Summary:
In this episode I address the over-the-top Democrat-Media outrage campaign over the Trump-Putin meeting. I also address and debunk comments by socialist Democrat Ocasio-Cortez.
News Picks:
Does Scandinavian “socialism” work? Nope.
The media lost its mind over the Trump-Putin meeting.
Socialist Ocasio-Cortez screws up again.
A solid analysis of Trump’s Russian approach.
These two charts easily debunk Ocasio-Cortez’s silly statements about capitalism.
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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.
Oh boy!
Oh boy!
Breaking!
Hashtag breaking news.
All prior outrage campaigns.
All prior outrage campaigns are to be put on hold.
All of them.
The travel ban.
Immigration outrage campaign.
The election outrage campaign.
All outrage campaigns are on hold.
Kavanaugh's outrage campaign.
The Supreme Court nominee.
Put them on hold, Joe, for the new outrage campaign over yesterday's press conference in Helsinki.
Oh my gosh.
Producer Joe, how are you today?
I'm doing fine except, you know, my head's spinning from all this goofy stuff.
Oh my gosh.
I almost was going to do a special show to talk everybody off the ledge.
Ladies and gentlemen, I don't do it.
Joe, you know this.
We're just chatting before the show as we always do.
I don't do outrage campaigns.
Sorry.
You want to have a reasonable down-to-earth conversation about the pros and cons of yesterday's presser in Helsinki with Trump and Putin.
I'm gonna break it down for you today.
I don't do outrage campaigns, and if you're a spineless, feather-spined, weak-kneed, phony, cowardly rhino out there who felt the need to jump on the outrage campaign bandwagon because you wanted a virtue signal to your 200 followers on Twitter, In desperate hopes of saving your congressional seat in the next election.
I've got no time for you either.
Don't care.
Don't call me.
Don't email me.
It's like Rocky 2.
Remember when he tries to get him in Rocky 2 and he tries to get him to do the commercial and Rocky's not interested?
Hey, Rock, how am I going to find you?
Call me.
What's your number?
No, no, call me just to be like, hey, Rocco!
Rocco!
Shifty!
Shifty!
That's what I'm saying to these congress people.
You're so lame.
It's so pathetic.
I've got so much, this is so pathetic.
Such, I can't stand weakness.
I can't stand it.
I sniff it out and it disgusts me.
The stench of it reeks.
It reeks of black death.
Like, you know that, you know what, you know when something rots and you get, well, I worked in a cemetery, not to be, but when you see it, when it rots, it turns these dark, nasty color.
That's what it reeks and the stench is unimaginable.
I hate weakness!
I can't stand it!
My gosh, you, you, you, you're just unimaginable cowards.
By the way, did I ask you how you were today?
How are you?
Oh, yeah, you did.
And I said, I'm going a little crazy.
And I woke up this morning and the world was exploding here.
That's right.
And listen, Joe, when we talk before the show, Joe, usually it's usually production stuff.
We were talking about some ability to get guests on and things like that.
But it's rare for Joe, I'm not kidding, to bring up an issue only because we have so much business and administrative stuff to talk about.
And Joe's like, I can't take it.
I can't.
It's ridiculous.
So I'm going to tell you a couple that I had some conversations yesterday.
I want to share with some folks and just to show you how bad this is.
First off, just some administrative stuff, folks.
I'm serious about this too.
I do not have Any GoFundMes, Patreon accounts, listen to me, please, this is very important because we're engaged in some significant legal action against a person.
We know who he is and we're working on it now, just to be clear.
I haven't told you about this, Joe, but we have like a stalker out there and he's out there and he's setting up and he's stealing money from people.
On Patreon accounts, using my picture, GoFundMes, listen to me.
Do not, under any circumstances, send any money to anybody using my name.
We have a Bongino.com account for where we sell chum stuff, the shirts if you want them.
That is it.
We have no Patreon.
There is no GoFundMe.
If there ever is in the future, I will put it out there.
Do not send money to anybody using my face, please.
Some lady got ripped off, and we're working now with people, let's leave it at that, for almost $250.
Oh!
Yes, do not, please, send any money.
This guy's in, we're on it, don't worry about it, but please do not send money.
Okay.
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Don't forget those.
You say you keep that in the pantry?
No, I keep it in my closet.
Yeah, because I keep my pants in the pantry.
No, no, I don't keep my pants.
You know I hate that word, pantry, by the way.
I know you do.
Because it's the worst word ever, and I know where you're going with this, because you're trying to bust my Rotchies here before the show, which I get.
I'm onto your scams and your schemes.
Yes, I know.
I hate that word.
Joe knows it, too.
I don't know why.
There's something about that word I can't stand.
So we're gonna have to talk to Patriot Supply.
Change that word in there.
Something else.
The Food Closet.
Let's just call it that.
But no, I keep it in my closet.
Okay, so the outrage campaign.
Let's just address this right away.
Of course we're talking about the presser yesterday in Helsinki where the media lost their minds.
And I want to explain a couple things away.
Listen.
Let's just get a couple of facts out of the way first for people who are confused out there about what the stance of me and others and any other conservative out there is.
I think most people get it that Russia is not our friend.
Most meaning like 99.99% of the world that has functioning gray matter in their brains.
The Russians are not our friends.
Trump has ceded the point multiple times that the Russians attacked our country, that they continue to attack our country.
Everybody gets that.
The House Republicans in their report put that in there.
We talked about that yesterday.
The information, the indictment from Mueller was nothing new.
