God's Debris: The Complete Works, Amazon https://tinyurl.com/GodsDebrisCompleteWorksFind my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.comContent:Politics, Domestic Terrorism, Swatting, Anti-Tesla Terrorism, Domestic Terrorism Organizers, Domestic Terrorism Funding, USAID Document Shredding, META AI Chips, President Trump's Tesla, Core CPI, Greenland Independence, MSNBC Propaganda, Biden's Perfect Economy, Guardian Loses Defamation Lawsuit, Douglas Murray, Ukraine Ceasefire, President Trump, President Putin, DOGE vs CR, Thomas Massie, Tom Cotton, Tucker Carlson, Beef Tallow vs Seed Oils, DOE Linda McMahon, Canada US Statehood, Howard Lutnick, Trump's Tariff Strategy, Anti-DOGE Injunctions, NYT Editorial Board, Ruth Marcus Resigns, CA Voter ID Support, Freedom Cities Coalition, EPA DEI Grants, Lee Zeldin, Climate Justice Museum, Gavin Newsom, Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
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So good.
Good.
Well, if you haven't heard, Rosie O'Donnell has moved to Ireland.
Yeah, she moved to Ireland because Trump got elected.
So that'll serve him right.
I guess she showed us.
Moved to Ireland.
Speaking of Ireland, Ireland was wondering if Trump is going to put any tariffs on Ireland.
And Trump said, tariffs on Ireland?
Only on Rosie O'Donnell.
Yeah, that's called a callback.
It's called a callback.
Well, if you didn't see the news yet on social media, one of the Infowars hosts, Chase Geyser, got SWAT-ed a couple of times just yesterday.
So the SWAT... Got called by bad people who were pretending to be him.
And they showed up.
And the most recent time was 2 a.m.
this morning.
And the police pull up to his place and they put on the bullhorns and they say, get out here with your hands up with his wife and children in the house.
Second time in one day.
Now, I believe this is domestic terrorism.
And we're seeing more of it.
All the Tesla stuff is domestic terrorism.
And you could argue even some of the news coverage is domestic terrorism.
It's so bad.
But this is really bad.
And I'm going to say, if this were my own police department locally, I would say things like, well, I guess they have to follow their procedures.
And I guess they can't know for sure, so they have to deploy.
That's what I would say if it were my local police department, so I didn't make them mad.
But this is not my local police department.
So I'm going to ask the obvious question.
What the hell is wrong with you?
How do you not figure out that these SWAT calls are fake?
After the first one?
The same day?
And you can't figure out that the second one's fake and maybe figure out a different way to handle it?
Now, I've heard people say, well, the law says they have to deploy.
Well, what is deploy meaning?
How about maybe call them on the phone and say, can you turn on your FaceTime?
You know, just show me the room.
Everybody's good.
It doesn't feel like this should be the hardest thing in the world.
So I'm going to blame the police.
If you do it once...
The police need to respond.
I'm totally on board with responding once, even though that's domestic terrorism, on behalf of the person who put in the fake call.
But by the second time, the same day, and you can't figure that out, I'm pretty disappointed.
Pretty disappointed.
So, yeah, they need to figure that out.
But this is just one of the worst things.
Because I feel like, do you remember when, under the Biden administration, the Democrats were saying that the biggest problem in the country was right-wing, white supremacist, I don't know, terrorists or something?
There's never been anything like this.
I mean, we're seeing full-out, you know, color revolution terrorism.
It's domestic terrorism.
And it really needs to stop.
So some people need to be arrested.
And I have a real question about people who make anonymous calls or they make calls pretending to be the person who's going to get swatted.
How in the world does that work?
How do you pretend to be the person being swatted where you're calling from a telephone number that's clearly not from that person?
Wouldn't the first thing they do...
Is look at their own logs and maybe call back on the number that they have for that person?
Because, you know, the police always have, don't they?
Can't the police always get a phone number for you if they have your address?
I think they can.
So I have lots of questions about this.
If you want to inform me where I'm wrong and the police are acting responsibly, I'll listen to that argument.
But I don't understand it at this point.
So they got some explaining to do.
Well, speaking of that, Trump has decided that he will label the violence against Tesla dealerships and perhaps Tesla owners as well, because there are examples of just people who own a Tesla getting attacked, their car getting attacked anyway, while they're in it.
And what does that mean if he says that he's going to label them?
Does that make it official?
Or does he have to sign an executive order or something?
Because it's time to make this...
Domestic terrorism.
We have to get this fast, and it has to be extreme.
And it seems to me that just about all of the people who didn't have a mask and did anything around a Tesla, aren't they all caught on camera?
The Teslas have cameras all over them.
How in the world do we not have their faces?
And today, the police have facial recognition.
So it should be as easy as looking at the video, running it through facial recognition, and then you go arrest them and you put them in jail for a long time.
Because we can't really put up with this.
This has to be a very hard response.
Anyway, but what about the funding sources?
For this protest.
If you're involved in organizing the protest against the Tesla dealership, and let's say the first time it gets out of hand and there's a little vandalism and I'm going to call it domestic terrorism, maybe the first time you could say, oh, okay, the organizer didn't know that was going to happen.
But what happens if you do it multiple times and every time it gets out of hand?
Doesn't that mean that the organizer is a domestic terrorist?
Shouldn't they be hauled in as some kind of an accessory to domestic terrorism if they know it's going to happen?
You know, if they were surprised by it, then of course no.
But once you're not surprised and you know it's going to happen and you organize it anyway, at what point are you a domestic terrorist?
So I think we need to be way harder on this.
Meanwhile, Politico and MSNBC and others are reporting that the USAID offices are madly shredding their documents because USAID is being defunded and shut down and absorbed, what's left absorbed into the State Department.
But my question is, is this as bad as it looks?
Because it looks really bad.
Or is it closer to a baseline normal?
Let's say at the end of every administration, do people shred a lot of things that weren't that important?
Maybe it was too important to let people see it, but it wasn't super dangerous or illegal or anything.
So I guess before I have a strong opinion about the shredding, of course it raises lots of questions.
Of course it looks sketchy when you read about it out of context, but I do wonder how much is normal.
