Ep. 2258 - Trump TAKES OVER Washington DC?!

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All righty, folks, a ton coming up on today's show.

President Trump taking over Washington, D.C., plus a Gallup hole showing that Bernie Sanders is the most admired politician in America.

What does that mean?

The latest on the markets, a Ukraine meeting coming up between President Trump and Vladimir Putin, just tons of stuff first.

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Well, significantly longer than I've been alive, Washington, D.C.

has been somewhat of a hellhole.

And by this, I mean that it's a very, very high crime area.

And it always has been.

When I say always, I mean for decades, it has been a very high-crime area.

And President Trump has decided he is done with this.

Under the Constitution of the United States, the federal government has control over the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C.

Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17.

Congress has authority to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over such district as may be,

as may, by cessation of particular states and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States.

That was the establishment of Washington, D.C.

under the Constitution.

It was supposed to be whatever, 10 square miles, and that became Washington, D.C.

Now, the Congress of the United States has delegated some authority to local home rule under the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973.

An elected mayor was created as well as a city council that allowed for a degree of self-government.

But Congress retains the power to approve or overturn D.C.

laws and budgets.

And the Home Rule Act bars the D.C.

Council from certain actions.

So that action remains in the hands of the federal government.

All council legislation is subject to a congressional review period.

The president also does have the authority to control the D.C.

National Guard directly under, again, that Home Rule Act.

The president can temporarily take direct control of the city's police force if he determines that there is a specific emergency condition that exists and that police services

are necessary for federal purposes.

Such control can last up to 48 hours, may be extended with notification to congressional committees.

So, bottom line is President Trump has absolute plenary authority over things like deploying the National Guard into Washington, D.C.

to stop crime.

And that's precisely what President Trump has decided to do on Monday.

He said he's taking over Washington's police department and activating 800 members of the National Guard in hopes of reducing crime.

City officials keep saying everything is fine over there, but nobody who lives in Washington, D.C.

actually believes things are fine.

They may not like President Trump.

They may not like the idea that President Trump is intervening, but pretty much nobody in Washington, D.C.

believes that everything is hunky-dory.

Every year in Washington, D.C., there are approximately 200 homicides or so.

President Trump put out a statement on Truth Social.

Quote, we are having a news conference tomorrow in the White House.

I'm going to make our Capitol safer and more beautiful than it ever was before.

The homeless have to move out immediately.

This, of course, is making people very angry on the left because presumably they would like Washington, D.C.

to remain like Seattle or Portland or Los Angeles, a gigantic way stop for vagrants.

We'll give you places to stay, but far from the capital, says the president.

The criminals, you don't have to move out.

We're going to put you in jail where you belong.

It's all going to happen very fast, just like the border.

We went from millions pouring into zero in the last few months.

This will be easier.

Be prepared.

There will be no more Mr.

Nice Guy.

We want our capital back.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

And then he included a bunch of pictures of vagrancy and litter all over Washington, D.C.

to demonstrate what it is that he wishes to get rid of.

So then the president actually gave that press conference.

And in a second liberation, a first liberation day was tariff day, which again, I'm not a big fan of.

I'm not sure that was really a liberation.

But the idea that you are liberating a city when you allow for people to live there safely and happily without the predations of crime.

That actually is a liberation.

Here's the president of the United States announcing that.

This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we're going to take our capital back.

We're taking it back

under the authorities vested in me as the President of the United States.

I'm officially invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act.

You know what that is?

and placing the D.C.

Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control.

And you'll be meeting the people that will be directly involved with that.

Now, demonstrators immediately gathered outside to whine about this, including the District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb, who said there's no crime emergency in the District of Columbia, which

there has been for literally years, for literally years.

And President Trump said, and this is Monday, that, you know, even if you're a liberal, you might not want people to be murdered on the streets.

I understand a lot of you tend to be on the liberal side, but you don't want to get,

you don't want to get mugged and raped and shot and killed.

And you all know people and friends of yours that that happened.

And so you can be

anything you want, but you want to have safety in the streets.

You want to be able to leave your apartment or your house where you live and feel safe and go into a store to buy a newspaper or buy something.

And you don't have that now.

By the way, this is right.

This is right.

And this is also a model that I would hope that Republicans all over the country run on in blue cities.

I was encouraging when I was a California resident, every Republican gubernatorial candidate from the Republican Party to run on crime, to run on homelessness.

And they all instead decided idiotically to run on education.

I remember it being a big annoyance, but the president of the United States is correct.

It turns out that quality of life issues, like for example, your streets not being covered with mentally ill drug abusers or people who are criminals breaking into your car every five seconds, it turns out that's good for everyone.

The president pointed out that for all the talk about how there's no crime emergency in Washington, D.C., well, they do have a higher murder rate than Bogota, Colombia, or Mexico City.

The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as

being

the worst places on earth.

Much higher.

This is much higher.

The number of car thefts has doubled over the past five years, and the number of carjackings has more than tripled.

Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever.

They say 25 years, but they don't know what that means because it just goes back 25 years.

So the President of the United States then added that Washington, D.C.

will no longer be treated as a sanctuary city where illegal immigrants can congregate.

That, of course, has been a main plank for his presidency since, well, before his presidency, he ran out in 2015.

It's now 2025.

Here's the president.

This city will no longer be a sanctuary for illegal alien criminals.

We will have full, seamless, integrated cooperation at all levels of law enforcement, and we'll deploy officers across the district with an overwhelming presence.

You'll have more police,

and you'll be so happy.

Because you'll be safe.

When you walk down the street, you're going to see police, or you're going to see FBI agents.

We're going to have a lot of agents on the street.

streets.

And you're going to have a lot of essentially military.

And we will bring in the military if it's needed, by the way.

Now, listening to the complaints, as we'll get to in a moment, from the left is totally insane.

I mean, disconnected from reality, utterly.

There's a theory of crime by a thinker named James Q.

Wilson that became very prevalent on the right in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in places like New York City, which were very high-crime cities at the time.

And his basic theory was called broken windows theory.

The idea was, and there's good sociology to back this up, that if you live in an area where somebody smashes the window of a car and you leave it unfixed, pretty soon people start smashing all the windows on the car and then they start smashing the windows on the apartment buildings and pretty soon you've wrecked the neighborhood.

The reason being, once people detect, there's a dark side to human nature, once human beings detect vulnerability, once they detect the possibility of being able to do things like break car windows and nobody does anything about it, well, then they just take over the neighborhood.

And so the idea here is more people on the the streets to police crime.

Again, this is all very simple stuff.

And this is the kind of stuff President Trump is great at.

