Blue State Chaos - In the Tank #514
Download MP3We are now live. Welcome to the show, everyone. And for your information, Wheelman, our viewer there, we are only two minutes late, so we are okay. So well, anyway, I keep saying that I want to cover something other than leftist violence in the show, and then they go and do a bunch of crazy stuff again during the week. So Portland and Chicago are well known for being chaotic under Democrat leadership, though their style of being so is different.
Linnea Lueken:We'll talk about that and how the government is responding. As for policy, this week, Trump again threatened to levy tariffs on films produced outside The United States, And no one quite seems to know what he means by that, so we're gonna talk about that. And on unhinged, we are going to look at two Democrat representatives who really need to learn some emotional regulation and also install probably new brain to mouth filters. We are going to talk about all of this in episode 514 of the In The Tank podcast. Welcome to the In the Tank podcast.
Linnea Lueken:I am Lynea Luken, your host. We also have, as usual, Jim Lakeley, vice president and director of communications at the Heartland Institute, and Sam Karnik, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute. Chris wanted to be here today, you guys, but he cannot. He's not feeling well, so please send him your prayers if you would. We also have Keeley working in the background since Andy is out of town today.
Linnea Lueken:So we are working with a mixed house today. Anyway, so how are we all doing this week? Sam, you wrote a nice op ed on Kansas' health care pricing program. I don't know if it went up yet, but what was that about? And and if it ended up somewhere, where is it?
S.T. Karnick:Thank you. Yes. I, don't know exactly where it is placed yet if it has. The idea is that they're, trying to expand a program that, keeps prescription drug prices down, supposedly. Unfortunately, what it does is it keeps the prices down for the people who do the prescribing, so the providers, but it doesn't necessarily keep them down for the people who actually have to pay for them.
S.T. Karnick:And in fact, that is what happens. It is a program that is meant to, as I say, keep prices down, but it ends up pushing them up and reducing access to prescription drugs. It's a very bad idea. Thanks for bringing it up.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Absolutely. Well, we'll have to cover that one of these days when we see a little bit more movement on that end. Jim, what is new with you?
Jim Lakely:Oh, not much. I mean, it's it's nice. You can see I'm, I'm in flannel. It is now flannel shirt weather here in Northern Illinois, which, I know I said that before we went live on air, Lanea said she was jealous. This is a really great time of year.
Jim Lakely:Really nice to see that the leaves turn and the temperatures get a little bit lower. But, yeah, before we get started, actually, I wanted to share something on the screen with everyone. On this day, in 02/2009, president Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, for what the Nobel Committee called, quote, his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. Basically, got the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George w Bush and for being mister hope and change. And we don't talk about this this topic on this podcast, but I just when I saw that on my Twitter feed today, I was like, there's another president who is actually achieving something pretty monumental in The Middle East, and he will I am more likely to get the Nobel Peace Prize than Donald Trump is.
Jim Lakely:That's all I'll say.
S.T. Karnick:Jim, you know, it's it's interesting that they they cited him for efforts. You know, I remember Jerry Seinfeld said, there's no Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry.
Linnea Lueken:That's true. Well, I saw someone I saw someone on x, comment that they hope that Trump does not get the Nobel Prize, because then it would offer a thin sheen of legitimacy to a illegitimate program if he were to actually get it. So, let's let's just let it die. How about that?
Jim Lakely:Well, you know what? They'll they'll give it to Greta. Greta Thunberg.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. For us.
Jim Lakely:She's the one who actually brought peace to The Middle East. So
Linnea Lueken:For sure. Alright, you guys. As usual, before we get started, if you want to support the show, you can go to heartland.org/inthetank and donate there. Please also clip click to the thumbs up to like this video, and remember that sharing it helps to break through that YouTube suppression. Even just leaving a comment helps.
Linnea Lueken:If you're an audio listener, you can help us out by leaving a nice review. Okay. So we are getting right into it. We are going to take a look at unhinged today. I only chose three topics, three kind of broad topics to cover this week because I thought that we would probably spend a lot of time on unhinged and and also on the second one.
Linnea Lueken:And and so I wanted to make sure that we had plenty of breathing room for all three of these. Guys, we need to talk about Jay Jones and also Katie Porter. Originally, I was just going to talk about Jones for unhinged, but a ton of stuff went kind of viral about miss Porter. So I think she deserves a little bit of attention as well. They are both unhinged.
Linnea Lueken:So to begin, from the national review, Democrat AG nominee Jay Jones fantasized about shooting former Virginia GOP speaker. He receives both bullets. On 08/08/2022, so these are resurface text messages, a Republican state legislator received a disturbing string of early morning text messages from a former colleague, Jay Jones, this year's Democratic nominee for Virginia AG. Jones suggested that presented with a hypothetical situation in which he had only two bullets and was faced with the choice of murdering then speaker of the house, Todd Gilbert, or two dictators, he'd shoot Gilbert every time, prompting pushback from his former former colleague. So Jones said, three people, two bullets.
Linnea Lueken:Gilbert, Hitler, and Pol Pot, Gilbert gets two bullets. Spoiler, put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know, and he receives both bullets every time. And his colleague, Koyner, said, Jay, please stop. And he just said, well, okay. Koyner called his comments disqualifying for anyone seeking office.
Linnea Lueken:Later, he called her again, and he doubled down on the call saying that the only way public policy changes is when policymakers feel pain themselves. At one point, the source said he suggested he wished Gilbert's wife would watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views, prompting Coiner to hang up the phone in disgust. Afterwards, Jones continued with a barrage of text messages saying that he was just asking questions. Coiner dismissed his excuse via text and chastised him for hoping Jennifer Gilbert's children would die. Rather than deny that he wished death on the kids, Jones responded by saying, yes.
Linnea Lueken:I've told you before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy. So, yeah, this guy cannot be attorney general. I wouldn't want him to be an attorney for, like, US general toolboxes. But certainly, no man who insists on that position or who wants to, like, kill his political opponents can be in charge of a state law enforcement apparatus.
Linnea Lueken:Right? It's one thing to make the two bullets jokes joke. It's an old one. It's a really old joke. I think I've seen it in, like, black and white films before.
Linnea Lueken:It's been around forever. But it's another to double down and then keep digging and make it worse as you double down. It is so bizarre. It's the weirdest behavior I've seen. Well, it's we'll hold that.
Linnea Lueken:There might be weirder behavior later in this very segment, actually. So, yeah, I I would where where are we at this? I mean, does someone like that should someone like that be in charge of state law enforcement?
S.T. Karnick:Certainly not. I think an interesting, element of this is that the premise that he has is that it's your you should be driven by your emotions and that your that public policy should be driven by your your experiences and the emotions you feel about those experiences. That's really crazy. I mean, it's it's so stupid. It's it's unbelievable.
S.T. Karnick:And yet that is somewhat the direction that this country has gone for at least a couple of decades. Maybe you can trace it as far back as the the Clinton era. But the notion that you you are, your credibility arises from your experiences and your background is simply an old fashioned argument ad hominem, you know, the argument from the person saying that if you're if you don't have this or that, character, this or that situation in your life, you don't qualify to talk about something. Well, that's the whole premise behind this, though, is that people who don't have the right ideas are not qualified to talk about them. That's why the the rise of the Internet and especially of the podcast era has made such a change in things that these kinds of, discussions would never have never have reached the public before.
S.T. Karnick:And but now there are so many alternative sources that you can reach the public with these truths and expose the absolute madness that, a lot of people are promulgating.
Linnea Lueken:Absolutely. And and, Jim, I don't know if you have any comments for this one or if we should move along. But I just thought, you know, like I said, it's it is one thing to make that joke in private to someone who's, a friend of yours or whatever. It's still in bad taste, but it's, you know, it's it's an understandable, like, emotion when you are frustrated with someone or, you know, hate them or whatever. But, like, to to call her repeatedly and, like, be text spamming her, trying to double down and say, well, actually, I hope his kids die too for real.
Linnea Lueken:That's, like, completely, completely inappropriate. And I would agree that it's totally disqualifying.
Jim Lakely:Well, it is totally disqualifying. It's actually just coincidental. I've lived in Virginia and I've lived in California, which are two of the crazy people we're gonna be talking about today, who are unhinged and cannot control their emotions. But let's a little bit of the background on this. He accidentally texted a republican for you know, a republican colleague from when he was in the house of delegates in Virginia.