You know, if this were a Republican organization, would they be shredding like crazy?
I don't know.
So I'm going to say that I have serious questions about it, and probably, you know, if I had to bet on it, it's probably covering their asses.
Because as far as I can tell, the whole USAID situation was just so sketchy that there's just probably tons of crimes that they're covering up.
That's what it seems like.
Meanwhile, Meta, the company, is designing, they've got their own in-house chip, microchip.
And it's supposed to cut their costs for AI training.
Rowan Chung is writing about it.
So I guess it would be manufactured by TSMC, the big chip company, but it would be their own design.
And somehow it would help them cut reliance on NVIDIA for their expensive GPUs.
I wonder if this chip's going to be so good that they can really get away with not using NVIDIA. And it does make me wonder what the future of NVIDIA is, because given the insane amount of profitability NVIDIA has for the AI chips, wouldn't that guarantee that a whole bunch of other rich companies are trying as hard as possible to match it or beat it?
So, you know, NVIDIA is kind of a tough one to invest in, because you don't know what the competition can do or how quickly they can do it.
Meanwhile, Trump, wanting to show some support for Tesla, did an event in front of the White House in which he bought a Tesla.
So he just picked out a nice red one.
I think it was a plaid.
That would be the high-end one.
But Trump joked about how much he likes to drive, but they don't let him drive anymore.
He hasn't driven in a long time.
And then somebody asked, since he's the great negotiator, They said, you could ask for a discount.
Or I think they may have asked Musk if he was going to offer a discount.
And before he could answer, Trump being Trump and being quick on his feet, he said, nope, nope, I'm paying full price.
I'm not going to negotiate this.
And basically he said, I'm the president of the United States.
I'm paying full price.
Which was the exact right answer.
Because he was there to support.
It's just poor Tesla.
He wasn't there to save a buck.
So I love that.
It was a good event.
Tesla stocks up about 7% when I checked this morning.
And what else is good?
Did you know that gas prices are lower now than they were when Trump was inaugurated?
Did you know that?
So gas prices are down.
Did you know that egg prices are down since March?
So at the beginning of March, this is according to perplexity, they're around $8 a dozen.
Now they're down to $5.51.
So gas is down.
Eggs are down.
And mortgage rates are down.
So interest rates are down.
Eggs are down.
Gas is down.
And we got new numbers for inflation.
Inflation's down.
So the February CPI went to 2.8, and that was less than we expected.
So people were thinking 2.9.
But the core inflation, because they measure it two different ways, falls to 3.1, and that was better than what they were expecting, which was 3.2.
And according to the Kobayesi letter, this is the first decline in both the Headline in the core CPI, so those are the two measures of inflation, since July of 2024. So, how does this make sense?
Now, part of the reason is that the roiling of the stock market and all the tariff stuff and the uncertainty is causing people to say, whoa, there's going to be less demand for everything because people won't be doing so well.
If there's less demand, prices go down.
So we might be seeing just a response to, uh-oh, everybody's going to have to tighten their belts and we're just assuming prices will go down.
Or it could be that nothing that's happening with the tariffs is really affecting any real prices yet.
Maybe it will?
Later?
I don't know.
But we'll talk about that a little bit more.
Meanwhile, Greenland had an election.
And one of the things I didn't know is that Greenland, four out of five of their major parties, are in favor of independence.
Not joining the United States, but being independent from Denmark.
Four out of five.
So the two biggest vote-getting parties were both, hey, we want to be independent.
So we'll see if that makes any difference.
But certainly there's no problem with the Greenlanders wanting to be not...
So the question would be, is there some way that we can have some kind of a tight association with Greenland that would give them freedom from Denmark while also getting the subsidies or whatever economic benefit they were getting from Denmark?
Would it be good for us?
Do we need to own them like a state?
Or would it be good enough to just have No tariffs and some kind of security arrangement and maybe some kind of a mining arrangement in case they have some minerals or something we want.
So there might be some place to work on that.
Anyway, MSNBC, which we talk about as more of a joke than a news source, I was noticing that they always have at least one big lie going.
Have you ever noticed that?
That there's always like a central big lie that's clearly organized from the top, or maybe it's organized accidentally and they just all gather around it.
But do you remember when one of the big lies was that the 2020 election was definitely fair because no court found it wasn't?
That's a big lie.
Now, I'm not saying it wasn't fair, and I'm not saying it was.
I'm saying that the lie is that the courts could know.
The courts only know what was handed to them.
They don't know if something was fair overall.
It's just not knowable.
So that's one of the biggest lies.
MSNBC was like just, you know, they were just living off that lie for a long time.
Then there was the January 6th was an insurrection as opposed to an attempt to stop one.
That's a really big lie.
And then there was the Biden's brain is fine.
Oh, Biden's brain is fine.
I don't know what you're talking about.
He's the best Biden we've ever seen, Morning Joe said.
But now the new big lie is that Biden left a strong economy.
And they even had some economists come on and say, quote, somebody named Edward G. Luce, I guess.
He said, quote, Trump inherited pretty much the perfect economy.
From a macro and economic point of view.
This is something that a real person said out loud.
Can you imagine saying that out loud?
That it was a perfect economy under Biden?
He said there had been a soft landing, inflation was under control, the magnificent seven stocks were booming for a good reason, and that Biden showed us he can create a perfect economy.
But do you think he left anything out?
Do you know how else you can create a perfect economy?
By borrowing.
We had this crushing debt with no way around it.
Basically, without Doge, we would all be dead.
And how do you ignore that if you're an economist?
So this is their new big lie.
The new big lie is that economy was great under Biden.
Trump's just ruined in that great economy that he was left.
No, he was left a crushing level of debt that was nearly impossible to solve, and we still don't know if it's solvable, because we haven't really taken a big bite out of it yet, even though Doge is doing great.
And then the other big lie is that Elon Musk wants to cut entitlements.
And, of course, every time that it's been talked about...
At least from Musk and Doge and Trump.
They're talking about waste, fraud, and abuse.
And then MSNBC's hosts and pundits and CNNs will say, oh, he wants to cut the entitlements.
No.
Maybe they do want to, but that's not even being discussed.
They're only talking about the waste, fraud, and abuse.