He's just cutting the Gordian knot.

Everybody keeps saying that crime problems are unbelievably complicated.

That is not true.

If you wish to stop crime, you put cops in high crime areas and you keep them there.

If you wish there to be less crime, you take criminals and you put them in jail.

And if you wish them to be in jail for a longer period of time, that is not a terrible thing.

And if you wish for people not to be released back onto the street immediately after committing a crime, that is also not a terrible thing.

The president says that Washington, D.C.

is supposed to be sort of showpiece for the nation.

And instead, if it's gross and filled with crime, well, then that's a bad look for the country.

Here he talks about that.

My father always used to tell me, I had a wonderful father, very smart.

And he used to say, son, when you walk into a restaurant and you see a dirty front door,

Don't go in.

Because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen's dirty also.

Same thing with the Capitol.

If our Capitol is dirty, our whole country is dirty and they don't respect us.

Alrighty, folks, coming up, the Democrats react to President Trump trying to quell crime in Washington, D.C.

They're not taking it well.

Plus, a new Gallup poll showing that Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in America.

Unbelievable.

First, is the continued divide between President Trump and the Federal Reserve putting us behind the curve again?

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Now, people who are complaining about what President Trump is doing here, people who are suggesting it's authoritarian.

Number one, he has the constitutional authority to do this.

Congress will have to green light it in 30 days or so.

Undoubtedly, Congress will.

Then there are the people who are suggesting that the crime rates aren't that bad in Washington, D.C.

Well, here's the problem.

Even if you believe that the crime rates have gone down in the last year or so, they are still so much higher than the rest of the United States that it boggles the mind.

Here, for example, is a chart of monthly homicides per 100,000 residents from January 2000 to December 2024.

And what you see is that the United States as a whole is somewhere around 0.5 homicides per 100,000 residents.

So essentially, if you have 200,000 people living in a given area of the United States, one of them might be murdered every month.

That's the normal rate across the United States.

In the District of Columbia, it has varied, but it went as high as three over three, right, six times the national rate as of 2023.

And then it dived again.

And when it dived, it is still at 1.5.

So it's still three times the national rate.

How about motor vehicle thefts and carjackings?

D.C.

is the carjacking capital of America, not just the capital of the United States.

And again, what you see here is that the normal American rate of monthly motor vehicle theft per 100,000 residents is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20.

Okay, and then you take a look at the D.C.

and what you see is 61 in December of 2024.

So three times the national rate.

So yes, this is a very, very high crime area.

This is clearly a high crime area, which is why presumably the D.C.

Police Union Chairman Gregory Pemberton has endorsed federalization here.

Well, look, we completely agree with the president that crime in the District of Columbia is out of control and something needs to be done with it.

We have to go back to how we got here, though.

In 2020, the D.C.

City Council passed an enormous amount of legislation that handcuffed police officers, exposes them to administrative, civil, and even criminal liability, even when they do their jobs properly.

And now five years later, our authorized sworn strength is 4,000 sworn police officers.

We currently have 3,180.

So we have more than 800 vacancies for the position of police officer.

And the way the department makes up for that gap is through 2 million hours of mandatory overtime every year.

So the fact that we need help from federal law enforcement and maybe even the National Guard shouldn't come as a surprise.

So the way Washington, D.C.

was dealing with that was by falsifying the crime statistics.

And this has been something that has happened in, again, major cities ranging from places like Chicago to Los Angeles, where they start reclassifying crimes from felonies into misdemeanors and from misdemeanors into nothing.

And they'll even reclassify homicides.

into other arenas of the law.

They'll treat it as accidental or they will instead decide that they're going to investigate and knock it down from a first degree to a second degree.

This is the kind of stuff that happens in high crime areas when you are seeking to subvert public knowledge of what it is you are doing.

According to, for example, NBCWashington.com, and this is just last year,

the Metropolitan Police Department confirmed that one Michael Polyam was placed on paid administrative leave in mid-May.

That happened just a week after Polyam filed an equal employment opportunity complaint against an assistant chief, and the police union accused the department of deliberately falsifying crime data.

The union claims police supervisors in the department manipulate crime data to make it appear violent crime has fallen considerably compared to last year.

Quote, when our members respond to the scene of a felony offense where there is a victim reporting a felony occurred, inevitably there will be a lieutenant or a captain that will show up on that scene and direct those members to take a report for a lesser offense, said fraternal order of police chairman Greg Pemberton.

This last year, instead of taking a report for a shooting or a stabbing or a carjacking, they'll order that officer to take a report for a theft or an injured person to the hospital or a felony assault, which is not the same type of classification.

And then they report the crime has gone down.

So instead of actually fixing the problem, you just reclassify a classic bureaucratic solution to a very, very real-world problem.

And again, even people who consider themselves somewhat moderate can admit that there are real problems in Washington, D.C.

Joe Scarborough over at MSNBC, no ally of the president at this point, read a text on air from a very liberal friend admitting that D.C.

has a major crime problem.

I want to read you a text from someone who

I won't say their name, but

we'll just say that they're very liberal.

And

he says, this may sound controversial, but I'm not totally opposed to Trump's National Guard move in D.C.

I know he's doing it for politics, but crime remains rampant.

I've had too many friends carjacked, shot at.

None of us will walk more than three blocks after 8 p.m.

13-year-olds are committing many of these crimes, quite a change from a decade ago when things were much calmer.

Well, that actually sounds like the D.C.

that I lived in when I lived a block behind the Supreme Court.

And, you know,

every three days, one of my neighbors was getting held up at gunpoint.

So how's the left responding to this?

With their usual sort of subtlety.

They are now claiming that President Trump is a racist.

Because, of course, Washington, D.C.

is heavily black.

So this means that if he wants to police crime in Washington, D.C., it's it's not about the crime, it's about the race.

According to the Associated Press, President Donald Trump has taken control of D.C.'s law enforcement and ordered National Guard troops to deploy onto the streets of a nation's capital, arguing the extraordinary moves are necessary to curb an urgent public safety crisis.

Even as district officials questioned the claims underlying his emergency declaration, the Republican president promised a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor, and worse.

His rhetoric echoed that used by conservatives going back decades who have denounced cities, cities, especially those with majority non-white populations or led by progressives, as lawless or crime-ridden and in need of outside intervention.

Ah, so that's it.

That's it.

It must be because there are too many black people in D.C.

that President Trump is doing that.

It can't be because it's a high-crime area, of course.

