Ep. 686 Troubling Details About the Surveillance State
Summary:
In this episode I address the growing surveillance state and how it will impact both criminal behavior and the behavior of innocent Americans. I also discuss the recent positive economic news and show how the numbers differ from the Obama administration numbers.
News Picks:
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Donations to the NRA have tripled.
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Get ready to hear the truth about America on a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino.
All right.
Welcome to the Dan Bongino Show.
Producer Joseph, how are you today?
I'm hanging in there, man.
Doing the blitzkrieg bop this morning.
I got a cool show for you today, Joe.
You may be interested in.
I know you're I know you like this kind of stuff.
Yeah.
I saw a report at Zero Hedge, which is I'll put in the show notes today.
And I want to get into this about how deep And detailed the surveillance state has become.
And as a former federal agent, this kind of stuff freaks me out a little bit.
Yeah.
But it's an interesting piece because it relates, I know you're fascinated by this stuff.
I am, yeah.
About how...
The intricate network of cameras and cell phones.
The piece is great because it uses a relevant example from the Austin bombing.
So it's at Zero Hedge.
I'll put it up in the show notes.
I want to get into this because I think it's going to shock a lot of you how in the future there's a good and a bad to this.
That's what I like to do on the show.
I'm a libertarian.
I prefer less government power.
I think the good part of it's going to be it's going to be very difficult in the future to commit crimes like this.
And I spoke about this on Fox.
The downside is a lot of your, you know, freedom and liberty to, you know, not fall into this surveillance net is going to rapidly disappear.
And I think we need to get that.
But before I get to that story, too, I want to get to some really fantastic economic numbers.
Boom.
Some good news for the Trumpster.
Throw the numbers out there.
Numbers are always tough for liberals.
This is going to be good stuff.
All right.
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All right.
So before we get to that story about the surveillance day, which I read this morning, I'm like, damn.
Even I didn't know it.
You know, I've been out of law enforcement for, what, five, six years now.
I was like, I didn't even know it got this intense.
I want to get to these GDP numbers.
Good news for the Trumpster!
I tweeted this out and it's on my Facebook if you all want to see this.
It's from CNBC.
I use this stuff on purpose so liberals can't say, oh my gosh, what are you using, Breitbart numbers or conservative review numbers?
No, numbers are numbers.
These are numbers from CNBC sourced, by the way, from the U.S.
Department of Commerce.
So unless the government and CNBC are lying to you, we can reasonably be assured these economic GDP numbers are accurate.
Growth numbers.
Gross domestic product.
What we are producing.
Gross domestic product for liberals.
What we produce.
A measure of our wealth.
Yeah, GDP.
GDP.
GDPizzle.
For sure.
So, I took a snapshot from the piece, and to make it easy, Joe, if you want to go to my Facebook, or if you want to go to my Twitter, you can see it yourself, and I'll read them.
It's free.
What I did, Joe, is I put a big circle around Obama's numbers, and I labeled it with N-O.
Because I know liberals have a tough time with this kind of stuff.
I put a circle around Trump's GDP numbers and I labeled it with, this is crazy, a T. Yes, a T. OT.
Overtime, baby.
So you can see it.
I will read off the number.
Here are Obama's GDP numbers.
And let me just put this out there.
The reason I'm reading off these numbers is because your liberal friends, I know it, and some of them who listen to this show, because I do get your feedback, especially my buddy Richard, who has gotten increasingly fired up lately on the gun control issue.
This guy sends me the nastiest emails ever.
I feed off it, though.
I feed off it like Electro from Spider-Man when he gets the electric.
I love it.
So Richard will hate this.
So Rich, here you go, babe.
Joe Warmacost language.
Obama's numbers from 2016.
And to be fair, we'll use the recent numbers.
Why am I using Obama's 2016 numbers and not his 2008 numbers?
Because I already know the liberal comeback.
Well, 2009, we were in a recession that Bush gave us.
Okay, great.
We're talking about eight years later into a recession Obama already declared was over.
Remember the summer of recovery?
Remember that one?
Yeah, yeah.
So he's eight years away from the Bush excuse.
What were Obama's 2016 numbers after 8 years of craponomics, otherwise known as Obama-nomics, okay?
2016, excuse me, Q1.
Q1, 0.6% growth.
Phew.
Yeah, that stinks.
Q2 under Obama, 2016, 2.2% growth.
That stinks, but not as bad as 0.6.
Yeah.
All right.
Q3, got a little bit of a rebound, 2.8.
That's actually not bad.
Q3.
Q4 under Obama, 1.8.
Now, that's pretty horrendous.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
As Macho Man would say.
We love Randy.
Randy's always calling into the show.
Total rando phone calls we get.
Joe takes them all the time.
He knows right away.
Go to Randy on the phones.
Here it is.
Q1 of 2017, Obama.
Now you may say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
2017, that's Trump.
How are we attributing this to Obama?
No, listen, the transition didn't occur until mid-January.
That first quarter is unquestionably still Obama's economy.
The Trump team just takes office.
There's almost no opportunity whatsoever to enact your agenda.
Any reasonable person would attribute this to Obama.
1.2% growth.
So we have 0.6, 2.2, 2.8, 1.8, 1.2.
Pretty disastrous numbers with the exception of that third quarter, okay?
Yeah.
Now, I circled that with an O. Here are the T numbers for Trump.