So, again, these are not news programs.
These are just pure propaganda entities.
And once you learn that they're propaganda, you can just sort of study them for the propaganda to see how they do it.
That's sort of why I'm interested.
I kind of love to see how big a lie they can tell their audience that their audience won't know the difference.
There doesn't seem to be any limit.
Because, you know, I just mentioned some whoppers.
Can you imagine that MSNBC still has any audience at all after telling you that Biden's brain was fine for years?
How do they have any audience?
I mean, it's so obvious that they're not in the news business, but I don't think their audience knows it.
I think the audience thinks it's some kind of legitimate news source.
Weird.
Speaking of illegitimate news, The Guardian lost a defamation suit, was ruled against him.
Douglas Murray was the victim in this case, so he sued him.
I guess the Guardian made some outrageous claim about him.
I'm not even going to repeat the claim, because given that it was a fake claim, I don't even want to associate it with his name.
So I'll just tell you that there was an outrageous fake claim, and Douglas Murray took him to court and apparently won.
So good for him.
So they apologized and had to retract it.
But as Douglas Murray was pointing out on X, he said he wanted to remind you that the Guardian left X, so it wasn't doing anything on X anymore.
And the reason was because of alleged disinformation on X. So the Guardian, which was too good to be on X, literally the only source of free speech that we have in this country.
And then immediately they got sued and lost for fake news.
Fake news.
Speaking of fake news, this is real news, but it's going to lead to nothing.
Apparently the Saudi Arabia meeting to talk about the ceasefire for Ukraine involved only Ukraine and the U.S., I guess.
But Ukraine and the U.S., and Zelensky has now specifically agreed to a ceasefire, a 30-day ceasefire.
With not many conditions, it looks like.
But that's just what Zelensky wants.
We don't think that Putin wants that so easily, because apparently Putin has lots of demands, you know, like no NATO, no boots on the ground from Europe, a bunch of things.
And so I don't think there's really much chance.
That Putin will say yes to a ceasefire?
Because what would that buy him?
Because at the moment, every day that he keeps fighting looks like a day that he's getting closer to winning just because he could take more losses for a longer period of time.
So he doesn't have to gain any territory.
He just needs to act like he wants the war.
It's just going to put him in a better negotiating position.
So it feels like that was a waste of time.
But I can be surprised.
It could be that Putin has a much bigger set of interests outside of Ukraine.
It could be that Trump said, here's the deal.
We're open to talking about all the other interests.
We'll make this a wider discussion, which is exactly what Russia wants.
But we want that too.
But we're not going to do it unless you give us a ceasefire.
Because we need to feel like there's progress.
And a ceasefire would feel to everybody like some kind of progress.
It would make it look like you changed the frame from fighting to talking.
And that's something.
So this will be a good test of Putin's persuasion ability.
Because if Trump pushes hard, you know, supporting this idea of the 30-day ceasefire, And it's basically 30 days where you would be negotiating other stuff.
And if Putin said no to this, it's going to look like it would piss off Trump because Trump would be putting his reputation behind it, assuming he backs it.
So would Putin be, let's say, dumb enough to piss off Trump on something that's not that important?
I feel like if he's going to make Trump mad, it better be on something big.
But a 30-day ceasefire?
That's kind of small potatoes.
So would Putin say no to something so small, knowing that it could derail everything else?
This will be a good test.
So let me make a prediction.
I think I'm going to reverse my opinion.
My first thought was, why would Putin say yes?
It would just put him in a worse negotiating position than he's in.
Because he doesn't care.
He doesn't care too much about his losses.
He can sustain them for longer.
But I'm going to say that if he's as good a negotiator as I think, and Trump says to him, look, nothing else is going to happen until you do this.
This has got to be step one, because at least this will show that we're more interested in negotiating than not negotiating.
I think Putin might say yes.
So it depends entirely upon whether Putin thinks he needs to manage Trump versus trying to get the best advantage he can on a minor point.
So I'm going to say yes.
That'll be my prediction.
And it would be almost entirely because of Trump's personality and the way he approaches things.
So something that maybe another president couldn't get done.
But I think Putin would know.
You don't want to waste your goodwill that he's developed with Trump.
You don't want to waste that on something not terribly important.
So I think Trump's going to get that if he pushes it.
Here's a little clarification on Thomas Massey.
Apparently the House passed that continuing resolution.
Now, background, a continuing resolution is when the Congress gives up on trying to do a proper budget.
Because they know they can't get it done or they're not interested or they wait until it's too close to a holiday or something.
And then they just say, okay, we'll just keep the budget where it was for another six months.
And that's not good because the budget is way too big and it's driving up debt.
But this particular situation is a little different because my understanding is even though they're saying the budget would stay the same, Inflation would suggest that it's really a cut, because if inflation is going up but the budget is not, well, it's sort of like a 3% cut if you have 3% inflation.
So I get that argument, but that's not much, and it doesn't address the doge stuff.
But what I think is going to happen is that even if the budget says you have this much to spend for the next six months, If the departments that were going to spend it have been suspended, the people are fired, and it's been closed down or absorbed by the State Department or whatever else,
what we should see is that the budget stays the same because Congress just failed to give us a proper budget and incorporate all the doge stuff, but that the actual spending should be substantially below the budget for the first time.
Normally you expect other The government to spend everything it has so they can ask for more next time.
Well, we used every penny we had this time.
We need 3% more next year.
So it could be that this will work out fine.
But you know that Trump threatened to primary Thomas Massey for saying that he would be a hard no on this.
And there was quite a bit of pushback.
So I was one of the ones that pushed back.
And my problem with it is not that they disagreed.
And my problem with it is not that it was a good or bad idea to do the continuing resolution this time.
Because this one's not like every other time.
Because the Doge stuff...
I do have reason to believe the Doge stuff will be incorporated in the spending part, which is the important part.
The budget's not as important as the spending.
So...
Maybe it was closer to getting it right, and maybe they just needed a little breathing room before they can do a proper budget.
Maybe.
I'll give them a little bit of benefit of the doubt.
But threatening to primary the only person who is more MAGA than MAGA, and the person who is wildly popular for being a hard-nose on spending.
