In this episode I address the astonishing comments by disgraced former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe regarding the targeting of the Trump team. I also address the proposed border deal and the pitfalls in it. Finally, I address a study on voter ID which completely debunks liberal talking points.
News Picks:
Disgraced former FBI official Andrew McCabe, incredibly, admits to his role in a coup attempt.
Republicans “pounce” by forcing the radical Democrats to vote on their own Bill.
Snowflakes get triggered by “Build the Wall” jerseys at a basketball game.
Another liberal talking point about voter ID is debunked.
Americans still love capitalism. Here are three reasons why they aren't flocking to socialism.
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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?
Hey, Dan, doing good, man, doing good.
Glad to be here.
Good.
Glad that you're doing better today.
Joe had a rough day yesterday, but he's back.
Never lets the audience down.
I got a lot of emails, Joe, people very concerned about you.
So thank you.
The audience loves you.
I just want you to know, maybe make you feel a little bit better after a rough day yesterday.
Thanks very much.
They love producer Joe.
Yeah, yeah, I know you appreciate that, too.
As always, a bullet train-like news day.
Wake up this morning, Andy McCabe, former deputy director, is admitting his role in a government coup.
This is just this morning, Joe.
Just this morning, since we woke up this morning.
We found out that the budget deal may be full of pitfalls and landmines.
Reminds me of that old Atari game.
Was it Pitfall?
Remember, it had that stupid kind of horrible Atari theme song.
There are pitfalls everywhere in this thing.
So that's just this morning.
So I've got a lot to get to.
Let's get to it.
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Okay, first story.
Let's get to this.
The budget deal.
So the budget deal came out last night, you know, a thousand plus pages of, you know, typical swamp nonsense.
As I said to you yesterday, and I will continue to reiterate, it's a bad deal.
I've acknowledged it.
Trump's acknowledged it.
There's no wavering on it.
There's no, that's it.
I can't be any clearer.
The problem is right now, we only control one half of one, of one branch.
Of the legislative branch.
We control the Senate, we don't control the House.
So the chances of getting a good bill pushed by the Nancy Pelosi self-destructive, let's say, you know, attack American principles caucus is very, very low at this point.
Now, getting right to the point, there are a couple of landmines from what I've seen in this bill right away that should give us all pause.
Yesterday I suggested that if the bill It was relatively clean, Joe, and provided some funding and we could get to 55 miles of border.
It was probably the best we were going to get.
Let's take it and let's fight in December on the sequester because there's really no other option.
Pelosi's already, you can't play chicken with people who have no will to survive.
Their party is self-destructive and they don't care.
They really have forfeited any semblance of rationality or reasonableness.
But having said that, there appear to be some landmines.
Let's get right to it.
One of them is a significant amount of back pay to pay contractors during the government shutdown.
Ladies and gentlemen, that has never been done before.
It's going to set a dangerous precedent.
Listen, I was a government employee as a Secret Service agent.
The government, you know, should be running efficiently, should be running according to its constitutional duties, and it's not doing that.
I certainly don't celebrate anybody losing a paycheck.
But to pay people who are not even government employees per se, but contractors for work that was not done, is an extremely dangerous precedent.
And the answer for me is that's an absolute no-go.
No.
I'm sorry.
The president, if that's in there, should not sign that.
That needs to be pulled out.
Secondly, it appears that there was some only language put in there.
What do I mean by only language, Joe?
That the 1.375 billion for this 55 miles of border wall was written in such a way that it can only be used in a specific sector of the Rio Grande Valley, nowhere else.
That should be scrap.
This should be at the president's discretion.
If they're going to limit the amount of money he gets to spend from his original $5.7 billion request to $1.375 billion, that should be an absolute no.
It should be at the president's discretion in conjunction with the border professionals who know exactly where this limited amount of money can be spent.
So that's got to go too.
Finally, it looks like they were going to waive the 72-hour rule, which ironically, Joe, showing you what hypocrites the Democrats are.
They institute the 72-hour rule when Nancy Pelosi takes over as the Speaker of the House.
Saying what?
That every bill on the floor will be debated for 72 hours, Joe, giving these representatives, congressmen and women, a chance to read the bill.
So, of course, one of the first bills that comes down the pipeline is CR.
They waived the 72-hour rule because they want to rush this thing through because it's a piece of garbage and we all know it.
Now, here's the solution to that.
Here's what we need to do.
Me proposing bad things is great, or pointing out bad things is great, but me failing to propose a solution to those bad things does you no good.
They should pass a quickie CR.
A week-long CR, Joe.
In other words, a continuing resolution that just funds the government for a week.
Alright, yeah.
During that week, that week should be the time frame where we get to dig through this monstrosity last night.
Because I'm afraid the landmines I pointed out and the pitfalls just now, those three alone, are just the beginning.
This could get a lot worse as we dig through this thousand-page-plus bill.
So propose a quickie CR, pass it for a week, use that week to go through this thing and find out where the pitfalls are and negotiate and get them out of there.
Do not sign this thing if it's a debacle.
Now they're running out of time.
The government shutdown would be tomorrow.
Now a CR for say a week or so wouldn't require a lot of extensive debate because it would just continue funding at today's levels.
That's not what we want.
Ladies and gentlemen, please keep in mind we're not talking about the ideal situation right now.
We're talking about a situation, what is the least worst option?