Jim Lakely:So this whole thing started because he text he texted the wrong person and then just kept going, and then, you know, had to call her up and all this stuff. And so he just couldn't let it go. What I think is really important to understand is the reason he was going on like this and wishing not just the death of his political opponent, which is bad enough, but to say that you hope that his children are killed and that they die in their mother's arms because that is the only way, apparently, he thinks a republican will change his mind on a policy issue. I think in this case, was on the second amendment. What's the reason he said those things and texted those things is obvious.
Jim Lakely:Yep. One, he believes them. And two, he talks like that all the time with his own friends. There are Democrats in this country. We know this.
Jim Lakely:We I I wish I wish the media would would wake up to this instead of always pointing everything at the right and Republicans and the danger and the white supremacy and Christian nationalism and all this other kind of nonsense. We have a very serious and dangerous democratic anger in this country that is extremely mainstream in democratic circles. He said those things because he says those things all the time. We have we had democrats, thousands of them across the country cheering, doing dancing TikTok videos after Charlie Kirk was slaughtered with a bullet to his neck in front of his wife and children. We had members of congress, saying that, essentially, Charlie had it coming.
Jim Lakely:We have had, assassination porn about Donald Trump since 2016. We've had plays done in public places. I think there was one in Central Park or somewhere in New York where Donald Trump was stabbed. We had I know that there's a a video with Snoop Dogg in which Donald Trump was assassinated, shot right in the head point blank. Then, of course, there's that infamous picture of the talentless Kathy Griffin holding the severed head of Trump up early in his first term.
Jim Lakely:These things happen because a lot of people in this country are sick in the head. They have no sense of morality at all, and they say and they say these things to each other all day, every day for years and years. There is no other reason. There's no other explanation for it than that this is what they believe. And and if there would be parties in the streets.
Jim Lakely:I mean, look at I mean, think about the assassination attempt on on on Donald Trump. People immediately went to TikTok and said into the camera, damn. They missed. I really wish it was just another half an inch to the left, and he'd be gone. And so is it it is not a surprise at all that Jay Jones texted these things and said these things.
Jim Lakely:What's actually, you know, again, I used to be a reporter in Washington DC. Kind of routine but kind of lazy journalism is that if there's some sort of controversy going on, it's the reporter's job to just basically track down everybody in that party and ask them if they condemn it or support it and all that sort of thing. That is that is a very common thing that's done, in Washington DC. Journalism has a single actually, it's happened. It took a few days.
Jim Lakely:They had to be shamed into doing it. But very few democrats have been asked if they support Jay Jones for attorney general and whether he should drop out of the race or even apologize. And even Jay Jones' apology wasn't even really an apology. It was one of those awesome non apology apologies in which, he doesn't just say the simple thing. I'm sorry.
Jim Lakely:I should have never have said that. In fact, I'm ashamed that I even thought that. That's disgusting. And for the betterment of our of our country and our politics, I'm gonna I'm gonna pull out of this race.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. He
Jim Lakely:can't do that, and he won't do that because he doesn't have the morality in him to do it because he really does, frankly, want the death of his political opponents. We're living in a time when the wishing for the death of your political opponents is now completely mainstreamed, and our media is missing this story. This is only talked about on, quote, unquote, right wing media and on podcasts like this. It needs to be an enormous national story, and I am so sick and tired of every time there's some sort of fake controversy that the media says we have to have a national conversation about race or about misogyny. The whole Me Too movement had to be a huge national conversation because Harvey Weinstein is a piece of shit.
Jim Lakely:But we are not gonna have a national conversation about basically death ideology and ideation of death by the Democratic Party continually for years and years against their political opponents. It's disgusting.
Linnea Lueken:Absolutely. Well, and, you know, if he had just stood up and said, yeah. Those were a huge mistake. I didn't really mean it. You know, I was, like, drunk texting at midnight or whatever.
Linnea Lueken:People would believe them and they'd be like, yeah. Okay. Now drop out. Like, just do the honorable thing, but there is no honor in the Democrat party. Speaking of no honor in the Democrat party, I added this other stuff a bit last minute because I realized it was too unhinged to ignore.
Linnea Lueken:And I just you know, Keely and I were joking about how this lady is like the lady from misery, and we were like, we have to we have to talk about this today. So ladies and gentlemen, I present to you another Democrat candidate hopeful. This woman is running for California governor. So, Jim or Keely, can we play the clip that we have for this?
Jim Lakely:Well, we have we we have I'll play it. We have two clips. We have the one where she's yelling at her staffer, and we have the one where she lost it in in a media
Linnea Lueken:Let's do let's do the media interview first, and then we'll do the staffer. I wanna show the audience both. As long as the
Speaker 4:40% of California voters who you'll need in order to win, who voted for Trump.
Speaker 5:How would I need them in order to win, ma'am?
Speaker 4:Well, unless you think you're gonna get 60 of the vote. You think you'll get 60% all everybody who did not vote for Trump will vote for you. That's what what you're thinking.
Speaker 5:In a general election, yes. If it is me versus a republican, I think that I will win the people who did not vote
Jim Lakely:for Trump.
Speaker 4:What if it's you versus another democrat?
Speaker 5:I don't intend that to be the case.
Speaker 4:So how do you not intend that to be the case? Do you do you are you gonna ask them not to run?
Speaker 5:No. No. I'm saying I'm gonna build the support. I have the support already in terms of name recognition. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And so I'm gonna do the very best I can to make sure that we get through this primary in a really strong position. But let me be clear with you. I represented Orange County. I represented a purple area. I have stood on my own two feet and won Republican votes before.
Speaker 5:That's not something every candidate in this race can say. If you're from a deep blue area, if you're from LA, or you're from Oakland, have an you don't have an experience.
Speaker 4:You just said you don't need those Trump voters.
Speaker 5:Well, you asked me if I needed them to win.
Speaker 4:So you don't
Speaker 5:I think feel like this isn't necessarily argumentative. What is your question?
Speaker 4:The the question is the same thing I ask everybody, that this is being called the empowering voters to stop Trump's power grab. Every other candidate has answered this question. This is not Correct.
Speaker 5:And I said I support it.
Speaker 4:So and the question is, what do you say to the 40% of voters who voted for Trump?
Speaker 5:Oh, I'm happy to say that. It's the do you need them to win part that I don't understand. I'm happy to answer answer the question as you haven't written and I'll answer it.
Speaker 4:And we've also asked the other candidates, do you think you need any of those 40% of California voters to win? And you're saying, no, you don't.
Speaker 5:No. I'm saying I'm gonna try to win every vote I can. And what I'm saying to you is that
Speaker 4:Well, to those voters. Okay. So so you
Speaker 5:I don't wanna keep doing this. I'm gonna call it. Thank you.
Speaker 4:You're not gonna do the interview with us?
Speaker 5:Nope. Not like this, I'm not. Not with seven follow ups to every single question you ask.
Speaker 4:Every other candidate has answered I care.
Speaker 5:I don't care. I I want to have a pleasant positive conversation which you every issue on this list. And if every question you're going to make up a follow-up question then we're never going to get there. Miss And we're just going to circle around.
Jim Lakely:I am
Speaker 4:in an investigator.
Speaker 5:Had to do this before ever.
Speaker 4:You've never had to have a conversation with
Speaker 5:To end an interview.
Speaker 4:Okay. But every other candidate has done this.
Speaker 5:What part of I'm me. I'm running for governor because I'm a leader. So I am going to make
Speaker 4:So you're not gonna answer questions from reporters? Okay. Why don't we go through? I will continue to ask follow-up questions because that's my job as a journalist, but I will go through and ask these. And if you don't wanna answer, you don't wanna answer.
Speaker 4:So nearly every legislative I
Speaker 5:am I don't wanna have an unhappy experience with you, and I don't want this all on camera.
Speaker 4:I don't wanna have an unhappy experience with you either. I would love to continue to ask these questions so that we can show our viewers what every candidate feels about every one of these issues that they care about. And redistricting is a massive issue. We're gonna do an entire story just on the responses to that question, And I've asked everybody the same follow-up questions.
Linnea Lueken:Yikes. I'm that guy too. Holy crap. Yeah. This guy.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. He's like, boy. Oh, man. Wow. So yeah.
