The Dan Bongino Show - Ep 482 Liberal Rhetoric is Out of Control

Episode Date: June 15, 2017

In this episode I address the roots of the dangerous political rhetoric emanating from the far-left.    I also discuss the economics of outsourcing and off-shoring and its impact on our economy.  https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-exporting-jobs-canard-1497482039 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Growth is essential for every entrepreneur. At BDC, we get that. And the businesses we support grow at double the average rate. Accelerating the pace. We're on it. BDC. Financing. Advising. Know-how. Dan Bongino. I owe you. Who owes who? You owe me. I owe you. There's no money. The Dan Bongino Show.

Anything run by liberals will be run into the ground, burned, stepped on, gasoline poured on it and burned again. Get ready to hear the truth about America. They're arguing about things and debating how quickly they can deconstruct the greatest country in the history of mankind and all of the ideas and norms that have gotten us here. On a show that's not immune to the facts, with your host, Dan Bongino. All right, welcome to The Renegade Republican with Dan Bongino. Producer Joe, how are you today? All set, ready to go, rock and roll. Yeah, let's get right into it.

Today's show brought to you by our buddies at Brick House Nutrition, Miles and Adam. You know I love these guys. Best nutrition product I've ever taken. And it's foundation, and I decided to double down and let's invent a new one. They you know I love these guys. Best nutrition product I've ever taken. And it's foundation. And I decided to double down and let's invent a new one. They said, I got an idea. We do a nutrition company. I think these energy drinks and coffee really stinks because you crash after you drink it.

Let's invent an energy product called Dawn to Dusk. And that's what they did. Love it. Yeah, it's good stuff. I spoke to the doctor who invented it. Really good guy. It's the best energy product on the market. It gives you 10 hours of continuous energy. You don't have to worry about any of the crashes. I get tremendous feedback on this product. People able to finally get through their day

without 6,000 cups of Starbucks coffee. So go give it a shot. Give them a look at brickhousenutrition.com slash Dan. That's brickhousenutrition.com slash Dan. Check out Dawn to Dusk. You're a working mom. You're out there. You got tough days. You're a CrossFitter, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. You're working out.

You're on an assembly line. You're working your butt off. Go give it a shot. I hope you get through the day. Give you a nice boost in energy. Dawn to Dusk. It's available at BrickHouseNutrition.com slash Dan. All right. A lot to talk about, so I don't want to mess around and waste any of your time.

So a lot of breaking news yesterday. Obviously, we discussed the horrible incident with Steve Scalise. And my apologies, I got an email and this is legitimate feedback on the show, Joe. Sometimes when you and I do the show, I think I assume that people already know what happened. And someone sent me an email and said, you did it again. You got into this incident yesterday and you never said what the incident was. I'm sorry. I had assumed everybody had seen the story yesterday about the shooter who shot up a congressional baseball practice for Republicans in Alexandria, Virginia. So my apologies. I'll try not to do that again in the future. Sometimes I assume too much. But that is what happened is Steve Scalise, the House Majority Whip, was shot in the hip, which is a very – there's no good areas to be hit.

Let me just be clear. But that is a particularly bad area outside of center mass because of all the sensitive organs in the hip area and also the extensive network of blood vessels. So he is now in critical condition, the Republican House Majority Whip, who was – it was a political assassination. There's very little doubt about that right now. The individual who, the shooter is dead. He was hit by Capitol Police and taken out. United States Capitol Police who were assigned to Steve Scalise because he's in leadership. Congressional leadership has security details. Regular rank and file congressional members do not unless there's some viable threat.

And Scalise lost a lot of blood. Yesterday took a bit of a turn for the worse after surgery. Apparently, he's been getting pints of blood for transfusions. And God bless him. We hope he has the strength. God blesses him with the strength to pull through this. So God bless him. But I did Mark Levin's show last night.

I've been doing Fox pretty much all night and this morning. Got into a little imbroglio this morning. But hey, listen, I'm loyal to my friends. And there's a particular guy out there who goes after one of my friends, and I'm not a particular fan of him. For those of you who saw the hit this morning, you'll get it. I'm not going to elaborate on that anymore. But I'm loyal, folks. It's my show. And you know what? Not everybody does the right thing, even when they're on our side. But there's two things I wanted to hit. Number one is, you know, yesterday I spoke about critical theory and how the left is that we're fighting an ideas battle and the left is fighting this idea that we're just bad people.

