In this episode I address the surprise development that a key Spygate figure plans to provide testimony to investigators. I also address the latest absurdities from AOC. Finally, I debunk the latest liberal nonsense about minimum wage.
News Picks:Here are the key questions that need to be asked of Spygate conspirator Christopher Steele.
AOC continues to make embarrassingly silly statements.
The Mueller report uses creative editing to paint a false narrative.
We must never forget Tiananmen Square.
Minimum wage hikes are economically disastrous. The latest research confirms this.
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.
Alright, welcome to the Dan Bongino Show.
Producer Joe, how are you today?
Dan-o, it's thundering Thursday!
How do you like that, baby?
Thunder and Thursday!
No, it's not.
It's Wednesday.
Now, for those of you who missed yesterday's show, we're joking.
Joe knows it's Wednesday.
We're messing with you to open up the show.
Joe didn't, however, yesterday know that yesterday was Tuesday.
Today is Wednesday.
Tomorrow's I told Joe.
I said, hey, come on the air.
Tell him it's Thursday.
At least you'll be consistent.
You know what it is?
It reminds, there's an economics lesson in this, Joe.
And this is why I didn't tell you this before the show.
I'm not making this up.
I wanted you to do that for a reason.
There is an economics lesson in this, okay?
That data and research, ladies and gentlemen, can be valid but not reliable.
And I want you to understand that.
Economists can be consistently wrong.
But it's valid, but it's just not reliable.
No, no, excuse me, I got it backwards.
Reliable but not valid.
In other words, if you get a scale that is off consistently adds 20 pounds, right?
Yes.
It's reliable.
I weigh 230, it'll say I weigh 250.
It's just not a valid measure of my weight.
Forgive me, I got that backwards.
But that's important.
Joe is consistently off by one day.
He is reliably wrong.
And that's why there's a lesson in this.
You see, that's the different thing about this show.
We do what other people can't do because we're not subjected to any kind of executive producer guidelines.
We do our own thing.
We're ahead of the curve.
Remember, liberals do this all the time.
They confuse validity and reliability.
You can be reliably wrong all the time, which liberals always are.
So thank you, Joe, for providing that interesting commentary.
We got some really big news for you today.
Christopher Steele, the British spy who started Spygate, shockingly, now that President Trump has given the declassification order, now he wants to talk to investigators.
Oh!
Stunner!
The number one stunner, for those of you who remember that song back from the 90s, right?
I'm going to get to that.
Some key questions that need to be asked to this guy.
And I want to call out by far, Joe, the worst analyst in TV news and in commentary, law enforcement analysts out there.
She is so bad.
She has a success record of failure that is close to 100%.
So I'll get to that a lot more.
Yeah, it's good.
All right.
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All right, let's go!
Nice.
Yeah, baby.
It's my favorite combo, right?
To the body and then split the middle right up with the uppercut.
That's my favorite when I was boxing.
Oh, yeah.
You can do real- That's a tough one, too.
That's a Mike Tyson favorite, too.
That's a tough one.
Oh, oh!
If you hit it just right, forget it.
It is crickets for that guy.
Out.
You may see chicklets if you don't, I'm not kidding, I'm just saying when you're boxing.
We're talking about sports.
We're not liberals here talking about street violence, just to be sure.
We are not condoning violence, we are not liberals on this show.
That's by the way, I got a video about that later too, which won't surprise many of you who've been following.
All right, so Chris Steele's agreed to be questioned.
The former British spy hired by Hillary Clinton basically to provide bogus information about the Trump team, which was used to spy on them.
You all know who it is.
And before I get into Christopher Steele being questioned and what we should ask him, last night, again, again, Chris Hahn, liberal, I debate a lot on Fox News, I get a kick out of these Democrats going on cable news and continuing to propagate a lie on cable news where they get called out.
Some of you may have seen it last night on Martha McCallum.
Just quickly, what did he say last night on Martha McCallum's show?
I just want it noted that Christopher Steele was paid by the Republicans first to get the dossier.
Okay, whatever.
It's totally false.
Martha McCallum stopped him in his tracks.
Chris, that's not true.
She's like, let me correct it for the audience.
It was very embarrassing for Chris.
But I only bring it up because this was said to me by Austin Goolsbee, too.
Another Democrat who I debated on the Hannity Show said the same thing.
They just make stuff up.
Steel was never paid by the Republicans.
The dossier project was a Democrat project.
End of story.
Period.
Full stop.
The first question I want asked of Christopher Steele, this is important, this is critical.
By the way, it's convenient again, right after the declassification order, he's coming out and talking.
Because now the depth of his depravity is going to come out into the open once we see the declassified documents.
Number one.
Who were Trebnikov and Surkov to you?
Now, we know you told, according to the notes Kathleen Kavalech of the State Department took when she spoke with you, you cited Trebnikov and Surkov, two Russians in the inner circle of Vladimir Putin, as we can see from this note that the State Department official took when she was Kathleen Kavalech, when she was talking to Christopher Steele.
What was your relationship with them?
Who were Trubnikov and Surkov?
This is important.
This is a key critical point.
I want to know who they were and what they were talking about to you.
Why were you dealing with Trubnikov and Surkov either directly or through a third party?
Trubnikov was a former higher-up Russian intelligence operative.
Surkov was, what they call him, the gray cardinal in the Kremlin, was Putin's ideological architect.
These are two close confidants of Putin.
