Soldiers Shot Down In Iran SAVED, US Pulls Off UNBELIEVABLE Rescue
Tim Pool Daily Show covers a daring U.S. rescue in Iran where SEAL Team 6 saved an F-15 officer hunted by IRGC forces with a $60,000 bounty, prompting President Trump to threaten destroying power plants if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. The episode also addresses SNL backlash over Michael Che's assassination joke, Pepsi and Diageo withdrawing from the UK Wireless Festival due to Kanye West's anti-Semitic remarks, Megan Rapinoe's criticism of the IOC's invasive transgender testing policy, and Ari Hoffman's analysis of Washington state daycare fraud, the Antonio Mays Jr. settlement, and the unconstitutional millionaire tax driving away corporations like Starbucks. [Automatically generated summary]
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Look, when they first reached out, I was like, yeah, sure.
There was an F 15 that was downed over Iran, and the pilot and a crewman were both ejected.
And while the pilot was rescued pretty shortly after the plane, after he was ejected, the crewman was behind enemy lines, and a daring rescue needed to be undertaken to get to him.
All the while, Iranian forces were also trying to get to this crewman.
This U.S. crewman.
So there was a race to get to this guy who was injured behind enemy lines.
Absolutely fascinating rescue.
And we have this from the New York Post how the U.S. used SEAL Team 6, a CIA ruse, and death from above to rescue the missing F 15 airman in Iran.
They've been schwacking dudes chasing him.
So this is, I really, I was watching this with some nervousness and trepidation.
I was very worried for.
The crewmen, I really did not want to see a situation where U.S. airmen were wandering around in Iran getting captured and tortured and something terrible.
I mean, absolutely could have been a horrific scenario.
And a lot of us were just on pins and needles waiting for this to turn out in the best way possible, which it did.
The U.S. rescued a missing F 15 airman deep inside Iran with an incredibly complex and daring mission that involved SEAL Team 6, a CIA ruse, a hastily constructed forward airstrip in hostile territory.
And patrols of friendly aircraft that gave the Air Force colonel cover.
From the New York Post, they say it was a life or death race between U.S. and Iranian forces to find the seriously injured weapons officer outside Isfahan over two days, which culminated in the crew members' extraction by America's most elite commandos and a firefight with local militias that were hunting for him.
The unnamed officer, he hasn't been named yet, we don't know who he is yet, was shot down on Good Friday in southwestern Iran.
He hid out in the Zagros Mountains and managed to climb a 7,000 foot ridge to evade capture for 36 hours with just a handgun for defense, while American MQ 9 Reaper drones pounded nearby Iranian forces with missiles if they got close to his position.
So, I mean, just imagine this.
Um, can I have the mouse?
Where is it?
What's going on?
Yeah, so the producer is stealing my mouse.
That's that's not helpful, guys.
But let's take another look at this.
Um, he evaded up a 7k ridge, they've been schwacking dudes chasing him all day.
Was nuts, a source told Toby Hamden, a veteran war correspondent.
In an effort to confuse the Iranians who put a sixty thousand dollar bounty more than ten times the average household income, just for reference, on the officer's head, the CI pulled off a diversion on Saturday.
They were planting fake intel saying that he'd already been rescued and was being driven out of Iran.
So the operation involved landing multiple transport aircraft inside Iranian territory just to the south of the city, some 2,000 miles inside the country.
So all of this was going on.
They were trying to get to the guy.
Meanwhile, Iranians were trying to get to the guy to collect this bounty.
And you had the CIA doing a misinformation campaign while the SEALs were going in to rescue him.
So I was very happy to see this.
I'm sure we were all very happy to see that this pilot, this crewman was rescued, as was the pilot.
Previous to that.
And yeah, I mean, I'm no fan of war, but I am a fan of not leaving any American behind enemy lines.
So that is a big deal to me.
And when he was rescued, he said, God is good.
After he was rescued, ejecting from the aircraft, the weapon systems officer who was rescued after the fight with the fighter jet was shot down.
Gave this message.
God is good.
