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available, taxes and fees extra full terms. @mint mobile.com Gas prices today have hit a nearly four year high. If you go and get gas today, you would pay a higher price than you paid at any time in 2026-2025-2024-2023. You would have to go all the way back to July of 2022 almost four years ago to find higher average gas prices than today. I have the chart on the screen as you can see up to 450 a gallon today. And you've got to go back really far. This is a four year chart we're looking at to see a spike. Even that spike was sort of a global phenomenon. It wasn't because one president decided to go to war with one country that controls 20% of the global oil trade. It was because we were finally coming out of the pandemic at the same time that the summer driving season was starting. And, and even then you have to go back to that to get to a higher price. There's even more bad news. For example, if you look specifically at Michigan, you find that the average diesel price in Michigan has never been higher.599 a gallon that was yesterday. Reporting today is that diesel in Michigan is even higher now and has surpassed $6 per gallon. Now I don't do the thing on this show where I don't give you context or leave out critical details when we talk about gas prices over a period of years. If we're going to be honest with each other, which I hope you're being honest with me, I'm going to be honest with you. We do have to talk about inflation and what I mean by that is we have to consider we're comparing nominal gas prices. In fact, over the weekend I had a funny conversation with some of my, my friends. We were reminiscing about the, this very short period after we got our driver's licenses when we were mostly like 16 and a half. There was a few day period where I remember a particular gas station where I was growing up where gas was under a dollar a gallon. It said 9, 9 9, 99.9 cents per gallon. And when we brought this up we said, you know, I wonder if we adjust for inflation, like how much would that be today? And it would be close to $2 a gallon. So we're like, okay, so, so when we think back, gas is now 4,5450 a gallon. We had the 99 cent gas. In today's dollars or inflation adjusted, it would be like two dollar gas. It's still a lot cheaper, but it's not as cartoonishly cheap. Same thing for 45 today. For a gallon of gas is not the same as 445 in 2022 because of inflation. It would be like about $5 today. Still, we have to remember who we're dealing with here because when Trump lied about gas being A$87 when he left office, not only was he lying, he was not contextualizing even what we're talking about by doing inflation adjustment. When Trump promised we're going to get gas under $3, he wasn't considering the effect of inflation. When Trump pounded Joe Biden relentlessly during Biden's presidency, comparing gas prices to when Trump was president, he didn't mention, by the way, we have to consider the effect of inflation on these nominal prices. But if we put aside the arithmetic for a moment, what I want to tell you is what this means politically. People do not seem to be motivated to vote one way or the other by gun safety regulations. It just, everything we know suggests gun safety regulations are not a strong voting issue. People don't seem to be motivated to vote or not vote or for vote for one person versus another based on trans sports and their position on transports just doesn't seem to be a voting issue for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Fine. Gas prices do seem to move the needle for voting. And gas prices are sky high right now. Sky high. And voters can easily compare and contrast. I go to a gas pump and I'm paying more than I've paid for almost four years. But I remember that Trump promised really cheap gas. We're not getting it. That's a promise that wasn't kept. The same voters who were told I alone can fix it by Donald Trump are now paying more than they did under the guy Trump blamed, Joe Biden. So look at how quickly the excuses are rolling in. We've already seen over the weekend, I didn't pull these clips. I could have, but I didn't. People in the Trump administration going on TV and saying, well, listen, we are still dealing with the chaos that Joe Biden left us and it's the Fed and it's Jerome Powell's fault and global markets and all this different stuff. Everything other than any accountability. Now, I want to remind you, I have a pristine record. Pristine of over a decade of being very upfront with you about gas prices. For the most part, gas prices don't depend on what the President of the United States does. Gas prices depend on global conditions. They depend on supply. They depend on black swan events like Covid and others. For the most part, there is very little American presidents can do to affect gas prices. But the biggest thing American presidents can do to affect gas prices is to choose to get into a military conflict with a country that either controls supply or transit of oil. And that is exactly what Donald Trump did. So it's not. David, you know, you spent all these years saying Biden couldn't be. No, no, no, no, no. I was very upfront under Bush, under Obama, under Trump won under. But the president does very little. They can do a gas tax holiday. They can release a little oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has a temporary impact of about 15 cents per gallon. Or the big thing presidents really can do is exactly what Trump did with Iran. So now we are going to see what effect this is going to have in November. We had video of Scott Bessant earlier asked, are gas prices or oil prices going to be lower in November? And he said a whole bunch of stuff that was not yes and it wasn't no. The simplest test of political claims is you said prices would go down and they went up. That is really easy for people to understand, even people loosely connected to the political space. And we're going to find out very soon. We're now just what, six months, not even six months almost to the day from finding out, are voters going to fall for this crap or are they going to say, here's what I was promised, here's what's happening. I'm not voting for you clowns. We will see. We have an incredible situation with Ben Shapiro. 