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Aug. 4, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:03:11
Texas Democrats RUN AWAY…Plus, The REAL Gaza Starvation
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All right, folks, tons coming up on the show today, ranging from Texas Democrats running away from Texas very, very bravely in order to stop gerrymandering to the latest from Gaza, Zor Mamdani leading in the polls in New York, above and far away beyond all the other candidates combined.
And President Trump, of course, firing the head of the Bureau of Labor statistics.
So tons coming up first.
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All righty, folks.
So Democrats are having a very tough time with continued Republican victory.
Obviously, their poll numbers continue to be in the dumps, but all of this is now manifesting in the latest routine in Texas.
So Texas Republicans are looking right now at redistricting the state congressionally.
This is called gerrymandering, and it's quite typical around the United States.
In fact, every state has some form of gerrymandering.
Some of the worst gerrymandered states are states that include Democratic states.
So just to take one example, Illinois, which we'll come back to later.
Here, for example, is a map of Illinois with its congressional districts.
As you will see, it's insane.
These congressional districts make no sense.
They are all over the place.
There's one congressional district, particularly, District 13, that looks like kind of a snake that just kind of goes halfway up through the state.
And then that is juxtaposed with another congressional district, District 17, that was created just to get to a Democratic majority that looks sort of like a stair stepper.
You know, all these congressional districts are a total mess, like a complete and utter total mess.
That is the Illinois congressional redistricting plan.
And how do I know that?
Because there is a website called gerrymander.princeton.edu that actually ranks states by how much they are gerrymandered.
And many of those states are Democrat.
Some of those states are Republican.
Illinois is particularly bad.
Nevada is particularly bad.
That is a half Democrat, half Republican state, sort of.
Oregon actually happens to be particularly badly gerrymandered.
So there are a bunch of, this is a way that politics is done.
The sort of attempt to treat gerrymandering as though it is unnatural and politics are only pursued by one side.
That, of course, is absolute nonsense.
So the Texas state Republicans are now attempting to re-gerrymander the state.
And now Texas Democrats are threatening that they are going to run away from the state.
Now, in order for them to do that, what they actually have to do is claim that this is an authoritarian threat to democracy as opposed to a way that congressional districts have been created since legitimately the beginning of the republic.
Elbridge Jerry, who is the person who actually the term is named after former vice president of the United States, who served under President James Madison from 1813 until his death in 1814, obviously the founder of so-called gerrymandering lived at the very beginning of the Republic.
So this is a very long-standing congressional practice.
There is nothing new here.
But according to former Barack Obama, A.G. Eric Holder, this is all authoritarian and a threat to democracy.
Here's Eric Holder, who once called himself Barack Obama's wingman, actually suggesting that this is a threat to democracy if the Texas legislature redraws congressional districts.
What we're seeing now is an attempt by the White House to insulate itself from any kind of congressional scrutiny, any kind of congressional oversight to make sure that Donald Trump remains the authoritarian figure that he has become.
We have a compliant Congress, and he wants to ensure that given the fact that they passed this bill that is unpopular, that takes health care away from people, that gives tax breaks to billionaires, and it puts at risk the Republican majority.
He wants to ensure that he continues to have that compliant Republican House of Representatives.
Now, again, this idea that somehow the president is responsible for gerrymandering as opposed to, you know, the party that happens to be in control of a particular state legislature is ridiculous.
So what are Democrats doing?
They're doing what they've done before.
They're running away.
So according to Politico, when the Texas legislature reconvenes today at 4 p.m. Eastern Time, it will be 57 Democrats short of a quorum.
While a small number of Democratic legislators remain in Austin, many more have fled.
Some will be in New York meeting with Governor Kathy Hochul, and they'll be hanging out 10 a.m. in Albany talking about how wrong they are and why they have to flee.
Others will be hunkered down at an undisclosed hotel in Chicago.
Now, I mentioned that I would be talking about Illinois.
Again, there's great irony to legislators from Texas fleeing to Chicago in Illinois, one of the most gerrymandered states in America.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker is providing them with logistical support.
Now, again, it's not a shock that Pritzker is doing this.
He wants to run for president in 2028.
One of the leaders of this new movement is Texas State Representative James Tellerico, who spoke to Playbook Politico while he was aboard a bus hurtling toward his Chicagoland Hotel late last night, hurtling toward the hotel.
He says, I'm hoping what we've heard from blue state lawmakers talking about retaliation may give Texas Republicans pause.
It may give Speaker Mike Johnson pause because he's got members in blue states that may lose their seats if this escalates further.
And apparently aboard the bus, he and other members talked about how Abraham Lincoln once broke quorum in the Illinois state legislature by jumping out of a window.
And he said, everyone is hungry and tired, but in good spirits.
Wow.
Oh, the heroism.
Oh, the heroism.
Now, this is not the first time that Texas Democrats have run away to break quorum.
They did this back in 2021.
And in doing so, they released some of the worst social media ever.
They went to Washington, D.C. and started releasing photos of themselves eating salads and talking about what absolute heroes they were.
Well, James Tallarico has made himself a little bit of a face now because he wants to run presumably for higher office.
He was on Joe Rogan recently where he promoted a bunch of very left-wing ideas that Joe, of course, started buying into.
Joe is not a right-winger.
Joe may be a heterodox person who voted for Donald Trump, but he is certainly not in any way sort of traditionally conservative.
Well, here is James Tallarico explaining why he is running away.
My Democratic colleagues and I have just left our beloved state to break quorum and stop Trump's redistricting power grab.
Trump told our Republican colleagues to redraw the political maps here in Texas in the middle of the decade to get him five more seats and protect his majority in Congress.
They're turning our districts into crazy shapes to guarantee the outcome they want in the 2026 elections.
If this power grab succeeds, they will hang on to power without any accountability from the voters.
The Texas Democrats are fighting back.
We're leaving the state, breaking quorum, and preventing Republicans from silencing our voices and rigging the next election.
We are not fighting for the Democratic Party.
We are fighting for the Democratic process, and the stakes could not be higher.
We have to take a stand.
We are taking a stand by running away.
That is the only way to take a stand.
Brave Sir Robin ran away, bravely ran away away.
