Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dissect the inflation pandemic, noting a 9.1% rise that devastates the poor while benefiting debt holders, and condemn Federal Reserve money printing as a vicious cycle. They critique Dr. Anthony Fauci's claims on Fox News regarding vaccine efficacy versus transmission reduction, labeling his confidence scientifically absurd amidst alleged conspiracies to control citizens. The discussion extends to John Bolton admitting coup planning yet defending Trump's January 6th actions as merely disorganized, raising questions about Trump's judgment for hiring him, while Steve Bannon's testimony and potential First Amendment defenses for election fraud loom over future legal complications. Ultimately, the episode argues that systemic government failures and elite manipulation drive current economic and political crises. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Age and Natural Immunity00:14:35
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Heart of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein, the king of the caulks.
COVID, Jesus.
What's up, my brother?
Good to see you back home.
I like being in home studio.
Lesser than the hotel.
I can yell more.
Yeah, you sure can.
Your neighbors know you're a psychopath.
Whereas the hotel neighbors who has any idea.
All right.
Well, don't forget, of course, tomorrow morning, I'm jumping on a plane, headed out to Freedom Fest there in Las Vegas.
Gonna have a great time.
Bunch of great speakers.
Robbie the Fire Bernstein, you're out on the road a bunch, I know.
Summer port store this weekend, Atlanta and Nashville.
Big shows planned.
Come on out.
It's going to be a party.
Hell yeah.
All right.
And don't forget also Young Americans for Liberty, Revolution 22.
I'll be there.
Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Michael Malis, Glenn Jacobs, a ton of great people out there.
Can you plug that Freedom Fest comedy lineup?
Because that's so fucking cool to me.
Oh, yeah.
John Cleese is doing the comedy show.
Yeah, out at Freedom Fest.
I'll be giving a speech.
I think I'm on a panel.
And then we got this late night comedy show with Mr. Monty Python himself in the building.
So that should be very cool.
Looking forward to that.
All right.
So there's a few things that have been on my radar that I thought were pretty great and worth discussing a little bit.
Let's open up with this.
Our Lord and Savior, Dr. Truth Science, made what has become a rarer thing these days, a public appearance.
Excuse me.
He used to really love talking into the camera.
But anyway, not so much these days, but he did pop by this week on Neil Cavuto's show over at Fox News.
So let's throw right to that clip and check in with Dr. Fauci.
Clarify it, Neil.
There's no doubt that the vaccines themselves, particularly vaccine plus a booster, at the appropriate time when you become eligible for a booster for more than one booster.
If you're over 50 years old, you get eligibility for two boosters.
One of the things that's clear from the data, that even though vaccines, because of the high degree of transmissibility of this virus, don't protect overly well, as it were, against infection, they protect quite well against severe disease leading to hospitalization and death.
And I believe that's the reason, Neil, why at my age, being vaccinated and boosted, even though it didn't protect me against infection, I feel confident that it made a major role in protecting me from progressing to severe disease.
And that's very likely why I had a relatively mild course.
So my message to people.
Okay, let's pause it right here.
You know, look.
I'm not saying that Dr. Anthony Fauci is Satan.
I just want to preface by I'm not suggesting that he is Satan.
I saw him where his bat boy.
Yeah.
But well, I'm just, let's just look at it like this.
Let's say he was Satan.
Let's say that Dr. Fauci was the devil.
A lot of things make more sense.
That's all I'm saying.
Things fall into place, and you go, Oh, okay, of course.
Of course, this is what he's doing.
That's every inch of it.
Oh, of course, he signed off on the exception for Obama's, you know, what was it, an executive decision there that said that you can't fund the Wuhan lab in China.
And of course, he would have made sure that we did continue to fund that lab.
And of course, he would have pushed lockdowns and vaccines and all of this stuff.
Again, I'm not claiming he's Satan.
I have no firsthand knowledge of him, in fact, being the devil incarnate.
I don't have any evidence against it.
I'm merely saying that if you looked at the world through the lens of Dr. Fauci being the devil, the world makes a lot more sense than it does without that lens.
Do with that info what you will.
This is so evil, what he's saying, and it's such bullshit.
It's such bullshit.
Like he's just straight up fucking lying.
So, first, he says that, um, well, what we know of the vaccines is that they really work.
