So let's turn it over to Tucker Carlson. He is in Brazil this week. Let's see what he has to say. Welcome to Tucker Carlson. Tonight we are here at the Presidential Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, a city famous to architecture majors the world over, a completely planned city built in the late 1950s as a new federal zone in this sprawling country, Brazil. We're here because this is the home of the president, Jair Bolsonaro. We just had breakfast with him, sat down with a fascinating interview with him that went on for more than an hour. We'll have more on that in a moment. We're going to speak to his son. But we're here in Brazil broadcasting all week for a reason. If you're worried about the future of the United States, this is a good place to come to get a glimpse of it or what it might look like depending on what choices we make. Brazil and the United States have much more in common than we realize. Both are huge countries. Brazil is actually a little larger than the continental United States. Countries with deep natural resources, diverse physical environment, diverse. Okay, forgive me. I don't really care about Brazil. I mean, we've got these January 6th bombshell hearings. So if Tucker says anything interesting, I'll play from it. But the news media portrays these January 6th hearings as more effective, more compelling than they expected, right? That seems to be a fairly universal reaction by the mainstream news media. Richard Spencer says the same thing. I don't have a strong opinion yet, right? I'm not committed either way. So right now, I don't see how these January 6th hearings are going to change anything significant. But I take note that pretty much everyone in the mainstream media who's offering an opinion says that they're far more effective than they thought. I think I also said this. Robert Wright has said this. Richard Spencer has said this. And particularly the bombshell testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson. And what I want to know is why is no one following up on the Washington Post making it fairly clear that they believe that she climbed the greasy pole to power through her close personal relationship with Mark Meadows. Now, Mark Meadows is a very happily married man. Apparently he's been married for 42 years to his wife. So where would he want to play around with a 23-year-old, 24-year-old intern? That's the question. So they have two children together. Now, in his 2020 book, Tim Alberta, 2021 book, American Carnage, Tim Alberta wrote that Mark Meadows is the only politician I've encountered who stacks up to a real-life version of Frank Underwood. There's the cunning, main character in the show House of Cards. So Washington Post published an extraordinary profile of Cassidy Hutchinson today. Makes her sound like Tracy Fleck. He's the wreath with a spoon character in the movie Election and who is a very cunning, goes to bed with people and uses them to get ahead. So how exactly did Cassidy Hutchinson, an intern, essentially climb up to be effectively co-chief of staff along with Mark Meadows? And he writes about her in his memoir. His memoir is called The Chief's Chief. And he writes about her just very passing reference, but he then includes in the paragraph where he mentions Cassidy Hutchinson, he includes a reference to Monica Lewinsky. So talking about Donald Trump's trip to the hospital with COVID in October 2020, he says, I remember that earlier that afternoon, just after we'd arrived at the hospital, Cassidy Hutchinson, my White House assistant, dropped off a few boxes of candies and gifts with a presidential seal on them. These weren't much, just cardboard boxes that said President Donald Trump, with an eagle and a presidential seal, but they were valued by supporters. It was the best we could do on short notice. Most of the time, we kept these gifts in a small room off the Oval Office, what we jokingly referred to as the Monica Lewinsky Room. So in the one paragraph, the one time in the book that he refers to his assistant, Cassidy Hutchinson, right, he links it with Monica Lewinsky, find that curious. Okay, let's get some more here from Tucker Carlson. In fact, it's the worst possible thing for America. So in a functioning democratic system, this would be a problem for the people trying to do it. You can't undermine the country you lead and expect to continue to lead it in a democracy. And the Biden administration knows this. And that's one of the reasons that the signature tactic of the Biden administration, this is our topic tonight, has been the criminalizing of American politics. And that's one of the reasons that the Biden administration, has been the criminalizing of American politics. Why have a political debate when you can just arrest people who disagree with you? And that has happened far below the media radar since the day Joe Biden was elected. And tonight to show it, we wanna go through a litany, a list of Americans who have been arrested, detained by federal law enforcement on the orders of the Biden administration, not because they committed recognizable crimes, but because they disagreed with the political aims of the Biden administration. Now again, you're not reading about this in the New York Times because the rest of the media are pretending that it's not happening. And instead they're focused on the January 6th committee, which has taken in fact a lead role in this effort, rounding up enemies of the state. The entire process is a farce. And that was proved yesterday. If you watched the hearings yesterday, you know how absurd it is. Democrats with the help of Adam Kinziger and Liz Cheney called up a star witness who testified she heard someone else say that Donald Trump attacked a secret service agent and tried to carjack the presidential limousine. Think about that. The president of the United States tried to seize control of the presidential limousine that he wasn't driving, it didn't make any sense. And then by the time that secret service agents who were on the scene denied the story to NBC News and other news outlets, nobody cared. They weren't even pretending that it was true. The initial story was the point. The shock value was the point, not the factual basis of it. That's what passes for rigorous investigation in Congress at the moment. But no media outlet is going to revisit their decision to turn over their airwaves to the January 6th committee even after yesterday's debacle. It is in effect a show trial. It is absurd by definition. And its absurdity is the point. The absurdity of it, the hollowness of it, sends the message, we run the justice system now. You are powerless. And that is the same message the Biden administration has sent to America for the last year and a half with the help of Merrick Garland, the most political attorney general in history. Here's a list of the things they've done because no one else has assembled it. Here we go. January 27th, 2021, days after Joe Biden's inauguration, the Justice Department arrests a man called Douglas Mackey known online as Ricky Vaughn. You heard very little about this. Why? Because Douglas Mackey had extremist political views. But under the American system, it doesn't matter if you have unattractive or unpopular views. Your views are protected by the First Amendment. He was arrested for what? A crime? No. For creating internet memes that made fun of Hillary Clinton. But according to the Justice Department, those memes, quote, deprived individuals of their constitutional right to vote. So he went to jail. Then on February 3rd of the same year, 2021, the FBI raids the homes of Russell Taylor and Alan Hosteler. What did they do wrong? Well, they organized a lawful political rally on January 6th. They even had a permit for the rally. Taylor also committed the grave offense of being seen with Roger Stone in the days before January 6th. That's now a crime too. Not in a free country, but in ours. Then in April 28th, 2021, the Fed sees the cell phones and computers belonging to the president's former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. That didn't used to be allowed. You can't seize the records of someone's attorney. Those are confidential lawyer-client communications. Now, at the time we were told that Rudy Giuliani had done something illegal in Ukraine. The walls were closing in. He was never charged with anything like that because it was all fake. But they got his privileged communications anyway. Then on June 24th, 2021, the feds raided the home of a Giuliani associate called George Dixon. The FBI never explained the purpose of that raid, but Dixon was working on a documentary about Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and their business dealings in Ukraine. And that's no longer allowed. A direct attack on the free press, not covered by the media. And then because this list does go on, on January 19th, 2021, a journalist at Info Wars called Owen Schreuer was arrested and charged. Why? Well, according to the federal complaint, Schreuer told the crowd on January 6th, quote, "'Today we march for the Capitol because on this historic January 6th, 2021, we have to let our congressmen and women know and we have to let Mike Pence know that they stole the election." End quote. Now you may not agree with that or maybe you do, it doesn't matter. That's protected speech under our constitution. But under Joe Biden, it's a crime. And then on November 6th, 2021, the FBI raided the homes of several more journalists who worked for Project Veritas, including the organization's founder, James O'Keefe. What did they do wrong? Drug trafficking, human trafficking? No. They reported on a diary written by Joe Biden's daughter, Ashley. And in that diary, Biden's daughter writes, reveals to the rest of us, that Joe Biden showered with her in a way that she described as inappropriate and that she blames for making her sexually compulsive in later life. For having access to that information, the FBI raided Project Veritas. I'm sorry, so what is this regarding? This is the Senator, I'm just, God, open up. Let me see your hands. Let me see your hands. My hands are, my hands are gone. So there's another team coming up. Yeah, there's a real little stuff up until I get ready to go out.  Remember that? Did Trump's DOJ raid the homes of a lot of journalists who embarrassed his children? No, you don't remember that, because it didn't happen. But Joe Biden's Justice Department has done that. And then they kept going. Later that same month, November 15th of last year, the Justice Department arrested one of the most prominent critics. That would be former Trump advisor, Steve Bannon. Now, what does Steve Bannon do wrong? Did he commit a crime on January 6th? No, he didn't. And no one claims otherwise. Instead, Bannon's crime was that he didn't bend the knee for the January 6th committee. He set an executive privilege. According to Nancy Pelosi, that means Steve Bannon belongs in jail. Do you think people who refuse to comply with congressional subpoenas should be prosecuted by the Justice Department and at the end of the day go to jail? Yes. You do? I do. Well, first of all, this, you know, people say, well, this hasn't happened before. We haven't had an insurrection incited by the president of the United States and one of his totes having knowledge of, advanced knowledge of that happening. So in fact, it's important for a number of reasons. It's important for us to find the truth about what happened on January 6th and assault on our constitution, our Congress, and our Capitol. Assault on the constitution, okay. So no, in other words, we don't arrest people for ignoring congressional subpoenas, particularly when they cite executive privilege, a principle that has a long history in American history. We've never done that. But we can do it now because it was, quote, an insurrection, an insurrection that wasn't armed, wasn't planned, it didn't actually insurrect anything, but it was still an insurrection. Now you're beginning to see why it's been so important from the very first day for the media to describe what happened on January 6th, not as a riot, but