Linnea Lueken:And, actually, Jim, it just, like, crossed my mind. In addition to the lady from misery who she also reminds me of is admiral Holdo. Yeah. Which if you think about it so that's my yeah. It's it's the whole it was her line about, like, I'm a leader.
Linnea Lueken:And it's like, oh, okay. Well, you're a you're a bad one. Like, a really bad one. Just amazing. I mean, what is there to say about that, really?
Linnea Lueken:She's lovely, really. She's a lawyer. She was once a representative from California. It's it's like she's never she's insisting that she's never, like, had follow-up questions before, and they're not hard questions. All she has to say is, you know, oh, do you need extra Republicans to win?
Linnea Lueken:And she can say, well, we'll see. I'm gonna try and get every vote that I can. And then the reporter would say, okay. I'm with move on. And she would ask her, you know, how does this work?
Linnea Lueken:Or how how would you how would you what would you say to the 40% of people that voted for Trump to get them to vote for you? And all she had to say was, you know, look around. Is this really the America that you want? Blah blah blah. That kind of thing.
Linnea Lueken:Like, just boilerplate easiest answers ever. And yet she just immediately loses it. It's amazing to see.
S.T. Karnick:She's never had to do it. She's she's been in a safe seat, and it's it's easy for her to get by. And all she has to do is is throw out the normal talking points and say, Trump bad, Trump bad, Trump man, orange man bad, and so on and so forth. And nobody questions her about it. The the fascinating thing about modern day, media is that there is an alternative, that this this material can get out.
S.T. Karnick:And and, now these people will be will be called out on it. You know? If you if you spare the rod, you spoil the child, and we've turned our politicians into children. And the only way to do that is to is to, you know, question them on these things. And when they act like as they are prone to do, let it be seen and let the public decide if they if they like that.
S.T. Karnick:And they want somebody who is I don't know if you'll show another clip or anything, but or or more information on this. So they want somebody, let's say, who's like this person, then they can have it good and hard, but they'll be sorry down the road.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. I mean oh, yeah. So this is a this is a little thing, just a little bit of of gossip news. So her ex husband who divorced her said that she was, like, physically and verbally abusive to him throughout their marriage. And yeah.
Linnea Lueken:Right? Can never see that. And she had poured a scalding hot mashed potatoes on his head during a fight. That's nice. Amazing.
Linnea Lueken:He was routinely called a effing idiot and effing incompetent by his rage prone spouse who also shattered a glass coffee pot on their kitchen counter when she felt their house wasn't clean enough.
Jim Lakely:Wow.
Linnea Lueken:Misery. Yeah. She's coming at him with that hammer. Yeah.
Jim Lakely:She hates. Yeah. Oh my god. Yeah. You know what's what's what's interest but actually, we're gonna play another clip that's a lot shorter, but it's it's a good one.
Jim Lakely:But you realize what set her off was the question of whether if she wants any of the 40% of Californians who voted for Trump to vote for her. Her the answer is no because Trump voters are deplorables. They're Nazis. They're fascists. Why what what self respecting democrat would want any of those horrible people to support them?
Jim Lakely:That's why that that's why this went off the rails. She could she didn't even have the grace to say, that she would want the votes of anybody who supports Donald Trump. He has been so villainized in the eyes of the Democratic Party and the left that to even want their supporters to support you is absolutely verboten. You can't have that.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. That's that doesn't bode well for the future. So we have this other clip too of how she treats her subordinates, so that's nice.
Speaker 5:We're gonna lose more than half a million Californians dying prematurely to air pollution and other problems, and the state could lose get out of my
Jim Lakely:fucking shot.
Speaker 5:I wanted to tell you that that's actually incorrect. It's it's not that it's electric vehicles. It's that if you don't need the commitments under the Paris Climate Accord. Okay. It does okay.
Speaker 5:You also were in my shot before that. Stay out of my shot. Okay. I'm gonna start again with electric vehicles saving us money. Perfect.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Linnea Lueken:I think she's on a Zoom call, like a Zoom interview with Jennifer Granholm and and some other people in attendance on this one, and that's yikes. What a group. Oh, boy.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. She's she's yeah. That's some kind of stage thing where they're talking about electric throwing electric vehicles and all that stuff. This is in this was in 2021. I do love that her staffer's wearing a freaking mask in the background.
Jim Lakely:Of course, she is. She's working for a democrat. But, look, do do you know how do you know how what how extraordinary it is to be considered the worst of the most horrible bosses in Washington DC and in congress? Do understand what an amazing achievement that is? Washington DC is lousy with horrible bosses.
Jim Lakely:In the you get a these the people that end up matriculating into DC, they get a little bit of power, and they go absolutely bananas with it. It is notoriously a horrible place to work. I have friends, college buddies, who end up working on the Hill, have horror stories as long, you know, as as long as the day is, can can talk about it all day. But, you know, Katie Porter was probably one of the top two worst people to work for on Capitol Hill, and that takes some doing, and that's an example of it right there. I don't understand why anybody I'm glad I don't live in California anymore.
Jim Lakely:I might have to have I mean, it's bad enough as it is right now with Gavin Newsom, but to have this woman being the governor of your state with those crazy eyes and that foul mouth and apparently a violent streak, I I can't understand how these people survive in politics, Sam.
S.T. Karnick:It's really pathetic, obviously, that that somebody would would do this kind of thing. But it's it's really hard to get people to be accountable for their actions.
Linnea Lueken:Why would you bring this up on screen?
S.T. Karnick:Pardon?
Linnea Lueken:Why would you do this?
Jim Lakely:Because Sam's phone keeps going off, and he won't turn it off. So I have to dispatch
S.T. Karnick:him. I didn't know it was it was audible. Sorry about that. Jim, how could
Linnea Lueken:you do this to our audience? Yes. This Put that picture away.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. No. I'm not. I'm gonna make it you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna make it I'm gonna do that.
Jim Lakely:That's what I'm gonna do.
Linnea Lueken:That's great.
Jim Lakely:Katie Porter. This is a very serious serious person here. Dresses up as Batgirl in 2019 on Halloween. She sat in many hearings in that outfit.
S.T. Karnick:I have a I have a question actually for for the both of you. Do you think that Katie Porter's antics actually are part of her appeal for her voters, for the people who vote for her? Does would she look at these these revelations as, well, they're they're just they're infuriating, but they won't do me any harm.
Linnea Lueken:So to her, like, kind of commie followers, I would say they wouldn't care the way that she was about the way that she was treating that reporter. I don't think that would faze them whatsoever. But I think that they would be phased a little bit by her going off at her aid there. I think that would offend pretty much everyone. And, typically, you know, socialists are, you know, freaked out by hierarchy to begin with unless it's, you know, them specifically that are in charge.
Linnea Lueken:I don't think anybody would like that, honestly. There are some sociopaths. I mean, she's I don't I don't like to, like, diagnose from afar because I'm not a doctor. I don't have any knowledge about any of that stuff, but she's gotta be somewhere in cluster b. Like, it's it's yeah.
Linnea Lueken:There's something wrong in the in the old noggin there with her. But, yeah, it's very, very strange. Oh, John z says, what do you mean the below 70 IQ crowd? Maybe. I don't know.
S.T. Karnick:Well, she but it seems like like she's just very feisty, and she's a fighter for the you know, I I think that she could probably take this whole thing, and make it into an advantage for her that she's a fighter. You know? The, JD Pritzker famously does that, and and Newsome is trying to turn himself into that, from from prep school, weenie to a big tough guy who, has a lot of tough talk for Donald Trump. So who knows? Maybe she could turn this into an advantage and and say, I'm I'm tougher than everybody.
S.T. Karnick:And and if you don't if those Republicans don't do what I say, I'm going to throw hot potatoes on.
Linnea Lueken:And engineer guy says, wasn't Kamala hard to work for? Supposedly, yes. But her her bad work environment was a different kind of bad work environment. Her bad work environment was like a depressive one where she was like losing it in the background because she felt like she was losing. And so and so she was like extremely anxious and upsetable in that way and would lash out at people over that, but she wasn't, like, randomly snapping on people.
Linnea Lueken:Especially, she at least had the wherewithal and the emotional control to not do that during a livestream. They're just
Jim Lakely:turning like she recorded it
S.T. Karnick:She was she had enough alcohol in her that she just didn't have the strength to do it. You know, Hillary Clinton, it's well documented that she was an extremely abusive person. The Secret Service were bloody terrified of her. Yeah. But again You know, these are tough guys.