Um, now they don't work super well at stopping you from getting the virus.
That they don't work.
No acknowledgement of the fact that him and Joe Biden and all these other people promised that they did, and that's how they were sold to the American people.
But he goes, We know they work super well against preventing a severe disease, which he refers to as hospitalization and death.
Okay.
Now, again, he goes, The data is overwhelmingly clear on this.
It's like, what exactly are we even talking about?
I mean, I saw one study recently that said that just being double vaccinated originally gives you like maybe 5% protection against this virus.
I don't think that, you know, whatever.
But this is what he's going to claim: that we know for a fact.
Now, forget the fact that there are tons of examples at this point now of countries that were highly vaccinated that had their highest hospitalization numbers after being very highly vaccinated.
It doesn't seem to jive at all with the data that he's talking about.
But then, for him to pivot into this, this is literally the caricature of what we all make fun of people on Twitter doing.
You know what I mean?
Like this, this thing where, oh man, if it wasn't for the vaccine, I would have died.
This, this kind of like, um, it's an unfalsifiable anti-scientific claim.
You know, there's no way to say what would or wouldn't have happened.
It's absurd.
But he goes, I feel very confident that the reason I didn't have a severe COVID.
So, in other words, as he just said, he just defined it as hospitalization or death.
He's saying, I feel very confident that the reason I didn't have that is because I'm vaccinated and boosted.
Now, just to be clear, he says, at my age, you know, but he almost puts it out there in this way that's like, it sounds like he's almost suggesting, like, well, I mean, at my age, getting COVID, you know, you're very likely to be hospitalized or died, but I didn't.
So I'm very confident it was because of the vaccines.
The problem with that is that you would assume that of all people, Fauci should know something about COVID.
Like he should know at least what I know about it.
So, going back to the original alpha variant of COVID, which was much deadlier than these Omicron sub-variants that we're dealing with now, right?
There was in Fauci's age range, there was something like a 98% survival rate somewhere in the ballpark, probably between 98 and 99, something like that.
Now, for younger, healthier people, it was way higher than that.
But the survival rate, even in Fauci's age, was something like 98%.
For these Omicron variants, I don't know exactly what it is, but higher than that, higher than 98% is what you're going to be looking at, even in Fauci's age range.
So to get this and not die and say, well, I'm very confident that the reason I didn't die is because of some factor when you were starting with somewhere in the ballpark of a 98 plus percent chance of not dying.
Like you see how ridiculous that is, right?
It makes absolutely no scientific sense to say, well, I know what it is is this factor.
It's, it's on the level of like, you know, whatever.
If I, if I were to, you know, I eat oranges every day and then go, that's the reason why I didn't die from COVID.
I'm very confident that that's why COVID didn't kill me.
And you'd be like, Dave, I mean, COVID, the odds of COVID killing you were like astronomically small.
So what are you talking about here?
There's no way you can claim to know one thing is the reason why you did.
Now, Adden, he says, you know, hospitalized or die.
Okay, fine.
But still, if you look at the numbers, the overwhelming odds are that that wasn't going to happen to you anyway, right?
Is this controversial at all to say that if you get COVID, the overwhelming odds are you will not be hospitalized or die?
That's not to say it's impossible, but the overwhelming odds are that neither of those two things will happen.
So to say, I'm very confident.
Well, why?
What are you basing that on?
Nothing.
It's just completely absurd, just complete bullshit.
It's really something how much this guy, who like so many Americans look to, you know, in this time to explain what the fuck is going on.
We don't really know epidemiology.
Explain it to us.
And then he would say, oh, anyone questioning me is questioning science.
And then we'll just spit out this anti-scientific drivel nonsense.
All right.
Anything you want to add to that before we move on?
Yeah, I agree 100% with everything you said.
And I think it's also funny that he seems a little bit reluctant to even lie here, where he's using language such as, I'd almost have to pull up the transcript, but he's not making bold claims.
He's like, this might have helped.
Yes, I could have been sick.
I'm right.
I feel very confident that.
It's all very legal language of not actually making any claims.
That's a very good point because he's not saying this vaccine is the reason why I wasn't hospitalized.
He's not saying this vaccine will make sure you're not hospitalized.
He's not giving you any numbers.
It will reduce your risk of being hospitalized by X amount.