as an insurrection, because if it's an insurrection, they can violate your civil rights and they have and they continue to. A day after Steve Bannon's arrest, this would be November 16th, 2021, the FBI raided the home of Sharona Bishop, that's the former campaign manager for Congresswoman Lauren Bolert of Colorado. According to Bishop, here's what happened, quote, while homeschooling my youngest children, the FBI decided it was necessary to bust open my front door with a battering ram and put me in handcuffs so they trampled through my home, terrifying my family. My daughter was pulled around by the hoodie by one of the agents. Now, why would you do this to the former chief of staff of a sitting member of Congress? Well, the FBI gave no reason. They took Bishop's cell phone and they left, never charged with a crime. Then that same day, and you didn't read this in the New York Times either, the feds hit the home of Mesa County Republican clerk Tina Peters. What was the justification for that raid? We're breaking into a lot of houses all of a sudden of Trump voters, why? Well, in this case, DOJ said Peters raised doubts about the legitimacy of the last election. That's not allowed anymore. Can't question the outcome. They didn't arrest her. They just tore her house apart. Peter called the raid evidence of, quote, a level of weaponization of the Justice Department we haven't seen since the McCarthy era. But of course, even during McCarthy, no one did that. In May, she came on Fox Denver to explain what exactly happened to her. Watch. My attorneys, when they read the indictment the other day they, I mean, Harvey Steinberg and I've got the best attorneys and they just laughed. They said, are you kidding? This is a political maneuver to shine the light on me to keep me from running against and defeating Jenna Griswold. Oh, so in the name of punishing people for complaining about the last election, they're subverting elections currently taking place. And the last night, the woman you just saw, Tina Peters, lost her bid for secretary of state, which of course was the whole point of targeting her. Peters would not be the last opponent of the Biden administration running for office to be targeted by the Justice Department. On June 3rd, Peter Navarro, who was a trade aide to Donald Trump, was arrested at Washington National Airport and put in the leg irons and put in jail. Why? Well, days earlier, he sued the January 6th committee. He claimed executive privilege in his communications with the president. And this is standard, a decades old standard. And rather than go to court, the January 6th committee simply had him arrested at the airport and sent to jail in irons. Navarro went on this show to explain what happened to him. The mission of that partisan witch hunt kangaroo committee, which is unduly authorized and not properly constituted and has no subpoena power, they have only one mission to concoct the fake hoax around January 6th, based on criminal charges against Trump to prevent him from running for reelection and taking back the White House in 2025 January. That's all this is about. So a decade ago, the Obama administration was caught sending automatic weapons to Mexican drug cartels. And Congress wanted to know more about this. Eric Holder, then the attorney general, had a key role in this Operation Fast and Furious, you may remember it, so they subpoenaed him. And he ignored the subpoena. And the media applauded. He was taking a noble position. But when Steve Bannon or Peter Navarro tried to do something like that, they went to jail. Again, we had this exact same thing happen in public 10 years ago, a federal judge ruled that Holder's privilege claim was not legitimate. And he was still never arrested. But the rules have changed. Why is that? No one in corporate media ever asked that question. Instead they celebrated Peter Navarro's arrest a 70 year old man in an airport. He'd made their day. He was indicted. And when you're indicted, you're arrested. What Peter Navarro did, it was so far out of bounds, it's so indefensible. This prosecution is really about punishing Navarro based on his latent disrespect for the congressional subpoena. His latent disrespect. By the way, there's no constitutional requirement to have respect for anybody in the US government. In fact, in a free country, you're encouraged to disagree. You are a citizen, you have that inherent right. But no more. The media think you should be sent to jail if you show disrespect. And so of course, with no media to push back against unconstitutional overreach, the Justice Department kept going. Then on June 9th of this year, the FBI arrested a Republican candidate for governor of Michigan. In fact, the candidate who poll show was in the lead. His name is Ryan Kelly. He came on our show to explain what happened next. There was no crime committed, Tucker, no. Never entered the Capitol building, exercising my first amendment. Those of us that have questions about their 2020 election results, they wanna intimidate us and they wanna threaten us. Not just me and my family, but my supporters as well. All of us that love America. I think a lot of Americans see right through this, Tucker. They understand what the Democrats are up to and it's not a big deal to them.  Noticing a pattern here? Speak up against Joe Biden. Dare to organize other people to speak up against Joe Biden. Dare to run for office against Joe Biden. And you raise your chances that the FBI is showing up at your house exponentially. It took months for us to recognize a pattern. In fact, it took coming to Brazil where this kind of behavior is common to realize that's exactly what's happening in our country. And as if you needed more evidence, these raids continue. On June 22nd of this month, the Fed's cornered former Trump attorney, John Eastman, in a parking lot and seized his phone. They didn't even provide a warrant before they did that. Watch. Go ahead and put your arms up for me. Can I see the warrant? Sir, put your arms up for me. Can I see the warrant, please? I'd like to see the warrant. I'd like to see the warrant. I'd like to see the warrant. Can I see the warrant? I'd like to see the warrant before you take my property. Sir, there's nothing wrong with that, sir. It's right over here. There is the warrant. Right. I want you to see that they took my property before providing me with the warrant. I'd like to read the warrant. Put your hands up, no warrant for you. What did that man do wrong? We still don't know. But again, is if you need more evidence that this is a pattern that nobody is doing anything to stop. In fact, some Republicans in Washington are abetting it and encouraging it. There's this. A day after that was shot, June 23rd, last week, the FBI searched the home of former Trump DOJ official Jeff Clark. Again, there's no suggestion he committed any crime of anything. They did anything wrong. What he did was say things that Joe Biden and Joe Biden's Justice Department didn't like. So he was hauled out of his home in his pajamas for maximum public humiliation. At one point, 12 agents and two Fairfax County police officers went into my house, searched it for three and a half hours. They even brought along something, Tucker I've never seen before or heard of, a electronic sniffing dog. And they took all of the electronics from my house. And I don't blame the agents. I think what you're talking about in terms of weaponization is really about who's pointing the agents and telling them what to do. I just think we're living in an era that I don't recognize and increasingly, Tucker, I don't recognize the country anymore with these kinds of stasi-like things happening. I don't blame the agents, he says. He's a bigger man than we are because we do blame the agents. Where are the agents who will resign their jobs before participating in the destruction of the US Constitution? We should see them, any of them. Is anyone else noticing this? No, and no one's saying a word and because no one is, abuses of power escalate. This show has just learned that as of this week, the DOJ's counter-terrorism division is prosecuting a lawyer involved in a dispute over election integrity. Counter-terrorism aimed at people who ask questions about the last election results. And by the way, if that doesn't pique your interest about what exactly must have happened in the last election, nothing will. Why are they so angry? Every election of your lifetime has been contested. Every single one. There's not an election or Republican wins in which Democrats don't say, oh, it's the voting machines were rigged. No one does a thing, but suddenly that's a crime. And in this case, the lawyer has not attacked the state capital of Arizona. Writers just did that after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Not a single one was arrested. He didn't burn down a church outside the White House in the name of George Floyd and said like every person we just mentioned, his crime was making Joe Biden mad. According to our Justice Department, he's now a domestic terrorist. Someone needs to stop this before it gets even crazier. Again, this view is informed by the fact we're now outside of the country in a political environment that resembles ours in so many ways, except there's less free speech. There is more police involvement in politics. Brazil is what America will be very soon if we don't slow this down. We're here at the presidential palace because as we told you a minute ago, we just sat down with the president of Brazil, President Bolsonaro ahead of an election here that will have an effect on the entire hemisphere very much. Okay, so you probably think you want the heck does Richard Spencer have to say about all this? I'm gonna talk about the January 5th hearing. I have to say, this was a bombshell. And I know that's a common opinion. It's kind of a normie opinion, but it is what it is. It was scintillating television. There was no doubt. I was glued to my iPhone watching the whole thing live from the opinion. And yeah, there was a lot of talk about these hearings failing at the beginning. And you could actually hear that from both the left and the right. So the right would just basically say, why won't you let us move on? No one wants to see this witch hunt. We did these impeachment trials and Trump in many ways got stronger from them because they didn't really land for one thing. And then secondly, in the logic of polarization, when your guy is attacked vehemently, you link him more. So the, you know, strike me down and I will become stronger than you could possibly imagine. In the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, that was what seemed to be happening. And Fox News didn't cover it at least at the beginning. And there are many liberals who said similar things that, you know, look, we're dealing with inflation and baby formula shortages and Ukraine and so on, even COVID, why are you doing this? This is going to seem tedious. We don't really have a nation anymore in the normal sense of that word. We have a hyper partisan, hyper polarized civil war going on. This is just, this is going to add flames to the fire. Well, I think those people were proven wrong. Tucker Carlson was right when he said this is a show trial. It is a show trial. It's not an actual trial, of course. No one will go to jail or have to pay a settlement or anything like that due to this, at least directly. But it has all of the trappings of court and it has all of the power of the court of law. They have subpoena power. There is a discovery process. And no doubt Donald Trump and others are being prosecuted. It is a criminal trial. It's not just a hearing where, you know, let's go talk about the dangers of social media for America's young girls or something like that. This is a trial and it is a show trial in that sense of the word. It's a good one. It has been done brilliantly. There's not too much fanfare. That is, it doesn't seem too slick. It seems like a regular congressional process, but it's just slick enough. And the... So that Tucker Carlson segment was absolutely infuriating, but was it fair and