Linnea Lueken:But again, Hillary Clinton is, like, wicked smart. I mean, she's evil, but she's very, very smart. So she knows how to turn that off for the cameras. This woman just it's no good at all. Alright.
Linnea Lueken:So I do wanna move on from this. I promise that we don't just have a a gossip channel. But I I thought that you guys would get a kick out of those stories. So our second topic today that we're gonna cover is Chicago and Portland are in total chaos. Democrats did it and they're totally unrepentant.
Linnea Lueken:They seem to want the chaos to continue. They have no interest whatsoever in tamping down on the crime and unruliness and drug problems and all of that, especially for the case of Portland. So but we're we're gonna start with Chicago since that's where the Heartland Institute is and where I grew up and where most of us lived at least for some time. Fox News digital reports that mayor Brandon Johnson on Monday signed an executive order creating ice free zones across Chicago, limiting the ability of federal immigration agency use city property and private businesses as staging areas for enforcement actions. The order covers schools, libraries, parks, other city owned spaces, and allows private establishments to voluntarily participate in a citywide network that protects residents from ICE operations without a valid warrant.
Linnea Lueken:The announcement comes after a week of high profile ICE actions in Chicago, including raids in South Shore, confrontations with residents, and the detention of elected officials with Johnson described as aggressive and unlawful. More than 900 people have been arrested so far during operation Midway Blitz since its launch on September 8. What a name. Midway is a tear kind of a scary airport to drive to pick someone up from according to the Department of Homeland Security. Alright.
Linnea Lueken:So while that's going on, at the very same time, Chicago continues to suffer from widespread widespread gang violence. Thirty people were shot over the weekend. Five of them died. And this might sound unrelated because it's not specifically illegal, but cartel activity or, like, illegal immigrant related stuff. But cartel activity is a known major factor in gang clashes even in Chicago.
Linnea Lueken:So, Sam, I do wanna know your take, though, on the Trump administration's conducting of these ICE raids. I'd like to know, like, what your understanding is of the play here between the state and the federal government on this issue. Illegal immigration is a federal problem. Can a state be a sanctuary like this for illegal immigrants and disallow federal arrests and deportations? Like, is that legitimate?
S.T. Karnick:They can't disallow federal arrests and deportations. They cannot do that. They can be a sanctuary state if the federal government doesn't try to go in there and and get the illegals out of there. So the the problem that you have is that these states are used to, getting away with this. And Trump has decided, well, we have the law on our side, so let's go and do this.
S.T. Karnick:And he clearly sees an advantage to that both politically, but also in terms of doing the the services that the government is supposed to do. The federal government does have to make sure that we're not being invaded by people who don't belong in this country and, who have not gone through the proper channels to get here. That's certainly a a federal job. So he has he has the just the authority to do it, he has the responsibility to do it. The fact that other presidents have not fulfilled their responsibility doesn't simply throw away that that point.
S.T. Karnick:So he he should be doing this. The problem that you have is that, as I say, the states are used to getting away with this. So they look at it as some some kind of weird change that that, Trump is bringing in, and it's it it must be illegal. It must be unconstitutional to do this. The fact is that it's not.
S.T. Karnick:Now ordinarily, what you would expect is when the federal government would say, we need to get in here and clean out, this, problem that this the governor of the state, first of all and it's really almost starts and ends with the governor of the state, quite frankly. The governor of the state would have to would ordinarily say, oh, of course. Well, let's work together to get this done. Maybe I don't, as a governor, want the National Guard in here, may, especially coming from Texas or whatever. And and so let's work together to find a way where we can do this, the the state itself.
S.T. Karnick:There's no cooperation, though. So what does the president have as an option? All he can do then is to call in the the National Guard from other states. So it was in, it's been in Pritzker's power from the beginning to prevent this situation. And he has chosen not to do it, because he has, different ideas from the president, and, he wants this to happen.
S.T. Karnick:Well, Brandon Johnson would be under, because the because municipal areas and municipal governments are under the state government. So Brandon Johnson would have to listen to Pritzker. But the fact is they're both on the same page, and that page is the very opposite from from where Trump is at. So that's why this kind of thing happens. And when you get in a fight like this, you better be able to take out the other guy.
S.T. Karnick:And I don't see how they can even conceive that they have an advantage here. That's the problem. You have to have the leverage and they don't.
Linnea Lueken:Yep. Jim, I don't know if you wanna weigh in. You, live in Illinois in the North Chicago Suburbs. So the, not to dox you there. But
Speaker 5:Nice. Thanks.
Linnea Lueken:But now they're gonna come get
S.T. Karnick:Specifically. Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:Here's your address. But it's I mean, it's bad downtown even in places that used to be nicer places. And there you know, it's still it's not like it's not terrible during the daytime. It's not like, you know, as bad as some of our other Democrat run cities are, but it's not safe at night at all, almost anywhere, even in places that were historically, you know, like the safe wealthy areas. And it's getting worse and worse.
Linnea Lueken:So how do they get away with just letting this spiral out of control? Like, why don't they care? They live there too, don't they?
Jim Lakely:You would think. Yeah. I mean, it's it reminds me of when, you know, when Donald Trump, you know, deployed the National Guard in Washington DC. Very clearly, there was not any, you know there wasn't any legitimate controversy over him doing that because that's federal land. Essentially, it's a federal district, and so there's a lot more leeway on doing stuff like that.
Jim Lakely:And when the media would actually so while the Democrats were, you know, complaining about it, demanding that this not happen, some enterprising reporters would go around in the neighborhoods, especially the so great neighborhoods in Northeast DC. And people on the streets like, wow. This is great. Thank god. Somebody's doing something.
Jim Lakely:This this this city has been a crime ridden, you know, poop hole for a long time. I'm gonna try not to swear so much on this podcast today. But and so now, you know, here in Chicago, I mean, it's it's you know, crime is a big issue. You would think that, you know, you should be able to run a campaign on cracking down on crime of all kinds in Chicago and win in in a landslide. You know, I I I thought you know, I've lived here in the Chicago area for well, since 2010.
Jim Lakely:And when Rahm Emanuel was running for governor, I thought he was the only democrat who was practical and sensible and not completely captured by the left and had political ambition. And I thought Ron Emanuel could be Chicago's Rudy Giuliani and telling everybody, you know, ignoring all of the criticism and just going ahead and fixing the city starting with crime. He decided he didn't wanna do that. He got scared off by the teachers' unions, and that was that. So Chicago had their chance.
Jim Lakely:A couple year you know, what was that? I guess about ten years ago to fix their city, and they didn't get it. Now they've now they've elected a moron commie, Brandon Johnson, as as as mayor. I I think, like, two months after his election, his approval rating was, like, 19%. It's like, well, approval rating should have been that low way back then, and maybe the the city could have been saved.
Jim Lakely:But, you know, just on this ice thing, though, I think it's I think it's clear I think it's important to get to to let you hear what's happening here. This is what a real insurrection looks like. The the whole idea and and Sam had mentioned it in his comments. Like, the the cities have gotten away with this for far too long, so called sanctuary cities. And now that there is finally a president who is serious about enforcing immigration law, immigration law, by the way, that Democrats approved.
Jim Lakely:This is the best immigration law we could we have right now. I would like it even stricter, but this is the law we have, and we wouldn't have it if not for Democrats. This is as far as Democrats were willing to go when it comes to setting immigration policy in this country. And And we have a president who decides, okay. That's the policy.
Jim Lakely:I'm gonna enforce it. The the whole idea to have a sanctuary city, that's an insurrection. You can't have a sanctuary city where we're not going to have immigration law enforced here. You're safe, like, in a church or something. We don't have sanctuary city laws for, I don't know, concealed carry.
Jim Lakely:We don't have sanctuary cities for, you know, polygamy. I mean, name it. I mean, you you this this it it should never have been allowed, Sam, just like you said, and yet it is. But we have a president who's not going to allow it anymore. You don't get to decide federal immigration policy in your own city limits.