The House Republicans have already talked about that information.
It's in a report from April.
We get that.
Secondly, yeah, Trump, I think, probably could have rephrased some of the answers to the question.
Okay, you know what?
People make mistakes, people say things, they say them, they could have said them a little differently.
Having said that, the outrage campaign, comparisons to Pearl Harbor, Kristallnacht, are, by the media, are outrageous.
No, these are real comparisons that were made.
Yesterday was the equivalent of a Pearl Harbor.
Good heavens.
Of, I mean, the Holocaust comparisons.
Ladies and gentlemen.
This... I've got so many points to get to.
I just don't know how to... For one of the first times on this show, I'm so furious about weak-kneed Republicans that I'm having a hard time categorizing it into digestible bits to give you a coherent narrative here.
Let me start with this.
Let's start with the media first.
This is the mistake the media continues to make.
By making every single thing Trump does, Joe.
Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, Nazism, Fascism, the collapse of the Republic.
By doing that over and over vis-a-vis outrage campaigns.
And when I say outrage campaigns, I want to be clear what I'm talking about.
I'm not talking about their objecting ideologically to a policy.
I'm talking about them trying to generate Phenomenal amounts of outrage to drain the political bank account of Donald Trump.
They're not really objecting to anything he said on substance.
They're just trying to hyperbolically, you know, cue up and fire up and light the fuse of outrage so that they can drain the political bank account of Donald Trump.
And I don't mean money-wise, I mean his credibility.
These outrage campaigns happen over and over and over again.
The last one, of course, was Kavanaugh.
The one before that was the immigration crisis on the border.
They don't really want to propose anything of substance.
They lie about the substance.
They just want to attack Donald Trump.
Now, this is another opportunity to do that.
I think the media fully understood that Trump would have probably rather taken back and rephrased his answer about The intelligence with the Russians about how Putin said no, that they didn't attack the election process.
The outrage by the media is only designed to compound this mistake and attack Trump, not designed to clear up anything here.
Now here's the problem.
And the mistake the media continues to make, which winds up in the end, ironically for them, Joe, hurting the media more than it hurts Trump.
I know where you're going.
You see where I'm going with this?
I said this to a friend last night, who's a very smart, astute political observer.
We had spent about a half an hour on the phone.
I said, the irony of this, because this friend of mine operates in the, you know, he's not a bubble guy, he just operates in the bubble because that's where, you know, that's where he is.
You know, I said to him, I go, you have to understand, like, in the bubble where you are, this is the story de Georgio.
This is it, right?
Oh my gosh, for the umpteenth thousandth time, we got Trump now.
They had him on the McCain comment, on the Access Hollywood tape, on the travel ban, on immigration.
We got Trump now.
What they don't understand is the bubble is not America.
It's not.
It's a small sliver of America.
It is an infinitesimally small portion of what's going on in real American lives.
I'm telling you, in my neighborhood down here in Palm City, Florida, where I talk to people, I go to the gym, nobody is talking about this.
Nobody.
People are on vacation, they're working out, they're like, there was a presser?
Oh, he met with Putin?
What happened?
Ah, it didn't go so well.
Okay.
Now the media, Joe, they think this is it for Trump.
It's over.
They've got it.
It's over, Johnny.
Sweep the knee.
Sweep the knee.
We're really dialing it up with the movie references lately.
By the way, hat tip to all those who caught the Maria reference yesterday.
TKA from Queens, you got it.
But the media thinks this is it, the sweep the knee moment.
They've got him now.
This is the end of it.
So what do they do?
In an effort to make sure That they hammer the nail in the coffin, Joe, that they dig, instead of digging the grave three feet, they go, no, no, we gotta dig it 12 feet just to make sure he doesn't do Superman from Justice League and get his way out of the grave.
So in digging 12 feet deep, they tire themselves out digging and then they lose all energy and run out of gas and they lose credibility in the future.
Ah, there it is.
The 12 foot of digging rather than a 3 foot grave, and I hope this analogy makes sense.
Instead of saving some of their ammo and energy for later, just think, he's dead, right?
They think they got him.
Put him 3 feet deep and let it go.
They say, no, let's dig a 12 foot one and let's make sure he never gets out.
And they waste all their energy and later on, there's no gas left in the tank.
They've wasted and output all their ideological energy and opposition by insisting, this is Pearl Harbor.
This is the worst thing.
And people tuned them out.
But here's the catch.
They didn't tune them out yesterday, Joe.
No.
They tuned them out on the second and third outrage campaign.
This is like the 10th one.
No!
This is why I don't do outrage campaigns.
Yes!
Yes!
I'm not interested.
I said yesterday on Twitter, nope, no thanks.
Not interested in joining the outrage campaign.
Good man.
I wish you would have answered the question a little differently.
People make mistakes on the foreign stage.
And I'm going to explain what I think happened.
But I am not joining in with, you know, the sellout class and people who are more interested in preserving the foreign policy swamp.
Not interested.
Sorry, folks.
Not interested at all.
Not even a little bit.
Here's what happened yesterday.
All right.
Guys, ladies, as I explained to another friend yesterday, Trump is not a politician.
Not an excuse, not apologizing for anything.
I'm just telling you the facts.
He is not a politician.
He has not been engaged in the political process where maybe let me, let me just, if you don't mind, let me just use a quick analogy.
Maybe this will make more sense because saying he's not a politician, I could sense it's not going to help this much.
Um, Joe knew me when I ran for office for the U.S.
Senate, when I first started.