The guy who wears a debt clock around his lapel and gives them to everybody else so they can be reminded that they're not doing their job.
You need to get this budget under control.
That's the last guy you should be threatening.
You should figure out some way to get it done despite him.
And I get that Trump just goes hard at anybody who's on the wrong side.
Of any issue.
And he loves them if they're on the right side of the issue.
So I get that he's being consistent.
But I feel like that was just a mistake.
If he had simply tried to slap him down with a mean post on truth, I'd say, okay, that's just normal.
They disagree.
He said what he said.
Massey said what he said.
But threatening to primary him?
That just fell too far.
I just can't get behind that at all.
And it's not like Thomas Massey was a little bit the enemy.
The things he wants are what Trump wants, and he wants it even more, which is to get the debt under control.
So if somebody agrees with you harder than you agree with yourself, that's not who you threaten the primary.
So that just seemed like a mistake to me.
And I saw a lot of other smart people say the same.
But one of the criticisms that people levied on Massey was they said, you're being hypocritical and inconsistent because in the past you have signed continuing resolutions.
But Massey clarified he's never voted for a continued resolution that became law.
He said he did vote for one under McCarthy that included an 8% cut to all discretionary spending, but it didn't become a law.
Now, that's a good answer.
Because a continuing resolution in its normal form means you spend the same amount as you were spending.
If in any way they could have gotten an 8% across the board cut in all the spending and call it a CR, well, yeah.
Yeah, I would expect Thomas Massey to totally vote for that because it's exactly what he's always asking for.
Let's be serious about cutting.
And then figure it out.
So I'm going to say that Massey has acquitted himself well.
I like him standing on principle.
I think I would be seriously disappointed if we didn't have anybody in Congress who said, nope, you're all wrong.
We cannot keep spending at this level, period.
So I like me some Thomas Massey in the world.
And I think this will all work out.
Now, Let me give you a correction.
I'm not sure that's the right word.
Maybe it's a clarification.
I talked about Tucker Carlson had this claim that Senator Tom Cotton was in favor of blocking the release of the JFK files and allegedly, according to Tucker, had been not in favor of some nomination.
Don't know which one.
Because that person might have wanted to release the JFK files.
So what did Tom Cotton say about those accusations?
He said on X, this is false.
I have no problem releasing the JFK files.
Had Tucker Carlson asked me, I would have told him.
And he said, he, meaning Tucker, has texted me multiple times in recent weeks, so he knows how to reach me.
And then in a follow-up, Tom Cotton said, Now, isn't this interesting?
Because...
You've got Tucker Carlson saying a thing happened, and he was very adamant that he knew the thing happened.
And then you've got the person who was allegedly the person who did the thing, who was saying in the clearest possible tone, I mean, this is really clear, that nothing like that happened.
So, here's my take.
I don't think Tucker Carlson is a liar.
I also don't think Tom Cotton's a liar.
As far as I know.
But they can't both be right because they're saying literally opposites.
But I'm a little unclear about Tucker Carlson's source.
Did somebody that Tucker trusted tell him that something happened?
And was that communicated properly?
Was it possible that the wrong name was in the story?
So if I had to pick a winner, I'm going to pick Tom Cotton.
And the reason is that I consider myself quite good at detecting BS. And the way Tom Cotton explained his complete lack of involvement in this, having done nothing even close to it, is the way that honest people talk.
If he were lying...
What you'd look for is stuff like a very specific answer.
I'll make this up.
This would not be a good example, but it would be something like, I did not talk to Tucker on Tuesday, or I've never had a conversation with Tucker about this, because I would still leave open that maybe he talked to somebody else, right?
So there's a whole bunch of tells that liars leave.
Tom Cotton left no tells.
He's speaking like somebody who is absolutely telling the truth.
Now, do I know that?
No.
No.
But if I had to call a winner, I would say that Tucker's source is probably less reliable.
And maybe it was just a miscommunication.
Maybe nobody had any bad intentions.
Could be just a miscommunication.
But this is one of the cleanest denials you'll ever see.
And if you see a denial this clean and this comprehensive, and it looked like he tried to cover every base so that you couldn't say, but, did you say it to Kash Patel?
Okay, but, did you say it to Pam Bondi?
But, but, did you say it to someone else in the administration?
He just completely, you know, ruled out all of that.
It looks honest to me.
So I'm going to rule Tom Cotton the correct one on facts.
Well, meanwhile, RFK Jr. has called for the top executives of some of the big food companies like Kraft Heinz and General Mills and some others to remove artificial dyes before the end of his term.
Makes me wonder why that would take so long.
Why would it take so long?
To remove artificial dyes.
You can't do that in a year.
It takes four years to do that.
Because if Europe has been removing these artificial dyes forever, can't you just say, ring, ring, hey, Europe, what are you doing right that we're doing wrong?
Oh, you just don't put them in there.
Got it.
Isn't there some easy way to do this?
Like, just don't do it?
I don't know.
But maybe there's a food replacement that acts as a dye that's more organic, and maybe there might be a supply limitation on whatever it is that Europe uses that we don't.
So maybe there's a reason.
I mean, it'd be weird to say that he wants it before the end of his term if it were easier to do.
So I'm going to trust that RFK Jr. knows what he's talking about there.
But also, Daily Mail is reporting that five big restaurant chains in the U.S. have decided to follow RFK Jr.'s lead on getting rid of seed oils.
And instead of cooking with seed oil, they're going to be cooking with probably beef tallow.
So I guess this has already happened at one of the chains, Steak and Shake.
You probably saw the news.
So the Steak and Shake restaurant chain already moved to Beef Tallow.
And it looks like Popeyes, Outback Steakhouse, Sweet Greens, and Buffalo Wild Rings have either already stopped or they're planning to stop using the seed oils.
Now, how many of you are convinced that the seed oils are the devil and the Beef Tallow is the healthy answer?
You know, I'm willing to believe it, but I don't trust any science anymore.
I just don't trust science anymore.
So I don't doubt that there are studies that say that seed oil bad, beef tallow good, but this is the kind of science that's usually a coin flip, meaning that if you took any of these studies and you tried to reproduce it, There's only a 40% or 50% chance you could.