Yes, they are so brave, loving every element of this tremendous bravery.
And again, it just demonstrates the extent to which Democrats are in real national trouble.
They're in trouble in states like Texas.
But the reality is that California has already been basically gerrymandered to death.
So this is nothing new.
The Democrats are like, well, you know, if you go after Texas, we might redistrict in California.
You already did it.
How many more seats are you going to take away from Orange County?
There's not that much more you can do to gerrymander Republicans out of existence in places like California.
But this, again, goes to the desperation of Democrats who do not have a national brand and what national brand they do have is quite negative.
Already coming up, Zoran Mamdani is still the frontrunner in New York, maybe by a bigger margin than before.
We'll get to all of that plus.
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I happen to be in New York right now.
Zorin Mamdani is likely to be the next mayor of this city.
That's what the polling is showing right now.
And Democrats have decided that they are fine with the momdanification of their party.
Bill Maher on HBO over the weekend.
He pointed out quite obviously that Zorin Mamdani represents the commies and he is likely going to be the mayor of New York.
This is Mondami.
If you've been not following the news, he is, he won the Democratic primary in New York, so he is certainly likely to be the next mayor.
We don't know.
I mean, there's a lot of opposition because we've never had someone this radical.
Some of the things he says, you know, he quotes Marxist, each according to their need.
I mean, that's straight up communism.
Whether you call it the abolition of private property, you call it housing guarantees.
It's preferable to what is going on right now.
I mean, just the phrase abolition of private property, not something we usually hear in America.
I mean, he is right about all of that.
It is, again, an amazing thing that Democrats have decided to mobilize behind him.
And they are, by the way, there is a new poll out showing that, you know, a couple of weeks ago, if you'd combined all the rest of the Democrats running against Mamdani, they would have essentially overcome his levels of support if you'd combined them with Curtis Sliwa, the only Republican in the race.
But now there's a new poll out by Zenith Research and Public Progress Solutions, and it finds him in the lead with over 50% of the vote, regardless of who else runs, which of course is a disaster area for the city of New York, which will clear out.
I mean, it's hard to think of a worse idea for the financial center of the human planet than Zorin Mamdani, a communist being in charge of it.
That is totally insane.
How radical is Zorin Mamdani?
Well, a clip is now merged of New York City Democrat Socialists of America steering committee head Daniel Golden, who talks about how they coordinate openly with Zorin Mamdani.
And actually, his plans are even more radical than the stuff he's talking about.
He actually would love it if other states and cities would send people who want to be trans to New York so they can pay for them.
Here is the New York City DSA steering committee head, Daniel Golden, describing the joys of Zorin Mamdani.
But most importantly, we collaborated with the Zoran Mamdani campaign on his trans rights platform.
And what we explicitly wanted to do was use the power of New York City to provide free gender-affirming care.
And I say free in case insurance companies decide to foot us off.
Free gender-affirming care, not just to people in New York City, but across the country.
There's no reason at all that we can't use telehealth and mailing prescriptions to people across the country to undermine state bands.
The Zoran campaign was always eager to work with us.
You know, we're like that.
We wrote the platform with him.
The team was so happy to work with us on this.
And now he's going to be mayor.
And all of a sudden, my work shifts from being on the outside to thinking about how to utilize the fairly significant municipal power of New York City.
I mean, amazing, amazing stuff.
And this is the direction Democrats are moving.
So keep doing it.
Seriously, keep doing it.
I hope that you do.
The Democrats are moving more and more to the left.
That is becoming clearer on a wide variety of issues, but it's not just economics, obviously.
It's also foreign policy.
I said when Mom Dani was running in the New York mayoral primary, a lot of people were saying politically, why is he not dissociating himself from globalize the Intifada?
Why is he not moving away from the quasi-support of Hamas?
Why is he doing all that stuff?
And I said the answer is because for the Democratic voting populace, that is popular.
I was there in 2012 at the Democratic National Convention when Antonio Villagosa, who was then the head of the DNC, got up and in the Democratic National Committee platform, they wanted to have a plank that said that Jerusalem was the eternal and unbreakable capital of Israel.
And it was booed down.
He overruled them in the room, but it was booed down.
So was God in the platform.
This is the direction of the Democratic Party for most of my adult lifetime.
And now it's reaching apex state.
You can see it in Its most virulent and ugly form with regard to what Israel is doing currently in Gaza.
Just to make clear right now, Israel is shipping in extraordinary amounts of aid to Gaza, extraordinary amounts of aid.
Ambassador Mike Huckabee put out a tweet this morning explaining exactly what is happening in Gaza.
Quote, there is no policy of starvation in Gaza except Hamas's deliberate starvation of the hostages.
Israel does not limit the amount of aid entering Gaza and has in the past facilitated the entry of up to 700 aid trucks per day, depending on UN and NGO supply.
In addition, Israel is now facilitating daily humanitarian pauses, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and aid airdrops.
UN-led aid distribution has stagnated after an initial increase, and the vast majority of it is diverted by Hamas.
We talked last week about how the UN is openly saying they will not allow the IDF to help them get the aid into the Gaza Strip because they want it stolen by Hamas.
It is a thing they desire.
A growing number of aid partners are trying alternative methods of aid distribution to civilians instead of relying solely on the UN mechanism.
The main obstacle is not aid entry, says Huckabee, but distribution within Gaza.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is the only mechanism successfully ensuring aid is not diverted by Hamas.
So how much aid went into Gaza over the last week?
23,000 tons of aid, 23,000 tons of aid.
Now, a rough estimate for how much aid it would require to feed 2 million people in Gaza every day is about 1,200 tons of aid, 1,300 tons of aid.
So what that means is that they shipped in the last week more than double, almost triple the amounts of aid that would be necessary to support the entirety of the Gaza Strip every day.
Where did it all go?
Hamas was stealing an enormous amount of it.
1,200 trucks entered Gaza over the past week, and Israel has been holding off on military action day to day in order to facilitate the entry of that aid.
It is pretty clear what is happening here, which is that Gaza is not in a state of overt famine, except that Hamas keeps stealing the aid.
Whatever famine is being caused in Gaza is being caused by Hamas.