balanced? I'm suspicious. The world as shown by Tucker Carlson is a very different world from the world shown by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News. And I don't side with either one, right? I think that there are times when seems to be pretty obvious that Tucker is right. I think there are times when it seems obvious to me that the New York Times is right. So it varies on the story. And that presentation, though, by Tucker was incredibly disturbing. So I don't know enough about the details of these incidents according to the mainstream media. These are no big deal, right? This is just hunting down the bad guys, but from Tucker's presentation, it's absolutely infuriating. But I don't trust my emotions to give me truth. I mean, emotionally, yeah, I side with Tucker Carlson. Now, when it comes to the analysis of the January 6th hearings, I find it interesting that Richard Spencer seems to base his analysis primarily on emotional drama. So he finds these hearings riveting. I haven't watched any of them live. So I don't know how riveting they are, but I do see clearly enough that there's no inherent connection between emotionally riveting and important. All sorts of things are exciting and unimportant. Generally speaking, that which is important is not exciting and that which is exciting is not important. I found it interesting that Tucker began his list of political prisoners with Ricky Vaughan, AKA Doug Mackie, getting arrested for making memes mocking Hillary Clinton. Yeah. And I think one thing that we can learn from that Tucker Carlson presentation and a million other examples of this is that if you're on the right like I am, the automatic respect and positive feelings that you have towards law enforcement and you have towards the FBI, they're not necessarily warranted. So anyone who has a gun, you should treat very respectfully with their law enforcement or not law enforcement, but to automatically accord respect to the FBI or to the police. Yes, you should accord it in your actions, right? When you're confronted with people with a loaded gun, but from the perspective of trying to make objective analysis of a situation, obviously there are all sorts of situations such as what happened at the school shooting in Uvaldi where contempt and disgust and hatred is the proper reaction to have for law enforcement in those situations. So sometimes the FBI is out there catching bad guys, sometimes the FBI is the bad guy and that FBI agents do not tape record their interviews, they just rely on their handwritten notes to then go arrest people. I think that's outrageous. And if you insist on tape recording an interaction with them, they will not allow that. So to me, that's highly suspicious retrograde behavior on the part of the FBI. Committee members, especially Liz Cheney is very well-prepared. Morgan Freeman, as you know, is also the committee chair and he has been doing a very good job. I was joking with Ed in the video we made. He does have a Morgan Freeman voice and I've just noticed these little things, these little Southernisms that he adds in there that he'll refer when he was referring to Ivanka Trump's father, he called Donald Trump her daddy. You hear a lot of acts as opposed to ask. And I think another Southernism, he pronounces January 6th, January 6th, S-I-C-K-S anyway. The fact is he is a smart. Isn't Luke Do for his fourth booster shot? I had my fourth booster shot about a month ago. Guy, and he's also a down-home guy and it works. It speaks directly to the public. Liz Cheney is not very charismatic, but she's good. She's smart, she comes from that family, which say what you will about them. I came of age as a young adult hating Dick Cheney and the Gulf War II and all that kind of stuff. But I would never say that she's not intelligent or well-prepared to put together. Whether or not she wins the Wyoming, her Wyoming congressional primary, she's actually facing a Trump-backed challenger in a Republican primary. She's down according to some polls. Who knows what will happen? Things can change. What is the polling line in Wyoming? Is it more of a sketch as opposed to a detail? Well, I don't know, but I think she will, for better or for worse, have a career after this. The whole thing is just really well done. And I noticed two things about it that are fairly interesting. First is that it seems to be a subtle attempt to revive your father's Republican party. And again, the right-wing critique of all this was that the J6 committee, it's just a partisan, nasty, shrill bunch. Right, so remember the January 6th committee is appointed by Democrats and it's obviously highly partisan. So if the January 6th committee is trying to support one faction of the Republican party, right? If Democrats want to support the old-time Republican party of George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, guys, they only have your very best of interests at heart.  Well, they definitely hate Trump, but maybe they're overcompensating, you could say, but they are out to promote and valorize, in fact, the Republicans who went against him, even at the last minute, and to revive their careers. This has been an amazing, fundraising, profile-inflating opportunity for Mike Pence. He has been depicted as a hero and the people around him are depicted as good, solid conservatives. One of the judges who was speaking about Eastman's memo was introduced in a laudatory fashion of being one of the great conservative legal minds of the country. I'm sure this might actually kind of ruffle the feathers of some of the liberals watching this, but it's what they're doing and I think that actually makes it much more effective. One of my favorite moments came when, I believe his last name's Jacob, and he was just tossed a softball right over the plate. No fastballs, no curveballs, we're gonna throw it underhand here. And he was asked a question, like, in this moment of crisis, did you turn to your faith for support? And he mentioned that he was reading the book of Daniel, and it's Daniel The Lion's Daniel 6, and all that kind of stuff. And he seemed like a dutiful, loyal, devout, morally upright man, and they allowed him to do that. Now, as we all know, at least as the saying goes, when you're in a court of law, you never ask a question to which you don't know the answer. That is a maxim, but I'm not sure that's really all that true. You know, with a hostile witness or something like that, a lawyer will prod and maybe be a little provocative, maybe bend the rules a little bit, try to get somewhere, try to get something, not necessarily a perinaceous moment, but something, and get into a confrontation with the witness. We don't see any of that. It's not exactly scripted, but it's very well prepared, and it flows smoothly. It doesn't seem like a boring trial that just goes on and on. At least my attention was kept throughout. I'm rambling here as usual. It was a good show. It is a good show. It will continue to be a good show. I think they're taking a break, Okay, so good show does not equal significant. A good show does not equal important. In fact, there's no connection between good show and important. After the July 4th holiday, the other aspect that I noticed about this was having attractive witnesses. So one of the witnesses on the first day, on the prime time day, was a very attractive police woman who just seemed too attractive to be a police woman.  If you would have looked at her, you would have thought, oh, I bet she works in corporate America or she's a lawyer or something like that. She just had a very good look to her. And one can say the same of Cassidy Hutchinson, who was the star witness on Tuesday that is yesterday. She's young, she's only 25. She's an attractive girl. She handled herself quite well. I think what she was saying was extremely explosive, but she delivered it well. And again, this is a young girl who is not maybe the most impressive person you could imagine. She's like a lot of interns and staffers and so on that you meet in Washington. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of Cassidy's out there. And she worked for Steve Scalise and she worked for Ted Cruz. At least from my perspective, those are fairly gross politicians, but that was not treated as something that was bad. That was treated as something that was good. It's like, isn't it impressive that we have this ambitious, successful young woman with us? And what she said was really remarkable. I want to make a broader point about Maga, but I'm going to save that and just talk about what she said. She gave a lot of behind the scenes stories. She gave us a look behind the curtain. And a lot of these include food fights, Trump would turn over the tables and pull up tablecloth and ketchup would get all over the walls and all this kind of stuff. Now, is she lying? Does she just hate Trump, even though she was working for his chief of staff, Mark Menos? Right, and a lot of these stories, she was getting secondhand. A lot of these stories are just hearsay. So is Richard concentrating on that, which is compelling or that which is true? Maybe, does she want a career after this and this is one way to get that? Sure. But you can say that about every witness basically. There's some self-serving quality to what they're saying. Is she going to be motivated to lie? I'm not sure about that. That would... So where would she lie? Where would she have it in for Donald Trump? And the Washington Post has an interesting essay. Like, who is Kasey Cassidy Hutchinson? And she sounds just like Tracy Fleck character in the novel and the movie, Election, which came out in 1999 and starred with a spoon. So she was an intern and then suddenly she got extraordinary access and inordinate power. So she was called Chief Cassidy, right? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's staff asked, why is this girl in our legislative meeting? So how did she climb the greasy pole to power, right? How did she become Chief Cassidy? Well, during the first impeachment trial, she grew close to Mark Meadows who became Donald Trump's Chief of Staff. And so once he was named Chief of Staff in March 2020, he immediately elevated her and she became his principal assistant. She was given an office next to his, which put her a few doors away from the Oval Office. The Washington Post is essentially saying without saying that they were having an affair. So Brendan Barker, former aide to former House Speaker Paul Ryan, said that Cassidy Hutchinson was always by Mark Meadows' side. Is it because he was just so interested in her perspective on social security? There's no normal rational explanation aside from that they were having an affair, that she would be this close to power. When there are meetings where you'd expect a principal level or very small senior staff level, Mark Meadows would always insist that Cassidy Hutchinson be in the room. It's unusual to have a junior aide to be in principal level or senior staff level, but it was Mark Meadows' call, so we deferred to him. So she was viewed throughout the White House as speaking for Mark Meadows. This is what happens when you are thought to be having an affair with a man in power, right? So she was giving other staff members orders. She kept saying Mark once or the chief says the chief being Mark Meadows. And Cassidy Hutchinson traveled constantly with Mark Meadows, going on Air Force One, answering his calls, getting texts from members of Congress. Key members of the White House staff who wanted to get a message to Trump or to Mark Meadows often went through her. So unless she had some kind of emotional physical affair with Mark Meadows, this makes absolutely no sense. So when you're faced with choices between, okay, this one perspective makes no sense and this other perspective makes sense, I choose the perspective that makes sense. So the simplest explanation for her rise and then her turn against Mark Meadows and Trump is the Tracy Flick story. There's no mention of her love life online. And Tim Alberta writes in American Carnage, Mark Meadows is the only politician I've ever encountered who stacks up to a real life version of Frank Underwood, the cunning main character in the show, House of Cards. That would be something. And the January 6th commission, if they had one witness who was just outright perjuring herself, even if the rest of the case was ironclad, it would just disrupt everything. It would be the only thing that people would talk about. So I think they were very sure that this was a solid witness. And she was credible. She did not ramble or tell stories. She did not contradict herself. She was very credible. And she also, what I find interesting as well is that she also kind of gave us another side of things. And in many ways, although this might seem a bit strange to say, I had a certain respect, a weird respect for Donald Trump after what she said that I didn't have earlier. So I'm sure that I've said on some podcast or live stream or whatever that Trump was just a complete grifter to the very end that he went up there at his speech at the ellipse and said, I will walk down Pennsylvania Avenue with you arm and arm and we will go together to encourage Mike Pence to do what is right and maybe yell with the rest of those senators and all that kind of stuff. But then he just backed out and went and watched TV or something. That was my impression. I mean, again, I'm a complete outsider in the situation and I kind of, you know, I turn to John Disdye towards all the stuff at this point. But that's not what happened. And so she's offering something that rings true but is also a kind of unique perspective. It's very interesting. Donald Trump did seriously want to go to the Capitol.  