In this episode I address the latest efforts by the Democrats to ensure another government shutdown. I address a stunning admission by FBI officials regarding just how easy it’s become to spy on Americans. Finally, I discuss the implosion of liberal programs similar to the “Green New Deal” in other countries.
News Picks:
Don’t believe the liberal hype, wages are not stagnating under President Trump.
The latest offer to avoid a government shutdown is not acceptable.
Sheriffs are warning Congress that the Democrats’ immigration proposals could put criminals back on the streets.
GOP Representative Devin Nunes says they are looking at criminal referrals for some of the Spygate players.
Media “fact-checkers” are a joke. They’re nothing more than opinion writers masking themselves as non-partisan observers.
The oversight into the FISA process is broken.
This Yale Daily News opinion piece is the most disturbing thing you’ll read all day.
Copyright Dan Bongino All Rights Reserved.
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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 Joe, how are you today?
Yeah, and a fine good morning to you.
I'm doing well, Dan.
How about you, buddy?
You doing good?
Yeah, Paul and I were up late last night, late for us by Eastern time standards here in Florida in the Dan Bongino schedule, where like nine o'clock has become my standard bedtime lately.
Watching the rally in El Paso and Beto's, I think, rather poorly, relatively speaking, attended counter rally and then the interview afterwards.
So a lot of news to cover today.
Hey, let's get right to it.
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Joe, just a note, I met you while doing politics while running for office.
We met a while ago.
And running for office teaches you a lot of things.
And one of the things it teaches you is that campaigns are about two things.
Joe's heard this line a thousand times, so forgive me Joe for being repetitive to you, but many of my listeners haven't.
It's about two things.
Campaigns are about snapshots and soundbites.
That's it.
You could give the greatest speech in the world at a campaign rally running for Senate, Congress, or even the presidency, and what makes the lead of a paper the headline is a soundbite.
And you want that soundbite to be powerful.
Whether it's Bill Clinton's State of the Union, where he said, the era of big government is over, or Donald Trump's State of the Union, saying that we are born free, we will die free, or last night when he said it again, we will die free, we are not a socialist country, which he also said in the State of the Union.
That's the soundbite you want.
Those are what make or break a presidency and make or break a politician.
And think about the logistics as to why, Joe.
Sadly, a lot of people, you know, I shouldn't say, me included, I don't want to be like dramatic.
I'm not trying to insult anybody.
People don't have a lot of time.
A lot of people read the first paragraph of a story in the headline and that's really it.
Some people just read the headline.
The soundbite is an encapsulation of what Trump's entire speech was about.
Last night, the soundbite captured from that speech is, we will never be a socialist country, we will die free.
It was a great speech in El Paso.
That was the soundbite a lot of people took away.
That matters.
So soundbites and snapshots, snapshots matter too.
Snapshots, meaning what is the photo of the event that matters?
What's the takeaway?
And when you run for office and when you're a secret service agent, you pick up how important this stuff is.
I'll give you a quick story.
And this is in relationship last night between the unbelievably well attended Trump rally and Beto O'Rourke's Again, relatively speaking at least, sparsely attended rally compared to Trump's rally, and how this does no favors to Beto O'Rourke, and he should have seen this coming.
When I was doing an event for Obama, when he was campaigning for the re-election of John Corzine, the governor of New Jersey, I was a lead advisor as a Secret Service agent on the trip, advising a guy who was doing his first lead advance.
And I remember this.
We were at the arena that the New Jersey Devils play.
I think it's the Prudential Arena, whatever it may be.
And they could not fill the place up.
They had expected 20,000 people, Joe.
8,000 people showed up.
The staff was terrified at the snapshots.
Now, 8,000 people, Joe, is a healthy crowd, right?
I mean, that's a decent-sized crowd.
But it's not a decent-sized crowd if you're Barack Obama claiming some progressive mantle to try and get a progressive governor of New Jersey elected in this rally that's supposed to be this breathtaking event.
They expected 20,000.
So what did they do?
They were so obsessed with the specter of empty seats appearing in a photograph in the newspaper That Joe, they spent hours and hours figuring out how to tarp off the upper layer of the arena, how to tarp it off to make sure that the press shot made it look like there were no empty seats, it was packed to the rafters, and the rest was just a backdrop.
You get what I'm saying?
Oh yeah.
To make the photos appear that the place was packed.
It wasn't.
I was there.
They expected 20,000 people.
8,000 showed up.
It was a disaster.
The guy who gets a, there's a staff guy usually responsible for crowd building.
I'm not sure he even, he even lasted after that trip.
I don't think they fired him, but it did not go well for him.
Let's leave it at that.
Soundbites and snapshots.
Last night, Beto made a critical mistake.
You know, Trump said he had two to three hundred people.
The crowd estimates I've heard from law enforcement being quoted in articles and reports, Joe, is closer to five to six thousand.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
Trump had 35,000 people and more people lined up outside the arena.
When you have 35,000 people and your opponent claiming this mantle as the next progressive champion, Beto, his snapshot is 6,000 people, no matter how much the media tries to deflect.
Trump said he had 200.
Beto really had 6,000.
It doesn't matter.