And I'm not criticizing just this domain of science.
I'm criticizing all domains of science.
Because generally speaking, this kind of study is sort of a coin flip.
You know, I guarantee you that there are studies that say that the seed oils are fine, even if they're not.
And I guarantee that there are studies that say the seed oils are the devil.
Even if they're not.
So, I hope the science is solid on this.
But it does make me worry about cooking at home.
Because you know what I don't do at home?
I don't use any beef tallow.
I never even heard of beef tallow until like a month ago.
What the hell is beef tallow?
I know it's something I'm not going to put in my body because I just don't eat.
Never mind.
You don't need to know.
But I don't know.
It seems like, is olive oil suddenly?
Did olive oil suddenly go from the healthiest thing you can cook with to the devil?
Did it really?
So this is the sort of thing where I feel like if you backed up 20 years and waited to see how it all shook up, I just don't know if the science holds up.
I just really don't trust it.
I'm not saying it's wrong.
I'm just saying I don't know why you'd believe it was right, given what we've seen about every other bit of science.
Meanwhile, Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education, According to Newsmax, says that Trump told her that her job is to essentially eliminate the Department of Education.
So that's the thing she's in charge of.
And according to her, Trump said that to be successful in her job would be to put herself out of the job.
Now, this is one of those perfect situations where I think the person in charge is just ideally suited for the job.
Because there's no way that Linda McMahon wants to be the Secretary of Education forever.
And I don't think she's looking to run for higher office.
It doesn't look like it's a step to a higher office or anything.
So probably she's just a patriot.
And she's a high-capability, high-functioning executive-type person.
And putting somebody like that in that job, kind of perfect.
Somebody who would view success as getting rid of her own job.
That's a rare thing.
If you can get that right person in that job, assuming you wanted to get rid of this.
So that's looking good.
Let's talk about Canada.
So Kevin O'Leary, as you know, he's got a connection with Canada and the U.S. I believe he's, was he Canadian?
Is he both Canadian and American?
I don't know how that works, but he invests in both places.
He was on Jesse Waters' show, and he said something I hadn't heard before, but it's worth talking about.
He's suggesting that we don't necessarily need Canada to be a state.
All we have to do is remove the economic barriers.
So we could treat it like it's this big economic zone without any friction caused by artificial barriers anywhere.
So he says that Trump's vision, I don't know that this is Trump's vision, so this is Kevin O'Leary talking, but he says a U.S.-Canada economic union, so it would be the largest economy on earth, and that China would never catch up.
And the idea is that Canada has just...
It's just wildly full of natural resources, the exact kind that the United States needs.
And the United States is the biggest market.
So if you combine the biggest resource with the biggest market and you get rid of the friction, get rid of tariffs, etc., you might have the greatest economic zone of all time.
It might be exactly what we need to bring back manufacturing.
You know, have access to all the raw materials and everything.
Now, this would not settle Trump's concern that we're the ones paying for the defense of Canada.
So I don't know how that works.
And then there would be all the wokeness up there that would be hard to deal with.
So, I mean, Canada would have to get rid of its, you know, crazy DEI stuff if we wanted to have a big economic zone.
Because you could almost imagine it.
It's like, okay, we got rid of all the tariffs.
And then we try to do a deal.
And then the Canadians say, all right, we'll be happy to sell you our lumber.
So just as long as the board of directors of your company has lots of DEI. And then we'd be like, you can't just sell us the lumber.
So I think there would be more friction than it seems like.
Just making any two systems compatible is always going to be a challenge.
But I like what Kevin O'Leary is adding to the conversation, which is that there might be this entirely reasonable middle ground where both Canada and the U.S. would take a hit with some specific industries, but in the long run it would be wildly good for both.
Maybe.
I like that new option or that new way of looking at it, that it doesn't have to be a state.
And that would be just a pain in the ass, turning it into a state.
And that would be a lot of work for maybe not a lot of gain.
And then Lutnick was talking about Trump's tariffs.
And he said the markets will learn.
Let the dealmakers make his deal.
So he's not worried about the stock market.
He thinks the stock market will catch up with what's happening.
He said that Trump's policy is going to produce revenue.
And according to Lutnick, who's a smart guy, Lutnick thinks that the tariffs are not chaotic.
It only looks chaotic if you don't understand what's happening.
And then Lutnick says that Trump is making sure our trade partners know this is not going away and can't be ignored and it's a top priority.
I would add that it might be the only way to get manufacturing back to the country, to our country, quickly, which is you have to make it wildly expensive to not do it in the United States.
That's what a tariff can do.
But here's my current take on the tariffs.
And this is very much informed by Lutnik's opinion.
So I'm going to adopt this.
I saw some other smart opinions about it too, but here's what I think.
On day one, if Trump says, I'm going to tariff you, it looks like a bad idea.
Just a pain in the ass.
So then the other country, whoever it is, says, all right, well, I guess we get to tariff a few things back with you.
And then Trump says, great, I'll give you another 25% tariff for doing that.
And then the other country says, but wait.
That's crazy.
Well, we're going to stop giving you electricity.
Okay, here's another 50% tariff.
Wait, what?
So here's what I think Trump's actually doing.
And I realize I'm the, you know, some call me the Trump whisperer because I'm always talking about his persuasion skills, you know, his four-dimensional chess.
There is some four-dimensional chess happening here that I had completely missed.
And I was in a wait-and-see mode, like, well, I'm not sure I fully understand this whole tariff business and the way it's being handled, but maybe Trump does.
Maybe his advisors are really smart.
Maybe they're operating on a different level.
Let's just see what happens.
Here's my current opinion.
You have to get their attention first.
Trump is making the trade inequities, as he would call them, the biggest priority for other countries.
So nothing happens until you can break through the noise.
So any country has a million things to worry about, domestically and foreign.
And if you say, hey, something about a tariff has something about a trade, you can barely get their attention.
If you say, we're going to completely turn off your whole fucking industry, suddenly you have their attention.
So what Trump is doing with the tariffs, even with the chaos, even with what looks like just completely almost suicidal economic policies that are so reckless, Some would say.
So chaotic, some would say, that it doesn't even look rational.