Second quarter of 2017.
3.1%!
Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding!
Yeah, boy!
3.2%!
Oh, yeah!
Oh, yeah!
Macho Man back again on the phones.
Oh, yeah!
3.2% growth.
2017, 2.9% growth.
Oh, yeah!
Fourth quarter, Macho Man!
2.9%!
Oh yeah!
3.2% growth.
2017, 2.9% growth.
Oh yeah!
Fourth quarter, Macho Man, 2.9%.
Now, why do I bring this up today?
I bring it up today because they recently revised up that 2.9% number
from the previously reported 2.5% number.
Folks, these are just the numbers.
I know they're hard for liberals.
I get it.
I understand it.
But 2016, Obama's numbers averaged 1.5%, 2017 under Trump, they averaged out, they're going to be by the time this is over and re-evaluations potentially double that.
I'm just trying to tell you that growth matters.
Gross domestic product.
Which is measured by, what's the formula?
It's C plus G plus I plus X minus M. Consumption plus government spending plus investment plus exports minus imports.
That's the formula for growth domestic product.
For gross domestic product, excuse me.
What we produce, the value of what we produce as a country.
It would be no different than the gross domestic product of your household where you work.
The value of what you produce is somewhat equivalent to what you would be worth to a company.
The country is what we produce, is what we're worth economically, collectively speaking.
GDP numbers matter.
You know, you can dispute the formula.
I don't like certain components of it, especially the exports minus imports portion of it.
But it is a good proxy for how we're growing.
We're growing under Trump.
We weren't growing under Obama.
These are just simple facts.
And as I've said to you over and over, the only way out of this debt trajectory we're on, we owe $20 trillion.
The entire economy annually is only worth $20 trillion.
The debt is going up dramatically every single year.
The only way out of this, ladies and gentlemen, the only way is going to be to hit 3 plus percent growth consistently for decades.
I don't want to hear about the business cycle.
I believe the business cycle is a creation of the Federal Reserve and printing money.
If we were to commit horse blinders on to growth policies, 3.5, 4% growth every year for two decades, we could halve the debt if we just put a cap on spending just by growth alone.
A little good news, because I know I was upset about the Omnibus disaster, and I still am.
But from what I'm hearing, Trump's pretty pissed, too, which is good news.
If you read an op-ed, even in the Wall Street Journal today, by the way, folks, which is no fan of Trump, let's just be honest with that.
Well, I love the op-ed page in the Journal, but they are not Trump fans at all.
Even the op-ed section of the Wall Street Journal today, Joe, is acknowledging that behind the scenes, Trump is pissed about this Omni bill, which is good news because we all should be pissed, too.
It was a total spending disaster.
Disaster!
Matter of fact, Mike Lee has a piece up in the Daily Signal today about just how bad of a disaster it was, the omnibus.
It was disastrous.
There's no lipstick to put on that baby, okay?
Now, if he turns around and puts a cap on spending in the next one, and we hit these 3% plus growth rates, folks, I'm telling you, we'll be okay.
I'd like to see spending cut, don't get me wrong.
But I'd like to avoid bankruptcy first.
It's important stuff. Okay, I just thought I'd put that out there, give you some good news,
because I know a laughter the Omni bill, a lot of us were pretty upset and based on your emails,
you were pretty upset too. The emails were, I'm guessing Joe, 30, 40 to one people who were
really, really, really bitter about the Omni signing.
And maybe one out of 40 was like, oh, well, you know, it was good for the military.
It was decent for the military, but... That sounds about right, though, from what I've been hearing.
Yeah.
Yeah, he was on CBS, too.
Yeah, the calls and stuff.
Yeah, Joe works the morning show, so he gets live-time reaction.
I only get it by emails after the show, so... That was pretty good.
Yeah, yeah.
By the way, thanks to everyone who's been tuning into my NRA TV show nightly at 5.30 p.m.
Eastern Time.
I appreciate it.
It is live.
I do it from my home studio here.
We've been getting some great feedback on that, so thanks a lot.
I've got a really great guest tonight, my buddy Matt Palumbo, my co-author on my Trump-Russia book.
He is an expert debunker, though.
Joe knows, Matt.
We've had him on the show before.
He is one of the best debunkers I've met.
He's going to be debunking the Australian, Joe, gun control, air quotes, myth tonight on the show.
So don't miss that.
He'll come on about 10 minutes in.
Okay.
This story blew me away and that's rare.
It is.
It's rare.
And I strongly encourage you to go to bondgino.com and read this today.
I'll put it up.
It's a zero hedge link.
About the depth of the surveillance state and the surveillance net we find ourselves in as a result, folks, of living normal, relatively normal lives, just using equipment that we all own now, cell phones.
The article is interesting because it's about the Austin bombing and how they caught him.
And I found it interesting because I had appeared on Fox, I think the night One of the nights, one of the explosives went off.
And I had made the point, and I think I may have said it on this show as well, that this guy, and he wound up getting caught.
Folks, I promise you, I'm not trying to be like Captain Know-It-All here.
I'm just trying to make a point.
So please, I hate that when radio hosts like celebrate themselves.
But I had said that night that this guy's gonna get caught and he's probably gonna kill himself and it happened the next day.
Well, I didn't say that because I was like trying to be, you know, Karnak or anything like that.
The, you know, predictor of the future.