To some, according to the Associated Press, it echoes uncomfortable historical chapters when politicians used language to paint historically or predominantly black cities and neighborhoods with racist narratives to shape public opinion and justify aggressive police action.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So, so basically, leave your city, a crime-infested cesspool, to avoid what?

The supposed implication that no one is making that's about race?

You wonder why there was an anti-woke backlash.

This would be the reason.

2024 was, in fact, a backlash to everything that the left did in 2020, from COVID to BLM.

And yet the left continues along these lines.

So, for example, you have Mayor Muriel Bowser saying that the actual solution here is statehood for Washington, D.C., to prevent the President of the United States from fixing the crime problem.

My message to residents is this.

We know that access to our democracy is tenuous.

That is why you have heard me and many, many Washingtonians before me advocate for full statehood for the District of Columbia.

We are American citizens.

Our families go to war.

We pay taxes and we uphold the responsibilities of citizenship.

And while this action today is unsettling and unprecedented, I can't say that given some of the rhetoric of the past, that we're totally surprised.

I mean, I'm sorry, this is ridiculous, and it's particularly ridiculous because Mayor Muriel Bowser is responsible for that giant spike in crime that happened over the course of the last few years.

You'll recall back in 2020 when Defund the Police was painted in front of the White House.

And then it turned out it was very difficult to get anyone to sign up for the D.C.

police because they were afraid that if they actually did their job, they would be unable to actually continue living in public.

They might be arrested for doing their job.

Here, for example, is retired NYPD Sergeant Felipe Rodriguez pointing out that D.C.

has been trying to give giant bonuses and still no one will come.

No one wants to take this job anymore.

Look at Washington, D.C.

They're giving a $25,000 bonus, and they still can't get anyone to take the job.

You know, post-Floyd, post-COVID, the law enforcement is no longer seen as an honorable way to a profession.

And we're suffering and the public is suffering.

So something has to get fixed.

So again, the left has come up with two narratives here to respond to the fact that D.C.

is a crime-ridden problem.

Number one, This is all racist.

So the Congressional Black Caucus put out a statement.

President Trump does not care about keeping Washington, D.C., D.C.

or any of our communities safe.

While we don't know yet the full impact this decision will have on D.C.

and the black and minority communities Trump has suggested he may target next, we do know this.

Militarized over-policing will inevitably lead to increased fear and mistrust among communities that have too often been treated as occupied populations rather than as citizens who deserve to be served and protected.

Wait, is the implication here that National Guard and cops, that these are occupying forces?

You mean actual mechanisms of law enforcement?

Are they occupying forces?

Is there some sort of counterinsurgency that I'm unaware of?

Is there an insurgency in Washington, D.C.

that we are unaware of?

If so, then probably we should send in the military and not the cops.

So, angle number one is that Trump must be a racist.

Angle number two is January 6th, because again, when you got nothing else, you go into the cabinet, you grab the January 6th bottle, and you just smack somebody over the head with it.

So, here, for example, is Dana Bash suggesting that President Trump doesn't care about violence in Washington, D.C.

After all, January 6th,

The most violent moment in recent history in D.C.

was January 6th.

And it was an attack on the United States Capitol by a lot of people who were doing it in the name of Donald Trump.

And it included the people who were hurt, included members of law enforcement.

So first of all, that is not even remotely true.

If you're talking about the most violent days in recent history in the nation's capital, you could go back to September 4th of 2021, when three people were killed in a Labor Day triple homicide.

Or you could go back to Memorial Day weekend in 2025, when four people were killed and multiple people were wounded.

Or you could go back just a couple of months ago to May, when two members of the Israeli embassy staff were murdered on the streets of Washington, D.C.

Or you could go back just about two months ago also, when a couple of people were killed and one wounded in another violent incident in Washington, D.C.

It turns out there's lots of violence in Washington, D.C.

But again, January 6th, they like to scream it so that they can make excuses for what, defending crime at this point?

Rob Henderson, who we had on last week, the philosopher who works for Manhattan Institute, so he talked about the concept of luxury beliefs, the idea that people on the ground, in real areas, all they want is better quality of life.

And then there are a bunch of people who are not subject to the same problems who say that the real problems of life, the real problems are things like greenhouse gas emissions, things like air conditioning, things like overpopulation.

Those are all problems for not them and also not poor people, but poor people get to bear the brunt of actual problems being ignored.

Well, I think I found the platonic example.

The platonic example is MSNBC's Anon Jurid Hardis.

Okay, so he was trying to explain why he is opposed to President Trump fighting crime in Washington, D.C.

And this right here is legitimately the platonic example of a luxury belief system.

When I go to D.C.,

I'm not afraid of losing my wallet so much as I'm afraid of losing my vote.

I'm not afraid of losing my wallet so much as I'm afraid that my children's freedom to breathe will be stolen in a world where climate change policy is non-existent.

What in the world?

So he's worried when he goes to Washington, D.C., he's mostly worried that there will be not enough regulation of carbon emissions.

Luxury beliefs up to Wazoo for this guy.

First of all, I don't know what's going on with his hair, but really he he needs to tame that.

That's a main right there.

It looks like he got his hairstyling tips from syndrome from the Incredibles.

That is a solid, solid,

that's a solid narrative.

My man, but that is a luxury belief system.

When I go to Washington, you see, I'm not worried about my wallet being stolen.

People are literally...

taping signs to the inside of their car windows saying, my window's been smashed four times.

I can't afford a fifth.

There's nothing in the car.

Please leave it alone.

And this is where they choose to go.

Truly amazing stuff.

But don't worry, there's more that came from.

Here is former Chuck Schumer policy leader Jim Kessler explaining that actually

only the brave live in Washington DC.

You know, that's the important thing.

If you're complaining about crime, well, it's because you're a giant panzi, obviously.

We are down 400 police officers

from last year.

Oh, last year.

Okay.

And 900 from our peak because stealing our money away.

So let's cut our load.

It had nothing to do with defunding the police.

No, no, it had nothing to do with defunding the police.

It had to do with taking our money away, our taxpayer dollars here.

If people are afraid to come to DC, go to Disney World, get fat, eat french fries.

I don't care.

I've lived here 37 years.

I am not afraid.

I live in the city.

I am not afraid of this thing.

If you're afraid, go ahead, leave your fears someplace else.

You know, I am enjoying Democrats doing this routine.

Like, we wreck a city.

And if you don't like it, you can just leave.

Well, you know what?

People are leaving.

People are leaving.

It just goes to show you why the left is so unpopular because if your response to major crime problems to serious lifestyle problems in your major cities is well you can just leave and go to disney world and get fat and your french fries

if that is your response you are going to keep losing already coming up New Gallup poll shows that Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in America, which is frightening as hell.