But is he successfully making those other countries say to themselves, we're going to need to clear our calendar because we need to handle this right away because we can't really go a month with a 50% tariff.
And if we retaliate, well, we can hurt the United States.
But we're going to get our ass kicked for doing it.
So how about we treat this like our highest priority?
And that is what Trump wants.
He wants them to treat it like their highest priority.
Has he succeeded?
Yes.
Yes.
I'll bet Mexico doesn't wake up, or Canada, I'll bet they don't wake up one day without saying, oh God, what am I going to do about all these tariffs?
Now, in the end, one hopes that you end up with a negotiated set of agreements in which both sides feel like, you know, it's not the perfect agreement, but that's how agreements work.
But it's better than what it was, at least for the United States.
So I think that the, I'm going to call it the genius of what Trump is doing, is he's making it everybody's top priority.
Because you wouldn't get anything done.
Until you do that.
If they knew they could kick the can down the road, it's like, ah, by the time some new president gets in here, you know, it would just stall.
Well, a 50% tariff today, there goes your stalling.
Good luck stalling.
Good luck making it your second priority, assholes.
How about it's your top priority now?
How about you stop worrying about DEI a little bit?
And you look at the fact that we just stopped your whole fucking industry from operating, and we're not going to stop doing it.
It's got to be your top priority.
Trump did that.
He just made it everybody's top priority.
Now, if nothing else came of it, except he made it everybody's top priority, that should allow him to negotiate productively to get some kind of agreement.
That isn't crushing anybody's industry, although some would do worse than others, but that we'd end up with a happy situation.
Suppose the thing that happened with Canada, because you saw that Canada was going to cut off our electricity in the Northeast, but then they said, well, okay, we will talk about it, so we'll pull back on that.
We got their attention.
We got all their attention.
Whatever they were doing before the tariffs doesn't even seem important.
They're all in on trying to figure out how to make this tariff thing work.
And it's Trump's frame.
He created a world that didn't exist, which is tariffs are your top priority.
So he creates that world, and then he creates so much, I'm going to say energy, but his critics will say chaos.
It's the same.
He creates so much energy that everybody has to flow into his frame.
Once they're in his frame, that's when the fun begins.
That's when the negotiating begins.
And he did that.
Nobody's ever done that.
Nobody's ever done that.
And I would argue, I don't think anybody could.
I don't think anybody could do what he's done already.
Just already.
Now, will it all work out?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Will it allow more manufacturing to flow back to this country faster than it would have?
I don't know.
But it's a hell of a good bet.
I'm going to do something that I normally don't do.
I'm going to give some investment advice.
But you've got to be really careful with this one.
Because this one's risky.
And it's also not advice I'm going to take.
Because I'm a certain age, so I'm not gambling too much with my money at the moment.
But if I were younger, and I saw that the stock market had just taken a gigantic shit because it didn't understand what was happening, I'd be buying hard.
And here's the philosophy behind it.
The philosophy behind it is invest in once-ever situations, the things that will never happen again.
So one of the reasons to own Tesla stock, and again, these are not stock recommendations, I'm simply describing a manner of investing.
So don't take it as a recommendation, please.
But if you said to yourself, wait a minute, there's only one time in history that Tesla will introduce robots.
It's only going to happen once.
There's only one time in history that Tesla will introduce self-driving cars.
Only once.
You can make an argument for other things like NVIDIA. There's only one time that AI will be brand new.
Just once.
So if you can find those situations, such as the introduction of the smartphone when Apple did it, that's only going to happen once.
The introduction.
If you had invested in Apple when they introduced the smartphone, well, you'd be pretty happy right now, wouldn't you?
So I can't recommend...
Tesla, especially because there's a lot of political risk overhanging it.
So if you buy it and it doesn't go well, don't blame me.
But what I'm saying is this tariff situation is a once-ever change.
It's a gigantic sea change if Trump pulls it off.
And the reshoring of manufacturing?
Once.
It's only going to happen once.
So whenever you see one of these gigantic changes that could only happen once by their very nature, that's when you should get serious about looking at your investments.
Because those are the changes that give you the big hits that are different from, oh, this company makes 14% profit per year.
I guess I'll get some of that.
I mean, that could be a great idea, too, as long as you diversify.
So the only advice I'm going to give you is diversification.
Diversification.
Make sure that you don't put too much money in any one thing, and it'd be good to spread it around.
But we might be looking at one of the greatest economic revivals in all of history.
It might not work, but here's the other part of the advice.
If it doesn't work...
We're all dead.
Because if we don't doge the national debt away, we cannot survive that.
So when you have a situation where if things don't go well, none of your money is going to be worth anything.
Literally, your money won't be worth anything.
The whole thing falls apart if we can't get the $40 trillion of debt under control.
If we can, Which would be a tremendous accomplishment by Musk and Trump and the Doge people.
A tremendous accomplishment.
And by no means do I think that's guaranteed.
But you have one situation where if it doesn't work out, you're going to be dead.
If they'd never tried anything, if they'd never tried to Doge and they'd never tried to do tariffs, you would be dead.
Because the debt will actually end the United States.
We're talking about actually starving to death.
It's an existential threat.
So on one hand, if you bet against it and it doesn't work, well, nobody's money is going to be worth anything.
It wouldn't matter if you owned stock.
It wouldn't matter if you had cash.
It's all going to be worth nothing.
But if it does work, if it does work, Stocks are really cheap.
So the upside is maybe amazing, maybe just pretty good, and the downside is if we don't do this stuff, you're dead.
So this is a very rare investment situation, and just be aware of it.
So again, I don't give financial recommendations.
Don't buy any stock.
Don't buy Tesla because I said so, because I'm not saying so.
I'm just saying, when you see a once-ever, that's where your eyes should widen.
This is a once-ever.
It's like the greatest once-ever you'll ever see, probably.
So, we'll see.
Meanwhile, Trump sent a memo to all the agency heads.
With this clever little legal advice, it tells them that court filing injunctions against them, so you know when the agencies try to cut costs, there's always somebody going to do a lawsuit, and then they'll find some judge that can say, oh yeah, you better stop doing that.
So that would be the injunctions.
