Ben Meiselis (31:09)
Welcome back. Thank you to our Pro Democracy sponsors right there. And thank you to all the Midas mighty. We had some pretty incredible news. This Pod Scribe account that traces the podcast downloads, this is just in addition to like digital views for like the whole network on this YouTube channel. We're just talking about the Midas Touch podcast of all podcasts in the world. It has the Joe Rogan experience number one. But then the Midas Touch podcast was a close second and then coming in at number eight was the legal AF podcast. When you then add all of the hot takes that we do, not just the podcasts themselves into the mix, Ad Week actually had us beating Rogan and tied with Disney for digital views, which is an incredible testament to the strength of this community. 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All right, we were talking about the MAGA civil war before we took a break between the MAGA tech bros, whose interests are very different than the other magas who want no immigrants and thought that Donald Trump's whole policy was going to be anti immigration. So you have Laura Loomer who's on the anti immigration faction of Trump and remember she was traveling with Trump throughout the campaign and she's been with Donald Trump's or been by Donald Trump's side, you know, almost every step of the way for years and years and years. So much so that like lots of other people in the MAGA world, you know, got jealous of their close relationship. Here's what Laura Loomer posted today. The elephant in the room is that Elon Musk, who is not MAGA and has never been maga, is a total effing drag on the Trump transition. He's a stage five clinger who overstayed his welcome at Mar A Lago in an effort to become Trump's side piece and be the point man for all of his accomplices in Big Tech to slither into Mar A Lago. Shots fired. Laura Loomer calling Musk Trump's side piece for Big Tech to slither in to Mar A Lago. Let's take a look at what Elon Musk was saying though on his social media platform, where again, Elon Musk had encouraged a lot of this anti immigrant, hostile, hateful rhetoric on his platform. So one of his followers and a MAGA person goes the following There are over 330 million people in America. Surely there must be enough of them to build your ultimate team. Why would you deny real Americans the opportunity by bringing foreigners here when there's enough among the 330 million Americans to do these jobs, these tech jobs, these engineer jobs? Take a look at Elon Musk's answer. Your understanding of the situation is upside down and backwards. Of course, my companies and I would prefer to hire Americans and we do as that is much easier than going through incredibly painful and slow work visa processes. However, there is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America. This is not about handing out opportunities from some magical hat. You don't get it. This is blindingly obvious when looking at NBA teams as the physical differences are so obvious to see. However, the mental differences between humans are far bigger than the physical differences. So, in other words, is Elon Musk calling Americans genetically dumber than other people? Because that seems to be what he's saying right there. Someone responds, Open a school. We have brains. Come on, Elon, bring it to America. Wasn't that the whole campaign? American schools, American factories, American manufacturing. By the way, let me just add all of the things that President Biden actually did with the Inflation Reduction act, the Infrastructure act, and the CHIPS act. Investing, I think like a trillion dollars in all of those things to build that up, to make these things actually in America. As President Biden said to me he hopes his legacy is I kept my word. I said I was going to bring it to America. I did that. I was investing in America. Red states, blue states. I invested in infrastructure. I invested in America. Elon Musk's response to this person saying, why don't you open up schools, Elon? You got billions of dollars, Elon. Open some schools up. Elon goes, if you need a school, you've lost already to. To which a MAGA follower goes, incredible. At this rate, you're actually going to make me side with the leftists who want you treated like a hostile foreign agent. Laura Loomer then responds, don't worry guys, the divorce is coming soon. Referring to the divorce from one group of MAGA and the MAGA tech bros right there. D.C. drano, a well known MAGA account goes, how did Doge go from let's cut wasteful government spending to here's why we need to import more immigrants almost overnight. Did I miss something? What's next? Gun control? No more oil drilling. Back the truck up here and you'll get back to the main mission. Elon Musk continued on with this. He goes, there's a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley. So again, Elon Musk is saying, we need certain type of immigrants here. We need the immigrants from India. So they work the tech jobs. They