But remarkable stuff. That was in her testimony. He went into a kind of narcissistic rage fit where he just said, I'm the president. We're going to the Capitol. But he also just genuinely passionately wanted to be there. He wanted to enter the Capitol himself. And he failed at that. It actually shows, among other things, the problematic aspect of this coup. The coups are hard. You're walking a tightrope. Your life is on a knife's edge when you do a coup.  Maybe at the very best, get exiled. You might very well die. You have to be willing to go through with it. And apparently Donald Trump was. And he wasn't exactly willing to die but you get my point. He was passionate about it. He wasn't nearly lying to his people and letting them get run over by bulldozer while he hung out in the Oval Office munching on Cheetos. But I think it also gets to the problematic nature of the coup itself. It was a very conservative coup and it relied on the conservative movement's power centers. One of those power centers was the, is the legal movement, the conservative legal movement, the Federalist Society, let's say. And they had a implausible and rather tedious theory about procedure that would have allowed them to reject the electors and get some new ones. Donald Trump also heavily relied on the vast and passionate conservative alt-media, the Alex Jones people, the Ali Akbar or Ali Alexanders, the Nick Fuentes, et cetera. And they're kind of like a hardcore or something that emanates out to Fox News and Tucker and Newsmax and all those kind of things. They're all on the same page with some are harder core than others. And how much weird theorizing and numerology went on. So Cassidy Hutchinson was the assistant, the right hand woman to Mark Meadows who's a very weird guy. So in January, 2013, this is Tim Alberta writing in Politico after an unsuccessful attempt by Tea Party conservatives to overthrow House Speaker John Boehner, a rookie congressman from North Carolina slinked into the Speaker's office. Mark Meadows had not voted against Boehner on the House floor, but he had participated in the plotting and he'd been named as one of the conspirators. So frightened, he would be exiled into the hinterlands of the House. The freshmen sought an audience with the Speaker. So John Boehner recalls, he's on the couch, he's sitting across from me in my chair. Suddenly he slides off the couch, down onto his knees, puts his hands together in front of his chest. He says, Mr. Speaker, will you please forgive me? All right, this incident was witnessed by several people, including John Boehner's Chief of Staff, Mike Summers, described it as a strangest behavior I'd ever seen in Congress. So Speaker John Boehner took pity, he figured that Mark Meadows was just a nervous new member who wanted to be like and there was no harm done. So the two men carried on fine until Mark Meadows surprised his colleagues by voting against Boehner's reelection in 2015. And then he sends me the most gracious note you'll ever read saying, what an admiral job I've done as Speaker John Boehner recalled, I just figured he's schizophrenic. So that's one diagnosis for Mark Meadows.  So he's so consumed with his cloak and dagger, three-dimensional chess approach to Washington DC cannot be trusted. So very weird guy and his right-hand man was Cassidy Hutchinson, right? So Paul Ryan tended to have a straightforward communication style, but Mark Meadows was always up to something, always playing the angles, always dealing in smoke and mirrors. All right, Mark Meadows had a nose for opportunity and a bottomless appetite for fame. Always manipulating, always trying to trick people. Just a really weird guy. And so he resonated with this Cassidy Hutchinson. On social media. How, what was going on on some Q forum in the dark sanctums of the internet, tons of it. And it was all channeled towards this, remarkable. Trump also relied on populism and there is a populist energy. It exists on the left, to a degree, you can see it crop up, but it really exists on the right and this populism is deeply emotional. I don't know if I could really tell you a policy objective of populism. Much like I don't think I could really tell you what the Tea Party from 10 years ago actually wanted. Sometimes they would sound like Rothbardian libertarians and anarchists. Sometimes they would sound like Neocon Wormongers. Sometimes they would sound like Goldwaterites, et cetera. They, depending on the mood and time of day, they would have a new policy agenda and ideology. But it was just that emotional quality that defined them. And you knew it when you saw it. You knew it when you heard it. And Trump clearly relied upon that. There, what these people actually thought about politics or about the election was wacky and incoherent, contradictory. But the fact is they were deeply passionate and that emotional energy could go somewhere. So Trump channeled those big three components of conservatism, of the American right. He channeled it directly towards a coup. And this January 6th incident and everything that follows demonstrates to us how weak those components really are. You ultimately can't do what they were attempting to do by just coming up with some unique, texturalist. So what is the Washington Post background for just slathering on the innuendo into its news stories like it did in his profile of Cassidy Hutchinson? Well, they've done this before. So in 1992, the Washington Post wrote about Jennifer Fitzgerald, who is George H. W. Book's White House deputy chief of protocol. Who, as the Washington Post once lightly put it, served president-like George H. W. Bush in a variety of positions. All right? It was like a clear reference by, inserted by a Washington Post editor that George H. W. Bush had been carrying on an affair with this woman. And so that's essentially what the Washington Post is telling us, not explicitly coming out and saying it in this long profile of Cassidy Hutchinson. Beating of the Constitution. It just doesn't work like that. I mean, even if that had worked, it had gone along with it. I mean, the just total lack of legitimacy of Trump.   The nonstop harangues on the mass media, nonstop protests, people refusing to do their jobs, mass resignations. It's just, there's a difference between legality and legitimacy. And you have to be legitimate if for the legality to work. If you are totally legitimate, if what you're doing is totally legitimate, then you can come up with as many legal theories as you can because nowhere. The alt conservative media in many ways is much larger than the mainstream media. And it undoubtedly affects people's lives and touches them directly, changes their minds, kind of brainwashes them in a way.  You know, it's just, it's not something that can ultimately sustain a coup d'etat. The populist energy about getting out in the street and holding up signs and camping out and talking tough and, you know, marching with the proud boys, you know, there's some power there, of course there is, but it just, it's not even close to being enough to sustain a coup. If you're going to do a coup, you need the military involved. You might need other nations involved, maybe not in the United States. And you need to immediately establish legitimacy. And you just don't do that through populist hordes and live streamers and conspiracy theorists and weird legal shenanigans that no one would possibly take seriously. So in many ways, we saw the limits of conservatism. This showed us that. This showed us where exactly it can go when all of... There are serious issues for Tucker Carlson to be dissecting what are the implications of these January 6th hearings. And he is doing the most inane stuff at his show.  So, so much to talk about and Tucker is just wasting his time. Are pointed in the same direction and firing away. This is it. Excuse me. This is it. It's really embarrassing that it just obviously fails. So I think that this is the end for Trump. I will make that call. Wow. I know that I can be proven wrong. I know that, you know, who can this guy has come back from so much. He's been declared dead so many times. Who am I to say that he can't pull this out? I was just scrolling through YouTube. I know it's one of the CNN, there was the mainstream media was striking back and you had Wolf Blisser and Bob Woodward. And Woodward is declaring that this is the, this day, not just the January 6th committee, but this day, Cassidy Hutchinson, this was the obituary of Trump. Well, I actually agree. I think it has just simply gone too far and all of this stuff is too credible to survive. And as I've said before, I've said this in our chats, I think there will be an indictment. I think there will be. So there's kind of this question of, so if Trump is either gonna be in jail or in court and if he, or at the very least, he's gonna suffer such dramatic illegitimacy, what happens to MAGA? And I think there's a curious thing about MAGA, which is that on one level, it is a personality cult. I mean, you can find videos, you don't have to search too hard, in which people who attend these rallies will effectively say, well, if Trump likes it, I like it. And I mean, even in this election that has actually kind of fascinated me to a degree, the J.D. Vance election in Ohio, he had to go MAGA. There was no other way for him to move forward J.D. Vance as a candidate, other than just embracing Trump, embracing the whole cult, just saying, Trump is the greatest president in my lifetime, all sorts of nonsense. And just the people wearing Trump t-shirts, the people thinking that, you know, QAnon people think he's their savior. So is there any right-wing movement that Richard respects or approves of? Are there any right-wing leaders that he respects and approves of and praises? It seems like he thinks the whole right-wing is just not worthy of positive regard, except for him. Hey, I mean, I get it. You have all of these components of a personality cult. But at the end of the day, MAGA really is independent from Trump. As crazy as that sounds, sounds. MAGA pre-existed Trump. You can see this in the Tea Party and all sorts of things. And the whole board certificate controversy was Trump jumped on board and certainly inflated, but certainly jumped on board. He adopted something. He saw energy somewhere and jumped at it. But he didn't invent that energy. And there are many cases in which Trump will effectively counter-signal. The most natural, normal, and healthy thing in the world is to identify with your nation and be concerned with your nation's best interests. And so Donald Trump picked up the proverbial $100 bill on the sidewalk. And two of his major campaign points and two of his major governing agendas he has believed in for decades. And that's immigration enforcement and shifting away from free trade to a more nationalist trade policy. So MAGA is simply one expression of this normal concern for the well-being of your nation. Right? And nationalism generally is a dirty word today. So MAGA and Donald Trump is considered uncouth and not very sophisticated. But it's a primal, natural, normal emotion. And you can have all sorts of national identifications going on at the same time. You can believe in the religious significance of America. You can believe in the propositional significance of America that America stands for certain values, ideals. You can believe in civic nation-state America. It's normal to want your nation-state to thrive. And you can believe in an ethnic understanding of your nationalism. You can have all four at the same time if you want. And so one type of nationalism, you're a sivnat in the streets. You're an ethno-nat in the sheets. You may be a proposition nationalist in Century City. And you're a religious nationalist in the sheets in Harlem.   