Hamas is not trying to bring aid into the people.
Hamas is desperately attempting to avoid that.
They're shooting people who show up in lines for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
They shoot rockets at the aid stations that Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has set up.
Here, for example, is a Gazan telling MSNBC the dirty part, which is that Hamas actually would like a famine.
Hamas wanted to see the deterioration of the humanitarian conditions in Gaza, knowing full well that this may be the only hope for drawing in the international community, for producing horrendous imagery that showcase the war as being a humanitarian catastrophe and therefore hoping to bring about a rapid end to the war that it started and it has an ultimate responsibility to end.
I think for sure Hamas has had a role in siphoning off plenty of the aid going in.
Look, obviously, as a father, as a human being, when I look at pictures of anybody suffering, particularly children, you have to be very concerned and upset about that.
It is very upsetting.
I don't know how a human being can look at pictures in Gaza and not be upset by those pictures.
The question is, who is to blame for that suffering and how does that suffering stop?
And the answer to the former question is Hamas.
And the answer to the latter is that Hamas is no longer in control of either aid distribution or of the Gaza Strip in part or in whole.
Obviously, also, if the Europeans continue to support Hamas and do Hamas's work in terms of propaganda to ensure that Hamas never gives up, the suffering only continues, which is Hamas's game.
That is the entire game here.
By the way, we know for a fact why Hamas is doing this, because Hamas is winning what it believes to be political victories precisely by starving the people of Gaza.
It is a thing that they want to do.
They literally came out yesterday and said they will not disarm until a Palestinian state is established with Jerusalem as its capital.
Now, they, as a fighting force, have been decimated by Israel.
They've been wrecked by Israel, clearly, and yet they believe they have the upper hand in negotiations.
Why?
Because they have pushed this propagandistic effort to label Israel as a genocidal nation.
And somehow, post-October 7th, after the deadliest attack on Jews since World War II, they are now on the verge of having a bunch of countries declare a Palestinian state with no government, no territory, no borders, and no freedom.
I mean, that's an amazing PR victory by them, reliant on the stupidity and gullibility of a bunch of people who are willing to do Hamas's propaganda work for them.
You know who's saying this?
Hamas.
Here, for the example, is Hamas official Ghazi Hamad saying October 7th actually achieved, achieved what they wanted.
Now, we should know, by the way, that there was a ceasefire that had been brokered by the end of July.
Steve Witkoff was due to fly to Doha for the signing on July 23rd, according to the Jewish Chronicle.
And you know what happened?
Hamas ran an op.
They ran an op saying that Israel is engaged in mass starvation.
A bunch of European countries came out and said they were going to give the Palestinians a state on the basis of that.
And then Hamas pulled out of the talks.
And so the end of the war was actually prevented by Hamas along with its European allies, which is what they are.
And it's, at best, delightful stooges in the media.
Here's Hamas official Ghazi.
Hamad saying, we played them like a fish.
7 October, this strong attack was directed to Israel.
He's saying the powerful blow that was delivered to Israel on October 7th has yielded three very important historic achievements.
First of all, it brought the Palestinian cause back to censor stage.
Why are all these countries recognizing Palestine now?
Had any country dared to recognize the state of Palestine prior to October 7th?
The overall outcome of October 7th forced the world to open its eyes to the Palestinian cause and to act forcefully in this respect.
So they killed their own citizens, 1,200 Israelis, took 250 prisoners.
20 are still alive, probably in tunnels under Gaza, being starved, as we'll talk about in a moment.
They did this and they achieved what they wanted to achieve because they knew that the left would go for it.
They knew the media would fall for it and they'd be able to dredge up extraordinary amounts of ire against Israel online.
They knew this.
It's why they've strengthened their bargaining position.
If they cared about the people of Gaza, they would not be strengthening their bargaining position.
They'd be looking to end the war.
And you know who's helping them out?
All of their friends in the media, all their friends in the media.
Look at the difference in coverage between a photo of a young child in Gaza with cerebral palsy who was blasted out all over the world.
We talked about this last week.
It's a picture on the front page of the New York Times of a kid named Yusuf Matar, a kid with cerebral palsy.
And the New York Times put it on the front page because the kid looked like in horrible physical condition because of the cerebral palsy.
He has a younger brother who's standing just off camera who looks totally fine.
The New York Times did not run the picture with the younger brother.
They ran the picture with the kid with cerebral palsy.
Why did they run it?
Well, now we know the details.
According to Semaphore, last Thursday at 3 p.m., the Times was preparing to run images of Yusuf Matar, a young child in Gaza with cerebral palsy, who is suffering from lack of nourishment, alongside its July 24th story that cited doctors in Gaza finding, quote, an increasing number of their patients are suffering and dying from starvation.
And by the way, if you think that there is a chance in hell that if Hamas, for example, and all of the Palestinian propaganda outlets had pictures of hundreds of starving Palestinians, like in skeletal condition and they weren't running on the front pages, you'd be out of your mind.
Of course they would be.
And you know they would be because the Palestinian propaganda effort is overwhelming and the media have bought into it because it matches all of their priors.
So what happened with this kid?
The Times' topmost editors wanted to err on the side of caution.
After viewing the photo, according to communications viewed by Semaphore, they worried it might inadvertently call into question the paper's reporting, which said many of the children suffering from hunger did not have pre-existing health issues.
Managing editor Mark Lacey said, quote, do we want to use a photo that will be the subject of debate when there's presumably no shortage of images of children who were not malnourished before the war and currently are?
Executive editor Joe Khan agreed.
The story isn't framed around people with special needs and the lead art really should not do that either.
They landed instead on a photo of Mohamed Zakaria Al-Mutawak, an 18-month-old child in Gaza suffering from malnutrition.
And they thought that that photo was going to actually do it better.
The problem is that actually Amu Tawak also had genetic and other disorders.
So they ran that as well.
They ran another photo of a kid who had significant health disorders prior to the situation in Gaza.
They were desperate to run a photo demonstrating that Israel was starving children.
And so they went ahead with photos of kids who had serious other health conditions other than lack of nutrition.
I mean, Hamas could always count on its friends in the media.