You know, the stuff that they used to love to say at the beginning.
They don't do any of that stuff anymore.
That's right.
They don't, they're not saying any of that anymore.
But now he'll say, I feel very confident that the reason I didn't die or go to the hospital was because of this.
It was because this contributed.
Yes.
It's like, it's all very loose.
And then also, I don't know, what's the most recent numbers?
They used to love telling us that 95% of the people, it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
Where are the numbers?
It's a good point.
It's a good point that they didn't go.
It's not like they went from, you know, like saying that number to saying some revised down number.
They just stopped.
You just, they never even told you that number turns out it was wrong.
They just stopped saying that.
Just stopped as if it never happened.
And the claim of an, yeah, I'll just say anti-vaccine people was always like, even if this is working, it's not going to work long term because you have variants.
So like they were right.
You know, I mean, firstly, the claim was, hey, it's not that good.
You're going to get in the way of natural immunity.
And it's not going to work long term.
And the not going to work long term, which was pointing out, hey, this isn't a winning strategy.
And don't shut down the economy for something that's not, you know what I mean?
It's not, it's not bulletproof and it's not going to work six months from now.
And so they were, I mean, there's no argument to be even made for that they were right about that.
Oh, and then on the other hand, Fauci was out there telling you that if you get the vaccine, you will not contract COVID and you can't spread COVID to other people.
And that actually the vaccine, this is back the original double vaccine, that it was very effective against variants.
That's how lucky you are to be eligible.
You're eligible.
Like it's a gift from God Himself.
Your kids are now eligible.
You might be eligible for even two boosters.
You're so lucky to be old and eligible.
That's how that's how good the booster works is you might be eligible for another one.
That's how that's how good these things work.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, let's keep playing.
People who seem confused because people who are vaccinated get infected, the answer is if you weren't vaccinated, the likelihood you would have more severe costs than you did have when you were vaccinated.
But you know, there are a lot of people looking at this, especially with this new strain.
I can't even keep up with it, doctor, or even know if I'm pronouncing it right.
This BA 2.75 or what have you.
It always seems to be mutating.
It always seems to be spreading.
Testing Accuracy Debate00:06:58
And yet the collective view of the world is we are over this.
Time to move on.
Time to live our lives.
Time to fly again.
We're no longer forcing those who are coming in from other countries that they've either been vaccinated or testing negative for the virus itself.
So how do you feel about all this?
Well, we are certainly not over it.
And I think that, you know, people have an understandable desire to put this in the rearview mirror and say we're through with it.
But that's just not the reality, Neil.
And when I say that, I don't mean to scare people to get people feel they have to dramatically alter their lives or do anything with mandating a thing like that.
We're not talking about that.
We're talking about making use of the available interventions that we have.
Let me give you an example.
Sure.
I don't understand.
So if you're saying we're not over it, then why aren't we doing all those things unless you were wrong the first time that you mandated all those things?
And in which case, that sounds like one of the biggest blunders ever made in human history.
And why are you now the person on the news who's explaining to me how we should be dealing with this epidemic?
You know, it really is right.
Like, it's unbelievable that the admission is right there.
You absolutely nailed it, right?
Like, it's like, okay, so we are.
So, should we have lockdowns?
You know, if there's still this thing, it's still a big problem.
Why are we not discussing lockdowns?
Oh, because you think what?
The costs of that would far outweigh the benefits.
All right.
Well, we had lockdowns once.
So, were you wrong about it then?
I mean, you know, it's just unbelievable.
I mean, you know, look, they'll always have something they can hide behind.
Oh, we have vaccines now, but we didn't have them then.
It's like, oh, right.
Except if you actually look at the data, whatever.
They're about to get into that.
So I actually will hold off on that point and let's just play that the rest of this clip and then we'll break it down.
That we have.
Let me give you an example.
67% of the people in this country are vaccinated.
We rank very low among developed and developing nations in the proportion that are vaccinated.
Of those who were vaccinated, only about half of them have gotten their first boost.
Again, we've got to do better than that.
We're giving the virus the opportunity to continue to spread in our community.
And if we do simple things, pause again.
I'm sorry.
Yes.
He already said at the beginning of this that the vaccine is not prevented, is not preventing you from getting sick or spreading.
So, what the fuck is he talking about?
Yep.
