Trump goes strong (maybe wrong) and lots of other fun with newsPolitics, Trump Popularity Polls, WH Ballroom, Van Jones, Charlie Kirk, Starbucks Cup Names, Spartacus Vibe, Jimmy Kimmel, FCC, Free Speech, Dave Letterman, The Atlantic Magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, Midterm GOP Convention, Jasmine Crockett, Kamala Harris, democrats Destroying Families, Antifa Leadership, Ukraine War, Estonia, H1B India VISA Program, Job Numbers Report, Laura Loomer, NCTC Al Qaeda Terror Warning, Argentina President Milei, Soros Redistricting CA, 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.
Well, I want to make sure I got your comments working.
Then we'll kick off the Saturday.
Come on, technology.
Hurry up.
So I have several things in my life where it takes 30 seconds from the time I hit press something to the time that something happens.
Do you know how long that is?
Do you remember the old days when you hit enter and then you just sit there?
Well, we're back to those days.
Boom, oh boom.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's the best time you've ever had, but if you'd like to take a chance of elevating your experience up to levels that no one could even understand with her with her tidy, shiny human brains.
All you need for that is uh copper mug or a glass of tank and chelestine a canteen sugar flask vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day.
The thing that makes everything better is called the simultaneous sip, and it's gonna happen right now.
All right.
Maybe a few things are going right this morning.
All right.
Well in the morning, I I have uh three tasks that I try to do.
One is I have to put the correct date on the comic before I publish it in the morning for the subscribers.
Then I have to publish the actual cartoon.
So that's two things: the date, then the comic.
And then there's another thing I have to remember.
I have to move a file somewhere before I start, and if I don't do it, it's just makes me so angry.
Uh I can't even stand it.
Well, today, all three things were wrong.
I had a bug, some kind of technical problem that made the date wrong, and I didn't notice till I published it.
I also selected the wrong comic, also because there was a yeah little glitch in the system.
Didn't notice until I published it.
So I got the wrong date, the wrong comic, and I forgot to move my file.
So I'm hoping the rest of the day goes better.
I'm 0 for three.
Well, after the show today, Owen Gregorian, as is tradition for Saturdays, we'll be hosting a spaces event where you can talk about more of this or whatever is on your mind.
Uh Owen Gregorian.
So look for Owen.
Um, and I think oh, there are four things I forgot this morning.
I think there were four things I forgot.
I forgot to rewind.
I forgot to repost your uh spaces like I'll do that after the show.
I'll probably forget that too.
Anyway.
Um, guess what?
According to Eric Dolan at Scipost, higher caffeine intake is linked to better cognitive function in older U.S. adults.
That's right.
If you're older and you're drinking coffee, that coffee is improving your uh uh it's improving your uh if you're older, the coffee is improving your uh your what?
Hold on, hold on just a second.
Hold on.
Cognitive function, your cognitive function.
There it goes.
Um yep.
So there's that.
So there's a new Chinese robot.
Um, it's sort of an optimist knockoff, but weirdly it seems to, it's almost as if it looks like you might be using some of the Optimus Tesla technology.
It looks like they're they may have licensed Tesla's hybrid architecture.
Anyway, they got this robot, and it's the Kepler robot, and they claim they're gonna commence mass production of the K2 Bumblebee.
Uh, do you think they're gonna mass produce the humanoid robot?
Now, I would like to impress you by giving you my impression of everything that the amazing, amazing humanoid robot can do.
Remember, this is in the news, so it's real.
Would you like to see my impression of everything that so far the robot can do there?
But wait, that's not all.
It can pick up boxes, and it can move him.
Yeah, that's impressive, and I'll say it for the millionth time.
If a humanoid robot could do anything impressive, and it was going to be rolling out soon, and they're already producing them, you would see the video of it doing something besides walking around and holding a box.
No, I don't believe any of these stories.
None of them could possibly be true.
If they could really do several things, you don't think the video would include all of the several things they can do?
If it could do two things, well, maybe walk and carry something is to two things.
If it could do three things, you don't think the video would show that?
If the entire the point of the video is to impress you, I've been watching these damn robots walking around like tards and carrying a box for 30 fucking years.
Am I right?
Anybody back me on this?
Do you do you remember seeing like a 60 minutes or something 30 years ago where there was a humanoid robot that was always plugged in, and they're always plugged in too if they're doing anything interesting.
The batteries are too bad.
Anyway, robots.
We'll see.
Well, Trump's uh popularity seems to be the highest in uh fighting crime.
Um, so he's losing a little bit on the border.
Do you know why Trump's uh popularity on the border is going down?
Now it's a little bit negative.
It's because he already solved it.
Nobody gives nobody cares about the border now because he solved it.
So now it's like who cares?
Yeah, now I will only look at the bad parts now because you you solved all the other parts, you know, the the hordes of people coming across.
That's what I was really worried about, but that's solved.
So let's talk about some guy named Hey Seuss who says he didn't get a good deal or something.
That's all you got to talk about.
But uh he's got that going for him.
Crime, uh, which would suggest that he's gonna do a lot more of it.
If your top popularity thing was solving crime, and you had a model for doing it, which is sending in the uh troops, um, what would stop you from doing more of that?
Like maybe one new city every two months and just keep doing it.
I would well, you know, Trump said he would pay for the uh White House ballroom himself, but uh seems he has uh collected 200 million dollars in pledges from big companies like Google and Palantir and Lockheed Martin that will uh pay uh as much as I think one of them is Lockheed, it's gonna give 10 million dollars.