We lost the House, and we have a party committed to the destruction of American borders, our economy, our energy economy, our healthcare system.
The Pelosi Democrats no longer care about the betterment of American society and the citizens who live here.
They don't care!
They've committed to a self-destructive ethos here, and all the rest has gone out the window.
Sanity, rationality, and elsewhere.
We're not debating with a sane party anymore.
But we should not acquiesce on every point.
So pass a weak CR.
Weak, not W-E-E-K.
It would also be a weak CR, ironically, with an A in there.
But pass a weak CR.
Give us time to look at this thing.
Let's get the pros in there to dig through this and make sure we don't get stuck with any more significant pitfalls and landmines that the Democrats stick in as poison pills later on.
Okay.
I got a ton of stuff to get through.
Some just explosive video and audio released this morning from a 60 Minutes interview.
A disgraced former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe, an acting director at one point, in an interview with Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes.
Some audio and video CBS put out to tease their Sunday interview with Andy McCabe.
This guy is a disgrace to humankind.
I mean this.
I have nothing but respect for The dedicated men and women of law enforcement I worked with at the state, local, and federal level.
But let's be candid, folks.
Some people out there at the management level of the FBI, this cabal of idiots who spied on and attacked the Trump team by weaponizing their own power, are a complete disgrace and the king of the disgraces.
In a village of disgraceful people, this guy is at the top of the hierarchy of the imbecile leadership, is Andy McCabe.
You would think a guy, a central player, key figure, who signed one of the now discredited FISA warrants that relied on a debunked dossier, would slither away like the snake he is, slither into the grass, hide his face in disgrace for the rest of his life.
A guy whose wife ran as a Democrat, took money from Democrat-connected operatives who are connected to Hillary Clinton, who then refused to recuse himself from the Hillary Clinton case until the last minute.
This is a guy who is a stain on law enforcement, our country, and anybody who knows him.
He is a comp- I can't say enough negative things about what a disgrace this human being is.
But instead of walking away, he doubles down.
He writes a book about his experiences and now he's going to be on 60 Minutes.
So let's play first what is an astonishing piece of audio here.
I have a video too, maybe we'll make into a cut today for Twitter.
But this is Andy McCabe interviewing with Scott Pelley, again, throwing out the entirely discredited, eviscerated, debunked theory that Trump was working in conjunction with the Russian government to get elected.
Play that cut.
I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and won the election for the presidency and who might have done so With the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage.
And that was something that troubled me greatly.
Joe, what do you say about that?
Him reasserting this now entirely discredited, debunked, he has no evidentiary backing for these claims at all.
And what does he do?
He goes on one of the largest news shows out there, news magazine show, 60 Minutes, which we'll see on Sunday, the full clip.
They released this clip from it.
and now reasserts the same nonsense that President Trump got elected
at the aid of the government of Russia, that that's what he was looking at,
keeps hammering this nonsense.
I mean, there comes a point where you just have to take the L.
You know these millennials, they always have these little like,
you know, they always have these catchy little sayings, right, that us older cats kind of miss out on.
But I have a teenage daughter, so they have the same thing.
You know, just take the L. Take the loss.
You're a discredited hack!
Your theory has absolutely no backing at all!
Not Bob Mueller, not the House, not the Senate, not even the political hacks like Shifty Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
These discredited conspiracy theorists, now amazingly sitting in Congress, have produced a scintilla of evidence that you, as the former FBI Deputy Director, that you keep putting out there.
Just take the loss.
Take the L and move on.
You've got nothing.
This is a discredited, nonsensical conspiracy theory.
You were the deputy director of the FBI.
And by the way, my sources on this tell me clearly that McCabe was a briefer.
Folks, believe me, that's not meant to be a complimentary term in law enforcement.
Let me give you some inside baseball.
Joe, I may have told you this before, because I've shared with you some stuff kind of OTR, but we'll put it out there on the show because the guy doesn't mind me talking about it.
Show prep, show prep.
A guy I know who's been a source for me, who knows McCabe well, told me that McCabe was a briefer, and that's a pejorative used to describe FBI agents who never did any real street work.
Never did the bank robbery cases, the task force cases on the drugs with the DEA.
Never really put the silver bracelets, i.e.
the handcuffs, on people.
They're briefers.
In other words, they walk in with their nicely coiffed tie knots, their greased back hair, their finely pressed suits.
They walk in and they brief administration officials, DOJ officials, and higher-ups in the FBI.
They looked apart, They talked apart, but they don't have the trifecta because they don't act apart.
Because they're not actual street guys.
And not being an actual street guy, they have relatively little experience with investigative procedures used to lock up actual bad guys.
So Andy McCabe is in fact a failed politician who managed to slither his way up to the top of the FBI.
He's a snake.
He's a fraud.
He's a phony.
And the guy who knows him directly made it crystal clear that this guy had very little respect amongst the rank-and-file FBI agents.
Listen, I'm telling you what I heard from a quality source of mine.
If you're in the FBI and you know otherwise, you want to send me something, my email's on the website.
I will read it, I'm open to hearing it.
I'm telling you this guy was crystal clear that McCabe was nothing more than a suit.
And an empty one at that.
He was a briefer.
Very good at briefing, very bad at doing actual cop stuff.
And it shows, because he's trying to save his tattered reputation.
Now, there were a couple of things I got a lot to get through.