It's a fraction of what Donald Trump had.
That's the point.
If you're trying to build this public pressure, that public support's on your side, and that Trump is this evil guy in a border town, and all these people are going to show up, and, you know, less than a fifth of the people show up that showed up at the Trump rally, it destroys you.
I get this.
Running for office, I remember having a rally, Joe, in Prince George's County.
Paula, you remember that?
The rally.
Paula, I gotta bring Paula.
Paula's been helping us produce the show a little bit.
I'm like yelling out there.
Hey, Paula!
Yeah, outside.
She's gonna walk in and start talking, right?
We had this rally in Prince George's County.
We thought we were gonna get like a hundred, two hundred people there.
We didn't.
We got like 50 to 75 and it was a big difference.
It was really, it made a big difference.
It didn't look good.
It didn't.
I remember, listen, I'm self-critical on the show because I use my own failures and some successes to kind of give you some inside baseball how this really works.
We didn't get any press coverage.
I think Maryland Reporter was the only one that showed up and the crowd wasn't big enough to make any kind of, the snapshots and the soundbites weren't good.
The crowd wasn't big enough to make a difference.
And Beto's efforts last night were a big flop because Trump turned it out and Beto didn't.
It's as simple as that.
Snapshots and soundbites, folks.
They matter.
All right, moving on.
So, listen, the Green New Deal stuff continues and it's turned into a real supreme embarrassment for the left.
Now, there was an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning.
About Australia's efforts on a much smaller scale to implement a similar type program to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's New Deal.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have to hammer this thing.
As a lot of sophisticated political analysts who I respect deeply have stated, this is very dangerous.
And if we let this thing go without constant ridicule and mockery for the disaster it is, as many people I respect again have noticed, you may see this thing getting voted on, and if we get a progressive president in 2020 passed, do not laugh this off!
You know, people laughed off the idea of something like Obamacare.
What do you mean?
There are going to be price controls?
They're going to fine people for not buying crappy insurance?
Yes, that actually happened!
Now, the individual mandate's been repealed, but us ignoring this and pretending it's going away is doing nobody any favors.
This stuff is real!
Ridicule this thing at every opportunity!
I'm sorry, I know that takes on a negative connotation, the word ridicule, but the thing is so stupid, hilarity is the best weapon against it.
Now, the fact-checkers have not done their homework on this.
I'll get to that in a second, too.
But the Wall Street Journal has a really good piece this morning about Australia's efforts on a relatively minor scale to do a similar thing here.
What Australia did, Joe, is this Green New Deal proposes basically raising many of the buildings in the United States and retrofitting every building in the United States to be more energy efficient.
Now, as I told you in my fact check a few days ago, given the amount of buildings in the United States, That would require the building reconstruction or retrofitting.
Of 30,000 buildings a day for 10 years.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, that is obviously not possible to do, but don't let that get in the way of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's dopey ideas.
30,000 buildings a day for 10 years, razed, rebuilt, or retrofitted?
It's absurd.
Matter of fact, Joe, I got an email from a guy, I'm not gonna name him, but it was interesting.
He worked for one of those companies that, remember that show, Joe, Extreme Makeover, where they make over a house?
Yeah, yeah.
You know the show I'm talking about, right?
Paulie used to watch the show.
We used to check it out.
He worked for a construction company that tried to rebuild one house.
His email was fascinating.
He knows who he is.
And he was talking about how to rebuild one house.
What a disaster this thing is if you don't have a staff of, he was saying, I think close to 200 people to monitor it.
Whoa.
Can you imagine that for 30,000 buildings a day?
It was a great email.
One of the best I've got.
I responded back to him.
I said, hey, thanks a lot.
This is terrific.
So, rather than trying to rebuild 30,000 buildings a day, let me get to the point, what did Australia do?
Australia created a program, Joe, for free, I'm using the dreaded air quotes here because nothing's free, free ceiling insulation for buildings that didn't have it.
In 2009, the Labour Prime Minister Kevin Rudd instituted this program in an effort to make Australian homes more energy efficient, Joe, where they were going to pay up to $1,600 Australian dollars.
Yes.
$1,600 to put insulation in your ceiling, you know, to keep the heat out and keep the cool air in, in the summers and make the country more energy efficient.
I know you're laughing already because you could tell this thing, sadly, it was, you know, it was, it was, what happened was actually pretty horrifying.
Let me see.
Let me get this.
Okay.
Some of it was tragic.
But the results are always going to be broken because the government has no incentive, when it spends other people's money, to monitor either the cost of the program or the quality of the installation.
So just to be clear, Australia was going to pay to put insulation in your roofs up to $1,600.
So what happened, Joe?
Well, of course it was a total disaster.
Now, here's where it gets tragic.
This is a quote from the Wall Street Journal article.
Today.
Then the deaths began.
Four young men were killed while installing insulation under the government's program.
Three by electrocution and one from hyperthermia.
He overheated.
Imagine being in a ceiling in Australia in the summer, during the Australian summer.
Dozens more workers, most of them inexperienced, suffered injuries and heat stroke.
Nearly 100 houses caught fire.
Environmental Minister Pete Garrett, remember the guy from Midnight Oil, Joe?