And the political process is something you can't explain to people unless they're in it.
You can't.
It's a devastating, difficult process.
When you're a Republican, when you're a Democrat, you expect to be coddled endlessly.
But when you're a Republican, I'm not whining about any of this isn't snowflake stuff.
I'm just warning you if you decide to get into politics.
Expect to be attacked.
On every single thing you say, facts be damned.
It's happened to me.
I mean, I actually got into a verbal tit-for-tat with a Washington Post guy, I'm not making this up, about unquestioned facts about the Bush tax cuts, how they generated more revenue.
I even sent him the links.
He didn't care because he was so committed that tax cuts cost the government money.
Expect to be attacked endlessly.
After a while, you just learn By trial and error, how to deal with these people.
And you almost learn to kind of ignore them.
You also learn, this is the most important takeaway here, you learn not what to do, you learn what not to do.
In other words, you learn that you'll never get in trouble for things you never said.
And with the media, you're almost better off just not answering questions sometimes.
Trump's not a politician.
The benefit to that, which I think is far, far outweighs the downsides, is that Trump has not learned to sell out.
He's not learned to sell out to moneyed interests.
He's not learned to sell out to lobbyists.
He has not learned to kiss the butts of people to get re-elected.
He doesn't care.
But that comes with a bit of a downside.
The downside is He hasn't taken some of the shots that people who have gone through the political process over the years have and therefore he hasn't learned yet what not to do.
So he says he's and he speaks in an off-the-cuff manner and the media jumps on every word and they assume he means every single word when it's clear that he talks in hyperbolic language.
I've explained the Queens thing a million times that there's a there's a there's a there's almost like a scale he weighs here.
He goes back and forth between bravado and flattery.
Now This is what I mean by that.
The media hasn't figured out why he uses this hyperbolic language at times.
The bravado and flattery is a New York thing.
I've explained the Queen's angle before, but when Trump goes into a meeting with, say, union bosses, New York City bureaucrats, and he's got to get a building built, he knows he has to walk in there with a certain amount of swag or they're not going to respect him.
But, but, and you folks who've done business in New York, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
For those of you who haven't...
You have to balance that though with hyperbolic flattery on the other side in order to for the other guy at the table or woman to understand you respect them too because remember the new yorker and who's doing business is walking in with the same bravado you are so you have to gain respect but you also have to confer upon the other person in the room a sense of respect via flattery too or nothing's going to get done and the building's not going to get built Folks, take it or leave it.
I'm telling you, I know exactly what happened yesterday.
He walked out there.
He has been very hard on Russia, combating Nord Stream 2 in an effort to gain natural gas influence for the United States and to wean Germany and the EU off Russian natural gas.
He has been tough on the Russian military mercenaries, which he wiped out hundreds of them.
Again, I'm not asking you to agree or disagree.
I'm telling you what happened.
Whether you agree or disagree is up to you.
I'm just giving you the facts on the ground.
His sanctioning and basically a doubling down on Magnitsky.
A sanctioning of people, by the way, personally connected to Putin.
Trump has been far harder on Russia than any prior American president in the last two or three.
No question in my mind.
The talk yesterday is an act.
It's the bravado, flattery, justice scales he has to balance going into meetings he's accustomed to dealing with in the past where he's got to get something actually done.
He understands he has to go in there first with the bravado and the swagger about how wonderful he is and how great that you know and how powerful his business is and he also has to flatter the other guy at the table in an effort to make sure he feels important enough that they're dealing as as equals.
Now, I get it.
In foreign policy, the foreign policy swamp doesn't like that.
They don't want Putin to see himself as an equal on the global stage because they think it lends an air of legitimacy to it with tyrant and a despot, which he is.
But folks, keep in mind, Putin is not stupid.
He knows 200 of his mercs were wiped out on a Syrian battlefield.
He knows Trump has provided lethal weaponry to Ukraine where Obama hasn't.
Again, I'm not asking you to agree with it.
I'm just telling you what's happened and what Putin knows.
He's not stupid.
He knows Trump does not agree with the shuttling of natural gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany from Russia because he just watched the presser.
And I find it triply ironic, regardless of your feelings about US involvement in NATO anymore, that people say, oh he's destroying it.
Destroying NATO?
His whole purpose of the meeting was to have folks, have these countries double down on their monetary GDP percentage commitments to NATO.
What are you talking about?
Putin's not stupid, he knows this.
Now, the press, Joe, this is important, that has never ever been in one of these meetings, because the press, these people don't have real jobs, okay?
They're media people.
Not all of them, but most of them went to school, couldn't figure out how to be engineers, couldn't do an MBA because they couldn't handle the finance and the spreadsheets, couldn't be doctors because they couldn't handle the science, so they wind up in journalism.
Bingo!
They've never been in a, they don't understand!
They've never been in these meetings.
These media people also never run for office either.
Joe and I are in like business meetings two, three times a week talking about really high-end stuff for millions of dollars in assets, okay?
It's not a joke.
I'm not like patting myself on the back, but you have to learn how to balance the bravado and the flattery and in New York you can double and triple that.
Because everybody's got a big New York personality because everything in New York is fast, everything in New York is edgy, and everything in New York is super tough.
You're not even allowed to talk to the person in the checkout counter in a grocery store in New York.
We're not getting yelled at by the guy behind you.
Doubt me?
Try it.
Go strike up a conversation in the local supermarket in New York with the checkout person with a line of five people.
Watch what happens.
No, I'm serious.
Watch what happens to you.