But apparently, the law says that if there's an injunction against one of the agencies, The plaintiffs would be the people complaining and the ones who want to stop the agency from cutting or firing people.
So the plaintiffs would have to post a security equal to the potential cost of the injunction to the federal government.
So in other words, you can't just shop for a friendly judge and get the judge to wave his arms and sign a piece of paper and then all progress stops.
That's the current situation.
They're going to have to find out how to put up money to cover it in case things go the other direction.
So that's really clever.
Unless there's some kind of legal judo that can defeat this, this might make a big difference on the number of injunctions that are stopping Doge from doing what it wants to do.
Meanwhile, over at the New York Times, according to Semaphore in their media newsletter, they said that the New York Times is shaking up its editorial board, and they're moving some writers, and they're firing some writers, and they'll have, I think, fewer opinion people, but they're trying to get better opinions.
So they're trying to figure out how to do that.
You know what it sounds like?
It sounds like the Democrats in general.
So it sounds like the New York Times is saying, our opinions are good, but sometimes the people explaining to them and the messaging isn't right.
That's what it reminds me of.
I feel like the Democrats just have this one thing, which is if we can fool people into thinking the way we want them to think, we win, independent of any reality.
They seem to be just completely message and persuasion related without being connected to anything real.
But the funny thing was, as part of the story, was I was reminded that, remember Krugman, their economist, who was sort of famous for having some famously bad opinions about things, but he was also a Nobel Prize, Nobel economics winner.
He quit because...
He was so heavily edited by the editors on his opinion pieces.
So he said it was like torture.
He'd wake up to see his opinion piece in the New York Times and then see it was rewritten or that important things had been removed or changed.
And he'd be like, my God, that's not even my opinion.
This is like somebody else's opinion.
So apparently at the New York Times, your opinion was not even your own opinion.
So it was always some...
Some weird mashup of what the editors edited after you submitted it.
Can you believe that professional writers at the highest level, Krugman being one, would have their stuff edited, not just for clarity and not just for grammar or something like that, but rather the opinion.
The opinions are not even real.
There's some combination of an editor's opinion plus the writer's opinion.
And you, as a writer, or as a reader, you wouldn't even know what it was.
You'd be thinking, all right, is this one person's opinion?
Or is this a mashup of more than one person's opinion?
Anyway, so it feels like New York Times realizes that they produce propaganda, but they want to do it better.
That's what it feels like.
Now, here's my other first impression.
Locally, whenever I see a restaurant that used to offer lunch and dinner, but not breakfast, and then suddenly they offer breakfast too, that restaurant's going out of business.
Because nobody wants to offer breakfast, lunch, and dinner if you own a small restaurant.
You don't want to do all three.
It would be a crushing workload.
You almost can't make money on brunch.
You know, lunch you can barely make money on.
Pretty much you do that because the landlord says you have to be open for lunch.
And dinner is kind of where you make your money.
We're talking about small private restaurants.
So whenever I see one say, we're going to try offering breakfast too, that's the last gasp.
They're going out of business pretty soon.
It means they can't make money on lunch and dinner because nobody who owns a small business would add Every morning to their current workload.
That would just be crushing.
So when I see the New York Times radically changing their opinion piece, I think, hmm, that's a dangerous sign for their business.
Meanwhile, according to the Post Millennial, a Washington Post opinion writer quit because the opinion writer wrote an opinion that was Negative to their owner, Jeff Bezos' new direction, that their opinion pieces should be limited to freedom and free markets, I guess.
Personal freedom and free markets.
And so the columnist wrote an opinion piece disagreeing with that as a direction.
And then I guess it was the editor killed that piece and said, no, we're not going to run.
We're not going to run an opinion piece that says our owner got everything wrong.
And so she resigned after 40 years.
And this is what she said.
She was a columnist named Ruth Marcus.
And she said, quote, Jeff's announcement that the opinion section will henceforth not publish views that deviate from the pillars of individual liberties and free markets threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner deems acceptable.
Do you see anything wrong with that?
Do you think there's ever been a time when the Washington Post allowed their columnists to write whatever they want?
No.
Do you think if Phil Bump decided that he was going to become pro-Trump and then decided to write a bunch of articles in the Washington Post being just unabashedly pro-Trump, you think he would have kept his job?
I don't.
I don't think that for a second.
So no, there's never been a situation where you could write for a major publication any opinion you wanted.
That's never been true.
You always know what the boss wants.
And you make damn sure that you're within that umbrella, or you get fired.
Or you don't get published.
So no, this is totally fake.
It's always been the case that opinions had to be within a narrow band, and you knew exactly what that band was based on who your boss was.
So that doesn't look real.
Meanwhile in California, two Republican...
Lawmakers, who are in the minority, of course, in California, they're introducing a ballot measure to mandate voter identification.
And I guess Trump has said that he might want to have that, the law in California, in return for helping with the fire relief.
Now, I don't know that that's exactly what's happening.
Did Trump really say?
That he wouldn't do fire relief unless they had voter ID laws?
I don't know.
But here's the amazing thing.
Apparently, a majority of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans all want voter ID in California.
It polls really well.
It's another one of these 80-20 things.
Now, with Democrats, it's a smaller majority, but it's over 50%.
There's not one group.
Democrat, Republican, or Independent, that doesn't have a pretty solid majority that want voter ID. Now, apparently it's the Democrat leadership in California that doesn't want it.
Doesn't that feel like a confession?
Because obviously it's a practical thing to do because it's done in other states and other countries.
Obviously, it makes your elections more secure, and obviously the public wants it, and obviously the public would feel like the election was more valid if they had it.
And this is everybody, by a majority.
And yet the Democratic leadership has been completely against it.
Why would you do that unless you thought it allowed cheating that kept you in office?
It feels like just...
You might as well just confess to a crime at this point, because I don't think there's any chance that the Democratic leadership are in favor of this, no ID, unless they're planning to use it to cheat, or they think it works in their favor cheating-wise.
So this is so icky.
And to imagine that, you know, I live in a state...
Where the Democrat leadership can just ignore the will of the people and do something that looks so corrupt that even if you weren't being corrupt, wouldn't you be smart enough to know that it looks corrupt?
It doesn't look like anything but corrupt.