That's him.
Subsequently announced the planned deregistration and suspension of 5,000 installers of this installation.
But the suspensions were never required.
In February of 2010, just a year after the package was announced, this installation package, it was abandoned.
It's a fascinating story about how government, when they, this is for a, keep in mind folks, a project on the scale one one thousandth, one one hundred thousandth, one one millionth less than Ocasio-Cortez's plan to rebuild every structure in America.
All they were doing was putting installation.
Well, what happened?
People saw free money from the government, Joe.
$1,600 to install installation.
So they tell the story in the Wall Street Journal piece, a fascinating story, about how a guy ordered pizza and the pizza delivery guy shows up and gives him a card and says, hey, I can install installation in your ceiling for free.
All of a sudden, Joe, Everybody was a ceiling installation installer.
Why?
Because the government was giving out free money.
Free money!
It's free!
You're delivering pizzas?
I can install insulation.
So what happened?
Houses burned down.
They were installing it wrong.
People died.
Houses, I mean, the installation, there was a story in there about a guy, people were fraudulently claiming to have installed insulation and collecting checks from the government.
Others, Joe, were going up there in order to save money.
They were telling the homeowner they're putting installation, they were putting shredded paper down in the ceiling?
Folks, government spending, as Milton Friedman has said repeatedly, when government takes money from others, you, taxes, and spends it on other people, Government spending.
Neither cost nor quality matter.
It is not their money, so the cost doesn't matter.
They're handing out money to inexperienced installers.
Everybody was getting a check.
And the quality doesn't matter either, because it's not even their house, these government people handing out the money.
They don't care if your house burns down, it's not your house!
I mean, it's not their house, it's yours!
Cost nor quality don't matter when the government spends money.
When you spend money on yourself and your family, cost and quality matter.
It's your money, therefore the price of the product has to be price effective.
And the quality of the work you're having done matters because it's your house.
Folks, I just read this this morning and I thought to myself, if this isn't a warning sign, You know, I don't know what is.
How many stories do we need to hear about government debacles, or debacles as I've heard people say, government debacles with taxpayer-funded programs that spend them on these pie-in-the-sky, ridiculous, outrageous, AOC-like proposals?
Now, on the fact-checker front, the fact-checkers are not doing their homework on this.
Matter of fact, they're covering for Ocasio-Cortez.
It's the last point on this.
I'm going to move on because we've got a lot more to get to today, but this is important.
Fact-checkers are nonsense.
They're garbage.
PolitiFact, The Washington Post, this is a total waste of your time.
These are nothing more than opinion journalists.
They're not even journalists.
They're just opinion-talking heads and writers who disguise themselves in non-partisan fact-checking masks to get you to believe they're actually fact-checking and what they're doing is propagandizing you.
If you listened to yesterday's show, and I encourage you it was a good one, it's one of my favorites, I told you that Ocasio-Cortez, this is all nonsense about her, that she is now trying to, they're kind of semi-admitting it now, but Ocasio-Cortez had a Frequently Asked Questions, an FAQs thing, on her own website.
Yesterday's Show Notes has the link to the cached version of it, in case you think it's not there, we're making this up, where they had FAQs that talked about paying people unwilling to work and talked about all these absurdities.
Farting cows and this other stuff.
That was on her website.
Now, she and this advisor to her who appeared on Tucker Carlson, as I said in yesterday's show, had denied this.
Now they're kind of semi-coming around.
But instead of the fact-checkers calling her out on the fact that they denied this was on her site, I gave you the link.
It's at the show notes yesterday.
You can see it yourself.
What did the fact-checkers say?
Here's a piece by the Washington Examiner, Beckett Adams, I have in the show notes today.
This is from the Washington Post fact-checker.
There's a case to be made that the criticism about ending airplanes and cows was a stretch to begin with.
It was there, folks!
It was in the FAQs!
I have the link on yesterday's show notes.
Read it yourself.
Since the resolution didn't mention any of that, the FAQs were not definitive on those points.
But Ocasio-Cortez has now disowned the FAQs and the statement that went beyond the resolution.
The line about providing for people unwilling to work has been walked back completely.
So we won't be awarding any Pinocchios to this kerfuffle.
This is such a joke.
Fact-checkers are such a joke.
This is so stupid.
The fact that you take these people at the Washington Post seriously, if you do, really is a testament to some homework you need to be doing.
I don't mean to offend you, but if you're taking these people seriously, as non-partisan people interested in the facts, you need to really start to backtrack and start to look at where you are.
Because you're being hosed.
You're being lied to.
They're not going to award any Pinocchios for AOC and her staff initially denying this was on our website despite the fact that the cached version is out there for the public to see because, oh, they walked it back and disowned it.
While the very same fact checkers at some of these other sites, Joe, awarded Donald Trump a somewhat true or a mostly false for saying that 33% of women who are in these illegal immigrant caravans are being sexually assaulted when the number Joe was 31.4.
So he was off by, you know what, a little more than a point and a half and all of a sudden Donald Trump is completely unreliable and this is so stupid.
Fact-checking is a waste of your time.
I just want to put that out there because there are some people who buy this nonsense.
It's a joke.