You know, I wasn't trying to do any of that.
I was just basing it based on my investigative experience and based on this guy's pattern of behavior that didn't seem like he was worried about getting caught.
It seemed like he was worried about carnage.
Um, so the next day he did in fact was caught and did kill himself.
But I said there are two things that are gonna make these types of attacks more difficult to pull off for any extended period of time.
And the analogy I gave was the Unabomber, Joe, who for years, years was mailing these packages in the mail.
Remember the Unabomber, that was the FBI acronym for University and Airport Bomber.
You know the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.
He operated for years and they couldn't catch him.
And I had said on the show that the reason this is going to become more and more difficult to pull off these kinds of attacks over any extended period of time is twofold.
Number one, the growth in DNA technology.
It is easy to wipe fingerprints, folks.
It is not easy to wipe your DNA off everything.
It isn't.
Yeah, just try it.
I know, I set myself up for that one too.
The DNA library, Joe, even worse, is getting larger and larger.
And for criminals, this is not, you know, but I'm going to give you the good and the bad.
Meaning the samples they have of people who are arrested with police departments who are collecting DNA is getting larger and larger and larger and larger.
And in decades, it's going to be really tough.
I mean, you're going to leave a DNA fingerprint on just about everything.
Knives at a knifing scene, firearms at a firearm crime scene, an explosive, God forbid, on a bomb site.
That's reason number one.
This is going to get tough, not to pull off initially, but to pull off for any extended period of time.
Secondly, and this is relevant to the article, is the surveillance network in the United States of private and public cameras is just exploding.
And it's exploding for obvious reasons.
The technology is getting cheaper.
The technology is getting better.
Matter of fact, when I left my house at Saverna Park, we have surveillance cameras in Saverna Park.
Joe's been in my house over there.
The cameras I had there even, gosh, what am I at, three years?
Are nowhere near the guy of new cameras in my new house and my friend who put them up, this NYPD detective friend of mine.
He's like, no, no, even those cameras are old.
I'm going to get you new ones.
So the camera technology has gotten better and it's gotten cheaper.
Camera technology is going to be so ubiquitous in five to ten years that there's not going to be a neighborhood in America that's not covered substantially by a network of both public and private cameras.
You are not going to be able to operate in the public sphere without being caught on one of these cameras.
You're not.
Now how does this relate to the Austin thing?
Because the zero hedge pieces like, hey Joe, yeah that's great and all, it's going to stop criminals, but hey listen folks, you have to keep in mind as well the downside to this is you're going to be under 24 hour surveillance whether you know it or not.
And I think it's fair to give both sides of this and to understand that there is a certain forfeiting away of liberty with the development of this kind of technology.
The initial part of the Zero Hedge piece walks through how they caught the Austin guy, and it's interesting, and some of you may have heard the story, some of you may have not.
He had evaded detection for a couple of days, and cameras and camera technology, how, we don't know.
Maybe he scouted the area out in advance, we don't know.
But where he got caught was when he went into the FedEx.
He went into the FedEx to mail a bomb, and the camera caught his license plate on the way out.
Now, I'm telling you from my experience with cameras, both in the Secret Service and as Joe civilian, having cameras myself, that those cameras, those were expensive 10 years ago to get a license plate from inside or outside a store.
Those cameras now are peanuts.
Peanuts.
The resolution, the high def capabilities, the night vision capabilities, they're cheap as dirt now.
And the guy's license plate, the bomber, was caught.
They knew who he was from the license plate check.
It then walks through what they did after that, which is fascinating.
They went out from the license plate, they got a cell phone number, apparently he had his cell phone off.
But when he powered it back on, what is his cell phone, Joe?
It's a homing beacon.
Here I am!
Right, here I am, daddy-o.
And they tracked him down, which again, is obviously a very good thing.
This guy was a homicidal maniac.
But, now, in the piece after, he says, okay, that's the good part, okay?
We got the good news, they caught the bad guy.
Now let's get to the ramifications for you, you know, Joe Armacost, Dan Bongino, and the rest of us as to what this means in the future.
And he walks through about 10 points.
I took out, you know, four or five of them I thought were really good.
The rest you can read in the piece.
It'll be up at bongino.com.
And if you subscribe to my email list, I will email you these articles.
Number one.
Folks, you better start accepting the fact that your cell phone is in fact a homing beacon and a tracking device.
It is!
Now, listen, that's a choice.
I obviously don't have an issue with it.
Why?
Because my iPhone X is sitting right off my right hand.
See that, Joe?
Is that creeping in the camera there?
There you go.
But the government didn't force me to buy it.
I understand this, and I am a willing, if not, I'm not very happy about it, I don't like the fact that I'm being tracked, but I am a willing participant.
I wish it weren't the case, but the ability of the cell phone to transmit information to towers, the way it works in law enforcement is they can triangulate among cell phone towers as to exactly where, you know, using simple vectors, where that cell phone is.
It's a tracking device.
It's a homing beacon.
It was used to catch this guy, and it can be used to track you, too.
Just accept it.
Now there's an easy way out of that, Joe.
What is it?
Don't buy a cell phone.
Now, some people may make that choice, due to my work and, you know, me having to read content basically 24 hours a day now between Fox, the NRA TV show, and this.
That's not an option for me.
I need to be connected to the internet, the LTE system, the 3G system, and soon to be the 5G system, because I need to read information basically all day.