He said it was not completely clear early on, but we stuck with it and verified he was alive and not captured.
And those who know him said he is religious, said a defense official, clarifying the words.
Even the population was looking for him.
They offered people a bonus if they captured him, Trump said.
The president added that the Iranian military got lucky after shooting down the F 15 with a shoulder fired missile.
And Secretary of War Pete Hegseth reacted to the message as well.
Oh, he said God is good.
I misunderstood that.
I'm sorry, guys.
It was Pete Hegseth who said that God is good.
So, oh no, it was both of them.
It was both of them.
Pete Hegseth was echoing the officer's remarks.
Apologies for that confusion, but that's what was going on.
It occurs to me that Pete Hegseth, when he took on the defense secretary position and later renamed it Secretary of War with President Trump backing that and then renamed the Department of Defense to the War Department, the Department of War.
I wonder if they had all of this in their minds already, Pete Higseth, saying that the United States needed to be on a war footing, going out to all of the munitions factories, bringing in more sort of startup enterprises.
I'm thinking like Hadrian and Andoril to fill in the gaps left by some of the bigger contractors who were out there.
I mean, this must be something that they had in mind, right?
That they were going to go into Iran, for example, and, you know, Undertake what is apparently not a regime change war.
I mean, time will tell on that one.
So, yeah, this was a very daring mission.
And yeah, it was a very tenuous couple of days waiting to see if these guys would be all right.
You know, I mean, nobody wanted to see a repeat of some of the previous scenes we'd seen, like Benghazi or other things.
And we also have some information about how the CIA played a key role in the rescue of the American F 15 crewman behind enemy lines.
US officials said that the CIA launched a deception campaign inside Iran, spreading information that American forces had already located the officer.
And we were preparing a ground extraction.
Both the aircraft's pilot and weapons system officer were ejected Friday following the incident.
The pilot was rescued within hours.
U.S. Black Hawk helicopter was struck by Iranian forces.
Crew members were wounded in that as well.
But the U.S. officials said that the CIA launched a deception campaign inside Iran, spreading information that American forces had already located the officer and were preparing a ground extraction.
Meanwhile, the agency used its Unique capabilities to determine his location.
This was the ultimate needle in a haystack, but in this case, it was a brave American soul inside a mountain crevice, invisible but for CIA's capabilities, the U.S. official said.
The officer's precise location was provided by the CIA to the Pentagon military leaders and the White House, and Trump is the one who apparently ordered the immediate rescue mission.
The IRGC moved forces to prevent a recovery.
But the U.S. Air Force carried out strikes targeting Iranian units to keep them from reaching the area.
And Trump praised the mission as one of the most daring search and rescue operations in U.S. history, noting that the officer sustained injuries but will be just fine.
This brave warrior was behind enemy lines in the treacherous mountains of Iran, being hunted down by our enemies who were getting closer and closer by the hour, Trump said.
Praise be Allah, he said, which was seen as insulting to many Muslims, as this was clearly an insult to Iran.
What kind of president goes out there and just says stuff like that?
You know, I mean, it does.
It's got a Hollywood movie all over it, you know?
But there he is saying that.
It was funny because when this was posted, I was talking to some people at Post Millennial about it, and they were like, no, that's just a meme.
And no, it's not a meme.
He actually said, open the effing straight, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell.
And said Tuesday would be power plant and bridge day.
Now, I think it's sort of not common for a.
An army to go striking power plants or desalination plants or anything along those lines.
It does seem pretty aggressive.
But at the same time, I mean, if we're doing the thing, I guess do the thing, you know?
I mean, it'd be better perhaps to not be doing the thing at all, but that's where we're at.
And then Trump followed it up with Tuesday, 8 p.m. Eastern Time.
I don't know what's coming.
None of us knows what's coming except for probably Trump and Hegseth and the people in the Whatever signal chat they're using to discuss it.
But this will be something to keep eyes on.
President Trump is also speaking from the White House briefing room today at 1 p.m.
The plan apparently is to discuss this rescue mission.