This is how unbelievable this thing is.
What a fucking like con artist this guy is.
He goes, if we don't get people boosted, then we give the virus a chance to spread in our communities.
But you already said at the beginning of this, Mr. Double Vaxxed, double boosted, just had COVID guy.
Like, it's like, who am I talking to here?
You already said the vaccine does not work very well at stopping it from spreading.
So, no, we're not stopping the virus's ability to spread by getting people boosted.
You already gave away this argument.
You already said that what we're doing, like you said, it's not about stopping it from spreading.
What it's about is reducing your likelihood of getting very sick or dying.
That's what you said.
But then your justification for why we need to get more people boosted is that we can't let it spread.
Sorry, that's fucking bullshit.
Okay.
The other thing there that I think is really interesting, bigger than just what a liar Fauci is, but this is very interesting number that he pointed out, which, from his perspective, of course, is a real problem.
But from our perspective, we might find pretty interesting.
So, about 70% of the adult American population got the jabs, got double vaccinated, but only half of them have gotten a booster.
That is kind of interesting.
So, even the people who either A bought into the propaganda or B were somehow coerced into getting the vaccine, they have about half of them are not interested in getting a booster.
That itself is very interesting.
That might be some indication of like how much of this bullshit you can keep throwing out there before people just aren't buying it anymore.
So, that I thought was something very interesting.
Look, Fauci, I don't know what to say about the other things.
The guy is just transparently full of shit at this point.
And it's not, there's no question, it's not just like, oh, he got some things wrong.
It's like, this guy is a bad, bad person.
He's a liar.
He's not this dumb.
Nobody, like, no reasonably intelligent person could be this dumb.
No epidemiologist could be as like this dumb as to just be getting these things wrong.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
And my guess is that there's some real nefarious reasons for why he's doing it.
Okay, I think we're just about at the end.
Just play, see if he says anything else.
Things which are not disruptive in any major way vaccination boosting testing, for example all right, so things that are not disruptive in any major way, just getting a vaccine and then a booster, and then another booster and then five more, and then stay tuned, we'll tell you how many more of these shots you need.
It's not disruptive.
I just want to control the medical decisions of all Americans.
What's disruptive about that?
You go okay.
Then he says at the end, is just like testing.
Like okay, no one's really arguing.
I mean, people are arguing about how accurate the tests are.
For sure, but there's not some big fight about testing.
People get covet tests all the time.
They have them at home.
Now people have I don't know everybody I know has had covet tests.
Like I don't think anyone's really arguing with him about that.
The argument is over this vaccine, which you lied through your teeth to sell to the American people, spent a year and a half pushing unapologetically, then walked back and admitted that you really didn't admit, but then just dropped all of the arguments that were proven to be wrong and are now moving the goalpost to these new ones, while still sometimes pretending that the old arguments apply, like, oh, we have to get boosted so that this can't spread through our communities.
What a fucking, how full of shit is this guy?
That really is something.
It's pretty unbelievable.
Um, all right, any other uh thoughts on uh, old Faux Dog?
Yeah, let's uh stop the january 6th stuff and turn it to the trial of Fauci.
Inflation Creates Separation00:03:56
I mean it, you really would think.
You really would think, and I like, I do believe that all of the people, I believe all of the people who pushed the lockdowns and the, the vaccine mandates and and all types of mandates and stuff like this, all of those people um uh, who just, you know, completely lied to the American people about you know what was going on here for their own reasons, to enrich pharmaceutical companies, to control the citizenry, for all this, I believe that they all should be tried.
Um I, I think it's criminal and they should all face prosecution, they should be convicted and they should go to prison.
But I would settle if like, if we just lived in an honorable society.
I would settle for them all just resigning and just like, maybe wearing like a paper bag over their head anytime they're in public or something like i'm a reasonable person.
I would settle for that, but the idea that they're still there and still you know, uh prescribing what the next thing we should do is, is just that's.
That's too much for me.
That's just going, we're gonna need bigger budgets if we're gonna prevent the next one, we're gonna need more money.
It really is something pretty uh, pretty goddamn unbelievable.
All right, speaking of uh, bigger budgets um, i'm sure you saw, Rob that the, um the inflation numbers came out uh today And they were great.
They're very price going up.
Well, all right.
All right.