Jim Lakely:You don't live in a little fiefdom or a kingdom, and you are not your own country. The last time, the Americans decided that they, were not going to adhere to federal law I mean, it's happened a lot of times, But, you know, it started at some place called Fort Sumter. Now this is not to get too crazy, but in principle, it's not all that much different. You don't get to basically have an insurrection against the federal government because you hate Trump. And, again, we've talked about this on this podcast a lot that the Democratic Party seems to be in a competition to crank up as much deranged, unhinged opposition to Donald Trump and his supporters as possible, And they just try to have to keep they have to keep topping each other to the point where they're excusing, guys, we had a shooting at an ICE facility.
Jim Lakely:We've had two shootings at ICE facilities in the last month. Yeah. It's out of the news. Nobody talks about it anymore.
Linnea Lueken:It happens all the time, actually. Like, it's on
Jim Lakely:all the time. Violence against ICE ICE agents is up 1000% over last year. And yet, again, the media is ignoring all of this because they hate Trump. They hate half this country, and they want this kind of chaos. I don't know if it's for ratings or or what, but it's it's it's ideological is what it is.
Jim Lakely:But what is happening in Chicago, what's happening in Portland, that's much more of an insurrection than anything that happened on January 6, which was a four hour riot with, infiltration by federal agents among the rioters. That is nothing compared to what we're having going on in this country right now. That is this is a real insurrection, and I'm afraid it's going to get worse before it gets solved.
Linnea Lueken:Well, and, you know
S.T. Karnick:I wanna follow-up. Oh, I'm sorry. I wanna follow-up briefly on the on the insurrection point because this is this is quite critical. It is that. And I I wanna go back a little bit.
S.T. Karnick:In the starting fairly early in the twenty first century, a very quiet insurrection began in which states decided that they were going to ignore the federal laws on on drug classification in order to legalize cannabis. And when states did that, it was sort of a, you know, a goofy thing. It wasn't seen as some very serious issue, but it really was a a an insurrection where they were nullifying federal law and saying we're we're not we're not going to enforce it here, and we're not going to conform our laws to the law of the land. And the laws of that are passed by congress supersede all state and local laws unless unless they are exempted in some way or the the or the law is declared unconstitutional. So you have federal supremacy.
S.T. Karnick:And so what happened was that that they started to undermine that with the with the marijuana. That led now to, you know, as they as they started to cut away at things, it led to the current situation where they're actually openly defying federal agents and and the actions of the federal government within their, borders. And that is that's obviously a big step away from, marijuana dispensaries and the like. That's a big step. And then you you move from there.
S.T. Karnick:What is next? We don't know. But if it is on the same scale of advance as this was, which was over the course of, say, a dozen years or so, things could get very serious, I think, much more quickly than anyone expects.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. I totally agree. And and, you know, the you know, across the country, we have the same thing. You know, it'd be one thing if it was just Chicago being Chicago, you know, and Pritzker being a blowhard and and all of that. But it's it's much worse than that.
Linnea Lueken:Meanwhile, across the country, Portland is doing as Portland does. You have a bunch of retirees during the day singing Woody Guthrie song Guthrie songs. And then at night, masked Antifa in black block attack ice facilities, including, you know, Molotov cocktails and conducting actual attempted sieges. So it really is out of control. And like in Chicago, Portland and Oregon government is not interested in stopping it.
Linnea Lueken:I've even seen rumors, that Portland PD have a large number of anti folk working in the police department. And so they they just simply don't do anything. Breitbart reports that president Donald Trump has authorized the use of troops to protect Portland, Oregon and any immigration and customs enforcement facilities that are under siege from an attack by Antifa. Trump said at the request of secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, I am directing secretary of war Pete Hegseth to provide all necessary troops to protect war ravaged Portland and any of our ICE facilities under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists. Just yesterday, there was a White House roundtable on Antifa and kind of how their terror cells work.
Linnea Lueken:Basically, every single person at that table has been assaulted. Some many of them to the point of having to go to the hospital by Antifa just for reporting on them. So I strongly recommend all of you guys watch the full roundtable, but at least watch some clips from it. We do have some for you guys here. Do we have those?
Jim Lakely:Yep. Here we go. Alright.
Speaker 6:Thank you, mister president, for having us here. And, you know, not to sound like a broken record, but it needs to be said that Antifa is real. It's real. It's a threat. I just saw him last weekend over in Portland while they're causing mayhem over there.
Speaker 6:And the reason why there's such a big problem is because we have Democrats and a lot of people in the mainstream media refusing to acknowledge that they even exist. Right?
Speaker 7:2019, it led to me nearly losing my life. I was covering another Antifa. Protest turned right, at that point, had been routine in Portland, and then I was ambushed in a in a mob beating, and I had never been in a fight. I didn't even realize that I was being assaulted until seconds in, and the punches came from everywhere on my head and my face, I was bleeding out of my eyes and ears, and then they threw all the drinks in my eyes to humiliate me further and to laugh at me. And I was rushed to the hospital in a ambulance and CT scan, and I had subarachnoid hemorrhage, which is bleeding the brain.
Speaker 7:I nearly died.
Speaker 8:Great principle. Yes. You know, I watched I'm a reporter in Seattle, and frankly, I could not care any less what any of you have to say about this meeting. Could not care any less. We're not here for you.
Speaker 8:I'm not here to convince any of you that Antifa is a real thing. Because if you have not come to that conclusion by now, you are never gonna come to that conclusion because you don't wanna see it. And you're gonna go and you're gonna say it's a bunch of right wing conservative influencers who are here spinning a tail. I was one of you. I was a mainstream reporter in Seattle for ten years.
Speaker 8:I was a TV reporter on the streets doing my job, and I was still assaulted by Antifa. So it's not about being conservative, it's about people who go there and show what they're doing. And when I saw after all those years that the media wouldn't be honest about what was happening, that democratic politicians wouldn't be honest about what was happening, I thought, well, gosh. If they're not being honest about that, maybe they're not being honest about president Trump either. And it opened my mind to just looking at things for what they were.
Jim Lakely:Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:Oh, here's some antifa mugshots.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. There's some in that's really fun. That's a good it's a really that's a real rogue's gallery there. You see that guy with the burned face? Yeah.
Jim Lakely:He he was an unsuccessful or I guess a successful arsonist, call it that way. He did end up burning himself. But
Linnea Lueken:Those two guys, the top row middle look like what I picture when I think of someone from Portland with the mustache.
Jim Lakely:For sure. I mean, I thought I thought the hipster mustaches were I thought those were out of style. I guess not. So, yeah, well done. Head tattoos.
Jim Lakely:I mean, real, you know, real winners there. What what's interesting about that clip, and I definitely encourage everyone, it's very, very easy to find on social media, or you can just go to Seaspan and watch the entire summit yourself. The fact that it was necessary to just prove that Antifa is a real thing to some people. Democrats in this country, elected Democrats, keep saying that Antifa is just an idea. Others say, why would you why would you be against an organization fighting fascism?
Jim Lakely:These people I I sometimes, Sam, I don't know, but both of you guys, I sometimes I don't know whether these people are just being purposely obtuse that they know the reality on the ground, but they're just partisans and politically or or journalistically, they don't want to let people know what's happening out there on the streets, that left wing violence is obviously been a major problem for the ever since Donald Trump's, ever since 2020. Left wing violence on the streets. They they think that they think that we don't remember. They think we don't remember cities all across this country burning, and that didn't happen by you know, the Proud Boys didn't do that. The Oath Keepers didn't do that.
Jim Lakely:That was Antifa along with with Black Lives Matter causing complete chaos.
Linnea Lueken:Well, I was I was gonna say, you know, don't you guys remember those Halcyon days in 2016 when Antifa was on campuses and they were attacking conservative speakers and people like Milo Yiannopoulos and stuff. It never went away.
Jim Lakely:Does No.
Linnea Lueken:It hasn't. I mean, does anybody remember, like, based stick man? If you remember that. There it was one, like, right winger guy who right winger started showing up armed. Not necessarily with firearms, but with, like, bats and stuff like that.
Linnea Lueken:And then all of a sudden, people started getting arrested when right wingers showed up wearing body armor. That's when it was like, okay. This is enough. It was one thing when it was anti fuh beating people up with no one able to fight back. But now that people are starting to come prepared to fight back, that's when they have to shut it down.
Linnea Lueken:It's just disgusting. Like, they didn't no one cared in these police departments in Los Angeles or in Portland or in Seattle when right wingers were getting beaten to a pulp. But Antifa thugs were only arrested once there was enough, like, social local pressure, you know, public outrage like that bike lock guy who was a college professor at, I think, UC Berkeley. So no. Am I wrong about the school?
