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aarp.org weearnedit paid for by AARP. Is the Iran deal blowing up before it even begins? There are some deeply inauspicious signs out of Switzerland. We unpack it all on today's show. I'm Josh Hammer, and this is the JOSH HAMMER show. So last we checked in on our rapidly evolving and in some ways disintegrating tale that was on Friday, we said that one thing that we were looking out for was to look as to whether or not the Iran MoU, this memorandum of understanding between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran, whether this thing would actually even last the weekend. Because last week there was a lot of pomp and circumstance as to this deal being signed. All these indications were for a Swiss mountaintop resort summit signing on Friday. That Friday meeting was at the last minute canceled due to Hezbollah killing four Israeli soldiers and then Iran saying that they were not going to join because of Lebanon and then Vice President Vance not flying over there. Long story short, the summit has now kicked off. You've probably seen a lot of footage of it over the past 36 to 48 hours or so. But even this weekend, this thing was looking like it was on deeply, deeply, deeply thin ice. President Donald Trump saying at one point after another Hezbollah terrorist attack killed another Israeli soldier. And Hezbollah basically showing no signs of feeling compelled or bound by this deal, despite the fact that there is clear language in this MOU that says that Lebanon has to not be a conflict for this thing to go forward. Despite that Hezbollah doing what terrorist organizations do is they kill a lot of innocent people. Donald Trump then saying that if this continues, that if Hezbollah keeps on engaging in hostilities and if Iran does not call in their proxy, then he says that you're not going to have a country anymore. And he's not talking to Lebanon, he's talking to Iran. And then Iran threatened to walk away from the table. And there was a lot of footage over the weekend that showed Vice President Vance getting a quite literal, a quite physical cold shoulder from some of our Iranian mediators, even from some of the Qataris as well, because, of course, Qatar in Pakistan as you likely know, are two of the not so neutral mediators trying to make nice here between the United States and one of its decades long enemies, Iran. So this thing is not off to a particularly good start. Vice President Vance Woitzworth does say that there is a, quote, good foundation. There's a good foundation. He said, quote, we set the foundation, we haven't built the house, but we've laid a successful foundation to get a good place for the American people. Which is a fancy way of saying that we have a plan to potentially arrive at a plan to potentially arrive at a plan. And in short, that's not necessarily much of a plan, is it? Now look, diplomacy obviously is always preferable than war. Here, there and everywhere. Diplomacy is always preferable. The fundamental problem remains that you are trying to engage in diplomacy with people who not only don't share your values, not only don't share your policy objectives, but fundamentally are operating on an entirely different wavelength. Because here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we believe in things like rational incentive structure and carrots and sticks and trying to weigh cost and benefits and do all the various things that rational good faith actors who live, breathe and act within the broader confines of Western civilization, how they approach what they do on a day to day basis in domestic policy, foreign policy and so on. The biggest problem remains, and has always been this way for 47 years and running, that you are dealing with radical Islamist actors who fundamentally are not operating like that. They don't believe in good faith incentives. They don't believe in sticks and carrots. They're not responding the same way that a rational intermediary or a mediating party would. They're responding according to their theological and eschatological precepts, their presuppositions. In short, they want jihad, they want apocalypse. This is not an exaggeration. This is who they are. And I don't see a path forward. I hate to say it, I'm not opposed to continuing this song and dance for a little while longer. We've already bit the bullet. We've already agreed to this MOU that we've been criticizing here on the show for the past week. We've already done that. So at that point, the ship has sailed. Now the ball will be put back into President Trump's court to make a grown up decision as to whether or not this deal is so bad that we have to just cut tail and get out of dodge, which in this case means get out of this fancy high flute and five star Swiss mountaintop resort and ultimately to re engage in hostilities that day might come sooner rather than later. In fact, another thing that happened this weekend was there was a lot of back and forth just on Saturday as to whether or not the Strait of Hormuz actually was shut down. It looked for a period of time like Iran had yet again shut down the strait. And now they're saying it's kind of open, but it's really not fully open. That that is the barest of bare minimums. If the Strait of Hormuz is not open, then there is not a foundation to have a foundation to have anything that, that, that is the absolute sine qua non, lowest common denominator. Before you get to a discussion of Iran funding its terror proxies, before you get to a conversation about Iran's drones before their ballistic missile programs, before you get to the crucial question, the all important question of their nuclear program, before any of that, you need an open strait. Donald Trump understands that. Why? Because he, unlike the Iranians, does respond to rational incentives, usually for the better. Although in this deal I think that he is being fed quite bad advice. But those rational incentives, at least for now, have been militating in favor, as our guest on Friday, Rich Goldberg explains, of cutting a deal for the sake of getting the strait open and the oil flowing. President Trump has heard from a lot of executives