I should be a little bit clearer.
They were very good if you're a billionaire.
For everybody else, pretty much it's a disaster.
But try to keep that in mind while all of you guys are being crushed with this inflation.
Just know that for the super, super rich, inflation is really great.
So, you know, why is that good for someone?
They got more debt.
Well, yeah.
So it's not just, it's good for debt holders and people who own assets.
That's where inflation always helps.
It's very bad for people who are on a fixed income.
It's very bad for people who, you know, I don't know, middle class, poor people, things like that.
Basically, whoever gets the new money first always benefits from inflation.
So if you get the new money, right?
So if you think about it like this, right?
If you have a certain amount of money in a system, if you create a bunch of new money and put it into the system, you don't see price inflation immediately.
It takes a little time for the money to work its way into the system, for the prices to go up.
So if you get the new money first, you basically get to buy assets at the old prices and then hold them as the money comes up.
It's really, it's a real fucked up thing.
This is why inflation does a lot to create a separation between, you know, like the super rich and the rest of society.
And that's what you see happening here right now.
But yeah, the new CPI came out.
What was the increase, probably?
It was over 9% or something like that.
Where beans and hot dogs said?
I'm not sure.
9.1 was the number.
I don't know, but probably higher than they used to be.
So now the CPI, of course, as I hope anyone who listens to the show knows, is a pretty bullshit number.
It's like there's this basket of goods that they keep track of to measure what the prices are doing, but they don't really, you know, they don't, they do their best to not really measure housing, not really proportionally measure energy.
So, you know, to most people, those are pretty important prices.
And of course, they change the way they measure the CPI, which changes things.
It's not, it's most people know that 9% is not really what we're looking at.
Unique Spending Moments00:11:01
We're looking at something much, much higher than that.
And of course, in key areas, there's, you know, things that are way, way higher.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, wonderful sponsor, which is Young Americans for Liberty.
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So if you ever heard about them, the Students for Ron Paul, well, after Ron Paul stopped running for president, they became Young Americans for Liberty.
They're a fantastic organization with some really, really great people.
This summer, of course, I will be speaking at the Young Americans for Liberty Revolution 2022.
Revolution 2022 is the largest liberty event of the year.
It's hosted by our friends over at Young Americans for Liberty.
There will be over a thousand liberty warriors at this event with speakers including Kennedy, Zuby, Rand Paul, Bruce Fenton, Glenn Jacobs, Brandon Herrera, Spike Cohen, Ron Paul, and of course, yours truly, and many, many more.
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Go apply to attend because I'm going to be there with all those other great speakers.
We're going to have a great time and support young Americans for liberty in any way you can.
All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, so anyway, Biden's chief economic advisor was on, I believe this was on CNBC to discuss this little bit of news.
And here's the messaging that we're getting out of the White House.
How long are we going to keep saying this is the worst of it?
Well, look, you know, a couple of points on today's report, as you just said.
The first is, you know, it's backward looking and it doesn't reflect what we've seen over the last 30 days, which is a significant decline in gas prices down about 40 cents.
That June report, about half of it was driven by energy prices, and we've seen moderation since.
But the second point is that in the core, inflation remains too high, which is why we need action.
And I just want to underscore if there's one thing to take away from this report, it's that there is more urgency now than ever in Congress moving to pass a bill to try to build more domestic semiconductors, to try to bring down the price of those goods.
You see across this report, things like used cars and new vehicles, those prices holding up.
That is not principally driven by demand.
It's driven by supply and constrained supply.
We know how to solve that.
We should have solved that months ago, but we now have a moment.
We need to do that.
If there's any takeaway from this report, it should do that.
Although that brings us right back to the circular argument, Brian, that more spending is not what you typically do in the face of high inflation.
How do we break out of that circle?
You know, look, I think you have to look at the unique situation that we're in as an economy and think about how do we build more supply?
How do we increase the productivity?
So what a great little moment they have there.
Well, inflation is really out of control.
And you just got a very bad report on inflation.
It was higher than you guys were projecting it was going to be.
Inflation is really crushing the American workers.
So, and he goes, well, look, I mean, the silver lining to this is that now we really have the urgency that we need to combat inflation by spending a lot more money.
And even CNBC host there, because they're at least supposed to know something about money, is like, I heard, I think I remember hearing once that spending a lot more money isn't really what you do when there's inflation.