Alright, moving on, we had another epic liberal failure and it's just... I mean, I don't like shouting fraud, but watching liberals implode upon themselves and walk back and be complete hypocrites, like this Andrew Cuomo up in New York, is just...
It's pitiful.
I used to celebrate it because it pointed out the hypocrisy, but now it's just a pitiful, disgusting sight to watch.
Because some people still believe this nonsense that liberals are in it for the little guy, Joe, that they're here to tax the rich and use the rich.
Yada, yada, yada, yada.
It's right.
It's like a Seinfeld episode.
It's all BS.
We're here to tax the rich, take care of the middle class.
It's all garbage.
This SALT, what's happening with this SALT deduction is just epidemic of this entire argument right now.
So Andrew Cuomo, a piece in the journal today, Wall Street Journal, is losing his mind over the fact that in high tax states like his in New York, you can no longer deduct your state and local tax bill over $10,000.
Right!
Now, what's ironic about this, Joe, is liberals have told us for a long time that they're in it for the little guy, they're here to tax the rich.
So the Wall Street Journal pulled some simple, whether you agree with this or not, the SALT deduction.
Just to be clear, on your federal taxes, you used to be able to deduct your state and local taxes.
You're now limited to $10,000 of that.
It's just that they have cement heads, these liberals.
It's like, they'll tell you, oh, we're in this for the little guy, we need to tax the rich.
Do you understand this SALT deduction?
The people who are losing the deduction are people who are at the upper 20% of earners.
Again, I'm not suggesting you have to agree with this.
I get emails all the time from people saying, listen, I'm upper middle class.
I'm getting hammered by this in New York and California.
Fine.
I'm just suggesting to you that I have never ever received an email from someone who is in the lower rung of income earners who has been impacted by this at all.
So let me walk you through what the journal points out to show you the hypocrisy of the left, how they're lying to you.
The left has told you they're about taxing the rich, taking care of the middle class, and, you know, earning more government revenue to redistribute to all these people who are struggling.
So now Andrew Cuomo is begging for a repeal of this.
They point out in the piece that the SALT repeal, by simple math, only benefits the top 20% of earners, with the largest cut of it going to the top 1%.
So that ability, before the SALT deduction, to deduct your state and local taxes, The largest cut of that benefit went to the top 1%.
Does that make sense, Joe?
If you were paying an extraordinary amount of state and local taxes that you could deduct from your federal bill, it's because you had very high income.
You had very high income.
The largest cut went to the top 1%, and most of that deduction benefited the top 20%.
You argue what you want for the bill.
I'm giving you the simple math.
The ability to deduct state and local taxes primarily benefited high earners.
Also, if this is repealed, and the old way of doing it, Joe, where you can deduct almost an unlimited amount, depends on AMT and other stuff, but almost an unlimited amount of your state and local taxes, if that's repealed like Andrew Cuomo wants, the federal government would lose $600 billion in revenue over 10 years.
So folks, do you understand how liberals are total hypocrites on one hand, right?
Reminds me of, was it Lyndon Johnson who said, yeah, I want to meet a one-armed economist because they always come over and say, on one hand, and on the other, they always give you like two, they never give you a definitive answer, you know?
I think it was.
But on one hand, you have Andrew Cuomo arguing that, you know, the rich somehow are the problem.
We have to tax the rich.
I subscribe to this liberal ethos that, you know, they somehow gained, you know, off the system and they owe the system back this amount of money and they're going to take care of the middle class and that this should be redistributed and given to the government.
But then on the other hand, you have the very same guy.
Same guy.
Same guy.
Remember when Clinton used to golf?
Same guy.
You have the same guy.
I used to tell that story.
A guy used to hit a shot golfing with him, and it'd be terrible, and then he'd hit a good shot, and Clinton would go, Bill Clinton would go, same guy!
This is the same guy, Andrew Cuomo, who's now arguing to eliminate the SALT deduction, remove $600 billion from the government coffers, federal government coffers, and benefit the top 1%, primarily, and secondarily, the top 20% of earners.
Folks, I'm just asking for ideological consistency.
I feel for the people in New York, New Jersey, and California genuinely.
I do.
Who've had their taxes increased by this.
I never support a tax hike, ever.
But broadening the tax base, what that means is making the impact of taxes and tax payments Leveling it across income groups is important, folks.
You may say, well, why, Dan?
The rich should pay more.
They do pay more.
If we had a flat 20% tax rate, folks, 20% of a million dollar salary is more than 20% of a $20,000 salary.
This is not complicated math.
I don't care about benefiting the rich or anyone else.
I'm simply suggesting to you that a broadening of the tax base Does what, Joe?
It makes tax flows into the government more predictable and not prone to boom and bust cycles.
Look at what happens in California.
When the economy's booming, California runs surpluses because the top 10%, 20% of California earners pay the overwhelming majority of taxes.
Yet when the economy struggles, Those same wealthy earners start to lose money.
California goes into a drastic financial shortfall because the tax base isn't broad enough to absorb the shock of it.
This is not complicated economics.
You want a broad, wide tax base where everybody has skin in the game on public policy, number one.
You want high taxes?
Then you should pay them.