They could always count on their friends in the media.
In fact, Hamas can count on its friends in the media so much that last week, very end of last week, Hamas released a video of a hostage that it took during October 7th.
His name is Evyatavid.
Okay, they released this video, photos of him looking like a prisoner at Auschwitz.
That's what he looks like.
For those who can't see, he's skeletal, totally starved.
If you look at a before and after picture of this guy, he looks totally different.
And they forced him to dig his own grave in a tunnel.
And then they released the pictures as a way to try and create pressure inside Israel for Israel to essentially end the war without victory.
They released those pictures publicly.
And in fact, in the video, they actually have a person from Hamas handing him food.
And they make the claim that Hamas is living in the same conditions as Evyat Tardavid.
There's only one problem.
You can see the arm of the person from Hamas, and it is a totally normal, not malnourished arm.
Here's the video.
He says what I'm doing now is digging in my own grave.
The key is from my perspective.
Because every day that I'm moving, every time I'm moving, my body is moving.
It's more and more and more.
From my perspective, it looks like I'm in the way of my blood.
I'm walking directly into my grave.
This is the grave where I think I'm going to be buried.
Time is running out.
You're the only ones who can end this.
To be released and to be able to sleep in my bed with my family.
Okay, they released this.
Hamas released this.
Why did they release this?
Because they knew that the media would not pick up on it and run with it.
The New York Times did not dedicate a front page to that picture of Evyatavid, who, by the way, is, as far as I have seen, maybe the only picture of an adult victim of starvation in the Gaza Strip.
Again, you would imagine lots of pictures of adult victims of starvation in the Gaza Strip if Hamas had those to bubble his eyes, except that Israel and the GHF have been handing out thousands of meals, millions of meals over the course of the last couple of months in the Gaza Strip.
Okay, so did this run on the front page of the New York Times?
Of course not.
They ran instead the picture of the Palestinian mom holding the kid with cerebral palsy.
That is what they did.
And again, they know that their friends in the media will do whatever they can to foster the idea that this is once again a cycle of violence and Israel basically should surrender.
Now, I do find it amusing that all of these people keep saying, well, Hamas should just give up the hostages and end the war.
Okay, how do you propose to do this?
How do you propose to accomplish this?
Do you really think that Hamas is going to stop now?
They believe they have the upper hand in terms of the politics of the situation.
The minute they give up all the hostages, they're dead and they know it.
I mean, what do you think is going to happen here?
And I think in order to truly understand what Evyatar David, how starved Evyatard is, here is a picture of Evyatar David before.
Here's a picture of Evyatar David after.
That is a victim of starvation because Hamas is deliberately starving its own hostages.
But then you have tweets like this one from Piers Morgan, who has truly turned into the Jerry Springer of low-rent politics.
Quote, it's interesting that all the prominent pro-Israeli voices on here who refuse to believe any Gazan casualty numbers published by the Hamas-run Palestinian Health Ministry accept the veracity of hostage pics or videos posted by Hamas without hesitation.
I don't know what the hell Piers is trying to say here.
Honestly, is he claiming that the pictures put out by Hamas are fake there?
Hamas put them out.
And if he's saying, why do you only believe the Hamas propaganda videos in which they accidentally expose themselves as opposed to the numbers that they put out that are totally unverified and unverifiable?
The answer is very simple.
It's an obvious admission against interest.
There's a principle in criminal law.
That principle is that if somebody makes what's called an admission against interest, it is admissible in court in a way that admissions against interest are not.
In other words, people don't tend to tell on themselves.
So if Hamas is putting out one line of attack saying that Israel is killing hundreds of people at aid stations every day, that serves their purposes.
And if they put out a video that is designed to stoke hatred in Israel by people against their government, which is what this was, and it accidentally instead shows that they are starving hostages, that is an accidental admission against interest.
So yes, I believe them when they put out a video of the hostage whose name we know of them starving this person to death.
Yes, I believe them when they do that.
And no, I don't believe them when they put out statistics that there's no way of verifying five minutes after an event occurs when we know they lie repeatedly.
But again, all this is part of a broader propagandistic idea and it is bought into by the left across the globe.
I mean, truly across the globe, which is an amazing thing and speaks to sort of the underlying dynamic on the left, which is always and forever to declare that unsuccessful third world regimes like Hamas are somehow victimized by their colonial overlords or some such nonsense.
Now, how's this actually going to come to an end?
According to the New York Times, there's now a discussion between the Israeli government and the American government.
They're going to try and push for a comprehensive deal.
Hamas does not want to make a deal, obviously.
So basically, Israel and the United States may say that there will be no more piecemeal deals.
Everybody comes out alive, Hamas goes into exile, or Israel goes to the end.
Okay, which, by the way, should have been the situation in the first place.
They should set up humanitarian enclaves in Rafah and a couple other places around the Gaza Strip.
They should make sure that the aid to those places is plentiful.
They should use face recognition technology to try and prevent people associated with Hamas from getting into those enclaves.
This would be basic counterinsurgency strategy.
And then they should, and then they should essentially clean up the rest of the Gaza Strip.
They should give people a particular period of time to get to those humanitarian aid areas that are protected by the IDF and other people on the ground, in which aid is controlled, not by the United Nations, which is, again, an awful, evil organization, but instead is controlled by an organization that does not wish to hand the aid to Hamas.
And then after giving people enough time to get to the enclaves, Israel should essentially start annexing one mile per day, one square mile per day for every day that Hamas does not surrender in the rest of the Gaza Strip because there's nothing else that Hamas understands at this point.
If Israel would like to get back its hostages, that is the only way of doing this.
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Okay, meanwhile, the other big news over the course of the weekend was that President Trump made the unique move of firing his Bureau of Labor Statistics chief after a weak jobs report.
So we talked about this jobs report that came out last week that showed not only weak job growth, that 73,000 jobs estimated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but also showed a revision downward of a couple hundred thousand jobs, demonstrating that actually over the last three months, there's basically been almost no job growth in the United States.
In a social media post, President Trump said that Erica McIntarfer, the BLS commissioner, would be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified, asserting that the government's jobs numbers have been manipulated for political purposes.