And I'm sure that the briefing room will be full of reporters all cramming in together, stepping on top of each other, and complaining to one another about how crowded it is and everyone pushing and jockeying for position because there's nothing like a grudge match in the.
White House briefing room.
I have only attended in there a couple of times and I don't enjoy it.
You know, we can leave that to others to go in there and push themselves around.
Only some people get seats.
I'm never going to get a seat.
This was interesting too.
Rachel Scott, a reporter, was discussing the conflict and because Trump was taking calls all weekend from reporters, he was doing little 15 minute interviews with a lot of different people.
Rachel Scott, Is a senior political correspondent covering the White House with ABC.
And she said, Spoke with President Trump.
He told me the conflict, this was yesterday, he told me the conflict should be over in days, not weeks.
But if no deal is made, he's blowing up the whole country with very little off the table.
If it happens, it happens, Trump said.
And if it doesn't, we're blowing up the whole country.
She asked if there was anything off limits, and he said very little.
So we wonder what that might be.
We had previously seen Trump threaten Iran with blowing up gas fields after Israel struck a gas field, and then Iran started lashing out at neighbors.
And Trump was very clear that if Iran continued to lash out, he would blow up the gas fields himself.
So we'll have to see what goes on.
I'm very interested to see what happens tomorrow at 8 p.m.
I think today at 1 p.m., we will most.
Be hearing details about the rescue mission.
President Trump really likes to take a victory lap after something goes well, and this has gone remarkably well.
I'm so glad to see that our crewman was rescued safely.
We've had, I think, 13 deaths so far in this conflict.
These are our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, and it would be great to see no more American lives lost in the Middle East.
I'm sure none of us is a fan of.
Of that.
So, so yeah.
Yeah, this was, there was a post also for from Phil Abonte, who you're all familiar with, I'm sure.
He's a co host on IRL, and he said, This is what happens when the U.S. is confronted by a few Iranian villagers.
And I thought we could just take a look at this.
Yeah, that's pretty bad.
That's pretty bad.
The U.S. just went ham on whatever this was.
You can hardly even tell what this might have been.
And Phil said, This is one reason I want the petrodollar to remain the world reserve currency so the U.S. can, without hesitation, dispose of dozens of millions of dollars in U.S. equipment to save one man.
That way, every soldier, pilot, and marine knows we will not leave them behind.
He said, The third world mind cannot comprehend.
I've seen a lot of posts from people on X talking about how it's crazy to blow all of these resources just to rescue one guy.
But as an American with a son, you know, who knows kids in the ROTC or, you know, anyone who has family in the military, I think that this should be a reassurance.
I think it would be absolutely unacceptable to leave any American behind.
That was, of course, part of the trouble with the Afghanistan pullout.
It was so.
Poorly done that, we lost U.S. service members that did not have to be lost in that conflict.
Everyone loved that he made a joke about President Trump potentially being assassinated while watching a play.
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while watching a play.
Of course, he was assassinated by a famous actor at the time.
And what I didn't realize was that that was actually a massive conspiracy, and a bunch of people went to the gallows for that one.
So that was something I only recently learned because I, of course, went to American public schools all the way through eighth grade.
So I had missed that part.
But this is what happened.
He.
Saturday Night Live is now facing backlash after a joke about President Donald Trump being assassinated drew loud applause from the studio audience in New York.
It was during the weekend update segment.
Co host Michael Che joked about Trump attending a performance at the Kennedy Center before making the remark that alluded to the assassination of Lincoln by Booth.
Loud applause.
And then, of course, there was some backlash, but that backlash was probably mostly on X.
It was not on Blue Sky.
It comes amid heightened political tensions and follows multiple past threats against Trump.
That is, of course, a difference, is that Trump has seen at least two assassination attempts that we know about, one of which caused him injury and killed another man in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Corey Comparatori was struck by the assassin's bullet and he did not survive as he tried to protect his family.
There were other jokes targeting the president and the administration.
Colin Jost referenced the recent firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi.
And said that it was her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files that caused her to be fired and that she had been asked to redact herself from the position.
That's sort of cute.
Saturday Night Live has not been quite as cringy as they had been previously.