So he's already got uh almost 200 million dollars that's pledged, which makes me ask the following question.
How the hell much does a ballroom cost?
You can't get a ballroom built for under 200 million dollars?
Really?
I mean, it's mostly a big empty room, 200 million dollars.
I don't know, something wrong with that.
Stevie S News is talking about that.
Anyway, um, how many of you believed that Trump would pay for the ballroom entirely by himself?
I mean, seriously, how many of you believed he really was going to pay for that all by himself?
No, I do kind of like the fact that he said it because it it put some distance between the story that it was going to get built and then the question of who's paying for it.
So time goes by, and then this story about uh who's paying for it, obviously.
Yeah, didn't you know it was going to be donations?
Even if he didn't ask for donations, you don't think people would have offered if they knew he was going to pay for it.
You don't think one of the big companies would say, you know, you don't have to pay for all of it.
I mean, we could kick in a few million.
Of course they would.
It would be the most obvious thing they could ever do because as a as a direct benefit to the president, because he doesn't have to spend his own money.
I mean, it's basically all right.
Let me just say it.
He he created a new way to get bribed.
It's totally legal.
So if you imagine that he would have lost, let's just say 200 million dollars of his own money if he built it, and you're a company that can say, uh, well, I can't pay for the whole 200 million, but I can take 10 million dollars off your plate.
You wouldn't have to pay that personally.
Is that a bribe?
Is it a bribe when you say I will reduce your expenses by 10 million dollars?
I'll take that off your hands.
I don't know.
I'm sure it's it's probably legal because there's no quid pro quo, you know, nothing in return.
Uh, it's all public, it's all transparent, etc.
It's you know, it is well reported, but it's kind of brilliant the way he handled that.
Um apparently there was a uh prosecutor who in Virginia who was looking into the uh Letitia James mortgage question and decided that they couldn't find enough evidence to make a case out of it, and so Trump's firing him because he couldn't make a case against Latin James.
Now, does that suggest that he's looking to do a little law fair?
If if the guy who was in charge says, uh we we don't have enough, we don't have enough evidence that she knew what she was doing.
So it was the knowing knowing that she was doing it was the uh was that was the part that mattered.
Now, I don't know how you prove that she knew it.
I used to think that ignorance was no excuse.
Did that change?
Uh didn't it used to be that ignorance of the law was no excuse?
So would it matter if she intended?
Well, I suppose if it were a pure clerical accent or just an oversight, that would be probably allowable.
But uh it does seem to me that Trump is uh looking to lawfare her for revenge.
I would normally say that the legal system should not be used for personal revenge, except this is revenge for all of us.
Um, if any of you thought it was a good idea that the person you wanted to be president was being law fared like crazy, well I didn't think it was a good idea, and it felt like it was something against me.
I felt like it was you know it was against my interests.
So I think I would be in favor of some law fair, only in the uh let me say that again.
I'm completely opposed to law fair.
I don't want my side to do any law fare to the other side, unless there is one exception.
If you're lawfaring the lawfare person, you know, the person who is the the most evil and tried to law fare you, then do whatever you want.
Uh I would say all the controls are off.
If somebody tries to law fare you into jail over just trumped up literally charges, uh, and then you get lucky and you get in charge of that person someday, and you can return the favor, 100% return that favor.
Yeah, that's mutually assured destruction.
I mean, that that's the only thing that will keep people from doing it forever is if the people who did it just get destroyed.
Yeah, the people who try that have to get destroyed.
It's best for the country.
When I say destroyed, I mean just legally and financially.
Well, uh, CNN's Van Jones had a story about Charlie Kirk that we had not heard.
Apparently, uh he and Charlie Kirk uh had been in a kind of a pitched battle about the uh question about the murder that happened on the light trail train, you know, the crazy woman who was stabbed to death.
And uh I guess Charlie said that the motive for the attack was race, because the woman the woman who got killed was white, and can somebody give me a fact check.
I I heard a lot of people talking about this, but I never heard the the audio myself.
Did he really say in a way that was captured on audio, I got that white girl?
Did he did the killer actually use those words?
I got that white girl, or was that just something that was on the internet?
Because I didn't see a source for that.
All right, I'm seeing some yeses.
But uh, all right.
So uh if you knew that that's what the killer said, would you say to yourself that's confirmation that that was a racial, racially motivated attack?
Or is it possible that that's just the way he refers to white girls?
Because maybe doesn't spend much time with them.
So if if there's a white girl in his life, does he say the white girl?
Because that wouldn't be that unusual for somebody just to refer to somebody as the white girl.
Unfortunately, that would be kind of normal.
Um, but in the context, it does seem to me like a pretty good argument that he had some kind of racial motivation, you know, probably wasn't 100% of what was going on, probably there was you know a bunch of craziness on top of that, but seemed to be in his mind.
Anyway, so Van Jones and Charlie Kirk were having a intense uh back and forth that lasted a little while, and you know, they were messaging each other.
And uh the last thing that Van Jones heard from Charlie Kirk was uh Charlie invited him to go on his show to have quote a respectful conversation about crime and race, and uh and I think uh Van Jones called it a to agree to be agreeable.
I think that was a phrase, agree to be agreeable, and so here again in his last moments of life, um, Charlie Kirk showed what made him Charlie Kirk, that he was having a tense disagreement with somebody who very much on the other side,
and his uh his uh solution is to be extra nice and to be extra attentive to listening to his point of view, and that's that's how he was going to treat that.
Uh and Van Jones, I think got quite touched by that, which I appreciate.