So first of all, to understand why jobs number change, you actually have to understand exactly what job numbers do and how they are calculated in the first place.
So according to News Nation, how are those jobs numbers calculated?
Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases an estimate of the change in payroll employment for the previous month.
That estimate is based on a monthly survey of about 560,000 businesses selected to represent millions of employers nationwide.
So businesses report the total number of people who worked or received paid during that pay period, including the 12th of the month.
So they produce an initial estimate for the overall economy based on job gains or losses at the businesses that submitted their data.
But many businesses haven't finalized their payroll data in time for the initial release, meaning the early numbers often represent an incomplete snapshot.
So then they give a revision.
So it is pretty consistent that there is either upward or downward revisions in the BLS numbers.
Not a giant shock.
Here, for example, is a chart showing jobs revisions since 1980.
And you can see jobs revisions happen all the time.
You have some outliers.
There was big outlier in 2006.
There was a gigantic outlier in 2009 or so.
Big outlier last year.
Those are those red dots, gigantic outliers.
But in reality, the revisions are pretty regular.
And it doesn't look like, you just look at a rural level at this chart.
It doesn't look like they've gotten significantly worse over time.
The revisions.
And so this raises the question of, was this jobs report rigged?
Why is President Trump going off on the jobs report?
According to Alicia Finley reporting for the Wall Street Journal, the BLS commissioner has traditionally been a nonpartisan post.
The Senate confirmed Ms. McIntarfer 36 to 8 last year.
But Trump asserted without evidence that McIntarfer faked the jobs numbers before the election to try to boost Kamala's chances of victory and revise the job numbers after the election by 818,000.
Well, the truth, says Finley, is the jobs numbers have become more volatile in recent years because of declining business survey response rates.
It's why polls have been not particularly great because response rates are down.
The Bureau surveys 631,000 workplaces by a variety of media, including phone, web, even fax.
Many businesses don't respond every month.
The BLS tries to collect the data and then revises its findings over the next two months.
The survey's overall response rate has declined to 43% from 60% before the pandemic.
Small businesses are less likely than bigger ones to respond, especially in the first month.
And the survey doesn't fully account for business births and deaths either.
So is it true that there was some sort of gigantic screw-up here?
That actually the person who's responsible is the person who's the head of BLS.
Probably not.
It doesn't seem like there's a lot of evidence to the idea that this lady in particular is responsible for the bad job numbers here.
The White House points out that there have been a lot of job revisions over the course of the last couple of years.
Quote, a lengthy history of inaccuracies and incompetence by Erica McIntarfer, the former Biden-appointed commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has completely eroded public trust and government agency charged with disseminating key data used by policymakers and businesses to make consequential decisions.
This is what the White House has to say about all of this.
Now, is that true?
Is that, well, here's the reality of the situation.
Either the economy is healthy and in good shape, or it is slowing down.
One of those two things are true.
And one of the big mistakes that politicians very often make is trying to talk past how people are feeling about the economy.
It's a mistake Joe Biden made.
As inflation was mounting, you saw his public officials out there saying the American people just didn't understand inflation was transitory.
And it turns out that was wrong.
Hiring the head of BLS isn't actually going to fix this problem.
In fact, in many ways, it undermines President Trump because let's say that the job numbers go up next month after he replaces the head of the BLS.
Is that going to be a more trustworthy number?
How many people are going to say that that person now has a political incentive to please President Trump by creating a number that he likes?
This is the catch-22.
If President Trump thought that Erica McIntarford did a bad job last year, he should have fired her when he came in.
Firing her after a bad jobs report makes it look as though he's just shooting the messenger at this point.
And that, of course, is what Democrats are now claiming.
And I don't see a reason for this sort of political liability.
It doesn't make a lot of, doesn't make a lot of sense.
Here's Governor Jared Polis of Colorado trying to claim that President Trump is shooting the messenger here.
This is an example of shooting the messenger.
Look, there's been times, and we have a state labor statistics department.
Yes, there's been times when there's been big revisions in that space and information that's submitted by the private sector, by others.
It's compilated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The president didn't like what he saw.
And rather than look in the mirror and say, guess what?
My tariffs and tax increases are causing this.
And we're already seeing the devastating impact across the country.
Rather than doing that, he just said, I don't like the person who tabulated the information and it's not going to change the reality.
William W. Beach is the former commissioner of labor statistics and former head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And he says, listen, these revisions, they happen pretty much every year.
There's nothing new here.
We always revise the number.
Every year, we revise the numbers.
When I was commissioner, we had a 500,000 job revision during President Trump's first term.
And why do we do that?
Because firms are created or firms go out of business, and we don't really know that during the course of the year until we reconcile against a real full count of all the businesses.
We do that once a year.
Once we do the reconciliation, like reconciling your checkbook, you find out whether you've got as much money or you have less.
Okay, so again, is this likely to make President Trump's economy stronger or weaker?
Uncertainty leads to weaker economies.
A belief that you're not getting straight data is also a problem.
The National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett, who may in fact be the next chair of the Federal Reserve, he's definitely up for it.
He was trying to defend presidents' actions over on Fox.
Here's what he had to say.
Look, the fact is that when the data are unreliable, when they keep being revised all over the place, then there are going to be people that wonder if there's a partisan pattern in the data.
Okay, well, I mean, that may well be the truth, but you know what else is going to make people believe there's a partisan bent to the data is when you fire the head of BLS and try to replace that person after a bad jobs report.
You'll notice that President Trump didn't fire this person after a good jobs report or a revision up, right?
If the idea here is that you're trying to ensure the veracity of the statistics, then an error in the other direction would be just as bad in terms of just ensuring that people believe the stats.
So do I think this is a smart political move?
I do not.
I do not think that it's a smart political move by the president because again, it is undermining people's belief in the fairness of the stats.
Now, again, you can say that the stats are flawed and you can point out that every stat should be taken with a grain of salt, which of course is, I think, a totally fair point.
I think President Trump could say, listen, they got it wrong one direction.
Maybe they got it wrong the other direction next month.
Maybe it's not 73,000.
Maybe we actually picked up a couple hundred thousand jobs.