So I have no doubt that the cell phone is true.
I always find it fascinating when I go in my car and I go to the gym, and I'll usually go after the show, Joe, and it says, 12 minutes to Stewart.
In other words, the Apple Maps thing knows where I'm going.
Yeah.
It's the weirdest thing ever.
You're like, oh my gosh, this is just freaky.
So number one, accept it.
Your cell phone's a tracking device.
Accept it or get rid of it.
Again, the government's not forcing it on us, but me having strong libertarian tendencies, it bothers me, but I am, you know, a willing participant.
Yeah.
But not a happy one.
There's a difference.
Number two, this was a great point.
That these can be synced and timestamped with the network of cameras, both closed circuit and otherwise.
In other words, your movements are not only detected as to where you are, but when you were there.
All right, this is creepy.
It is creepy, so like, they can go, Joe, in other words, and find out at, like Joe and I, Joe had a busy meeting this morning and we were a little bit late, but he's gonna try to bounce this thing out early, but Joe was stuck in traffic.
It's not only creepy that they know Joe was still at the studio at whatever, 9.30, but what's creepy is they can go and timestamp that with, cameras from the Doubletree, which is that still next door to CBM where you are, and not only see when Joe was there, where he was, but they can get video of what he was doing.
So now you have the when, the where, and the what, which explains the how, if you're trying to explain how Joe, say, committed a crime in the parking lot of WCBM.
You have everything!
He was basically watched the whole time, and he wasn't even under physical human body surveillance, where someone was actually watching him.
It is creepy.
And it can all be synced up using timestamps on this network of cameras.
That's super creepy stuff.
Wow.
Alright, here's another takeaway from this.
And by the way, that did happen with the Austin case.
They synced it up with timestamps so they knew how and where and why he was moving where he was moving.
I said before the private and public camera network is growing.
It's only going to be more.
There is not going to be less.
That's just, that's tautological.
This network is going to grow.
If you're being caught on surveillance now, you're going to be caught on more surveillance tomorrow.
Here's another one.
The network of license plate readers is growing too!
Oh yeah, baby!
So now they don't only have your license plate on these high-definition cameras that have higher resolution than cameras 10 and 20 years ago, but the license plate readers in a lot of these places, especially over in Europe, these are ubiquitous, they know exactly where you're going.
I remember... there's an interesting story on this, Joe.
It's a little damn bunchy.
I don't tell personal stories a lot, but this one's funny.
We were in the United Arab Emirates one time when I was a Secret Service agent, and we had to desperately get to a car plane.
I think we were there with Bush, and I was in the transportation section of the Secret Service.
We handled the motorcades, the cars, the security on the motorcades.
It was a tough job, but we also handled logistics.
Why, nobody knows.
But the TS, the transportation section, handled logistics, which was always a pain in the butt.
One day I get a call and Bush leaves.
And I forget where he was going next, Kuwait or whatever.
I forget the order of the trip, but it was a Middle East jaunt.
And they said, Dan, I was a driver on a trip.
They go, you got to get these cars to the car plane, the military plane.
You know, we drive the cars on the plane, like ASAP.
And I'm like, well, we're like a hundred miles away.
They're like, I don't care what you do.
Get those cars to the plane.
We're in the United Arab Emirates.
Keep in mind, we have no law enforcement powers at all.
We may be secret service agents with guns, but you have no law enforcement powers in the UAE whatsoever.
So we're looking at the guys, we're like, guys, we gotta go.
We gun it all the way on this highway in the UAE back to the airport to get there.
And we get a call like, I don't know, like a week later, and it turns out the embassy there was pissed.
And I was like, what happened?
They're like, you guys were caught on every single traffic camera, license plate reader, whatever, for like 80 miles, doing 100 miles an hour to the airport.
They're like, you're lucky you guys are in PNG, meaning persona non grata, meaning kicked out of the country forever.
Like, don't ever come back.
I'm like, really?
He goes, oh no, they're pissed.
Like they got this boatload of citations in the mail at the embassy and it's all our cars.
So this is gonna happen too.
It's already big in the Middle East overseas and it's obviously here too.
Yeah.
Number five.
More freaky deaky mode.
Your purchases and your email searches are all catalogued.
Not forever, but for a really long period of time.
Now, remember the show, Joe, you and I did about how, you know, the liberals want a cashless society, negative interest rates.
It was a great show.
I loved it.
How their goal is negative interest rates, which is a tax.
Negative interest rates, meaning you put your cash in a bank.
The bank has negative interest rates.
You lose money every day.
If the government has negative interest rates, the government is basically a de facto form of taxation because they get to take your money every single day.
And you say, well, I'll just take my money out of the bank.
What if you can't?
What if we lived in a cashless society?
Now, I don't want to get off track, but we did a whole show on this and we got tremendous feedback.
Liberals love this idea of negative interest rates in a cashless society for two reasons.
Number one, it's a tax.
They take your money every day it's in the bank.
For nothing.
Positive interest rates, you make money.
Negative interest rates, you lose it.
But the second reason is they can track everything.
They say, oh man, we're getting into X-Files stuff.
Are we really?
We're already moving towards a cashless society in other countries that are already pushing for this.
And the Zero Hedge piece makes the point that these purchases are being tracked and a lot of them are being catalogued.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that's been my major beef against them in the United States.