So that was number one, him reasserting this absurd, now debunked theory that President Trump won this election at the aid of the Russian government, which is just nonsense.
But this is Scott Pelley, the 60 Minutes interviewer, on CBS this morning.
We cut this quick, right before we got on the air.
Describing another portion of the interview to air on Sunday, again on 60 Minutes, that he found to be really, really, let's say interesting, which I find to be deeply disturbing.
Play that cut.
There were meetings at the Justice Department in which it was discussed whether the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet could be brought together to remove the President of the United States under the 25th Amendment.
Folks, here we go again.
So first, Joe, let's be clear, that first soundbite of Andy McCabe, he admits he's an idiot.
Andy McCabe admits he's at the top of the totem pole of stupid and that he's still buying into a collusion hoax that nobody else in the sane, rational world actually buys into.
But secondly, that's Scott Pelley there, of course, citing McCabe.
That's on a clip of McCabe at the interview.
Where Andy McCabe apparently admits to Scott Pelley that he was one of the main players in Joe, what we can describe, I think fairly at this point, as a coup attempt.
Joe, I mean, I'm serious, you know, listen, you're my buddy and stuff, but is that an unfair accusation?
No, no, not at all.
That's what it was, dad.
To use the 25th Amendment.
The 25th Amendment is designed to remove a president from office who has suffered some mental or physical incapacitation.
You know, in a coma, some kind of brain disease which makes him incapable of coherent or reasonable thought.
Right, right.
Some kind of psychological incapacitation.
Now, if the president disputes that, there's a procedure to go to the cabinet and to take votes on this.
The fact that this was actually being discussed, Joe, when it's clear as day you may not like Donald Trump, that's fine.
In a still hopefully free constitutional republic, you're free to like or dislike any darn politician you want as long as you don't threaten them and engage in any law-breaking behavior.
Sure.
But the fact that serious people Or what we thought were serious people at the top of the FBI acknowledged to Scott Pelley, Andy McCabe included, that they were engaging in a 25th amendment attempt to quote count noses, in other words count the number of heads in the cabinet that would agree to this.
Is an absolute disgrace and an embarrassment.
This was a coup attempt.
How else do you describe this?
There is zero evidence whatsoever that there was any incapacitation.
Even talking about this makes us all dumber on behalf of Donald Trump.
The dislike of Donald Trump was driven by personal animus and political aspirations, bureaucratic aspirations only.
It had nothing to do with anything else.
There's any number of ways to pull off a coup, and this is one of them.
Joe, I gotta tell you, I'm actually astonished because McCabe, I once thought was a smart guy.
Now, I mean it, like a reasonably intelligent guy.
You told me that, you told me that.
Yeah, I did.
I said, you know what, these guys, they seem to be smart and conniving in a way.
I'm now starting to question, I really believe after this interview that this guy, you know, I'm not kidding folks, I don't mean as an insult, I mean it as an actual measure of intellectual aptitude and achievement.
I think Andy McCabe is a moron.
I really do.
This guy is an idiot.
He's on an interview with 60 Minutes now, admitting that he still believes in a hoax.
You know, he believes in the Sasquatch or whatever.
You know what?
Let me take that back.
There's more evidence of Sasquatch, Bigfoot, than there is of Russian collusion.
I don't even want to compare the two.
There's at least some...
Those clay footprints that, who knows?
There's more evidence of Bigfoot than there is of the Russian collusion hoax.
So you have this guy who now is pretty clearly a moron.
The former deputy director, who instead of just taking the L, slithering away through the grass in complete humiliation for buying into the hoax, he goes on the interview and advertises that he played fully into the hoax, the collusion hoax.
And then he says, after the hoax and after the firing of Jim Comey in this eight-day period where Comey's fired.
Just to be clear the timeline we're talking folks.
McCabe and this 25th Amendment talk happens in this eight-day window, Joe, where Trump fires Comey, and then eight days later, Bob Mueller's brought on a special counsel.
So it's just a little over a week where all of this conversation is happening.
I remember the period.
Now, not only is Andy McCabe, yeah, it's a very sensitive time.
Not only is McCabe now a moron, I mean, advertising is lack of intellectual cognitive ability for admitting to a coup attempt.
That's what he's doing.
Yeah.
Admitting to a coup attempt under completely false premises under the 25th amendment.
Agreed, agreed.
Something else happens here, Joe.
He also says that Rod Rosenstein, at the time the Deputy Attorney General, that Rosenstein was willing to wear a wire In other words, a recording device to get Donald Trump on some kind of a recording to use to implement the 25th Amendment removal procedures for physical and mental incapacitation later.
Now, time out.
Everybody, let's take a T.O.
Red flag on the gridiron.
Let's go under the hood for review here.
I'm not a fan of Rod Rosenstein.
I believe he is knee-deep in this as well.
Rod Rosenstein, as I've said on this show multiple times, has very, very severe liability here in the whole Spygate scandal, Joe, because Rosenstein signed the fourth FISA and is a player in the expanded scope memo.
Let's go over those two things quick because it relates to what's going on with McCabe.
Let's not lose the lead here.
We're talking about McCabe admitting to a coup and admitting to getting hoaxed out by the dossier hoax.
But he throws Rosenstein under the bus here saying, hey, it was Rod Rosenstein who was going to wear a wire against Trump.
These two hate each other now.
Rosenstein is a player in this.
He signs the fourth FISA.
Why is that a problem?