of major oil companies, companies like Chevron, ExxonMobil and elsewhere, that we really are on the precipice of a generational historic energy crisis. And however flawed this deal looks at this time and again, we have spared no words in criticizing it. At a bare minimum, we can say those are the rational incentives to which President Trump, Vice President Vance and the whole team has been trying to respond. But if the strait is not open, then none of this is worth it. This whole dog and pony show is not even worth the price of admission because getting that oil flowing, this crucial 21 mile wide strait through which one fifth of the world's petroleum flows, getting that flowing has to be, has to be the bare, bare minimum before any of the other conversations take place. So as I speak, we do not know whether this MOU song and dance is going to last another day. Genuinely, it is an open question. I presume it's going to last at least another day or two, or perhaps three. Again, the Qataris and the Pakistanis are calling a lot of the shots over there. I do not understand exactly why this is. Pakistan is very, very far from a neutral country. They were caught red handed at the Height of Epic Fury. At the height of the 39 day war between Israel, the United States and Iran, they were caught red handed harboring a lot of Iranian military aircraft and other materiel at their military bases. So Pakistan, not exactly a neutral party. Pakistan is basically just a, a province of the Chinese Communist Party at this point. They are very much part of the Chinese communist sphere of influence, a sphere that is in direct contrast in irreconcilable loggerheads frankly, with the American sphere of influence in this 21st century. Great power competition, struggle. Qatar. Well, maybe Qatar is cleaning up his act. That would be news to a lot of us. Maybe, maybe, maybe they're doing it after all. During Epic Fury, Qatar took a lot of incoming, they took a lot of missiles, a lot of drones from Iran. Prior to that, Qatar, of all of the Sunni Arab states was by far the coziest, the most friendly with Iran. Maybe they're changing their tune. However, I have my suspicions and my doubts. Qatar, for far, far, far too long, has mastered the act of playing gullible Western powers like a fiddle and simultaneously speaking out of one side their mouth and funding a lot of nice things. If you've been watching the World cup, you've probably seen Qatar Airways plastered all around the sidelines of the soccer stadiums. They fund a lot of nice lavish stuff, while on the other hand they fund a lot of terrorism. So it seems to me that what the administration is really, really, really truly hoping for is some sort of intellectually defensible mechanism by which we can basically just take a pause, take a deep breath and at least kick this thing back past the November midterms, get the oil flowing, get those oil prices down, and when Iran inevitably violates a deal, which they will, and you have to be so naive as to be indescribable to believe that they will not, at that point, perhaps the military hostilities will recommence. The better solution all along would have been to not call the ceasefire in premature fashion on April 8th. We live in this bizarro world where the actual military operation epic fury lasted 39 days. And then we had this 70 plus day period of seemingly being quite desperate for a deal, any deal, at all costs. Which is why we are here right now. When it comes to the current mou, notably really no one else besides the Vice President is involved at a very high level when it comes to this mou. You've seen the Vice President this weekend in Switzerland flanked at aside by Steve Wyckoff and Jared Kushner. They're the two top foreign negotiators when it comes to a lot of the foreign conflicts around the world since the second Trump administration came into power about a year and a half ago. But there's really no one else at a high level who is involved in selling this deal. Marco Rubio is mia, Pete Hegseth is mia. They're the two guys who were most visible during the operation itself. The reason for that is fairly straightforward. We know based on leaks and reporting by Axios and other outlets that they oppose this, that they oppose the mou. And Donald Trump, in a not so subtle statement, said in response to a question from Fox News Peter Doocy last week on the sidelines of the G7 in France. He said that if this deal goes down, then he will go ahead and start blaming JD Vance. So JD for better or for worse, is 1000% the spokesperson for this deal. He is shoring up his would be peacemaker bona fides. And I'm not trying to downplay that everyone wants peace, for goodness sake. The only question is how you get to that. And to take us back to one of our longer standing themes here on the show, I continue to think that this gets back to a confusion between means and ends. Saul Alinsky was the Marxist Chicago community organizer who was infamously a mentor to our 44th president, Barack Obama. Saul Linsky, in his Rules for Radicals all those decades ago, famously said that the ends will always justify the means. This notion of how to calibrate means and ends is one of the longest standing, oldest questions in all of politics. What we say on the show all the time is that you define your ends in domestic affairs, foreign affairs, or anything else. And then you work backwards to try to calibrate the the appropriate means in order to achieve those ends, whether it's economic pressure, sanction, deal, military engagement, or some combination thereof or something else entirely. What I continue to fear is that this administration, for some understandable reasons, to be clear, when it comes to approval ratings, oil prices above all, for some understandable reasons, is nonetheless at a fundamental level, confusing means and ends. That's a difficult thing to walk back from, especially when the other party is is operating, as we said, on a fundamentally different wavelength when it comes to valuing apocalypse and radical Shiite supremacist jihad over rational incentives. Folks, we're going to a quick commercial break. We'll be right back with much more after this.