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And again, I think this demonstrates, it really does demonstrate the difference between real life, between people who touch grass and people who spend too much time online.

I've said this about President Trump before.

One of the benefits of President Trump is that he is not particularly online.

He really doesn't spend time on X.

The President of the United States is not trolling social media.

He will use social media to troll others, but he is not sitting there all day browsing his responses on X.

He isn't.

Meanwhile, apparently all of his opponents are.

And so what they are doing is they are running themselves into every political box canyon they can find.

It's kind of fascinating.

And that seems to hold across the board.

So you'll recall that there was a two-week-long controversy in our very mature country over Sidney Sweeney's chesty ad for American Eagle, where everyone in the world had a take on Sidney Sweeney's ad.

So how many Americans actually thought that it was really, really offensive?

It turns out pretty much no one.

So we had a controversy over nothing.

Great job, everybody.

According to an economist YouGov poll conducted August 9th to 11th,

people asked whether they found the advertisement more offensive or more clever.

And what the survey found is 39% found the ad clever, 12% found it offensive, 40% said neither, and 8% were unsure.

So 12%,

about the percentage of Americans who believe Elvis is still alive, thought that this ad was deeply offensive.

Again, this notion that the left has to latch on to every 20% issue, as in 20 versus 80, it is amazing.

It also happens to be the case that President Trump has a better feel for this than the vast majority of politicians.

So we have now spent a couple of months on this Epstein story or Epstein non-story, as the case may be, because again, there have not been any new revelations and nothing new appears to be forthcoming.

A Manhattan judge over the last couple of days denied the Trump administration's bid to unseal the Ghelaine Maxwell grand jury transcripts.

That, of course, is not a shock.

He apparently said that a public official lawmaker, pundit, ordinary citizen, deeply interested and concerned about the Epstein matter, who reviewed these materials, expecting to learn new information about Epstein and Maxwell's crimes and the investigation into them would come away feeling disappointed and misled.

There is no they're there.

That is what the judge wrote.

Okay, so.

How many Americans care about this?

If you listen to the media, the answer is 197% of Americans are deeply, deeply ensconced in the details of the Epstein case.

They just wake up every morning wondering about Epstein.

If you listen to the media, there are people not yet born who are deeply fascinated by the Epstein case.

So, what are the actual stats?

The answer is,

remember that day when President Trump, like the day after the DOJ and FBI put out that statement saying that there was no evidence that Epstein was running a child sex trafficking ring on behalf of intelligence agencies and that the Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself stuff wasn't true, that he killed himself.

You remember the day after that, President Trump said, you know what?

This is not a major issue for most Americans.

And I said, he's right.

Right?

Meaning that many Americans care, but it isn't a major, this isn't the list of top like 100 issues for most Americans.

And the president has a better feel for that than many others.

Here is Harry Empton explaining.

I would say that this is, from at least a political point of view, quickly turning into a dud of a story.

What am I talking about here?

Which is wild.

Which is wild.

Which has been for three weeks.

exactly take a look here google searches for epstein down 89 percent versus just three weeks ago falling through the floor it is no longer the top term searched alongside donald trump snake that's been trading off between taros and vladimir putin with obviously the meeting coming up later this week but at this particular point the american people's interest in this story it's quickly becoming something of a nothing burger

Okay, so again, what the media tell you people are interested in and what people are actually interested in are two different things.

What the chattering heads will tell you are the things that matter to people, like, you know, greenhouse gas emissions versus what people are actually interested in, like not being killed on the streets.

Two very, very different things.

Now, that doesn't mean that when it comes to politics, there aren't luxury beliefs.

There are.

The biggest luxury belief in politics that actually is held by an enormous number of people, there are a few that actually cross the street from touch the grass to the internet.

And because people have not felt the ramifications of those beliefs in a long time in the United States, they continue to adhere to those beliefs.

The biggest sort of luxury belief held by a huge number of Americans remains socialism.

There are a bunch of Americans who are still in love with the idea of socialism because it seems to solve all of their problems, both emotional and financial.

The idea is that if you're not doing well in American society, it must be somebody else's fault.

There's a giant conspiracy that can only be cured by handing over to a cadre of an unbelievably powerful people in government control over everybody's life.

This is always a temptation.

I point this out because the right is looking at the left and they're riding high because they're looking at the Democrats and they're saying, you guys are really, really unpopular.

There are some problems.

There are some problems here.

This is why I've been saying, I'm going to keep saying it.

If the economy goes south, this country is in serious, serious trouble.

Not because we can't survive a recession we have before and we will again, but because if the country, if our economy goes south, there will be a vast turn toward the socialistic left.

And here I point to a Gallup poll that came out August 5th.

Among 14 prominent U.S.

and global figures, the most positive image held by anybody is Pope Leo, which, of course, is not a giant shock.

He's a religious figure.

And then number two is Vladimir Zelensky, who continues to hold a 52% favorable rating and a 34% unfavorable rating.

But third on that list is Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders has a 49% favorable rating, a 38% unfavorable rating with 14% of Americans saying they have no opinion of Bernie Sanders.

And you know who comes in number five on the list?

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, 34% favorable, 38% unfavorable, 28% no opinion.

That puts her at negative four.

That means that her approval ratings are better by the spread than J.D.

Vance, who comes in at 38% positive, 49% negative.

comes in hotter than Donald Trump, 41% positive, 57% negative.

Marco Rubio, 31% positive, 47% negative.

And Elon, who has the worst of any of the public figures, 33% positive, 61% negative.

And this is a problem because Bernie Sanders has stood outside the two-party system, shouting socialist nostrums his entire career.

He is a career useless person, a leech on the ass of American society.

And yet he is somehow seen as a widely admired figure in America.

And this bodes ill.

It bodes very, very ill.

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He's just awful.

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So one of the reasons that Bernie Sanders remains popular is because he stands outside the two-party system, getting nothing done but shouting extremely simple bumper slogans.

And I think that that is the thing that people are attracted to in Bernie is that Bernie is a purist.

He never actually has to come down to earth to make policy.

Instead, he just stands there saying that rich people are rich not because they provide a good service or product to anybody who wants it, but because they are greedy.

That the reason that some are succeeding and others are failing is because the system is rigged against you and the parties themselves are rigged against you.

And this is a very convenient stance for somebody in electoral office to take because it means nothing is ever his fault.

He's not had to change a single thing in American public life.