Why were you taking information from Putin cooperators?
Isn't that evidence in and of itself of Russian collusion?
You've heard that before, no need to beat that dead horse, but those are Kavalech's own notes from Christopher Steele's comments to her.
Clearly, she either asked him or he volunteered who his sources were for this negative information on Trump, and he says Trubnikov and Surkov, two Russian confidants of Vladimir Putin.
So question number one, what was your relationship with these two?
Now, question number two is an obvious corollary to that.
If you were getting information from a former high-level Russian intelligence operative, Trebnikov, close to Vladimir Putin, and his ideological architect, Surkov, did you ever consider the possibility, you numbskull, that this was a disinformation effort designed to sow chaos?
Did that ever occur to you?
Did you ever say to yourself, Maybe these guys are spinning my wheels for political purposes I'm not aware of.
Now, Joe, you were not a spy.
I was not a spy.
I was an agent, not a spy.
This is very different.
But I think common sense would dictate that Russians who are experts in disinformation campaigns and former intelligence people who do this for a living could be feeding you potentially bogus information.
It doesn't take a trained Central Intelligence Agency operative to figure that out.
Did you ever ask that question?
Question number three.
Why couldn't you recall your own story eight days later after that meeting?
When I say that meeting, I'm referring to the October 8th meeting Christopher Steele, who's now going to be questioned, has with the State Department's Kathleen Kavalec.
What were you even doing at the State Department?
In that meeting, you specifically stated that Michael Cohen went to Prague to arrange his collusion scandal and get paid for it.
Yet days later, you wrote a memo for the dossier.
Remember, the dossier is a compendium of memos.
It's not one continuous document.
It's a series of memos.
One of the memos in the dossier, he writes just days after that meeting.
He says his sources don't know where the Cohen meeting happened.
How is that, Chris?
So question number one, who's Trubnikov and Surkov to you?
Two, did you consider it Russian disinformation?
Question three, how come you couldn't remember your own story about Cohen Prague eight days later?
Is it possible you didn't write the dossier?
As I cover in my second book.
Sounds awfully close to a Wall Street Journal article written by Glenn Simpson back in 2007, what we refer to on the show as the movie script.
Now why would he sign a dossier memo if he potentially didn't write it?
Because he was a, quote, verified source by the FBI they'd used before.
He's not verified.
It wasn't his information.
And if it was his information, the alternate explanation in the dossier, how come he couldn't remember it eight days later?
Question number four.
Keep in mind, I think I know the answer to most of these questions in advance.
That's why I'm asking them.
Did the FBI interview your subsources?
You said Trebnikov and Surkov were your sources of information?
Did you know that Trebnikov was also teaching a course over at Cambridge in the United Kingdom with Stefan Halper, the same spy who the CIA was using to spy on George Papadopoulos and the Trump team?
Did you know that?
Is there a connection there between you, Hacklett, the intelligence, the private intelligence firm over in London, Halper, and Trebnikoff?
Were you all working in one big circular firing squad there?
To shuttle around the same information to make it look corroborated?
Do you guys all know each other?
Was this all one big setup?
Who was giving you instructions?
Did the FBI interview your subsources?
Did they interview him in January?
Was there a 302 on it, an FBI summary of that interview?
Did they make any attempt to verify those sources?
I think you know I have from a very good source that the answer to that is yes, they did.
And the FBI figured out in January of 2017, before they renewed the FISA a third and fourth time, and there's apparently a 302 on it, a written summary of the interview, that one of his subsources was completely illegitimate and full of it.
Did he know that, Steele?
Let me add one more.
I didn't even include this in there.
Here's a fifth.
By the way, I have this story up on my website today.
Bongino.com.
Matt Palumbo has it down.
It's a really nice job.
It'll be in the show notes today.
Please subscribe to my email list on my website.
It's called steel to be questioned at last.
Here's what investigators need to ask by our buddy, Matt.
It's a very, very, very good piece.
I have another question about steel.
After you were terminated by the FBI and your services were no longer required, and the FBI deemed you not worthy of being used, not suitable for use, to quote their exact terminology, in November of 2016, Who's the one who tried to bring you back in?
Remember, later on, Andy McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI, tries to go back to Christopher Steele to get information again.
If they tried to bring you back in, what was their stated reason?
What did they say?
Why did the FBI, after they deemed you not suitable for use, try to bring you back in as a source, and all of a sudden deem you suitable for use again?
Did they give you a reason for that?
Did they forgive you?
Were they paying you again?
All interesting questions that need to be asked.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, to call out the worst analyst on television, bar none.
And when I say analyst, keep in mind, I'm not talking about opinion people.
Rachel Maddow, Chuck Todd, Chris Cuomo, these are discredited liberal activists.
They were, you know, they're conspiracy theorists.
They're not really worthy of your time and the collapsing ratings of CNN and MSNBC and the utter complete collapse of the audience of The Rachel Maddow Show proved to be, you know, you should smile a little bit because it says to you that even radical liberals understand that they wasted their time with Maddow and these other shows.
They invested in a show that fed them a nonsense collusion conspiracy for upwards of two years, and a lot of them probably feel, because the audience is collapsing, look at the numbers yourself, you don't need to take my word for it, for Maddow and other shows that had pretty sky-high ratings, CNN never had that of course, but even their low ratings are now hitting an ebb there.