They're tracking pockets of financial data across the entire country.
And it's, oh, well, we're keeping it anonymously.
Really?
We were told that about metadata too.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, right is right.
Your purchases, folks, your email records, all being cataloged.
I don't know why I'm surprised.
I don't know why I'm surprised at that.
I don't know why you're surprised either, because we've talked about this, and I think because we're putting it all together in one spot.
But let's go through this now.
So cell phones, your conversations, your texts are all being recorded by metadata.
Right.
You're tracked by it.
It's a homing beacon, basically.
It's synced up with a camera network.
Not officially synced up, but by timestamps.
The network is growing, the private and public camera network.
License plates are being read as to where you travel.
Your phone already knows where you travel anyway.
Your purchases are being tracked.
Your email searches, your emails and your searches on internet searches, I should say, not email searches, internet searches are being recorded.
And let me just put a cherry on top of this whole thing.
This is a really good piece.
Please read it.
Biometrics is growing everywhere.
Face ID, face ID catalog.
I mean, again, I'm a willing participant, but it is convenient on the iPhone X. You don't have to remember, you don't have an X yet, do you Joe?
No, I have the other one.
If you get the X, it is pretty convenient, although your face, your fingerprint, this is all being recorded.
I'm an Android guy, that's what I meant to say.
Oh, you're an Android, yeah.
I still have this iPhone thing, and I will tell you this, it's super convenient.
You have this Face ID system, and I have PNC for a certain banking account I use, and you don't have to put in a password anymore, you just look at it.
I mean, you literally just look at the phone, and the Face ID unlocks it.
Folks, this Face ID technology is tremendous, but we gotta remember, this is gonna be used elsewhere too.
What happens when you walk in a store, Joe, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, whatever it is, whatever it may be, local mall, and all of a sudden they have a face ID tracker.
I mean, this is out of minority report.
Welcome, Mr. Armacost.
And Joe likes Under Armour, whatever it may be.
You know, he likes their polo shirts.
Joe, we have a 25% sale on Under Armour polos today, and it's an audio system that speaks to Joe on the way in.
Oh, that's crazy.
Is it?
It's already happening!
It's already happening!
Biometrics!
So now they also have your face and your fingerprints.
Listen, I'm not trying to get, you know, crazy with you and get all conspiracy theory stuff.
I just... I mean this sincerely as a... having...
You know, had the power of government as a federal agent and knowing what it can do, this stuff scares me.
I mean, it's the reason I do this podcast.
And the good news is it's going to be very difficult in the future to go on prolonged crime sprees because you're going to get caught and you're going to get caught relatively quickly.
The bad news is you are being tracked.
And if this information is wants to be used against you, it can be.
And what bothers me is, and that's why, by the way, for those of you, because I got an email yesterday from some guy, he's like, listen, I get it with the Trump-Russia thing, but that's why the story, he wanted to know why I'm so interested in it, and that's why.
Because the Trump-Russia thing speaks to me to a very dangerous future if we don't stop this now.
How all of these materials, and some of them in certain points were used to spy on potentially innocent Americans really deeply disturbs me and should bother you too.
All right, I got a lot more to get to today.
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All right.
On Sessions, by the way, because I get a lot of emails still about Sessions.
People are fired up and my line on Sessions show has been what?
Take it ease!
Take it ease on Sessions.
I told you, I'm just kidding.
I don't know Sessions personally.
I'm just, the people I trust are telling me he's working behind the scenes.
I already told you last week, we had the McCabe firing.
We had other things going on.
Things are happening.
Now, Another terrific Byron York piece in the Washington Examiner today, which will be in the show notes on my website.
Sessions is apparently super pissed off right now, no other way to say it, because the Justice Department, the Bureau, the FBI has been slow-walking subpoenas to produce information on the Hillary Clinton email investigation, the FISA abuse process during the spying operation on Trump, and the firing of Mike Flynn.
Sessions apparently, according to a source, lost his marbles yesterday and told the FBI, hey fellas, ladies, you better get on this like yesterday or me and you going to have a reckoning here.
So what did the FBI do?
Read the article yourself.
Christopher Wray, the FBI director, came out and doubled the number of personnel from 27 to 54.
That are dedicated to this investigation exclusively and to producing documents.
I'm not happy about it.
I wish things would have moved faster, but I'm just saying with Sessions, let's be careful here.
If we're going to be fair to the president on the Omni and say, hey, signing it was a mistake, All right, but he acknowledged it and let's move on because we have fight bigger fights to fight right now.
Then we have to be fair to Sessions too.
Okay.
It was a mistake.
They slow walk this and the slow pace of it, but stuff is happening.
Give the guy some time.
I know I'm going to get negative feedback on it.
That's fine.
But I have ladies and gentlemen, I work out of my office in Florida.
I have no allegiance to these people.
I stay out of the swamp for a reason.
I don't, you know, go up there to Glenhead people.
I don't care.
I don't care.
I know that nobody asks me to say anything.
I'm just telling you people I trust are telling me behind the scenes that Sessions knows exactly what's going on right now.
So give him some time on that.
Hey, one more thing on this, and I want to move on to a couple other topics.
Really, it is a busy news day, and I don't want to lose you.
There was a fascinating piece in the American Spectator.
Great piece.
It'll be up at the show notes today again.
Bongino.com.
Please check it out.