work at the Teslas and for X and for the Tech Bros. For our companies, we need them, but not the immigrants that work the agriculture, hospitality, construction and other jobs, right? Elon saying, this is what I need. So just when you see Elon and these Tech Burrows pros talk about America, just replace America with I or me and you see what their intentions are. As our editor in chief Ron Philipkowski said that as well. And then Elon Musk also posts, it comes down to this. Do you want America to win or do you want America to lose? If you force the world's best talent to play for the other side, America will lose. End of story. Now this is the exact opposite message that Donald Trump was making during the campaign. Quite literally the opposite. The opposite. Now I want to read this for you. And again, as Ron Filipkowski and I just said before, replace I or me with America. When you hear these things from Elon and he's saying that it's beneficial to him. And that's the thing with these Tech bros. They're like, yo, Trump, we gave you all that money for that campaign. We bought this White House for you. So now pay up. This is what we want. And then the other Magas are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't buy it. We're the real Magas, we're the real ones. And that's creating this civil war. I want to read for you what Vivek Ramaswamy wrote. He's the other co head of doge, this made up agency pulling the House Republican strings and Donald Trump strings right now as well. Now when I read this to you, I just want you to think for a second. Imagine if President Biden said this. Imagine if any Democratic Cabinet member said this. Imagine if Vice President Kamala Harris said this. Imagine the outrage. Imagine what you would hear everywhere from Fox to CNN to msnbc, all of the corporate media, they buy into the right wing outrage. Oh my God, can you believe they said this? Now because it's all hypocritical and just at this point controlled by right wing forces and the oligarchy. They're not going there. But again, let me read to you what Vivek Ramaswamy says. He goes, the issue is the American culture is all about mediocrity and you need to bring in people from India and immigrants from India because they just work harder than white Americans. White Americans are too busy watching Boy Meets World and Saves by the Bell and they're not as smart and dedicated as the immigrant Indian families. So that's the problem. Let's be honest about it. If you go, Ben, whoa. Did he really say that? That would seem to be something that would cause outrage in in Maga World. Let me read it for you what Vivek Ramaswamy, who's like the key person in the Trump administration, said. He goes, our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long. At least since the 1990s and likely longer. That doesn't start in college. It starts young. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the mantle, the Math Olympiad champ or the jock over the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Corey from Boy Meets World or Zack Slater over Screech and Saved by the Bell or Stefan or Steve Urkel in Family Matters will not produce the best engineers. Fact. I know multiple sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates. More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of Friends, more math tutoring, fewer sleepovers, more weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less tv, more creating, less chilling, more extracurriculars, less hanging out at the mall. Most normal American parents look skeptically at those kind of parents. More normal American kids view such those kind of view such those kind of kids with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, then normalcy is what you will achieve. Now close your eyes and visualize which families you knew in the 90s or even now who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest, normaly doesn't cut it in a hyper competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we'll have our asses handed to us like China. Kind of sounds like isn't that what they were referring to as globalists and globalism and all of these things? As our editor in chief Ron Philip Kowski goes, maga has suddenly realized that the tech Bros are globalists. I'm not going to read to you some of the stuff by Nick Fuentes, Ashley Sinclair, John Cardillo and some of these other kind of right wing MAGA people because it's really kind of xenophobic about Indians and people from India and foreign cultures and things like that. But it is interesting to see right now that Trump ran an entire campaign on attacking immigrants and now you have at least the tech bro saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, we need him for us. As our editor in chief Ron Filipkowski says, Elon is just saying what every other Republican employer is about to say in 2025. Deport everyone else's employees, but not mine, because I really need them. Look, we're going to follow up more here about this civil war taking