He just gets to stand there shouting at the system.

well the problem right now for the country is that if the system then fails in some way people tend to turn to the guy who is shouting at the system from the outside when i've talked about the zorin mamdanification of the democratic party understand that is not zorin mamdani's shtick okay zorin mamdani is second gen

he is just bernie 2.0 but more ethnically diverse the same thing is true of aoc

Bernie is the kingmaker in this space, and he continues to ride very high, which is why the economy economy best not fall down.

So over the course of the past couple of days, he's doing a lot of TV.

And he suggests, for example, that the real problem, the reason that Kamala Harris lost is because she was influenced by wealthy people.

You'd said something pretty tough when you were speaking to this crowd about Kamala Harris.

One of the reasons, in my view, that Kamala Harris lost this election is she had too many billionaires telling her not to speak up for the working class of this country.

Ouch.

Well, no, I think, I mean, I don't think that that's, I like Kamala.

She's a friend of mine, but she was her core

consultants, you know, were heavily influenced by very wealthy people.

How do you run for president and not

develop a strong agenda, which speaks to the economic crises facing working families?

Again, so convenient for him.

So convenient for him.

He wasn't the nominee.

And Kamala Harris, I mean, again, I think Kamala is awful.

But the reason she didn't go full socialist is because she would have lost by more if she had gone full socialist.

But Bernie can sit there and say that the reason that she didn't is because the billionaires bullied her into it or something.

And then, of course, he says the government is run by extremely greedy people.

Do you think that in America, with all of our genius, all of our capabilities, we spending so much money cannot provide a high-quality system that guarantees healthcare to all people.

And do you think people here don't know that?

They know it.

They know we can do it.

Throughout Europe and other countries, you don't have to leave college $50,000, $100,000 in debt or a half a million dollars in debt if you're going to medical school.

That makes zero sense.

But look, let's be clear in the message of tonight and what I will continue to give.

You have a government today that is run by the wealthiest people in this country.

They are extremely greedy people.

They want it all, and we've got to stand up to them.

Okay, so again, this shtick, it's ridiculous on its face.

The fact is that the government sucks money out of the pockets of Americans at an exorbitant rate, trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars every single year.

He says that he wants to live like a person in Italy.

Well, he can start by getting rid of his air conditioning in his lake house.

That's where he can start.

It won't end there, by the way.

He can also give up civil liberties, First Amendment rights, and all the rest.

But what is the thing that undergirds the Bernie movement?

What undergirds the Bernie movement is a seething hatred of the United States, a seething hatred of the West, a belief that the West is somehow morally inferior to other parts of the world.

This is why I've said for a while, people on the right who say, how could Zara Montani win despite being radically anti-Semitic?

The answer is he won because he's radically anti-Semitic.

That is the reason the left-wing base of the Democratic Party.

is totally happy to do the third world thing.

It is their favorite thing.

Bernie Sanders is the kind of person, again, he remains extremely popular with Americans, broadly speaking, because he represents a sort of fantasy version of politics where you snap your fingers and magically everybody has a third car and it's a Ferrari.

But he also suggests a system wherein the reason some people win and some people lose is not because some people make better decisions than others.

It is because there is some sort of overarching conspiratorial system designed to harm other people.

I have a new book coming out called Lions and Scavengers.

He is a pure example of a scavenger.

He has not produced a single thing of value in his entire life and the man is in his 80s.

He's a career useless person, but his entire life has been dedicated to wrecking the systems that have granted him fame and fortune.

He's the kind of person who believes that Hamas, you know, the terrorist group that has been stealing something like 90% of all trucks that the UN ships in, have been hijacked.

The food has been stolen.

Hamas has been stealing an awful lot of that.

They've been shooting people in the streets.

But Bernie says, for example, that Hamas, there's no problem with Hamas.

Hamas has no responsibility for any of the lack of food in the Gaza Strip.

Would you say Hamas has some culpability in people starving?

No.

Why?

This is sort of.

When they spent so much money building tunnels and everything under the city.

So right now...

Right now, what is going on is a slaughter.

All right.

And right now, Israel is, you know, with few exceptions, is in control of the military situation.

It is not Hamas.

Hamas is a terrible terrorist organization.

All right.

And I certainly hope they have no future in a new Gaza or Palestine.

But the fault right now is 100% on a Netanyahu government, who has waged an all-out war, committed just, I mean, it's war crimes.

They are war crimes.

Okay, this despicable human being somehow has a plus 11% approval rating with the American people.

And the reason that he is saying those things is because the left of the Democratic Party likes to believe that Western powers are responsible for all ills.

Western civilization is responsible for all ills.

This is the key luxury belief.

When you talk about luxury beliefs, this sort of fancy luxury belief has to do with climate change.

But the luxury luxury belief is sitting in the West, the beneficiary of hundreds of years of development, particularly in the name of free markets, to sit there and talk about how free markets are the problem, how the West is the problem, and how terrorist groups bear no responsibility for their purposeful starvation of their own citizenry.

That is a luxury belief, and it's a luxury belief a lot of Americans hold.

It's a luxury belief because, again, the people who actually have to live under regimes like the ones that Bernie Sanders is soft on, you know, like Hamas.

or in Cuba or in Venezuela, it turns out they don't like it very much.

There's a reason why the United States is still the number one destination for people who are seeking to get to a better place on planet Earth.

But these luxury beliefs have consequences.

Zarmam Dani is currently leading that New York City mayoral race by 20 points in a five-person field.

The split continues in the field, by the way.

Right now, he has 44% of the vote.

Andrew Cuomo has about 25% of the vote.

Curtis Sliwa has 12% of the vote.

And Eric Adams has 7% of the vote.

Now, the problem is that if you add together Cuomo, Sliwa, and Adams, you still end up with about a tie with Momdani.

So it looks like Momdani is going to be the next mayor of New York, and good luck to all of you.

Truthfully, good luck to all of you in New York.

I hope that you enjoy the ride because you are absolutely buying the ticket and you deserve what you get if you continue to subsidize a city that wants to vote for somebody like a Zorin Mamdani.

And by the way, the hypocrisy continues to be astonishing.

Zorin Mamdani is a trust fund baby.

He's literally living in a rent-controlled apartment.

He is taking a rent-controlled apartment away from somebody who presumably would need the rent control.

Here's Andrew Cuomo, who again is no great shakes, but is correct for calling out Mamdani on this.

Rent-stabilized units, when they're vacant, should only be rented to people who need affordable housing.

Not people like Zoran Mandami.

You don't need to be renting rent-stabilized units to wealthy people.

Otherwise, what you're doing is you're abusing the the system.

I'm going to propose not rent that apartment by law except to a person who actually needs affordable housing.

