Fri Episode #2201: Bondi Dodges Epstein Questions Under Oath
Pam Bondi’s February 13, 2026, hearing under oath exposed her evasive tactics—denying Ghelaine Maxwell’s special treatment while hinting Trump’s pardon would absolve him of crimes—amid accusations of siding with Epstein-linked perpetrators over victims. Democrats highlighted inconsistencies like redacted co-conspirator names and her dismissal of survivors, while Republicans mocked Mike Johnson’s unconstitutional "calendar days" gambit to delay Trump tariff votes. El Paso’s airport shutdown fueled speculation about Pentagon lasers, cartel drones, or UFOs, contrasting with AI leaders’ godlike claims while pushing for government overreach. Critics like David Bonson argue housing shortages stem from zoning, not Blackstone, and warn Trump-style interventions risk class warfare, while praising inflation-indexed capital gains. The episode underscores systemic power abuses, from justice to economics, eroding public trust in institutions. [Automatically generated summary]
In a world of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
It's the David Knight Show.
As the clock strikes 13, it's Friday the 13th of February, year of our Lord, 2026.
Well, today we're going to take a look, since we didn't have the show yesterday, about Pam Bondi's hearing on Wednesday.
The Trump regime has hit a new low, hasn't it?
We're also going to talk about Mike Johnson.
He wants to redefine what a day is for the next six months, for legal purposes, one of the most absurd insults to our intelligence and the Constitution I have seen.
I mean, we're not talking about daylight savings time.
He wants to pretend that these days don't even exist.
And we're going to take a look at this strange story out of El Paso, a new laser weapon the Pentagon is testing, but also talk about it being wielded against cartel drones or UFOs or party balloons.
Which one of those you think it is?
Multiple choice.
But we're going to also take a look at the AI essay that I talked about the other day.
A very impressive essay.
Is it true?
A lot of people are saying it's hype, advertising, and maybe it's real.
We'll be right back.
Well, yesterday we had an issue with my device here that I put all the articles on as we've gone paperless.
And the problem is, is that it was a centralized control.
Whenever you put everything together, centrally controlled, and it goes out, then you have a big problem.
Transferred Evidence: Prisons and the Gutter00:15:11
So it took us quite a while to get a workaround.
And now I've got a second one so that this isn't going to happen again.
Hopefully, I guess the meantime between failure is like a raid array.
If you've got one disk drive, five years.
If you've got two of them in the mirroring mode, you can get many decades, perhaps even longer than that.
So hopefully that'll happen this time.
But I wanted to really talk about Pam Bondi and weren't able to do that yesterday.
So maybe we want to talk a little bit about this.
It was one of the most ridiculous things, but not unexpected.
What was unexpected was the extent of the absurdity and the extent of her temper tantrums that were there.
And I said it on Wednesday when before it ever happened.
I said, well, she's going to be testifying today.
It'll be another one of these deals where she shows up with a wrap sheet on everybody and hurls insults at them instead of answering the questions.
That's the way she dodges the questions whenever she does it.
And so she agreed as part of the questions.
There was only one point of agreement that I could really see, agreed that Maxwell, Ghelaine Maxwell, did not deserve special treatment.
However, she, at the same time, said she knew nothing about it.
Wasn't anything that belonged to her.
It was just a coincidence that the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, who was Trump's personal lawyer, just a coincidence that he went to her jail cell and interviewed her for a very long time.
And then afterwards, she gets the special treatment.
Had nothing to do with any quid pro quo.
And yet at the same time, we see her lawyer saying that she's willing to testify that Donald Trump didn't know them at all, basically, and never committed a crime as long as she gets a pardon.
I mean, they're openly putting this out.
Will anybody, will that do Trump any good?
No.
Nobody's going to believe that.
Everybody understands it's a quid pro quo that's happening here.
So we all know this.
We saw this happen with Todd Blanche, but she pretends it didn't happen.
She's transferred to a Texas Minimum Security Prison, of course.
And now they're floating a pardon for her if she says that Trump is exonerated.
This is one of the club Fed prisons that's in Texas.
For example, she gets all kinds of special privileges.
Puppy, a puppy tie.
I don't know what a puppy tie is.
I don't know if she's got a puppy.
Anyway, she does have private workouts.
I had heard she was given a puppy.
Yeah.
I heard that a while ago.
It's like Washington, D.C. They say, if you want a friend, get a dog.
Well, I guess federal prisons are like that as well.
Anyway, private workout area.
She has secretarial services.
I don't even have that.
And personal mail.
How about that?
And so she was asked in questioning and said, Attorney General Bondi, does a convicted sex offender like Glenn Maxwell deserve special treatment and privileges in a prison?
Yes or no?
Well, of course, you're not going to get a yes or no answer from Bondi.
She's going to answer it the way she wants to answer it.
She said she wasn't transferred to a lower security facility.
First of all, that's a lie, one of many.
And then she said she didn't know anything about her being transferred to the lower security facility.
So first of all, it's not a lower security facility, according to her.
You know, it's pretty standard in all the prisons that you get puppies and secretaries in private workout areas, right?
Isn't that right?
Standard issue prison puppy.
That's right.
Yeah, it's, I guess, what kind of a puppy do you get in prison?
It's not a Rottweiler or something, right?
It's not going to be a guard dog of some sort.
And that's what I mean.
This is such an insult to our intelligence.
The lies that Pam Bondi told, the lies that Trump had.
And she is the mere image of Trump.
You know, this regime is rotting from the head down.
You look at people like Cash Battell and Pam Bondi, and it's like, what is the matter with them?
Well, they're just mimicking the guy they work for.
Anyway, she said, I said I do not agree that she should receive special treatment.
She was transferred.
I learned that after the fact, to the same level facility, lie.
And that is a question for the Bureau of Prisons.
Well, the Bureau of Prisons, it wasn't the Deputy Secretary of the Bureau of Prisons that got her transferred.
It was the Deputy Attorney General that got her transferred.
So it turned into a brawl.
Yeah.
I was just looking up what kind of permissions she's given.
She's got a special cordoned-off area for visitors, as well as snacks and refreshments for guests.
Permission to go to the exercise area after hours.
And there's a whole article about it here, as well as the puppy, of course.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, but according to Pam Bondi, it's not happening.
That's not a problem.
Every prisoner gets that kind of treatment.
It's a real luxurious life if you get arrested and given prison time for.
Well, maybe we should consider robbing banks or something.
I think it's only the human traffickers that get this.
That's right.
That's right.
Well, it was a brawl, as many have characterized it.
And I think it's kind of interesting to see the reaction of the press, of the public, and of the politicians that are there.
But first of all, some of the things that happened.
Here is Pam Bondi.
When she is confronted with Ted Liu, says you lied under oath.
There is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime.
Everyone knows that.
This has been the most transparent presidency.
Yeah, he was.
Transparent fraud.
Can I claim my time?
I got your answer.
You said no evidence.
Mr. Chairman, please stop the clock.
Stop the clock.
This is my time belongs to the gentleman from California.
I'm going to put up another document from a witness who called the FBI's National Threat Operations Center because I believe you just lied under oath.
There is ample evidence in the Epstein state.
Did you ever accuse me of a lied under oath?
And this is on videotape.
Even if she commits it, don't you ever accuse her one.
I'm showing you.
Here is a witness statement who called into the FBI's Threat Operations Center.
He drove Donald Trump around in Lemo.
He overheard what Donald Trump said to Jeffrey on the cell phone.
He was so angry he was going to stop a limo and hurt Donald Trump.
And he met a girl who said she was raped by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.
She later had her head blown off.
And the officers at the scene said that could not have been suicide.
No one, no one at the Department of Justice interviewed this witness.
You need to interview this witness immediately.
Epstein should rot in hell.
So should the men who patronize this operation.
And as we sit here today, there are over 1,000 sex trafficking victims, and you have not held a single man accountable.
Shame on you.
If you had any decency, you would resign right after this hearing concludes.
But she doesn't have any decency.
So she's not going to resign.
And she's going to continue to lie to our face, regardless of what we know is true.
And that case was one that I mentioned the other day.
And, you know, it was ruled as a suicide by the coroner, who but the police officers who were there said there's absolutely no way that could be the case.
And so again, you can get people to say whatever you want them to say under some circumstances.
And so he says you just lied under oath.
Isn't that interesting?
You know, we just had the other day, Wednesday, we're talking about Lutnik lying under oath on Tuesday.
Then on Wednesday, Pam Bondi lies under oath, and Cash Mattell has done it many times himself.
Every time these people go, it is a perjury trap, except we see that they don't charge them with perjury.
Just like they didn't charge James Clapper with perjury when James Clapper was asked point blank, are you spying on Americans with a search warrant with the NSA?
No, Senator, not intentionally, blah, blah, blah, right?
We all know that he lied under oath, and yet they never charged him.
Statute of limitations ended, I think, in 2018.
That was back in 2013.
He did it.
And so it even got to the extent that Pam Bondi went after a Jewish Democrat who got so upset she pushed back her chair and stormed out.
She accused the Jewish rep of being anti-Semitic because she doesn't support Netanyahu.
As I've said many times, there's a lot of Jews who do not support what Israel is doing because there's a lot of Jews in Israel who didn't vote for Netanyahu.
He barely got together a coalition to govern, and he had to have three elections in order to do that.
And so there's a lot of people who don't support him there as well as in the United States who are Jewish.
And so Pam Bondi is out there throwing the race card around, just like a liberal, right?
So Pam Bondi traded barbs at just about every Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.
When she got to Jamie Raskin, she called him a loser.
She said that Thomas Massey had Trump derangement syndrome.
Boy, that's pretty original, isn't it?
You point out what Donald Trump has done.
Oh, you got Trump delusion syndrome.
This is give me a break.
They always resort to that.
And then she said that Jamie Raskin was a loser.
He wasn't even a lawyer and so forth.
He taught in law school.
Anyway, I think she is projecting.
A total meltdown from Representative Becca Ballant, who stormed out of the hearing after the Attorney General seemingly grew frustrated by one of the many questions about Jeffrey M. Steed and launched into a personal attack on her voting record, which is Pam Bondi's tactic and strategy.
It is weakness.
It is clear to everybody that it's a cover-up.
Everybody knows she's dodging the questions.
She might as well just plead the fifth.
Anyway, accusing her of anti-Semitism for not supporting Israel.
Ballant was the first Jewish congressman to use the term genocide to describe the war in Gaza with this anti-Semitic culture, said Bondi.
She voted against a resolution condemning before being interrupted by Ballant.