It's a problem because by the time the third renewal Of the initial warrant to spy on Carter Page, Joe.
Right.
By the time the third renewal, the fourth FISA altogether, but the third renewal is signed, it's pretty clear to the players in the FBI that the document used to spy on Carter Page, the dossier, is a hoax.
So in other words, Joe, any ability for Rosenstein and others at this point, by the time the third renewal of the FISA happens... With you, bro.
Well into 2017.
Right.
Right!
At that point, Rosenstein clearly knows he's signing a hoax FISA warrant.
He must!
Or he's an idiot too.
And I don't think he's as stupid as Andy McCabe.
Now, secondly, on Rosenstein's culpability here.
Rosenstein also is a player in this expanded scope memo.
Now, the initial memo to Bob Mueller when he's appointed special counsel from Rosenstein charges him, Joe, with going out and investigating Russian collusion.
Now, there's an expanded scope memo a few months after Bob Mueller's appointed.
And it says, Mueller, don't only look at Russian collusion, but look at this too.
That memo is still classified.
Devin Nunes and others, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, have been trying to get their hands on this memo.
There's a reason, Joe.
The reason they're trying to get their hands on this memo is there is some chatter, let's say, out there amongst the people who are familiar with this case, that the scope memo charges Mueller With going outside of the initial jurisdiction he was given to investigate Trump-Russian collusion.
And some of the information that they used in there may have come from the dossier, too.
Which would then again put Rosenstein on the hook for going back again to a debunked fake dossier to not only get a FISA warrant to spy, but to then give Mueller the ability to look into the Trump team for a document that's already been debunked.
Now, Rosenstein's on the hook for that.
Rosenstein and McCabe clearly at this point don't like each other, and I believe it's because they're both key players in this.
Remember, Andy McCabe's the number two at the FBI, Rosenstein's the number two at DOJ.
I think they both think the other guy's gonna flip.
Simple jailhouse politics, Joe.
You arrest two guys for a robbery, you put them in a separate room, what do you tell them both?
You tell them the other guy ratted them out.
Because then what happens?
Each one wants to beat the other one to rat the other guy out.
Folks, we used to do this all the time when I was a cop.
You arrest two guys for a robbery, you separate them.
You put Joe and Johnny in a room, separate.
You tell Joe, hey listen, Johnny's singing over there, big time.
He's gonna get the deal from the judge, and you know what?
You're gonna get nothing.
Stew on that, here's a bag of Doritos, whatever, you give him a drink, some coffee, you go, stew on that for five minutes, I'll be back.
You come in, you stick a videotape on the table, you just label it.
Johnny.
There's nothing on the videotape, Joe.
Nine out of ten thousand.
You stick it on the table anyway.
And you don't even mention it.
He'll look at it.
He thinks he's on the videotape, right?
You don't even mention it.
You stick it on the table.
You go, hey man, bad news.
Johnny's singing next door.
Have you made a decision yet?
Yeah, yeah.
I want to talk.
I need the deal first.
Let's do it right now.
This is, I think McKay, because he's not that bright, is afraid Rosenstein's going to sing on him.
You tracking me, Joe?
Oh yeah.
So what is McCabe doing?
McCabe is trying to rope Rosenstein into this 25th Amendment thing by suggesting Rosenstein was the one who wanted to wear a wire.
Now, the wire conversation is not in dispute.
Right.
But Rosenstein's suggesting it was a joke.
Folks, for as much as I can't stand Rosenstein, I think he's a snake too.
And I've already told you he's knee-deep in this.
Given the weight of the evidence on both sides, and McCabe's obvious stupidity at this point, I think it's pretty clear he knows Rosenstein was kidding.
Was, like, making a sarcastic joke.
In other words, Joe, like, what do you want me to do?
Wear a wire?
You get it?
Again, I'm not absolving Rosenstein of culpability in this major Spygate debacle, but given the weight of the evidence, and this could change, I don't want to make a dispositive statement at this point, But given the ferocious denials by Rosenstein on this and just the implausibility of wearing a wire around the president, what would you do with that information?
If you recorded the president and they found out you recorded him...
This would dismantle the entire reputation of the DOJ and the FBI.
I mean, it's such an utter absurdity that I, although I think McCabe is dumb enough to try to pull that off, I don't think Rosenstein is dumb enough.
You get what I'm saying, Joe?
Sure, yeah.
What are you going to do with a recording of the president?
Imagine that leaking to the American public that his own DOJ were wearing recording devices around him.
Oh!
I mean, there would be riots.
I don't think Rosenstein is that dumb.
McCabe, however, I think is.
And I think McCabe is trying to rope Rod Rosenstein into this at a deeper level to send the signal through his lawyers and his public statements, Rod, you rat me out for my role in this, I'm coming for you too.
And believe me, there's a lot of culpability on the Rosenstein end, make absolutely no mistake.
So the question you have to ask yourself, and I'm going to move on because I got a lot more to get to here, The question you have to ask yourself at home is who do you trust less at this point?
Not who do you trust more because you don't trust that all the players in this case are snakes.
Who do you trust less?
McCabe, who's got liability on the fact that he didn't recuse himself, his wife was running for office as a Democrat, taking money from major Democrat players connected to the Clintons, while McCabe Was a senior FBI official involved in the Clinton email investigation?
He refuses to recuse himself to the last minute?