So for us, just to be clear, conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, and even some good moderate Democrats out there, they believe in fighting ideas. You know, we want fighting fighting ideas. We want fighting on ideas. We believe in lower taxes because they cause economic growth. We believe in patient consent or healthcare because we believe you can decide your healthcare better than a bureaucrat. We believe in school choice because we believe you're paying for the school system and you should pick where your kid goes to school. These are ideas, folks. We have evidence to back up these ideas. The left is not fighting ideas. The far

left is fighting bad people. They just think you're a bad person, and critical theory teaches them that. Critical theory is the idea that the people in power, the white patriarchal power structure, these are bad people, and everything they do, everything they tell you is done to reinforce their power structure system. So they do everything they can to devalue us. They invent things like white privilege just because you happen to have white skin, you are somehow to be treated as a second-class citizen because you're somehow privileged, which is, I mean, tell people in Appalachia that. They'll be like, really? We're privileged? Are you crazy? People who are struggling in other areas of the country too. These are efforts to dehumanize and depersonalize

people. And one of the things I hit last night on Mark's show is this depersonalization is done for a reason. The reason folks at the left talks about people in groups on the right that disagree with them, they try not to get into treating people, they want to depersonalize you is because it's easier when you depersonalize someone to imbue a sense of hate towards the other side. So Joe, just to be clear on this, if the left doesn't want to fight on ideas, they don't want to talk about, oh, we want to hike taxes. We want to take away your health care. They don't want to talk about any of that. They want to talk about a war on women. Republicans want to kill old people. Republicans hate minorities. Republicans hate the LGBT community. That's all they want to

say because they just make it up. They do that and they talk about people in groups because when you depersonalize people, it makes it easier psychologically for other people to accept it. Now, last night in Levin, I explained this a little bit in reverse. So analogies work. When I was a cop, right? The NYPD. We used to go every year to this place in Brooklyn. I've told this story before, but it's important in this instance. We used to go to this place in Brooklyn. I've told this story before, but it's important in this instance. We used to go to this place in Brooklyn and it was a very orthodox, I think they were the Hasidim, the Jewish community. And there was this rally they'd have where they had to touch this rabbi. You were supposed to touch the rabbi. And forgive me, I'm not familiar with why exactly this was. I'm Christian. I'm not Jewish. But I just remember being a cop and we would go there just for

general crowd control. And it would get know we would get people get excited it wasn't like a riot situation but people would get excited and i just remember one of the cops who was pretty good at crowd control things like that and he would say you know if you can get someone's name in other words like there's someone in the crowd next to you joe and they use your name like hey joe come look at this if you can get someone's name that in a crowd situation where people are getting really excited, that look them in the eye and use their name. If you're the cop, you say, Joe, Joe Armacost, calm down, stay calm. Not that you need to hear that. But what happens is it personalizes it. It brings it back to them and it gets them out of the crowd

energy atmosphere where they feel like they can do things they wouldn't ordinarily do because they feel like, well, other people are doing it and they almost feed off the crowd energy. When you personalize it to them, they start thinking again about the ramifications of their own behavior and they don't lose it in the crowd energy. It's very real. This is nothing new. It's not pop psychology. It's the real deal. People, when you confront them with their own name, they start to get back into the situation, viewing it through their eyes and not through the eyes of being part of a bigger crowd. You were thinking about throwing a bottle or jumping over a barricade to touch this rabbi, you may not do it. I don't want to over-exaggerate how excited the people were, but it was an

interesting situation to be involved in. I never forgot that. Well, you know, I don't want to over-exaggerate how excited the people were, but it was an interesting situation to be involved in. And I never forgot that. Well, the left does that in reverse. They don't want to use individual. In other words, forget about Trump for a minute. They obviously call him out in political leaders. But they very rarely will engage the far left in anything but big, gross demonizations of the Republican Party because it makes it easier for people to fall into the trap. You know what I'm saying, Joe? They don't name people specifically by name all the time. They'll just say Republicans are engaged in a war on women. Republicans and

conservatives want to kill grandma. Republicans and conservatives don't like people who are black or Asian or whatever. And they do this because they know it makes it a little easier for them, for other people to digest it. These are very deliberate moves. And when you combine that with critical theory, and critical theories focus on the fact that nothing, there are no objective set of facts. It's all subjective. And if you're part of the white power structure in the country, your opinion is meaningless because you're stating things that are objective facts, like, oh, tax cuts work and healthcare

has to be controlled by the individual. But the left will say, your voice doesn't mean anything. Those aren't facts. Those are just you trying to reinforce your own power. Folks, I get it that you're pulling your hair out right now and going, this sounds like the dumbest thing I've ever heard. You know what? It is.