place. But again, could you imagine if what Vivek said AOC wrote or if what Vivek said, Bernie Sanders said or, or of course, Biden. Just think about it. It would be every single day, every second, the top coverage. You know, it's why it's important we have an independent voice to let you all know what it is that's happening and what is being said right there. Wild stuff, right? Wild stuff. I'm not quite sure as wild or comparably wild to this whole Matt Gaetz ordeal. I'm not going to go through the entire House Ethics Committee report which made these findings that by substantial evidence that Matt Gaetz engaged in statutory rape, illicit drug use, receiving gifts, obstructing the congressional investigation. But you know, Matt Gaetz's defense since this report has gone public is like it is the height of, of privilege. I mean, I mean, I just want you to think about what he's doing. So here's an example of what Gates is doing. He posts a selected portion of one of the depositions of one of the women. And here's what. And here's what he writes. He goes, another one of the ethics witnesses who was an alleged, quote, prostitute, claims she was indeed not when actually pressed in a deposition. This won't be in the ethics report because of course, and this was a lawsuit, I think, brought by a Republican lobbyist who was alleged to have been at a place where some of the conduct that was described in the ethics committee report was occurring. So here's the deposition testimony that Gates claims is like, good for him. Question, were you escorting, working? What were you doing? A lawyer does an objection. And then the answer from the woman was, I wouldn't consider it any of those. There was a lot of times where I did not get paid for being there in that time. I thought a lot of these people were my friends. Question. Okay, all right. So you wouldn't characterize anything you did in 2017 as sex work. Objection, you can answer. And then she says no. To be clear, what she's saying here is that there was a lot of times where I did not get paid for being there, which means there were times where apparently she did get paid. And this is not this deposition transcript, if you're wondering, is not the 17 year old statutory rape one. This is a different individual. What Matt Gaetz would do, according to the ethics report, though, is his close buddy Joel Greenberg, who ended up taking a plea for sex trafficking. Greenberg would find the women, or in the case of the girl, they'd find them on a website called Seeking Arrangements, where implicit in the relationship was that there would be payment for sex. So the woman wouldn't charge the money. It would just be part of what would take place, is that you would make the payment. And that was clear in some of the other text messages between Greenberg and the woman where he would show the photographs of Matt Gaetz and he would even say, all right, the usual 400 for the meat. They'd say $400 for the meat and then they would go, $400 for the meat. And that's how they would call it. But like, Gates is like looking at this like, like, these were my girlfriends. Like, these were. I was just giving gifts to girlfriends. And just, just think about that as like his defense. And this is another post that he made. Gates goes, giving funds to someone you are dating that they didn't ask for and that isn't, quote, charged for sex is now prostitution. There is a reason they did this to me in a Christmas Eve Eve report. And here's, here's what he claims is like, helpful to him. Question. So it wasn't that the amounts charged did not depend on how attractive a guy was. Is that fair to say? And then the woman responds, I never charged anyone anything. Like I said, it was just given question. Okay, answer. And it wasn't spoken about. So Gates views that as his strongest evidence. Right there, where the woman is saying, I didn't have to charge because the arrangement that was sought on seeking arrangement was just given what this was all about. And Gates is like, dude didn't do anything. Look, how great is this? Okay, Matt Gaetz was who Donald Trump picked to be Attorney General, the top law enforcement officer in the United States. The most powerful legal position, essentially, that there is. Matt Gaetz was a member of Congress entrusted with a public position while he was in. Again, I don't care about private sex lives of members of Congress or private individuals. Like, by the way, with all of the stuff against Hunter, the stuff with Hunter was consensual sex. While Hunter was a private citizen, he wasn't picked to lead a governmental agency or the Attorney General or to run anything in the Biden administration. Hunter's conduct was when Biden was not even the VP and not the president. In between, he hit rock bottom because Bo, his brother died of cancer and he went into a serious drug addiction. To which Hunter took full responsibility for. Hunter was not out there saying, oh, they said this. Look at the deposition. Hunter said, I did it. He