And I'm going to call it Zoron's Law because it's an abuse of the system.

Okay, well, I mean, he's right about that, but does that matter to the socialists in New York City who, again, live on the back of generations of American growth?

Of course not.

They're going to rip on Wall Street while Wall Street really built gigantic sections of New York City.

I was re-watching the movie Gangs of New York recently, which is, you know, a fun movie.

It's very dark, obviously.

Great performance by Daniel Day-Lewis.

But the premise of the movie is that gang warfare in New York built the city of New York.

No, it absolutely did not.

You know what built the city of New York?

Gigantic commerce and investment is what built the city of New York.

So, you want to shut that down?

Good luck to all of you.

But this is why I am deeply concerned about the state of the American economy.

Because if the economy goes south, then schmucks like Bernie Sanders, who sit outside, or Zorin Mamdani, who sit outside, sit on top of the wonderful things that capitalism has wrought, and then rip on capitalism in the system and talk about how the West and America are evil.

Those are the people who are going to be the beneficiary of any sort of serious economic downturn.

So,

how is that economic downturn going to happen?

Well, there are a couple of ways that an economic downturn could happen.

One could be that the wages of the trade war continue to come in and that they are worse than currently expected.

Now, so far, that has not happened.

So far,

that has not been the major concern.

For example, new inflation report came out.

This is yesterday.

Inflation held steady in July, even as President Trump's tariff increases left their mark on some consumer prices, keeping a Federal Reserve rate cut in play for next month.

Consumer prices were up 2.7% in July from a year earlier.

That was below the 2.8% rise expected by economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal.

Prices excluding food and energy categories rose 3.1% over the past 12 months.

That's slightly above forecast for a 3%

increase.

Now, the Fed looks like they're probably going to cut the interest rates by, you would imagine, 25 basis points at the upcoming Fed meeting next month.

And the markets are taking that into account.

So today, the markets are up specifically because of this, because people believe that that's going to mean the interest rates go down.

That means mortgage rates come down a little bit.

It means that maybe it's easier to have access to capital and all of the rest.

And that's fine.

But

there are a couple of possible reasons as to why inflation has not yet kicked in.

One reason may be that it's too soon.

One reason may be that demand is already softening.

And so, if the prices go up and the demand softens, then prices already come down.

It could be that we don't have great transparency in the data, which brings up the question of the data.

President Trump has now nominated to lead his Bureau of Labor Statistics, E.J.

Antoni of the Heritage Foundation.

He's a longtime critic of the agency's handling of jobs data.

Apparently, he's going to redo how the stats are done.

And honestly, a revamp is called for here.

This is something the Wall Street Journal correctly points out, that there have been lower and lower response rates to, for example, BLS surveys, which is why the numbers have come in so variable, why there have to be these sort of back-filled reports and all the rest.

So there do need to be some fixes right there.

The problem is that if the president is perceived as messing around with the internals of economic data, it's going to be hard for people to trust that economic data.

And the president has been doing this a little bit.

So, for example, on Tuesday, the president called for Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon to replace the bank's top economist over his past predictions.

He said that David Solomon should go out and get himself a new economist because the bank made a bad prediction a long time ago on the market and tariffs.

He also questioned whether Solomon himself should just focus on being a DJ because the bank chief has fun on the side being a DJ.

Apparently, Trump was referring to a man named Jan Hatsius, the bank's longtime chief economist.

Hatsius and his team have been among the many economists who predicted tariff policies would dent labor markets, cause higher inflation, and slow U.S.

economic growth.

A report by Hatzius and his team on Sunday included an analysis that found U.S.

consumers had absorbed 22% of tariff costs through June, but will absorb 67% if recent tariffs follow the same pattern as earlier tariffs.

That goes in the stack of maybe it's just taking a little bit of time for all of the burden of the tariffs to kick in.

And we're going to find out in short order.

Meanwhile, again, if the jobs reports, there's been talk that with the replacement of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobs reports may go quarterly as opposed to monthly.

Well, lack of transparency in the economy will indeed lead to more uncertainty about investment in the economy.

You don't know which way things are going until you actually have some data.

Here's Caroline Lovett at the White House saying they're going to try and keep it going monthly.

Will the Bureau of Labor Statistics continue to put out monthly jobs reports?

Well, look, what I'll tell you about the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I believe that is the plan and that's the hope, and that these monthly reports will be data that the American people can trust.

As you know, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has made massive revisions after the last several

points reports that they have put out.

And there has certainly been a decline in the quality and the reliability of data coming from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and there's been an increase in revisions.

Okay, you know what?

We need less action.

Okay, we actually just need some level of stasis in the American economy.

We need to see how these tariffs play out.

If President Trump wants to keep them, if it starts to damage the economy, we need President Trump to move in and stop it.

We need all those things.

If the interest rates are lowered, I am concerned that there will, in fact, be a fair bit of bubble in the economy.

One of the big problems with the stock market right now is that essentially all gains in the value of the stock market are accruing to the top 10 companies.

Like almost all of them.

Over the course of the last couple of years, something like 70% of all market gains in the stock market have gone to the top 10 companies because pretty much everybody's just piling money into AI.

So there's concern.

Will AI bust?

Will it be like the internet bubble of 99, 2000?

There are some smart people who say no, that much of the infrastructure was what was the problem when it came to, for example, the internet bubble of 99, 2000.

It wasn't pets.com going bust.

It was really things like Qualcomm.

It was major companies that had invested in infrastructure.

The infrastructure ended up being overbuilt and underutilized.

Is that actually going to happen with these chips?

The answer there is probably no.

We're going to keep churning those chips.

So NVIDIA's stock valuation, for example, is real.

With that said, there's a reason why NVIDIA is trying to get the United States government to open the Chinese market to NVIDIA chips, and that has to do with NVIDIA's market cap.

And so there is a bit of a catch-22 here.

If you go to war with China over AI, if you cut off the NVIDIA chips to China, then yeah, you're stopping China's development of competitive AI, which I think is really important, but you're also going to hurt the stock valuation of maybe the most outperforming stock in the American economy right now, NVIDIA.

So the solution that the Trump administration came up with, which frankly I'm not super excited about, is a solution in which the United States allows for the sale of the H-20, which is kind of their second or third, depending on what chip is available, most important chip to the Chinese.

And by the way, the networking of those chips using a lot of the other infrastructure that NVIDIA provides

in exchange for the United States basically taking 15% of the chip sale revenue.

According to the Wall Street Journal, apparently, Jensen Huang, who's the chief executive of NVIDIA, he worked for months behind the scenes in Washington and Beijing to protect tens of billions of dollars in future sales from the heated U.S.-China trade rivalry.