And it's hard to understand because it doesn't make sense. But it's not dumb. It used to be called brainwashing. Brainwashing. Yeah, I mean, exactly. Gaslighting, which we've talked about before, where you- It's a technique. You repeat a lie over and over, and you repeat it confidently.

Keep talking about white privilege, white privilege, white privilege, Republicans in a war on women. Repeat it confidently. Have it echoed by the media, and isolate people from the truth, what we would call gaslighting. And eventually, they start to believe the lie that there really is some kind of a war on women out there, which is, folks, it's just outrageous. So when you combine this critical theory, number one, with the second thing, which is,

and this is how you create the witch's brew of potential violence out there, folks, that's brewing on the far left, right? So critical theory and depersonalization of the enemy to make them less human, to dehumanize him and make him easier to hate. With the second part of this, which is, folks, liberals have nothing to fall back on

when they lose elections. You know, I brought this up last night again, and it's critical that we reemphasize this. Republicans are big believers in big R rights, the power of God, the power of liberty, the power of economic entrepreneurialism. This is what we believe in. The fact that there's a

government and a constitutional republic that enshrines those rights doesn't mean that we'll ever believe those rights are given to us by government. Those rights are given to us by God. We only see government as a conduit with our permission to just enshrine those rights into law. They're not given to us by government. Do you get what I'm saying, Charlie? Sure. Whether government exists, I guess what I'm saying, Charlie? Sure. Whether government exists, I guess what I'm trying to say is the Republican conservative libertarian position,

if you're on the right side of this, and not every Republican is, is that whether the Constitution existed or not, we still have big R rights given to us by God. The fact that men try to take those rights, we enshrine it in a governing document to protect us against raptor-like rattlesnake men who will try to steal our liberty at every opportunity.

There you go. Right. But we don't believe at any point that these people are giving us those rights. I'm not thanking the government for my rights. Right. Now, where am I going with this? The left doesn't have that. The left believes, the far left, not all Democrats, but the far left believes in the exclusive

power of the state. The state should be able to take your money and spend it. The state should dictate where economic resources go. The state should control the means of production. The state should control your healthcare. The state should control your kids' education. The state should control the court system and influence that. And justice shouldn't be blind.

It should be tilted towards what's good. Well, folks, what's good is not always what's fair. And the left doesn't believe that. They believe in the all-knowing, all-powerful state. So when we lose elections, ladies and gentlemen, like we lost under Obama, we're really pissed off. Don't get me wrong. I know I was. I mean, it's what motivated me to get into Congress.

I know Joe was. I know most of the people I hang around with in the conservative movement were really upset. But we don't lose our minds and engage in violence like the left because we have something that stops us from doing that. It's God. It's the idea of big R rights. If you believe in big R rights from God, you don't only believe that those rights apply to you. You believe that those rights apply to liberals and Democrats as well. So what stops us from engaging in political violence, and again, I'm not talking about all people. There obviously have been isolated incidents of people involved in violence who have claimed a right-wing ideology. I want to emphasize that,

claimed. But what stops the overwhelming majority of conservatives and libertarians from advocating violence is they believe that despite our political enemies' failed political ideology and their crappy ideas, despite liberals' bad ideas, that these are still children of God imbued with big R rights, and we're not here to take those rights away from them. We'll fight back with a fury when you try to take them from us, and if you threaten violence against us, but we will not initiate violence against anybody else because we believe in big R rights. when they lose the power of the state. So when we lose power, like we lost to Obama, what do we do? We organize and we try to take power back,

which is what happened with the Tea Party revolution. What does the left do, Joe? They have nothing left. There's a vacuum there. There's nothing to backfill the loss of power from the state, nothing. This is their God. It's their golden calf. It's everything.

It's that the obelisk object from that movie. What is it? Space Odyssey or something? Yeah. 2001. Yeah, that's it. It's their God. This is all they have.