The American Spectator did a piece about John Brennan that is damning, and it confirms everything I've been telling you the whole time.
Well, asserts, I should say, confirms it.
I don't like to.
That's a liberal term.
The evidence is building, in other words, that Brennan Had some personal animus for Trump and used foreign entities to spy on him.
I talked about it yesterday during the show.
Please listen to yesterday's show about this.
How it's becoming clear as day right now that U.S.
intelligence operators under the direction, it appears right now, of John Brennan, United Kingdom intelligence operators worked with them.
To get information on Trump.
Foreign intelligence agencies got information on Trump and passed it on to the Obama team.
It's already been reported by CNN.
Listen to yesterday's show.
But here's an interesting... Let me read this to you.
It's a paragraph from the piece, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.
It's not long, but it's really, really good.
The piece is very critical of Brennan.
It says, Joe, while Brennan's recklessness, and he was the former CIA director, and I should just put that in case some of you are new listeners and some of you may not have heard of him, most of you have, while Brennan's recklessness is obviously of no interest to the media, you know, because they're all hacks, of course, it's me editorializing.
It is provoking increasing concern amongst government investigators who are looking at a range of his abuses from leaks to perjury to, listen to this, listen to this, to the outsourcing of spying on Trump to foreigners under the guise of intelligence sharing.
Really?
What do I tell you at sessions?
Take it easy.
Take it easy.
People know what's going on.
Folks, I got an email yesterday from a guy.
I don't want to hear about this case anymore.
I'm frustrated.
Nothing's happening.
Stuff is happening.
People know what Brennan did.
Let me read that last part again.
They're investigating.
Government investigators are looking at leaks by Brennan, perjury, and the outsourcing of spying on Trump to foreigners under the guise of intelligence sharing.
Listen to this.
It gets better, Joseph.
A member of the intelligence community tells the American spectator that he was approached, this is crazy, but he was approached by FBI investigators inquiring about Brennan's improprieties at the CIA.
Oh boy.
Goes on.
This is the source in the intelligence community.
He was startled to hear them venting aloud about Brennan's practice of using British intelligence officials to spy on the Trump campaign, including American contractors hired by the British who were working from the 12th floor of a building in Crystal City, Virginia, and an NSA building in San Antonio, Texas.
Brennan, they fumed, was using British intel agents so that he could deny, if asked, that he had spied on the Trump team.
We've only been talking about this now for, gosh, six months plus.
This has led to the explosive growth of this podcast, because you're not going to get this kind of coverage anywhere else.
Folks, Brennan's been dirty.
He's dirty.
He's knee-deep in this whole thing.
Don't believe for a second.
That he is going to escape this thing entirely unscathed.
It is not.
People know exactly what Brennan did.
All right, enough of that.
We talked about it yesterday and I do agree there's so much else going on.
I do want to get to some other stuff as well.
All right, let's get this one done.
And I got a really, really interesting quote from a piece written by Russ Roberts that I want to get to about Jordan Peterson.
I have become You know what?
Before I get to that, let me just read this because this is important.
Don't miss this segment, folks.
It's going to be important.
All right.
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I have always been enthralled, fascinated, deeply moved by people I consider to have really deep and profound intellects.
If you're a regular listener to the show, you know I drove... If you listen to the initial shows that Joe and I did, I almost drove Joe into an insane asylum by incessantly quoting Nassim Taleb from The Black Swan, who wrote the book The Black Swan.
Joe now actually likes to book himself.
Yes, I do.
I really love deep thinkers, and I came across Jordan Peterson, as many of you did, about four or five months ago in what became a viral interview.
This guy is just incredible.
I talked about him a little bit yesterday.
On the podcast.
I went into some video of him last night on NRA TV.
I'm probably, you know what, let me take a note on that.
I'm probably going to use some more video of him tonight as well because he's an amazingly deep thinker and he does it in such a way that he just dismantles the left.
Now, for those of you who don't know Jordan Peterson, his I don't want to speak for him, obviously, but from watching a library — I spent probably two hours yesterday going through some of his library of YouTube hits, which have been viewed millions of times — his primary beef is with the danger of the left's push for egalitarianism.
And this is something, Joe, you and I have talked about on this show repeatedly, how Yes, there are dangerous people on all sides of the political spectrum, always, because they're just psychopaths, right?
But there are ideologies that are particularly pernicious and dangerous as well, and one of them, obviously, is socialism.
It's been responsible for the deaths and the murders and the homicides of hundreds of millions of people.
I said on yesterday's show, I don't want to repeat it, but this is important, How egalitarianism, in other words, equality of outcome, everybody should be equal, you know, fair share type lingo.
How that, the reason that the left, a lot of people on the left, who are good people, Joe, there's a radical left, and I say this all the time in my show because I mean it, I'm not talking about old Democrats.
There are a lot of Democrats, I know because I go to church with a lot of them, who just see the world differently.
A lot of them are, the ones down here at least, are pro-life, they're pro-second amendment, they just think They've been taught by their parents that the Democrats were in it for the little guy, they haven't seen the evolution of the Democrat Party into radicals, and they still think it's real.
Those are good people.
But one of the points I think Peterson tried to make on the Tucker Carlson show, which I covered last night on the NRA TV show, is That doesn't sound like confrontational stuff, and therefore the left sees no reason to isolate these people.
Oh, you know, everybody should be equal!