And I think that's because the administration has actually given them more to joke about.
So go back to making it harder for SNL to make jokes at your expense, federal government.
Let's see.
Nope, not that one yet.
Let's talk about this one.
Didn't we?
I think we have a different one for this.
We can talk about Kanye West first.
Can we talk about Kanye West first and then do the other one?
For me, it's still kind of a morning show as far as I'm concerned.
But this was interesting.
Pepsi as well as.
Drinks giant Diageo pulled out of backing the wireless festival in the UK.
Basically, it seems like this is because Kanye West is headlining the event, which is set to take the stage in July.
Diageo and Pepsi pulling out of backing the event came after Keir Starmer and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan both slammed Kanye West for his past remarks.
Kanye has recently released a new album called Bully and he's been on tour.
And I don't know if any of you guys.
Scroll Instagram like I do, but there have been all these amazing clips of Kanye West performing, I think, in Mexico City and definitely at the SoFi Arena or Stadium or whatever it's called in Los Angeles, where he's standing atop the world basically.
It's like it's the world and doing these songs and having all of these special guests like Lauryn Hill and Travis Scott.
And I was thinking about Kanye West because he's faced some serious scrutiny over the past few years.
There was the Nike, you know, debacle and all kinds of other things, his White Lives Matter thing.
And of course, his song that got everybody very mad at him and got everyone to call him anti Semitic, as well as other comments as well.
And so I started thinking about why there are some artists who fans just keep flocking to, no matter what mainstream media tells them, you know, that they should think about that artist.
I'm thinking of Kanye West, of course.
You also have people still love Michael Jackson despite all of the commentary about him and negative reactions to him.
You also have people still love Morrissey, who is one of my all time favorite musicians.
And I think it's just because there are artists who really capture something and fans just keep demanding more of it.
J.K. Rowling, it doesn't matter what people say about J.K. Rowling, HBO is still launching a new show, right?
Based on Harry Potter.
People still read the books no matter what the trans lobby wants you to believe.
And I, So I downloaded the Bully album and I thought, you know, I'll take a listen to this.
I've liked past Kanye West previously.
And so I was thinking about it.
And what Kanye West does is he takes scraps of our culture.
And he weaves them together basically with the, you know, demolished threads of his own heart.
So I think that's what's going on.
And whatever he says, fans still will go listen to it because his music is very emotional and people like it.
So there are artists that are just like that.
And we can see what Kier Starmer said.
This is what he said to The Sun It is deeply concerning, Kanye West has been booked to perform at Wireless despite his previous anti Semitic remarks and celebration of Nazism.
Anti Semitism in any form is abhorrent and must be confronted firmly wherever it appears.
Everyone has a responsibility to ensure Britain is a safe place where Jewish people feel safe.
Now, sure, I totally agree with Kier Starmer.
That's definitely true.
Britain should be a place where Jewish people feel safe.
But under Starmer's leadership, it is not.
And Kanye West is not the person who's the problem.
Kier Starmer is, right?
I mean, they have like massive parades and things of, you know, Muslims shouting, the pro Palestinian contingent shouting against Jews.
Jews getting harassed in the streets.
We've seen this.
Police coming after people who raise the Union Jack flag, police coming after people who take down the Gaza flag.
So Keir Starmer is such a hypocrite in that situation because he's going after an American pop star, but he doesn't really take any responsibility for what's gone on in Britain.
There have been countless interviews with Jewish, English people who are like, hey, it's not safe here in the UK for us Jews.
They're making it a place where, you know, Muslims can gather and congregate and Jews just have to be, you know, pushed aside.
So, I think Starmer really should take a closer look at what he's actually saying.
And it's sure easier to go after Kanye West than it is to look at his own policies and biases.
But that's what's going on.
We also had Sadiq Khan, London's mayor, said, We are clear that the past comments and actions of this artist are offensive and wrong and are simply not reflective of London's values.
Again, he's totally cool with the massive Gaza anti Jewish protests.
That goes through London with some frequency if social media is to be believed.
And we've certainly seen those.