They have nothing else. So when they lose the power of the state, what do they fall back on to prevent them from attacking their enemies? And the answer is amongst, again, a but it but there is there has been strong advocacy for violence black lives matter you got it you know with and um on a different note the southern poverty law center calling people hate groups and stuff and the floyd corkins incident he used that to attack the family research center there are people on the left who have there's a vacuum there when they lose power and that vacuum is is filled by rage. It's like the waves coming in and out of the shore when you dig that hole in the sand near the shoreline, and the waves come in and it fills it up with sand again. The left is refilled with rage because there's nothing else there.

Folks, I'm not trying to be overly philosophical here. This isn't a Plato, Socrates, or Socrates, if you watch Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. I'm not trying to be overly deep or melodramatic about this. I'm just giving you the facts from my experience as a Secret Service agent under both Republican and Democratic administrations and listening to the protesters on both sides how they talk republican protesters talk about organizing getting people out of office taxed enough already they talk about policy specific stuff obamacare sucks whatever it may be but i found with a lot of leftists in the bush administration when i was an agent that it was very personal you know bush is a liar he killed people people died and you're like what what are you talking about are you crazy like i didn't even agree with the Iraq war, but he'd be like, really? Do you have the facts straight? Are you okay? I mean, it was very personal. That vacuum when they lose power is entirely filled by rage and it creates a problem. So just to sum up, because I don't want to do two days in a row on the same topic here, but it's obviously yesterday was a seminal moment in our history. I mean, this is in a horrific way. Number one, the left depersonalizes and believes that you are a bad person. They don't believe you have bad ideas. Well, they may believe that too, but that's irrelevant. They just believe you're a bad person. While conservatives and people on the right think you just have bad ideas.

Secondly, there's a vacuum left when the left loses power that's not there with the right. The right believes in big R rights and the power of God, and that stops them from engaging in this political violence. The left doesn't have that emergency break, Joe. So when they lose the power of the state, you have this witch's brew of people who've depersonalized their enemy. They think they're bad people and they have no big R rights from God to stop them from acting out. This is the problem we have now in the country. I hope that makes sense, Joe. I hope I... Yeah, Dan, I don't think you went over the edge explaining that either. It's got to

be explained and acknowledged that this is what's happening so you're you didn't go yeah and i'm you know i'm trying here and i'm very cautious with this topic because i really as i said last night on mark show you know i don't want to keep quoting it for those of you missed it but you know at a time like this you don't want to contribute to the to the downfall of the country you don't want to be in a spark gunpowder situation, an additional spark or a match. But as you just said, Joe, I think we do our audience a huge

disservice if we don't tell the truth. You know, I mean, like I said this morning with Fox and Friends, they asked me an honest question. I gave an honest answer. I know that's not going to make everybody happy on one specific issue. But on this, we have to speak to the truth here and the truth is that that's exactly what's happening on the left the entire ideological vacuum has been created

and you know as i wrote my piece you know things liberals taught me a conservative review i don't feel like either that this has made me a better person i'm not under any illusion here that the things liberals have taught me mockery works boycotts work i'm not under any illusion here that the things liberals have taught me mockery works boycotts work i'm not under any illusion that this has made me a better person or these are morally upstanding things to do i'm being self-deprecating because i really wish liberals would listen and say is bongino right did he really learn that mockery of your political opponents works from us and the answer is yes i did yes yes because that's not taught in my religion it's not taught by my dad it's not of your political opponents works from us? And the answer is yes, I did. Yes, yes. Because that's not taught in my religion.

It's not taught by my dad. It's not taught by my mom. And it's not taught by my political ideology. I learned that from you. And I'm not proud of that. I learned, again, boycotting companies works. I hate doing it. It's ridiculous.