I appreciate his humanity there.
All right.
Um, Starbucks apparently is having a little uh A wave of people saying that their name is Charlie Kirk, the name that they put on the cup when you're when you're your order is ready.
And I guess there was one case where a individual barista said we can't do that because it's political.
And that caused a big bro.
And uh Starbucks backed down immediately.
Starbucks folded like a uh Starbucks napkin.
Now it could be that they just you know agreed that you can put anything on a cup as long as it's not obscene.
It could be that they they were just you know reiterating the policy or maybe clarifying, but uh boy, Starbucks didn't want a piece of this fight.
If you were the Starbucks management, would you come anywhere near this topic if you could avoid it?
No, you would not.
You would stay as far away from getting involved in this as you possibly could.
So when it came down to that, they were on the on the side of the people who wanted Charlie's name on the cup.
Um so it's taking on kind of a Spartacus vibe.
I saw a video of a bunch of school children uh one at a time saying, I am Charlie Kirk, as the movie is Spartacus.
There's a famous scene where the I guess the Romans were trying to figure out which of the many slaves was the slave called Spartacus, because he'd cause all this trouble, and uh they were gonna kill him.
And uh he stood up and said, I am Spartacus.
So you thought, okay, it's over, he's gonna get killed now because now they know who he is, they're definitely gonna kill him.
And then somebody else stands up in the crowd and goes, I am Spartacus, and then somebody else or somebody else, and pretty soon everybody had stood up and said they're Spartacus.
They did that because they were willing to take collective punishment over letting Spartacus die.
So that was uh quite uh impactful uh part of the movie, and it looks like people are taking the Spartacus energy to Charlie Kirk, which is kind of cool.
Well, here's a Kimmel update.
Jimmy Kimmel update.
Um are you all aware that things can happen for more than one reason at the same time?
Do we have to argue whether uh Kimmel got fired because the government put pressure on Disney or because Disney and ABC were losing a ton of money and his contract was up at the end of the year, and there's no way they could ever make money on him.
Do we need to know which of those was the one reason?
Those are both pretty good reasons, aren't they?
Let's see.
I don't want the government to come down to me like a ton of bricks.
I don't like losing money.
Why isn't it obviously both?
Do we really need to have like a uh a big old conversation about which one it is?
Uh do you feel superior if you say the real reason was economics or the real reason was the government?
It's obviously both reasons.
Am I wrong?
It's obviously 100%, no doubt about it, both reasons.
Let me put it this way.
If Kimmel made $10 billion a year for Disney, do you think they take him off the air?
No, obviously it's about money.
If uh if the government put pressure on them, like maybe you don't get approval for your mergers or acquisitions or whatever, which are pretty important.
Uh, do you think that they would uh just ignore the government and take their chances?
Well, we'll take our chances.
No, not really.
Not really gonna take their chances.
That's too big of a chance.
It would be uh uh you'd be uh letting down the uh stockholders for sure.
So let's just agree it's both anybody want to come with me on that journey, just say, yeah, it's obviously both.
All right.
Uh But apparently the viewership was even worse than we thought.
It'd been going pretty much straight down since uh several years.
And looks like nothing was going to change that.
So they probably knew that they were never getting conservatives back.
I don't know if they had any, but they were never going to get conservatives back if they ever had them.
Or if they had them in the last few years, they probably already lost them because of the things he said.
Well, um, have you been paying attention to which people in the conservative and or libertarian view?
Um thought that the uh free speech was being violated by the government uh by putting pressure on the FCC.
Well, not pressure, but um the FCC is part of the government, and you assume that they're gonna be at least influenced by the preferences of the administration of which they belong, and they're the same party, and you know, they know they have a lot in common.
So the president doesn't have to give, does not have to give a direct order to the head of the FCC.
He chose him.
He know he know he knew what he was gonna get, right?
When he chose him, so he chose him because he had a certain set of qualities and priorities, and uh he liked them.
Um the people who are seemingly concentrating on the um the attack on free speech would be Ted Cruz.
So Ted Cruz is saying, uh, no, the government's can't put the government can't lean on people for their speech, and that's when it arguably there's an argument the other way.
The the counter-argument is the FCC is literally just doing his charter.
Its charter is to make sure that the airwaves are which are public and limited, uh, that they're used for the the best interest of the public.
However, everything has a however.
Every time you think, okay, I gotta figure it out.
You have to go, however.
Uh however, there's a judgment call here, isn't there?
If it were not subjective as to what's too far and what's in the interest of the government, if it were not subjective, well, I don't think we'd have the conversation.
We'd say, well, that's his job.
That's what the job says, that's why the job exists.
Do the job.
But if there is a little uh judgment about how to do that job and when to do it and when it's important and when it's not, well, that's where the free speech question gets in there.
Anyway, so Ted Cruz is going hard at the free speech being violated.
Ben Shapiro, uh, I believe did the same.
Free speech being violated, uh, unacceptable.
Uh, I think Kat Timfame, you know, did a free speech pro-free speech.
I don't recall, but I'm sure that Dave Smith probably did, right?
Can you confirm that to me?
Did Dave's comic Dave Smith?
I'm guessing he went with the free speech um position.
And me.
Um, I'm also on the free speech position.
Now is there anybody here who wants to go full NPC?
If you want to go full NPC, this would be the time to say, Scott, but it was just uh it was a business decision.
Scott, don't you understand?
It's not free speech if it's a business decision.
A business decision doesn't need to worry about free speech, it's a business, just a business decision.