So I don't see how this makes sense going after Kanye West, but being fine with all of the anti Jewish sentiment that has rose up in England.
So there's one more story I wanted to talk to you guys about.
Oh, I put in a thing about a little link that probably did not unfurl.
Two things, just real quick.
One, the New York Times ran a puff piece about American students taking out a bunch of student loans and then fleeing the country so that they don't have to pay it back and just defaulting on their loans, including one woman who took out, I think, $65,000 in student loans and then her payment was $60 a month and she thought, that's just too much.
I can't do it.
It's too much.
And so she moved to the Czech Republic and now refuses to pay.
The thing about this is, colleges should be the ones that are on the hook for paying student loans back when students default on their loans.
Instead, it falls to American taxpayers, many of whom were like, hey, I'm not going to take out a bunch of loans to go to college because I don't want to be on the hook for all this debt.
American taxpayers should not be saddled with the debt of students who go get historical preservation degrees and then, which is a true example.
And then refuse to pay it back.
And then, lastly, before I think our guest comes on, is our guest getting queued up?
Now, her comments come after the IOC, the International Olympic Commission, said, no more men and women's sports.
We're just not doing it anymore.
We're going to test you, make sure.
That you're actually a lady before we let you play.
This comes after, of course, Imam Khalif, the Algerian Olympian wrestler, who was like, I'm totally a woman, and then won a bunch of stuff.
And it turns out, not a girl, guys, not a girl.
But Megan Rapineau said that it was hateful to allow the International Olympic Commission to undertake this testing of female athletes, hateful to the trans community.
And I just wanted to point out that Megan Rapineau, Her, I think, 2017 women's U.S. national soccer team was beaten into the dirt by like a 15 year old boys' team from Texas.
Like it was just, you know, 15 year old boys totally took them to town.
And so now that, you know, she had a career that was unmarred by men invading women's sports, she doesn't think that the rest of women deserve that.
Because it has nothing to do with protecting women.
I feel like two people who played at the very highest level for every competition that you possibly could don't agree with this and never felt like this was an issue at all.
The protection of the female bracketed women's category.
You've been doing a lot of coverage of what's going on in Washington State, your home state.
And as we were looking at the fraud that was happening in Minnesota, and we saw Nick Shirley going around there exposing all of this essentially fraud of federal programs and state programs where people were taking money, opening up, for example, autistic services businesses and then providing nothing in return.
We've seen Feeding Our Future, people have been prosecuted for this where people were taking COVID money to feed kids who needed food during COVID, but they actually weren't feeding anybody.
You've started to dig into this in Washington state.
So, 10 years after she threatened to blow up a school bus filled with children.
She decides to run for King County Council thinking nobody's going to find that out.
So we got the video over at the Post Millennial.
We shared it.
It went mega viral.
And people still backed her.
People still support her.
She was Somali.
And then what happened was we started digging into her more and more and more.
And I found her finances and who was donating to her campaign.
And at the time, this was back in, I think, 2021 or 2022, we saw that there were Somali daycares in Minnesota that were donating to a candidate in Washington state.
Now, all of a sudden, you start wondering about that.
And I remember at the time, I started looking at these daycares and I said, Why are they in strip malls?
So, this was going on back then, but she lost and we kind of lost track of what goes on.
The news cycle continues.
And then Nick Shirley comes out with this video and immediately that rang some bells with me.
So, I went and looked it up.
It was all still there, still on the finance websites.
And then I started digging in and there was some crossover, there was some correlation.
But then it got worse where there's a massive Somali community here in Washington.
And myself and other citizen journalists started digging into them and found millions of dollars in fraud.
Now, Washington state officials refuse to look into this in any way, shape, or form.
But recently, the Washington state auditor has been looking into this, and all they're doing is auditing.
And they say there is $1.3 billion of money they cannot audit of payments to daycares from the Department of Children, Youth, and Family Services.
That's just money they can't audit, $1.3 billion.
I would actually wager to say that the fraud here in Washington is going to be infinitely bigger than what was found in Minnesota.