I mean it is, if they are at the bottom of the mountain, CNN at this point, People generally don't want their time wasted.
So I'm not talking about them as being, because they're not analysts, they're opinion people who just promoted a conspiracy theory.
When I say the worst analysts, I'm talking about this body of people, the Phil Mudds, these former FBI personnel, DOJ personnel that go on TV and provide supposedly expert advice.
I want you to be very careful about these people.
There's another guy.
Tom Nichol or something like that.
Another guy who ironically wrote a book called The Death of Expertise and was one of the lead Russian collusion hoaxers for the longest time.
He wrote a book called The Death of Expertise.
Ironic.
You might want to ask for a refund on that one.
But these are the people I'm talking about.
But this one by far is the worst analyst on television.
It's Asha Rangapapa.
She is really awful.
She is a former FBI agent who ironically only worked three years in the FBI.
So I was talking to my wife this morning.
I'm like, you know, it's weird.
I instructed agents in the Secret Service Academy as an instructor longer than she was actually a federal agent, yet she blocked me on Twitter because I was constantly calling her out for her nonsense, because she does nothing but defend this police state tyranny we witnessed in Spygate, and she does it at the expense of her alleged principles.
She doesn't have any.
How do I know she doesn't have any?
Big hat tip to at John W. Huber on Twitter.
Again, one of the best accounts to follow out there on Twitter.
I don't know who he or she is.
All I know is the information on there is just really, really top notch.
At John W. Huber pointed out an interesting problem Asha Rangapapa, the worst analyst on television collusion hoaxer, has with her latest thread.
She puts a thread out there again trying to defend the entirely discredited garbage Spygate investigation, and point number two of her thread is this, this tweet, which is just a gem.
This is Asha, again, three-year FBI agent.
The second is the bizarre idea that verification of source material in a FISA application means the FBI has to hunt down the source's sources and get the info directly.
What would be the point of having a source?
Asha, who I'm, correct me if I'm almost positive, has never actually worked a FISA case directly where she was the case agent, nor a terror case.
Nor a counter-terrorism case, which I have.
A rather large one.
Asha clearly is either saying something she knows not to be true, or is so ignorant of FBI policies due to her limited experience with the FBI that she just tweeted this out randomly, not realizing she had written something quite the opposite a little bit earlier.
Put up the headline from her earlier piece.
Bye!
Asher Rangapapa, March 6th, 2017.
It ain't easy getting a FISA warrant.
I was an FBI agent and I should know.
You apparently don't because you said this in the piece directly contradicting the tweet I just put up.
Here, here, this is from Midway Down.
I'm not going to read the whole, this is from Harappa Beats.
Woods, she's talking about the Woods procedure and the levels of verification.
The DOJ verifies the accuracy, accuracy of every fact stated in the application.
Can we flip back to the tweet?
Okay, so now she's saying the FISA application must have been legitimate because of the Woods procedures and the FBI verifies quote, every fact.
Here's her tweet from yesterday.
The second is the bizarre idea that the verification of source material, otherwise known as facts, Joe, in a FISA application means the FBI has to hunt down the sources.
So in one case... See, this is the problem with being unprincipled and being in it for the money.
I know, we need Donnie Brasco right now.
Totally Donnie Brasco.
If there was ever a time for Donnie Brasco on the drop, that was it.
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
My wife's favorite drop ever.
I don't know what to say.
This is the issue about being unprincipled.
You have to remember your own lies.
When Ashton, when they appeal to, this appeal to authority in Asha Rangapapa is absurd.
She was a three-year agent!
I'm not discrediting her three years, but one of those was probably spent in training.
She has two years in the field.
I don't know what you could have possibly done in two years to make you this ultimate appeal to authority, that when the Washington Post, where that op-ed appeared, when they needed someone to defend the FISA, they go to Asha, who says, the FISA, it's not our fault, it screwed up, the FBI must have verified it, because this is how they work, and this is the Woods procedure.
Now that the FISA application has been entirely discredited, what does she do?
She says, hey, it's bizarre to say that the FBI had to verify the information.
Jeez.
You just said the opposite.
See, we don't have this problem on the right.
We don't have this problem with defending our principles because we don't have to lie about anything.
I was against the Patriot Act.
Signed by a Republican president, George W. Bush, for the exact same reason I am a vocal opponent of what happened in the Spygate scandal.
Because I don't believe we should be spying on American citizens, in some cases without a warrant, and in other cases in a secret court with a warrant, where we're not even bothering to verify the information in a non-adversarial setting.
Your Fourth Amendment rights go out the window.
There's no hypocrisy there.
When a Republican does it, it's bad.
When a Democrat does it, it's bad.
When the McCain team spread the dossier around to the media, it was wrong.
He was a Republican and his team was.
When the Democrats did it, it was just as bad.
That's not what Asha does.
They said, why are you picking on her?
Because she's using her very limited experience in the FBI to attack people like me who've never wavered on her principles while she's clearly unprincipled herself!
The FBI- Yes!
Yes!
The FBI verifies every fact in the Woods- using the Woods procedure.
Second, it's bizarre to suggest the FBI has to verify the information.
Which one's right?
The answer is, your op-ed was right!
Your op-ed was right!
Your tweet today is a lie!
I just want to be clear on this.
Ash is suggesting that...
A disputed conversation between one guy and another guy about a disputed other conversation about hearsay is enough to open up a surveillance FISA court warrant to spy on and implement the two-hop rule, innocent American citizens?
