AND NOW THEY'RE ADMITTING IT.

That litany of numbers that you just provided was the single best economic miracle report in the media that I've seen all election season, right? I've been pointing this out as well, and the media intentionally buried this story, and the Trump administration did a very bad job of getting around that, of finding a way to get the truer message out.

And now we learn from Van Jones, that the Democrats were way ahead of the Republicans in terms of getting a message out.

And what bothers me about it is first, well, let's remember, Van Jones is the $100 million man.

That's how much Jeff Bezos gave Van Jones After Jeff went into space and made some joke about, hey, Amazon paid for this and got criticized for it, gave him $100 million.

I don't know what he ever has done with it since.

But now comes this American network, this American accountability network, founded only in 2025, a budget of less than $300,000.

NOW THEY'RE TRYING TO TANK THE STOCK MARKET, TANK THE TECH STOCKS AND GET RID OF DATA CENTERS, GIVING CHINA A LEG UP.

CAN YOU BREAK DOWN WHAT IN THE WORLD KIND OF A DEAL ZUCKERBERG MADE WITH CALIFORNIA SO THEY DON'T TOUCH HIS BILLIONS? I'M CONFUSED.

YEAH, IT'S INTERESTING THAT THE BOARD OF META, THE OWNER OF FACEBOOK, WAS SO INTENT ON KEEPING HIM OFFICIALLY IN CALIFORNIA THAT THEY'RE WILLING TO PUT UP BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN SHAREHOLDER MONEY.

AND THIS MEANS THAT THE CALIFORNIA PROPOSAL NOW OSTENSIBLY IS TAKEN WAS SUPPOSED TO BE SOAP THE BILLIONAIRES TAX AND SPREAD IT TO RANK AND FILE SHAREHOLDERS OF FACEBOOK, INCLUDING TEACHER PENSION FUNDS AND NURSE RETIREMENT FUNDS AND FIREFIGHTER FUNDS.

THAT'S WHAT THEY'VE DONE HERE.

AND IT'S RATHER BELATED BECAUSE LET'S ALSO REMEMBER that one trillion dollars of the total two trillion held by billionaires in California, one trillion has already left the state in anticipation of this passing.

And that includes the billions held by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google.

So the losses already are counting.

IN

WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF AMERICA'S SPENDING PROBLEMS WHEN PEOPLE MAKING HALF A MILLION BUCKS A YEAR STILL CAN'T AFFORD STUFF? I DON'T KNOW IF AT THAT POINT THINGS ARE TOO EXPENSIVE OTHER THAN PEOPLE JUST CAN'T SAVE, RIGHT?

You know, we can say, we can clutch our pearls and say, what was me and blame inflation.

The fact is that any couple making $500,000, they do not have to live paycheck to paycheck.

That is their choice.

They are spoiled.

We live a very rich lifestyle even at the lower levels of our earnings.

We have giant flat screen TVs.

WE'D BE GETTING FURTHER AND FURTHER AHEAD BUT WE'VE GOTTEN TO A POINT WHERE EVERY YEAR PEOPLE JUST WANT TO KEEP BUYING THE NEWEST, GREATEST STUFF AND WE'RE SPENDING OURSELVES AND ENTITLING OURSELVES BEYOND OUR PAYCHECK CAN EVER KEEP UP WITH.

That's how he made the deal.

And the journalists would have kicked and screamed about that.

And where are they on this? It's a pretty striking development, isn't it? And now in the old days when CBS News was a powerhouse and when CNN was the admiration of cable news, there used to be talk about a merger between these two as being ideal.

And so you cut to 20 years later and they both are under the same roof, but it's of, you know, not under their own power.

It's under a new owner.

The question is how much will change? I don't think anything will change.

I mean, what should change is a lot because CNN is not a financial powerhouse.

All the news was filtered through the big three evening news and the morning show, and it was all the same groupthink, right?

Please, please.

Okay.

GDP current growth going at more than 5%, real growth after deducting inflation.

Uh, previous quarter, second revised upward.

Um, median income in the US just rose to an all-time record high of $87,000 a year.

In Europe, median income is $24,000 a year.

US poverty rate just hit an all-time low of 10%.

So I wanted to ask you your thoughts on that.

Yeah.

which has already led, according to Chamath Palihapitiya, to the draining of a trillion dollars of the $2 trillion in California billionaire wealth because of the threat of this tax.

Well, this interview is extraordinary for a couple reasons.

You know, Ari's out shilling a new book, of course.

That's why he's doing the interviews.

And he's one of these three extraordinary sons, three extraordinary brothers.