I've been looking at the crossover and I haven't found which ones are specific yet.
It would be so great if it was the quality hearing center, it was right there.
But still, you got to ask yourself even if they weren't the same ones, why are daycares in Minnesota donating to a King County Council candidate in Seattle, Washington?
One has nothing to do with the other.
Look, Congress, you might be able to say, oh, maybe they're going to vote for more things like what Ilhan Omar proposed originally, which opened up the whole fraud, which opened up.
For the feeding our future and all these other scandals.
Maybe you want more votes in the rest of the country, but a King County Council candidate seems to me like they just got money to burn.
And I do remember that at the time, those daycares were in Ilhan Omar's district.
So if this is going on in Washington state, and it seems like, you know, it seems like you guys are all pretty close to totally blowing this up, it's going on in Minnesota.
So we've seen in California, it's not just the daycare problems, but the senior assisted living daycare facilities.
Hospice facilities.
Hospice, look, unfortunately, anybody who's had a relative who died, you know, it's a few weeks, maybe a few months, but that's what hospice is.
It's basically just a waiting room until you die.
How is it that people are living for years on hospice care?
And Nick Shirley's latest video, when he goes to what used to be what looks like a hotel complex, but is now just offices, offices, but nobody's there, or they're driving really fancy cars in this rundown hotel dump.
They're driving nicer cars than I drive, and I'm trying to figure out how they're affording all this.
And actually, there's a car dealership that I work with here in Seattle, and they told me that Somalis just come in here in Seattle and pay in cash for some of the highest end cars.
This is something that's happening across the country.
And why is nobody really paying attention to this?
I mean, we've now seen JD Vance is heading up this task force, which I think is probably a good thing that maybe we're going to get to see some transparency on this.
But it starts to feed into, you know, and as a taxpayer, it starts to feed into like this real theory that we're all being fleeced for following the law.
Where all of the money that is getting taken from us, I'm thinking of a New York State tax bill that I hate from when I lived in New York State.
But we're all getting, we're sending all of this money to the government, and the government is sending it to all of these social services organizations.
And all of these social services organizations, so many of them, are completely fraudulent.
And then you have governors like Ferguson in Washington State, Gavin Newsom, Mamdani, the mayor of New York, who keeps trying to extort Governor Kathy Hochul, proposing things like.
Wealth taxes, proposing that they tax even higher the people who are already in the 1% tax bracket, who are already paying, like, I think in New York State, it's like if you live in New York City, I think it's like 40% or something is of your income is taxed.
So, the first one who left was the most high profile one was Jeff Bezos.
Jeff Bezos left when they started putting in some of these other taxes.
He saved over a billion dollars in taxes.
He moved to Florida, sold his stocks, and saved a billion dollars in taxes.
Now, the day that the Democrats passed this millionaire tax, which we all know is an income tax, so I'm going to call it that from now on, the day that that happened, Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks, said he was moving to Florida.
On top of that, Starbucks itself, their corporate offices have been emptying.
Because they've been moving their corporate offices to Nashville.
So, this building near downtown Seattle, which has the mermaid on top, it's Starbucks corporate headquarters.
That thing has been getting emptier, emptier, emptier, and getting back to daycares.
There's a daycare downstairs, which closed, which means if you don't have people sending their kids anymore, you don't have the daycare in the basement of the Starbucks building because the building is completely empty.
Also, in that building was an Amazon Go, one of their Whole Foods to Go food service things.
That's gone now, too.
So, now that everybody's moving out of Seattle, The Democrats are saying, oh, there's not going to be any wealth flight.
There's not going to be any capital exodus.
It's already happening.
You had an increase of people listing their homes over $2 million of 65%.
44% of business owners have considered getting out of Washington.
And to make matters worse, you already have a 33% office vacancy rate in downtown Seattle.
They've been closing some of their high profile locations because while they've been dealing with all the taxes, while they've been dealing with minimum wage hikes, their own employees have been on strike against them, a lot of them since Thanksgiving.
Some of these stores that they're closing were unionized Starbucks locations, and they were closed for months.