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Who helps America go farther, fly higher, dream even bigger? People do. Since 1879, our people have been more than a source of energy. They've been a source of progress. Today, that same progress is helping deliver record US Energy production, fueling the workers, the makers, the boundary pushers and risk takers who spark the breakthroughs that move America forward. Learn more about what our people do@chevron.com USA250.
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Welcome back. So the polling on the Iran situation is a little bit all over the map. So by a pretty wide margin, Americans say that they want the war in Iran to to come to an end, which undoubtedly that is some of the polling that the administration has been looking at as they have gotten to this MOU and as they are in Switzerland currently negotiating with the world's number one state sponsor of radical Islamic Jihad just this week. So CBS News, for instance, had a recent poll that was conducted alongside YouGov. And the poll is a straight up binary question, what should the US do when it comes to Iran? By a 78 to 22 margin, Americans currently tell CBS News they want to end the conflict. Now only 22% say continue the conflict until Iran gives up more. Part of the problems was that with one exception, there was one evening in March or April where Donald Trump did sit down in fairly solemn fashion, looked the American people in the eye into the camera, read the teleprompter, and explained what this war was intended to do. But that evening aside, there has been fairly little in the way of compelling directly on point messaging and explanations as to what exactly we are seeking to accomplish in Iran. Our perspective has not changed. From our vantage point, there were four goals of Epic Fury. The first goal was to actually open the Strait of Hormuz. A lot of Trump skeptics say, oh, the strait was open and the United States just blew it up and then they closed it because of their military action. That's not quite accurate. The status quo ante. What happened prior to the February 28 assassination of the Ayatollah Khamenei and the commencement of Epic Fury? The status coente prior to that was that Iran did still have they didn't always exercise, but they still had primacy and control to an extent over the strait. They were able to engage in acts of sabotage and piracy and tolling in fees as they saw fit. So that was goal number one was to actually genuinely open this strait to take us back to what we were saying earlier. Unless and until that actually happens, there's really nothing else to discuss here, period. Goal number two was the full end of Iran's funding of its terrorist proxies throughout the region. That has not happened. On the contrary The Hezbollah theater is still heating up even more. There are no signs, literally none, zilch, zero, that Hezbollah is even remotely interested in stopping trying to kill Israelis. If Iran wanted to end that, if Iran was serious about mou, they could stop that in a single phone call. Why? It's very simple. Because Hezbollah, even though it is physically based in Beirut, Lebanon, is directly accountable to Iran. Their loyalty is not to Lebanon, which considers Hezbollah a cancer. Their loyalty is to the radical Islamist regime in Tehran. The fact that Hezbollah is still doing what Hezbollah has always done shows that Iran is not remotely serious about trying to get a deal. Alongside their shutting of the strait on Saturday, they're kind of sort of maybe reopening of it on Sunday and on and on. That was goal number two. Goal number three was the end of the Iranian ballistic missile and drone program. That, frankly has not been addressed at all in this MoU. There's nary a word, not a single word about the ballistic missiles in this deal, despite the fact that that earlier in the conflict, Iran launched one missile towards the joint American British airbase Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean over 2000 miles away, thus proving that they have the capacity to hit swaths of Central and Eastern Europe. You would think the Europeans would care about that. Unfortunately, you would be wrong. And then finally was the nuclear issue, which the MoU says, we will see what we can do. Vice President Vance, to his credit, saying this morning that apparently the iaea, the International Atomic Energy Authorities have said that they will go in and allegedly Iran is allowed access to the inspectors. I guess that's okay. They have nominally agreed to that many times in the past. They've never really fully allowed it. So this, from our vantage point, was the way that this thing should have actually been sold and explained cogently and coherently on the merits. I'm not entirely sure that that happened. And it didn't necessarily happen because to get us back to means and ends, I continue to think that the administration has, after a certain period of initial destruction called epic fury, if you may. After that initial period, administration has valued the means of the deal over the end. And that is why you see a lot of this schizophrenic polling. Frankly, some of this polling from CBS News is actually quite, quite bad. So for instance, CBS News asked the populace, they said the agreement between the United States and Iran is what? 