Is that what you're suggesting?
I hope you're getting paid well by CNN.
Because when you raised your right hand and swore to uphold the Constitution, you clearly forfeited that away.
And what I meant by that whole lengthy thing there, was you're telling me George Papadopoulos, allegedly telling Downer about Russian dirt that both of them deny even happened, that he heard from another person who disputes he said it, weeks earlier, in another disputed conversation about hearsay, that's enough to start the biggest FISA investigation we've seen or most impactful in modern American history?
You're sure about that?
If that's the case, and there are FBI agents out there like Asha who believe that, I'm begging you, please resign today.
Please.
Please resign today.
Because whatever oath you took, it's not the one I took.
I have no issue with my principles at all.
If a Democrat president had done, or a Republican president had done to Barack Obama, what the Obama team did to candidate Trump, we'd be having the exact same conversation on this show.
Bank on it.
Not with Asha.
Asha will, whatever, moistens her finger, sees what direction the wind is going.
What does CNN need today?
CNN needs you today to say the Woods procedures are bunk.
I'll tweet it out.
The Washington Post needs you to write an article.
How great the Woods procedures are.
I'll write the article.
That's what being unprincipled look like.
Bar none, the worst analyst on television.
She has been wrong on everything.
And it's important not to make this personal.
Because these appeals to authority on the left involve unprincipled people who are lying to you.
Alright, moving on.
I got a lot more to get to today.
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All right, listen.
AOC's back, Joe.
She's back!
AOC is back!
Yes, yes, yes.
Back on the scene.
We haven't done a lot of AOC.
I know, I get it, I get it.
I hear from the audience sometimes, why are you putting out AOC stuff?
You're promoting her.
I'm not promoting her, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm not.
There's a reason I do this.
The reason I do this is you cannot ignore Representative Ocasio-Cortez, she has a significant following amongst the left, amongst the younger crowd.
She's managed to convince a lot of people that things that are fundamentally untrue could have basis in fact.
This is dangerous, this gaslighting, this propaganda effort.
If it's not counteracted, you're assuming it's going to go away.
Whether I ignore her or not, she's building her profile.
It is our job to go out there and counteract some of her misinformation.
Well, yesterday she made another I'm gonna call them faux pas.
She says them so often, they're becoming her standard way of talking.
She says stuff that's so economically ridiculous, it's hard to believe more people don't jump on it.
Hat tip from Twitter, I think it was Ryan Saavedra who pulled this off of an account from America First.
Forgive me.
America First, I think.
This is video of AOC.
Again, confusing rights and obligations, a subject I bring up all the time.
When you declare something a right, don't ever forget this.
Healthcare's a right!
Housing's a right!
If you declare it a right, you confer an obligation on someone else.
If you think healthcare is a right, that obligates a doctor or a hospital to provide that service to you for free.
Right.
Well, that's how it should be.
Really?
Until they go bankrupt?
I mean, the world is a complicated place, ladies and gentlemen.
She constantly confuses rights and obligations.
So here's her take now on how you should work, not to pay your own mortgage, but you should have to work to pay someone else's mortgage.
Listen to this nonsense.
So when we talk about what are we doing to make sure that housing is being legislated as a human right, what does that mean?
What it means is that our access and our ability and our guarantee to having a home comes before someone else's privilege to earn a buck.
Oh my gosh.
Hat tip, by the way.
Forgive me.
America rising.
So just be clear on this.
I know the audio is low.
Joe did the best he could.
Those are really hard.
A lot of that's filmed on cell phone cameras.
It's the best we could do.
But I know you raised it up, because when I sent it to you, I could barely hear it, so good job on that.
Thank you.
Just to be clear, she's saying that your privilege to earn a profit is subordinated to someone else's right to own a home.
Ladies and gentlemen, think about how nonsensical that is.
Think about how dumb that is.
See, it doesn't matter.
The left won't call her out on it.
So just to be clear what she's saying by that, this is not a leap of faith.
She is clearly implying That it is your privilege.
It is not a right for you to go out and work and earn the fruits of your labor.
That's a privilege.
That's her line, not mine.
Yeah, dude.
That we're not in a free market.
That this is some kind of privilege.
Meaning what?
That it's extended to you by who?
Well, obviously, being that she's a socialist, she means by the government.
So her thing is that you will get paid when the government says you can get paid.
This is a privilege.
That you should be able to work, and if people decide to pay you, you can rely solely on the imprimatur of the United States government.
Which sounds a whole lot like communism to me, but that's for another conversation.
But then she follows it up with an equal absurdity.
That you have a right to own a home, now.
Let me explain to you, using a single subject example, how ridiculous this actually is, which he said, because no leftist will call her out on the problem.
Some of you are already getting this, by the way.
If you're picking up what I'm putting down, you're like, now's the time, Joe, for the, oh, some of you are figuring it out.
I'm having a Brasco moment.
Yes, if it's a single subject design, That would mean that I don't have to work because me working and collecting revenue for it, a wage, it subordinates to my right to have a house.
Bingo.
No, no, no.
That's not what I was saying.
No, that is what you said.
That's exactly what you said.
That is exactly what you said.
So technically, Joe, there you go.
Let's just forget the show.
Show's done.
We're just going to sit here.
I don't have to work when I gotta work.
I pay for my house.
I'm sitting in my house right now in my studio.