No, MAGA. And they will disobey him. I think the vaccine is the main one. Trump was, in late 2021, bragging about getting a booster shot, bragging about the vaccine, saying, our achievement, we did this. We created three vaccines. Now, in some ways, it's very ridiculous for him to say we created three vaccines. But yeah, he wanted his people to take credit. And I think genuinely wanted them to get vaccinated at that point, perhaps after all, he was dying of COVID himself. Maybe he had to change a part. And it just never really worked with them. They just listened to him. Maybe they got a little angry, and then they just moved on. You can see a little bit of that with Russia, where Trump has kind of changed his position. It doesn't seem to really affect. They exist without him. And as much of a personality call that it's been, it will continue to be a major force in politics with or without Trump. Now, whether they can win without Trump, that is win a national election without Trump, who knows? But he is not necessary for them to go on. You can also see this in the Roe v. Wade case. Now, Trump is bragging a bit about the judges, but Trump adopted the anti-abortion crusade and pandered to the religious right in the most cynical fashion possible.   The judges, folks, the judges. You could tell that his heart wasn't really in it. He has openly declared that he was pro-choice before 2015. But again, MAGA can move on and it can kind of mutate into other forms. And I think the form that it is mutating into, at this moment at least, is Christian nationalism. I can talk more about that. But it doesn't necessarily need Trump. And in some ways, Trump is a kind of friction for them or restraint. He holds them back. And they can kind of move on without him. They certainly are more radical without him on very important issues. You know, it's hard to go back now after all that we've experienced in the past five years, but if you go back to Trump of 2015, you see a certain kind of conservative, but not religious nationalism. And it's mostly a kind of economic nationalism. You can see this in the Ross Perot campaign of 1992 and subsequent ones, although they were not as successful. You can certainly see this in Pabukannon. He was a culture warrior. He was a Catholic, but he was perhaps most compelling when he was talking about economic policy and reindustrialization. What is our foreign policy going to be after the Cold War is over? All of that stuff. There was a certain kind of reasonable, in many ways, disinterest, mainstream nationalism that these three figures, Trump Perot, and began to tapped into. And you can see that in 2015 Trump, 2016 Trump, even into his presidency. And at the beginning of his presidency, he adopted, in many ways, the Paul Ryan agenda. He overturned Obamacare, it's a long-term goal. Tax cuts, all that kind of stuff. And by the end of the term, when the immigration aspect of his campaign had just failed, it did just kind of mutate into a queue cold. But there was something there. I think there is something, maybe not salvageable anymore because we're so late in the game, but something that's redeemable, incredible, and compelling. And I think that version of Trump, in many ways, restrains the excess and outlandish quality of the Magda movement. Okay, thanks, Richard. Let's get on to some, Pete, as I did. All the sales from the first three books to a specific cheer. The general belief in Ukraine, in Europe, in the United States, here, me, was that this was going to be a relatively quick war. Sure, the Ukrainians had proven that they actually have a national identity now and they didn't 10 years ago. And so there were debates about whether this war is over in a month or three months or six months, like I went for six. But there was not a lot of hope in a lot of sectors that the Ukrainians could really stand up in any meaningful way. And wow, wow, have they outperformed? And that has encouraged different countries to draw different lessons. So you may recall on the third day of the war back in February, that the Russians had a 40-mile-long convoy of military vehicles advancing south out of Belarus, which is their Patsy country, stooge, satellite, use it, whatever negative word you like, it's probably appropriate, towards Kiev. And 24 hours in, they stopped because they forgot to bring fuel tanks with them. And two days after that, a lot of the soldiers had to dismount and walk back to Belarus because they forgot food trucks as well. And in some circles, this made people really excited because it showed that the Russians didn't know how to fight a modern war. But for the Russians, this is an issue of existential conflict for them, of survival. They see that if they can't forward-position troops into a series of geopolitical gateways to their west, that the next time that someone attacks them, yes, they're not expecting that right now, but Russia's been invaded 50 odd times in history, they're pretty sure it's gonna happen again at some point. They fear if they can't position their troops now that they never will. The Russian ethnicity is dying out, just like a lot of others around the world, and they're geographically vulnerable. So they saw this as their last chance. And if they can't fight a real war by Western standards, that's a problem because the Russians see this as an issue of survival, which means they are willing to use nukes because they know if they don't, and they fail in the conventional war, then Russia ceases to exist in about 20 years. It's a reasonable fear, I think it's accurate. But other countries drew, so from the Western point of view, that means we have to provide the Ukrainians with other weapons systems they can use with a minimal of training without American forces being required there for the logistics. That way the war stays bottled up in Ukraine, and we don't get a direct West NATO confrontation that the Russians know that they would lose, that the West knows the Russians would lose, and that would induce them to consider nukes. We can't allow that to happen, keep the war in Ukraine. The Russians drew their own conclusions. Theirs was that they had been drinking their own kool-aid a little bit too much, and the Ukrainians were never going to welcome them in as liberators, and so the solution was to simply destroy them as a people. So the Russians have gone back to their pre-World War I playbook, and advancing slowly under mass dumb artillery, and specifically targeting not just anything that moves, but anything that doesn't move, any sort of civilian infrastructure, especially if it's agricultural in nature. And so we have now seen that around Kharkiv, we've seen that in Mariupol, and we've seen that on the outsides of Mikhailov, and of course throughout Luhansk and Donetsk provinces. The Russians are just physically obliterating everything they come across, because that turns the Ukrainian population into puts them into two groups, group one of refugees, you never have to worry about them again. And the second one you can treat as subhuman and either shoot them, sell them into slavery, kidnap the kids, send them off to Siberia to become Russian or whatever else that destroys the existence of either the Ukrainian identity or Ukrainians proper. At present, between the internally displaced people in Ukraine and the refugees, that's already 15 million people. That's a third of the pre-war population. Even if somehow Ukraine manages to win this war, this is still the end of Ukraine as a country within 30 years because they literally no longer have the people. It was. That's the key point. So for all those people going, yeah, yeah, Ukraine, we have to arm Ukraine. All right, by fighting Russia, Ukraine has entered itself as a country and as a nation state. Ironically, if they had simply accepted Russian domination, they may well have gone on to survive and do much better. So sometimes fighting is not the best option. I don't know enough about this issue. Just I think Zion is touching on something important. This is the end of Ukraine as a nation state. They don't come back from this level of destruction. And so I think there are life lessons that sometimes it is best to just surrender and not fight back, even though emotionally you just want to fight, fight, fight. Already bad, but now there's a demographic bomb that's been set off under him and it's already exploded. The damage has already been done. It can only get worse. To that end, Zion on geopolitics, that's my consulting firm, it is... Okay, so I think that's significant for all the rah-rah coverage of Ukraine. This is the end of Ukraine. Ukraine does not come back from this. So I know it certainly seems that the media wants to fight the last dead Ukrainian. It seems like Western politicians want to fight Russia to the last dead Ukrainian, but fighting Russia, I'm skeptical that it's being in Ukraine's best interests. Everyone, Peter Zayn here coming to you from Colorado. The big news today on June 27th is that the Beijing government has announced that the zero COVID policy in China is going to persist until at least, wait for it, 2027. Now, a couple of things going on here. Number one... All right, do you get that? China is going to pursue a zero COVID policy with massive lockdowns until at least 2027. You really don't want supply chains in China anymore. Are we ever going to have another version of the iPhone? You have to keep in mind that the Chinese domestically-generated vaccine really does not work. It barely worked against the original wild strain out of Wuhan, but then we have Alpha, and then we have Beta and Delta. Now we're in Omicron, BA2, and Omicron, BA4 and 5 are just around the corner, already in the United States, so there's more and it's changing faster. The bottom line is that the Chinese can't keep up from a scientific point of view, and the soonest that they might be able to get a Western-style mRNA vaccine is about 2026. At current rates of build-out, assuming everything goes perfect. And as we all know in immunology, the whole idea is that things don't go perfect. That's why we're in this problem. So we've got a population in China who does not have any sort of vaccination benefits to help them fight off the disease, and the disease is changing rapidly, so they couldn't keep up anyway. Second, the Chinese have been broadly successful until now at keeping the various COVID strains out of the country. So unlike most of the world, no one in China has naturally occurring resistance. And we can have a conversation in this country about whether or not vaccines are better than natural immunity and we will have it long and we will have it loud and we will do it in a destructive way because that's just how we debate things here. But in China, they've got neither. So lockdowns are their only option. So honestly, a five-year window is kind of a preliminary stake in the ground kind of makes sense. Now this has a lot of implications for a lot of people, but the one that is going to matter most to Americans at large will be in manufacturing because the United States over the course of the globalized era has bit by bit outsourced most of its low to medium manufacturing of the countries with China being the single largest beneficiary of that policy. Well, that pretty much ends now. Shanghai has already been in lockdown for two months and since Omicron is the most communicable virus we have ever dealt with as a species, it is regularly punching into the Chinese system and infecting areas and lockdowns are really the only thing that they can do and they only work temporarily. We had a scare last week that looked like Shanghai was about to go back into full lockdown already, less than a month after opening up and I have no doubt that we're gonna be facing this sort of problem over and over and over and over again. So manufacturing in China, the short version is it's screwed. The more complicated the supply chain, the more pieces you need and the more free transport you need to get it from place to place to place. Your average passenger car has 30,000 pieces, your average cell phone has more than that and these are complicated systems and if you break down one piece of it the whole thing falls apart. Well, the whole thing is now falling apart.  