Some of the high profile locations, the one near where my studio is, is right next to the Space Needle.
They're closing these high profile, well performing locations.
A few of them they closed because of crime, because it's gotten so out of control, because instead of people working for Amazon or Starbucks, you have drug addicts wandering the street.
But some of the other ones, because they don't want to deal with the union anymore, these union workers started protesting at the Starbucks corporate headquarters along with representatives like Pramila Jayapal.
And they were wrapped in Hamas kefias.
Basically, they had their own venti fada down there where they were just protesting whatever the current thing was.
Oh, it's not really Starbucks, not really minimum wage, not really Israel.
It's just we want to protest something today.
And that went on for ages.
And Starbucks says we're not putting up with this nonsense anymore.
Starbucks right now pays them close to 30 bucks an hour college tuition.
Health benefits.
What else do they actually want?
Being a person who pours coffee should not be your long term career goal.
You know, that's the kind of stuff you and me did, Libby, while we were starving actors in New York, just trying to make ends meet or whatever the case may be.
That's not something we looked at as, oh, I really want to be a barista the rest of my life.
Some of these jobs that people have now where they're like, you know, saying, oh, this needs to be a $30 minimum wage job.
And you're thinking, but don't you want a better job?
Like, go get a different job, you know, have some of these skills.
I'm thinking of like some of these, you know, students who have given up their student loan debt and they refuse to pay it.
And it's like, why?
Who told you to get a degree in historical preservation?
A master's.
Who told you to get a master's in historical preservation?
And if you look at that, someone who's getting a master's in historical preservation probably should have done something like study architecture or engineering and then learn about historical preservation on the job.
You know, that used to be something that you would go figure it out while you were employed elsewhere instead of spending all of this time.
Studying historical preservation, like, what are you going to do?
These are probably also the same people studying historical preservation who hate things like classical architecture and don't think we should have any more of it, you know, in the United States.
So, what happened was this father of Antonio Mays Jr. sued the city of Seattle for $100 million.
And he said, You guys were grossly negligent.
If you guys hadn't instructed the police to abandon their precinct and six blocks of Seattle and forbade them from going in there, rapes, robberies, and murders wouldn't have gone up 250%.
Let's not forget there's video which you and I covered at the time of the warlord of the autonomous zone.
So the warlord of the autonomous zone drove up in a Tesla, popped the trunk of his Tesla, and was handing out AR 15s to anybody who would stand a post.
Well, one day this Jeep is driving around the autonomous zone, and all of a sudden the security guards who are Antifa BLM John Brown Gun Club open up, open fire.
So, that one kid is killed, Antonio Mays Jr., his friend is horribly maimed for life.
And a few days later, the autonomous zone finally gets shut down.
But let's not forget that the police chief, the mayor's office, the fire chief, all these city's officials were coordinating with the warlord of the autonomous zone.
And in fact, we're bringing in barricades to help them secure their positions.
I mean, we wrote this up, we filed a public disclosure request, we found out they spent over a million dollars.
Bringing him barricades for the city.
So, what happened was because EMS, because police, because fire couldn't get in to help this kid when he got shot, there was a delay.
And because of that, the kid died.
They might have been able to save his life.
And that's what the trial was all about.
So, a jury found that the family should get $30.5 million.
That's what they decided.
Well, a new Seattle city attorney gets elected who's more left.
And this one says, wait a minute, hang on.
If they actually have to pay this, Then that opens the floodgates because six people were shot in the autonomous zone.
Two of them were killed.
Never mind the damage to businesses, you name it, all the people who were assaulted, all the impact.
What if everybody sues us?
So the city of Seattle says, no, no, no, no.
We're appealing this judgment.
And the judge comes back and says, no, this was in the right.
You guys have to pay it.
So we'll see if they can take this to any other level.
But for right now, the city of Seattle has to pay $30.5 million.
That's on top of the, in my estimate, somewhere between $12 and $14 million in other settlements they've had to pay so far because of the Summer of love, street party, block fair, whatever they called it.
So, you have Washington State, which we always sort of look at on the East Coast as a bellwether for what's coming next, right?