Paula, this is great.
AOC said that I have a right to the house, meaning other taxpayers have an obligation to pay for my house.
I don't have to work.
No, no, she said you're privileged to it.
Yeah, privileged.
That's not a right.
I don't have any right or obligation to work at all.
She said it's a privilege.
I don't need that.
She said clearly, and if you listen again, you can rewind it.
You'll see, she said, it is subordinated to your right.
It comes after your right to own a home.
So newsflash to liberals.
This is the question for your liberal friends who defend this total ignoramus.
She knows nothing!
She has immense power!
She has a huge following of people who applaud!
People applauded this!
Did anybody stop and say to themselves, um, Mr. Ocasio-Cortez, Representative Ocasio-Cortez, give her the proper respect, she won the race.
If I don't work, do I get a house too?
Well, I would love to hear her answer.
Wait, wait, you just said it's my right.
A right meaning other, a right meaning, it's a right.
A big alright, right?
I have a right to a house.
A right is something you can claim.
You have the right to free speech.
You can claim it.
Means it can't be infringed upon.
So if I have the right to a home, do I get to walk into a house for sale, claim it as, it's the right of Prima Nocte, remember Braveheart?
I'm here to claim my right of Prima Nocte.
Do I get to claim my neighbor's house?
No, no, it's not that kind of right.
Well, what kind of right is it?
Why can't I, my neighbor's selling his house, why can't I take it?
Well, you don't have the money.
You didn't say that.
You just said I don't have to work.
You just said that, right?
You just said that working and claiming proceeds for my work is a privilege that comes after my right to a house!
Is anybody gonna call her on this?
Any interested media person out there?
Are there any?
You know, there's this guy, um...
I work with at Fox.
He's a contributor.
He's a Democrat.
Forgive me.
I'm not being a jerk, honestly.
I don't remember his name.
But he's a Democrat.
He's a very nice guy.
And he's very sane and rational.
He's one of these moderate Democrats who sees like the streak in the party now with AOC and Bernie Sanders is like nuts.
He's an older guy.
I cannot remember his name.
Bob.
I think his first name is Bob.
Forgive me.
I'm really, I shouldn't bring it up.
But he's a super nice guy.
We need guys like this to speak out.
You know, political friction in a country isn't a bad thing to have multiple parties, people have different feelings about different issues, that's fine.
But when people say things that are clearly insane, where are the Democrats going?
Uh, Representative Ocasio-Cortez, that's kind of dumb.
What you said isn't even, doesn't even rationally make sense.
You have a right to a home, means that right can't be infringed on.
Meaning if you can claim other people's property with no compensation, Did anybody not see this?
I mean, seriously, this is the kind of stuff, when Republicans say stuff that is dumb, Joe, do we not call them out?
Gosh, we've gotten emails from people's staff saying, hey, ease up on Senator so-and-so and Congressman so-and-so.
Not necessarily from their staff, but from other people's staff.
Like, this guy's talking.
I don't care.
We try to stick to our principles here.
This is just dumb.
Okay, on the video front, let me describe this one for you for audio listeners.
This is a short video, but it was taken in the United Kingdom.
It's of a, I'm approximating here, about an 80 year old man with a MAGA hat on.
You'll hear the ruckus in the background at a rally in the United Kingdom, an anti-Trump rally.
And the man is viciously thrown to the ground by a bunch of anti-Trump lunatics in the United Kingdom.
This is pretty disturbing stuff.
It's short, but you can hear the scuffle in the background.
going to check this out.
[CROSSTALK]
I mean, really?
Really?
Is this, you know I said yesterday, is this where we are?
Is this really where we are as a country right now?
You may say it happened in the United Kingdom.
It happens here too.
They supposedly share some of our enlightened values, freedom, freedom of speech, freedom to protest, freedom to assemble.
But apparently the anti-Trump, anti-civil liberties, psychotic left, that's supposed to be the enlightened ones, the ones interested in diversity and so-called tolerance in the United Kingdom and here, free democracies, in our case a republic, they have a parliamentary system, obviously over there.
Is this where we are?
You know, I ask you as some of the leftists that listen to the show, I get your emails.
Like I said, I want to thank the Bernie supporter last week.
Very nice email.
It's like, listen, I voted for Bernie.
I listened to your show.
I think you're on target.
You're welcome here anytime.
But I just want to, I want you to understand how disturbing that video is in context of two points and why we're seeing what we're seeing.
Because again, you know, anybody can rant.
Talk radio is full of ranters on the left and the right.
That's why I love shows like Mark Levin, where he goes into deep detail on the legal implications, constitutional implications.
But on this show, if I can't provide some context to it, screaming and yelling is not going to do you any good.
I want to show you that video in context of two points.
Point number one is this.
Here's the difference between us and liberals.
And I'm not talking about the fringe elements.
Every movement has jerks.
We call our jerks out.
That's the difference.
The left embraces theirs.
But I'm talking about, largely, the difference between conservatives and liberals.
Our ideology has an emergency brake on its behavior.
We believe in big R God-given rights.
Those big R God-given rights.
Whether you believe in God or not, you still have those.
It doesn't require you to believe in God.
I want to be clear on that.
But we believe in God-given big R rights that are not granted to you by government.
They're granted to you by your creator.
You are born with those rights.
They may be enshrined through a governing document.
We have a constitution, the United Kingdom does not.
They use case law.