McCabe's signature is on one of the FISA warrants?
McCabe has already admitted on the record that the dossier was the key to the FISA warrant.
In other words, Joe, McCabe has already admitted the entire spying process, entire spying process on Carter Page and the Trump team was based on a fake document and the warrant wouldn't have existed without it.
That's McCabe who said that.
Again, because he's not bright.
This guy's really dumb.
He's now admitting in a televised interview to his role in a coup, let's not put any lipstick on that, and admitting that he bought into the Russia hoax completely, the collusion hoax.
This guy needs to bring down and rope in other players with him because he doesn't want corroborating evidence against him to come from Rosenstein and elsewhere.
It's pretty clear.
Rosenstein's culpability I already laid out.
He's got issues too.
And I think Rosenstein, who's a little more savvy than McCabe, is looking to save himself politically.
And Rosenstein is doing vicious denials of this.
I mean, he has been absolutely clear that he was kidding with this 25th Amendment thing.
Again, I'm not trying to cover for Rosenstein.
If you're a regular listener to the show, you know I'm as down on him as everyone else.
But the question, who do you trust less?
I think it's pretty clear, who do you trust less?
The answer is Andrew McCabe.
I just don't find this guy credible at all.
Not a scintilla of evidence that this is a credible actor.
I got a lot to get to here, too.
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Okay.
I have a piece up at foxnewsopinion.com that I'll put in the show notes today that I strongly encourage you to read.
I found out yesterday about a poll that Fox News commissioned, a poll or a survey.
And in the poll, they found out that 57% of people in the poll, Joe, have a positive view of capitalism, and only 25% have a positive view of socialism.
Now, this poll runs against the grain, Joe.
We've seen and discussed some polls recently where it appears that younger voters, younger millennials, people who don't vote, people in college in that younger demographic, seem to have or be leaning towards some relatively positive view of socialism.
That's a disgrace.
How that's happened, I'm seriously unsure.
How we have managed to do such a poor job in our education system, of educating our younger men and women about the death and destruction imposed upon people by socialism.
And one of the reasons that is, is because of the apologists.
We have an apologist class out there, like Representative Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others, who apologize for socialism.
And Joe, That has not been acceptable when it comes to things like fascism and Nazism, which are universally reviled amongst sane people.
Always.
You don't hear sane, rational people ever talking positively about that.
You just don't.
But socialism has managed, despite the hundreds of millions of dead bodies, death, destruction, deprivation, torture, Everything that goes hand-in-hand with socialism, it has somehow, because of the apologists, managed to avoid the negative connotations and actually polls somewhat well amongst younger voters.
I wanted to cover this because it's nice to see that finally amongst the sane folks out there, that capitalism has taken the lead in this.
So I wrote this piece at Fox News Opinion, and I wanted to take a bit of a sarcastic tone with it, because I'm actually astounded we're even talking about this.
So I said to myself, I'm like, all right, if we're gonna do this piece, how do we do it?
So I said, Joe, let's highlight three things we love about capitalism more than socialism to see why we may be getting this result.
You should probably see where we're going with this.
So Joe, number one, the number one reason we prefer capitalism over socialism, according to this new poll, at least according to me, Joe, and tell me if you agree with this.
If you don't, call me out right away.
I like food.
I like to eat.
Me too.
I don't know about you, Joe, but you do.
Okay, good.
That's good to know.
I'm good with food, man.
You are.
You're good with nutrition, vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, you know, fats and protein, branch chain, amino acids, essential amino acids, you know, the kind of stuff we need to survive.
The idea of death by starvation, call me crazy, or Joe and Paul or anyone else listening, is not a very appealing idea.
No.
So as we put in a piece, when we put this thing together, I wrote, you know, like you, I prefer three meals a day and rotten meat for none of them.
Call me petty, but this is kind of a major issue for me.
You know, for as much as we hear about our nation's obesity crisis, it's a problem that our friends in bread lines seriously would kill to experience, right?
But Interesting tidbit here.
Did you know, Joe, that in just the 20th century alone, 6 of the 10 worst famines in the world were in socialist countries?
No!
And 7 of the top 15.
No, I know this is a... and seven of the top 15.
Ironically, what we put in a piece too, Joe, capitalism does a better job of producing food in socialist
countries than socialism does.
You're like, wait, wait, wait.
Time out.
Time out.
All right, let's again, let's review the play on the field.
Instant replay.
What do you mean capitalism does a better job of producing food in socialist countries than socialism does?
One of the little tidbits we put in a piece here is while private agriculture never composed more than 4% of the landmass of the Soviet Union.
So think about this.
There were some components of the Soviet Union where, due to the mass starvation, they allowed people to control their own production of food.
But that was only 4% of the land mass of the Soviet Union, Joe.
That 4% yielded a third of the nation's total produce.
So capitalism even works to feed people in socialist countries better than the socialism that the socialists subscribe to does.
How about that?
How about that?
How about that, buddy?
Folks, this is, you know, I took a sarcastic route in the piece.
I know those of you regular listeners, you know I like the sarcasm route because I don't know, candidly speaking, I don't know any other way to break through to the younger generation.
A guy emailed me last night, I was filling in for Mark Levin last night, and he said, hey, great job, but don't do so much entertaining.
Your job is to educate.
Yeah, thank you.
Listen, I always appreciate your feedback.
That's why I read it on the air.
It means a lot to me.
But I disagree.