85% of Ben Shapiro's YouTube audience has disappeared very quickly and they are not coming back. As the right wing media network, the Daily Wire is in free fall with massive layoffs. This is a disaster for right wing media. It is terrible for Ben Shapiro, it is terrible for the people who work at the Daily Wire. Now I'm going to go over the numbers with you and tell you why this really matters for upcoming elections. The numbers are as follows. Since the middle of 2023, Ben Shapiro's average daily viewership is down every 85%. Isn't it possible that everybody's viewership is down? Because that was a very interesting period. No, that's not. We. In fact, we keep growing. A lot of left Wing media keep growing, and some right wing shows are growing very quickly as well. But not Ben Shapiro and not the Daily Wire. In fact, the Average day on YouTube for Ben Shapiro right now is about 800,000 YouTube views. While we are averaging closer to 2.5 million YouTube views per day, our channel is now typically more than doubling Ben Shapiro's YouTube channel and sometimes close to tripling it on many days. Shapiro used to get 170 million views per month. That's down to 28 million million views. Last month we had 75 million. Think about that. Now, there was a report that came out that the Daily Wire fired half of its staff. That is disputed by a Daily Wire spokesperson. Daily Wire spokesperson said, we have done some restructuring. There were some layoffs. The cuts were largely concentrated in Nashville. But it's not nearly 50%. And this is all going to be very useful and helpful for us. Okay, well, the, the other aspect to this is that Shapiro's YouTube channel is also losing subscribers. That's never a good sign. Now where this becomes an issue is that the Daily wire had roughly one to 200 employees or more. There are conflicting reports about their peak number of employees. That is a lot of employees. Now they've got a ton of shows, that's true, but that level of employment is simply not sustainable with your flagship show getting 800,000 YouTube views a day. I mean, we have five full time people on this show, myself included, and we are doubling and sometimes tripling the views of the Ben Shapiro YouTube channel. Now let's step back for a second because this really isn't about Ben Shapiro's views dropping. This is about something I spoke with Tim Miller about on Substack last week. Or was it the week? Last week? Yeah. Who controls the conversation on the right and who sets the agenda? For a long time, it was really clear Rush Limbaugh would set the agenda and the tone for conservative media. Then Fox News sort of took over that role. What they focused on became what Republican voters cared about. Now, more recently, outlets like the Daily Wire, built around people like Ben Shapiro, have tried to do the exact same thing in the digital space. And the goal was, let's do more than just have an audience. Let's, let's really set the agenda. Let's be the people who direct the conversation. For the American right wing, when Ben Shapiro's audience is collapsing like this, you can't set the agenda because you've got almost no audience. And when that agenda setting power breaks, you lose viewers, but you also lose a central voice. That is there to direct the right and tell them, here's what matters, here's what you need to be talking about posting about on social media. And this gets back to the point I discussed with Tim Miller, which is that when you don't have a dominant agenda setter, everything kind of fragments. And you get a lot of smaller creators. Sometimes with viral clips, you get these algorithmically driven spikes. One person is up, another person is up, all with different messages. And that causes two important problems. Number one is incoherence of the message. Because when it's like today, this creator went viral and here's their message today, that creator went viral, they have a completely different message about what the right, which should care about that creates a total lack of coordination and it weakens the right. I'm glad about that. I'm telling you that this is great for the left in terms of the opportunity that it presents. The other thing that happens is that it will sometimes cause escalation when no one is consistently the agenda setter for the right or the left. But right now, this is what's happening on the right. You get the sort of knock of opportunity where creators will say, wow, no one is really agenda setting. If I become really extreme and outrageous, maybe I can start to get the attention of that agenda setting power which just radicalizes the right. And in the past, when Fox News or Rush Limbaugh would push something, it would move through the entire ecosystem. It would be Rush. Now Fox News is talking about it. Republican senators are talking about it. Republican congresspeople are talking about it. Everybody online is talking about it. That's broken now. And it is not just, oh, Ben Shapiro is down. It's that the right used to have this very sort of organized system where here's where the messaging comes from. We amplify it. Oh, now it's the War on Christmas. They don't want religious freedom. They don't like people saying Merry Christmas. Stupid concept, but it would trickle all the way through. And by the nighttime, it's on Bill O'Reilly when he was on Fox News. It's on Sean Hannity, it's on Greta Van Susteran, who used to have a show on Fox. That world is gone. And when you lose that coordination, you are weaker. And it is an opportunity, not a guarantee for the left, but it is an opportunity for the left to be able to take back some of that agenda setting power and to prevent some of these really silly narratives from ever becoming as dominant as they become. Now on the bonus show today, we will talk about a governor busted helping the rival party win for a very petty reason. I think you're going to like this story. We will talk about California starting to give tickets to driverless cars that violate traffic laws. And Trump's disapproval hits a record high. We'll tell you why and what it means. We have a bonus show. And you know what, Alex Jones may be gone from the broadcast, but he still hates the bonus show.