But there are other documents, the Magna Carta and others, that speak to some form of higher power rights given to you by a creator.
Why is that relevant to this older gentleman being assaulted by a bunch of anti-Trump lunatics?
Because, ladies and gentlemen, if you believe in God-given rights, you believe that that higher power is given those rights even to your ideological enemies.
And it creates an emergency brake on your behavior that liberals don't have.
Folks, 99.999% of the people listening to my show right now would never, in a thousand years, consider doing what happened to this old man, this older gentleman.
Ever.
Just ask yourself, you know I say to my daughter a lot, my older daughter, who I obviously love to death, I say to her, and I heard this somewhere so forgive me for not attributing it because I just can't remember, but I said one of the great ways to teach your kid a sense of morality is to tell them, imagine you're watching yourself in a movie.
Are you proud of what that character did, or are you embarrassed?
And I thought, gosh, that's a great way to remove yourself from a situation you're in, at least psychologically for a moment, to interpret your behavior through a different lens.
I know for a fact, my listeners, if that was them on that video, they'd be like, oh my gosh, did I do that?
I pushed an old man to the ground?
Not the liberals.
There are liberals, I'm telling you right now, watch my show, the Media Matters lunatics and others, who think that's grace!
Oh, this guy's a Nazi.
He's a Trump supporter.
He deserved it.
Okay.
We have an emergency brake in our behavior.
That emergency brake is the Almighty.
That is a sin.
Violence in the absence of self-defense is a sinful behavior.
Punching someone in the face because you disagree with them politically.
There's no excuse for that.
I'm sorry.
And listen, once in a while, once in a very blue moon, I get an email from someone who's like, it's time for a revolution!
Wrong show.
I'm not really sure you understand what violence up close and personal looks like.
You know what?
I've gone into that too much.
I don't need to get into this again.
I'm just telling you, having spent a lifetime chasing bad guys down, having them hit me with iron boards, you know, my first night out of patrol, getting into a foot pursuit with a guy who took a shot at us, spending most of my life on mats, taking beatings from bigger and stronger guys, I'm not sure you really understand how horrible violence is.
The left has no emergency brake on this.
They see violence as a tool to suppress opposing political voices.
And sadly, many of them, not all, many of them will celebrate that video.
While I can guarantee almost all of you watching that are disgusted by it.
That's takeaway number one.
We believe in God-given rights, even when you disagree with us.
Which requires that I allow you to peacefully assemble, because I can't get in the way.
Those are rights granted by God.
That I allow you to speak, I can't get in the way.
Those are rights granted to you by God.
I allow you to petition the government.
Again, rights given to you by God, I can't get in the way of that.
And that I allow you to practice your religion freely, even when it's not mine.
Because God granted you those rights even if you don't believe in him.
The second disturbing portion and takeaway of that video.
It's an explanation of why they do what they do.
I kind of hinted to it in takeaway number one.
But quickly summed up for you is in this bullet point I use a lot when I speak in the media about it.
The difference between us and liberals is we believe that these are, in most cases, I mean, like I said, there are fringe elements who are just bad people all around.
But in most cases, we believe liberals are people with bad ideas.
But these people, their rights have to be respected, no matter what.
These are God-given rights.
But these are people with genuinely bad ideas.
And we confront them using our rights to air our ideas.
But that's not how they feel about you.
Don't ever equate the two.
They feel that you are people, bad people, with ideas.
There's a big difference.
We think they're people with bad ideas.
They think you're bad people with ideas.
They are not trying to combat the ideology.
Oh, sure they are, Dan.
Really?
That's not what they did to that guy.
They just decided to attack him.
Why?
Because he was a bad person.
Now, when you understand the left and critical theory and their nonsense, do you understand why they say things, Joe, like, speech is violence?
Wait, I thought they were trying to combat us on the field of ideas.
If you're trying to combat people on the field of ideas, which we should do, you make your argument, I make mine, then how is speech violence?
How is speech violence?
They don't believe that.
They think speech is violence because they want to justify that you're a bad person with ideas.
They want to justify attacking you.
I mean, literally attacking you.
And destroying you!
No, no, no.
That speech was violence.
And we can't allow violence, so don't open your mouth.
Joe, you know, I know what you're doing.
Joe stays very quiet when he says I'm on a roll because he lets me just go.
But as the audience ombudsman, I sincerely... Does that make sense, what I just said?
Absolutely, yeah.
Sure.
Because you and I have been doing this show for four years and this has been a running theme to this.
There have been a lot of great thinkers who have broken down the ideology of the left.
I've read a ton of stuff and it all has this common theme that this is the difference between us and them.
That they sincerely believe you morally should be shut down from the battlefield of ideas because you are a bad person and many, not all, but many of them feel the violence is justified to stop you because what you would have said would lead to some sort of violence, which is absurd!
Bingo.
Thank you.
Very, very troubling.
And ladies and gentlemen, I say it because as I said to you yesterday, when I went on a little bit about how damaging this case was to the Republic, I am sincerely, candidly, from the bottom of my heart, deeply concerned about the direction this country, the United Kingdom, and other free democracies, constitutional republics, parliamentarian systems around the world, I am genuinely concerned about the direction we're going.
This stuff is becoming justified by cultural elites.
You had Bette Midler tweet this morning something about shivving someone?
A shiv, like a prison shiv?
What?