Do you do you feel like that would be a good point?
Is that a good point right now?
Like right now, based on what I just said.
Is that a good point?
No, it's not a good point.
I started the whole thing by saying things can have two reasons.
It doesn't have to be one reason, and the fact that it's also a good business thing Does not excuse the free speech element of it.
And we should be brushing back the free speech risk wherever we can.
So let me let me say it a different way.
I don't like to be on the other side of a constitutional question from Ted Cruz.
Do you all know Ted Cruz's background?
And he's literally one of the best constitutional lawyers before he became a senator.
He was famous for it.
If if Ted Cruz tells me something's a violation of free speech, am I gonna say, oh, I don't know, Ted?
I don't know.
I I feel like you haven't analyzed this correctly.
Uh let me use all my experience as a cartoonist to tell you where he got that wrong about the Constitution of the United States.
I'm not gonna do that.
No, if Ted Cruz tells me something is true about the Constitution, I'm just gonna change my mind to whatever he said.
What about Ben Shapiro?
Do you think Ben Shapiro doesn't understand the issue?
No, of course he does.
Of course he understands the issue better than me.
Better than you, probably, unless you're Ted Cruz.
If Ben Shapiro is on the same side as Ted Cruz on a constitutional question, you feel comfortable being on the other side?
Have you have you not been paying attention at all for the last decade?
No, if Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro are solidly on the same side of a constitutional question, give up.
Just give up.
Just adopt their point of view.
Because they're not going to be wrong if it's both of them and they're sure and it's not that complicated.
They are right.
They are right.
Don't listen to me.
You know, I I happen to agree with them, but don't take my side.
I'm no constitutional scholar.
I've, you know, I have no I have no track record of being right on constitutional questions or anything like that.
Um Bill Marr, who's sort of our canary in the coal mine, uh every Saturday morning after his show, which by the way is a tremendous accomplishment.
Um, I don't think we give Bill Barr enough credit for what he's accomplished that every Saturday morning, both both sides of the country, if you want to call it that, uh, really, really want to talk about what he said.
That's quite an accomplishment, right?
You we can disagree with him all day long, but the fact that we figure it's important that we deal with what he said, that's amazing.
I mean, that's that is really a career that worked out.
So good job, Bill Moore.
Even when we disagree with you, you have created a powerful and important asset that's uh benefit to the country, in my opinion.
Um yeah, and he uh went hard at the liberals for uh well, yeah, went hard at not the Republicans this time for violation of free speech or pressure on it.
You could just call it pressure on it as opposed to a violation.
Um David Letterman appeared as some event hosted by the Atlantic, and Jeffrey Goldberg was interviewing him, uh Goldberg's uh boss over there at the Atlantic, and uh so obviously uh you know Letterman was in favor of free speech and didn't want to see uh Kimmel fired, etc.
Kind of what you'd expect.
Here's the thing.
I feel like Letterman was showing us the problem more than the solution.
The problem was that Letterman apparently didn't know that he would lose all of his credibility with half of the country by appearing with the Atlantic and Jeffrey Goldberg.
Do you all know that the Atlantic it's hard to know if they're even trying to be legitimate?
Yeah, they're they're sort of the MSNBC of print magazines and well online too.
So the fact that Letterman would even appear on stage with that entity does suggest he doesn't pay attention too much to politics or how the world works.
So I would discount anything that Letterman says about anything.
Um he's brilliant at what he did for a living, but I don't think he has any special appreciation of the constitution or politics or the bigger picture.
He seems poorly informed just by the fact that he was on that stage.
So that's a poor decision.
Apparently it's a go for the 2026 Republican convention.
Now, as you know, they don't normally have one, a convention unless a president is running.
But uh Trump quite wisely, and I think this is just brilliant, decided that if the Republicans always get a bump when they do uh when they do a convention, why wouldn't you do another convention?
If every time you do it, you get a bump in popularity, because it's uh what I call the the documentary effect.
If the TV is sort of nailed on, and for hours the people who care about politics watch because it's on and it's about politics and they like stuff like that, they're gonna see a whole lot of one point of view.
We are great, democrats are bad.
Why wouldn't you do that?
This to me, this uh this midterm convention by the Republicans is such a good idea that it just makes me wonder why nobody thought of it.
And if if it took Trump to think about this, again, he would be impressing the hell out of me with his innovative uh innovative ways at his current age.
I mean, that's really impressive.
And if somebody suggested it to him, he still gets the credit because the boss is the one who decides what's a yes, what's a no, and who might my advisors.
So this is uh this is a good sign for Trump.
It's just brilliant.
Well, Jasmine Crockett was at some public event, and she said, and I quote, most black people are not Republicans simply because we just as like y'all racist, I can't hang out with a KKK and them.
Let me read that again.
Most black people are not Republicans simply because we just as like y'all racist.
I can't hang out with a KKK and them.
All right.
Now may I translate that for you?
Um, I'll translate, I'll summarize it.
Let's say summarize it.
Uh what she said is you should not hang out with a body of people that might have uh some percentage, not not a majority, but it would have some people in it that have a bad feeling about you.
Um she didn't say get the fuck away from them, but that's what she meant.
Now, I agree with her totally.
This is this might be the most I've ever agreed with Jasmine Crockett.
If you believe that there's a group that has too many people in it who don't like you, it's not really your job to sort out the good ones.
Now, uh Jasmine uh might agree with the statement that people should be judged individually.
She might agree with that.
I certainly agree with it.
I think everybody has to be judged individually, and you should not judge individuals by immutable characteristics or religions or stuff like that.