And you have a little bit of some reflections of that in New York City with Mamdani, you know, the socialist mayor there, total disaster of a person.
So, when we look at Washington State and we see a couple of things one, the refusal to prosecute crime, the upholding of lawlessness, the allowing of people to get shot and killed when it's for the right cause, apparently.
Then being slapped with massive lawsuits and settlements.
Then they're watching corporations leave.
They're watching the wealthy leave.
They're trying to tax them into submission.
You essentially are having, in real time, you know, there's some stuff with sports teams.
There's like, because there's also this crazy jock tax, right?
Which is nuts.
So you've like a hollowing out of Seattle.
What's going to happen to these cities where the leadership is so incompetent, inept, and ideologically captured that they allow rampant crime and try and tax their way back into solvency while just having to watch corporations and people of means leave town?
And I am with you in wondering how conspiratorial we really can get because you look at it, and of course, you're from New York.
I'm from New York.
You look at Mamdani and what he's doing in the city, and then you look at like Ayanna Presley trying to put into effect this federal law.
It's not going to go through, but she's trying to prevent eviction so that basically you can live in housing and not have to pay for it, even if it doesn't belong to you.
Well, if that's not an attempt to eradicate private property, I don't know what is because what happens next?
If you are a landlord, your tenants stop paying rent.
You can't kick them out because the feds say you can't because Ayanna Presley says you can't.
Suddenly now you're in foreclosure because you can't pay your mortgage.
Who comes in to bite up your property at the auction?
Well, look, it's the government.
And now you have the government becoming landlords and everybody in the country.
This is sort of what I think Mamdani wants to do and his, what's her name, Sia Weaver, his like tenant czar or whatever her name, her title is.
They really seem to want an entire nation of renters.
Who are not capable of creating any kind of generational wealth or plunking down roots or creating any kind of assets, who are all entirely reliant on the government, not just for their housing, but for their jobs.
Mamdani just implemented a thing where, you know, he's got this whole thing about free childcare, right?
So now you can get free infant care in New York so long as you work for the government.
It's like a perk of government jobs is that you can bring your infant to some sort of funded daycare that the taxpayers are paying for.
So now, not only are the taxpayers paying you to work for them and do something stupid, but they're also now paying for your child to be taken care of by probably ideologically captured babysitters who are operating in the city.
And you look at it and you're like, what kind of country do they want us to have?
What kind of lives do they want us to be leading?
You know, they want us all to go to school for historical preservation on the government dime and then not have to pay it back and then just suck on the government teat for the rest of our lives.
But really, the only people who are paying their taxes are the people who want to, you know, live free or die.
So, what is what I look at this and every day, you know, like I work at the post millennial or work with you and I look at what's going on and I'm like, none of this is toward the end of a goal that is good for anyone at all, anywhere.
Her new proposal is the 33% office vacancy rate that I mentioned.
It's actually probably much higher than that.
Now she wants to tax the landlords for having vacant buildings.
So, because now your tenant moved out because of your bad policies, you want to penalize the landlords for having empty buildings, even though it's not their fault and you chased out all the businesses.
So, then the other thing she wants to do is she wants to start turning all those vacant offices into housing specifically for the reason you mentioned.
Because if you have a bunch of people who are renters, then anytime you say, oh, your landlord's oppressing you, or your landlord's the reason it's so expensive, then they'll vote for the communist, or they'll vote for the socialist, or they'll vote for whoever.
And that's exactly what they want, because the more people they get as renters, the more voters they get.
And lastly, here's the other one you had all these developers in Seattle as Amazon and all these other companies were moving in, building these big high rises, building them along transit.
Well, now when you drive past these brand new buildings, They are all low income housing because a lot of these developers realize, screw it.
I'm just going to sell the whole thing to the government for two or three times the price.
And what happened was the government picked them up for Homeless Inc. for subsidized housing, moved in the attics, moved in whoever it was.
Now they're destroying entire neighborhoods where these big, beautiful buildings were going in.
And now you see exactly what you were talking about happening in real time.