Ballant said, you want to go there?
You're talking to a woman who lost her grandfather in the Holocaust.
Ballant responded before slamming her chair into the dais behind her and storming out of the room, fuming.
She repeatedly asked Bondi if her department had investigated the ties of top Trump administration leaders have to Epstein at one point stating, this is not a game, Secretary, to which Bondi responded, I'm attorney general.
My apologies.
I couldn't tell.
She behaves like a secretary, doesn't she?
And I don't mean a secretary with a capital S as part of the cabinet, just somebody who is serving the every whim of Donald Trump.
I thought that was the best comeback of anybody, actually.
Calling her a secretary.
And as you get, it reminds me of Vinman.
Remember that?
Lieutenant Colonel Vinman to you, that Ukrainian shill.
Anyway, the AG furiously clashed with Jamie Raskin.
He accused Bondi of filibustering.
And he said, I told you about that, Attorney General, before you started speaking about the filibustering.
She said, you don't tell me anything, you washed up loser.
You're not even a lawyer.
So we have this hierarchy that lawyers are special or something.
If that ever was the case, I think Pam Bondi just blew that.
If she's the top lawyer, she's the top attorney general.
What does that say about the profession right there?
That's probably one of the worst attacks on the legal profession to have Pam Bondi there.
Nevertheless, before he was a congressman, he was a professor at American University Washington College of Law.
But anyway, whatever you think about Jamie Raskin or any of these other people that are Democrats who are attacking her, can we look at Pam Bondi and say that she absolutely owned herself?
As a matter of fact, Dana Lash, who I think, since she is a Second Amendment person, she has no love of Pam Bondi, who has no love of the Constitution, especially the Second Amendment.
It's not just the Second Amendment that Pam Bondi hates.
It's everything.
She and Christy Noam are out there with their surveillance state.
They're out there getting Apple and Facebook to pull down people who have groups that are watching what ICE is doing, punishing them and so forth.
She hates every aspect of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Anyway, Jay Apollo said, will you turn to the survivors behind you now and apologize for what your DOJ has put them through, the absolutely unacceptable release of the Epstein files and their private information?
I'm not going to get in the gutter with you, she said.
So she got into the gutter with Donald Trump, though.
And Jamie Raskin said, this performance screams cover-up.
I'm not going to get into the gutter with you.
How dare you bring up the reprehensible actions of my department?
That's right.
Down in the gutter with my department members.
I'm not going to get in the gutter with those victims over there, the people that we had one job, and that was to redact the victims' names.
Instead, what they do is they put out the victims' names and redacted the perpetrators.
Amazing that she would say get into the gutter with you as she is insulting everyone and throwing mud.
But to get into the gutter with you to discuss the actions of my department, the mistakes we made.
Yeah.
People like Bondi and Kash Patel, they just, they epitomize the Trump administration and what a disgusting display it is for the world to see.
Redacted Perpetrators00:10:06
As Attorney General, you're siding with the perpetrators.
You're ignoring the victims.
And that will leave your legacy unless you act quickly to change course, said Raskin.
You're running a massive Epstein cover-up right now out of the DOJ.
He's absolutely right.
Now, this gets to the point where the people want to cover up for this, like Breitbart.
Breitbart is just disgusting.
Breitbart, their first response to Larry Luttnick being caught with perjury and the awful things that came out in terms of, you know, he definitely has a perjury issue.
But when you look at the financial aspects of what Larry Lutnick is doing as commerce secretary and the traps that he's laying for all of us, Breitbart had a special exclusive interview with him, and they were featuring Larry Luttnick all over the place, more so even than their defense of Pam Bondi.
And their defense of Pam Bondi was a congressman, Brandon Gill, who came on and said, well, you know, in the Biden administration, they didn't do this and they didn't do that.
Again, it's the what about ism?
Well, you know, they committed a crime or they did not prosecute this and so forth.
So therefore, we can do the same as they did.
So they simultaneously criticize somebody else for the wrongdoing that they're doing.
And then even though they criticize the other side, they use it as a get out of jail free card for themselves.
When is that going to stop?
I'm so sick and tired of seeing that.
Every time you catch the Trump people or the GOP and something, oh, well, the Democrats and Biden did it as well.
That's no excuse.
None whatsoever.
And this is just a downward spiral that they're taking the entire country in.
Once the other side commits a crime, and of course, they usually get away with it.
We're not going to try to reform anything.
We're not going to try to punish anybody.
And don't you criticize me when I do the same thing that I criticize those people for.
So they're talking about Epstein today.
She said, this has been around since the Obama administration.
The Dow is over 50,000 right now.
There you go.
And I think one of the best comebacks that I saw from anybody said, we don't worry about pedophiles unless the Dow is below 50,000.
Isn't that essentially everything that Jeffrey Epstein was doing?
I mean, isn't that the essence of what we're talking about with the elite?
As long as they can make money, as long as they get away with what they want, as long as they get what they want out of it, whether it is the hedonism or whether it's the massive amounts of money, then we're not going to punish anybody.
There's no crime that we need to take a look at.
She has embraced with that statement that everybody can't, she embraced the essence of Epstein and the pedophile elite with all of that.
So Massey launched a blistering attack on her for not properly redacting the names of victims.
As a matter of fact, he had said the night before he was a stop by a reporter there asking him what was going to happen the next day.
He had this to say.
Same questions.
You mentioned that there are some things that have been redacted that probably shouldn't have been redacted.
Yeah.
Is there anything, can you elaborate it on that?
Yeah, six men's names.
One of them's listed as a co-conspirator.
Why would you redact his name?
Right.
There's not vict.
What I'm saying is it's not just victims' names that they've redacted.
And how can we get those names then?
Like the public generally.
Well, I'm hopeful the DOJ will release them now that I've pointed it out to them.
They've either got to say, okay, we made a mistake or we're not going to unredact that.
Okay.
And are you going to be going back to see?
I know there's sort of like a procession now of members who are going.
Yeah, I'm scheduled for tomorrow morning, too.
Okay.
And what are you looking to, what are you going to look into tomorrow that you haven't looked into today?
It just takes a while.
Even there's millions of files.
I've still got files on my list to look at.
Got it.
All right.
Thank you, Congressman.
Well, it all began with a question from Jerry Nadler.
It's amazing, this Humpty-Dumpty-like character.
And to see these people doing it, again, they can talk about the fallacies and the lies and the faults and the crimes of the Republicans when they're out of power.
They'll ignore it when they are in power as well.
What difference does that make?
If they committed the crime, it's still a crime, even if the Democrats are going to look the other way when they do it.
So Jerry Nadler presented her with, asked her whether or not the DOJ is indicted or is investigating any of Epstein's alleged co-conspirators, citing what he called concrete evidence of disgusting criminality.
Bondi attempted to sidestep the question.
When Nadler repeated it, she raised her voice and insisted she would answer the question the way I want to answer the question, talking over him as colleagues tried to intercede.
As the exchange escalated, Bondi pivoted away from Epstein entirely and went down her, the Dow is at 50,000 talking point.
Isn't that amazing?
And of course, the back and forth with Ted Liu, where she got very nasty with him, you're not even a lawyer type of thing.
That's the pathetic aspect of this.
But let's stick with Massey.
And this is what happened as the two of them were talking.
Did you ask Merrick Garland that the last four years?
Did you talk to me?
I'm glad you're asking about Merrick Garland.
I'm going to reclaim this.
This is bigger than Watergate.
This goes over four administrations.
You don't have to go back to Biden.
Let's go back to Obama.
Let's go back to George Bush.
This cover-up spans decades, and you are responsible for this portion of it.
And that's where the people are.
I want to know at what point did the FBI and the DOJ decide that Lex Wesner was not a co-conspirator?
Because our Epstein Files Transparency Act requires you, please put it back on the screen, to release the internal decision about whether to prosecute him or not.
And it's not in the files, and it's not in the files for any of these other men.
One of the gentlemen has may she answer.
And he's a hypocrite because he voted against the ban that we were talking about on deep fake AI porn.
Only two people voted against it, and you were the gentleman's time has expired.
And you voted against a deep fake porn ban, and it's like, yeah, how is that going to solve anything anyway?
That has nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein and what these people are doing or her cover-up for them as well.
Or the fact that she violated the law, then lied about violating the law as well.
I like his expression at the end there.
It's like, what?
Yeah, what's going on with this?
Answer the question.
Just answer the question.
So, yeah.
So by the end of the exchange, Bondi had not answered whether the DOJ agrees that there's no credible information about co-conspirators, why a document listing Wexner as a co-conspirator was redacted, or who approved releasing victims' names while obscuring alleged abusers.
The hearing closed with unanswered questions, a stark contrast between Democrats' early sparring over evasions and a later bipartisan rupture that put the department's handling of the Epstein files squarely on the center of the controversy.
Let me tell you how damagingly bad this was.
Even a sell-out sycophant like Alex Jones criticized this and was using every swear word he could think of.
He was so upset because his team that he's gone to bat for fell on its face.
She fumbled the ball, Alex, didn't she?
But they're just a bunch of crooks.
You know that.
I know that.
Why'd you ever cover up for them?
Anyway, the Jamie Raskin thing was you're a washed-up loser lawyer.
That's a bit of projection that's there, isn't it?
But meanwhile, you look at what Breitbart does with this.
As I said before, on Wednesday's show, Larry Lutnick was caught committing perjury.
He had testified once before that he had no involvement with Epstein.
He met him once, he said, after they moved next door to him.
They went over for tea or something at lunchtime on a Saturday.
And he talked about his massage table and said, we thought he was pretty creepy and suggestive and innuendo about that.
We didn't ever want to have anything with him.
That's any involvement with him whatsoever.
And we cut it off at that point in time.
Then the documents show that that's not true.
He actually went to the island after that.
So he actually had testified to that one thing under oath.
We have a commerce secretary who's not only next-door neighbor, friend, and island visitor, but also obviously committed perjury.
So what is Breitbart's reaction to this?
They immediately bring him in for a special interview.
And some of the things he had to say have more to do not just with the corruption, but with things that are going to actually harm us.
Robots And Subsidies00:07:47
So watch live.
Breitbart News hosts a Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for a policy discussion.
Yes.
I just thought it was really funny.
The way that he tried to spin it was, oh, no, I really was disgusted by this guy who was talking about his massage table and all that.
But when I went to the island, it was with my kids.
My kids were there with me.
I brought them to go see the creepy massage table guy.
I know.
That's what I'm saying.
They're not even good liars, right?
Let alone lawyers.