I don't believe that.
Uh I do believe that if you're trying to protect yourself, uh, that you maybe don't want to spend time with people who very clearly don't like you and don't like you around.
I would say I would only adjust her opinion one way, which is the KKK are more geographic than party related.
If you can stay out of the town where there's a KKK presence, do You should do that.
If you're a black American, don't go anywhere near a town that has like a even one KKK chapter that's active.
Don't go near it.
Stay away.
Get the fuck away from that town.
But you probably don't have to get away from Republicans, because there are just tons and tons and tons and tons of Republican towns that have exactly zero KKK people in them.
So you're safe there.
And uh there's nobody in the Republican Party who's loving the KKK, by the way.
Well, there may be some uh wild cards in there, but generally speaking, it's not like that, it's not like the Republicans accept the KKK.
That's not a thing.
Uh now, if you're an NPC, what do you say now?
NPCs?
I'll give you a moment to say the thing that you always say now when the KKK is mentioned.
I know you're gonna say it, somebody's gonna say it.
Go ahead, say it.
All right, I'll say it for you.
But the KKK was created by the Democrats a million years ago.
Stop saying that.
It's true, it just doesn't move the ball forward.
Um Kamala Harris, her new book is nothing but cringe material, apparently, and she talked about how uh she wanted to pick Pete Buttigieg as her VP, but she didn't think the country was ready to accept uh uh gay man as the vice president, so instead she picked Tim Wals.
Now that was a good choice, because by my estimate, Tim Wals is a good 20% less gay than Pete Budig, maybe 25%, but you know, yeah, that's a completely better choice.
Imagine if she had gone full gay.
Well, apparently she thinks that people would not have accepted that, you know, the the bigots, etc.
But she thought to herself cleverly, what if what if I don't go full gay?
What if I go 20% less than that?
We've got this guy, Tim Wals.
He's not gay.
No, he's not gay, he's 20% less than whatever gay is.
And then I saw a joke by I don't know who this is, but Stu Berjera.
I guess he's part of Stu does America, he must have a podcast.
But he had a pretty good joke.
He said, the only person I've ever heard admit they didn't hire someone because they were gay is Kamala Harris, and I thought about that myself, and I thought, all right, in my entire career, uh, obviously people say things to me in private that are often terrible.
So I've heard every bad opinion, every negative opinion, every everything.
Have you ever heard of somebody who didn't get hired because they were gay?
I've never even heard of that.
Have you?
I don't even think it's a thing.
I live in California, so the...
Just even the thought that you wouldn't hire somebody because they're gay, it doesn't really even come up.
It's not even a conversation, you know.
Why would it be?
So I think that's funny.
She was the only Californian whoever didn't hire a guy because he was gay.
Anyway, um I've been uh reflecting on the size of the damage that the TDS um communications has caused.
People have lost family members because they voted for Trump, they've lost friends, they've lost careers, etc.
But the family part bothers me the most.
And I wonder if you could actually do a data collection in which you could find out how many families have been destroyed by MSNBC and the other evil hoaxers and liars.
How many do you think it would be?
I I feel how many families are there in the United States?
Maybe maybe uh are there a hundred million families?
An average of three.
No, there's a lot of single people now.
Let's say I don't know, 75 million or something families.
How many of the families?
Let's say half of them.
Let's say half of them were Republican families.
Or, well, no, it doesn't matter.
It only has to be families where there's some of both.
Um I would guess.
I'm just gonna put an estimate on it, and this is not based on research.
I would guess somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million American families were destroyed.
Destroyed means at least one key member of the family got excommunicated forever.
50 million.
I would bet that the demo democrats have destroyed 50 million families, and that's just from one thing.
That's only from their communication and lying and hoaxing.
50 million families destroyed.
Does that seem like too much?
Because it's hard for me to imagine any family that has both you know, left-leaning people and right-leaning people who were unfazed.
So I guess the real question is how many families have both a left and a right-leaning element to them?
And I would think a lot that wouldn't.
Maybe a third, maybe one-third of families would have a mix, something like that.
That would be a conservative estimate.
So I don't know.
I think it could be 50 million families that were just destroyed.
But far more lives, if you count the number of lives that were destroyed by their lies, you would include uh losing careers, getting canceled, uh losing friends, your entire social structure.
I lost all of that.
I lost, well, I didn't lose any family because none of my family are bad shit crazy.
Is there anybody else who didn't lose any family members because none of your family is bad shit crazy?
I got lucky.
I mean, I have a smallish you know, relatives, not too many, but as far as I know, none of them were bad shit crazy, and none of them had even the slightest the slightest problem with anything I've ever done politically, not even a little bit, as far as I know.
And and that's even better if maybe they did have a problem and didn't mention it.
Even better.
I I have a quite an awesome uh family.
Very awesome.
All right.
Um other topics.
I guess uh you know, Trump wants to uh look into Antifa and maybe see if they can Rico them or something, but that might be difficult because they don't have a leader.
The Democrats actually tried saying that you can't go after Antifa because they don't exist, and that it's just spontaneous, you know, collections of people getting together.
Well, you know what that sounds like to me?
Sounds like the Democrats know that if uh Antifa is pursued, somebody's gonna find out who is funding them, and it could be that Antifa will be the last to find out that they had a leader.
I don't know.
I don't know, but they might find out they do have a leader and they didn't know it the whole time.
You know what I mean?
Because what is it they get Santifa to show up at the same place?
Well, it's not a lack of leadership, is it?