Right, Joe?
Watch.
You'll get thrown out of there so fast.
Get down here in Palm City.
I talk all day in the local public.
No problem at all.
People like, hey, they'll join the conversation.
You're not in Kansas anymore.
Yo, you're not, Toto.
You are not in Kansas anymore.
This is what this guy's lived his entire life.
Mob people trying to shake him down on jobs.
Oh, you don't think that happens?
Hey, here's how the san... You know the New York sanitation racket?
Here's how the sanitation's gonna work.
You know private sanitation in New York?
See, again, if you're not from New York, you have no idea what Trump's made of.
And the media people who've never done a business deal in their lives, never, matter of fact, they've never been in business at all in their life, don't understand this.
So what do they do?
They jump on, this is Pearl Harbor!
He sold out U.S.
interest!
I'm nauseous over this.
I'm nauseous.
Saul makes a comeback.
Bring your glasses and your shoes.
This is the media, whiners, the worst.
They don't get it.
They've never done any of this.
None of this makes any sense to them because they've never had to deal with anyone like Trump and they don't understand it.
He's walking in there and at the business deals he's walked into his entire life with hard-edged, tough, real-world, cutthroat business negotiators who will throw you overboard in a minute if you don't walk in there and puff your chest a bit.
But you can't puff it too much.
That's right.
Because the other side, if they think you're trying to take advantage of them, they get upset too.
So you've got to, there's got to be a certain amount of flattery.
And he, the mistake I think he made is the flattery cannot transcend into a question that's almost universally settled at this point, which is the fact that the Russians are just not our friends in that respect.
That was, I think, the problem we had yesterday.
So the points I have, here's the takeaways, because I don't like to just ramble.
I want to make sure you have something to take away from this tangibly.
One, this is another outrage campaign, meaning the outrage is not commensurate with what actually happened.
It's not.
You're free, obviously, to disagree.
Media folks, too.
I always, you know, vocally support a free media, even the freedom to be stupid.
But the outrage is no way corresponds to, I think, the small mistakes he made that can be easily corrected.
Second, the massive, absurd, ridiculous, outrageous overreaction by the media, again, will do nothing outside of the DC bubble to damage Trump, but will do everything to damage the credibility of the media.
That's point number two.
You lose again.
Point number three, the man is not a politician.
You have to stop analyzing every single comma, period, prepositional phrase, or hanging participle he puts out there, Trump, and analyze what he does.
Listen, critique what he says all you want.
That's your job in the media.
I love the free press, even when you're free to be dumb.
I'm just suggesting to you that you are making a critical mistake by constantly overlooking what this guy's done for what he says.
And by making that critical mistake, even liberal Democrats trying to combat Donald Trump and beat him in 2020, win against him in 2020, you are going to lose again!
Because the American people are not paying attention exclusively to what he says, but to what he does!
That's what you're missing!
Another point, takeaway, the bravado versus the flattery.
If you really care to analyze Trump, honestly, critique him, not critique him, whatever you choose to do, if you don't understand that his, how he's been trained to operate in a competitive cutthroat business world of New York City where you actually have to build things, you can't just talk about them, there's a balance of bravado and flattery that defines how he operates.
Puff your chest.
Puff your chest.
Puff even more.
And in a minute you get some kind of grind by the other guy who's puffing his chest, too.
You flatter him a little bit.
Listen, we get it.
You're running the biggest union in New York City.
I understand how important you are.
I'm glad you're at the table and I'm dealing with you.
I've heard from your members.
They love you.
He probably hasn't heard from any members, Joe.
I was talking to a guy in the street yesterday.
He said you're the greatest union boss in the history of humankind.
You're huge.
You're terrific.
It's the greatest thing ever.
This is Trump, right?
He probably hasn't heard any of that, but he understands that he's got to talk this guy off the ledge and make him feel important for a minute.
There's going to be no, none of the friction points and critical questions will be resolved or addressed because it'll become personal and not professional.
Another takeaway, pay attention to what Trump is doing, not what he is saying.
I'm not suggesting you don't criticize or we become golden calf worshipers of anyone in office, the president included.
I agree.
I probably could have rephrased that yesterday.
But are you even interested in what the man is doing?
The Democrats are not.
Pay attention to that.
Finally, one last takeaway here.
Put yourself in the man's shoes for a minute.
Please.
This is a guy who has been ruthlessly attacked by senior level managers at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the former DNI and Jim Clapper, the Obama administration, Susan Rice, and people we had previously thought, although political, everybody's political and has a partisan ideology, in the past we had thought at least that these people should be above reproach.
The idea that we would weaponize the federal government's massive powers, the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, to gather intelligence and use it against someone to potentially take their freedom and bankrupt them in the case of Mike Flynn, both, was abhorrent to Americans.
Matter of fact, you would have laughed it off as a conspiracy theory.
Oh, that's crazy.
Ladies and gentlemen, that happened.
That actually happened to this guy.
He knows this.
Maybe this is directed at the rhinos, by the way, not the media, because the media is going to attack Trump regardless.
So I'm done with you now.
Now I'm moving on to the rhinos, to the conservative, so-called pseudo-conservatives, all the weak-kneed folks out there.
Maybe before you jump out there and virtue signal, maybe you should come out with a statement saying, listen, I disagree.
I think we could have worded that differently.
But on the other side, I understand where President Trump's coming from.
President Trump has been attacked.