Ezekiel is the oldest.

he's just such a show

Yeah.

Hence, this newly contrived really warning that AI could kill us all.

The problem with it is that if you are a company making stuff, and that stuff manages to hurt consumers, then you shall be held liable under the law and with the punishment of, uh, of lawsuits that could put you out of business.

And so don't warn us that this stuff could get out of control.

You should control it.

Just today, uh, OpenAI delayed its release six point one of this thing called Astro, a, a chatbot, because it was out of alignment.

And what they mean now for alignment is will it do what you tell it or will it end up doing more than what you told it? And so it's kind of out of alignment.

this AI, don't you think this was a- all to do with the AI bubble over evaluation of con- uh, stocks?

What are your thoughts about that?

Yeah, the entire media – and I was part of them for more than 30 years – has changed from a watchdog on government to a lapdog for Democrats.

That's entirely true.

CNN, MSNOW, and Politico kind of deserve what happened to them.

And while they're claiming, and so is Jackie Hendricks, the White House reporter for Fox News, while they're claiming this is a terrible violation of the First Amendment, the First Amendment says government shall impose No prior restraint on content you want to publish, things you want to say.

Well, these guys can go right outside in front of the White House and continue to say all of the inaccurate, slanted, skewed, biased things they want.

No one has restrained that right for them to lie to the American people whatsoever.

Remember him?

Well, Trump News, they planned this thing well in advance.

Yeah, that had to be set up, that kind of infrastructure.

And then we're told, well, the five companies that make up the pool coverage, all the main guys, the five horsemen of the lib-wit media, we're not gonna be covering the pool.

And we thought, well, oh my gosh, we're gonna have no video of the president.

There's video all over the place on the X platform.

You know, there's 100 million Americans on X and there's 340 million people in the U.S.

I urge more of us to get on that platform.

Yeah, I was told Barack Hussein Obama was behind this AI propaganda.

What else has Dirty Act Blue been up to? What's bugging you about Act Blue?

Well, what's bugging me is that this report, it's the third one from a couple of these House committees, all of this sturm and drang, all the king's horses and all the king's men, and still, I see no path up to what seems a likely possibility, which is that Democrats orchestrated this.

Leading Democrats may have ordered ActBlue to do all of this, to be this lenient, maybe to mislead Congress, which they did do.

Even their own internal study found that.

They not only took foreign money, but I wonder also, Dan, whether the foreign money thing is a distraction.

This group, ActBlue, took in $20 billion for Democrats.

It took in $3.5 billion in 2024.

So Dennis says, hey, Jim Jordan at Judiciary, hey, Comer at Oversight, all those guys should be looking into Democrat leadership to see if we can find some emails, some text messages somehow that proves the Democrat Party was the one ordering Act Blue to take this foreign money that probably should never have been accepted into our political system.

They've destroyed that once very beautiful city.

And here's the thing about feeling safe.

There's this, I forget the name of the guy.

Anyway, the basic things of civilization that you need.

And the very first one is safety, that feeling of safety.

Before you can have a good life, go to work, build something, safety.

And yet you don't have that in Portland.

And people don't want to go there anymore.

Uh, those of us that are on the conservative side of things, libertarian side of things, we're kind of tired of, of really the whole West Coast, but Pacific-- uh, specifically the Pacific Northwest, of just always being this liberal nightmare.

Yeah, a parody of itself.

You know, some people have asked, "Dennis, you lived in Brooklyn for 43 years." I moved down to SoFlo, down to South Florida, only in January.

"Why didn't you write a book about New York gone crazy?" Well, New York's so big and diverse, it's hard to kill, and it takes years before bad effects really show up.

In Oregon, 4.2 million people, it's a canary in the coal mine for blue states and liberal policies that are morally high-minded, but voters and politicians ignore the bad outcomes.

They show up in sharper relief in Oregon, and they show up sooner, and they're showing up like crazy, okay? You have problems such as super high taxes.

Something like 68%, I think it is, of Oregoners say, "Oh, we're headed in a seriously wrong direction." Taxes are one of the biggest reasons companies leave.

... she's not getting the support from the RNC.

What do you think?

Entirely, it's a lack of discipline.

You know, I mean, our grandparents saved vastly better than our children do, although my daughter is an inveterate saver, a great saver, because I was pounding that into her from the time she was a little girl.

But people spend way too much, and spending is the enemy of investing.

And they can say that they don't earn enough in their jobs, but move to a cheaper neighborhood, move to a cheaper state.