You have skin in the game on that public policy.
But secondly, Joe, it enables the government to absorb these vicissitudes and highs and lows and peaks and valleys of recessions and, in some cases, economic booms.
Because everybody's paying in.
It's not just reliant on a couple of wealthy people who, if they go broke, the government goes broke.
This is basic economics.
But Cuomo doesn't want any of that.
Andrew Cuomo's a hypocrite.
He wants high-end earners to benefit from a deduction that benefits almost exclusively them based on simple math, and he wants to strike government revenue from the federal coffers because it benefits him politically.
He's a fraud.
He's a fraud.
It's as simple as that.
Alright, I have another great piece here, but this is like liberal debunking day.
You know, we have to do that once in a while.
Call them out on their nonsense.
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Okay.
Matt Palumbo wrote a great piece today on my...
On my website, Bongino.com.
It's in the show notes and I strongly encourage you to read it because it debunks another widely held nonsensical liberal BS theory that the Trump economy is not motoring along because, quote, wages are stagnating.
That's garbage.
Wages are not stagnating.
The piece will be in the show notes.
If you subscribe to my email list, which I strongly encourage you to do, it's available at my website.
It just says subscribe to email list.
I will email you these articles right to your inbox and you will have the intellectual firepower you need to debate your liberal friends who are lying to you, unfortunately, all too often.
So the title of Matt's speech is, no, wages are not stagnating.
This is basically, you know, nonsense.
He addresses it right away.
Don't be fooled.
Wages are not stagnating under Trump.
That's the title.
That's the exact title of the piece.
I should have been precise there.
Matt points out some more liberal gaslighting techniques, and it's a brilliant piece.
Folks, number one, wages are not stagnating at all.
That's actually factually, numerically garbage.
It's made up.
In 2018, wages jumped 3.2%.
Now, to be fair and give you the facts and data, the left-wing media won't, when you adjust that for inflation, the net, in other words, factoring out inflation effects, the net effect is wages are only up 0.76.
So, you know there's a difference between real and nominal.
Nominally, 3.2% wages are up.
But again, when you factor in the buying power of that money, wages are still up, Joe, but they're only up 0.76%.
Which, granted, is not a profound change, but is still a factually accurate statement.
So if your liberal friends tell you wages aren't up, they're actually lying to you.
This is widely accepted, easily available public data, which Matt links to in the piece, that I strongly encourage you to check out.
It may not be up in real terms as much as it is in nominal terms, but wages are up.
But Matt points out another interesting piece of information.
We had addressed this a long time ago in a show.
Joking.
Six months ago, Joe.
Everything six months ago on this show.
Seems that way.
We addressed this a while ago.
How liberals like to skew the numbers and fact-checkers like to mess with Trump.
But when I give you the facts back, you'll have the ammo to go back.
What's really going on, folks?
And the reason wages are up but are only up in real terms in 0.76%, again, which is still up, is because, folks, we've had a lot of retirements from people 55 to 64 in the workforce.
Now, what would that have to do with wages?
Think it through.
This is a genius point.
Matt did a good job here.
Joe, let me ask you this.
Have you accumulated more value-added, workforce-related skills?
Do you have them now in your 50s, or did you have more skills when you started doing this in your 20s?
Well, accumulated means over time, so I think... When I was older, yes.
You know what you make me laugh sometimes?
I love with Joe, what he does is he knows the question's dumb.
So what he does is, in order to expound on the dumbness, the intentional dumbness of the question, because it's a liberal question, so of course it's dumb.
Joe makes the dumb question appear, the answer, pseudo-sophisticated in an effort to exaggerate the stupidity of the question.
Well, since chronologically, over time, that means I've been living longer.
Yes, then that would mean that yes, I have accumulated...
Yes, of course!
Joe in his 50s is a smarter guy than he was in his 20s.
Joe does things now.
With this live stream we do, with Adobe Audition, with compression devices.
We always get compliments about the audio quality of the podcast.
We use two mics, by the way.
The reason they sound different is because Joe is responsible for the audio version only.
That's exclusively his.
Paula works a little bit with him on the lav mic.
That's this thing here.
So that's why they sound a little bit different.
They both require different technologies that Joe's learned.
Joe is worth more to me And any other employer he may work with now in his 50s than he was in his 20s because he knows stuff he didn't know then.
What does this have to do with wages stagnating?
Because people 55 to 64 due to the booming economy now and some financial security they didn't have under the Obama administration are now deciding, Joe, it's a good time to retire.
Yeah.
Meaning, those are the highest earners in our workforce.
So when the highest earners in our workforce leave the workforce, you're left with what?
The mid-level earners and low-income earners, which drive down the average wage.
Which means the wage growth effect, again in real terms, only 0.76%, but still going up, is even more profound.
Matt gives a great example, that if there were three, say, listen, Joe is the oldest amongst us, so let's say Matt's the youngest, which he is, I'm the middle guy at 44, and Joe's older than me.
Joe, based on skills in a company, say Joe's the CEO, Joe'll be making the most.
I'll be making them, say, $20 an hour, Joe's making $40, and Matt's making $10, because he's new, he's the youngest, he doesn't know as much, right?