Is it their lack of leadership that gets them all to drive across the country and be in the same place at the same time?
No, somebody is organizing something.
If you say to me, but Scott, you don't understand.
It's sort of all you know organized at the grassroots.
To which I say, no, it's not.
There's always somebody who starts the ball rolling and says, all right, everybody, you know, maybe you can go do your own thing about this, but I'm telling you what to do your own thing about.
Of course there's a leader, because absolutely nothing happens at a regular, you know, sort of group event.
No, that doesn't happen spontaneously.
That's like imagining that our other protests are organic and grassroots.
That doesn't even exist.
You don't have to wonder if the next protest is organic.
None of them are.
None of them are.
I don't even know if it's possible to have an organic one.
So yeah, maybe maybe Antifa is more clever about hiding, you know, where their support is, but I got a feeling uh we might find out pretty soon.
Turns out that we're not alone though.
Because it looks like uh Victor Orban and in Hungary wants to um make Antifa a terrorist organization.
Uh well that that's what Trump wanted to do, make him a terrorist organization.
And also, I guess uh the Dutch.
Is it the Dutch?
I think the Dutch parliament also wanted to call Antifa a terrorist organization.
So it's not just us.
So that should help.
In other news, um, the ongoing energy infrastructure war between Russia and Ukraine.
Uh features, I guess Ukraine took out another oil refinery in southern Russia.
If you're keeping track, what was the number I gave you the other day from Grok?
30 oil refineries in Russia, and now this would be a handful so far that have been attacked.
I don't know if they're operational or not, but they've been attacked.
So the estimate that some people said was if half of the oil refineries went offline, uh, Russia's economy would be in serious trouble.
Yeah, 20% so far.
But I don't know, you can't you can't really trust any of the numbers coming out of the war zone, whether something is destroyed or whether you know they've rebuilt it in two days, you never know.
But uh clearly Kiev is going on the attacking oil refinery strategy.
Here's what I don't know.
Doesn't it seem to you like there should be a lot more of these every day?
As in was there really only one oil refinery that got attacked overnight?
Why wouldn't why wouldn't they be attacking five to ten of them every night?
Are they running out of drones?
Do they not have enough uh enough weapons?
So I thought that uh so it must be there's there must be a specialized kind of drones that can get that far and do that kind of damage.
So maybe they don't have enough of the specialized ones at that distance.
But it seems to me that the inevitable direction is that however many drones are being sent by uh Ukraine every day, won't that be doubling every 30 days or something?
I feel like the numbers should be just doubling every 30 days, because they all know that winning is almost entirely a question of how fast you could and how capable your drones are, how fast can you build them, and how capable of they are.
Given that we know that's the plan, uh are they really not able to put hundreds of drones in the air against refineries every day?
So it makes me wonder what it what it is I don't know about what's going on over there.
Probably a lot.
Meanwhile, Estonia released a map showing uh the Russian military had apparently intentionally violated Estonian airspace.
Uh the belief is that Russia is You know, rattling a saber and scaring them and making them see that you know they have military dominance over Estonia, which of course they do.
Um, but uh if you don't know about Estonia, Estonia is not like the other places over there, it kind of stands alone because they have a real big emphasis on education and the tech industry.
So Estonia is actually a real advanced country.
Uh they they could do voting on their phones.
So in case you wondered if it's possible, yeah.
Estonia does it, they just vote on their phone.
I don't see anybody complaining.
Uh maybe there are.
Um, but why would Russia be doing that?
Are they planning to attack?
Or is it just you know, as in as soon as they get uh some comfort away from uh Ukraine, are they gonna take Estonia?
I don't know.
Don't know what's going on yet.
It's not obvious to me how Russia wins by frightening Estonia, unless they actually plan to conquer Estonia.
I don't know.
Um the big news, I think, is that Trump signed this big uh uh H1B visa fee situation.
Uh the H1B visa people are the workers, almost all of them, well, 75% come from India, most of the rest come from uh China, and then a smattering from other places, so it's mostly an India situation.
So Indian tech workers come over here and work for a big tech companies, and uh Trump thinks that maybe they should be hiring and training American workers instead, and so he's still gonna let the big companies hire their H1B visa people, but the company will have to pay a hundred thousand dollars apiece per year, per year to keep these uh Indian high-tech workers.
Um I saw a uh post by Bindu Reddy, who said that U.S. tech dominance takes a massive hit imposing this uh fee will kill skilled U.S. immigration to America.
Uh this fee will also be applied to immigrants graduating from U.S. universities and seeking jobs, it'll be a domino effect, and we'll lose our technical dominance to India and China.
It's time to panic.
What do you think?
Do you think that Trump is right?
You know, maybe like he might have been right on tariffs.
Is it possible that uh we come out ahead by making sure that we have lots of domestic high-tech people who are well trained and can do the job, or are we gonna lose so much because the Indian workers are bringing with them you know insane amounts of talent that we couldn't possibly grow domestically, which is well, don't know.
Um, probably the court will block it, because I guess the court can block it if uh they didn't do proper notification to you know allow people to comment on it before it happens, so that alone might delay it or block it until the proper notifications could come.
And I think there's at least one other reason that the court might get involved, and therefore I'm sure it will.
So don't assume it's gonna happen.
The other possibility is there'll be a lot of tweaking.
So you can expect that uh, I don't know, some special industries will say, uh, okay, can you make us an exception?
Because there is absolutely no way we can do this with Americans.
We'll we'll work as fast as we can to make sure there's a day where we can do it with Americans, but right now, honestly, there are no Americans who can do this, and we just need a little relief.