22% say it's better for the US, 37% say it's better for Iran. So get this. By a nearly 4 to 1 margin Americans are telling CBS News they want the conflict over, and yet by nearly 2 to 1 margin, they're saying that this deal, the MOU, is better for Iran than the U.S. and unfortunately, they're correct. It is a very good deal for Iran because Iran gets virtually everything they want, including this pledge to invest $300 billion. It's not gonna be $300 billion, God forbid, of American taxpayer money. But the United States did sign on to an agreement to help raise that money, likely coming from Qatar, one of the wealthiest states in the world. And another unfortunate element of this is you see some elements of the Trump White House inner circle that are acting in a little defensive fashion. So this White House, when it's operating at its best, and for most of this one and a half years, they've been operating at the best. Let's be very clear, I've been very critical of this mou. The rest of this administration's accomplishments are legion. They are legion and they are in many ways extraordinary. The violent crime rate has come down to the lowest rate in 125 years. 125 years. Lowest homicide rate six since the McKinley administration. National Guard in Washington, D.C. smashing success story. National Guard in Memphis, Tennessee, smashing success story. Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, all these blue cities that have had crime dramatically go down. Illegal border crossings from the height of the Biden Harris border invasion. Illegal border crossings down 95 plus percent. Amazing. Absolutely extraordinary stuff, this DOJ, absolutely killing it. The whole Epstein and Brolio possibly aside, absolutely killing it. We saw recently the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law center, all sorts of amazing rulings coming out of the Office of Legal Counsel. We talked about on the show recently this amazing opinion. When it comes to disparate impact when it comes to cracking down on the use of race in labor and employment law, and on and on and on. There's so much to love about this administration. And when they are at their height, they are not feeling defensive. They're going for the jugular. They're going against the left. That is why I found it very notable that on Friday there were two, at least two posts on X from the White House Rapid Response X account that were directly targeting people, more broadly speaking, within the right of center fold, one of whom is my former colleague at Newsweek, Bhatia Unger Sargan, who now hosts a nightly program on News Nation. Now, Bhatia's politics are a little complicated. She is a former self described socialist, maybe even a Marxist who has moved ever, ever towards the right. Not on, certainly not on all issues. I'M sure we disagree on a lot, but she definitely has taken on a very pro Trump posture if nothing else. But Bhagya has been very critical of the MOU and the Rapid Response X account came out swinging at her in utterly excoriating, dare I even say mean girls esque fashion, making fun of her allegedly low ratings. I have no idea if that's true or not. And it wasn't just Bhadya. They came after another old friend of mine as well, Dave Rioboy, who is like me, based in South Florida and has been a long standing decades long, decades long player when it comes to conservative politics, when it comes to counter Islamism, etc. Why would the Rapid Response exit count feel compelled to come out swinging against two people who, broadly speaking, are supportive of the administration's goals? And the answer is twofold. The answer is that I fear that there is a bit of a culture that involves the Vice President's office, but is not limited to him, that is just hyper online and is paying way too much attention to what is happening online. We have seen how poorly this ends up in the past. I think back to 2020, when Kamala Harris ran for president in 2020, before she was tapped to be Biden's VP pick, she ran a hyper hyper online campaign. We all saw the clips taxpayer supported, transgender surge reason, federal president, all these stupid garbage stances that she took based on blue sky or far left social media online sentiment that blew up in her face. Ditto Elizabeth Warren, by the way, who did the exact same thing. I fear there's a little bit of that happening in parts of the White House as well, because according to the CBS News poll, which is not hyper online is more, let's call it real America. Yes, Americans want this war to end, but they also feel that this current MoU gives Iran the better end of the stick by roughly a 2 to 1 margin. If the White House can find some sort of intellectually defensible way to to punt this thing past midterms, get those oil prices down, I say great. I do not think the Iranians are going to give us that opportunity because to paraphrase Herm Edwards, that football coach from all those years ago, they are who we thought they were. Roger Daltrey, the lead singer who famously sung in 1971 in the hit song Won't Get Fooled Again, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. That is who they are. That is who Iran is. If we get a deal, great. But Iran, I fear, will not let that happen on anything close to our terms folks. Another quick break. We'll be right back with much more after this.