Instead, firing this person, it just doesn't seem like particularly beneficial politics for the president of the United States.
Meanwhile, speaking of economic uncertainty, the White House released a bunch of new tariff rates for dozens of countries on Friday.
Those tariff rates range from 15% for Iceland and Israel to 30% for South Africa to 39% for Switzerland and 20% for Taiwan and Vietnam.
These are major changes, okay?
Trying to pretend that this is not a massive increase in tariff rates.
Obviously, it is a massive increase in tariff rates.
Now, is that going to kick into inflation?
We'll get into Federal Reserve policy here in a second, because if, as Milton Friedman has said, and as I've quoted many times, inflation is anywhere and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, what you would expect is a temporary increase in prices followed by a drop in demand, followed by a decrease in prices.
That is normally what happens when there is a bad piece of policy.
The prices go up because of restriction in supply.
And then people are like, well, I don't want to buy it at that price.
And then the demand goes down.
And then the prices go down to adjust to lack of demand.
That is actually what happened during the Great Depression.
There's a price spiral that was partially brought on by tariffs.
It wasn't like there was a massive amount of inflation.
There was actually a price decrease and a massive amount of deflation happened in the early years of the Great Depression, partially due to tariff policy, actually.
Okay, so what actually is happening here?
Well, the problem here is not just the tariffs.
It is also the uncertainty associated with the tariffs.
Here is Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan.
He says, listen, a lot of this slowdown is just nobody knows what the hell is going on.
They don't think they're going to move.
Now, the market says they're going to move in September, maybe twice this year.
The market was at seven times one point this year.
Now they're down to two.
Then they're down to one.
Now they're up to two.
This is going to move around.
But the reality is two things people should really keep in focus.
One is until the inflation is out of the system, the Fed's going to be a little very careful.
And that's what they said.
And then secondly, the rate we're going to go to is a rate that is more normal than pre-global financial crisis, more of a 3%, 3.5% rate, which actually means the American economy is probably functioning better, frankly.
Okay, so we are going to see exactly whether that is true or not.
Jameson Greer is our U.S. trade representative, and he says there may be more coming.
He says that August 12th, there's the possibility of a tariff snap back.
Here he was on CBS with Margaret Brennan.
There's an August 12th deadline.
And if that deadline is not met, you have said tariff levels could snap back to above 80%.
Is that deadline going to slide?
So that's what's under discussion right now.
I would say that our conversations with the Chinese have been very positive.
We have discussions at the staff level, at my level.
President Xi and President Trump have had conversations.
They said that it's sliding.
The Chinese said it's sliding.
That's something we're working toward.
That's what we talked about.
They're not there yet.
And so they want to do that.
We're working on some technical issues, and we're talking to the president about it.
I think it's going in a positive direction.
I'm not going to get ahead of the president, but I don't think anyone wants to see those tariffs snap back to 84%.
Okay, so I think he's right about that.
I think that he is looking, presumably, for an off-ramp President Trump here.
With that said, this amount of volatility in the tariff economy, unpredictability is going to lead to investors slowing down.
There's certain areas where it's not going to slow down, like AI.
We know that AI, the money is just going to keep dumping into AI.
That is going to keep happening until presumably the bubble bursts.
Because right now, the amount being poured into AI is not being met by productivity gains on the other end concomitant with the investment.
And somebody's going to win the AI race.
Open AI will beat Anthropic or Meta will beat both of them.
And then there will be losers and those losers will fall out of step.
All of that could happen.
One thing is very, very clear.
If President Trump wants a booming economy at this point, he already has deregulation.
He already has the one big beautiful bill.
He needs some sense of predictability and solidity in the American economy.
And that jobs report that came out last week is a warning sign.
It is a red warning sign saying that you might want to slow up on the tariff war if it is going to undermine demand.
And maybe the Federal Reserve does what President Trump wants, and maybe it's the right thing to do to lower those interest rates finally and increase the ability of people to borrow at lower rates.
But the big problem is going to be where do people put that money?
Because right now we have a bunch of speculative bubbles all over the place.
You can kind of sense these bubbles everywhere, from the real estate market to the crypto markets to things like AI.
And while I don't think that we are on the verge of those bubbles bursting, I don't think that a recession is going to just pop upon us.
Bubbles burst suddenly.
It's not as though they are gradual.
They just sort of happen.
We are in still a very risky economic time and treating it as though we are not, I think, is a mistake and shooting the head of the BLS in order to blame her for the fact that these factors are cross-cutting and existing.
That, I think, is a mistake.
Meanwhile, an executive branch ethics watchdog has now opened an investigation into Jack Smith.
You'll remember Jack Smith.
He became, for just a moment in time, a person for whom the left lit vote of candles is after Dr. Anthony Fauci and Anthony and Robert Mueller.
There are a bunch of figures that the left has really worshipped for a very long time.
Jack Smith was a brief object of worship for the left because he was going after President Trump with a wide variety of lawsuits.
Well, now the Office of Special Counsel has confirmed that it is opening a probe into Smith for possible violations of the Hatch Act, which is a federal law that bans partisan political activity by certain government employees.
That inquiry comes at the request of Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who on Wednesday asked the agency to scrutinize whether Smith's actions were designed to skew the 2024 election in favor of then President Joe Biden and his then vice president Kamala Harris.
Cotton accuses Smith of trying to influence the election by rushing criminal proceedings.
Now, you'll remember that Smith did, in fact, attempt to accelerate his criminal cases against President Trump prior to the election.
He wanted to ensure that something got adjudicated before the election actually happened.
Smith's team brought two federal cases against Trump in the lead up to the November election, one alleging Trump unlawfully retained classified documents, another over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election laws.
Both were charged in 2023 ahead of the 2024 election.
Neither case went to trial.
Smith dropped them after Trump was reelected.
Smith and then Attorney General Merrick Garland have repeatedly said politics played no role in the investigations.
The probe is unusual because the steepest punishment for violation of the Hatch Act typically is dismissal from the federal government.
Now, the Hatch Act is very rarely invoked.
People online like the Hatch Act a lot.
Our sort of online lawyering club loves the Hatch Acts.
The Hatch Act's like, you're not allowed to do political activity if you are in politics, if you're in a nonpartisan position, no politics.