It's absurd. It's outrageous. Should we make economic decisions on good products and good companies? Instead, we're doing it on It's ridiculous. It's absurd. It's outrageous. Should we make economic decisions on good products and good companies? Instead, we're doing it on where they advertise. This is ridiculous. I want this to stop, but it's not going to stop if we don't call truth to power and say, you guys started this, libs. You started this with the Florida citrus thing years ago on that singer. You started this. Now it's up to us to fight back but folks let's not be under any illusions this makes us a better person because it doesn't all right um i got a lot of stuff to get through so

i just want to move on here quick hey there's another article today in the journal about trade and every time i bring this up i always get emails from people who are on both sides there's a lot of passions about it but folks i'm again i'm not gonna lie to you i'm sorry you know i don't both sides, there's a lot of passions about it. But folks, again, I'm not going to lie to you. I'm sorry. I don't obsess over the download numbers. They continue to go up and thank you very much for that. And we have a great audience, but I do obsess, however, over the truth. I'd rather nobody listen to me tell the truth than everybody listen to me be full of, you get it. So there's another article today about tariffs remember uh for those of you didn't listen to the show two days ago about tariffs there's a talk again about imposing steel tariffs and sugar tariffs are already there and i said folks this is a really bad idea because

if people want to send us stuff from other countries cheaply that we're going to use sugar steel whatever it may be how is us asking them to pay more consumers in the United States by imposing a tariff at the border? How does that benefit us? Folks, it doesn't make sense. Economically, it does not make sense. It will never make sense. And I get a lot of feedback on that. But there was another interesting piece today.

And in the journal, I'll put it in the show notes today, a conservative review, where they talk about – and he doesn't mention these terms specifically, but I'm going to use these terms. He basically is highlighting the difference between offshoring and outsourcing. And folks, you have to understand the difference between the two to understand the economics of trade and the outsourcing of US jobs. Yeah, we covered this long ago, didn't we? Yeah, see, you've got a good memory. Yeah, about a year ago, actually. So for those of you who are new listeners, this may be a refresher course for some of

you who've been with me from the beginning, but for our new listeners, folks, these are not the same thing. Outsourcing of jobs, which a lot of people think is a really, really terrible thing, and in some respects, I agree with them, and not all, I'll get to that in a second, is not the same as offshoring. Here's the difference. Outsourcing would be, say, a call center where you could hire people in the United States to handle calls, customer service calls, and they send it over to whatever, India or Pakistan or whatever it may be. We would consider that the outsourcing of jobs. So just to define it for you and sum it up and wrap it up in a little package here, those are jobs that could be done here, but are done somewhere

else likely because the labor's cheaper. Make sense? Yep. Outsourcing. That is not the same thing, economically speaking, because of the value added, as offshoring. Offshoring jobs is not a bad thing, ladies and gentlemen, by any measure. Let me give you an example of what the difference would be. You have workers all around the world in different time zones. People don't like to work in the United States midnight hours. They have to pay a premium. You know, Joe, they have night diff. You've heard night differential. Well, I don't want to be silly about it, but this isn't a newsflash to anyone. People sleep at night. They don't like midnights. I hated them when I

was a Secret Service agent. They used to mess with my brain. I used to have like the worst nightmares ever when you're sleeping during the day. So there are some companies that find it more advantageous, even though technically the job could be done here because of the time difference. It can't be done the same way. So they have it. They have those positions and they give an example in the piece, which is a good example of Caterpillar. You know Caterpillar, the company builds the big, heavy machinery? Yeah, the cats.

Yeah, exactly. The Caterpillar, so Caterpillar has a factory where they'll send data they accumulate during the workday. So let's say that data is on a factory line. It's how long it took to build this truck, how many problems they had, how many widgets they used. Now, you could bring in a data processor to work overnight so they have the data for the next morning shift. Right, Joe? Or who's going to be tired, by the way?

He's not going to be at his highest mental acuity, and you're going to have to pay him night dip. Or you could send it overseas where it's daytime and you could get people overseas for maybe the same price, maybe a little cheaper, but that's not the reason they're doing it. They're doing it because it's the day over there and people sleep at night. Here's another example. So that would be the difference between outsourcing and offshoring. Offshoring of jobs sometimes is not a bad thing. Here's another one. There are companies, car companies, this is an easy example I've used in the past. There are car companies out there that make cars specifically for foreign markets and only for foreign markets.

For those of you who travel overseas, I know you've seen this. I used to travel overseas a lot with the Secret Service and you're like, gosh, that's a strange looking Toyota. I've never seen that before. That's because you haven't. They don't make it in the United States. They only make it overseas. Also, there are factories overseas where people drive on the other side of the road. The steering wheel is on a different side of the car. There's a different, not incredibly different, but to a degree, there's a different assembly line construction because you don't want to put the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car. So they build those cars only for an overseas market.