Linnea Lueken:I just pulled the school out of my butt. It was some California school, but I'm I I feel fairly confident it was Berkeley. But yeah. I mean, that stuff was crazy. I think well, I think the Bike Lock guy I might be conflating a couple of them because it just happened all the time back then.
Linnea Lueken:But wasn't that at a, like, an Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos speech at UC Berkeley? Something like that. Anyway, it was crazy. And it hasn't stopped, but people stopped talking about it. And a lot of people stopped pushing back publicly on Antifa because they knew that nothing would come of it.
Linnea Lueken:So I'm glad to see that Trump, you know, made the Matera organization because they are one. And people are like, well, they don't have they're not like the the KKK or they're not like some very obvious group that has a particular specific funder and stuff. So therefore, they don't exist. And as one of our viewers here, Elysian Kentarky said, it's he's quoting from another tweet a tweet, a very popular tweet that makes the rounds. And it's it's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.
Linnea Lueken:And that's exactly right. Everybody knows that how terror cells work is that they are in cells so that if one of them gets taken out or if one group of them gets taken out, like Rose City Antifa or something specifically gets shut down, they've got a million other little pop up hydras that come all over the place. So that come up all from the woodwork all over the place. So it's just it's extremely frustrating. It is like whack a mole, and that's what it's designed to be like.
Jim Lakely:I just wanna mention that your your memory is is very good. Look at that. This is from a story from 2017. A former East Bay College professor pled not guilty to using a u shaped bike lock bike lock to strike people at a Trump rally in Berkeley last month. So he wasn't a Berkeley professor, but it did happen at Berkeley.
Jim Lakely:He was a professor at another at another college. Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:That's pretty good. I'll give myself half credit for that.
S.T. Karnick:I think it's very possible for a person to think that there is no particular violence on the left. If you if you confine yourself to the major media in MSNBC and CNN, little little niche audiences like that. If you confine yourself to those those spaces, of course, you're not going to hear about the the horrible things that Antifa has done. That's that's a choice that people make. And I think they they, it's obviously, it's wrong to do that, but it it makes sense for them because they don't wanna be challenged.
S.T. Karnick:They wanna be like that the the woman in the interview earlier in this show, the representative, because they they don't wanna be challenged. They don't want to hear that that their side is, you know, up to some no good things there. The key thing, is that this is the violence level here is way beyond, and it and it has been since 2020. And really before that, Andy Noah has been getting beat up for a long time. And it's
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. I mean, they know his face, so that's seriously dangerous. I mean, they they know him on-site.
S.T. Karnick:Right. So it's been going on for a long time, but it hasn't been the police of these cities and states doing it, of course. It's been the the these organizations and and as basically ANTIFA, which is some sort of network of lunatics, really. I do think that they are that they are somewhat centrally funded, that a lot of money trickles down to them from, very wealthy people. Well, the question though is that, why is all this happening on, in this sort of nongovernmental mode?
S.T. Karnick:And that's anarcho tyranny where the the the state, the the government, decides to let people run wild, in order to throw a scare into the public and make the public accept, authoritarian action. And interestingly enough, of course, you can spin that also by saying, see, the Trump administration is authoritarian because they are they are trying to to, come into the states and and do these terrible things. The the whole the whole thing, though, is always always an effort to get more power concentrated, at the upper echelons of the the of of the nation so that you're concentrating, economic power, you're concentrating police power, You're concentrating all government authority. And, ultimately, anarcho tyranny is all about that. So the question that that we we should we need to address is, do we even really have any obligation to wait until state governments and local governments are explicitly, knocking heads as they are doing to people on the right anyway?
S.T. Karnick:But do we really have to wait for that? If if this is happening, couldn't we just declare these people as domestic terrorists and go after them? Well, like, obviously, that's the point we've reached. And definitely, it's going to be called authoritarian, but you have to push through and do the right thing. And I think the public will will respond very positively to that.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. DJ Bow here is totally right. He said or I guess by extension, Tim Pool is totally right. If he's been saying that to the left, violence is a no is a knob that they turn up slowly. To the right, it's a switch, and we are hesitant to throw it.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. I think that's probably fairly true.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Let let me make one
S.T. Karnick:thrown, it's full it's full throttle.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just let me make one more one more observation here. It's like this whole idea, and I I keep seeing these arguments. I still I'm still gobsmacked that the left of Democrats are pretending to Antipa and the media, that Antipa isn't really a thing.
Jim Lakely:I had a clip I was gonna pull for the show of Aaron Burnett saying that very thing on CNN, I think, last night that Antipa doesn't really exist. But you know who else doesn't really exist? January 6. There was no January 6 organization. Right?
Jim Lakely:Yet the Biden, justice department, went to the ends of the earth to bring to justice all 1,600 of them, every single one of them a conviction, by the way, or a guilty plea. Isn't that amazing? In Washington DC. But they spared no staff or expense. They showed no restraint, and they were knocking down doors in the middle of the night of, you know, grandmas who took selfies who were a lot of these people in January 6 were invited into the into the capital, did not realize they were trespassing.
Jim Lakely:They got they got overcharged. They got overcharged so much that the supreme court had to what was it? The they called the fifteen twelve c provision in the law that the that the justice department was trying to impose on January 6 people to make them to basically make them identify them as terrorists or very very give them make them subject to larger sentences and felonies for parading around. Again, the Biden justice department spared no expense and no staff to go down and track down every single one of those people. They set up websites with the faces of these people.
Jim Lakely:Do you know this 78 year old grandma? Tell us who she is so we can go arrest her. Websites for all of that stuff. You're telling and so now the same media and Democrats who applauded that use of federal law enforcement are now saying that it's impossible or we shouldn't even try to go after the say just the people that you can identify and see rioting, assaulting, burning, not just conservatives, but federal law enforcement, setting fire to to things and rioting. We can't go after those people in the same way we went after January 6?
Jim Lakely:Damn right we can, and we're damn well better because there's really no difference. You don't need to I know that Donald Trump in that in that in that Antifa summit talked about how they're gonna be going after the money and the and the organizations and the NGOs and the and the rich leftists who are funding all of these things. You know, a pallet of bricks doesn't just show up on itself by magic in in the middle of a of a planned protest area. Somebody bought those bricks and and delivered them there.
Linnea Lueken:So And that's stuff the FBI can track. Absolutely. That's I do fires and stuff, you can get the ATF involved, and the ATF is very good at finding people, like scary good. So
S.T. Karnick:I do have to question the premise that there was no January 6 organization. Well, we should look into whether the FBI was that.
Jim Lakely:Oh, well yeah.
Linnea Lueken:Well, yeah. The I mean and one of the things that people say all the time even on our side, and I've seen it in our comments section too, is people saying, well, you can't they don't have a centralized funder, so you're not going to be able to, like, track down funders and get them into trouble and stuff. And I and I think that's not true if they put the effort like Jim said, if they put the effort that they put into tracking down January into this stuff because just private individuals who are just investigative journalists online tracked down the fact that, like, the Utah Antifa protest groups and stuff had their posters and their protests and stuff being distributed by, like like, state socialist groups, like the Socialist Party of Utah. Well, I think I I could be misspeaking here, but it's something along those lines. Like, that's where you start.
Linnea Lueken:And those guys are posting on Facebook, you know, oh, come to this, you know, anti fascist or, like, a like, an anti fascist self defense class or whatever. And it has, you know, the same anti like, colors and logos and it's got the flag on the poster and stuff. And it's like, well, maybe they're just using the iconography, but you should still look into that. You can still attend. You could send an FBI agent to this dang anti fuh, you know, thing.
Linnea Lueken:And and they're paranoid about that stuff. So they're they tend to be kind of careful. But from what I've heard from people who have been embedded in anti fuh, they're not all that careful. Like, if you're especially if you're like a white guy, they'll treat you like garbage and they'll treat you suspiciously whether you're on their team or not. But if you can pretend to be a simpering little soy person long enough, you will gain access and you can figure out where that stuff comes from.