Again, I would have phrased that comment differently, and I think a statement's probably in order here, but if I were under ruthless, endless attack on spurious, counterfeit, nonsense, false, fraudulent charges about being a traitor to the United States for two years, I'd probably be pretty upset too, and maybe sometimes I wouldn't be so eloquent in my comments when asked about the intelligence community's assessment that my election results were fraudulent.
But no, they don't do that.
The weak-kneed rhinos run out there in front of the cameras and take every opportunity to join in the anti-Trump brigade.
And listen, I'm not doing it.
I'm not interested.
I'm sorry.
And folks, if that bothers you, I get it.
I love you to death.
You matter to me more than anything.
I try to answer as many emails as I can.
Emails on the website.
But listen, this may not be for you.
You know, when I feel there's a substantive reason to question the president's actions, you know where I stand on the tariffs thing?
We've done this before, Joe.
I've taken, you know, the death penalty thing, which, gosh, I mentioned that.
My email account didn't stop going for three, four days.
I'm not, you know, I'm not a puppet of anybody.
I have my own opinions and I owe you honesty.
But I think the president's mistake yesterday was a small one.
I think the media response was outrageous.
I think the RINO response was even more outrageous considering the context.
And I'm not jumping on the outrage bandwagon.
I'm sorry.
I'm not doing it.
That's for suckers.
You want to jump on it?
Go right ahead.
Yeah, I did get a kick out of him a little bit yesterday when he was commenting on Putin had offered to send his guys over and help.
Now, look, everybody knows, by the way, that that's not going to happen, of course.
And we're not sending any Russians over here.
This guy's not our friend, we get that.
But listen, the timing of the indictment was suspect, as you, Joe, saw on yesterday's show.
By the way, they loved my song.
And Joe said, I forgot where I got that from.
If you listen to yesterday's show on Monday, Joe's always good.
I forget the pop culture stuff sometimes.
I'm a Russian.
You're a Russian.
He's a Russian.
She's a Russian.
Wouldn't you want to be a Russian too?
Yeah.
That's from the Dr. Pepper ad.
I knew I'd heard it somewhere, but I swear I had no idea that was Dr. Pepper.
Joe, after the show, was like, hey, that was funny.
Dr. Pepper.
I'm like, what?
He's like, that was the Dr. Pepper course.
I'm like, yes!
I'm a Russian.
So ridiculous.
Yeah.
So ridiculous.
Conspiracy theorists are out in full.
All right, I've got some other good stuff for you today.
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All right.
What's up next?
I still have that cut ready for you if you want it.
Oh yeah, you know what?
Let's get to that.
That's a good one.
This woman's becoming a recurring gift for the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
The winner in an upset victory in a New York congressional race over established Democrat insider Joe Crowley, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
She keeps talking and the Republicans and the conservatives keep shaking their heads like, did she really say that?
Now, she was on firing line with Margaret Hoover and just had some more outrageously silly, ridiculous things to say.
Her concept of economics is, it's not even economics.
I don't know what it is.
It's some kind of religion she believes in.
But listen to this, and I want to just break this down and destroy some of the stuff she says in this, because it's so not based in reality at all.
Do you think that capitalism has failed to deliver for working-class Americans or is no longer the best vehicle for working-class Americans?
Well, I think the numbers that you just talked about is part of the problem, right?
Because we look at these figures and we say, oh, unemployment is low, everything is fine, right?
Well, unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs.
Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their kids.
And so I do think that right now, when we have this no holds barred, wild west hyper capitalism, what that means is profit at any cost.
Capitalism has not always existed in the world and it will not always exist in the world.
Oh my gosh.
Can somebody please get me a Pepto tablet?
Seriously.
I'm getting indigestion listening to Alexandria.
Is it Alexandria or Alexandra?
I don't mean to mispronounce her name.
Seriously, I'm not attacking her personally.
Good for her for getting out there and knocking on doors and beating this guy.
Sometimes you need that to shake up the political establishment.
But folks, just on the issues, if we can stick to that, Ms.
Cortez just doesn't know what she's talking about.
So, the Dan Bongino Show.
Joe, what do we do best?
We use actual facts.
All right!
Hashtag, facts matter on the Dan Bongino Show.
So, let's attack a couple of those ideas she put out there that are absurd.
The first, that the reason unemployment is so low is because a bunch of people out there are working two jobs, 60 and 70 hours a week.
How, by the way, she came to that answer, I have no idea.
Sometimes it's just better off saying, I don't know, let me look it up.
So, just to be clear, the liberals listening too, we're going to do facts here.
You may want to tune out now because this is the actual data portion of the show.
So if the premise here is that unemployment is low because there's an unusual number of people working two jobs, you would think the data would belie that.
What did I do?
What I always do, I'm helping you out.
I am going to attach an article in the show notes from AEI.org.
Go to Bongino.com, subscribe to my email list.
I will email this stuff to you every day that actually has the numbers about people working two jobs.
Joe, what is the data on people working two jobs?
4.8% of the workforce, which has been declining over the years and is lower than it was before the Great Recession, 4.8% of the workforce only are people working two jobs.
Not only is that not true, that that's what led to the low unemployment numbers, And remember, she's saying that the unemployment is low because an unusually large number of people are working two jobs.
Not only is that factually incorrect, the opposite is true.
That the number of people working two jobs is declining and is lower than it was before the Great Recession and is some of the lowest numbers we've seen in decades.
Joe, does this matter?
I know it matters to you because you're a sane person, but to the liberals who listen to my show because I get your emails.
Including some nutjob yesterday who was like sending threats over email, which I promptly screenshotted, which scared him a little bit by the way, which is kind of funny.