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Who helps America go farther, fly higher, dream even bigger? People do. Since 1879, our people have been more than a source of energy, they've been a source of progress. Today that same progress is helping deliver record US Energy production, fueling the workers, the makers help boundary put and risk takers who spark the breakthroughs that move America forward. Learn more about what our people do@chevron.com USA250.
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Welcome back. So it was an action packed weekend. It wasn't just happening in Iran. Donald Trump, while he wasn't tweeting about how Iran will not have a freaking country anymore, when he was not posting about that, he also revealed to the world he actually broke a bit of Newsweek and Donald Trump. If he's done being president, which I guess he will be soon, he's term limited. If he wants to get in on the breaking news siren emoji game on social media, he might have a feature in that because he actually broke some news to us. He broke the news that Keir Starmer is done so that Keir Starmer is resigning over in the uk. So Keir Starmer, who has been Prime Minister of the UK for give or take two years since 2024, has been utterly eviscerated in the polls. His Labour Party is less popular these days than venereal disease and he finally, finally, finally formally came out after Trump broke the news. Starmer came out earlier today on Monday and said that he's out, that he is going to be resigning essentially as soon as his party actually finds a leader. There is an up and coming lad, we might say to use the British English by the name of Andy Burnham, who was the former mayor of Greater Manchester in northwest England. He had a big victory in a very closely watched special British election that that just happened last week. This was a bit of a warning sign of Starmer that there was this up and coming labor guy and that therefore he has to get out. Keir Starmer finally meeting political reality. His tenure has been an unambiguous disaster, an unambiguous disaster for the people of Britain. I am personally very much an Anglophile. I love historically what England has done for the world. It's World cup season, cards on the table. I actually root for England as well. In addition to the United States after us, of course, I root for England as my second team. I lived there for a brief period of time. I went to at least one or two soccer matches there and More generally speaking, putting on my conservative cap, I am just deeply grateful for all that that country historically has given Western civilization. There is just a tremendous mound that has flowed from broader Britain, especially England, to the world in a way that has made the world a better place. Thinking of things like Runnymede and Magna Carta, thinking of the English common law, the baseline for separation of powers, that America's Constitution ultimately improved upon notions of individual liberty and equality. Again America improved on all this. Think of America as a more refined, may not the accent, but a more refined and just overall just better and kickbuddier version if you will than the UK But England really set a lot of this emotion. I find myself just a genuine Anglophile. But that country has been going down the toilet for far too long. Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister did some some things to try to bring Britain back in a better direction. Fortunately, Boris Johnson was just totally eviscerated and not wrongly. He was, I would say rightly eviscerated in the court of public opinion for his COVID 19 scandal. And that all paved the road for a series of some very short lived prime ministers. Liz Truss comes to mind. Rishi Sunak A lot of very short lived ultimately getting us here to Keir Starmer. The Labour Party now is trailing in a lot of polls. The next time that there is a general election in Britain which might not happen for another two or three years, it looks like labor is probably going to get smashed. The good news is that it looks like that the up and coming lead party in most of the polls over in Britain is Reform. UK Reform is led by Nigel Farage. It is a national populist party that is led by Nigel Farage who was the intellectual godfather of the Brexit movement. Brexit was the landmark, landmark vote heard around the world back in 2016 where the British people said that we do not wish to continue to be associated with the European Union. It was my hope at the time that that vote would be mimicked, it would be imitated by various other European countries. We have not seen that to this time, but it has held up. Brexit, whatever you can say, was not a model that other European countries, much to my chagrin, did not immediately at least imitate. But it's held up even a very liberal Prime Minister like here. Starmer didn't necessarily do anything to try to get his country out of Brexit. The failure of Keir Starmer indicates a few things. One is that when you are a leader you actually need a vision. To get us back to what we were saying earlier in the show, you need to state what you are for, not just what you are against. What you are against is very helpful when it comes to running political campaigns. For instance, if Republicans are nervous about the