I mean, this, cultural elites, academics, thought leaders, dreaded air quotes, media personalities condoning this stuff?
God forbid you did this on Fox News, you would be fired tomorrow.
I'm telling you.
100,000% certainty.
If you were caught at a rally, uninstigated, and not in any way self-defense, beating the snot out of someone, I would be done.
Done-zo.
Off the air.
Done.
Finished.
Justifiably so.
Not on the left.
They ignore this stuff.
Really sad.
Okay.
I got one last story.
It's a good one.
So don't go anywhere.
Maybe I'll get to two more, but this is about minimum wage.
And again, it just shows.
It just shows the complete hypocrisy.
You should wake up every morning and say to yourself, thank God I'm a conservative or a libertarian.
Really.
Because no, you're on the right side of truth.
The rest is just garbage.
Can we, I wonder if they, look, I can create a shadow on my face by blocking the light in front of me.
All right.
I just realized that sometimes I do that when I read these things.
No good.
You got to keep the light.
Only on this show can we do this.
Me and Paul and Joe run the whole show.
There's no executive producer going, you can't say that on the air.
I can say whatever I want.
It's my show.
I love it.
Although once in a while, Paul will get on me after the show and be like, ah, maybe you shouldn't have said that one.
A couple times.
All right.
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Yes!
Now I'm hungry.
Sorry about the show.
We ate ours, right Paula?
There's nothing left?
Yeah, we're done.
Omar, if you want to say another one, I'll take it.
I'm just saying.
Just throwing that out there.
We did.
We ate it like the first day.
And then, true story.
I have a freezer in my garage.
So, a freezer's a cheap one.
And the magnetic strip on the freezer is not very good, so the freezer sometimes doesn't close if you bump it.
So I put the Omaha steaks in it.
We were going to eat them over the course of a week.
You know, you get the steaks, the sirloins, and it left, I left it open.
So the stuff had defrosted.
So Paula cooked all of it one night.
And she's like, what did you say to me?
This is a true story.
It's not part of the commercial at all, folks.
She goes, this is great.
We'll have food for the week.
How long did it last, Paula?
Yes, yeah, not even that.
I eat the whole thing.
The meatballs, the chicken fries.
I'm not kidding.
It's not a joke.
All right, moving on.
True story.
It was that good.
Okay, this is an interesting minimum wage story.
Not because it's about minimum wage or wonky economics, but because it's about, again, leftists telling you things constantly that are just not true.
Tim Warstall, who does really terrific work at the Washington Examiner, he does really excellent economic pieces.
When I see them, I try to pick them out and put them on the show, because they explain again how liberals lie to you constantly.
Title of the piece, which will be in the show notes.
It is definitely worth your time.
Is, yes, a nationwide $15 minimum wage would be quite damaging.
And the premise of the piece is this.
There's a new study out that's exhaustive on the effects of minimum wage in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which is a reputable economics journal.
It's not like, you know, People Magazine or anything.
It's a very reputable journal.
And in the journal, it comes away with the conclusion, paradoxically, that the effects of minimum wage are muted Now some of you, if you stop there, you're like, what do you mean?
Liberals must be right.
Liberals are always saying, oh, minimum wage isn't going to hurt anything.
It's only going to help people, right?
No, no, no.
It doesn't stop there.
It says, paradoxically, the effects of minimum wage are muted.
As long as the minimum wage stays at or relatively below What the overall median wage is.
Let me translate that for you.
Yeah, please do.
It basically says minimum wage isn't a problem as long as it's not needed.
But the leftists are... That's exactly what it says!
That's exactly... Make... Almost keep this headline in mind.
Dan Bongino.
You know, Matt Palumbo, if you're listening to the show, the resident fact checker.
Paul, remind me to send this to him.
I want him to write up a piece in easy-to-understand language.
Again, just like Warstall's piece.
Why this... This is the headline.
Minimum wage is great as long as nobody needs it.
That's the report.
But liberals are already using this report to suggest that the minimum wage could be higher.
Now, without getting into overly complicated median mode, averages, wages, and summer wages, part-time wages, the report essentially says this.
That a lot of these employers that employ people at the low end of the income spectrum, Joe, fast food, low skilled labor, some forms of administrative work.
Some's very complicated.
I mean, you have bookkeepers who have, you know, tremendous math skills, right?
But some forms of administrative, you know, people who may be in the tourism industry, you know, people at the low end, you get what I'm saying.
Yeah.
That the minimum wage doesn't really hurt them as long as it's what they're already paying.
So they suggest, in other words, that minimum wage, if you up it to $15 an hour, will be a big problem only because it's above what they're already paying.
When the federal minimum wage, which is $7, what is it $7.25 an hour?
When it's below what the market wage they're already paying is, There are relatively few negative interactions.
You get what I'm saying, Joe?
In other words, you're forcing to pay employers largely what they're already paying people anyway.
Supply and demand!
Some lady sent me a screenshot.
She's like, you make the most incredible faces on your YouTube show.
She sent me a screenshot.
I mean, here's one for you, for the lady who sent that to me.
I get excited about this stuff because liberals are already saying, but the median wage dictated, according to this new research, the minimum wage could go up a few bucks an hour, according to this, and it wouldn't lead to any negative ramifications.
But think about why they're saying that, Joe.
They're saying that because employers are already paying people a median wage already higher than the minimum.
Which is called supply and demand.
The supply for their labor is small enough that the demand forces them to raise wages above the federally mandated floor.