As everyone else is calling for him to be impeached, Breitbart has him on for a live policy discussion.
As if, again, let's talk about the $50,000 DAO.
You know, we can make a lot of, let's forget about all the stuff with the kitties and everything else.
This guy can make us a lot of money.
He can help America somehow.
And yet, if you look at his policies, that's not there either.
But notice how these people, whether it's Pam Bondi or whether it's Breitbart, they grab this ring of the stock market or the promise of money, and they don't care about the pedophile ring.
They're going for the golden ring.
And so one of the things that he says is that we're going to have automated manufacturing coming to America.
And I said this in 2017 when Trump did the tax cut.
And he said, that's going to reshore all these different manufacturing things that have gone to other countries.
I said, no, it's not.
And, you know, I remember Gerald Sunti and I talking about it, how it was going to, he was, his big thing was, yeah, it's just going to be stock buybacks for the corporations to do that.
And it really was.
It was a windfall for all of them.
It was absolutely amazing.
And I said, yeah, they're not going to bring back any manufacturing until they get their mechanical slaves or robots.
And again, the robots are not necessarily the biped robots that are going to be carrying around things like the humans would do.
But it's also when you look at all the other aspects of automation, I mean, Amazon's got a tremendous amount of robots already automating the process going around and just look like Roombas and they go under a particular, you know, restocking what they've got on the shelves and picking stuff off the shelves.
You don't have to have something that looks like a human to do that.
And so it's going to be a capital intensive thing.
They'll get a lot of tax breaks.
Maybe even they'll get subsidies from the federal government if they change the federal government more like Trump wants at his model of economic fascism, where it's actually a partnership between the people running the government, just like Communist China, the partnership between the people running the government and the people who have the corporations as the two of them merge.
But he says the automated manufacturing is coming to America and it's perfect for us.
We got to get his voice on here because he's got this gangster rough voice that's there and he really is a gangster, I think.
Anyway, it's perfect for America because we don't want to have any Americans working in the higher paying factory jobs, right?
We want to have robots or H-1B visa foreigners come in.
That's really what we want.
He said there's some things that should be made overseas, sandals, cheap t-shirts, and we're cool with that.
You can do an enormous amount of manufacturing domestically, he said, using advanced robotics, not people.
You know, we don't want people getting, We don't want people getting high-paying jobs or anything like that.
We don't want to, when we have things that have a lot of value, we don't want to pass that on to employees.
We want to keep all those profits ourselves.
Yeah, it's real telling how he's like, yeah, sandals.
We don't want Americans making sandals.
That's beneath us to make sandals and t-shirts.
Those things that actual people are making, just have the Asians make those and we'll pay them for that and import that.
But, you know, us, the owners of these factories, we can get the machines to do the stuff that we need, the more expensive luxury.
Well, it's always been a big part of the China price, right?
It's been slavery, you know, and slave wages and things like that.
Well, that is actually what robot means.
It's the Czech word for slave.
Well, what I mean is mechanical.
It shows that he's not interested in actually bringing out the actual manufacturing to Americans.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
Close your eyes.
Just think of a modern autoplay, you know, with their arm that goes out and drills like that.
You know, that's his thing.
He's such an intellectualist.
Anyway, Breitbart, exclusive.
He also wants to bring pharmaceutical manufacturing home to America.
$400 billion worth of pharmaceutical manufacturing, he said.
Yeah.
Poison those people as well.
Don't pay them.
Poison them.
They'll own nothing and they'll be poisoned.
Yeah, pay no attention to the desperate attempt to protect and cover up satanic pedophile rings.
The economy is doing great.
That's the bottom line.
That's what Breitbart will tell you.
That's what Pam Bondi will tell you.
That's what the GOP will tell you.
It doesn't matter about satanic pedophile rings and satanic child abuse and so forth.
That doesn't matter.
We can all get rich.
It's just what we need.
It's more billionaires poisoning us as they rape our children.
We're going to get cheaper drugs in America.
They're going to be made here as well.
I expect we're going to have $400 billion of onshoring of pharmaceuticals.
Generally speaking, said Lutnick to Breitbart, for name-brand drugs like Ozempic, Manjaro, things like that, we produce 75% of their revenue and 100% of their profits, right?
Because we are the big payer.
We pay $1,000.
Everybody else pays $150.
Why is that?
Why is that?
And why is it that Trump threw tens of billions of dollars at Moderna and Pfizer to make the mRNA vaccines and continues to do that?
And they do that.
They grease the skids for them in terms of approval.
And then they turn around and in gratitude, they screw us to the wall in terms of price.
We pay many, many times more than everybody else has.
According to him, it's about a factor of 10.
Why is that?
Well, they have this thing called most favored nation.
You would think that the nation that paid for the development costs of one of the most profitable products they've ever had, the Trump shot, you would think that we'd get some favors back from them, but no.
They act like they're a country.
And so, you know, countries have most favored nation status in terms of trade, but pharmaceutical companies do as well.
It's just they don't favor us.
They exploit us.
And he wants to be a part of that.
He wants to, as long as he can get a piece of it with Trump RX, they're all for that.
And I kind of misspoke before I was saying comment on it.
What I mean is when you talk about automated manufacturing, the only reason that people would want automated manufacturing is for things like sandals and t-shirts.
But he's saying, that cheap stuff, let's just leave that to the slaves.
You know, we'll have automated manufacturing for the stuff that is actually made in America currently.
The few things and a few more.
We'll have our factories doing that.
And maybe they'll be on American soil.
Psychopaths And Profit Motives00:15:04
Maybe not.
It's just whoever gives us the power plants and most water that would have gone to the citizens.
You're absolutely right.
Because already we're getting our sandals and t-shirts from abroad.
So he's going to use the automation to take American jobs is what he's saying.
You're absolutely right.
Democrats and one Republican accused Bondi of ignoring the victims.
You're not showing a lot of interest in the victims, said Jeremy Raskin.
Whether it's Epstein's human trafficking ring or if it's the homicidal government violence against citizens in Minneapolis, the Attorney General, you are siding with the perps and you're ignoring the victims.
And she's also siding with the criminals because she doesn't want law-abiding people to have guns.
That is, throughout the Trump administration, it's not just her.
It's also people like Janine Perot.
The Attorney General accused Democrats of only caring about the issue because Trump is in the White House.
Well, she doesn't care about the issue because Trump is in the White House.
That's the bottom line.
Raskin demanded in one of those back and forth, the Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan restore time.
And that was another shouting match that they got into.
Anyway, that was the point at which she called him a washed up loser lawyer, not even a lawyer.
And so she said, you should all be apologizing.
You sit here and you attack the president.
And I'm not going to have it.
I'm not going to put up with it.
Yeah, this is her 3D approach.
The typical Trump 3D.
It's not chess.
It's checkers.
Deny, distract, divert.
And always lie.
None of them asked Merrick Garland over the last four years one word about Epstein.
How ironic is that?
You know why?
Because Trump.
Why are they coming?
Why is it a big deal with Trump then with the MAGA people?
Well, it's because Trump campaigned on releasing these files.
Yeah, it's not as though he wasn't talking about it during the Biden administration.
That was a huge part of his campaign.
That's right.
And Trump was also this pedophile's best friend for 15 years.
That's another issue as well.
So anyway, it goes on and on, but I'm going to move on to something else here.
Bondi used her time to draw attention to how Democrats and their donors had associated with Epstein for years.
But we're not going to talk about Trump associating with him for years, right?
See the double standard that's there?
And I say send them all to jail.
But they use that as an excuse.
Well, you got some Democrats associated with him.
So now that means that, you know, because this guy saw him a half dozen times, now it means that for all those disgusting parties and beauty contests that he and Jeffrey Epstein did together, that Trump did with Jeffrey Epstein, now you don't get to look at any of that.
You know, we have now declared Trump to be Epstein free.
It's absolutely amazing the nonsense logic behind all this stuff.
And again, Breitbart, again, the only thing they had about Bondi was the fact this Brandon Gil guy says, well, what about the Biden-Harris Department of Justice and their weaponizing of the justice system?
That's the headline on Breitbart.
He asked her about several instances in which the Biden-Harris Department of Justice weaponized the justice system.
So now she can weaponize the justice system.
You see, every criminal act that the Democrats did, now can be done by the Republicans and vice versa.
The Democrats will play the same game when they get back in power, which probably won't be too long.
They'll say, well, we can do that because Trump did it.
They already did it with gun control by executive order.
So he said, this is the way this thing ran with Gill.
He said, so did the Biden-Harris Department of Justice allow Jack Smith to spy on a dozen Republican members of Congress?
Bondi, absolutely.
Did the Biden-Harris Department of Justice seize the phone of a sitting Republican congressman?
Bondi said, yes.
See how it works?
And so now you can do all this stuff.
And he said, thank you for returning the Department of Justice back to its core focus, which is on the rule of law.
Are you serious?
Are you serious?
How cynical that is.
So Jerry Nadler attacking Attorney General Bondi over Epstein while his colleague, Representative Plaskett, was using Jeffrey Epstein as a confidant and advisor is the height of hypocrisy.
That's what the Republicans are saying.
So let me get this straight.
He contacted him as a confident confidant and as an advisor.
But Trump, as his party pal, we don't want to pay attention to that.
And the Republicans want to pay attention to the Clintons, but they don't want to pay attention to Trump.
I say put them both in jail.
And I say that I point this out because you just need to understand what Breitbart has become.
It is one of the most dishonest of all the news media.
And I mean that whether you're talking about alternative media or mainstream media, I don't see anybody lower than Breitbart.
It's absolutely amazing.
Well, Massey accused Bondi of criminal negligence in the Epstein release, the crime being that she violated this law that was specifically passed by Congress to stop this kind of cover-up.
And so Massey said, I'm trying not to be apathetic and subscribe to the memes that say you're not going to vote your way out of this.
But I want to point out that Americans voted for four different administrations, and they're all part of the Jeffrey Epstein cover-up.
And you could see her.
Her only concern, you know, when he mentioned, yeah, this goes through several different administrations.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
See, it's not Trump at all.
That's her only concern.
You could see in her reaction to what Massey said.
She didn't care anything about getting these people who had committed these crimes.
Her only concern is to protect Donald Trump.
That's absolutely disgusting.
It's true.
She was yelling at him until he brought up someone else and then she goes quiet and backs off.
Yeah, let's play it again.
It's worth seeing.
It's amazing.
Yeah, let's play that again, as a matter of fact.
Did you ask Merritt Garland that the last four years?
You talk about Epstein.
I'm reclaiming my time.