And it turns out that people do that all the time.
It's possible the Hatch Act is actually a violation of the First Amendment.
There's all sorts of questions about the utility of the Hatch Act.
However, it does signal that the President of the United States is unwilling to allow Democrats and Democrat appointees to be let off the hook for the politicization of everything from the DOJ to the Intel divisions.
Speaking of which, CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed over the weekend on Fox and Maria Bardaromo that John Brennan, James Comey, and Hillary Clinton might actually face indictment.
So what I think I hear you saying is there is still an opportunity for indictments, potential prosecutions, accountability from those people who may have lied under oath, like John Brennan, James Comey, and perhaps Hillary Clinton.
Well, that's why I've made the referrals that I have.
DNI Gabbard has made referrals and why we're going to continue to share the intelligence that would support the ability of our Department of Justice to make fair and just bring fair and just claims against those who have perpetrated this hoax against the American people and this stain on our country.
Okay, so we'll find out whether that happens or not.
Certainly, if the evidence is there, prosecutions should be in order.
Meanwhile, director of the FBAC Cash Patel put out a tweet over the weekend, quote, in 2017, 2018, I proved the Steele dossier was fictitious intelligence weaponized by corrupt FBI officials to deceive a federal judge, an unlawfully spy on then presidential candidate Trump's campaign, all paid for by his opponent.
The media called me a liar.
Now, says Cash Patel, I'm the FBI director, we just uncovered burn bags filled with hidden Russia gate files, including the Durham manners and declassified them.
Once again, I released the prior FBI's own documents and exposed the truth.
The same media is calling me a liar again.
Maybe this FBI will release more docs directly from FBI headquarters so we can see who is lying.
Wouldn't want to deprive the fake news of more bogus Pulitzers.
So we'll find out what else he has to release.
It sounds like there is more that is going to drop in the very near future.
Okay, meanwhile, Chuck Schumer and his Democrats are still holding up a bunch of President Trump's nominees.
According to Politico, GOP's internal frustration in the Senate has been building over the past month.
Many Republicans are annoyed about the lack of voice votes for President Trump's nominees.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune noted in a floor address last Monday that at the same point in his tenure, President Biden had gotten dozens of nominees approved without having to call individual roll call votes.
Democrats have basically been utilizing a wide variety of methodologies in order to hold up President Trump's even intermediate or low-level nominees.
Thun added in an interview on Tuesday, quote, pressure is going to grow to take steps to expedite this process if Dems don't start playing ball soon.
It's going to start coming from every direction.
There are roughly 150 nominees currently awaiting action on the Senate floor.
Democrats are forcing Republicans to eat up floor time to overcome procedural hurdle nominees on even mid-level picks.
Senator Dick Durbin, of course, says, quote, Republicans would like to return to those golden years when there were groups of nominees considered, but we weren't given that courtesy by them.
We're kind of stuck where we are.
Okay, so the question, of course, is if that's the case, then why were so many more nominees approved by Republicans while Joe Biden was president of the United States?
Chuck Schumer is trying to claim that it's because President Trump's nominees are historically bad.
Let me say, historically bad nominees deserve historic levels of scrutiny.
I saw the majority leader bring out a chart again today comparing the situation right now to past nominees from past administrations.
What he fails to mention is that we have never seen nominees as flawed, as compromised, as unqualified as we have right now.
And the Republican senators know that.
So once again, historically bad nominees deserve a historical level of scrutiny.
Well, I mean, that's not true at all.
I mean, Joe Biden tried to, as you will recall, appoint Nira Tandon to the head of the Director of Office of Management and Budget.
And she had attacked Republicans.
She had attacked even some Democratic senators.
Even Senator Joe Manchin had to step in when he was a Democrat and kill that Particular nomination.
Nancy Abudu was nominated to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
She was director at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Her nomination was obviously quite controversial.
She was nominated to the 11th circuit.
There are a bunch of other nominees that Joe Biden put forward who were quite controversial.
So that's just nonsense.
This is Chuck Schumer again playing this game where if he holds up Republican nominees, then that is just him being principled.
But if Republicans hold up nominees, then it's a threat to democracy or some such.
Senator Tom Cotton commented on this.
He says, listen, we can also do this the hard way.
It's a Democrat's choice.
They have a third choice.
They could return to historical precedent.
They could agree to voice vote today in the next few minutes.
More than 150 nominees at this point, most of whom came out of our committee on a bipartisan basis.
Many of whom are nominated to offices that have literally never had a recorded vote on the floor of the United States Senate.
The question is up to the Democrats.
Do you want to do this the easy way or do you want to do it the hard way?
So what are Democrats actually doing?
It's not about the nominees.
What Democrats are actually doing is, according to Fox News, they are attempting to leverage Republicans into stopping future recision packages.
Those, of course, are the things done where the White House says we don't want to spend a certain amount of money.
And then Congress essentially passes a bill by a pure majority vote saying we are not going to force you to spend a given amount of money.
President Trump doesn't want any of that.
He put out a post on Saturday on Truth Social, quote, praising Republicans for fighting over the weekend and far beyond, if necessary, in order to get my appointments approved and on their way to helping us make America great again.
He said, Senator Cry and Chuck Schumer is demanding over $1 billion in order to approve a small number of our highly qualified nominees who should right now be helping us to run our country.
The demand is egregious and unprecedented and would be embarrassing to the Republican Party if it were accepted.
It's political extortion by any other name.
Tell Schumer, who's under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the radical left lunatics, to go to hell.
Do not accept the offer.
Go home and explain to your constituents what bad people the Democrats are and what great jobs the Republicans are doing and have done for our country.
Have a great recess and make America great.
Again, not one of Trump's nominees has gotten a voice vote or gone through unanimous consent.
At this point, four years ago, 49 of President Biden's picks had already been confirmed by voice votes.
So according to Senator Mark Wynn Mullen of Oklahoma, he says the Republicans have a few options.
One, they could reach a deal with the Democrats.
Two, they could adjourn the Senate and give the president runway for recess appointments, which appears to be what they're going to do.
And finally, a rules change package in which Republicans consider the nuclear option.