midterms this fall, if they are nervous about inflation, oil prices or this or that, there a very good rule of thumb would be to run against the other idiot, to run against the Nazi tattooed girlfriend beating slob in Maine, the oysterman grand platner, to run against Tofu Tel Rico, the dude who says God is non binary and all this other garbage that's great on the stump in campaign season. That is tremendous. No problem, no problema. Then once you get elected, it's no longer sufficient. You have to lead. You have to actually advance and articulate an agenda and you must sell that agenda to the American people. I deeply wonder whether Keir Starmer ever had any vision whatsoever of what it actually means to be Prime Minister of the uk. I doubt he ever woke up in the morning and said aha, here is why I am running other than just for the sake of petty power qua power which is not a justifiable or defensible reason to seek power in the first place. You seek power in order to use it for good, in order to restore liberty, secure our rights, to advance justice, human flourishing and the common good. The traditional ends of governance in the Western tradition, and on and on and on. Keir Starmer never had any idea about that. It's actually even worse than that though. Keir Starmer infamously presided over the long standing cover up of the horrific Pakistani rape gang scandal that's been going on in the uk well frankly for decades, but really came to light during the Stormer administration. Labor is an absolute mess. Labor starting at least far back as Jeremy Corbyn who infamously spoke of his so called friends in Hamas and Hezbollah and from Corbyn to Starmer and others in between. Labor in the UK is an absolute socialist mess. If you want to know where the Democratic Party led by the DSA is going to be five years from now, look at labor, the Tories. The Conservative Party actually is also a mess over there in the UK as well, which is why reform is probably going to stand a very strong chance of winning in the next election, that would be an absolute godsend. If Nigel Farage is going to is going to make Iran, that would be a tremendous, tremendous thing for Britain. Probably Britain's last hope, actually the last hope of Anglophiles the world over might actually be Prime Minister Nigel Farage. Really extraordinary stuff. I truly hope that happens. But on this note of how the Democratic Party here in the US Is only a few years historically speaking behind where labor is over in the UK I think it's worth talking a little bit more about Kamala Harris herself. So Kamala Harris styled herself in many ways as the future of the Democratic Party. She is the one, as I mentioned, to ran a hyper online campaign in 2020, trying to gin up this far left social media sentiment, trying to run essentially as the blue sky president, not the president of we the people in the United States. And that bit her, as it often does, in the rear end. Kamala Harris seemingly has not learned her lesson because she was back on Don Lemon's show, whatever the heck it is that Don Lemon, the failed former cable news host, is actually doing these days. And she had one of those somewhat infamous Kamala Harris word salads where at one point she actually said, I really, truly believe this. We each have the light inside of us, and we need to know that that is what inspires our hope much as anything external to ourselves. Okay, I didn't know that Kamala Harris was a ghostwriter for John Lennon's solo measle career. But in any event, at another point in the conversation with the execrable hack Don Lennon, Kamala Harris said that we should not take off the table the possibility of abolishing the Electoral College. Oh, yeah, okay, right. This one again. Isn't it funny how it is the would be antifascists, the folks who purport to stand against authoritarianism, who purport to stand against Trump, who they say is the Orange man who will tear it all up. Isn't it funny that they're the ones who are still threatening to pass the Supreme Court? They're the ones who are still threatening to add Puerto rico and Washington, D.C. as states. They're the ones who are still threatening to abolish the US Senate and oh yeah, the Electoral College, which they say are these throwback institutions back to the days where white supremacy was rampant, if not ubiquitous. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the one who was threatening to tear up a 250-year-old institution, maybe that group are the radicals. Maybe they are the ones trying to tear it down. Ironically, Kamala doesn't even have the courage of her convictions. She said we shouldn't rule it out, ma'. Am. At least show an iota of courage and own up to the fact that that is what you want to do. Really, she couldn't even bring herself to the actual stage. She said we shouldn't rule it out. At least own up your garbage take. She's eyeing the 2028 field clearly does not see a loss from contenders. We could be on for a potential California mano a mano matchup. Gavin Newsom vs Kamala Harris, a Bay Area California battle royale for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, which is rapidly heading towards Keir Stormer's Labour Party. And what an ignominious future for the Democrats that would be, folks. One final break. We'll be right back with more after this.