So they're saying that the minimum wage doesn't hurt right now because employers are already paying people more.
Does that make sense?
Because it's not needed, yeah.
But liberals are then saying, therefore we should raise the minimum wage.
And they're using this report.
That's not what the report says.
The report doesn't say that.
It says that the minimum wage is largely irrelevant until you make the minimum wage high enough, like $15 an hour, that it starts to have sincere negative effects on both employment, wages, and hours.
But you will, I guarantee you, you will hear liberals say this.
Now, when you read Warsterl's piece, you'll see why.
Liberals are conflating median wages from full-time workers for part-time and seasonal workers.
In other words, full-time worker wages, Joe, obviously are always going to be higher for obvious reasons than part-time or seasonal workers.
That goes without saying.
You're a full-time 40-hour week, your wages are going to be because you probably have more skills and you're working year-round.
Seasonal can be tourism, things like that.
But liberals are suggesting that the report says the minimum wage could be $15 an hour because that median wage amongst full-time workers is so high that, look, it's not going to do any damage.
Let's just raise the minimum wage because wages are already that high.
No, that they're not already that high.
They're leaving out seasonal workers and some temporary part-time workers.
And that median wage, using this scale, is closer to $10 an hour.
In other words, capitalism is already won.
We don't need the government.
They're already paying people above it.
Right.
It does not back up your liberal argument.
Please read the piece.
I can't extend to you enough the takeaway to simplify it.
Minimum wage is great, as long as it's not necessary.
Thank you.
From the piece, I was forgetting, here's a quote from the piece.
This is how he leaves it, Warstall.
The bite.
When he says the bite, by the way, he's talking about the bite minimum wage laws would have on the economy.
The bite is, in and of itself, the trying to push wages above the rates that are already being paid, like I just said.
So the finding that a minimum wage about what is already being paid isn't a problem really doesn't tell us, it doesn't tell us at all, that pushing wages up by 40%, i.e.
the $15 an hour minimum wage, won't be a problem.
But that is the argument Warstall predicts large numbers of people will start using.
Again, minimum wage is not an issue as long as it doesn't go above what the capitalism free market wage already is.
In other words, we didn't need the government!
Companies are already paying people more!
But yes, count on liberals to point to this research study.
I can't leave without doing this, Tiananmen Square.
It is the 70th anniversary of D-Day, so I want to leave you on a laudatory note to the heroes of our past.
First, I neglected to mention yesterday, it's the 30th anniversary.
of the student protest in Tiananmen Square.
Many of you are familiar with the iconic picture of the, I mean incredibly brave, you want to talk about a titanium spine, the student standing in front of the Chinese tank in Tiananmen Square.
Just incredible, unparalleled bravery.
We have a piece up from the Washington Examiner today, never forget Tiananmen Square as well, it's worth your time, worth reading.
But it really speaks to the You know, almost unimaginable bravery.
I say that, unimaginable, because a lot of us can't imagine that.
We live in the United States.
I mean it literally, not figuratively.
It's hard to imagine what it would be like for a U.S.
tank rolling down the street, trying to take away your right to protest, and you, like the Chinese student in Tiananmen, standing there blocking its path.
That picture is just so iconic, and 30 years later, it's worth remembering what happened there.
Now, I think it makes a lot of sense why I'm constantly bringing up this threat to our liberties by violent liberal activists and speech suppressors and police state tyranny.
You know, ladies and gentlemen, I don't bring up this Spygate stuff and liberals attacking us and AOC's conference of state rights, not God-given rights, because I get bored before the show.
I bring it up because this is my heart, it's my passion, it's what matters to me.
I gave up my career in the Secret Service to fight for this stuff.
But my fight, honestly, is nothing, nothing pales in comparison to the bravery of that Chinese student at Tiananmen.
Also, I had a grandfather, was involved in the Normandy invasion.
He did not land at Omaha, he landed at Utah Beach, which was not as violent as Omaha.
They had their own issues, of course, over there.
But this is the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion.
Now folks, many of you have seen the pictures, some of you have seen movies about it, Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan.
Can you imagine for a moment what it must have been like for our forces getting ready to hit the beach, Omaha Beach, right?
On these Higgins boats, these little boats where the front gate drops down.
And Nazi German fire is taking out the first two or three lines of people, and then having to go four or five hundred yards onto a relatively flat beach, where Nazi gunners have just about every inch of the beach covered with heavy arms fire, while your friends next to you are being mowed down.
And keep in mind, as I heard this morning on the news, it was a great point.
A lot of the soldiers there had just gotten out of boot camp.
They were, some of them were accountants, school teachers, some of them were kids who'd just gotten out of school.
These were not, most of the casualties were not career soldiers who'd been in the military for 20 and 30 years.
These were kids!
But some of the bravest souls among us.
I saw this picture on Twitter this morning.
Because it was a picture taken on a Higgins boat.
And if you look in the upper left, it's Sergeant Sandy Martin, upper left-hand corner, with that, looks like a pack of Lucky Strikes.
Remember Lucky Strikes?
I bring that up because that picture was taken likely hours before he died, before they hit the beach.
I don't know Sandy Martin, I never met him, but I do know my grandfather, who was on Utah Beach.
He did not die over there.
He died later, but you are truly, I'm not a huge fan of Tom Brokaw, but I'll tell you what, his line, the greatest generation.