He told President Trump restrictions on U.S.

chip sales to China would backfire by pushing China technology champions to achieve self-reliance.

He advised the president to keep China hooked on American tech.

As a sweetener, Huang said the company would invest as much as $500 billion in the United States.

His argument, apparently along with that half trillion dollar offer, appeared to seal the deal.

The Trump administration decided last month to allow China to buy that H-20 AI chip.

NVIDIA had developed the H-20 to comply with past export restrictions as a less powerful chip specially designed for China.

And that, of course, pushed NVIDIA's stock up 4%.

Beijing reciprocated by allowing a $35 billion deal involving U.S.

chip soft makers, software makers, that it had held up for about a year.

And they also froze an inquiry into an already completed NVIDIA deal.

And then the president demanded that NVIDIA give the federal government 20% of its chip sales to China in exchange for issuing the export licenses.

All this sounds very cronyistic to me.

I am not in love with it.

I really am not.

And by the way, I think that it is actually an offshoot of much of the bad China policy that we saw for literally decades.

There, the idea was get China hooked on capitalism and soon there will be political change.

Now, the idea seems to be get China hooked on H-20s, and then they won't build up their own domestic chip production capacity.

I do not think that that is the truth.

I think China is going to copy that tech.

I think they're going to try to rip off that tech.

I think that they are going to try to brute force their way to superiority in AI, which has real military ramifications for things like, for example, a possible invasion of Taiwan or dominance in the South China Sea.

Again, you could see a geopolitical event spurring a recession.

I think President Trump is trying to avoid that with much of his more conciliatory policy toward China.

You could also see a bubble being created in the economy economy in which the Federal Reserve lowers those interest rates.

People take out loans at lower rates and then dump them into these AI companies.

Some of those AI companies go bust and suddenly you have not a giant meltdown, but stagnation in the economy in broad ways.

And again, this is my number one concern.

My number one deregulation, good.

Tax decreases, good.

Gigantic trade barriers, the government.

putting its thumb in and out of the economy, picking winners and losers, making sweetheart deals with particular companies like NVIDIA,

in which pledges are made, but maybe not fulfilled, or money comes back to the United States government to the tune of, I don't know, three, four billion dollars when China is getting the benefit of the H-20 tech.

All this seems very, very bubbly to me.

It does not give me tremendous confidence as an investor that the next few years are going to be stable, predictable, and booming.

I remain concerned.

Let's put it that way.

Meanwhile, the White House is holding a summit on Friday between President Trump and Vladimir Putin.

That, of course, is happening in Alaska.

The goal, according to the White House, this is political reporting, is for President Trump to simply take the measure of Putin, find out if Putin is serious, and work toward a trilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

A White House official basically says that they want to get Trump in the room with Putin and then let him trust his instinct.

The administration believes Putin has given signs that demonstrate this time is different.

Putin offered a plan.

The officials said it may not be a viable plan, but there was something on paper which shows progress.

I'm sorry.

Give me a break.

There was something on paper which shows progress.

This is like a teacher asking a child to fill in a quiz.

The child fills in his name and hands it in.

You say, oh, that's progress.

At least they filled in their name.

Vladimir Putin needs to put forward an offer that looks like something with a resemblance to what would be a resolution of this conflict, or at least a ceasefire in this conflict.

The White House has not divulged exactly what Putin wants, but Trump and NATO Secretary General Mark Rudy have said swapping land for peace, which is an idea that Zelensky is rejecting right now, is on the table.

Right now, however, Putin is asking for basically half of Ukraine.

He's not asking to freeze the lines where they are.

And in the meantime, he is ramming through the front lines of Ukraine.

He's radically increasing his military spend and his military action in Ukraine.

Just this week, he activated another 110,000 troops to try and exploit

an apparent gap in the Ukrainian lines.

Meanwhile, Moscow, according to the Wall Street Journal, sees an opening to reset relations with Washington, with Kremlin officials hinting at potential for deals with the U.S.

on infrastructure and energy in the Arctic and beyond.

Senior Putin aide Kirill Dmitriev says, and neocons and other warmongers won't be smiling.

The Putin-Trump dialogue will bring hope, peace, and global security.

So it sounds very much as though they're going to basically try to hand President Trump a bunch of economic deals, a bunch of pledges to work together on oil in the Arctic or something in return for the United States backing off its support for Ukraine.

We'll have to see how President Trump plays this.

Suffice it to say, I am not a big fan of meetings like this that do not actually have an agenda.

I don't think vague things like taking the measure of, I think we have Vladimir Putin's measure at this point.

He's only been dictator of Russia for 25 years.

I feel like if you don't get it by now, there's not a lot of getting to do.

Again, it's not wrong for the president to meet with Putin, but it depends what comes out of it.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating at this point.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States is hoping that Zelensky will end up at some of these meetings.

Here she was explaining.

With regard to President Zelensky, he has been since day one of this horrible aggression committed to peace.

And we have shown that he is ready to be anywhere

to advance the agenda of peace.

So if needed, President Zelensky, of course, will be present at the meetings.

We have been very open about it, but let's see how this will go.

Now, again, if what they're talking about is a ceasefire in which the lines of battle get frozen, that just seems like a recognition of reality.

That's a point that NATO Secretary General Rudy was making on CBS with Margaret Brennan.

What I'm saying is that in the end, the issue of the fact that the Russians are controlling at this moment, factually a part of Ukraine, has to be on the table.

That any discussion going forward from there will be with Ukrainians deciding on what they're doing in terms of

you're saying they don't have to withdraw their troops.

But obviously, they have to, but factually, they are controlling a part of Ukraine at this moment, as you said.

Now, the president, in advance of the meeting, has been making some comments about Ukraine.

That again, he tends to do this before big meetings.

The president intends to try to warm up his partner before he gets to the negotiating table.

And so, what that means is that he's being critical of Vladimir Zelensky.

The rule, by the way, it is a constitutional provision in Ukraine that if you're going to quote-unquote give up territory in Ukraine, that must have the approval of the actual legislature.

The people of Ukraine have to sound off on that.

President Trump, however, was somehow critical of that.

The next meeting will be with Zelensky and Putin or Zelensky and Putin and me.

I'll be there if they need, but I want to have a meeting set up between the two leaders.

I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelensky was saying, well, I have to get constitutional approval.

I mean, he's got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap.

Well, I mean, to be fair, he was invaded, and the Constitution of Ukraine does actually require a nationwide referendum to approve any changes to the country's actual territorial borders.