Linnea Lueken:Don't tell me that the FBI can't do that stuff and doesn't do that stuff towards other groups. You know? How many FBI agents embed themselves in, like, the Proud Boys, which is just a right wing drinking club Right. Essentially, that that ran security for free for for conservative speakers on campuses and stuff. Or how many
Jim Lakely:Or the Gretchen Whitmer of Yeah. Exactly. Actually, you know, actually called a fed napping, not a kidnapping.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It is, like, that stuff shouldn't
Linnea Lueken:be happening. You know, that that that entire situation was, like, being set up like that is terrible, and the government should not be doing that.
S.T. Karnick:But when you important folks.
Linnea Lueken:To have that power when the when the federal government has legitimate power to, like, embed agents into groups and whether you think it should be legitimate or not. But if they have that and we're not doing that to take down groups like Antifa, what are we doing? What's the point of them?
S.T. Karnick:It is important to recognize that people have the right to organize, that people have the right to, to get together and and talk and and even say that communism is a good thing or whatever crazy things they wanna say. The people have the right to do that. But what you don't have a right to do is have a criminal conspiracy against other people's rights. People have a right to their life, liberty, and property. And when you are, harming people like Andy they they do to Andy Nell and many other people, they they harmed all kinds of people.
S.T. Karnick:Many people were killed in in riots in in the, early twenty twenty. So you have you have the the government is supposed to protect our rights. So if you if you are having conspiracies to, to deny people their rights, which is what's going on in Antifa, I mean, it's it's clear that that's the whole purpose of it. If that's what you're doing, then you are breaking the law and and the government should be infiltrating these organizations and destroying them because they are they are simply outside the law. They're lawless and and and wrong.
S.T. Karnick:And so I think it although we don't want the government just just to be going after social clubs, this is not that at all. This is something very, very different. It's it's a massive conspiracy against the people of The United States.
Jim Lakely:Just let me just one one last thing. I mean, think you would think that both political parties should be able to unite on the principle that violence is not the answer violence is not acceptable in any way over a political dispute. And the reason the Democratic Party will not join that is because the Antifa thugs on the streets are useful to them politically. They're the shock troops. They're the ones intimidating dissent from the leftist agenda.
Jim Lakely:And as long as they continue to find them useful, you will not you will not hear a I have yet to hear a single Democrat, you know, condemn Antifa, condemn the, know, the the demonstrations and the riots and the assault upon ICE officers. Officers. Again, up 1000%. Haven't heard a single Democrat decry that because the and you have to draw the obvious conclusion. This is what they want.
Jim Lakely:They want this, and they're encouraging it, period.
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Linnea Lueken:Go to climaterealismshow.com/metals. And when you talk to Ira, make sure that you let him know who sent you. That means you're helping us while you're helping your financial future by diversifying with precious metals at Advisor Metals. And thank you as always to Ira. I don't know if he's watching this time, but we are so grateful for sponsorship on this program and on the climate realism show.
Linnea Lueken:It means a lot to us. So I wanted to end this show today on kind of a lighter tone, a lighter topic, but still interesting from an economic and policy focus perspective. And it's an opportunity for Gemini to be nerds about pop culture again for a second here. So from the hill, Trump renews threats to impose a 100% tariff on movies made outside of The US. President Trump announced Monday he is imposing a 100% tariff on movies made outside of The United States.
Linnea Lueken:Our movie making business has been stolen from The United States Of America by other countries just like stealing candy from a baby, the president posted on Truth Social. Trump did not specify when the tariff would be imposed. It's also unclear how the administration will calculate the value of a film and how the directive would apply to movies that partially film overseas. The president previously threatened those levies on foreign made films in May, and he also took the moment to criticize California governor Gavin Newsom, as always, on Monday calling him weak and incompetent, which is true. In a Monday morning post on social platform x, Newsom's press office called Trump's move 100% stupid.
Linnea Lueken:The governor tried to explain this to Trump months ago, they said, when this was initially proposed that his actions will cause irreparable damage to The US film industry. Well, we're all gonna cry. Cry, cry, cry over that for sure. So I wanna go I wanna take this to Jim. This is like you love the the pop culture and the Hollywood stuff, but I am not going to let you have it first.
Linnea Lueken:I'm going to pass it off to Sam first because I want to know what he thinks about this particular tariff idea. I don't know. I mean, everyone has a lot of questions about this. What does he mean? Where will the lines on this tariff be?
Linnea Lueken:Does he mean, like, American films that are filmed outside of The United States, like in Canada where a ton of them and also television shows are filmed? What if the film is set in another country? Would Lord of the Rings have suffered a tariff for filming in New Zealand? Or does he mean, like, screenings here of entirely foreign made films, like the recent anime hit movie Demon Slayer or popular Korean or Scandinavian horror films, which always do well here. Trump said simply that it would apply to any and all movies made outside The United States.
Linnea Lueken:Does he mean it, Sam? Wouldn't it make more sense to just give domestic filmmakers, like, a tax break to film here or something like that, like a positive reinforcement instead of a tariff on this particular issue? I'd like to I'd like to know your thoughts here.
S.T. Karnick:Thanks, Lynette. The the most important thing is to remember that we have to take Trump's statement seriously, not necessarily literally. And the reason he hasn't given any details is because he probably hasn't worked out the details yet, and his team probably hasn't. But what is the serious point behind it? The serious point is that Trump does not care about the the benefit and wealth of the film industry.
S.T. Karnick:What Trump cares about is the benefit and the health of film workers. So he wants Americans to be working on these films and not people just across the border in British Columbia or Toronto or over in Europe or Asia and so forth. He wants American films to he wants all as many possible films as possible to be made with American workers there. So the key thing here, I think, is just to recognize that that this is all part of Trump's whole whole premise as a leader is that he believes in America first. And for him, the first Americans are working people.
S.T. Karnick:The Americans said he who's who's who's who he has the most concern about are American workers. And this whole issue is simply a part of that. So when Gavin Newsom and his office complain and say, well, Trump is stupid and he's going to ruin the industry, they don't get the point. Trump's not worried about the industry. The industry can go blow as far as he's concerned, and it can go blow up and die.
S.T. Karnick:And a new industry, a new, a new form of the industry will arise from that because people do want movies and they do like movies. And I would point out that that I, have written about pop culture extensively over the years, and I sort of stopped around 02/2012, 2014 in that range because it just got to be so bad. I couldn't do it anymore.
Linnea Lueken:Well, and I I was gonna say
S.T. Karnick:But that's what's happening there, is that Trump is defending American workers and he just does not give as much of a hang about what the industry looks like that, that employs them. He would rather have power to the workers than to the than to, let's say, multi a multinational corporation, that shall remain nameless, but is very woke. He would rather have the power to the workers than to Mickey Mouse's owner. Oh, I gave it away.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. We can we can we can name and shame Disney on this program. Definitely. We like to do that. Chris Nisbet asks, can Trump please put a tariff on woke movies?
Linnea Lueken:And I agree. You know what? This is how we'll do the tariff. I'm gonna write this up. I'm gonna send it to Trump right now.
Linnea Lueken:I'm gonna say if the movie in the box office after the second weekend has a higher critic score than audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, it gets a tariff. That that would be a good judgment as to whether or not the movie was woke. We'll we'll we'll see. But, yeah, that would be terrific. Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:And it's it is it is pretty notable how bad most of the stuff coming out of Disney and coming out of Hollywood in general is these days. I mean, I love movies. I like to I like to be up to date, but I just haven't been able to generate the care to watch any new movies. The other night, I had some time to watch a movie before or, like, after dinner. And I was scrolling through Amazon's new releases and stuff and looking at Disney's original, like, new releases.
Linnea Lueken:And I was like, man, I'm gonna watch rear window because all of this is just all of this just sucks. I'm not watching any of this garbage.
S.T. Karnick:It's that little barfing emoji that, you know, that always comes to mind.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Exactly. And, Jim, you have the jar. I don't have the jar. I haven't made the jar yet, but you get a Jim moment.
Jim Lakely:I knew I was gonna do that. I have to do one every show. Yeah. But the last movie I saw in the theater was Superman, and it was okay. And I can't remember the movie I saw before that.
Jim Lakely:I frank I only go to movies once a year now. I used to I used to go probably a dozen times a year back in the day. And, you know, my wife and I after that, we're just like you, Lynne. We're watching you know, we're like, alright. We have had dinner.