That will probably happen, and there might be some industries where uh they're important industries, and the government says, okay, we can't really wait To get all the Americans trained up, so all right.
All right, for now, for now you're allowed to have more of them.
Maybe they'll drop the fee for some cases, if there's special cases.
So there's gonna be a lot of tweaking and adjusting and you know, legal actions and stuff.
So we don't know how this is all going to turn out.
But if the thing that happened is a big tech company, uh, as they they certainly can hire the high tech people from India, they can still do it, they just have to pay.
Would would Google be willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars a year to keep uh the smartest tech person in India uh on their payroll?
Well, yeah, of course.
That would be cheap.
Uh I don't know what a bonus uh a bonus signing bonus is at Google, but I'll bet it's more than a hundred thousand.
Uh, and I'll bet the the bonuses per year for somebody who would be a top, top, top technical person, I'm sure that's over a hundred thousand dollars a year.
So what could have happened is Trump created a situation where the big companies are guaranteed to still keep the top at the top of the top, it'll just be expensive, but they can afford it.
Um small companies won't be able to do it at all, but I don't know how much they were doing.
We're small companies doing a lot of H1B visas.
I've never heard of it.
Anyway, um I guess it's too early to know.
Um, my I'll tell you my uh my take from my business experience, which was not as directly related to the this topic.
Um, I didn't know too many of them, the H1B visa people, but I don't believe there are Americans who can come anywhere near the smartest of the immigrant technical workers.
I don't think they can get anywhere near it.
In general, you know, there are exceptions, right?
Plenty of exceptions, but in general, so I guess I would agree with uh Bindu Reddy's first take that if you're looking at the near term, it's really dangerous in the near term in the long term, it creates the right set of incentives so that American workers will be trained up and um you know maybe become uh maybe become capable so we can do everything we need.
But let me ask you this.
If you said we're gonna take the best American tech workers, but only Americans, and then you compete against somebody who says, I'm also gonna take the best American workers, but I have access to oh, around a billion Indians,
and I'm not gonna take them all, but I'm gonna take uh the top 200 smartest technical people in India that I can get, and then I'll add them to the best people I can get from America, and I'm gonna compete against somebody who only has Americans.
Who wins?
Well, what do you think?
You do you think that out of a billion extra people to choose from, you couldn't find smarter people there than the people in the US who may be also very smart, but have already already have jobs and you know they got lots of competition and stuff like that.
I feel like it's a no-brainer that just because of the numbers, if all you knew that is is that India's got a billion people, whatever the number is, it's around there somewhere.
If the only thing you knew is that you could choose from a new pool of a billion people, and a lot of them are really well educated, you would do better, right?
Both in the short run and the long run, right?
Sorry, my news has just gone crazy today.
Anyway, so I'm worried.
I'm worried.
I'm worried that here's what I think.
I'm just going to say it.
This is probably going too far, but I'm just gonna say it.
I believe that the people who who who think that we can do just as well by ignoring a billion, a billion people, not all technical people, but if you have a billion people to choose from, and it's from a country with a good education system, your best one percent of them, that's a lot of people, and they're gonna be really good.
I don't believe that we can compete as well without that.
And and what I'm saying is not controversial, it's just one plus one is two.
If if if you have three people to choose from, and you have to pick uh a CTO for your company, but only three people in the world.
They're technical, but they're only three of them.
You just pick one of them, and I have let's say a hundred million to pick from.
On average, who's gonna be able to pick a better tech person?
Just numbers.
There's no opinion or subjectivity whatsoever.
So when I see America seem to ignore the numbers, the only way that would make sense is if you believe that you could pick one of those three Americans and get a better work product than any one of the hundred million brilliant uh ITT or IT, I forget what it is, uh, university graduates.
That's crazy.
And also, I feel like if you'd never worked with the smartest Indian American workers, you wouldn't quite understand just how smart they are.
They're not they're not ordinary smart.
You know, I consider myself a really smart American.
I was valedictorian, went to good college, went to a good graduate school.
Um I'm easily, easily in the top two percent of educated, you know, capable Americans.
I'm not anywhere near uh a lot of the Indian tech people.
There is a whole different level of smart.
Now, there are also a whole deal different level of smart Americans, but again, it's a numbers problem for every one American who is just extraordinarily capable, you know, way more than me, for every one of those, how many do you think are in India?
And now they may be priced out of our possibility.
So I'm gonna be open-minded on this one.
I believe that the administration has probably done his homework, and they've probably created a situation and a structure, an incentive system that would favor American workers.
Um will it be too damaging in the long run?
It might be.
I think Bindu Reddy is giving us a caution that we should watch out for.
But it's also reversible.
So I think you run it for six months or a year, and then you have the big companies come into the White House and sit there and maybe privately, this doesn't have to be public, and just say, we can't make this work.
Or they say, you know, surprisingly, it worked.
Or they say the only way this is going to work is if the government, you know, does something to train people better or faster or something like that.
But more likely, it'll get tweaked or reversed.
Anyway, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you remember them?
The head of that got fired for the labor numbers being so ridiculously wrong and then always getting corrected.
They postponed the release of a key annual report that is central to future inflation data.
So Unusual Wales is reporting this on X. And they didn't explain the reasoning for the delay or when it might be released.
Well, I've got a suspicion.
Does anybody want to take a wild guess why the Department, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has postponed a new data report?
Can anybody take a wild guess?
Could it be that the boss, the new boss, asked a question that sounds like this?