When I say this, I'm not talking COVID, I'm talking the propaganda, I'm talking the espionage, I'm talking the genocide for people who just were willing to ignore all of that.  Okay, let's see what Sean Hannity has to say, I can't believe I'm saying that. The nature of the sham January 6th committee now ongoing in the DC sewer and swamp but over the past 48 hours the charade has been exposed for all to see. Now, after yesterday's frankly, ludicrous testimony no one in their right mind should take this committee seriously. It has been apparent from day one this committee always had a predetermined outcome and every single person on the committee we all know voted to impeach Trump and hate style Trump and what we all witnessed was so blatantly dishonest so unethical that the members of the committee well, they should be ashamed of themselves although we all know they have no shame nor do their cheerleaders known as the media mob they're completely shameless. Now together they have lied to this country about Trump, Russia collusion. They have ignored Hillary Clinton's dirty Russian disinformation dossier, the Democratic Party, the media, they together ignored abuse and the FISA courts. They ignored Hunter Biden's laptop just weeks before the 2020 election that could have been relevant and could have had an impact on that election Russian disinformation, they made it up. It turned out all to be true. They ignored the real quid pro quo with Joe Biden holding out a billion taxpayer dollars unless they fired a prosecutor investigating his zero experience son making millions in Ukraine. They ignored Joe's lies about I never one time talked to Hunter about his foreign business dealings. Now we have a phone call from 2018 he was denying ever talking to him about it in all through 2020, the media mob they echo every lie of the Democratic Party they protect the Democrats at all costs at all times. Remember they told us yesterday this was an emergency hearing. We have shocking game changing new information brought forward by a White House staffer named Cassidy Hutchinson, but that wasn't true. This was not an emergency hearing at all. This was not breaking new information. In fact, the committee actually we discovered interviewed Ms. Hutchinson on tape on four separate occasions prior to the testimony. Now they have known about her claims for months but apparently they never got around corroborating any of them, which is pretty weird because Hutchinson's claims we now have discovered are hearsay claims. Like for example, her wild story about Trump physically assaulting two Secret Service agents while trying to commandeer the presidential limo the beast as they call it and drive it to the Capitol himself. Now tonight we're learning that the committee never even one time reached out and did their due diligence to the Secret Service to ever verify that far-fetched claim. And now the two agents involved are prepared according to every news report pretty much to testify under oath that the story told yesterday is not true and never happened. But none of that matters to committee member, Jamie Rasket, take a look. Have you corroborated from other witnesses that President Trump grabbed the steering wheel in that limousine and got into an altercation with his lead agent? Well, Cassidy Hutchinson is an entirely credible witness.  Everyone was able to judge her demeanor. She has no motivation or interest in lying in any way. And so what we have on the other hand is some anonymously sourced rumors of feelings of particular agents. Look, anybody who wants to testify can come forward and testify under oath about what happened. All we're interested in is the truth. In other words, no, they didn't corroborate the story at all, nor did they really seem to care. And by the way, Hutchinson does in fact have a motivation to smear Donald Trump because we can break news tonight according to two separate sources that I have now spoken to. This should have been disclosed yesterday. Hutchinson was desperate to work for then soon to be former President Trump. And we have confirmed that in fact she did work for Donald Trump after the election in his post-presidency Washington, D.C. office for several months to be exact from January 21st to April 9th, 2021. Now keep in mind that as well after January 6th, 2021, but now suddenly she is so deeply impacted by January 6th, she had to speak out. Okay, now about her story about Trump assaulting the Secret Service. It's not the only part of her testimony that is under scrutiny. There are also serious questions about a letter presented as evidence during yesterday's testimony. You may remember, take a look. Ms. Hutchinson, could you look at the exhibit that we're showing on the screen now? Have you seen this note before? That's a note that I wrote at the direction of the Chief of Staff on January 6th, likely around three o'clock. And it's written on the Chief of Staff note card, but that's your handwriting, Ms. Hutchinson? That's my handwriting. All right, we have a little problem. According to former Trump attorney, Eric Hirschman, she did not write that letter. He claims he did. He claims that's his handwriting, not her handwriting. Now, one of them is telling the truth and one of them is not. Now, if she's lying about the letter, we need to know. And by the way, we can easily ascertain the truth in this, but again, the committee doesn't care. They put out a statement that claimed, quote, the committee has done its diligence on this and found Ms. Hutchinson's account of this matter is credible. What diligence did you do exactly? Now, if this is such an important committee presenting such important evidence to the American people, I don't know whose handwriting it is. I'll be honest, the committee that never asked the Secret Service about her story, why not get, follow the science? We'll use the Democrats' favorite line. Follow the science, bring in handwriting experts and let them verify the handwriting on the letter. Is it his or is it hers? Keep in mind during a legitimate proceeding, while covering up exculpatory evidence, that would be considered deeply unethical and would usually end the case right then and there or if it's found out later, that would overturn a guilty verdict, for example. If this was a legitimate proceeding with all sides being heard, well, we'd hear from that handwriting expert. We'd also hear these critical facts. Take a look. Calling up the guard and then it became, the chain of command went to Nancy Pelosi and to the mayor of D.C. Muriel Bowser. Did you, as required by law, authorize that? 100% and attested to by many people and they turned it down. Nancy Pelosi turned it down. Mayor Bowser's written refusal. The communications between the leader of the Capitol Police and their chain of command to the DOD, refusing our request to allow national guardsmen and women to stage on January 4th and 5th before January 6th. Did you both ask for the national guard to be called up? Without a doubt, Sean, we've made that very clear, not just once, but on numerous occasions. We wanted to make sure that there was plenty of national guard on the ready in case there was some kind of violence. I had a meeting with President Trump on the 3rd of January concerning some international threats and at the very end, he asked if there were any requests for national guard support. What was the president's response to you with regard to the request made by Mayor Bowser? Fill it and do whatever was necessary to protect the demonstrators. So as you just heard, four of the five people we now have on tape present during that meeting in the Oval Office on January 4th, then President Trump authorized up to 20,000 national guard troops to be available, they would never called up by Pelosi or DC Mayor Bowser as the law requires because they get jurisdiction. President Trump did his part. Then the jurisdiction goes to them. They didn't do their part. If this was a legitimate committee and wanted to prevent this from ever happening again, they would demand the emails, the call logs, all text messages from Speaker Pelosi, Mayor Bowser, who sent a letter, by the way, preemptively declining national guard support. We'd also get phone records from the House Sergeant-at-Arms and texts and emails and the Sergeant-at-Arms in the Senate. I believe he passed away. God rest his soul. Chuck Schumer, by the way, we get all of his information. The Capitol Police Chief who requested the National Guard six separate times, but was turned down by the Capitol Security officials. Why hasn't he been called in before national TV? You know, we'd also like to hear from the Secret Service agents that were referenced yesterday during testimony. We'd like to hear from the handwriting experts whose handwriting was it? Hirschman's or hers? And other key witnesses. Of course, that's never gonna happen because this is not a legitimate committee. This is critical because it destroys the entire predetermined narrative that Donald Trump wanted violence, was happy about the violence, encouraged the violence, and the committee with all their selective, self-serving editing still refuses to show in the hearings what Donald Trump also said during that rally. This. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. That would be called more exculpatory evidence that the committee refuses to show you the American people and others. 20 calling up ahead of time, 20,000 troops. Sounds like he cared more than Bowser and Pelosi about safety at the Capitol. And they don't care about the truth either.  