I mean, communism, socialism, this is great!
We gotta level the playing field!
That doesn't sound radical.
A lot of people on the left who are good folks are not disturbed by it.
But do you understand, folks, that that type of lingo about leveling the playing field and fair shares and equality of outcome, that that type of lingo has been used for centuries as a preface to enact a system of governance and organization and socialism that has snuffed out the lives of hundreds of millions of people?
That's a fact!
That's not in dispute.
So Peterson has been this unbelievably eloquent advocate for deconstructing the ideology of the left for the danger that it is.
Now, I bring this up because I saw a tweet from Shannon Bream the other day from Fox, who is an angel by the way.
She's like the nicest person in media.
Her and Janice Dean are just too... I mean, I know them.
I met them.
I know them personally.
I'm not like patting myself on the back.
They are amazing, amazing people.
Shannon Bream put out a tweet.
about um a kid who was dying who wanted to meet one of the avengers and you know i'm not a big fan of hollywood joe but i gotta give a hat tip to chris evans um and the guy who plays hawkeye jeremy renner and a lot of other people you know shannon bream's on fox she's a conservative and they all stepped up Which, hat tip to you guys in Hollywood, the Avengers, it was a really nice thing.
They were like, Jeremy Renner tweeted back, suited up and ready to go, and they want to go help this kid out.
So, you know, listen, we can disagree on politics, but that was a very nice thing for you all to do, to help out Shannon Bream.
Why do I say that?
Because I kept thinking to myself, you know who my Avengers would be?
Like, if I could get the Avengers together, like my dream, if I had the Dan Bongino Make-A-Wish Foundation, it would be to get these great thinkers together on a panel, And to talk about the growing threat of radical egalitarianism, leveling the field economics, to talk about economics in general, you know, the idea that, you know, postmodernism, that, you know, knowledge is a construct of power.
It would be to get Jordan Peterson.
Russ Roberts from EconTalk, Thomas Sowell, and Nassim Taleb on a panel.
So if I'm ever dying, folks, and you want to do a Make a Witch Foundation, do that!
That would be the greatest podcast of deep thinkers I know in modern human history.
Now, you may say, where am I going with this?
Roberts, Russ Roberts, he's the only podcast I listen to religiously in EconTalk, I don't agree with this guy on a lot of stuff.
He's not a big supporter of the president.
I think he kind of gives liberals a little bit of a pass on his show.
He challenges them, but he is brilliant, and I have nothing but admiration for the guy.
He wrote a piece at Medium yesterday about his interview with Jordan Peterson, and I just want to read to you four or five sentences from it.
Which are amazing, and they're so unbelievably well said that they deserve repeating on the show.
He's talking about his interview with Peterson.
He's talking about now, just to be clear of the setup here, he's talking about how the left, how they're almost unable, how Peterson's assertion that the left is unable to call out the radicals on their side, Russ Roberts is talking about that.
So he says, despite their best efforts at anthropology, the panelists were like fish in water, unable to imagine what water is.
He's talking about a panel full of leftists who seem to be unable to comprehend the Trump election.
So he says they were unable to imagine what water is, like fish.
He says the reason the right is less interested in the left than the left is in the right is that the left is everywhere.
This is a great point, Joe.
You don't have to take a trip to Kentucky or to a church to understand the left.
The left dominates our culture, Hollywood, the music scene, the universities.
And the left can't seem to imagine that anything they are pushing for might be problematic.
In particular, the radical egalitarian project is not everyone's cup of tea.
By radical egalitarian agenda, I mean equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity, or that gender is a social construct.
That is a fantastic point.
And he's talking about how Peterson changed his mind on a lot of this, that the left is entirely unable, like a fish in water, surrounded by water, to understand potentially some of the damage, its commitment to radical egalitarianism, socialism-type economic models and organization.
How they don't even seem to understand this is dangerous because it's ubiquitous, Joe!
Hollywood, academia, the media, celebrities.
There's no interest in it because it's Everywhere.
But to understand us, Joe, on the right requires some commitment to doing something, requires a volitional act.
We're not everywhere.
We're not Hollywood.
There aren't many conservative professors in academia.
There are so few conservative TV shows.
That's why Roseanne, this new Roseanne show, is such a threat to the left.
They don't want any of that on TV.
And Roberts says it takes work to understand the right.
Is this making sense?
How you have to go to like a church in Kentucky and actually talk to people, Joe.
You have to go to a church in Palm City, Florida and talk to people and see why they think what they think.
This takes work.
It doesn't take any work on the left.
You know what they think?
Because they're everywhere.
We're surrounded by them all the time, 24 hours a day.
It was a brilliant point by Roberts.
talking about how this fundamentally the democrats the left liberals have this tough time understanding what's going on in their own movement because there's some it's been so normalized that it does you know it's like you wouldn't know happiness if you were happy all the time you wouldn't know sadness if you were sad all the time it would just be your standard state of being I don't know.
Interesting point I wanted to put out there.
I was reading a piece in the gym yesterday and I think Russ is a brilliant guy.
And again, just to show you how on the show we present different ideas, he is not in any way, matter of fact, the piece in Medium is You know, goes after Trump pretty good.
He's not a Trump guy.
I am a supporter of the president, I think, for a lot of reasons.
I, you know, I think he's a flawed man like all of us, but I think no one's done more damage to the deep state and the idea that, you know, government should be the locus of power in our lives than Donald Trump has.