Are these numbers real?
And then after that, everything just fell off the rails?
Yeah.
What else would it be?
Right?
Is there any other reason it would be delayed?
You know, when it's not typically delayed, no.
No, the boss asked, some boss said, are these numbers reliable?
And everybody said, Ah.
What do you mean by reliable?
You know what I mean?
You don't have to wonder what really is happening.
Of course that's what's happening.
Somebody asked the wrong question, and somebody gave them an honest answer, and that just shut down the whole thing.
Do you know why?
I don't know if you've ever heard me say this before.
All data is fake.
All of it.
Well, I saw a Laura Luber post today that's pretty scary.
It says uh Al-Qaeda's um taking route in the United States and planning a multi-city attack.
Um multi-city attack.
Uh have they done that before?
I don't remember the multi-city part, but that would be extra bad if we were multi-city.
And my question is, would that include drones?
Do you think Al-Qaeda's gonna start using drones?
Because if they're in lots of cities, and all they do is everybody through puts a drone in the air at the same time, and they're all you know, bad purpose drones, they've got bombs or something, something worse on them.
Uh I feel like that's just gonna happen.
You better get your own drone defensive uh laser system.
I want one on my roof.
Uh oh, speaking of the H1B people, uh Microsoft already told it's uh H1V visa employees to get back to the US so that they don't have to pay to get in, and or risk getting locked out, and uh so I guess they're scrambling to uh to uh reduce the risk, as they should.
Um I saw a post by somebody called Leon Fresco, who I must dislike because I noticed I had blocked them on X, but somebody else had forwarded the uh his post, and uh although I don't like him for reasons I don't remember, I will read his point because I think it's provocative.
Um I'll summarize it, which is that he suspects that the H1B visa thing may be a negotiating strategy with India, meaning that if uh 75% of them are the H1B visa people are coming from India, India may have a big incentive for continuing that because I'm sure a lot of money gets sent back home, etc.
And that maybe what this is is just more pressure on India because ultimately we want them to stop uh providing or buying oil from Russia, so it could be if if uh that what Trump is really doing is saying if you're gonna buy uh Russia Russian oil, which is bad for the world, bad for us, bad for Ukraine, bad for Europe.
If you're gonna do that, we're not gonna we're not gonna buy your employees unless they're so valuable that you know it's good for us.
So maybe I don't know, maybe that's part of it.
But I don't think you know, again, this is uh we have to agree that there can be two reasons for things.
It might be that it's helpful for negotiating, but it might be that we just want America first, so it could be more than one thing.
Uh Trump's already also introducing his uh gold card visa, so for a million dollars, you can get a visa, a million dollars.
Um and if a corporation wants to sponsor the individual, it's two million dollars.
Wow.
It costs you $15,000 just to do the paperwork.
So if you want to buy yourself a visa, you can do it.
But it's gonna cost you.
I like having I like the United States having a two-drink minimum and a cover charge.
I kind of like that.
You can't even get in this country without paying.
Um I have not been exuberant about uh Argentina's president Melee.
Yeah, even though he was doing impressive things, you know, with cutting expenses and getting things turned around.
And you may have noticed that I was not really ever joining into that celebration parade, because there was always something about him that I said to myself, uh, I'm gonna wait and see.
I do not believe that this uh no matter how smart he is or well-intentioned, I don't believe he just came in and fixed everything.
Doesn't that sound a little too a little too on the nose, a little too convenient, a little too not how the real world works.
Like the real world's much messier than that.
He comes in and waves a chainsaw around, and all of a sudden, you know, everything's working again.
It doesn't seem likely to me.
But now there are reports that there are I saw from stock market, not news today on X. The currency is under strain, and uh uh there's all kinds of problems.
Uh bad enough problems that uh they may be teetering on the edge of going back to the major problems that they had.
You know, it's that bad.
Um, that's what I would have expected, even if Mele did everything right because the world is a messy place, you don't just go in and wave your hands around and suddenly everything works.
That doesn't happen.
So that seems a little more realistic.
I I think his publicity was way better than what could have possibly been the reality on the ground.
Okay.
Um Soros organization is dropping a bunch of money on uh Newsom's redistricting plan, according to Fox News, Emma Colton.
Um, so I guess the uh donors have now given to Proposition 50.
I guess that's the proposition that would allow California to redistrict and create some more Democratic seats.
There's a 70 million that's been collected for that.
70 million now, is that all being spent on convincing people to say yes?
In the in the bluest country, it's the bluest country.
How hard is it to convince Democrats to do something weasley to get another Democrat seat?
Isn't that the easiest sell in the world?
Hey, uh, are you Democrat?
Yes, yes.
Well, we're thinking of doing this weasley thing to create uh another seat.
I mean what would be the sales process there?
70 million dollars.
I mean, are they using some kind of magic pencil to draw the lines?
If I see something like 70 million dollars collected for this one thing that obviously it shouldn't be the easiest thing in the world to get uh accepted.
By the way, I do know that even Democrats are a little bit against redistricting, surprisingly, but I think they just haven't been you know presented with yeah, it's easy, it won't hurt you.
We come in ahead.
That they'll they'll be flipped.
Maybe it takes 70 million dollars to do that.
Maybe I could have done it for one million.
Just ask me next time.
All right, that's all I got for today.
Owen, I remind you, is hosting his spaces event.
Just go to X and look for um just uh look for Owen Gregorian and uh do a search and he'll pop right up.
All right, I'm gonna say a few words privately to the beloved subscribers and locals.