And what is his response here?
Well, what does he say?
It's a very unique moment.
So that's it.
So again, just to be clear here, if you're talking about another big spending bill from the Congress, what are we talking about?
Are they advocating that you're going to see an increase in taxes in order to pass this new spending bill?
Well, I don't think so.
And of course, that would pretty much defeat the purpose, right?
If you're trying to help people, you know, if I'm trying to lower your cost of living because it's, you know, prices are way too high.
Well, if I have to tax you in order to do it, that doesn't hard to spend that as helping somebody, right?
But nobody's proposing a raise in taxes.
So what are we talking about here?
Oh, yeah, the Fed's going to print up more money.
So we'll print up more money and spend it into the economy to combat inflation.
Does anyone see a little bit of a problem with that?
I mean, you don't have to be a professional economist to go, hmm, that sounds like what caused this problem to begin with.
And then when he points this out to him and goes, yeah, but that's the thing.
What?
That doesn't make any sense.
This is like circular like reasoning, right?
Where he goes, if you always say, like, oh, the answer to inflation is to spend more money and then that creates more inflation.
And the answer to inflation is to spend more money and that creates more inflation.
It goes, oh, we're in quite a vicious cycle here, aren't we?
And well, what's the answer?
Well, it's because we're in a truly unique moment.
What's unique about this moment is that we're feeling the pain from this dumb bullshit.
Like, that's what's unique.
And so, in this unique moment, go, let me tell you something.
You want to pass another one of these $2 trillion spending bills?
We're going to find ourselves in an even more unique moment.
We might really need to start spending some money at that point.
Of course, this was always, this has been the justification for the economy of the entire 21st century.
You know, the low interest rates after 9-11 were, hey, we're in a fucking unique moment here, right?
The country just had 9-11.
And then when we pulled them down to zero in 2008, it was, well, hey, we're in a unique moment here.
We just had the biggest financial recession in almost 100 years.
It's a big, this is a unique moment.
And then, of course, all of that COVID spending, which is what we're feeling the ramifications of now in 2020, well, that was a pretty unique moment.
It was a global pandemic.
And then in 2021, we were in a unique moment because we were recovering from the pandemic.
And now in 2022, we're in a unique moment, Rob, because we're dealing with the inflation caused by the unique moment of 2020 and 2021.
So there's just a lot of unique moments going on.
So what's your, do you have any unique takes on these?
Well, I like first that, you know, he's surrounded by a sea of red.
It almost reminds me of that Jim Carrey scene.
I forget what movie it was, but he gets promoted to Comm Directors and they put him on TV as it's being exposed that like it was a financial Ponzi scheme.
I forget the name of that movie.
Maybe it was I Love You, Dick and Jane or something like that.
I don't know if I ever saw that.
But the opening is, hey, you keep telling us it's going to get better and it's getting worse.
So what do you have for us?
And his answer is basically, well, now it's gotten so bad, we're actually going to take action.
It's like, well, you mean all the other times it just wasn't bad enough?
Yeah.
And as if there's where exactly was the inaction?
I mean, if you're proposing like a government spending bill, like what, where was the inaction?
The record high government spending that we've been seeing in 2020?
What was it?
What was the moment where we just weren't acting enough?
Freaking sending out direct checks in California now.
I also love he starts off what he's saying with a bold-faced lie, which is that he wants to say inflation is going to get better because it's a lagging report.
And so since energy prices have come down, the inflation should come down.
So we're looking at the last 30 days numbers.
And I didn't watch him the last couple of times he was on the news, but do you think he reported he thought it was coming down?
Right.
Right.
Like every time when gas prices were going up, was he going, oh, we'll be better next month?
Yeah, that is a point.
It's like, so if you were, were you a month before predicting that this would be much worse?
Oh, the reality is that this was higher than what they thought it was supposed to be.
So, okay.
The Fed should be celebrating because for three straight years, they were having difficulty hitting their 2% target rate.
And then they decided, you know what?
We can't hit this target rate.
I mean, our entire operation is about hitting 2%.
But they realize, you know what, we can't control it.
But what we can do is we can make up.
It's like when you don't do all your homework because you get a makeup assignment.
They're like, we can make up for all the lost time.