It was because he was so brave until I sent him screenshots of his own emails.
I guess he read them.
I was like, this is crazy.
Folks, do facts matter?
Liberals, does that matter to you?
If the numbers were there and what Cortez said was correct, I would be happy to put it out on the show and offer an explanation as to why I think that's true.
What she's saying is not only untrue, That unemployment's low because an unbelievable number of people are working two jobs.
It's not only that, the opposite is true.
That that number's been declining for years, is lower than it was before the Great Recession, and is almost historically low compared to other times in our history.
It's just not true.
Only 4.8% of people in the workforce are working two jobs.
Do you get that?
Liberals, is this hard?
Can we put that to bed that she's just making that up?
That she's not only wrong, she's double wrong, because she's not only wrong, she's wrong in the wrong direction.
It would be one thing, Joe, to say, okay, It's still a low number but the number of people working two jobs is going up and that may have something.
She's wrong twice.
She's not only wrong about the quantity, she's wrong about the magnitude.
It's in the wrong direction.
The number's going down and it's historically low.
She just made that up.
Now you wanna, I get it, the cult of personality on the left, and that's why we don't do that, we don't golden calf politicians here.
I get it, you do the cult of personality stuff, and you're in love with the woman for what, I don't know, I don't understand.
I'm just telling you she doesn't know what she's talking about.
She says later in the piece, and this part's just silly, I debated even addressing it, but at the end of the piece she says, that this is the wild west and there are no rules.
Hey mom!
The meatloaf!
Dude, that was all.
This show's over.
That was all.
We're just going to end it.
We're done.
People love the Marla Beatloaf one, I'm telling you.
They do.
What?
There's no rules?
Does she know what the Federal Register is?
The thousands of pages that the federal government compiles of federal rules.
Joe, that's not state rules, local rules, municipality rules, HOA rules, unfettered capitalism.
Are you?
I'm trying to hold my tongue because this is so dumb.
I feel like you're going to need to take like one of those fish oil supplements to rebuild the neuronal connections you're losing by listening to the utter complete ignorance coming out of the mouth of this woman.
We live in unfettered wild west capitalism, a profit at all costs.
What do you mean?
So we're allowed to go out there and what?
Buy my product!
Or we're going to poison you to death!
It's an unfettered cow!
I better buy it today!
Is this real?
Are we really having these debates with a woman who's going to win a seat in Congress?
I'm serious.
I debated even addressing that.
Because facts and data, do I have to really produce facts that the government exists and has regulations?
Are we going to waste time on the show with this?
This is a real person really running for Congress, who is really humiliating herself with every single appearance now.
Now, although I don't have the cut of this one, she went on to say later in that interview, Margaret Hoover did a pretty good job and said to her, well, how do you explain the incredible advances in human prosperity over the years without capitalism?
Like, it doesn't make sense otherwise.
And she said, and I quote, that that is due to human evolution.
That's the question.
What?
Oh man.
Oh boy, human evolution.
Yes, so when we evolved from Australopithecus Africanus to Homo sapiens sapiens and to where you know that the yes that that was that was everything and nothing to do with the actual economic organization system bedrocked in freedom.
Again, how to address this is bizarre, but in an effort to speed up the show here, to get you just the facts, to show you how dumb that assertion really is, the AEI piece has a very simple chart for you to look at.
Joe?
Yes?
Here it is right here.
I will show it to you.
It's super simple.
I gotcha.
Yep.
GDP per person.
Gross domestic product.
Meaning?
Individual wealth per person, the things you have, medicine, water, food, GDP per person from 1000 AD to 1750 AD remained flat, well below $5,000 per person.
Right around 1750, afterwards, when we see the advent of some form of economic freedom, capitalism, which to be clear, capitalism is the use of a price mechanism to allocate resources, It's the use of a wage function to measure the value of someone's labor rather than forced slavery and indentured servitude.
And third, it's the ability to own private property rather than that property being owned by the government.
When we see those ideas start to advance and move, 1750 on, we see a dramatic uptick A geometric growth in the GDP per person, the wealth of each individual person, up to today, which is approximately, in the United States, roughly $45,000 per person.
Now, you can explain that by the influence of ghosts, demons, whatever you choose to.
That's called the correlation.
The correlation is ironclad in this case.
It's so ironclad that to not call... I'm always hesitant to infer causation from correlation.
To not infer causation from that is just plain ignorance.
She doesn't know what she's talking about.
How else you would explain away the wealth of individual people here and around the world growing almost correspondingly one-to-one with the growth in economic freedom?
How you can explain that away any other way speaks to your ignorance and you really should reconsider doing any public appearances until you can figure out things like basic math and basic facts and data and research.
It's just embarrassing.
Embarrassing.
All right, folks, one more, and then I want to wrap up with a couple.
I want to hit that Scandinavian thing, too.
I teased yesterday because it's really good.
Matt Palumbo has been knocking it out of the park with these pieces he's been doing on Scandinavian socialism.
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Okay.
So, Matt Palumbo is putting together some great pieces.
This will be at my website, Bongino.com.
It's also, as always, available in the show notes, which I'll send to you if you subscribe to the email list.
And he's been debunking the myth of Scandinavian socialism.
Denmark, Norway, all these countries, oh, democratic socialism!
Kind of the Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders idea of a worldwide utopia.
So Matt's part one of the piece debunked three ideas.
Number one, these Scandinavian countries are not socialist!
They're not socialists.