Matt gives this great analogy, how when Joe retires, even if I get a raise, Joe, and I was making $20 an hour, now I'm making $25, and Matt gets a raise from $10 to $15, the average wages, if you were making $50 to $60 an hour, to give a more profound example, the average wage still goes down.
Even though me and Matt got a raise.
Does that make sense, Joe?
Matt and I still get a raise.
Our wages went up.
But the most skilled people, Our older members of the workforce who've been around a long time, who've accumulated life skills, work skills, value-added skills, managerial skills, they are retiring now!
And wages are still going up!
Which speaks even more to the power of the Trump economy to overcome even that.
Secondly, he points out, Joe, how labor force participation has gone up dramatically under Donald Trump.
People who were eligible to work, who had given up opportunities to work in the Obama workforce, where labor force participation was at near record lows.
People had given up, again, statistical facts, easy for you to research online, Matt, links to them in the piece.
Labor force participation under Obama was at record lows.
People gave up looking for jobs.
What's happening now, Joe?
Not only are some of our highest paid, skilled, and older workers retiring now because of the good economy, But because of the great economy right now, a lot of people who had given up looking for work, whose skills have atrophied, and may not be able to demand the salary they could demand eight years ago because they lost out on a lot of that work time, are now coming back into the workforce at a lower salary, driving down wages a bit.
Even the San Francisco Federal Reserve, as Matt points out in the piece, This isn't some bastion of right-wing conservatism pointed out that this is one of the anomalies of a growing economy.
That initially, as people come back into the workforce because of the availability of jobs, that wages can actually go down a bit because some of these workers lost some of their skills.
Again, let's leave the sophisticated economic analysis to us.
Let's let the liberals, you know, dance on their own facts and data grave as they constantly go out there and trot out debunked stupid points.
So the three takeaways before we move on.
Yes, wages are going up.
In nominal and in real terms.
They are being dragged down a bit by older, more skilled workers retiring because of the good economy.
And third, the fact that jobs are opening up in near record numbers, people are coming back in the workforce with lesser skills who are taking lower wages, driving down wages a bit.
But they're still going up.
That's how good the economy is.
Right.
Or really, one of Matt's finer pieces, I love economics, so I'm kind of biased.
Two things fascinate me, a spiky case in economics, And I, you know, I love Matt's work and so maybe I am a little biased, but folks, please, I strongly encourage you to read the piece.
It's on my show notes today.
It's at bongino.com.
If you don't want to subscribe to the email list, that's up to you, but please read it.
It's really good.
It's short, it's sweet, and it hammers.
Paula put it up there again in the video.
Thanks for doing that.
It just hammers, hammers this idea that the liberals keep hitting Trump with.
It is not true.
I'm just asking people to do basic homework on this.
Okay.
Oh, another development here in the Spygate case, and a great piece by Jeff Carlson over at the Epoch Times, who's done some really great work.
And folks, it worries me.
The gist of the piece, to get the lead out in the front, is if you're a libertarian at heart like I am, who's genuinely concerned about the private self versus the public self, It's giving me goosebumps talking about it.
I'm not even kidding.
Like you see it on the video.
You see my hair standing up because it freaks me out that much.
I'm not even kidding.
The private and the public self are disappearing.
And this piece Jeff wrote at the Epic Times, it's about Spygate, but it's about something bigger, folks.
And it's the reason I wanted to bring it up today.
What he talks about in the piece is how the FISA court, the ability of the federal government to use its law enforcement and intelligence powers to spy on you, Was initially subjected to a bunch of stringent restrictions.
The Woods Procedure, which we've talked about frequently, which is designed to fact check the information before it goes into the court.
Right.
And there were multiple layers of redundancy, Joe, designed to protect you from being spied on by the government in a court where you're not even entitled to be at the proceeding, or any of the proceedings.
It's not adversarial.
Right.
It's effectively the new spy chamber.
Jeff's piece is long, but it's worth your time because it talks about how adoring the spying on Donald Trump case, despite all of this broke down, Joe.
Now, I'm going to read to you a snippet of that piece shortly about how none of the safeguards against your privacy were implemented in this case at all, and the government was basically given unfettered access into the private lives of people who had no business being on the government's radar.
But before I get to that, so that's the lead here.
What's bothering me is a former federal agent, a cop myself, who had the power to take away people's freedom, their assets.
Folks, the distinction between a free society and an unfree society is the distinction between the private and the public self.
If you live in a socialist, tyrannical, despotic regime, North Korea, Venezuela, or others where political spying happens.
Your personal life is always public.
Your emails, what happens in your home as in the Soviet, in Mao's China, and in the Soviet Union, even family members were encouraged to spy on other family members for Treason and sedition and insubordination of the government's efforts to propagandize people.
You understand where I'm going with this show?
You were never safe.
This is a topic I've discussed often on this show for five years now.
You were never safe.
There was no personal life.
The argument I give is we live in this free constitutional republic, relatively free, where you know when you open the garage door in the morning and turn your car on to leave for work that you are leaving your private life at home and you now become public.
You're out in public, people can see you in your car as you're commuting to work, people can see you at your job, your work emails, your work can read.