You know, anybody can read a bunch of statistics, Joe.
Seriously.
I could go, did you know that seven of the 15 worst famines were in socialist countries?
And then just leave like a pregnant pause?
Anybody can do that.
But I think the sarcasm and the entertainment value of the show is one of the reasons the show has taken off like it has.
I mean, I'm not trying to be self-congratulatory.
You listen.
I can only listen once, and so can Joe.
But I don't know any other way to break through to these younger millennials out there other than taking somewhat of a semi-sarcastic tone and maybe getting people to smile and read a little more about a very serious and very deadly topic.
Socialism is deadly.
There's no question about that.
Matter of fact, it's probably the most deadly governing system known to humankind.
Hundreds of millions of dead.
But what other way to tattoo upon your cerebral cortex, do you like to eat?
Well, I prefer three meals a day without rotten meat in any of them.
So you may not like socialism.
And then we lay out the facts and data later down in the piece to make it really hit home.
Point number two, Joe.
You know, although nobody likes inequality and income.
They don't!
I mean, we'd love everybody to be middle class, upper middle class.
We'd love everybody to be wealthy.
But ladies and gentlemen, we call that the Utopia Fallacy.
The Utopia Fallacy is comparing the world we live in to a world that doesn't exist.
Suggesting to you the obvious that we would love a world where everybody's wealthy and resources aren't scarce, and comparing that to the world now is a standard utopian fallacy.
There is no sense in comparing a world we live in now to a world that can't possibly exist.
Because ladies and gentlemen, in the world we live in, due to basic rules of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, physiology, anatomy, biology, and anything else, resources are scarce.
All resources are scarce.
It's only a question of how we allocate them.
There is always going to be some degree of wealth, income, and capital disparity and inequality in any society.
There's no other way around it.
The socialists leverage that and they compare it to societies that don't exist.
Well, we need every from each according to his ability to each according to his means.
Well, that's not possible because we can't give everything away to everyone all the time because those resources are scarce.
The only question is how do we allocate those resources?
In a free society, in a constitutional republic, we allocate those resources according to a price mechanism.
That price mechanism is clear.
It allows people to work, to accumulate assets, and to spend those assets on things they want.
I may want a pet rock.
Joe may want a new microphone.
We may not want the same thing.
But when we work for money, we can bid on those things, which sends a signal to a supplier of those things about what's important and what's not.
There may not be much of a market for pet rocks other than me.
Therefore, I can get it really cheap on eBay or I can walk outside of my house and grab one from the rocks I have out in front of my palm trees in front of my house.
Joe may have to bid on an RE-20 microphone.
Those are expensive.
I know.
I've had two now.
They're complicated to make.
They're great microphones.
And the price will indicate how many people want them and what the supplier can produce them for at a reasonable rate.
That's not what socialism does.
Socialism rations resources.
Capitalism is a pricing mechanism.
And those rationed resources, microphones, pet rocks, food, and everything else, go to the politically connected.
That's why people starve to death and die en masse in socialist systems.
Now, we point out in the piece, in this income inequality piece, on the second part, that, yeah, of course, in other words, I make the suggestion that socialism will make everyone equally poor.
Here's an interesting little tidbit of data I'd like you all to know about socialist countries.
Ironically, Socialist countries do tend to have immediate short-term effects on poverty, Joe.
They say, wow, that sounds great, Dan.
You mean they decrease poverty in the short term?
Yeah.
Joe, me confiscating the assets of Bill Gates, the legacy assets of Steve Jobs and the wealthiest, I'm just throwing names out there people have heard, and giving them to people who are poor will unquestionably equalize income and asset levels in any society.
That's not, it's a mathematical certainty.
Till it runs out!
What's the problem, Joe?
Yeah, yeah!
Yes!
Yeah, dude!
Thank you!
We're writing a piece.
After Chavez came to power, The Venezuelan poverty rate was cut in half from 54 to 27.5% from 2004 to 2007.
To the cheers of Sean Penn and the socialist crowd worldwide.
Everybody loved it.
Oliver Stone, oh look at this.
Chavez is the best.
He's cutting poverty.
This is socialism at its finest.
Well, as Joe just said, what eventually happens?
What eventually happens is you run out of other people's money as people fail to continue to produce wealth that's going to be stolen from them.
So, what happened after that, Joe?
Joe, I did not read you this piece before you went on the air.
Joe predicted it.
Next line.
And then Chavez ran out of other people's money, as Joe just accurately stated.
And by 2014, the poverty rate had caught up to where it was in 2004, and in 2018, the poverty rate skyrocketed to 90%!
In 2018, the poverty rate skyrocketed to 90%!
Oh!
Ironically, Joe, only then did the Venezuelans, according to the fake socialists out there,
Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, and these other losers out there who supported Chavez, only then
did this not become real socialism.
This was fake socialism.
It's always fake socialism when it fails.
And it's real socialism in the beginning when they steal other people's assets.
There is no Long-term survivability of any socialist system in any society of human beings who are incentivized to work based on a payment system they will be rewarded for.
If the reward for your work Your creative endeavors, your entrepreneurial pursuits.
If the reward is a government bureaucrat coming in and stealing your money to give to other people that did not work for it, it is only a matter of time before everybody stops working.
That's what happened on the farms in the Soviet Union and in Mao's China, where farmers were having their produce
and their food stolen and stopped producing food afterwards other than the need to, the basic survival
for their own families, which promptly caused mass famines and hundreds of millions of people dead.