So if we print, then maybe next year we'll get six, seven, eight percent.
We'll make up for the three years where we didn't hit our 2%.
As to how the takeaway is, hey, we're not all that good at decentralized planning and we can't even seem to make our, we can't even seem to inflate our own currency.
We can't even make our people's currency worse.
We're not even capable of that.
So they should be thrilled because this means that for the next couple of years, they don't even really have to work.
They're already ahead.
Yeah, there you go.
You guys, you crushed your target way over it.
Now you can take a vacation.
You're on break.
You did it.
Yeah.
Just to be clear here with what Rob's saying, according to...
You ruined the economy ahead of schedule.
Yes.
Well, this is how backward this whole system is, right?
Is that according to the Federal Reserve, the idea of prices not increasing or perhaps even coming down is something that must be avoided at all costs.
Keep that in mind.
When you think about what your cost of housing and energy and health care and all of these things are, if those prices were to get more and more affordable, the Federal Reserve sees that as a threat.
And we better keep the money supply increasing at a rapid enough rate that even if there's technological improvements or enough slave labor available in China, these prices don't come down.
Yeah, there you go.
There you go.
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All right.
Switching gears a bit before we wrap up on this one.
I did want to, of course, mention there was a clip from John Bolton that's been going very viral.
He was on CNN discussing, of course, January 6th, because while the world falls apart, this is what the corporate press is really obsessed with.
So here was Donald Trump's national security advisor, John Bolton.
It's not an attack on our democracy.
It's Donald Trump looking out for Donald Trump.
It's a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.
I don't know that I agree with you, to be fair, with all due respect.
One doesn't have to be brilliant to attempt a coup.
I disagree with that.
As somebody who has helped plan coup d'état, not here, but other places, it takes a lot of work.
And that's not what he did.
It was just stumbling around from one idea to another.
Ultimately, he did unleash the rioters at the Capitol.
As to that, there's no doubt.
But not to overthrow the Constitution, to buy more time to throw the matter back to the states to try and redo the issue.
And if you don't believe that, you're going to overreact.
And I think that's a real risk for the committee, which has done a lot of good work, mostly when the witnesses testify, not when the members are opining.
It is invariably the case that when you go too far trying to prove your case, you undermine it.
And I think you got to give credit to the intelligence.
So, um, so John Bolton just in the middle of going off on uh on this topic, which was, it was pretty funny the way it happened.
Like Jake Tapper's giving him a little bit of pushback.
He goes, Well, I don't really think that's the way coup work coups work.
And he's like, Excuse me, who here is the expert?
Listen, as somebody who's actually planned many coups, uh, not here, of course, but in other countries.
Now, you would think if we were not such an insane society with a corporate press that is nothing but the mouthpiece of the military-industrial complex, that that would have been something that would have thrown Jake Tapper for a loop.
Like he, he might have even interrupted.
He might have even had a follow-up question, like, what, what coups did you plan?
What are you referring to?
But that was just like a fucking run-of-the-mill comment from John Bolton, who's just sitting there just trashing Trump as a bumbling idiot, uh, narcissist who only cares about himself.
And this is, this was the guy who Trump hired to be his national security advisor.
So, I don't know.
There's not too much more to expound on there.
It's just like, wow, how awful is John Bolton?
How awful of a journalist is Jake Tapper?
And how awful of a president was Donald Trump that he would ever give this guy the job, ever put this guy in there.
If not even for the fact that he's like, you know, horrible, or not even saying like, oh, this guy's so evil.
How would you hire him?
But just for your own sense of like, he's going to throw you right under the bus.
He's going to like, he's, and he's up there doing it on CNN.
I guess you could say, but on the CNN, you know, within the CNN Overton window, that's the pro-Trump defense is like, oh, he wasn't even trying for a coup.
He's just retarded.
I don't know.
You know, he's a big dummy.
So he had no plan, which is probably, by the way, closer to the truth than this whole.
He was attempting to overthrow our democracy or whatever.
But pretty stunning to just sit there and just, you know, be able to admit, like, you don't even have to.
I thought these coups were supposed to be secret.
I thought we were the conspiracy theorists for talking about this stuff.
I thought you guys were the ones who get on there and go, Russia interfered with our elections and that's wrong.
But then you can just throw it out there.