They're not going to build a car that has the steering wheel on what we would call the passenger side of the car for the United States, because that would be the driver's side. You get what I'm saying, Joe? I sure do. So there are factories that are specifically built overseas to sell cars to that market and that market only. In some cases, ladies and gentlemen, it doesn't make any sense to build a factory here for a car that can only be sold in China. So some companies will build those cars over there and keep them over there, but that doesn't impact our market because they're not selling those cars here. What are you going to do? Build those cars there and ship them here and build their cars here and ship them there? Maybe that works, maybe it doesn't make sense. It's for foreign markets.

Now, you may say, well, I don't care. Either way, we should be doing everything here. Okay, well, folks, I'm sorry. The numbers don't back that up. And again, I believe in data and facts, unlike liberals who believe that you're a bad guy no matter what facts you have. Here are some numbers from the piece I thought were interesting. From 2004, Joe, to 2014, multinationals, in other words, what we would call big companies that have

companies, they have affiliates in the United States. So you have company X and company X owns company X1A in the United States and company X1B in China, but it's the same parent company. These multinationals, jobs in foreign affiliates from 2004 to 2014, in foreign affiliates, so overseas jobs, we would consider outsourcing has gone up. Here are the numbers. It were 9 million, 2004, it jumped to 13.8 million. So you may say, well, Dan, you're making our point. Jobs have jumped overseas. What's the good news here? Well, here's the good news. Employment in the parent companies in the United States jumped from 22.4 to 26.6 million. So I'm not saying there's

not been an impact to trade. Please, I get it. I totally understand that. I've done entire shows on that. So I'm not going to reiterate that now due to time constraints on the show. I've already talked about how there have been dislocations in local markets and there's no question people have lost their job, but you cannot take that information and extrapolate a larger argument that trade and the hiring of people overseas and offshoring and outsourcing, you cannot say and be factually correct that it has done major league damage to the United States workforce. The numbers do not support that assertion. And you can massage the numbers all you want.

They are never going to support that assertion. Multinational hiring has gone up, and so has employment in the United States in the same companies. You see what I'm saying,e company x right yeah their employment and company x1b in china which is their affiliate went up but so did the employment in the united states it the numbers the numbers don't add up here's another one wages are about 30 percent higher in multinational companies so again if a company is multinational and has jobs in the United States and jobs overseas, how is it that those companies are paying their employees more than the companies that don't have a multinational affiliate?

Folks, again, I believe in numbers and data. I'm sorry, I can't just like fall in line because somebody said that, oh, this is a talking point. We should all be supporting. It doesn't make it true. Here's another one. Capital, and by the way, the writer of the article is Matthew Slaughter. He's a dean of a business school. I think it was Dartmouth, but I'll put the article in the show notes. Capital investment in these multinational companies that have jobs in the United States and jobs overseas outperform the U.S. private sector in total.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I don't get the argument. I get the argument that there have been areas of the country, and the Rust Belt's been a real victim of this, that have been hurt by the entrance of the Chinese workforce, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, followed by millions of people into the workforce like that, bang, that has caused dislocation in very specific areas. And I don't mean to minimize the struggle of those folks at all. But extrapolating that to a larger economic argument that trade is in fact a bad thing and outsourcing and US multinationals hiring people

overseas and it's cost jobs at home. Extrapolating that and saying that, it's not factually correct. Capital investments hire multinationals, salaries are higher in multinationals, and US hiring has gone up in these multinationals on our shores, despite rising overseas. So it's just factually incorrect to say that it's costing the United States jobs in total. It's unquestionably costing people jobs in specific industries. But I don't understand what your solution is. Your solution is to do what? To impose tariffs on every single product that's imported into the United States to

make everything U.S. consumers buy more expensive under the belief that that's somehow going to cause economic growth? Folks, if a family has $1,000 a week in expendable income, say they pay $1,000 for their bills and they have another $1,000, Joe, which they spend on whatever it may be, going out at night, football games, entertainment, movies, whatever it may be. If you up the price of those items, whatever it may be. If you up the price of those items, whatever they may be, you bought your kid an extra football to play around with, and you make the football, because we put a tariff on footballs, $10 more expensive. That's just $10 less he has to spend anywhere else,

on a movie, on a haircut. I don't get how you're doing the economics, how you think this is going to make anybody richer. And for those of you, because I did the show on tariffs the other day, and I do always appreciate the feedback on the show. I forget, someone emailed me and said, yeah, but they're costing American jobs and those people could go and spend money.