The demarcation point between socialism and capitalism is government control of the means of production.
If the government does not own the means of production in the government, de facto or de jure, it is not a socialist country.
It is a capitalist country.
It may have a big government, it may have an expansive government, may have a welfare state, but it is not socialist.
He debunks that.
Secondly, He makes a terrific point that's been brought up before by other authors on this topic too.
That Swedes in Sweden are not as wealthy as Swedes in the United States.
In other words...
The Swedish Scandinavian work ethic, which is strong, eventually overpowers the force of big government.
They do have a big government over there.
It's very expensive.
Let's not make any mistakes.
But when you take the same Scandinavian work ethic, that Swedish work ethic, and you transplant those folks into a freer market system in the United States without the heaviest burden of government they have over there, the heavier burden of government, I should say, they are wealthier here than they are there.
Finally, third point.
These Scandinavian countries got wealthy before government exploded in size and their degree of growth, their rate of growth has slowed down since their government expanded.
This is a critical point.
Now, in part two, which is up at my website, he hammers a couple more points.
That they cite the levels of equality, the democrat socialists.
Oh Joe, these Scandinavian countries, everybody's equal all the time.
Ladies and gentlemen, Matt puts conclusive data in there that the drop in inequality, the drop in inequality happened again before the explosive growth in government in these countries has been rising since government has picked up steam and expanded in size.
Read the piece.
You'll see the data.
It's pretty conclusive.
You're already fired, even.
Not to mention, Joe.
He says in the piece, and I quote, an income inequality isn't the only kind of inequality, ladies and gentlemen.
The Scandinavian nations have plenty of wealth inequality.
In other words, Joe, you may make $100,000 a year.
I may make a dollar a year.
But if I have $40 million in assets, I'd rather be me than Joe.
I'd rather be you, too.
He says in the United States the top 1% owns roughly 35% of all wealth.
In Sweden the top 1% controls 25 to 40% of total wealth.
So you're mixing and matching inequality but you're confusing income with wealth.
High taxes have proven unsuccessful at alleviating that problem.
According to one study, the share of the richest Swedes who inherited their wealth is around two-thirds, with only a third being entrepreneurs.
In America, the majority of wealth is self-made, while in Sweden it's generational.
Don't let that get in the way of a good story, though, folks.
I know you need that.
Secondly, Matt hammers away at the democratic socialist point.
Oh, these Scandinavian countries, Joe, they have free college!
Free!
Everything's free!
Nothing's free.
Remember folks, as Milton Friedman once said, all debts are paid by the debtor or the creditor.
You lend someone money and he doesn't pay it back.
That debt was paid.
It was paid by you.
All debts are paid.
Nothing is free.
Someone is paying.
The only question is who's paying and how's the money allocated.
Here's some points debunking the myth of free college in Scandinavia.
And I quote, in 2013, average college debt among the graduating students was $19,000 in Sweden.
Wait, wait, wait!
Time out!
Red flag under the hood for review!
How is it, right, Joe's scratching his head.
How, if college is, air quotes here, free, are students in Sweden graduating with $19,000 in debt compared to $24,000 in America?
Now our college is not, quote, free, but those are relatively comparable numbers.
Yeah.
That doesn't make any sense.
Well, Matt goes on, it's presumably room and board, which is responsible for the debt in Sweden.
After all, why commute when the tuition is covered?
When everybody has a college degree, nobody does.
Matt goes on.
An American college graduate earns 65% more than a high school graduate, while in Sweden, college graduates only earn 25% more.
As a result of the lack of return on investment described above, Swedish graduates have the highest debt-to-income ratios of any group of students in the developed world.
Wait, wait, wait.
Let me get this straight.
You're selling this Swedish-Scandinavian model of, quote, free college to Americans.
You're selling it to impressionable kids based on the effect, hey, kids, you're going to come out of college with a debt that's going to be unimaginable.
If you just went to Sweden, yes, if you just went to Sweden, you would go to a country that graduates their graduates with the highest debt to income ratio in the world.
Because they don't make enough money because everybody goes to college, therefore there's no differentiating quality at all to the degree.
And secondly, you still have to pay for all the room and board, which tallies up to $19,000 a year while you're making a lesser salary.
Yeah!
Nice job, Chucky!
Nice job!
Wonderful work!
You guys are really knocking it out of the park.
Does anything liberals ever tell you, is anything ever true?
Ladies and gentlemen, again, we do facts and data on the show.
And when you dig into the facts and data, you find out that the facts and data prove conclusively that these people are just making this up about Scandinavian countries.
Finally, point number three, the welfare state.
Oh, Joe, the welfare state.
Free sick leave.
Everything's free, remember, which we all know is nonsense.
Somebody's paying and that someone is the Swedes who are paying through exorbitant tax rates.
Despite being one of the healthiest nations in the world in the early 2000s, nearly 10% of Sweden's entire workforce at any given time was on paid sick leave.
And why wouldn't they, when their government would pay 80% of their salary while on sick leave?
The average number of sick leaves taken per Swede per year more than doubled when the government increased the percentage of salary they'd pay from 75 to 80%.
You have similar numbers in Denmark.
Ladies and gentlemen, the welfare state has consequences.
The consequences are this.
When it's, quote, free for you to take off from work, unsurprisingly to many, people will do what?
They will take off work because they get 80% of their salary.
You get sick leave Rates of sick leave taken that are some of the highest in the world, which leads to what?
Decreased productivity, which leads to what?
Decreased national wealth over time.