I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but I think Sean Hannity just made a lot of strong remarks. And I think Sean Hannity's analysis was far more profound and far more factual and far more analytical and far more rational than Richard Spencer's. So the chat says Richard Spencer wants Trump to fall, leaving a spot for him to sneak in by the sinister path. So Sean Hannity just made some great points there. The January 6th committee does not seem to be particularly concerned about whether or not what they put on for the public is factually true. They don't seem to have done due diligence. And I don't see that analysis being picked up by the mainstream media. I mean, why would you not want to investigate this woman's claims? You interviewed her on four separate occasions, right? You put her on in a special emergency hearing, but I think Sean Hannity was right. There was no emergency. So when I got the highlights of what Cassidy testified about yesterday, it just made me think more highly of Donald Trump, that he wanted to go join the protestors as he said he would do in his speech. That Donald Trump is volatile, that Donald Trump throws things. That's not an emergency. That's not breaking news. That's not shocking. Of course, he's a volatile guy. But that's a great point by Sean that the committee has not shown any interest apparently in investigating whether or not what Cassidy Hutchinson says is true. Also, if she was so shocked and appalled by what happened on January 6th, why did she continue to work for Donald Trump? So what led to her dramatic break with Donald Trump was at the end of an intimate relationship with Mark Meadows. That's the explanation that makes the most sense. Without an intimate relationship with Mark Meadows, her entire rise and career in the Trump White House and then dramatic turn against it doesn't make any sense. So the simplest explanation is sometimes the most accurate one. I can't believe I'm praising Sean Hannity. The Jewish people. The very essence of our people's holiness is the separation and the election of this people from all other people's and customer habit. Right, so this is a traditional Jewish perspective but it's really the perspective of almost all strongly identifying in groups, right? If you love your in group, then you are gonna look at the world through a lens in which you see how your in group is superior to all the out groups. So that it might be a monotheistic nation devoted to service of God. In other words, we're chosen as a monotheistic nation and we're special. Hence, Paul times says, holiness expresses itself almost exclusively with the exception of the eternally and generally valid moral laws and laws of separation. That is, kashara, separating old, all sorts of things that we divide ourselves from the non-Jews. How often is the Jew told? You must not do this or that in the same manner of other peoples.  And we still hear this today. We're told that the Jewish people have a special role, we can't do that. That's what the non-Jews do. He continues. If one searches after the reason for most of the ceremonial laws of the Bible, one will find that they were given only because of the existence of pagan peoples and had as their purpose separation from these peoples. Now, that's what- Right, so there are definitely peoples that you wanna stay separate from. I mean about 5% of the population are psychopaths, right? You wanna stay separate as far away from many people as you possibly can. Now, the Torah was composed at a time when surrounding people were pagan and were not monotheists, were sacrificing children according to some scholars and engaging in all sorts of reprehensible behavior. So when you're surrounded by reprehensible people, you really need separation. But by and large, Americans, Germans, French, English today are not reprehensible people. So maybe Jews and wider thinking philosophically all strongly identifying in groups don't have the desperate need for separation that you do when you're surrounded by bad people. But he assumes, and he has good authority. That's what the Rambam says. The Rambam, all these things, even things like shotness, it's all to keep us away from the practices of the pagans because they would do this, the pagan priests would do this. Rustin says, leftists in power don't care about facts, they operate as a cult. They operate like people on the right.  Almost everyone is going to choose power, status, sexual allure over damaging one's status and power and telling the truth. So it's not that leftists are just some completely different breed of humanity who are just really dastardly people. A leftist is just as likely to be a good neighbor as someone on the right. A leftist is just as likely to be honest in business as somebody on the right. A leftist is just as likely to be a pleasant person to work with as somebody on the right. So just like a secular person and an atheist is just as likely to be honest in business, to be a pleasant person to work with, to be a good neighbor as someone who's religious and ostensibly all about God. People are complicated. Sean, how did it even so good? I wanna play him a little more. I don't care about the truth either.  They yearn to be relevant and look at this committee. Look at this on this committee. Jeremy Raskin, he himself once contested the results of the 2016 election. He attempted to block Donald Trump's certification along with 10 other Democrats. Oh, wow, one might conclude he's an insurrectionist himself. In 2004, the chairman of the January 6th committee, that guy, Benny Thompson, attempted to do the same thing with President Bush. Wow, what about him? Now all of a sudden they care about accepting all elections results, no questions asked. I wonder how many people on the committee are supporting Stacey Abrams. And then there's the least honest person in the entire Washington swamp, which is saying something, that guy, the congenital liar, Adam Schiff, one of the biggest Russian collusion truthers in the entire world. He told everyone he possessed top secret evidence proving Donald Trump's collusion with Russia. Well, that never materialized except of him on tape with a Russian prankster saying they had compromising materials on Donald Trump and he was scheming to get them. And all of this, by the way, so-called evidence has been debunked, why?  And that brings us now to Congresswoman Liz Cheney. Oh, look at that. Right there pictured with a warm embrace with yesterday's star witness, here hugging a prior witness several days ago. Now, quick question. We're just supposed to sit back and accept all of the anti-Trump rhetoric by all the Trump impeachers, not one person that has a different point of view on this committee was supposed to just take everything as pure gospel truth. A committee, by the way, that who is apparently very close with the witnesses, a committee with members who never accepted the results of the 2016 election and other elections, a committee without any dissent, without any pro-Trump Republicans, a committee purposely leaving out critical testimony of Donald Trump's efforts to protect the Capitol with National Guard troops before crowds ever showed up in D.C., especially with smart in light of the 574 riots where, let's see, dozens of Americans died and thousands of cops were injured and billions of property damage. That seemed like a wise and prudent thing to do. Jim Jordan, Jim Banks will join us in a minute. They were not allowed on the committee. They were kicked off the committee. Why? Because the committee doesn't care about the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It doesn't care about ethics. It doesn't care about real justice. It doesn't care about making the Capitol more secure. Okay, so when does a congressional hearing move from regular grubby politics to becoming a transcendent moment that captures the emotions and the attention of the people? Iran-Contra didn't do this. I remember I was working landscaping during Iran-Contra hearings and listening to NPR and 90% of the news coverage for 90 minutes of all things considered in the evening show was all about Iran-Contra. Same for the morning shows, just 90% Iran-Contra didn't have that much significance. Now Watergate was different from pretty much all other partisan political hearings. So what was it that made Watergate so successful? What allowed Watergate to seize the national attention? And how can we pay attention to the January 6th hearings and check to see if they are taking on the qualities of what happened with the Watergate hearings? So there's a sociologist, Jeffrey Alexander, and he wrote a 2003 book, The Meanings of Social Life, A Cultural Sociology. So he describes that June 1972 illegal entry in burglary into the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel as a third-rate burglary, right? And Democrats said, oh, this is a major act of political espionage. It's a symbol of an amoral Republican president, but Americans were not persuaded, right? The initial incident received very little attention. It generated no real sense of outrage. Just as these January 6th hearings, I don't sense them generating outrage. So Richard Nixon, four months, five months after Watergate, he won an overwhelming re-election. Now two years later, Watergate became the most serious peacetime political crisis in American history. It became a riveting moral symbol, right? So it moved from being a matter of grubby mundane politics and it entered sacred time and space, right? And it was shown as a wrenching conflict between the pure and the impure. So how and why did this perception of Watergate change and what are the chances that a similar thing happens with these January 6th hearings? I would say right now that there's no chance, zero chance, zilch chance that these January 6th hearings will take on the riveting spectacle of the Watergate hearings. So political hearings generally occur at mundane levels of goals, power and interests. You have certain norms, you have certain laws, you have certain values. And when politics is operating routinely, right? You see the political participants, they're just focused on their goals and interests. And so this is the level of routine and profane politics. Now, non-routine politics begins when people switch out of the mundane and the strictly partisan. And you see the January 6th hearing trying to do this with all its praise of the good Republicans, right? They're trying to take the hearing out of the mundane and the partisan and elevate it to sacred commitments like democracy, right? So when you see the attention of the committee shift from mere partisan political goals to sacred concerns, right? That is the committee trying to leave the mundane world of grubby partisan politics to enter the realm of the sacred. So how do events enter the realm of the sacred, right? You need symbols, you need to mobilize the elites and the public, you need a different level of rhetoric, you need a social consensus, right? That there's something that's happened that is a polluting, right? That is so deviant that it makes our country smell, right? Can you arouse society to this level of indignation? And can you get a consensus among important elites and important groups in society that our society is threatened by the polluter? So Watergate started off as a grubby, third-rate burglary and then it became a sign of deep, deep pollution.  So many people want to make Donald Trump and the MAGA crowd a symbol of ultimate evil. I don't see any success yet. They're only convincing their own. So in 1960s struggles, the left continually invoked universalism and rationality. They wanted to tie this to social movements for equality. The right tends to prefer to evoke particularism, tradition and the defense of authority and the state. So when you have a significant shift, you get centrist forces aligning with either the left or the right. So right now you do have the center, generally speaking, aligning with the January 6 hearings. So you see this movement in the center to try to develop a common feeling of moral outrage, right? We're trying to move beyond partisan politics to move into the realm of moral outrage. And then you'll see leading participants try to create a less politicized atmosphere. So you see this in the January 6 hearing. They're trying to say, this isn't political. There are these good Republicans. We praise these eminent conservatives, right? There are many good conservatives. This isn't partisan. This isn't political. Now, when this gets serious is when the courts, the Justice Department, the various government bureaucracies and special congressional committees start issuing regulations and arrests so that our government, all the different facets of our government starts aligning with this effort to try to tackle evil, right? So you get more and more social control so that the only socially acceptable perspective is that Donald Trump is evil. And so what you're seeing right now with the January 6 committee, they're trying to force more and more facts to surface.  