I'm glad you're asking about Merrick Garland.
I'm going to reclaim ties with you.
I'm not going to be longer than Watergate.
Shut up.
This goes over four administrations.
You don't have to go back to Biden.
Let's go back to Obama.
Let's go back to George Bush.
This cover-up spans decades, and you are responsible for this portion of it.
And that's where the people are going to be.
I want to know.
At what point?
Yeah.
She's going to be able to get it.
Let's just start talking over him again.
Yeah, tell people how other people did this because now I'm exonerated because of the whataboutism.
I'm covered under the Whataboutism clause.
What about these other three administrations?
Even though I'm committing a crime, I'm now exonerated.
Disgusting.
Absolutely disgusting.
So she called him a failed politician with Trump derangement syndrome.
I think she's the one who's got the derangement syndrome.
She is the one who's got a psychosis, that's for sure.
So they're being sued, as I said before, for strong-arming tech companies to target people who are monitoring ICE.
That's not a crime.
She hates the First Amendment.
She hates the Second Amendment.
She loves pedophiles.
What else can we say?
You know, Brandon Smith of Alt Market, I liked what he had to say, again, about the psychology of evil.
He said, you know, conspiracy theorists are almost always right.
We've been proven right again, time and again, and will continue to be right about many things that corporate media used to call fringe.
And why is that?
It's because we are looking at the operation of individuals that are there.
He says, globalists, first and foremost, are an occult network of organized psychopaths.
And we look at that.
You look at the bigger picture of this.
What are these people's motives in terms of doing this?
What can we say?
Just like with Pam Bondi, her motives are very transparent, what she's doing there.
Psychopaths seek out people with psychopathic traits like them.
They recruit.
They grow their numbers.
And remember, I've talked to John Kiriaku many times.
He said the CIA is always looking for sociopaths.
They don't really want to hire you if you're not a sociopath.
And he said, and they want you to get right up to the line of psychopath, but hopefully not over that.
But that's really what they're looking for.
CIA is one of those organizations that seeks out psychopaths.
He points out from the mafia to violent drug cartels to religious cults to authoritarian governments.
We have seen psychopaths congregate together and cooperate in the worst moments of our timeline.
And again, the CIA checks almost all those boxes.
We're talking about mafia, drug cartels, or authoritarian governments, probably even as religious cults.
There's a lot of evidence that the intelligence agencies that are there are heavily involved in the occult, right?
Remote viewing and a lot of other really strange things that they do.
They think it's real.
So anyway, Jeffrey Epstein, he says, was not the top of the pyramid.
He was also not some self-serving flim flame man selling sex and depravity just to gain access to the halls of power.
Rather, he was a middleman, a drug dealer selling dopamine experiences as a reward for members of the cabal while collecting the blackmail materials.
But the cabal is far bigger than what we see in the Epstein files, and it supersedes any one nation or government.
There are strange mentionings of clonings, of baby farming for black market sales, of the creation of a superior race in the files.
In other words, the interests of Epstein and his associates went far beyond sexual fetishes.
And this is why it is so disgusting to see people like Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Donald Trump covering this stuff up.
There's real evil at the core of this, and it shows us that they are part of that evil.
As he points out, some of the Epstein emails openly discuss sexual abuse and torture of victims brought to the island from Pizzagate information.
Released by WikiLeaks in 2016, we can see that food code words are common for the globalists and seem to be tied to the abuse of young children.
Pizza symbolism has been common within pedophilia networks for many years, leading up to the exposure of Pizzagate.
It's also common within the pages of the Epstein files.
The word pizza is used as a code at least 900 times in the emails.
As a matter of fact, Ben Swan got into the Pizzagate stuff when it was first put out there.
I saw that he put up another video where he says, I've been vindicated now.
Look at these Epstein 900 times it's mentioned here.
He goes, Yeah, this stuff is real.
There was a lot of disinformation that people jumped into that was sensational.
And of course, that is the way this stuff always gets shut down.
You have people who are basically control ops to shut this stuff down.
What they do is they put out, just as we've seen over and over again with Steve Pieczenik about so many different things, they have people like Steve Pieczenik who will put out lies in and around a particular event.
And then when that gets reported, that gets, you know, something that is sensational.
And because it's false, easily disproven, they use that to disprove the entire thing.
That's the way it's always been done.
And so now we see with this that, yes, the Pizzagate stuff, not necessarily that particular pizza parlor or whatever, but it was evidence of exactly what they were doing, and it's back again here.
But there's something else that's there, as Smith points out, the use of beef jerky in the Epstein emails, mentioned hundreds of times, specifically disconcerting, including talk of keeping, quote, the jerky on ice, unquote.
So when do you do that?
When do you keep beef jerky on ice?
A strange obsession with jerky portion weights, with lab testing of jerky in order to prevent sickness, etc.
Whatever they're talking about, it's not jerky.
You have to ask yourself, what kind of edible product would be so criminal that it has to be hidden behind elaborate code speak?
Well, the obvious conclusion would be that jerky is code for human meat.
Some might argue that there's no benefits to eating human meat, so why would the elites do it?
Well, the critics are operating from a logical perspective, not from the perspective of the occultist.
One can't separate Epstein Island from occultism and still understand what happened there.
And he makes a distinction between Luciferianism and Satanism.
Satan is occupied with the pursuit of pleasure at the expense of morality, while Luciferians are occupied with the pursuit of power.
So power versus pleasure.
But they both say, do as thou wilt.
And it is psychopathic in the sense that it has no empathy for anyone else.
And it functions as essentially a parasitic cult on the rest of humanity.
He points out that if they weren't such a small percentage of the human race, there wouldn't be anything left.
He said, the majority of us have, though, a mechanism called conscience, which either stops us from committing evil most of the time, it also causes us to feel guilt when we know that we've acted in a destructive manner.
If the majority of the population didn't have that, we would have gone extinct.
But the psychopaths, the globalists, don't have this mechanism.
In fact, they think the conscience is a hindrance.
It is a sign of weakness.
And that people who have it are easily victimized.
This is a predatory class of humans.
And this is something you see from criminals in every regard.
I mean, I've seen this over and over again in people who are scheming about how they can do something to somebody.
Predatory Class Exposed00:05:14
Truly is amazing to watch these people in operation.
Well, Pam Bondi unmasked a dark truth about the Trump administration with these theatrics, says Daniel Hampton.
And the one thing he got wrong about that is it's the Trump regime.
It's not an administration.
It's just a power regime.
These people are the Luciferians.
During her congressional hearing this week, Epstein survivors sat behind Bondi, unacknowledged and irrelevant to her purposes, as she performed for the cameras.
That is the way it was described by Dahlia Lithwick in a scathing analysis for Slate, in which Lithwick said that Bondi's testimony wasn't about justice or accountability.
It's about a woman who knows that she has to seek and maintain protection.
And so she sits there and she crows about the Dow Jones before the cameras because she understands that if she doesn't, she will be left behind.
What Bondi and Trump and Luttnick and Blanche are doing under the banner of law and law enforcement and pardons and immunity and impunity is an operatic performance of a single truth.
That the law will now protect those who are within the network of favors and privilege and secrets and side eyes and snickers and abuse of young girls.
And the law will abandon those who are not.
She said Bondi's theatrics during her combative house hearing is very similar to a protection racket.
They prey on everyone who refuses to buckle.
We should probably stop calling this law and simply call it power.
Or maybe we should just call it Luciferian.
It amazes me that as all of this stuff is happening, when we talk about the Christian aspects of this, we talk about the occultic aspects of this.
Think about as all this stuff has been unfolding over the last couple of weeks, right in the middle of it, you have the Melania movie comes out.
And it is truly amazing to see people like Robert Jeffers, who has a mega church in Dallas.
Thousands of people go to his church.
And he is there talking about how it was so wonderful that he was a part of the movie.
He said, they had me in this movie.
And I was surprised to see myself in this movie.
But here's some of our church ladies who went to the event.
They even get dressed up.
They went to the trouble of making replica Melania dresses, this long white dress with a black zigzag on it.
This is a bunch of women who go to his church going to celebrate this prostitute, Melania Trump, an Epstein girl herself, right?
And I don't even know.
I don't even know what we could, how we could explain this to anybody who looks at that.
I just have to say, folks, this is not what Christianity is about.
Especially, this is a movie that was the comeback movie for a director who had had some big films.
They weren't good films, but they were big budget films.
And he did an X-Men movie, among other things.
So they gave him a lot of money, Hollywood did.
But he had his fallout in 2017, a lot of sexual allegations.
And here he is in the Epstein files, hugging a young girl.
He's the guy on the right, of course.
There's Jeffrey Epstein, the girl's face is blacked out.
Now, this is the guy that Jeff Bezos picked to do the Melania movie.
Again, as I pointed out, the budgets that you typically have on these documentaries or maybe in the million-dollar area, the entire budget, they gave her $28 million.
It was a payoff.
And Robert Jeffers is so excited about the fact that he's in that movie.
I would want my name taken off of it if they put me in there, make it clear that I had nothing to do with that.
I can't believe that he is pushing that so hard and pushing the people in his church to go to it.
And he's proud of this.
He puts this out.
That says Twitter.
He's the one who put that picture out there.
Some of our church ladies had the new movie Melania that includes my prayer for the president and the first lady.
Yeah.
Yeah, every time I see that, I think of the fiddler on the roof.
Is there a prayer for the czar?
Yes.
God, bless and keep the czar far away from us.
But anyway, Lutnik again.
Sorry, not Lutnik, but this is Lithwick who's talking about Bondi's theatrics.
It's nothing but a protection racket that preys on everybody who's not a part of that club.
And again, I said Dana Lesch has no love for Pam Bondi because Pam Bondi despises the Constitution, especially the Second Amendment.
Lithwick On Bondi's Theatrics00:04:23
And so Dana Lesh said, this is one of the most embarrassing things I've ever witnessed from a lawmaker.
Republicans, Democrats were asking her about Epstein and the Republicans.
It wasn't just Massey.
You're talking about Jim Jordan.
You're talking about Brandon Gill.
He said, more conservatives than Pam Bondi because they'd never been for gun control like her.
If you want to sit here and introduce the Dow into it, let's go ahead and talk about your positions on red flag laws and universal background checks, Attorney General.
She was asked why she has not prosecuted the people that we know who are in these emails.
And she tries to deflect.
She's not savvy enough, though, to do that.
She has no political acumen.
She's not savvy enough to take that tone and try to spin it like that.
It was disastrous, she said.
Every time she was asked a tough question, she would be like, well, you have Trump derangement.