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Who helps America go farther, fly higher, dream even bigger? People do. Since 1879, our people have been more than a source of energy, they've been a source of progress. Today, that same progress is helping deliver record US Energy production, fueling the world workers, the makers, the boundary pushers and risk takers who spark the breakthroughs that move America forward. Learn more about what our people do@chevron.com USA250
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welcome back. Alan Greenspan has passed away at the age of 100. Alan Greenspan was one of the longest chairs of the Federal Reserve in the history of the Federal Reserve. Federal Reserve goes back to to the eponymous Federal Reserve act of 1913, a creature of the Woodrow Wilson administration. The full history is neither here nor there. Alan Greenspan served as chairman of the fed for nearly 20 years, from 1987 towards the end of the Reagan administration, all the way until January 2006, well into Bush's second administration. He therefore served parts of three Republican administrations, Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2, and also the Clinton administration. At the time that he resigned. He was hailed as one of the great economic heroes of all time. The American economy had been roaring 1990s.com and it did quite well actually after 911 as well. A lot of folks thought going back to that time that after 9 11America's economy would retrench, that we would no longer have sustained growth. But it held up quite OK until the crash. So Greenspan out in 06 and then the big financial crisis happens 07 into 08 and the rest, as they say, is history. My personal opinion of Valon Greenspan has not changed a whole lot. I think that he is correctly still viewed as one of the better Federal Reserve chairmen in the history of that institution. Could he have done a little more to try to prevent the financial crisis? Sure, but it seems to me that most of that was a failure of housing policy, a failure of mortgage policy. It's giving out way too many loans to deserve them. Mortgage backed securities, etc. Etc. A lot of policy that did not directly implicate the chairman of the Federal Reserve. The chairman of the Federal Reserve is responsible first and foremost for setting interest rates. There's a big debate about fiscal policy and how the Fed should be involved with that. Greenspan actually was very outspoken about tax cuts. He was a self described libertarian Republican from his early days until he died. When it comes to the bread and butter of monetary policy, Greenspan had a sound legacy. Now speaking of the fact that Greenspan was a limited government guy, there's this one anecdote about Alan Greenspan that has always stuck with me. I can't remember where I heard this, but I heard it might have been from an economics professor back in college. I majored in economics in college. It might have been a professor back then who told me this anecdote about how Alan Greenspan became Alan Greenspan. So before he went to got his PhD in economics when he was a kid, just a young Jewish kid growing up in New York City, at one point he bought an ice cream cone, or I guess more accurately his parents bought him an ice cream cone. And the story goes that before giving the cone to little excited Alan Greenspan, his father just took a big bite out of the cone and young Allen presumably looked quite puzzled. And the father, Mr. Greenspan said that's what the government does to you in taxes every year. And that lesson clearly stuck because Greenspan was a big proponent of tax cuts and a big proponent of deregulation and a big proponent of balanced budgets and all the various things that the fiscal conservatives historically traditionally have believed. So it's a very funny anecdote and it says a lot of things. One is that it shows you just how influential some of these parenting tactics can be. We have an 18 month old and something that frankly that I think about a lot, especially just having celebrated only my second Father's Day with my young daughter. And it also says a lot about political economy. My quick and dirty take on political economy, which I'm not going to have sufficient time to unpack fully on today's show, is this. I am not a self described libertarian Republican like Greenspan, I am a, let's call it a common good conservative. What that means is that much like Irving Kristol decades ago, who unlike his adel brained son Bill Kristol, was a real intellectual, much like Irving Kristol from decades ago, I believe in, let's call it two cheers for Capitalism, which basically means the capitalism is very good, but is not the end all be all. You do need sufficient guardrails. You do need sufficient regulation. One of my favorite examples to prove this rather obvious point, at least a point that I hope will be obvious, is that you can look at the GDP of the San Fernando Valley of California outside the city of Los Angeles. The San Fernando Valley has a massive porn industry. That porn industry undoubtedly makes a lot of money for Silicon