said, I made mistakes in my life. I was at the lowest point in my life. I take full accountability for what it is I did. And what did the magas do? They found ways to charge Hunter with things that nobody other than Hunter has ever actually been charged with. And the irony is that you have someone like Matt Gaetz who's out there. Abolish the atf. The Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Agency. Abolish it. That there shouldn't be any of these ATF forms at all. Let weapons of war proliferate. There should be no common sense gun control as well. But Gates and the Magnas went after Hunter because when Hunter was under the influence of drugs or when he was suffering from drug addiction, he purchased a gun that he only had for a few weeks where he signed a form that said that he was not under the influence or was not consuming drugs or was not addicted to drugs on the ATF form. Now, there was substantial evidence in the Congressional ethics report that Matt Gaetz was on drugs during the relevant time period. Matt Gaetz is a known gun owner. Matt Gaetz is someone who called Florida, not the Sunshine State, but the gunshine state and so, you know, Gates is photographed with AR15s. And so did Gates fill out that form that Hunter filled out that Hunter was charged with that nobody else but Hunter was charged with? Gates gets a pass there. Why is Gates getting a pass there? I mean, wouldn't Hunter's ultimate revenge be that Matt Gaetz should ultimately be charged with the things that he's alleged to have done in this report that's made public? Also, I did a Google search of other people in Florida who were charged with statutory rape of a 17 year old. And I saw the story of a former police officer who was I think 28 years old, I think younger than Gates was, who met a girl on Tinder. And she said at first she was 23, admitted she lied and said that she was actually 19, but it turned out that she was 17 years old. And this guy, Jose Robel Hernandez, who met someone who he thought was 23 years old on Tinder, he was a former police officer. He was prosecuted for statutory rape. Matt Gaetz wasn't. And I want you to think about the ultimate kind of. And Matt Gaetz is out there making posts with deposition transcripts about other women. Although let me be clear, the 17 year old's a girl, but he's making posts about other people and he's like, they didn't charge me anything. What are you talking about here? And then he's posting Donald Trump's in support of him. After all of this, Gates is saying, I got a great note from President Trump. And then Trump's like, Matt, very unfair, exclamation point. After the ethics report came out, Trump had Matt Gaetz's back. So when you put all of this together, folks, though, you have to kind of go and ask yourself. And this again, one of the things we try to appeal to on this show, there it is right there. For those watching, you see what Trump said to Gaetz, Matt, very unfair. We try to appeal to people's common sense right here. And I try to take away the political tribalism that exists. And I just try to appeal to logic. That's why I show you what Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are saying. I show you what Matt Gates is saying. We go through the ethics report in a strong amount of details. We go through what Trump is posting on Christmas, what the reaction to it is by the international community, what President Biden is doing. Because to of the biggest corrosive plagues, the biggest corrosive forces in politics is treating politics as some game with different teams. And both Sides, ism and a horse race. And this team did that and that team did it. Elevates these things as one side's doing this, one side's doing that. Look, you could watch the 30 minute interview that I did with President Biden. And President Biden had all the opportunity, if he wanted to, to say all of these things about the red states and the people who were effing around and finding out now who voted against their interests. And I asked President Biden these questions and he's like, look, whether you. He goes, I don't care. He goes, if Trump took credit for my accomplishments and that meant American people were benefiting, go take credit. He goes, this isn't a credit game. My job was to deliver on promises I made. And if those promises are delivered, then I feel I did my job and my duty. My view and the view of the Midas Touch network, I believe, is that that is a statesman with dignity in President Biden. Right. To me, when we talk about Teddy Roosevelt, and it's fitting we did that interview in the Roosevelt Room. The big stick policy. Walk soft and carry a big stick. You don't have to go and be loud and obnoxious, but you should back up what you're doing by delivering results. And if people get in your way and try to undermine your vision to be helpful, you respond with audacious power. But you don't have to wield that power recklessly and carelessly. And I've said you have the big stick policy from Roosevelt to Biden. And now with