You understand and you act differently.
So we act differently at home than we do out in public.
Everybody knows it.
Listen folks, there are things people do at home that they wouldn't want people to know in public.
People use the bathroom.
They don't want the public.
No one's going to live stream that if you're not an imbecile.
People pick their nose or whatever.
They eat a bad diet at home and maybe they're watching things on the internet that they shouldn't be watching and they don't want people to know that.
But you got a personal life!
Right.
And the idea about a personal life, in contrast to a public life, is that in that personal life, as long as your personal behavior doesn't negatively impact others, that you're to be left alone.
That's what freedom is!
The security for your private papers and behavior to stay private as long as it doesn't violate laws or negatively impact anyone else's civil rights.
Folks, this is all breaking down.
All of it.
Now, before I get to the Epoch Times piece, I'm going to throw Paula for a loop here, sorry.
She's trying to, she's getting used to my cavalier style on the video here.
But I read another piece in the Yale Daily News, which is in the show notes today, that was highlighted by Christina Hoff Sommers on her Twitter feed.
That's how I found it.
By a student by the name of Isis Davis Marx, who wrote an op-ed piece in the Yale Daily News about how he intends to spy on, quote, white boys.
I'm not making this up, Joe.
Here's the end of his op-ed.
He's talking about how he sees these white kids on campus who he feels have white privilege, who may grow up later to be Supreme Court justices or politicians, and how students on the campus have an obligation now to spy on these white kids.
Take screenshots of their screens, their behaviors, take screenshots of them to video them and basically to incorporate like a Gestapo file in case these white kids become- I'm not making this up folks, it's the op-eds in there.
In case these people become prominent officials later so they can use it against them later on.
He ends his op-ed, oh it's her, excuse me, it's her, Isis Davis Marsh, forgive me.
She says, but I can't do that anymore.
I can't let things slip by.
I'm watching you, white boy, and this time I'm taking a screenshot.
Folks, The private self and the public self, the distinction, even in a constitutional republic like we're supposed to have, is slowly disappearing.
Has identity politics gone this far that we don't even need Soviet gulags anymore?
We have our own citizens walking around as a spy patrol for the identity politics police, taking screenshots of the computers of white college students with the assumption, what, accumulating them in a file?
What is it, white kids file for later on in case they become famous or popular?
This was a real op-ed, folks, that was allowed to run in that paper.
Unbelievable!
There's a screenshot from it on the video there.
Evil is banal.
I guess making a reference to some of the trials they had had.
You know what she's talking about.
This is unbelievable.
Now combine that with this Epoch Times piece.
The Epoch Times piece about how there were supposed to be safeguards in the FISA court, Joe.
We weren't supposed to be spying on our citizens without legitimate safeguards built in.
I have said to you repeatedly, the problem the three-letter agency players involved in the Spygate scheme are going to have is that paperwork was laid out in the Woods file about a number of people who were supposed to check the facts before they spied on the Trump team and didn't do it because the facts, the dossier, were unverified.
They weren't facts, they were anti-facts.
Now, an FBI lawyer, the Epoch Times got a hold of some of her testimony up on the hill.
And the FBI lawyer talks about these accuracy reviews and compliance audits that were supposed to be done by the Department of Justice, Joe, to ensure that people like you and I and Trump and Carter Page are not spied on without fact-based evidence.
From the piece, again, in the show notes today.
Moyer said that routine compliance audits, known as accuracy reviews, are sometimes carried out by the Department of Justice's Office of Intelligence that would entail a review of non-specific Woods files.
So the DOJ, to be clear, is supposed to come in and review the Woods procedure, where layers and layers of people in this Woods procedure, named after the lawyer who invented it, the FBI, Are supposed to check information before you were spied on by our government.
And the DOJ is supposed to do compliance audits to make sure that the facts are being checked.
However, Moyer also noted that the Woods file relating to the Page FISA had not been reviewed or audited by anyone.
Question.
Ms.
Summers asked her.
Previously you had mentioned, I think, that to your knowledge an audit or a Woods review had not been performed on the Carter Page FISA.
Ms.
Moyer.
Correct.
Do you understand the gravity of what we're talking about here?
Ladies and gentlemen, we're talking about a presidential campaign.
Where the fully weaponized assets of intelligence assets used by the United States government and law enforcement assets in the FBI were turned on the political opposition of a sitting president, Barack Obama.
The basic safegu- that a decision in and of itself that should have elicited a higher degree of scrutiny.
Joe, if any case in American history Demanded the response of accurate fact-checkers to make sure they were spying on the Trump team for legitimate reasons.
Do you think this was the case?
Yeah, pretty sure, yeah.
Yeah, kinda sorta, right?
This Woods procedure is in place to ensure they are spying on them for the right reasons.
And when asked on the record, On the record, was this Woods file checked?
Was a compliance audit done?
The answer is no!
And as Jeff also points out in the Epic Times piece, When another principal FBI attorney, Tricia Anderson, as I discussed last week, was asked if she reviewed the FISA application for one of the most important spying cases, counterintelligence cases in U.S.
history, Tricia Anderson said no.
She only looked at the cover sheet which indicated there were no problems.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what happens with the growing federal bureaucracy.