So point number two, although income inequality is not a great thing, it is a necessary component
of a human society full of fallible people.
And unless you want everybody to be equally poor, the only system in human history to drive mass numbers of people, hundreds of millions, out of poverty into some semblance of survivability from the rigors of daily life is capitalism.
It's not socialism.
My man.
Finally, the third point I make in the piece.
You know, this podcast we're listening to right now, I always appreciate your listenership and I write in a piece, many of you might listen to my show.
I know a lot of you are Fox News watchers, you see me on Fox, your listeners, regular listeners here.
Joe, this freedom of speech thing kind of matters to me.
I don't know how you feel about it.
Joe has spent decades in the radio industry, and Joe, you've been in this business a lot longer than I have.
While you were working at CBM and radio stations, you've been around other programs as well.
Um, did you ever have like a state gulag operator come in and lock you guys up for the content on your show?
Has that ever happened?
Uh, no, that never has happened.
No, no, it hasn't.
No.
Okay.
Okay.
I know you had to probe your memory deep for that.
So there's not a, you haven't had an operator of a state gulag come in and rip you out of station.
Did you ever miss that?
In other words, did you ever wake up one morning and go, damn, If I only could have spent some time in a state-operated gulag being tortured with my arms pulled behind my back and beaten on the bottom of my feet with rods because of what I said on the stage.
Damn, I really missed that.
Did you ever say that?
Dan, I don't think that's ever entered my mind.
You don't recall?
No.
You don't recall?
Okay, good.
Now, listen, maybe if you really want to probe the depths of your mind to find out if you ever wish for that experience, I will happily cover some cognitive behavioral therapy where you can go see a therapist and you know they'll do that.
Joe, sit back on the couch and relax.
Let's probe your mind for those deep memories.
I sincerely doubt that therapists will find it.
I doubt Joe, who's worked in the radio industry his whole life, wants to forfeit freedom of speech for an opportunity, a one-way ticket to the gulag to have the bottom of his feet beaten with bamboo rods.
I'm pretty sure.
Joe and I are both relatively confident.
I'm looking at him on the screen.
I was shaking his head saying, yes.
Freedom of speech, ladies and gentlemen, matters.
And again, we use sarcasm a bit, but this podcast would not exist where we can be critical of government officials in a state where socialism exists.
Ladies and gentlemen, although sadly we've seen some breakdowns, and granted the Spygate case in our constitutional republic, we are not a society marked by political prisoners and the suppressing of political speech.
Thankfully, because we have First Amendment protections, our Bill of Rights, which sadly is evaporating as we speak.
But socialism is hallmarked By the taking of people as political prisoners who speak out against the regime.
I talked about it the other day.
I'm not going to readdress the topic in any detail, but I talked about the hallmark of socialism is the blurred lines between the private and public self.
You have a private self in a free society where you can sit in your house and email your friends and talk to your buddies and say things and not worry about the conversation being recorded and used against you.
At least we used to.
You don't have that in a socialist regime.
They have to suppress dissent.
If you are a farmer who refuses to feed people who won't work for your labor, in other words, you produce food and then your neighbor doesn't want to work and you have to feed him in a socialist system, if you refuse to do that and speak out, you will be put in a political prison and potentially killed or tortured.
This freedom of speech thing kind of matters to me, folks.
And it should matter to you, too.
This poll is, you know, there's, just finally on this, there's some good news and bad news.
The good news about it is 57% of people have a positive review of capitalism, which is really just economic freedom.
The problem, Joe, with the poll is, you know, 20 plus percent of people still think socialism, despite the death and destruction that comes with it, is a positive thing.
One last thing on capitalism, just so you understand what capitalism is, so you're able to transmit this information to your liberal friends who seem to be confused.
Capitalism is greed.
Really?
Socialism is death and greed.
Greed, death, and greed.
Greed, death, and greed.
I'll take the greed.
Everything's marked by greed.
That famous Milton Friedman clip with Phil Donahue we used to play all the time on the show, Joe, when we first started.
Where Phil Donahue was like, don't you have a problem, Milton Friedman, a great conservative economist, with greed?
And Friedman laughs at him and says, greed?
What political system do you know of not marked by greed?
You mean the government bureaucrats of the Soviet Union that stole all people's stuff?
That's not marked by greed?
And Donahue's sitting there like, uh?
They're the greatest clip ever.
You know what?
Joe, can you take a note?
Maybe we'll cut that for tomorrow.
I should have cut it today.
I'll have it somewhere, yeah.
Just remind me.
Oh, good, good.
Because we'll play that through.
It's a really great cut.
It's always worth playing.
But just quickly on capitalism, what is it?
You know, as I've remarked often on the show, capitalism is not even an ism, like a belief system.
It's just a couple of things involving freedom.
It's not really an ism like it's some socialism is an actual belief system.
It's faith in the war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
And the makers and the takers, supposedly.
The use of capital to suppress the working class.
Das Kapital!
Capitalism is a couple of very simple things.
It's the ability of you to freely trade your labor for a wage.
To work for money.
It's not complicated.
It's not really an ism, Joe.
That's really just liberty and freedom.
There you go.
That's just the tangible result of being a free person.
The ability to work for assets.
What else is capitalism?
So it's the ability to work for a wage and not be a slave to a government bureau.