The person who kept bringing it back to the hearing, kept bringing Trump back to the hearing, was her.
She said she was the only one that was bringing up Trump, but she was always Trump this and Trump that.
She said it was one forced error after unforced error about the entire thing.
Meanwhile, how does Fox News handle this?
Well, crickets, basically.
This is Mediaite.
They went through and they totaled up the number of mentions on Wednesday morning of Jeffrey Epstein as all this stuff was happening.
On MSNBC, they mentioned Jeffrey Epstein's name 300 times in three hours of Attorney General Pam Bondi's House Judiciary Committee hearing.
CNN mentioned during those hearings, CNN mentioned it 150 times.
Fox mentioned it three times.
Basically, they made it disappear.
And then, of course, what Breitbart does is they bring in the worst of the worst, Lutnick, and they start talking about how he's going to make all this money for America by automating everything.
No jobs for the rest of us, but for he and his Luciferian friends.
We'll be right back.
Night show.
Whether you're feeling like the blues or blue grass, APS Radio has you covered.
Check out a wide variety of channels on our app at apsradio.com.
Well, as I said at the beginning of the program, talking about Mike Johnson and the amazing lies that he's pulling off here, we look at the Trump people.
National Emergency Shenanigans00:10:23
It's almost funny if it wasn't so criminal, the things that they're doing.
Now, what Mike Johnson is trying to do is he's trying to stop other people in Congress from taking back the power that Trump usurped over taxation.
That's the key power of Congress, the power of the purse.
And he just declared a phony emergency.
Everybody knows it's a phony emergency.
And that is before the Supreme Court right now.
And I don't know what is taking him so long.
It's an open and shut case, quite frankly.
But anyway, they have people in Congress who are trying, they want to be able to bring up motions on the floor and say that they're going to stop these new tariffs that Trump puts in.
And he's trying to stop it by this kind of fictional thing about how do you measure a day.
Isn't that amazing?
And in the backdrop of all this, I can't understand why the Supreme Court hasn't already come up with a decision on this because Trump is bragging about the fact that he raised tariffs on Switzerland because a phone call from one of Switzerland's leaders.
He says, I didn't really like the way she talked to me.
Isn't that amazing?
That's the basis.
It's not something that has to do with economics.
It isn't anything that has to do with national security.
It is about the fact that he doesn't like the way she talked to him.
Like I said before, his geopolitical planning and the things that he's doing in terms of geopolitics is nothing but egopolitics.
And these tariffs don't have anything to do with economics.
They're egonomics.
He said on Tuesday that he raised tariffs on Switzerland after a phone call with the country's former president saying he didn't approve of the way that she talked.
He said, so the tariffs were at 30%.
I really didn't like the way she talked to us.
So instead of giving her a reduction, I raised it to 39%.
This is exactly why you don't want somebody like this in the office of president, but you don't, especially don't want one person doing the setting the rates.
This is why tax rates should be, and it is a tax, by the way, in spite of their lies about that.
You want that to be done by Congress.
He said, she just rubbed me the wrong way.
I'll be honest with you.
Democrats then said his comments were an admission that his tariff policies are not about national security.
No, they're not about national security.
They're not about economics.
They're about egonomics.
It's not about even the trade deficit.
And it certainly isn't about making Americans great again.
You notice he says America, but he doesn't say Americans.
This is an America without Americans being involved in it.
In the case of Switzerland, he increased the tariffs because, let me check my notes.
He didn't like the way the Swiss leader, quote, talked to me, said the Democrats in a statement.
Republicans must join Democrats to end this reckless behavior.
I agree.
The U.S. and Switzerland reached a trade agreement in November to reduce tariffs on Swiss imports from 39% to 15%.
On Tuesday, three House Republicans joined with Democrats voting against banning members' ability to call snap votes to repeal the president's tariffs.
So in other words, what Speaker Johnson is trying to do was to stop them from having a vote to question Trump's tariffs.
He can just impose these things at will, according to Speaker Johnson.
So the three who push back, yes.
That's the level of 40 chess is you insult him, and it's entirely emotional.
Yeah, it's egonomics.
So it was Thomas Massey, Kevin Kiley, and Don Bacon.
Unfortunately, Don Bacon isn't coming back.
He's had enough of this stuff.
Trump used declarations of national emergencies.
Again, all this stuff is phony.
You know, I don't like how they talk to me.
So I'm going to bump this up.
We got a national emergency because of trade deficit.
No, we don't.
You know, if you want to talk about deficits being a national emergency, it is the budget deficit that is a national emergency.
He doesn't care at all about the budget deficit, but he doesn't want to have a trade deficit with anybody.
Again, the guy doesn't understand economics or anything else.
The Supreme Court is also considering the legality of using a provision under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Again, this has absolutely no merit whatever.
The Marquette Law School poll found that 63% of respondents want the Supreme Court to restrict the president's authority to impose tariffs.
So what he was doing, again, gets to the point.
Like I said, they're not even good liars.
They're not even good when they try to shut this stuff down.
They come up with things that are absolutely insane.
And that's the way it was characterized by many people.
Absolutely insane.
Trying to pretend that a day is not a day.
What a difference a day makes.
24 little hours.
Almost got that to play that.
Mike Johnson lost a key procedural vote Tuesday night when he tried to delay future votes on Trump's ability to levy tariffs with a rule that rewrote what constitutes a day in order to delay a vote on Trump's tariff emergency.
This is how sick this sycophant Mike Johnson is.
And again, look at how this guy who presents himself out as a Christian, how he is doing everything he can to cover up for these pedophiles.
Isn't that amazing?
You see, he just meant it as like a sentiment for era.
It's the day of Trump right now.
That's right.
Trump Day.
So here's what it said in the bill.
This is reading from the bill.
Section number 19 provides that each day during the period from February the 10th through July 31st, 2026, shall not constitute a calendar day.
Each day shall not be a calendar day for the purposes of Section 202 of the National Emergencies Act with respect to a joint resolution terminating a national emergency declared by the president.
So again, why is that there?
Well, they have twisted and inverted the Emergencies Act so many different ways.
It's the same thing they do, the Constitution all the time.
They turn it inside out, upside down.
Congress has to vote to renew each emergency declaration annually, and they have to approve a new emergency after 15 days.
See, they didn't do any of that stuff.
First of all, we don't have an emergency.
We've had trade deficits that have been around this amount for quite a long time.
It does not constitute an emergency.
And then, even if it were an emergency, they're supposed to have a vote within 15 days of the new emergency.
And so none of this was done.
Same way that they declare war with Venezuela.
Everything is thrown out.
So again, this is worse than daylight savings time.
This is calendar day lying time from Mike Johnson.
The rule would have allowed Trump's emergency declarations to stand through July by simply declaring and denying the existence of time, said Thomas Massey.
And he got it exactly right.
He said that the speaker is trying to pass a resolution that literally says a day is not a day, just to avoid voting on the emergencies that underpin the tariffs.
Smoke and mirrors.
No, it's lies and fraud is what it is.
It's so absurd you can't even joke about it.
It is a level that even parodies wouldn't go to.
I saw this and mentioned it briefly on Wednesday, and I thought, I got to go back and do a little bit more research on this because that just doesn't make any sense.
They're going to say that calendar days are not days for six months or whatever it is.
And yet, that's exactly what it is.
Only Mike Johnson could come up with something that devious and that stupid and that corrupt.
Former House Republican.
It goes well beyond what the meaning of is is.
What's the meaning of days?
Yeah.
I think they need to spell days with a D-A-Z-E, right?
House Republican Justin Amash shared Massey's post and added, to vote yes on this would have been absolutely insane.
Yet nearly every Republican voted to pretend that a day is not a day.
Think about that.
All but three of them, and one of them not running for re-election.
Two wolves in a sheep voting on what a day is.
It's so crazy.
It is what they will not do to curry favor with Trump.
It's absolutely amazing.
You know, they will cover up for pedophiles.
They will try to redefine what a day is.
Congress needs to be able to debate on tariffs, said Don Bacon, who's one of the ones, one of the three Republicans who vote against this.
And stop and think about it.
You know, we had, of course, what was it?
It was in terms of the Epstein files, it was Thomas Massey and three women, Nancy Mace, Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Green.
Well, Marjorie Taylor Greene's gone.
The other two voted for this stuff to redefine a day.
Isn't that amazing?
But Don Bacon didn't.
He said, we need to be able to debate tariffs.
Tariffs have been a net negative for the economy, and they are a significant tax that American consumers, manufacturers, and farmers are paying.
Article 1 of the Constitution, look at that, he's talking about the Constitution, places authority over taxes and tariffs with Congress for a reason.
But for too long, we've handed that authority to the executive branch.
Kevin Kiley, who voted against redefining a day, said, I don't think the House should be limiting the authority of members and enlarging the power of leadership at the expense of our members.
Ceo's Party Balloon Mystery00:07:39
And that's what this does.
So I think it's important for the House as an institution to push back against this.
Well, fortunately, because those three Republicans joined with the Democrats, they were able to shut it down.
And so it would have made it impossible to vote on Trump's tariffs until August.
Same kind of stuff that Johnson was doing to try to stop any votes about the Epstein thing.
So again, there was one guy, a fourth guy, that said he was going to do it, Tom McClinick.
And there was a similar resolution back in September.
He backed out of that one and backed out of this one as well.
It's completely spineless, as are the Guardians of the Pedophiles, the GOP.
Well, we had this strange report about something happening in El Paso.
And it really is strange.
And again, we don't really know what it is, just like you had all these strange things about drones in New Jersey and other places in the Northeast.
It was about a year or so ago.
It was before Trump became president, I think.
But anyway, it is another one of those deals.
National Security, they're not going to tell you.
Some people are going to play it up as UFOs.
And so we've had a lot of different explanations about this.
Futurism's headline was, I thought, the best one.
You are not prepared for what actually shut down the El Paso airport.
But let's just say it involves a military mega laser shooting something down.
And then that's the other part of it, right?
First of all, there's the mega laser and they shot that down.
But what they shot down, we've had a lot of different stories about what that was.
Was it a drone from the cartels?
That's one story that came from the White House.
And then they pulled it back and said, oh, no, it was just a party balloon.
Don't want to alarm anybody.
It's like a party balloon.
You use this gigantic laser and you shut down all air traffic control for a party balloon.
And then you've got some people who have put up, you see a little dot that's on the horizon and say, it was a UFO.
And look, there's little dots that are coming out of this.
So it was a mothership UFO.
And they shot the laser at it.