It's like, oh, listen, I've organized a lot of coups.
I mean, not here in other countries.
Really is kind of something, huh?
All right.
All right.
What else?
What else did we have that you had sent over a couple of things, Rob?
You know, there's an interesting storyline in development, which is Steve Bannon refused to speak to the committee.
And he kept claiming that it was Trump's executive privilege.
So they had to speak to Trump first.
And if Trump suspended his executive privilege, he'd be happy to talk to them.
But if not, it was a violation of Trump's legal rights.
And then Bannon finally said, you know what?
If you'll have me live on TV, I'll do it.
And Trump's like, okay.
And he gave up his executive privilege.
And I think the order of that last one was a little wrong.
I think Trump said he'd let Bannon speak.
He'd waive his executive privilege.
And then Bannon jumped on it and goes, okay, you want to do this?
Let's do it.
Well, to my eye, that was in coordination.
So maybe I'm giving you the coordinated effort, but I think that's quite possibly.
And Trump had that conversation.
Now I think Bannon's going to get the better of them.
I'll bet on Bannon in that fight.
I think that's going to be interesting.
However, a tape came out today of Bannon behind closed doors talking about like that Trump's going to make wild claims and not take losing well, which doesn't sound great.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, but I don't know that that at this point is really that damaging for Bannon.
That's kind of Bannon telling the truth, right?
I mean, it's it's so, but it will be interesting.
I do Bannon's formidable.
Okay, if you guys haven't seen the, it's worth checking out.
I believe it's on YouTube, but David Frum debated Steve Bannon at the Monk debate series, something like that.
This is years ago, maybe back in 2017 or something like that.
But anyway, if you get a chance, go watch that.
It's worth watching.
Bannon is sharp.
He may not be right about everything, but that dude is sharp and he knows his stuff and he's a formidable opponent.
And it would be, I will say that would be something that will definitely get me to tune in if Bannon goes and testifies before this committee.
And I think that it seems to me that legally speaking, and again, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not the expert here, but it seems to me that basically Trump's defense largely rests on the fact that he believed the election was stolen.
Now, if he didn't believe the election was stolen, you could kind of say like you're whipping everyone up into a frenzy to go do this thing to try to prevent, you know, this, the mechanism of our government working.
But if he does believe the election's stolen, then doesn't he have a First Amendment right to say, I think this thing was stolen?
And you don't have him on, no matter what they're going to impeach on, like in terms of actually being criminal, you don't have him on inciting violence.
He never directly told anyone to storm the Capitol.
I mean, that would, that would be like, you know, the only thing that if it were to come out, you would have like a really strong legal, you know, argument on is like if you had in some way him directly telling people, go there, be violent, smash up property, storm the Capitol.
But they don't have that.
And that's not coming out anytime soon, I don't imagine.
But as long as he can claim that he really believed it, then from his point of view, he can say he was just telling the truth to all of his people.
And so Bannon saying he's not going to handle this well and he's going to say all this crazy shit is, I don't think really hurts.
And he can go, yeah, which is what a lot of Trump's people have been saying so far.
They're like, yeah, I didn't think he won the election, but he really thought he won the election.
He really believed it.
And as long as that's the case, I don't know how much they have.
I don't really know how much they're going to be able to get here.
And I think they're going to run into a problem that if they actually try and open up a real court case against him, by the time they get that done, I would think the next election will already be in process.
So they're going to create a big mess if they try and disqualify him for one.
And for two, if he wins, I'm going to guess he's going to come back and be really vindictive.
Because then they defy pretty interesting.
Yeah, because then they defied kind of the convention of not prosecuting earlier departments.
And I would venture to guess that there were certain threats made to him, for example, with like a freeing Assange or other individuals.
Like I think he was kind of told that certain things were a red line and that he was going to be in a lot of trouble if he did it.
And so he backed off.
And I'm speaking purely pulling this information out of my ass.
I'm just telling you a flavor from what I saw in the conversation that Mitch McConnell and like what was being stated in the news.
But I think if they press hard enough and then Trump wins, gets back in, he might bite back.
Yeah, I guess these things are always interesting to wonder about.
Who the hell knows?
Who the hell knows?
All right.
Well, look, on that, we got to wrap up today's show.
I do apologize, a little bit of a short show today, but I got a packed schedule.