Basically, they go to the Senate parliamentarian and they ask for a ruling that by pure majority vote, they can just push through these nominees without any sort of obstruction by Democrats.
So that's still on the table as well.
Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, he says, listen, we are getting some of Trump's nominees through.
We've got a great start, but Democrats are holding up the process for sure.
But I want to emphasize, despite Chuck Schumer's trying to slow things down, we've had an incredible first seven months under President Trump.
We've had 11 pieces of major legislation that the president signed.
We've repealed 16 Biden rules as well, 125 nominees, but the Democrats are not following suit at all.
They're doing everything they can to obstruct us.
Well, it will be fascinating to see what Republicans do next.
They should hold Democrats' feet to the fire on all of this.
Meanwhile, we have updates on that horrifying video last week of a white man being pummeled by a group of black young men.
And then a white woman steps in and she gets absolutely clocked in the face by a young black man.
And this, of course, went viral online.
And it raised the question that we briefly discussed on the show: if the races were reversed, wouldn't that have been a national story?
The answer, of course, is 100%.
It definitely would have.
Well, now she's speaking out.
Here she was.
Her name is Holly, apparently.
She is a single mom, and she's thanking people for their support.
As you can see, I mean, her face is still deeply bruised.
I mean, there's a person who got pretty hurt.
I just want to say thank you so much to everyone for all of the love and support.
It is very humbling that you have set your prayers, your blessings.
It's definitely what's keeping me going.
And you have just brought back faith and humanity.
So God bless you all.
Thank you.
I appreciate everything that you're doing for me and my family.
It's been very, very hard.
And I'm still recovering.
I still have a very bad brain trauma.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.
So one of the alleged assailants is 34, claimed he was called racial spurs and spat on the lead up to the beatdown.
Well, of the woman, I mean, you can see that on tape.
But I mean, let's assume for the sake of argument that the N-word was used by the white guy or even by the woman who was punched in the face.
So when I say so, I don't mean they did something okay.
It's not okay to use the N-word.
But the punishment for using the N-word in the United States of America is not you get your ass kicked by an entire group of people.
That is not how this typically works while people stand around filming and dancing and cheering.
Words are not to be met with violence.
This is one of the typical rules of a civilized society.
The monopoly of violence is supposed to be held by the police or to be used in self-defense.
Apparently, according to the police, one of the women who was involved in this conflagration interjected herself into a brawl on the street.
Family members, according to the New York Post, of the alleged assailants have since attempted to make the street rampage into a racial issue, claiming the only reason it drew so much attention and outrage was because of the skin color of those involved.
Okay, like, I mean, yes.
I mean, that's obviously true in the sense that if this were a bunch of black people beating up a black person, it wouldn't receive a lot of attention.
But the point is, until social media, a bunch of black people beating up a white person would not have received a lot of attention and still has not nationally.
The real question here is about the legacy media coverage, because the question is not if a bunch of white people beat up a white person, would it make news?
The answer is no.
If a bunch of black people beat up a black person, is it news?
The answer is no.
If a bunch of white people beat up a black person, is it news?
Yes, for months on end in the legacy media.
And if a bunch of black people beat up a white person, it makes news on X, but pretty much nowhere else.
I have yet to see an enormous amount of media coverage of this particular incident from, say, the New York Times.
I'm waiting to see it.
I've yet, it's a mystery.
I don't know where it went.
Meanwhile, Ken Cober, the president of the Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police, spoke to the Daily Wire about this.
And he slammed elected city leaders over allegations many have made against the victims of the mob attack on July 26th.
He said, quote, I speak to our investigators probably every 12 hours.
There's been absolutely zero evidence so far that suggests these victims caused this.
I mean, they've looked at video evidence, they've done interviews, nothing suggests these victims were the ones that started this mob attack.
After videos of the mob attack began circulating online, Cincinnati City Council President Pro Tem Victoria Parks wrote a Facebook comment saying the victims, quote, begged for that beatdown.
I am grateful for the whole story, which is insane.
Vice Mayor Jan Michelle Kearney said, quote, let us be clear, we do not condone violence.
We condemn the violent actions of the instigators of the fight, as well as the violent actions of those who responded to the provocation.
Opportunists are trying to use this incident as a way to divide us racially and politically and cast our great city in a false and negative light.
Cobra said, quote, I think a lot of it is pandering to their constituents.
They do it in the face of what the investigation says.
These investigators have met with city officials, explained to them, here's the evidence we have.
And they just snub their nose at that.
Quite honestly, it's pretty disgusting.
Now, apparently, the city's police force, according to Daily Wire, has operated understaffed by roughly 20%.
Republican Senator Berry Moreno of Ohio ripped into Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Peraval last week after the mayor's response to the attack.
He said, nice words don't mean anything unless you have actual actions in order to improve policing in Cincinnati.
So, again, the fact that this is turned into a sort of apparent racial defense, racialist defense by some members of Cincinnati government is totally insane, but indicative of where we are politically.
Okay, meanwhile, in foreign policy news, Dmitry Medvedev, who is the deputy chair of the Security Council of the Russian Federation and was for just a brief moment a Potemkin president of Russia before Vladimir Putin decided to get rid of the facade and just do what he wanted.
He had been threatening nuclear action based on American support for Ukraine and NATO support for Ukraine.
And he had threatened the possibility of nuclear action.
He put out a tweet, quote, Trump's playing the ultimate game with Russia.
50 days or 10, he should remember two things.
Russia isn't Israel or even Iran.
Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step toward war, not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country.
Don't go down the sleepy Joe Road.
Well, President Trump responded to that by positioning two nuclear submarines closer to Russia in response to the recent comments.
He said, quote, based on the highly provocative statements of the former president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the deputy chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I've ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that.
The U.S. does have strategic submarines at sea that carry nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.
But the bottom line here is that this is obviously President Trump backing the Russians off, saying, listen, you guys really think you're going to go to nuclear war at the United States?
Really?
That is a thing that you're threatening?
Because President Trump said there's an ultimatum on sanctions based on your behavior in Ukraine.
Good luck with that.
Playing chicken with the president of the United States when it comes to foreign policy is typically a very stupid game to play.
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