I don't know if they claim that they shot it down or not, but always somebody wants to make it a flying saucer.
And so according to CBS News, the bizarre airspace closure came under orders from FAA Administrator Brian Bedford.
Bedford made the call after learning that the Pentagon planned to unleash high-energy counter-drone laser weapons at Fort Bliss, situated right next to the El Paso International Airport.
Fox News reported that military personnel had shot down a rogue party balloon like you'd see at a child's birthday party.
Maybe it was a gender reveal or something, right?
Near El Paso after misidentifying it as a foreign drone.
Whether this was done using the Pentagon's mega laser is unclear at the moment, but it would be a wild coincidence if this was not the case.
And so again, further muddying the water is the Trump administration's claims that the Pentagon had taken action to disable a vague cartel drone incursion right before the airspace shutdown.
So we've yet to see any evidence that that is the case.
But again, the UFO crowd is there as well, as we see over and over again.
One thing that I talked about on Wednesday that I wanted to come back and revisit, because I think it's important, is the story about AI.
And there's been a lot of pushback.
This is a story, again, as I pointed out, it was by an AI company CEO, Matt Schumer.
And his company actually is called Other Side AI.
Their product that they put out is something called HyperWrite.
And it is there as an AI writing assistant, which has caused a lot of people to say, if you look at this, this is another one of these AI CEOs telling us that their product is going to be godlike and everybody's going to be, you know, it's going to be the only thing left standing.
So you better get in line and start making friends with it and that type of thing.
We've seen that over and over again going to the federal government, people like Sam Altman of questionable integrity.
This is a guy who was going around not that long ago before he weaseled his way into open AI control.
He had this orb and he was going to give you cryptocurrency if you let him create, put you in his database that he evidently was putting together one to sell to government.
So you wanted to have an eye scan of you.
So he had this orb like a giant eyeball.
And if you'd let him scan your eyeballs and put you in his biometric database, he'd give you a couple of tokens and his new cryptocurrency, that kind of guy.
And so we've seen over and over again this parade of AI CEOs going to Congress saying, this is going to be the biggest thing ever in the world.
And you're going to need to have it because the Chinese want to have it as well.
So you've got to give us a lot of money to make sure that we're there first.
And we've got this creating this arms race scenario thing.
And then the other aspect of it is it is so powerful that it's very dangerous.
And so you need to have responsible people like me that's going to do it.
You can't let my competitors do it.
You've got to put some regulation in there to keep them from getting involved in this.
And so it gets immediately suspect when you start seeing these CEOs of AI companies making these pronouncements about what's going on.
To me, a lot of what the guy said rang true.
That's why I read it because of the rapid escalation of AI that we can see just looking at things like vocal mimicking and the images and videos and stuff like that that we have a use for with the program occasionally.
But a lot of people said, no, this is something that was written by AI because that's what this guy's company does.
Well, the comeback from one person is talking about it, and it went viral.
I mean, it had millions of views, a lot of people talking about it.
And I thought one of the most interesting quotes there was from the Washington Post, Megan McArdle.
She said, well, if this was an AI written article, it's evidence of his thesis being true because if an AI article could create that much stir, maybe that's exactly what he's talking about.
But I think on the flip side of this, we have seen people in the last, and this is another reason why I covered it, but I didn't have time to get to that much of it.
On the flip side, we have seen a lot of people who have no interest in growing an AI company.
As a matter of fact, they have washed out and said, I'm done with this stuff.
I don't want to have anything else to do with it.
It's going to be very harmful to our society, to humanity, and it's going to, there's so many negatives to it.
I don't want to have anything to do with it.
And so they're resigning and going public with it.
And they're not trying to sell fear and trying to prop up an AI arms race or anything like that.
And so that's on the other side of it.
An open AI engineer calls it an existential threat just days after Anthropic's safety lead quit over the same concerns.
And it's not just them.
It's also one of the founders of AI, the guy they refer to as the godfather of AI, Jeffrey Hinton, has been warning of the negative impacts on society as well in terms of not just employment, but so many different things.
Economic Policies and Life's Meaning00:02:05
Well, of course, the issue is, what do we do if we don't have jobs, right?
It's not just a matter of giving people universal basic income.
What is the meaning?
What gives meaning to life?
Is it our job?
our career, our bank account.
David Bonson has written a book about the importance of work and the importance of it from a Christian perspective.
And so we're going to talk to him about that.
Also, going to talk to him about some of the economic policies or maybe the egonomic policies of the Trump regime.
He is somebody who is very well versed, of course, in economics.
He runs the Bonson Group, which has $8 billion under asset of assets under management, I should say.
So we're going to take a break.
And when we come back, we're going to talk to David Bonson of the Bonson Group.
And I just want to tell everybody, I apologize that we've not been able to do comments and tips today.
Everything should be normal again on Monday.
So I apologize that we're not able to respond to you today, but that should be back on Monday.
So we'll be right back.
The David
Knight Show.
Well, joining us now is David Bonson.
He is the manager of $8 billion with a B dollar wealth fund.
David Bonson Joins Us00:02:49
He's also a prolific writer.
He is a contributing writer for National Review.
He serves on the National Review Institute board.
He's named one of America's top financial advisors by Barron's, Forbes, and the Financial Times.
He's also regularly on Fox News and Fox Business, as well as a contributor to World Magazine.
And I wanted to talk to David about several issues.
First of all, his expertise, of course, is in economics, but he also is a published Christian author.
He has some perspectives on the meaning of life and how to find life's meaning in your work and other things.
So we want to touch on that as well.
He had a rebuttal to a piece that was done on the Atlantic talking about the isolation that has become characteristic of our society.
So joining us now is David Bonson.
Thank you so much for joining us, David.
Well, thank you so much for having me.
Pleasure to be with you.
Thank you.
Let's talk a little bit about this piece from The Atlantic.
I thought it was pretty amazing.
And it began with an anecdote, as most of these stories do.
This is a guy, he's in a restaurant, I think it was North Carolina.
And he says he's sitting there and he's seeing one person after the other come into the restaurant, grabbing a paper bag and going out.
There's not really any interaction.
You know, there's not a group of people coming in and having a meal at a table.
They're not even really interacting with the people behind the counter.
And he wrings his hand and says, this is awful.
This is what is happening to American society.
And he said he talked to them that it was a very bustling place before the pandemic.
And yet he believed that it was some kind of a problem of capitalism.
What did he say the problem was?
How did we get to this?
Yeah, and what the author ends up doing is concluding that it wasn't a problem of markets.
It was rather markets adjusting to what the problem was with the culture, that the society moving towards increased alienation, a decreased value on community, on being together.
And of course, that was an opening anecdote to what was a really longer piece.
I did a whole podcast at my National Review Capital Record podcast about the broader subject of how do we reverse this trend of greater alienation and isolation in society.
And one of the points I make is that this restaurant's not going to go out of business just because people don't want to go out to eat together anymore.
So they're going to shift to do more deliveries and DoorDash and to go orders and some of the other things.
So the business of the restaurant might find a market mechanism that maintains some cash flow.
Societal Trends and Isolation00:11:22
But the societal issue that undergirds it is really the challenge.
And I want to make the argument that markets are not causing the problem.
They're responding to the problem.
We don't blame markets when thousands of people go out together for big, successful concert events.
We don't give markets the credit for that.
But that's an example of markets accommodating a societal trend for the togetherness of what was the successful Taylor Swift concert tour a couple years ago.
The point I think you're bringing up, David, is that there was a societal trend taking place before COVID of people valuing community and togetherness less, and COVID exacerbated it.
And it's a trend that we ought to be very concerned about.
I absolutely agree.
And of course, my listeners know that I was a pandemic skeptic before, during, and especially after.
I mean, even the people who are pushing this on us say, well, we did our best.
We just did the wrong thing.
And that was, as you point out, it was a trend that had been happening for quite some time.
And it was actually wargaming and simulations that they had done since two months before 9-11 to lock everybody down and to keep everybody locked down until you got their special formula.
So I was skeptical of that all along.
And I've seen the ways that this has been used and how it has advanced a lot of the, let's say, the agenda.
Because when you look at that, as well as some things like universal basic income and compare that to the stimulus checks, seems to me like there was a lot that was going on with that that was pushing us down this very bad path of isolation and dependency on the government.
And it doesn't surprise me to see the Atlantic take the approach that when the government gaslit and forced a lockdown and isolation, that they would then blame people who responded to that as businesses trying to stay alive.
Well, I believe that the pandemic response is unforgivable, outrageous.
I think there were some people who were better intentioned than others, that all of it still, you know, you don't judge a policy by its intentions.
You judge it by its results and it was bad results.
But the lockdowns and pandemic issue ended a long time ago.
And one of the things Derek points out in the Atlantic article he wrote a year ago is that the worst year at 2021 was very bad for this.
Then 22 was bad.
And then it got worse in 23.
No one was locked down by 2023.
So what you see is this sort of craving of people dining alone.
Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone, was written in the year 2000.
That was 25 years ago.
That was well before the pandemic.
The death of community is a postmodern and secular problem, not merely a byproduct of the very bad COVID policies.
And I believe that societies that don't value mediating institutions like and family end up being very lonely societies.
Oh, I agree.
Yeah, it was a trend that was already in place.
And this accelerated it and intensified it significantly, I think.
And we're living with that.
I guess that was one of my thing I was most surprised about was how rapidly this accelerated trends like that that we already saw in place and kind of solidified them.
You know, in my son's generation, almost everybody meets their spouse or whatever that they know, have met them online initially.
And there used to be places where you could actually go and have a human-to-human interaction with somebody rather than primarily being online.
And it's such a strange thing to see that.
And it really is that kind of isolation.
And many have bragged about that being the design.
You know, they want to have like a ready player one environment where we're all just sat there in our virtual world, you know, communicating with people on the outside rather than having any kind of in-person communication.
That's exactly right.
Dining is but one example.
All sorts of various community activities.
You know, we can talk about the role that COVID played in exacerbating it, but nothing has exacerbated it quicker than screens, than electronics.
And I think there's a very healthy way in which one can use electronics for productive use.
There's plenty of benefits that come from it for people staying in touch.
It's an easier way to send your long-lost aunt and uncle on the other side of the country family photos.
There's no reason to be Luddite or a technophobe about things, but to the extent that people have replaced human interaction with screen time, it is entirely unhealthy.
Well, it's one of those things where because it makes it easier and available to not actually be in person and it takes some of the discomfort of some of the aspects that you would have in meeting with somebody in person, takes a little bit of that out.
It is kind of seductive in that regard.
