss with the regular folk.
	As though they were Steve Irwin checking out some strange form of kangaroo.
	What exactly these weirdos thought?
	And they wanted to know for a moment, for a brief moment in time.
	This is when books like J.D.
	Vance's Hillbilly Elegy started making inroads, where people were like, oh, maybe these people think differently than we do.
	Maybe they have certain moral values that we don't hold.
	Maybe they are afraid of the peculiar morality that we are bringing to them that suggests that men can be women, women can be men, and that basically individual subjectivism is the height of human experience.
	And then it all went away.
	Then it all went away.
	Within about six months, it was like, no, no, no.
	Trump won because of Russia.
	It wasn't because there's any cultural moment that we're missing here.
	It's because of Russia.
	Well, every time one of these kind of cultural moments reaches up and grabs the left, they freak out.
	And instead of trying to understand where's rich men north of Richmond coming from, what does this mean?
	Instead of that, they just freak out and they're like, oh my God, look at these hicks.
	These crazy hicks who like stuff like this.
	How dare they?
	We must have the absolutely anti-melodic warblings I'm like, Rihanna.
	We need them.
	We need people gyrating on a screen.
	That's the only way that we can have a major hit.
	If it's just a guy with a banjo playing about how, you know, his life is tough because it turns out too much of his money is being taken away from him, we can't have that.
	That's super duper bad.
	So good, once again, for Oliver Anthony.
	Good for Richmond, north of Richmond.
	I couldn't be more pleased about that song's continued durability in the marketplace.
	All right, guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We'll be jumping into the mailbag.
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