And when significant members of the public and of the elites take on this belief, then you are getting closer and closer to a sacred event. So if you start to get centrist saying, how much did President Trump know and when did he know it, right? When you start to see more and more anxiety by the center and more and more sentiments that they feel this growing sense of moral violation. And when there is increasing consensus by the elites, by the center, by various publics, right? When you get increasing coercive social control and you get this widespread realignment so that there are good and bad sides to what happened on January 6, then you have moved beyond partisan, grubby politics and you have entered the realm of the sacred. So if the January 6 hearings become a world unto themselves, a world that is unique, a world without history, a world without partisan political players, right? If January 6 hearings become widely presented as just a pursuit of truth and goodness and decency and there's no attention paid to political interests, partisan interests. If you get the editing, the repetition, the juxtaposition, the simplification, right? And all these other storytelling techniques to present these January 6 hearings as mythical, right? As telling an essential story about our country. If you get hushed voices of the announcers, if you get more pomp and ceremony of this event, then we have the recipe for constructing within the medium of television and the internet a sacred time and a sacred space. And then people who view the hearings, they get to participate symbolically and emotionally in what's going on with the hearings and viewing then becomes morally obligatory for wider and wider segments of the population. So old routines get broken, new routines are formed and people get to watch a simplified drama where there are heroes and there are villains. So that's what the January 6 hearing is trying to achieve. They're trying to break out into sacred space and to invoke our narrative myths about our essential values and how Donald Trump is at war with what it really means to be Americans. So you'll see people supporting the January 6 committee or people on the January 6 committee, they'll try to emphasize the absolute purity of their motives. They will make refrains like this is a nation of laws not of men that they are acting out of their concern for the obligations of their political office and that they have obligations to a higher transcendent authority rather than the melee partisan. So the laws of man must give way to the laws of God. And so you had that invocation of the book of Daniel from that favorable witness. And so you'll have sentiments such as the one that Sam Irvin used at Watergate, you know, what is more important, not violating laws or not violating ethics. And then you'll see the participants in the January 6 hearings try to create some kind of concrete universal morality that all right-thinking people aspire to, right? Republicans do not cover up. Republicans do not go ahead and threaten. Republicans don't view their fellow Americans as enemies to be harassed but as human beings to be loved and to be won, right? So if you see centrist Republicans or January 6 hearing Republicans making these kind of sentiments, they're trying to transcend this grubby partisan affair and turn it into the realm of the sacred. So right now these hearings are still part of everyday life, right? They haven't become fully ritualized. They're not a liminal event meaning separated from other events. We don't yet have a period of intense generalizations with claims to universal truths. We don't yet have the January 6 hearings as a sacred time. The hearing chambers have not yet become a sacred place. The committee is not yet effectively evoking luminescent values rather than just describing empirical facts. So we don't yet have the January 6 committee moving into sacred space. But the Torah itself doesn't say this and the Gomorrah doesn't say this. This is the Rambam's approach. There's no reason to be bound to that that already are some sort of all harsh and others. How far back must one go to find a congressional hearing that was more than political theater and partisan opportunism? I think the 9-11 commission, though flawed was probably the closest that we've had to a transcendent mythical committee that many people would think was essentially doing God's work. Criticized the Rambam for the way they look at the commandments. In fact, Hirsch thinks that this gives strength to the reformers because if these are reasons for the commandments, this is what you're going to let to just like whole time. He says, we must admit therefore that these laws would either not have been given at all or would have been given differently had the Jewish people. Rustin Schackelford says, just because a leftist smiles to my face doesn't make me forget that they are turning my neighborhood into a scene from Hotel Rwanda. Well, much of the American right has not opposed, effectively opposed the left turning your neighborhood into a scene from Hotel Rwanda. So it's not just a left-right issue, right? Until Donald Trump, there was not an effective right-wing movement of which I'm aware to significantly limit immigration. People have been the only people in the world and that other people are human beings not just at all. So he says, since all these ritual laws are there to keep us away from the non-Jews and their immoralities, had the Jewish people been the only people in the world or had they been the only people, then these wouldn't have been commanded. There wouldn't have been these commandments, the reasons of which are to keep us away from the non-Jews because there aren't non-Jews in the world. So needless to say, January, the Watergate hearings were not sacred, right? What happened with Watergate and Richard Nixon was not unusual. It was grubby, nasty partisan politics as it being practiced by his predecessors. Nixon lost not because he was a transcendent force for evil, but because every major power center in America turned against him, right? You can't effectively govern if you've got every elite against you. So in a parliamentary democracy, you can have a vote of confidence in a government and if an insufficient people vote their confident in the government, the government falls in their elections. So with impeachment hearings, you get the equivalent of the parliamentary vote of confidence and it's a way that presidents can be undone and overturned. It's a way of making our presidential system a little bit more like parliamentary systems. It's also a way, let's be honest, where the will of the people can be subverted, right? Richard Nixon was overwhelmingly elected and so impeachment and concerted attempts like the January 6th hearings where you have this generalized alignment on presentation of these hearings where the media is speaking with one voice, where all good people are expected to venerate what's going on with these January 6th hearings. Again, you're having a movement against essentially the will of the people. You're having elites trying to take away people's choices. It's a form of democracy 3.0, as Stephen Turner would phrase it. That's it for now.


In this video, we are going to show you about the participatory method of conducting a stakeholders' workshop. The workshop topic will be on developing strategies to make the rice sector in one's country more sustainable. We are going to use a technique that uses an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, or SWOT, combined with what we call a strategic orientation round, or SOR. These are the steps. First, to achieve a common understanding of the concept of sustainability, a presentation is given about the discussed particular topic, in this case, sustainable food value chain development. The framework presented covers the triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. The goals of the workshop and the technique to be used are presented. Next, participants are divided into smaller groups of five to six persons each to discuss and list down the strengths and weaknesses of the rice sector as it pertains to its sustainability. By strength, we pertain to characteristics of the rice sector that give it an advantage over other competitors. On the contrary, by weakness, we pertain to characteristics that place the rice sector at a disadvantage relative to other competitors. Strengths and weaknesses are internal to the rice sector and can be controlled. Each group then chooses a representative to briefly present the list of strengths and weaknesses that they came up with. Next, each group will discuss and list down opportunities and threats that the rice sector faces. Opportunities are elements that the rice sector could use to its advantage. Threats are elements that could cause trouble for the rice sector. Opportunities and threats are factors external to the rice sector and are thus beyond one's control. After the discussions are concluded, the lists are gathered from the groups and filtered for repeating or overlapping answers. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that are misclassified are placed in the appropriate sections by the researchers. A long list of all the SWAT items identified by the participants is then completed. From the full list, each group chooses five of what they decide are the most important strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. SWAT items that appear consistently across the group's lists are automatically included in the final list. SWAT items that are different from the rest are discussed by group representatives. All the participants then decide whether to include these items in the final SWAT list. After the general discussion, participants fill in the SOR matrix individually. In the matrix, participants score each strength and weakness depending on how important or influential each is over each opportunity and threat. Scoring is on a scale of 0 to 3, with 0 being the least important and 3 as the most important. Only a maximum of 12 points can be attributed to each column. First, each participant rates each strength according to how important it is in helping the RISE sector benefit from each opportunity. Next, each participant rates each weakness according to how important it is in preventing the RISE sector from benefiting from each opportunity. Next, each participant rates each strength according to how important it is in helping the RISE sector cope with each threat. Finally, each participant rates each weakness according to how important it is in preventing the RISE sector from coping with each threat. The scores in the SOR matrix can be analyzed by quadrant, by column or by cell. Total scores per quadrant reveal the most relevant strategic choice for improving sustainability. This level provides an overview of what the best main strategy would be for the RISE sector to become more sustainable. For example, in Vietnam, government support and good politics were found to provide a strong basis for taking advantage of an expanding export market. Vietnamese farmers are also quite experienced, which allows them to seize the opportunity presented by new and advanced technologies. Next, the total score per strength, weakness, opportunity or threat can be analyzed per column. It is possible to rank these according to importance. The total scores indicate the relevance of each cell compared with the other cells in the SWAT matrix. There are several ways to interpret collected data. Results obtained through a participatory workshop can help scientists develop overall, more inclusive and comprehensive strategies for the sustainable development of a country's RISE value chain.


Another really important thing is that when it comes to preparing for oskies you absolutely have to have to have to have to this is like non-negotiable practice with other people sitting in your room and reviewing your favorite oski resource book or pdf or whatever it is that you have and saying things out loud to yourself is just not the same at all as having a conversation with another person or practicing the steps and skills on another person and since your exam is going to be on either a simulated patient or a real patient it's really important to sort of get into the habit of having someone else there during your practice.