I mean, that's just a reality of the law.

I understand the president is trying to

make some sort of common ground happen with Vladimir Putin.

Whether that happens or not really is not up to the United States.

It really is up to Vladimir Vladimir Putin so long as the United States continues to hold the line.

Okay, meanwhile, the situation in Gaza continues apace.

The Hamas propaganda is just, I have to say, their program for propaganda is outstanding, and they have the help of the entire legacy media.

It is astonishing, astonishing how on side the legacy media are with the members of Hamas.

It truly is unbelievable.

and incredible.

Just to take an example, you remember that there's a chef named Jose Andres, and he has made a big deal deal out of the idea that World Central Kitchen is doing like an amazing job in the Gaza Strip, or they were doing an amazing job in the Gaza Strip, and then it was only the Israelis who were getting in their way that was causing a problem.

It's all Israeli policy and all the rest.

Well, it turns out now film has emerged of a vehicle marked World Central Kitchen that has been surrounded by Hamas carrying weapons.

And you can see it right here on the video.

It is marked World Central Kitchen with like their big logo on the top of the vehicle in order to prevent them from being hit with a drone strike.

And it's being surrounded by members of Hamas.

Those are armed terrorists, and that is the WCK emblem on the top of the vehicle.

Well, now, World Central Kitchen is acknowledging that, yeah, actually, by the way, that is not our vehicle, and they have been, in fact, using our logo in order to steal aid, smuggle aid, and move terrorists around the strip.

World Central Kitchen put out a tweet.

WCK was contacted by Israel's coordinator of government activities in the territories and confirmed the vehicle and persons of interest were not affiliated affiliated with WCK.

We strongly condemn anyone posing as WCK or other humanitarians as this endangers civilians and aid workers.

The safety and security of our teams are our top priority.

Well, I mean, yes, that's what Hamas does.

And yet somehow, somehow, it's Israel that is interfering with aid.

Well, the latest op.

And they're just dumping out the op bag at this point because Hamas is essentially on its last legs.

If Israel were to go through with the planned takeover of Gaza City, that presumably put Hamas out of commission.

That is the last major center for Hamas militarily speaking.

So now they're just dumping out the bags.

They're very upset that Israel killed a person named Anas al-Sharif.

Anas al-Sharif is a member of Hamas, but he likes to pose as a journalist.

That is his favorite.

There's this lie that has been going around, promoted by many in the legacy media and in the interweb space, that Israel is quote-unquote killing journalists.

As though if a Hamas member puts on a press jacket, suddenly they're no longer a Hamas member.

They're a member of the press, like a a magical status that is conferred upon them.

So Anasa al-Sharif worked for Al Jazeera, which shows what Al-Jazeera is a propaganda outlet on behalf of Hamas.

There is a problem, however, which is that there is tons of evidence that he in fact was a member of Hamas.

In fact, here is a picture of him with Yahya Sinwar hugging one another.

Also, in September 2020, He posted pictures of himself with a Hamas fighter whom he mourned and blessed after his death.

Also, in April 2022, he praised a 28-year-old Palestinian after he killed three Israelis in a terror attack in Tel Aviv, calling him heroic.

On October 7th, he posted nine hours and the heroes are still roaming the country, killing and capturing.

God, God, how great you are.

This is a journalist, apparently.

So clearly, when he was killed by the Israelis, that meant that some crime against journalism had happened in some way.

My favorite thing here is how the legacy media are not only are they complicit, they are just involved.

They are just an adjunct to Hamas at this point.

Here is the president of the Foreign Press Association, Ian Williams, saying, well, I mean, just because he's a member of, you know, like an actual honest to God murderous genocidal terror group, that doesn't mean he's not a journalist or anything.

Frankly, I don't care whether Ash Sharif was in Hamas or not.

We don't kill journalists being Republicans or Democrats or in Britain Labour Party.

Hamas is a political organization as well as a terrorist organization, perhaps.

But it's not permissible to go killing people.

And this was the distinct change now.

Unbelievable.

That's the head of the Foreign Press Association saying that being a member of an honest to God murderous terror group is the same as being a Republican or a Democrat, which is insane.

But probably we should trust all these people.

You know who else we should probably trust?

The UN.

So it turns out.

that according to Adam Credo, reporting for the Washington Freebegin, the UN-affiliated watchdog group that recently declared a worst-case scenario of famine in Gaza.

How did they get to that conclusion?

They literally changed their reporting metric for what constitutes starvation.

Okay, it's like Washington, D.C.

defining crime up in order to prevent crime statistics from increasing.

So now the UN is defining starvation down to include things that are not actually starvation so they can label Israel a state that is engaged in starvation.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a network of Western governments, the UN and nonprofit groups, determined in a July 29th report: quote, the worst case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip.

And then that was immediately picked up by the rest of the legacy media, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, ABC News.

Well, the July report includes a metric known as the mid-upper arm circumference the agency has not historically used to determine whether a famine has taken place.

It also includes a lowered threshold for the proportion of children who must be considered malnourished for the IPC to declare a famine down to 15% from 30%.

So, MUAC, that measurement of the child's arm circumference, it's a measurement that can be done more quickly, but it's considered significantly less precise.

And the IPC has only declared famine after finding typically 30% of kids in an area are suffering from acute malnutrition after using weight and height measurements.

Well, now they are changing the measurements that they are using and they are lowering the bar in order to get to where they want to go.

That is their goal.

It's astonishing.

The aid worker who pointed this out pointed to previous famine declarations the IPC issued in Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan, all of which used different metrics because the starvation there is actually significantly worse.

So, again, the United Nations is now changing standards simply in order to achieve the idea that Israel is engaged in starvation.

And the media are eating it up because this is their favorite thing to do.

They love it.

They can't stop it.

They will continue to do it.

And you wonder why?

Hamas continues to exist in the Gaza Strip.

If it were not for the legacy media and their friends in European governments,

this would have been over months ago.

It would have been over.

It is only outside support that has kept Hamas going, not just material support, but actual, real PR support on behalf of an honest to God tarot group.

This is what Hamas banked on.

And you know what?

They banked right.

All righty, coming up, we'll get to some culture.

David Justice, you remember him?

Baseball player.

He was married to Halle Berry at one point.

Now he's under serious fire because he talked about why they got divorced.

And apparently it got a little spicy.

We'll get to that as the show continues for for our members.

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Folks, the release of my brand new book, Lions and Scavengers, is right around the corner.

You can pre-order a signed copy right now, but only at dailywire.com/slash Ben.

This isn't just a book.

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Trust me, scavengers will not like it.

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