Folks, nothing's free.
Everything has a consequence, everything has a price.
And if there's one If there's one point on, because I have one more thing I want to get to here, but if there's one point I'd like you to take away from the show I haven't mentioned in a long time when it comes to basic economics and understanding of basic economics and government policy that influences economics, it's keep in mind Pareto optimization, maximization, whatever you want to call it, based on an economist whose name was Pareto.
Shocking how that happens, right?
It's kind of like how the Dan Bongino Show found a guy named Dan Bongino to do the Dan Bongino Show.
Incredible how that happens.
Pareto Optimization says this, that a policy can be deemed somewhat effective if it helps just one person while harming no one.
Now, when you view government through that lens, you see quickly how almost nothing fits this category.
This is why people who are libertarians, capitalists like me, prefer to keep the government as small as possible.
Because there is no government policy that's going to help at least one person while harming no one.
Someone is always going to be, and keep in mind that harm doesn't mean you're taxed, because the tax, the money you pay, say you pay $1,000 a year for the military, you may garner $1,001 in benefits.
That's not, the economics, that's not being harmed, right?
You get what I'm saying?
Yeah.
So the problem with this is that these policies clearly Clearly, do not help people.
They lead to decreased productivity, excessive rates of sick leave, excessive rates of debt-to-income ratio on your quote, free college.
They lead to reduced economic benefits for everybody in society.
Keep in mind that Pareto optimization any time you hear about a policy.
Whenever you hear things about Obamacare, oh, we're gonna give away free healthcare.
So what, you're helping one person?
Well, how many people are you harming?
Oh, millions.
Oh, okay, maybe we shouldn't do that.
Pareto optimization.
Keep it in your head at all times.
Okay.
Um, one last story.
The tax cuts.
So, in a genius move, the Republicans are getting ready to double down on the tax cuts.
Now, I just want you to remember the history here quickly in the last few minutes of what happened.
Trump signed the tax cut bill in conjunction with the GOP in the House and Senate.
No Democrats voted for it.
It cut the corporate tax rate and income tax rates.
Now, the Democrats' talking point after that, you may have forgotten because that outrage campaign has been replaced by six or seven subsequent outrage campaigns, Joe.
Remember the talking point there?
Wow, the Republicans made the corporate tax cuts permanent, but the personal income tax cuts, they didn't make permanent.
No, wrong.
That's not what happened.
What happened is, the Democrats in the Senate threatened a filibuster.
By threatening a filibuster, the Republicans had to use a process called reconciliation.
That reconciliation process in the Senate, to overcome a Democrat filibuster, has a 10-year sunset.
That 10-year sunset would not exist if the Democrats did not filibuster.
Ladies and gentlemen, again, these are facts.
Whether you believe them or not is entirely irrelevant.
It doesn't alter the fact of the matter on the ground.
Now, in a genius move, putting the Democrats on the spot, the Republicans are going to put forth a bill to combat the Democrat talking point.
Oh, you guys just made the good, you wanted to help businesses, therefore you made the personal ones temporary.
Okay.
So what I told them to do, what, six months ago, Joe?
I said, you guys need to put a bill out there making these tax cuts permanent to show how hypocritical the Democrats are.
Therefore, right before the election, when all these Democrats saying, you know what, we would have made these permanent, but the Republicans just don't want to.
Okay.
Here's the Republican bill.
Now watch the Democrats vote against it and show what, what kind of outright rank hypocrisy these people, uh, hypocrites they are.
They're complete, total frauds, ladies and gentlemen, they're just making this up.
All right.
Um, one final note before we leave on a sad note, uh, So I got an email this morning from a friend in the Secret Service who has since left, and I was really taken aback.
I was kind of floored.
I didn't see it coming.
A guy, a friend, I just want you to remember the name in a good way, a guy named Noel Remagen, whose father was a Secret Service employee as well.
He's a good guy.
He was overseas in Scotland with President Trump on the trip and 40 years old.
He's 42.
He died unexpectedly.
He had a massive stroke while in the... I can't even imagine Joe.
I got the email this morning.
We have a down room when you're a Secret Service agent.
There's always a hotel room when they're at an R.O.N.
An R.O.N.
is where the president remains overnight.
It's always called an R.O.N.
So we get hotel rooms too, and one of them's a down room.
So you rotate out the agents in front of the door and everybody kind of takes a break so that you don't stand for eight hours.
You'd be totally not functional.
So apparently he went in the down room and sat down, and you don't sleep in the down room.
And I guess one of the poststanders, according to the story, was next to him and noticed he was sleeping, so nudged him.
You know, like, hey, you're not supposed to sleep.
Well, he wasn't sleeping.
Apparently he'd had a massive stroke.
They took him to one of the best hospitals in Scotland and he didn't pull through.
So he has two young children.
He's an incredible guy.
His name is Noel Remegen.
And I'm going to ask you in the future if they do a GoFundMe or something like that, if you'd be willing.
It's totally, of course, your call.
I'll be chipping in there as well.
But he had young kids and a wife and it's just a horrible, horrible story.
And it just reminds me of, you know, how, You don't know the plan, folks.
And I don't mean to be hyperbolic or overly traumatic, but you don't know the plan, and just cherish those kids and everything every day, the sunsets, the kids at a baseball game, those little smiles, that laugh they give you, because you just don't know when it's going to be your last.
We don't know the plan.
We're not smart enough to figure it out.
The Almighty's got a plan for us, and he wanted Noel a little early, so Noel Remigian.