So, interesting.
All right.
I said yesterday I would get to this story and we'll wrap up with this because it's a good one and it's short and sweet, but it just points to the just hard to grasp The growth of the federal government in basically in the course of just a couple of lifetimes.
This was a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about the growing power of the federal bureaucracy, and I want you for a second to process the numbers I'm about to give you.
In 1890, again, we're talking about two, three lifetimes, but not that long ago, the federal government, Joe, only had 78,000 employees, military included.
Military included.
78,000 employees.
And in today's money, today's money, this isn't 1890 money.
This is adjusted money.
In 1890, the federal budget was $10 billion.
In today's money.
In 1890 the federal budget was 10 billion dollars in today's money.
2018 we went from 78,000 employees including the military to 2.1 million
civilians alone no military even included.
2.1 million.
And the federal budget now, obviously in today's dollars, 3.98 trillion dollars.
Folks, that is just staggering.
Staggering!
Now, if you listen to my show, I don't know, three weeks ago, I forget the dates, but I had talked about how the problem we're having is tax revenue is going up and has been going up historically, almost linearly, outside of a couple recessions and dips here and there.
The problem we have is not taxes, folks.
The problem we have is government spending is going up faster.
That's why we're going bankrupt.
It's not that we don't have tax revenue, it's that we don't have enough tax revenue to support how big the government wants to grow.
But in the journal piece, which I can't put in the show notes, it's subscription only, and I don't like annoying people.
I'll just give you two takeaways from this, and they're two really, really good suggestions.
Because I don't like to throw, oh, we have a problem.
Okay, how are you gonna fix it?
These are good ones, and that's why I wanted to include it.
Here's two.
Number one.
Increase the number of political appointees.
I know people hate that idea.
I know it.
They're like, oh my gosh, you know, we're going to get away from civil service exams.
Now we're going to get back to, what, Tammany Hall and New York City-style corruption, you know, back in the day.
Folks, we have New York City-style corruption now with bureaucrats who are embedded in the government and who, quote, burrow in, as the article addresses.
What does burrowing in mean?
It means they're appointed as political appointees and then when the president leaves, they're transitioned over to civil service so the new president can't fire them.
We already have a corrupt system of bureaucrats.
Look at what happened with the Spygate scandal with Trump, with the metadata collection, with the IRS scandal.
We already have a corrupted class.
Now how would increasing political appointees fix that?
Political appointees can be fired easily.
They typically are during a transition.
Civil servants are not.
There's a big, long, drawn-out, nearly impossible process.
This is a great suggestion.
At least make them politically accountable.
Now, I'm not saying they should all.
There should obviously be civil service for law enforcement, intel, things like that.
You don't want our intelligence politicized.
Giving Joe the wink and a nod after I just did that Brennan piece.
Political accountability, increasing the number of political appointees, and eliminating a lot of these civil service positions would at least let us vote these people out!
Gosh, they burrow in forever!
They're like ticks!
We can't get rid of them when they're bad!
Here's another suggestion I had never considered.
Term limits for political bureaucrats.
That's a great idea!
You can serve in government for a maximum of, say, eight years.
That's a great idea!
The reason I say that is, I have never been historically a huge fan of term limits for lawmakers.
That may surprise you, but the reason is, there was a Heritage Foundation study a while ago that really impacted me, that showed that term limits on lawmakers are not correlated with the things we think they are.
Lower government spending, better control, and why not?
Because people are term limited from being a state assemblyman.
So then they go on to the state senate, and then they go on to congress, and then they go on to the senate, and then they go on to run for mayor or governor.
They're not term limited from anything.
They're not.
They're term limited from a position, not from government.
And it would be entirely unconstitutional for the federal government to draw up a term limit law for the states.
You do four years at the State Assembly, four years in the State Senate, and what winds up happening, folks, is as they move from position to position and they learn the new position, who gets empowered?
The bureaucrats behind the scenes who understand how each of these new positions work, while the actual legislator who's voted in figures it out.
The bureaucrats have the power.
Why?
Because the process is power.
The process is confusing.
And the bureaucrats who have been there forever wield that power over the legislators that get voted in.
Oh, you want to write up a law?
Well, you know how to do that.
But here's what we're going to do.
So I'm open to hearing about term limits.
I'm not.
You know, I'm not against them entirely.
I just want to go in with an open mind.
And that heritage study really bothered me a lot.
Now, if we could combine that with term limits for people inside the government, a point, a political point, that would be great.
Because then it would force us to replenish the pool of people with new ideas in the government and prevent them from taking advantage of the process and using it as a lever of power.
I just, I thought it was a really interesting idea.
I wanted to put out there that I read and hadn't really heard before.
So two interesting proposals there.
Increasing political appointees, restricting burrowing, and term limits on bureaucrats.
Interesting stuff.
All right, folks.
Thank you again for tuning in.
I really appreciate it.
And if I could ask you a favor, I don't do this often.
I try not to, at least.
I don't like to get too many asks in here.
If you wouldn't mind subscribing to our show.
I know a lot of you listen every day.
It's up to you.
I don't know.
This isn't a hard sell.
But it helps us a lot.
The subscribers help us move up the charts on iTunes.
iTunes measures its top charts, so you know, almost exclusively by people who subscribe and new subscribers.
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