If you said, but Scott, there's this other reason.
No, there's not.
There's no other reason.
It's purely in the hope of corruption or in support of corruption.
There is no other reason the Democrat leadership would be in favor of no voter ID. Let's be real about that.
So we'll see where that goes.
Probably no place, because the Democrats are in charge in this state.
According to Gizmodo, there are a bunch of tech execs and rich people who want to build freedom cities.
You know, Trump had said he wants to make some government land, federal land, available for building freedom cities.
But there's this group that is pushing for these libertarian enclaves in Central America, and I think they've made some progress.
They're the Freedom Cities Coalition.
So what they're trying to do is build communities where they're just well-designed.
And they've got a big corporate kind of corporate, let's say, presence so that you've got jobs and you've got housing and you have more of a libertarian, keep the government out of my business kind of a world.
So the idea behind them is to be free of government interference, basically.
So you'd have the people who organize these freedom cities be...
In charge of what the rules and local regulations are.
And then you could see if wise, rich, successful people who have a lot in common, meaning they want to build a place that just works, just works really well, we'll see if they can.
Maybe it'd work.
Maybe it wouldn't.
But it doesn't look like the government would be spending any money.
So as an experiment, I like it.
And apparently the Trump administration is showing some, you know, positive vibes toward the idea.
So this is an existing organization.
They've got good history at this point.
I've heard of them before.
And they have very specific ideas of how to build a freedom city that would be free of all the red tape and government crap.
And so that, you know, maybe you can build a nice little manufacturing zone.
With the right kind of workers.
So I love the idea of it.
And I would say you can't know if it's going to work until you try.
And if you get a bunch of billionaires who are willing to put their own money into it, I hope they're not asking for government money.
That would seem the opposite of what they're up to.
But yeah, let's try it.
Meanwhile, according to Breitbart News, Lee Zeldin over at the...
Environmental Protection Agency.
He's canceled $2 billion worth of diversity, equity, and inclusion environmental justice grants.
How in the world was that ever a thing?
Over $2 billion of DEI? Oh, my God.
And so he's canceling over 400 DEI and environmental grants.
400?
My God, across nine grant programs, actually totaling $1.7 billion, bringing their total savings to $2 billion.
And here's the funny part.
Apparently, the Biden administration spent millions of dollars on a museum to praise their environmental justice work.
Their little douchebag museum was the size of a one-bedroom apartment, just blocks from the White House.
And it was costing hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
What kind of bullshit is that?
An environmental justice museum.
Doesn't it feel like the Democrats were literally just making up stuff?
How about I do the Environmental DEI Justice Museum?
And I'll be the director.
And you'll only have to pay me half a million dollars a year.
And we'll build a tiny little museum.
And what exactly would you see in that museum?
Did you ever say to yourself, you know, I'm going to go to Washington, D.C., so we'll visit the Lincoln Memorial and we'll see the Capitol and take a tour of the White House.
But boy, we're really excited about the Environmental Justice Museum.
And what did Stacey Abrams get?
$2 billion to buy appliances, good appliances for people.
None of this seems real.
It just seems so insanely criminal and corrupt that, you know, there was a time when I thought, there's no way we're going to balance the budget just by getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse.
I mean, it's going to have to cut deeper into the bone.
But now I think we could.
Because it seems to me that Democrats are just a criminal organization.
And I mean that literally.
It seems like Democrats with all the NGOs and the weird suspicious funding, especially for DEI and especially for environmental stuff, it looks like it's just a criminal organization and it's being unwound by the Trump administration if we don't get killed by domestic terrorists.
Did I see that Steve Bannon had agreed to go on Gavin Newsom's podcast?
Is that really going to happen?
I saw just a mention on social media, so I'll need a fact check on that.
But that would be interesting.
I'm pretty sure I'd watch that.
Now, I have to give Gavin Newsom some credit.
The whole I'm going to do a podcast thing, it's looking smarter every day.
It's just looking smarter.
And if he keeps having Republicans on...
Especially the ones who have the most to say.
He might be able to pull this off.
Because I think he's correctly identified that it's just a great way to communicate.
And if he gets the right guess, people will definitely watch it.
I don't know.
I would be concerned that if he didn't want him to be in a higher office, he's executing pretty well.
On at least this part of his plan.
So I'd worry about that.
But Joel Pollack was writing in Breitbart News.
There's this new book that's talking about all the bad things in California.
It's called, let's see, the book is called Fool's Gold.
That was like a fool's gold.
The radicals, connards, the subtitle's too long.
It's called Fool's Gold.
But anyway, it's about all the bad things happening in California.
And one of the stories is that Newsom used some government funding to arrange for a bronze bust of himself to be sculpted and put inside City Hall to commemorate his term as mayor.
And apparently when he was asked about it, he'd famed ignorance of the identity of the private donors who funded it.
But apparently it may have been some funds that he had some control over.
So let me be fair.
If this book were written to be the real secret bad story of Trump, I would say, hmm, I don't believe it.
Because books that are about all the bad things that one side does, I don't think they're the most credible things in the world, just by their nature.
So I don't know if this story is real.
And if you don't hear Newsom's version of it, you haven't heard the whole story.
So I don't know if it's true, but it's a fun story.
And it's a little too on the nose, because you think of Newsom as sort of an arrogant, self-promoting kind of a guy.
So when you hear that he was behind funding his own bust, it sounds kind of perfect.
But I'm sure the book is well-researched.
So I guess the story is that it's in the book.
So what is true would be maybe separate from that.
Anyway, Chinese scientists figured out how to use a new kind of...
Amino acids, well, not a new kind, but a weaker kind of acid, to extract almost 100% of the lithium from old batteries, according to interesting engineering, Amir Callum is writing.
Now, that's a pretty big deal.
Imagine if you could extract, without much effort, 99.99% of all the lithium in a used battery.
That's a pretty big deal.
And, you know, every day there are new breakthroughs.
That will increase your heating efficiency, your battery efficiency by 30%.
There's a lot going on in this whole battery situation.
So it's pretty exciting.
I guess this would work on not just car batteries, but even like little batteries.
Anyway, so ladies and gentlemen, that's what I had for today.