Jim Lakely:Let's let's look around. And we'll scroll around, and it is extremely rare for us to pick a movie that was made after 2,010, you know, and that was before all the wokeness stuff happened. It's it's before, you know, Believe All Women or whatever it was, the Me Too movement, and all of that and all of that nonsense and and, you know, girl bossery and and, you know, remakes that change the ethnicity of half the characters just because because diversity is important. And, actually, we saw Sherlock Holmes. You know, I'd never seen Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Junior because I thought I thought, you know, well, why don't they hire a British actor to play Sherlock Holmes?
Jim Lakely:It's very weird that Robert Downey junior would do it. Bet he's terrible. No. He's great. He's really enjoyed the movie.
Jim Lakely:He's fantastic. So, yeah. We the watched two Sherlock girls movies back to back. That was 02/2011. So and it it is seriously refreshing to watch, quote, unquote, older movies just from ten years ago.
Jim Lakely:The difference in tone, talent, writing, it's all so much better just even ten years ago. There's so little that is any that is really even worth watching these days. But to get it back to the to to the tariffs and Sam's point that you should take Trump seriously, but not literally sometimes. This this idea is so crazy that I don't even I usually, Trump's tariff threat is a negotiating tactic. But what is he negotiating?
Jim Lakely:I don't understand what he's doing here. Because the the fact of the matter is, California leftist politics ruined Hollywood. They left because, you know, with with the union rules, with all these regulations, it is it's literally there was a a channel I watched called Film Threat. I recommend that to everybody on YouTube. He had a independent filmmaker on who explained that, you know, he makes he makes movies for, like, a million or $2.02 to $5,000,000, and he can't make a film at all in California for that money because of all how expensive it is to to produce anything in in California.
Jim Lakely:Like, he got a he got a fine because the wrong union guy picked up the wrong cable on one of his sets and was reported to the union, he got fined a few thousand dollars for, like, having the best boy pick something up instead of the key grip. Right? So, you know, these these sorts of regulations are what drove Hollywood or Hollywood out of California. I mean, you think about how many films did you watch if you watch all the to the credit all the way to the credits. I actually can't remember the last time I didn't see a film that didn't thank the state of Georgia or thank the state of Tennessee, you know, or or Texas at the end of that thing.
Jim Lakely:You know, they filmed The X Files in Vancouver, not just because of the aesthetics, because it was cheaper. This was back in the nineteen nineties.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. And they always film anything any movie, basically, that says that it's, like, supposed to have an episode in Colorado or something. They're probably filming it in Vancouver. Like, you have a wood scene, it always is a Pacific Northwest woods and it cracks me up every time as, like, a tree, like, a nature nerd. And you see those woods with the, like, heavy fog and the ferns and the moss growing up the trees and stuff, and they're like, yeah.
Linnea Lueken:This is Arkansas. You're like, okay.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Well, half the movies that you see that you think are set in New York City are filmed in Toronto.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah.
Jim Lakely:And most people can't tell the difference. But, you know, just but how is this tariff again supposed to work? I mean, I think it's so impractical. I and I'm just really curious when we finally find out what he's really getting at here. Maybe it's to get Gavin Newsom to increase, you know, tax breaks to keep more productions in California.
Jim Lakely:I mean, you listen if you ever listen to Justine Bateman who has become, you know, awake instead of woke over the last, you know, ten years or so. She has fantastic commentary, and she's been saying for quite a while that Hollywood is dead. There there's nothing there anymore, and AI is only gonna make it worse and faster. You know, there's the democratization of filmmaking now that's gonna make it's gonna accelerate with the rise of using AI to make films. You know?
Jim Lakely:So I don't know what what Trump is really getting at here. I mean, if I wanna go see yeah. One of the best movies I've seen over the last two years is Godzilla minus one. I paid $15 for that ticket. Is that ticket gonna be now $30 because there's a 100% tariff?
Jim Lakely:Is it on when the is it on the can of film that comes in? Is it on Yeah. No. I don't understand I don't understand understand how this can be enforced. You know?
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Well, it
Jim Lakely:But his his intent is to get more filmmaking done in The United States instead of exporting it to Canada and and other places. But when you have spent three decades disincentivizing making productions in California, in Hollywood, you can't fix that with a tariff, and you can't fix it overnight, I don't think.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. And
Jim Lakely:this is
S.T. Karnick:think it's I do think it's interesting that, Newsom has basically said that this will destroy the, the film industry in Hollywood. You already did that. Your you you all your regulations and and favoritism toward unions and so forth have already destroyed the film industry. So, you know, it's it's it's Georgia and and Texas and North Carolina and and places like that that really care about this.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, I'm all for punishing Hollywood. But, you know, punishing them by by showing them that their stuff is mostly crap right now. And, you know, it there was a good article in The Federalist the other day by Evita Duffy Alfonso who wrote a article saying why Demon Slayer speaks to the soul and Disney doesn't.
Linnea Lueken:And she was comparing the income or the the box office office numbers that a Japanese film got, and its scores that it got after its opening weekend, 98% audience and critic score, $70,000,000 on its opening weekend. And DreamWorks and Pixar both had movies come out this weekend, alright, over or recently. I didn't hear about either of these. I had no idea that DreamWorks and Disney Pixar both released new movies, and they flopped big time hard. And it's and and the question is, like, why is this stuff making people like, why is a Japanese, like, an anime movie killing it?
Linnea Lueken:Just slaughtering the box office for, like, a young adult or a children's film versus, like, the most famous children's films producers on the planet. Right?
S.T. Karnick:Very simple. There's no DEI hiring in Japan.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. And I think that's probably true. Oh, thanks. You didn't have to pull it up, but thank you for pulling it up. But the the article is really interesting and really good.
Linnea Lueken:The writer, she goes into some description of the plot of the anime film and talking about how, like, this stuff is like, they're they take on heavier topics and take them more seriously and have, you know, themes of, like, honor and stuff. And American films just can't seem to figure out how to do that anymore. And that's part of the reason probably why people like the like, so many people are turning to foreign films and foreign animation and stuff over American.
Jim Lakely:Well, what
Linnea Lueken:happened And LaSalle LaSalle on Rumble says the Japanese and Koreans have not abandoned traditional storytelling. That's why their products are better. And I think you're right.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. And again, how would this tariff be like, Squid Game was an enormous hit
Linnea Lueken:for for Netflix.
Jim Lakely:So what happens there? I mean Yeah. Do I get a surcharge on my monthly Netflix bill? Because I watched yeah. I I I don't understand.
Jim Lakely:I I just don't understand how this could be remotely enforced. I really don't. But, again, I I it's gonna be curious to see what he's getting at. Maybe he's just he just wants to just to piss off Gavin Newsom. I don't know.
Jim Lakely:But I don't understand how any of this could be enforced.
Linnea Lueken:Oh, John Z in our comments, Jim, has a comment for you. He says there's a community that you might not be aware of called Geeks and Gamers and Friday Night Tights. A group of about a 100 individuals that work together to report on entertainment. Yeah. Both both Jim and I are are fans.
Jim Lakely:Big fans of both of those channels. Yeah. I watch Friday Night Tights every every week. It's great.
Linnea Lueken:It's very fun. Alrighty. Well, you guys, we've done our hour and a half show. That's, I think, all the time that we have. So thank you everybody for tuning in.
Linnea Lueken:We are live every single week on Thursdays at noon central central on Rumble, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook. We are all over the place. So, Jim, what do you have for us to close out on?
Jim Lakely:Well, I want you to if you enjoyed this show, you're really gonna enjoy tomorrow's show as well. That is the Climate Realism Show that we broadcast every Friday at 1PM eastern time. We are going to have a hurricane expert on to talk about what happened to all the hurricanes. It's hurricane season, and not one has hit The United States. We've improved on entire September.
Jim Lakely:First time in ten years, one not once for us in The US. So we'll talking about that and, some crazy climate news of the week, and Lanea will also be
Linnea Lueken:there. Absolutely. Sam?
S.T. Karnick:Thanks. Please visit heartland.org and look at all the, fantastic, policy analysis we have there. I think you'll find plenty to stimulate your thinking and, get you on the right side of things.
Linnea Lueken:Awesome. So for audio listeners, as I said, please rate us well on whatever service you're using. Leave a review. It really helps us out. Thank you so much to all of our usual panelists that and and the ones who could not be here as well.
Linnea Lueken:So thank you, guys. We will see you again next week.
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