Valley. But the GDP of Silicon Valley, or excuse me, the San Fernando Valley, if it's going up, does that mean that we're better off? That human beings are better as a whole? The obvious answer is no. The political economy more generally speaking of scripture in the Bible is much more free markets, private property with guardrails. There's no such thing as socialism from the biblical worldview, no such thing. At least two of the ten Commandments, thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not covet, are irreconcilable with socialism. No doubt about that. There's also lots of built in ways to not hoard too much for yourself. This is why you have the 50 year Jubilee in the Hebrew Bible. It speaks of how you have to leave the edges of your field ungrown for the passersby and so on and so on. So I am a two cheers for capitalism guy, not a three cheerist guy. I think Alan Greenspan was a three cheerist guy, but nonetheless his legacy stands really tall and he is now passed away at the age of 100. He lived a very rich life. Humorously, he was married for the final four decades of his life to Andrea Mitchell, the long standing MSNBC liberal commentator. I'm not entirely sure how they made that marriage work, but clearly they did because it lasted for four decades. So may the memory of Alan Greenspan be a blessing. Alan Greenspan is dead at the age of 100. Finally, for those of you watching on the CN News Channel or on another video platform, you likely see that I am not at my daily day to day recording setup. And there's a reason for that. And I talk about what that reason is. So I am here in the nation's capital where I will be speaking later today, an event that's being hosted just off Capitol Hill by the Susan B. Anthony Pro Life America Organization, commonly known as Susan B. Anthony List or just SBA for short. And this event that I will be speaking at has to do with the 14th amendment. The 14th amendment, which was this sweeping reconstruction amendment passed in 1868 just three years after the End of the Civil War has a lot of provisions in it. And among those provisions are the equal protection laws where it says famously that the law there shall be equal protection of the law for all persons. Well, the intellectually curious pro lifer surely must ask, do persons in this context apply to the unborn? There were some folks who read the Dobbs opinion. The Dobbs case, which came out in 2022, which overturned the absolute grisly case of Roe vs. Wade Dobbs, which finally, finally said that you do not have a quote unquote right to snuff out your unborn child in the womb. There are some folks say that it kicked it back to the states and there's no federal role. That is a misreading of the Dobbs opinion. The Dobbs majority opinion from Justice Sam Alito speaks only of legislatures in the plural, Congress is a legislature. In fact, Brett Kavanaugh's concurring opinions in the Dobbs case explicitly mentions Congress as the legislature. Congress has the ability under Section 5 of the Fourth Amendment to enforce the first four sections, including the all important first section as it sees fit. In other words, if Congress understands the original meaning of the equal protection clause as including all natural persons, and if biological science and other instrumentalities now compel us, as they do, to understand that the unborn child is a person in every sense of the term, then Congress can absolutely choose to legislate that they are included in the equal protection of the laws. What that means is that there is a homicide code, which every state has a homicide code. That code cannot discriminate against unborn persons if it protects born persons. And you might say, oh, what does that mean? Okay, fine, every state will be a little different. Every state will have some mitigating factors. For instance, if you kill someone in self defense, as we all know, if it's in true self defense, you will not be prosecuted. So there will be ways to work this out on a case by case basis in legislatures, through the courts, etc. But at the level of principle. Before getting into the exact specifics, at the level of principle, our lodestar, our true north in the abortion abolition fight is to not leave this. As Stephen Douglas once asserted to the states, there is justice at stake here. There is human life at stake. We cannot rest until the 14th amendment is used to properly secure the rights to humanity of all persons born and unborn in America. And that's why I'm in the nation's capital today, folks. Have a great rest of your evening. We'll be right back as always. Tomorrow. Josh Hammer signing off. He will see you.
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B
When the world is just too much.
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Turn it off and turn on.
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Positive, encouraging K Love,
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Kayla. On caleb is sunshine for my soul. I love k love. Listen now on your radio, online or on the free K Love app. K Love makes me feel so good. Positive, encouraging Caleb.