And the growing diminishment of the Fourth Amendment, the protection against illegal search and seizure in our society.
As the federal law enforcement bureaucracy grows, what happens?
Institutional protections collapse and fall apart.
Everything becomes pro forma.
People just check a box.
Did you review it?
Yeah, Joe, I was in the federal government.
I know how this works.
I know how it works.
People check a box!
Did you read the whole case?
Oh, I didn't read it, but the other guy did.
Right.
How do you know the other guy did?
Well, he checked the box, too!
So what happens?
We now have a system of a FISA court, an effective star chamber, you can spy on Americans, no notice to them at all, delve into their most intimate secrets, what they're emailing from their house when they thought they were living their private lives, What they're talking to people on the phone about, what they thought was private, that's all gone now.
You can now do that as long as someone submits a cover sheet on a Woods file?
And you check a box saying you read it even though you didn't?
Folks, you understand how devastating this is?
The dramatic loss of privacy, how the lines, the hard lines in a free constitutional republic between the public self and the private self are now gone?
Everything is becoming the public self now.
You've got kids in Yale threatening to screenshot your computer in your classroom to put together a file on you in case you do something later in life so they can use it against you.
And they didn't even need a gulag, a threat of a gulag to do it!
They brought in their own totalitarianism!
With no pressure of arrest or torture to do it!
You didn't need to be threatened by the Soviets to spy on your own family and classmates.
They're doing it because identity politics demands it!
And then we have a de jure system in our federal government now, a legal system, that has codified legal spying on American citizens as long as, Joe, we check a box here and there.
Did you read it?
I didn't read it, but I checked the box.
Somebody else read it.
We're spying on the president's team.
You think you may want to read that file?
Nah, we're good!
Joey Bag of Donuts looked at it.
The bagel guy on this corner checked it out.
We ran it by him.
He said it was all good.
It's A-OK.
What is happening?
Listen, you may not like some of these guys, but if there was ever a time to start to support people like Rand Paul and others.
I like Rand a lot.
Who has been firmly principled on the issue of diminishing privacy in a free constitutional republic.
If there was ever a time to support people like that, that time is now.
This is scary stuff, folks.
And for you mini-totalitarians, especially the one who wrote that Yale Daily News piece, I'm ashamed and embarrassed for you.
I never thought despotism, tyranny, and government apparatchiks wouldn't even need the threat of force to spy on their own citizens and friends and neighbors.
Disgraceful.
Absolutely horrible.
All right.
I got another story to get to today.
I should have spoke about this in the beginning, but I had a lot going on.
It required detailed explanations.
I didn't want to miss it.
So there is a pending government shutdown, as you likely heard on Friday, if there is no deal reached.
It would be a partial government shutdown, just like what happened last time just a few weeks ago.
And there is some talk of a deal being brokered up on the Hill.
Right now the deal looks like some sort of down payment on fencing.
Slatted fences, not a wall.
It would be significantly less than the 5.7 billion.
The president's asked for, but there's some conflicting information out there about the Democrats' desire to have the number of immigration detention beds for people who broke the law decreased.
Now, this is an insane talking point.
I discussed it yesterday on the show.
The Democrats actually want to effectively remove detention space for people who enter the country illegally and some who may have even committed crimes and release criminals back into the country.
That's all that is.
Right.
You can talk about all the talking points in the world, Joe.
That's exactly what the Democrats want.
They don't want us to have the ability to detain illegals, okay?
Excuse me.
So that's what they're doing.
There's some dispute now.
Over in this agreement that's been reached, nothing's been signed, it's just word of mouth right now spreading around through sources, and I have an article in the show notes from the Washington Examiner that discusses it.
There is some dispute if there is a decrease in detention space in that agreement or not.
The Republicans are saying no, the Democrats are saying yes, there's a 17% decrease in that.
Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know what to say about this other than we have to hold the line.
Again, we cannot cave to this.
These political fights matter right now.
They matter because they involve the very security of our country.
If this is the deal, I want to be clear on where I stand.
So you understand, you listen to my show, you spend your time with me, I'm honored by that, you deserve an opinion by me.
If it does involve any, any effect on the ability to detain people who came here and broke the law, then the President should absolutely categorically not sign this deal and make that known right now.
Because due to the 72-hour rule in the Congress that Pelosi just implemented, they need 72 hours to read and debate a bill.
If they don't get this done, you're gonna see another shutdown on Friday, and they need to get this done now, Tuesday.
So if President Trump is not going to sign this because there's a decrease in detention space, he needs to put that out there right now.
Because we need to prepare.
And we need to get ready for another fight.
And that's fine.
That's a fight I and you are willing to have.
Listen, I travel too.
I get it.
I see what's going on.
If it results in some delays, it's delays.
And we gotta suck it up.
But these are fights we have to have.
But I just wanted you to update on that.
I'll give you a quick update on that.
I think that would be a terrible, terrible deal.
Alright folks, again, I appreciate your time today.
Thank you very much.
Please subscribe to my email list on my website.
I have these articles out there.
Read Matt's piece on the wages going up.
It's very, very well done.
And if you don't mind, please subscribe to the show.
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