And I think we're going to see a lot more of that as AI intrudes more and more into our lives.
But let's talk a little bit about the solution because you wrote a whole book really about a perspective of life full-time, work and the meaning of life.
Give us a little bit of an overview of that.
Well, I try to make the argument from creational theology, from the very beginning of the world as to what God told us as to why he created us, that our endeavors here on earth matter.
That work is not just something we do for transactional benefit to help feed us or sustain us, but that it is a venue for creative and productive outlet.
That in producing goods and services that enhance quality of life, we can enable our dreams to come true, our passions, we can develop our skills in ways that bring tremendous meaning and joy to our lives.
This is a productive, proactive view of human agency versus a reactive and I think very sedentary one where people are sitting still waiting for things to happen to them.
Yes.
And one allows for humans to experience great joy and meaning and dignity, and it reflects the created intent and character of our creator.
And one is depressing.
One leads to isolation.
One leads to this societal malady that we're dealing with now.
Work is not the source of our problems.
It is the solution.
Absolutely.
And it's one more aspect here where we can see the wisdom of God, the wisdom of the Bible in the sense that this is what we were designed for.
And we know that that is very effective.
As a matter of fact, just recently we had Dr. Oz out there saying, we need to keep people working longer and retiring later.
So the cynics came in and said, see, he just doesn't want us to have a nice life, you know, and yet he was pointing out that study after study have shown that if you have a fulfilling job, as a matter of fact, people who are doing work that is not menial or reproductive typically naturally work for a longer period of time until health makes it impossible for them to do that.
But if it's something like some kind of an intellectual pursuit or something like that, that's a part of their work or some kind of creative process, they typically do work longer.
And I'm thinking of the many conductors that I've seen who continue conducting the symphony workers in the 80s and 90s.
And it keeps them young and alive.
It's not just waving their arms around, you know, getting that kind of exercise, but it's something that engages their spirit and their intellect.
And so there is a truth to that because there is a truth to what God said.
He designed us to work.
He designed us to tend the garden.
Work has become more difficult because after the fall, God cursed that work, and it has now been deliberately made more difficult.
And yet, there are ways that we can still find our purpose in it, even if it is tainted by the curse of sin.
And I will say what I think is a little bit more biblically precise language in Genesis 3.
We don't generally talk about children as being cursed.
There's pains of childbirth now, but that verse came before in Genesis chapter 3.
The curse to the woman was the pains of childbirth.
It was not the children.
And the curse to the man was not work.
It was the sweat of the brow.
It was the thorns and thistles.
You're right that with the taint of sin, work now.
Hang on a second.
David, you're breaking up there a little bit.
We can pull this back here.
I'm not sure why.
Yeah.
Do I sound okay now?
Was it breaking up when you heard it, Lance, or was it just on my end?
It was breaking up.
It was.
Okay, it's okay now.
Yeah, it was just, it was cutting out.
So we didn't get the last of that.
So let's pick up the picture.
Let me pick it up from the sentence before.
We'll edit that together.
Yeah.
I think that the man that we talk about thorns and thistles, that it is a curse that now is going to be accompanying work, but that the underlying work itself remains a blessing, just like children remain a blessing.
Sin polluted a lot of things, but in God's redemptive plan to restore all of us to an edenic condition, I believe that we err to believe that work itself was cursed.
Work and family both predated the fall.
And that perspective, I think, is important theologically.
Yes, exactly right.
Yeah, it is work is harder for us now, but even hard work like that, difficult work has its reward, you know, just like the pain of childbirth, and yet there is a reward of the children as well.
And so both of those things are there.
The process is painful, but the reward that we were built for is still fundamentally there.
Is that the basis then of the thesis of your book, Full Time?
Work and the Meaning of Life?
It is that there is not 50% of people who are made to work and 50% who are made to consume.
That because all of us were made in the image of God, and He did this, by the way, because He loves us, not because He hates us, that we all have an ability to work.
Some have different skills and interests and abilities and backgrounds and whatnot, but that there is no one God made not in His image.
Housing Imbalance & Usury00:14:43
And if part of being an image bearer of God is the creative, productive, innovative capacity that He has, then this means that what I'm speaking to doesn't apply to just Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
It applies to all of us in some capacity to go and wake up every day with the blessing of being able to be productive, the four-letter word we call work.
I agree with that.
That's great.
And we should all, I think we'd all be better off if we had that perspective.
Let's talk about what many of us work for, and that is a roof over our heads.
And you talked about the root of the housing problem in a recent article that you had.
Trump's got one idea of how he thinks he could, actually, he's got several.
He came up with 50-year mortgage life and denturement to the mortgage company.
That was one of them.
Of course, manipulating interest rates.
And now he's got the idea of prohibition of institutional investors.
And you take issue with that.
Tell us why you think that is the wrong approach to it and what the real root of the housing problem is.
Well, I take issue with almost all of them, although that one might be among the worst.
We have a tremendous problem of inadequate supply.
Housing is too expensive because we need more of it.
And this is basic economics.
When supply stays level, but the demand curve moves up, then you get higher prices.
And so you need an equilibrium between supply and demand in order to avoid prices going higher, let alone higher than the rate of inflation itself.
House prices have outpaced wage growth and job growth and economic growth for some time.
And that is unsustainable and it creates an affordability price problem.
Vice President Kamala Harris, when she was running for president, said, well, I'll address the affordability issue by giving every American $25,000.
President Trump has said, or every American wants to buy a first-time home.
President Trump said, I'm going to address it by having Fannie and Freddie buy a ton of mortgage bonds so it creates more supply of mortgage financing and pushes interest rates down.
Both things feed demand, but do nothing about supply.
And when he talks about supply, he says the institutional people that have come in and built new homes and bought homes have now made it more unaffordable.
The reality is, first of all, the largest institutional holder owns about 60,000 homes, 30,000 that they own to sell, 30,000 they own to rent.
This is in a nation with 90 million homes.
Some of the cities with the worst home price appreciation, meaning the lowest, have the highest level of institutional ownership.
Some of the cities that have the highest home price appreciation and the biggest unaffordability problem have no institutional ownership.
So there's no real empirical evidence that this is a factor at all.
But what it does do is tell Americans who they're allowed to buy and sell their home to and from.
Yeah, exactly.
It's just outrageous.
And so it's not only not addressing the problem, but it is a solution that is outside of market principles that most of us on the right have believed in for a long time.
That's right.
And you point out in your article, American Enterprise Institute going through and looking at the data behind it, that 80% of all institutionally owned homes exist in just 5% of U.S. counties.
So again, that's not the systemic issue for prices because they're seeing this everywhere.
And he also pointed out that not a single country in America has even has 10% institutional ownership share.
So clearly.
Yeah, that's not the issue, clearly, when you look at the numbers.
But again, what he's talking about doing is, as you point out, it's going to feed demand.
I look at this in a sense like the car issue.
Look at how unaffordable cars have gotten.
I talked about this week the electric vehicles and how they were bragging that this new type of electric vehicle would be priced at under $60,000.
I thought, how is that a selling feature?
That is so incredibly expensive.
I went back and I looked at the average car price and adjusted it for inflation.
And that's going from 1974.
So the last 50 years or so, that is double what it would be if you just adjusted for the inflation, for the devaluation of the dollar.
And so there's something else going on here.
We know that the price of cars, it's not like it has a supply issue.
It's really a pricing issue because the car manufacturers would be more than happy to ramp this up.
But it's all the regulations that are put onto the cars are making it very expensive.
What about the regulations that make houses more expensive?
Because they've got a lot of mandated stuff with regulations from that standpoint as well.
How does that affect the supply side in your view?
Well, it's a huge issue.
And it doesn't just affect the supply side in getting priced in.
It affects the supply side in not getting new supply.
Because some of these regulations are so expensive that they simply cannot build.
Or it takes so long to build that you end up not keeping up with growing demand.
There's a few things that all played into this.
And I'll do this very quickly for your listeners.
But you had the financial crisis.
There was a big glut of supply relative to demand.
And when the bubble burst, it was very difficult to get capital investment into housing.
And then they came in with a lot of new regulations about the banks, what they were and weren't allowed to do.
And so there was so much excess inventory that had to be worked through as millions of Americans had bought homes they couldn't afford.
So that was going to set everything back a few years.
And it made a lot of sense why there wouldn't be a lot of people lining up to build new homes in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis.
But then combined with that, demographically at the time, we had millennials becoming adult age and normally would be buying a home, starting a family, but they were getting married five years, 10 years later than their parents did.
They were having kids five, 10, 12 years later.
So it put a big increase of demand on multifamily homes and a big decrease in demand on single family.
But then a few more years go by.
It turns out they do want to get married.
They do want to have kids, even though they're now into their 30s instead of their 20s.
And so that is what it is.
But lo and behold, now the housing crisis purge is long gone.
A lot of millennials have gotten older.
There's a huge demand for single family housing, but we haven't built any new homes in 10 years.
Then the COVID moment happens.
Interest rates go to zero.
There's tons of demand, low price financing.
Everybody wants to move to a bigger home, and we don't have the supply.
It pushes prices up.
Now you have a ton of people own homes at very low interest rates and they don't want to sell.
They think they've made a bunch of money on their home, but now all of the young people entering the workforce can't afford to buy a home.
There's three or four things involved there.
Some are more dominant than others, but I put all of them together to say it isn't a simplistic thing.
People that want to blame Blackstone for the housing crisis or blame Fannie Frankie for the unaffordability thing or just blame the Fed or whatever.
There's a lot of different things going on here, but the fundamental solution is that you don't have enough supply.
And where you do have states that didn't give in to SECA and the environmental regulations and burdensome permitting and zoning requirements, they were able to keep in front of it by building a lot of new supply.
Now, house prices got more expensive in Phoenix and Dallas and Charlotte and Miami and Nashville too, even though they were much better behaved states about building new supply, but that's because their demand was huge.
And so thank God they built a lot of new supply because they had a lot of new demand because a lot of people left blue states to move to red states that were behaving themselves.
Yeah.
Fundamentally, you look at building code and the massive expansion of regulations.
Much of that being driven by Washington, pushing out regulations for people, do this, do that.
It's going to be greener if you do this.
And so there's a lot of those types of things that are there.
And when you talk, you brought up the concern about Blackstone and people get Blackstone and BlackRock mixed up and you point that out.
But I think that kind of plays into people's suspicion because BlackRock made so much money out of the derivatives market that created the real estate crash that was at the heart of the real estate crash stuff.
They made so much money with that.
Everybody's think, oh, they're going to do something about that again.