Secondly, it's a pricing system.
I already discussed this.
You're not subjected to government rationing of scarce resources.
Where the government goes to the farm, takes people's stuff, and then gives it to the politically connected few while everyone else starves.
You get to pay for food, which means you can work for it, which means you can eat.
But third, it's the ability to own private property.
Yeah.
It's the ability to work to acquire property which you can use to the benefit of yourself and your family.
Now, what I find ironic about that, too, is people—that's not an ism, again.
That's not some kind of belief system.
It's a basic tenet of human liberty.
The people who question that, I find it awfully odd.
Well, no one—there should be no private property.
No, there's always private property.
Somebody owns it.
It's either going to be you or the government.
So it's either private in the hands of the government that can steal it from you and use it to pay off their connected buddies, or you own it, which you worked for it, and you can use it, your home, your investments, to the benefit of you and your family.
There is no public property.
That's a myth.
There is no such thing as collectively owned assets.
They are owned by someone.
Someone who exerts power over them and leverages those assets, whatever it may be, land, money, or capital, to benefit themselves.
Whether that's the government or you is entirely up to you.
Don't get confused about the ism in capitalism.
Alright, sorry, I got off a bit of a tangent, but it's still important stuff.
One other story I wanted to address today.
There's a great piece in the show notes today.
By Guy Benson from Fox at Town Hall.
I strongly encourage you to read it because I think one of our areas of expertise here, let's say, is we're one of the few shows out there that focuses almost exclusively a couple times a week on debunking prominent liberal talking points.
I just enjoy doing it because almost everything liberals tell you is false.
I mean that.
That very little of what they say is in any way based on any kind of facts and data.
So one of the things we've heard, Joe, often from the liberals and their mass media activist friends out there, Is it voter ID having to produce a photo ID card on voting that it suppresses minority votes?
It's been said so often by the Looney Tunes and the media and the radical far leftist that it's managed to be, you know, it's a gas-lit fact, air quotes, meaning it's an anti-fact coming from liberals.
It's managed to seep its way, yeah, you know, into the current popular thinking, and it's expressed so often as a matter of fact rather than a matter of opinion that people think it's true.
Well, Guy Benson has a really wonderful piece in Town Hall about a new study that came out from Harvard, near business school, regarding the effects of photo ID on voter turnout.
So let's be clear what we're talking about.
Liberals have lied to you.
They said voter ID leads to the suppression of minority votes, which is racist in and of itself to say, suggesting somehow that black and Hispanic voters are incapable of getting photo IDs is a racist statement.
You get no pass on that.
I'm not going to allow you say it.
It's a racist thing.
Sorry.
But of course, the media won't call them out because they're liberals on their obvious racism.
So they did an actual study that measured this correlation, Joe.
States that have implemented voter ID that's, quote, strict.
Has that led to an actual decrease in minority voters at the polls?
Well, let's quote from the piece.
As Warner Wolf used to say, let's go to the videotape!
Let's check this out.
The new research from an economics professor at the University of Bologna and another at Harvard Business School indicates that strict voting laws of the type implemented in those 10 states they studied Wait for it.
Do not have a statistically significant effect on voter turnout.
Listen, don't, libs, don't let any of this get in the way of your stupid narratives.
I understand there's nothing we're going to do to penetrate your seven foot thick lead skulls.
I get it that facts and data don't matter.
So this is for the normal people out there who may one day coax someone walking over to the radical liberal side that their entire talking point is garbage, okay?
Joe, by the way, the studies from Harvard Business School, you know, that bastion of right-wing radicalism, right?
It's a joke, of course.
You know, the liberals love Harvard, until Harvard Business School puts out a study that debunks what I'm talking about.
But it goes on.
Strict ID laws have no significant negative effect on registration or turnout overall or for any subgroup defined by age, gender, race, or party affiliation, the paper's authors found.
Most importantly, they write, Strict ID laws do not decrease the participation of ethnic
minorities relative to whites.
You know, I can't imagine finding a more conclusive study debunking a nonsense liberal talk.
Joe, it doesn't like massage the data at all.
It's like, no, you guys are idiots for saying it.
It doesn't matter though.
They will continue to parrot this.
But Joe, we laugh about it because it's so easy to be a liberal because you get to be stupid all the time and no one ever calls you out on it.
If you're a conservative and you say something dumb, you're the subject of a Twitter tirade for two, three months straight.
But if you're a liberal and you say something stupid, it doesn't matter.
You just get a free pass.
But they will continue to parrot this debunked talking point and why.
For a very obvious reason, folks.
It plays into the whole, Republicans are racist.
They don't want black people to vote.
This is a debunked, nonsense, stupid talking point.
It is simply about the integrity of the ballot.
This is not complicated.
It's only complicated to media people.
They love the racist nonsense.
Republicans are racist.
It's all they have.
That's why they will continue to go to the well on this, which is ironic given the fact that we've seen this debacle in Virginia with two prominent state officials, either in blackface, one of them admitting to it, another one suspected of being either in blackface or a Ku Klux Klan outfit.
But yes, it's voter ID measures that are, quote, racist, despite the fact that absolutely no evidence whatsoever backs up that absurd assertion.
So stupid.
All right, folks, thanks again for tuning in.
I really appreciate it.
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A special thing to talk about tomorrow, so don't miss tomorrow's show, alright?