Folks, I get it. I just said I understand the dislocation in specific markets. But even with the steel tariff, if you want to get specific, I gave you the numbers last week. The numbers don't back you up. We imported a steel tariff under George W. Bush and lost 200,000 jobs in steel industries to protect 150,000 jobs. I said that right. I didn't say that backwards. You wanted to protect 150,000 jobs in the steel industry, and you cost the overall economy 200,000 jobs because people that were relying on steel for homes and everything else had to pay more and had to hire less people.

Folks, it just doesn't make sense. All right, one last story quick, and we'll rock and roll. By the way, have you signed up for CRTV yet? If you haven't, we've got my show coming soon. I promise you. I don't have a time yet, but we're closing in on some final details. Go sign up, CRTV.com. Use promo code Bongino, B-O-N-G-I-N-O.

You'll get Steven Crowder's show, Mark Levin's show, Steve Dace's show, Michelle Malkin's show, all available for the price of a chicken sandwich for a month. You can't beat it. So go use promo code Bongino. It'll be about eight bucks a month, B-O-N-G-I-N-O, and sign up at CRTV.com today. I really appreciate it. One last thing. Yesterday, the narrative doesn't take a day off, even when tragedy strikes, Joe. Yesterday, I'm watching the news and I'm in doing Mark's show, and I'm like, I can't believe it. The Washington Post, breaking news, Trump is under investigation for obstruction. Ladies and gentlemen, for the fifth, sixth, seventh time on the show, the president of the

United States oversees the FBI. The FBI is not N-O-T, all in caps with an exclamation point, an independent agency. That is a fallacy. It is not correct. We want them to be independent thinkers. We don't want the president to unduly influence them when he doesn't have to. But saying that the FBI is an independent agency is nonsense. It is not true. The FBI director is appointed by the president. They fall under the executive branch. They are not a separate branch of government. The reason that is, is we want political accountability everywhere. Independence sounds good as a talking point until you think through what you just said.

You really want an FBI out there that doesn't fall under the president? Not that I don't trust the men and women, but you really sure you want a criminal investigative and counterterror agency that's responsible to no one? What if they come after you? I'm not saying that would happen. I trust the men and women there. Thank God they're not an independent agency, but everybody gets oversight. The oversight of the FBI, Joe, is the presidency, and the oversight of the presidency is impeachment and the voters. That's how it works. suggesting that Trump, because yesterday the news broke that the Washington Post, breaking news, Trump's under investigation for obstruction of justice, which is not a breaking story at all. This has been talked about for months, but the Washington Post needs their clicks. Folks, you can't obstruct justice when you're the president of the United States and you, quote, hope an investigation into Mike Flynn, which was said by Trump to Jim Comey, according to Jim Comey's account, you cannot obstruct justice.

The president, if he wanted to, can order the investigation into Mike Flynn to stop. I'm not suggesting it would be politically a good idea. I'm not suggesting it's the morally upstanding thing to do. I'm not suggesting it would be wise. I'm just suggesting to you that it's possible and it can happen. And you arguing that it can't happen and that somehow is obstruction of justice is simply factually incorrect. The president could pardon Flynn today if he wants to. These are plenary powers. He could pardon the president. He could pardon Flynn today and make this whole thing go away.

And you know what? It might not be wise, but there's nothing anybody can do about it. This is not an obstruction of justice case. You don't like the president's decisions running the FBI, vote for someone else. But this is a nonsense story. It's completely made up. You can't obstruct justice when the administration of justice falls under the purview of the president of the United States. Now, if it was an investigation to him, it would be a different story, but that's not what's happening here. He actually encouraged

the investigation into his, quote, satellites. It's the investigation into Flynn that he said, I hope this will, you can find a path to make this go away. It's not obstruction of justice. You're just making it up. All right, folks, thanks again for tuning in. I will see you all tomorrow. You just heard the Dan Bongino Show. Get more of Dan online anytime at conservativereview.com. Get more of Dan online anytime at conservativereview.com. You can also get Dan's podcasts on iTunes or SoundCloud. And follow Dan on Twitter 24-7 at DBongino.