Donald Trump, we've got that micro stick policy. He's got that micro stick complex or the tiny stick policy. Act loud and obnoxious, but you're a paper tiger. You're ultimately not backing it up with real force and real power. And all you're doing is energizing the world against you and making you weaker. I'm sure if we reflected on the lessons of Machiavelli or Sun Tzu or whoever, like Trump does the opposite. When we teach negotiations or I teach negotiations, I mean, everything that Trump's doing is what you don't do in a negotiation. It screws over your bargaining power and ultimately exposes you and just makes you look dumb. I mean, look what happened with the continuing resolution. Trump demanded something or else. And then when that thing didn't happen, the debt ceiling wasn't added to it. There wasn't a removal or elimination or extension of the debt ceiling. He didn't do anything. He just moved on and played golf and then moved on to attacking Canada or attacking Greenland or attacking. Then he just moves on to the next one. And people see that as weakness. I promise you, Putin sees that as weakness. President Xi sees that as weakness. Our allies see that as weakness. They know the force and power of the United States. They know that it could be wielded. They have to take Trump's threat seriously, but they view him like they would view, like a mad king. They view him as someone who's kind of crazy and unstable and illogical, and they have to deal with it in that way and that type of instability in a global world order. As Charlie Angus, the Member of Parliament from Canada, said, that allows Putin to feast, that allows President Xi to feast, that allows our adversaries to take advantage of that. And that's not strength. That's weakness. That's weakness. And so I think it's important that we point that out. We point out Trump's broken promises that are going to inevitably happen on day one that I've talked about already on this show, with prices not going down but up, mortgage rates not going down but up, the tariffs and bloody mass deportations causing real harm, real problems. And I think it's important that our opposition to that be rooted in logic like this. And that's what we're going to do. We're going to be passionate, we're going to be ferocious, we're going to be logical, we're going to be fearless, and we're going to support democracy, not just here in America, but abroad. The ramifications of this are international in scope. That's why we're focusing a lot of our attention to what's happening in Canada, in the uk in Germany, as Elon Musk is supporting a party there that's known the AfD, which is known for supporting neo Nazi views and why that's so dangerous, or Elon Musk potentially giving $100 million to Nigel Farage in the UK and we need to focus on what's happening in Australia, what's happening in Mexico, what's happening in Austria, what's happening with all these far right movements taking place and pro democracy coalitions and government forming to try to stop that. And ultimately, a lot of these far right wing parties, they're supporting Putin's agenda. And then there are these pro democracy alliances which are supporting power to the people. So we'll keep talking about that. Do me a favor, make sure you're subscribed right now to our YouTube channel. I want to really get 4 million subscribers. So if you can help us. Please hit subscribe right now. Also, if you want to check out midasplus.com I think you'll enjoy the coverage there from Ron Filipkowski, our Editor in Chief. Also check out patreon.com Midas Touch as I've said, we don't have outside investors, so one of the ways we grow this is through Patreon P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com Midas Touch it really does help us grow and I'm looking forward to holding that Zoom meeting sometime next week where we can talk about all of the behind the scenes stuff about my interview with President Biden and such a such an honor. And I hope I really made you all proud and how we handled that interview and showed that look, you can be tough in the interview but also dignified and respectful and actually get answers. What a novel concept. Actually get answers from the politician and not make it about you, the host. Make it about the country and make it about what President Biden's responses was. So I hope we made you proud with that. And on that note, thank you everybody for watching. We appreciate you. You can subscribe to the audio podcast as well. If you're not our audio listeners on the Midas Touch podcast, subscribe to the YouTube channel. Our YouTube watchers subscribe to the audio podcast. Thanks everybody for watching. Have a lovely and wonderful day. We love you. We're so grateful for you and we'll see you next time. Shout out to the Midas Mighty. Hey Midas Mighty. Love this report. Continue the conversation by following us on Instagram. It's TOUCH to keep up with the most important news of the day. 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