I think that's a big part of this policy that I would characterize Trump's policy as a mixture of demagoguery and Democrat economics.
What do you think?
Well, I think there's a lot of demagoguery.
I'm not sure what BlackRock had to do with the derivatives market in the financial crisis, right?
They were just a passive asset manager that had very little fingerprints around all that.
There's a lot people could criticize BlackRock for.
There's certain things they could compliment BlackRock for.
I have a pretty thoughtful take on the good, bad, and ugly of BlackRock, but they have almost nothing to do with housing.
But Blackstone is a larger.
I don't blame people for getting BlackRock and Blackstone mixed up.
That's an easy enough mistake to make.
I do, however, blame people for still holding on to the class warfare narrative when it has been corrected, when it has been pointed out.
Hey, we're not talking about BlackRock guys.
We're talking about Blackstone, but the demagoguery is too important to them to let go of.
I want to hold on to truthful narratives when we critique public policy.
And I don't like seeing my friends on the right hold on to untruthful narratives just because it fits a demagoguery that has become baked in the cake.
Yeah, I've said many times the The Republicans are the Democrats of my youth.
The Democrats are the Marxists of my youth.
We have drifted in that direction on both sides.
And so it is kind of interesting, as I said, kind of the demagoguery as well as the Democrat policies.
And you point out in your op-ed piece about how this sounds like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Even Trump, I think, sounds like it.
By the way, if I'm being fair here, some of it does not sound like them.
It's literally them.
It was, you know, banning institutional ownership of homes, limiting credit card fees.
That was actual legislation that these two socialist senators wrote.
Yeah, well, you know, I think that there is something to say about usury laws.
I think that was something that served us well as a society in the past.
I think there's been a huge imbalance in terms of what they actually have to pay to get their money from the Fed or whatever and what they charge people.
I think we've gotten into loan shark territory there.
So I'm kind of sympathetic to putting something on about usury.
But of course, what Trump is talking about is a one-year moratorium on it.
And to me, that is no different than a kind of a come-on rate to get you to switch your credit card company that we've seen over and over again.
One-year moratorium on lowering the rates really doesn't do much to help.
You can actually get a better deal than that with changing credit card companies.
Yeah, I don't believe that the credit card companies have anything to do with usury laws biblically defined.
I mean, the concept of not having exorbitive interest, but in terms of usury being a personal law with one's neighbor who is destitute and hard up and not taking advantage of them for commercial purposes, credit cards, the interest cost is zero when you pay your bill every month.
This is revolving and non-purpose credit that one lender in America has $7 billion of bad debt write-downs per year because this is totally unsecured lending.
And so the cost of credit cards to low-income and new borrowers or maybe people with troubled credit past, the cost of it has to factor in just for one bank, $7 billion of people that don't pay their credit card bill back.
So my problem is if I'm afraid of usury, which it sounds like you and I both are, I believe this creates a lot more usury because when the banks stop generating credit cards because they're going to lose money, their net profit on the credit card business is somewhere between 7% and 9%.
When they then say, okay, well, now we can't charge more than 10% and we're going to lose $7 billion on bad borrowers.
So we're just not going to extend credit cards to a whole segment of the population that needs them for building credit, for expenditures, for medical emergencies, what have you.
Where are those people going to go?
They're going to go to real loan sharks, to pay lenders, to other higher cost, higher usury expenditures.
So that's why I opposed it when Bernie Sanders wrote this bill last year.
And while I want to see cost of credit be proportionate, there's one thing that really does hold the credit card companies in line, and that is the competition.
But what President Trump's trying to do is eliminate competition and make everybody charge the same amount.
Why Credit Card Caps Are Risky00:03:38
That's not going to help.
No, yes.
I would argue, though, I would say one more thing.
I'd say if they've got that big a bad debt issue, as you pointed out, maybe they're not doing due diligence when they extend credit.
So maybe that should be a problem.
Due diligence on first-time home on credit card borrowers.
They have no assets and often no income and no credit.
So the due diligence means not giving them credit.
And society hates that even more.
It's a risky form of credit, and what they do to pay for it, pay for the lack of due diligence.
Because this is not like a home underwriting when you're looking at income verification and you have an underlying asset you can repossess.
What they do is they charge 20% because they're going to recover the bad debt from good payers with a higher interest rate.
That's the business model.
And if you take away that, then you can say, hey, we are going to have to do harder underwriting.
And that means we're not going to give about 2 million of you credit cards.
There's trade-offs.
Right.
Right.
Now, when you look at some of the other policies of Donald Trump in terms of economics, you wrote an op-ed piece for the National Review, and it was titled The Saddest Part of this Recent Economic Lunacy.
What is the economic lunacy in your view, and what is the saddest part of it?
Well, in that particular article, it was all in about a four-day period, I believe, where the president announced, and I'm going to say some really great economic things that the president has done and hopefully will do.
But what I was referring to there was the ban on institutional ownership.
We've already talked.
My opinions on credit card interest caps that we've already talked about.
That I'm going to make Fannie and Freddie go buy $200 billion of mortgage bonds to try to manipulate interest rates.
And then saying I'm going to tell our defense companies that they can't return capital to shareholders.
So our private companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and Boeing, that we're not going to allow them to reward investors with dividends and stock buybacks, as if somehow we're going to maintain our superiority as a defense industry if we can't attract capital.
And what causes you to not attract capital is treating capital poorly.
So he had all four of those ideas in about a five-day period.
I wrote an article at National Review criticizing all of it.
And yet, right now, I hear that the White House is very seriously considering indexing capital gains on primary residents to inflation.
That's a brilliant idea.
That's supply side.
That will enable people that want to sell a home but are holding it because of the tax burden, a tremendous tax relief that incentivizes the natural flow of activity that creates new available inventory in the housing market.
He, in his first term, reduced the corporate income tax from 35% to 21%.
In the Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, which had plenty of things in it I didn't like and plenty of things they didn't do enough.
They didn't cut spending enough, in my opinion.
But it has supply-side tax deductions to incentivize more business investment, full expensing, bonus depreciation, deduction for research and development.
So I'm not a constant critic of the president's economic agenda, but I do want to call it out when some of the good things in his economic agenda are going to be impeded by the bad things in the economic agenda.
And where it comes from is impatience.
The Knowledge Problem00:06:57
It's the same thing that caused Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren to come up with these ideas.
The belief that government needs to do something now.
Most of the time when government does something now, they make it worse, not better.
Oh, yeah.
And you talk about that.
You talk about human action, human freedom.
You talk about some of the Austrian economists like Mises and Hayek and so forth.
The knowledge problem, and I've always said that about centralized control and centralized planning.
Even the smartest person doesn't have sufficient information to make these decisions like the marketplace does.
It's kind of the invisible hand that is there.
And yet, do you think that they will use the idea of artificial intelligence to attack that knowledge problem?
In other words, saying, well, we can sort through massive amounts of information as they can with AI.
They can go through and do audits of individuals and a lot of things like that to organize and find the needle in the haystack.
Are they going to then try to make that argument that we ought to let government do it with their artificial intelligence?
How do you see that breaking out?
If people don't fight back against this, they have no idea what kind of tyranny and statism is coming.
I agree.
Because the notion that all we're talking about, the knowledge problem means they don't know what questions to ask.
They don't know time and place circumstances.
They don't know the immediate context the way a person who runs a trucking company in Nebraska knows or a bakery in Des Moines, Iowa, that they have local access and thought process and history and whatnot at a very imminent proximate level, that those are the decision factors that matter most in what we do that Washington, D.C. can never have.
The idea that AI is going to give the government the ability to do it in a better way than the humans using their own language learning models and then the application from that knowledge that you could say, well, AI gave us more information, so we may as well let the information go to bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. because they're really smart.
Even if they get the information because of AI, it doesn't solve Hayek's knowledge problem as to what they do with that information, contextualized to one's own individual family, business, community, et cetera.
Buying into that argument is an invitation for statist tyranny.
I agree.
And I'm very concerned about the AI initiative.
That's one of the things that concerns me so much.
The Genesis Act and clearing the decks for AI to go basically unregulated for 10 years, because there's a great deal of harm that can be done by AI by the government.
There needs to be regulation of the government's use for AI, I think.
And that's one of the things that really concerns me a great deal.
We've talked about a lot of different things, and I really do appreciate your perspective on it, David.
And very interesting.
And I enjoy reading your articles.
I have not read your book yet, but I'm looking forward to doing that at some point in time.
I think we all need to get back to human interaction and the importance of person-to-person interactions, the family and the community and other things like that.
And I think all this, the new technologies being thrown at us, the rapidly increasing change is naturally pushing us away unless we fight against that tide.
And I think it's important for us to understand where we're being, where we're drifting to.
I used to go to Daytona Beach a lot with my family, and you could get pulled out with the undertow, not really realize how far you were out until the lifeguard whistled you in.
And so we're trying to act like a lifeguard and whistle people in from this drift that is taking us out to sea.
And I think you've got your finger on the pulse of this.
We have to get back to our interaction and our families and our relationship with God.
That's very true.
Thank you so much.
Amen.
I appreciate your kind words and I agree with you completely.
And I think it's a great analogy.
We don't want to get pulled away without realizing we're getting pulled away.
And yet also one of the greatest agents for change here is going to be us modeling the right behavior.
People, the society is not going to change if we're not changing, if we're not doing the right things.
Yes.
It starts with each and every one of us and then it goes out like a pebble being dropped in a pond, you know, that you get things right with yourself as much as you can, and that's going to move out to your family, your community.
It's really got to come from the bottom up.
It's got to happen one person at a time.
We are in agreement on that as well.
Thank you so much.
David Bonson at the Bonson Group, you have a website?
Yeah, so dividendcafe.com is the easiest one to remember.
That way people don't have to spell anything tricky like Bonson.
DividendCafe.com, plenty of my economic writing and investment writing and information there.
And then for those that are interested, Bonson.com is where all of my other material, theology, politics, all that fun stuff can be found.
Great.
And I'll spell it for them, B-A-H-S-E-N.
B-A-H-N-S-E-N.
Oh, okay.
There you go.
See, you just illustrated the point for us.
That's right.
I did it for you.
The good news is God gave me a last name that is easy to find on Google, but the bad news is he gave me a last name that has to be spelled on radio.
That's right.
Thank you so much, David.
Appreciate that.
Have a good day.
God bless.
The Common Man.
They created Common Core to dumb down our children.
They created Common Past to track and control us.
Their Commons project to make sure the Commoners own nothing and the Communist Future.
They see the Common Man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
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