When I left New York after 40 years in January and moved to SoFlo, South Florida, I instantly got a 14% raise on my earnings, because that's how much combined state and city taxes, uh, w- were taken out of anything I earned up in New York.

And so there are things we could do.

Can we not come up with a system where the reporting of data is different than it was 50 and 75 years ago, subject to, uh, filling out a, a form and mailing it to Washington? I don't understand why the data is so poor, but I'm led to believe it's because of the methodology in collecting it.

But but before we do tell my audience who you are, give us a little bio background and, you know, how you be in life.

Good.

Well, it's so nice of you because, you know, nothing's more fun than talking about myself.

I am a longtime rabble rouser like yourself.

I spent over three decades as a journalist with four of the biggest media platforms in the world, The Wall Street Journal.

I was the managing editor of Forbes magazine.

Then I left that to be an anchor at CNBC and then I was an anchor at Fox Business.

But I mean, we should take a little bit of a page out of their book and at least all get aligned on the things that we believe in.

What happened in

Oregon? Yeah, we're already seeing the outcomes.

You know, I lived in Brooklyn for 43 years.

I moved down to SoFlo.

South Florida only in January.

So gee, why didn't I write a book on New York going to the hell paved with socialism? Well, it's because New York is so big and fat and diverse and strong that it'll take forever to kill it.

So the outcomes don't show up as in sharp relief.

What was the effect of decriminalization on businesses and people in the state of Oregon?

They were roasting him while he's speaking.

Yes, of course.

Well, it's extraordinary that they carried it at all.

And had it not been the correspondence dinner, they would not have carried it.

But it was about them.

So, yeah, they're going to carry that.

But then Trump trumps them by doing a whole hour.

They're so full of themselves, that national press corps, that they can't take jokes towards themselves, right?

And I think that there almost needs to be a mindset mentality change.

This is...

Look, come on, Jeff, this is way too negative.

This is way too hopeless, this picture you're painting.

I just saw a headline move today that there's this burst of entrepreneurialisms and more startups than ever before.

Today, there's so much infrastructure that you can start an Insta firm.

You don't have to employ an entire logistics supply chain.

How do you how do you feel like that is going to play into this upcoming scenario between capitalism versus socialism? All

They're not just full blown socialists.

Their 1968 Chicago convention.

I mean, it's amazing what's happened to them.

It's amazing that New York City, the most capitalist city in the world, has been taken over by a commie mamdani, the socialist mayor.

I mean, and it's because for a decade, the Democrats have had almost no other strategy other than oppose Trump.

They're going to miss him so much when the president is gone.

Because everyone dances to that tune, whether you love him or despise him.

Although, can we expect that that translates into votes? That's the real question.

In the past

10 years up to 2022...

New York has lost $10 billion a year in tax revenue as billionaires and multimillionaires move out of the city.

And that's just up to 2022.

It's going to be even more significant now with Mamdani talking about a billionaire tax, with Democrats talking about that.

Look at what happened in California, Tim, right? $2 trillion in billionaire wealth held by 100 billionaires in California.

They start talking about this idea of a wealth tax, and suddenly...

I did want to discuss the new book, Oregoners, How One State Chased Away Businesses and People.

They're feeling drunk with power.

They're feeling drunk with power.

They've taken over the Democrat party when the DSA has 120,000 members out of 340 million people in America, right? This is look in part, the only way socialism can take over.

And the only way Democrats can take over is by fear mongering and hanging crepe and saying everything sucks.

And the thing is we learned during the world cup, didn't we? Europeans came here and they loved it.

They were astonished at our bountiful grocery stores, at having 11 different varieties of Dr. Pepper on sale, at refills of free coffee and ice water and air conditioning.

They said this on the X platform, Americans are spoiled and ungrateful.

Isn't it remarkable, Dennis? Isn't it remarkable that these people sit there and pontificate on their iPhone, on the Internet, and on X owned by Elon Musk about the evils of capitalism, that they use every tool that capitalism created, smartphones and computers and communication and X, right?

I don't even really, I mean, I understand the concept of rent control, but how does this happen in New York City? Is it something that only exists in New York City? How long can this go on? How often does this happen? I know, like, I listen to Seinfeld, right, about rent control, but how does it actually play out?

The worry is that something like this could spread and it would be even worse for the housing market.

I love what you just said about that picture of those people looking like they'd been taken hostage.

And notice, Scott, they were legal immigrants who went and followed the rules.

He didn't dare bring his illegal immigrant friends in there, otherwise ICE might show up, right? So rent control in New York City makes them look good.

Oh, I kept a campaign promise.

I'm freezing rents now.

So it means that if you've got to keep rent stable in one location you have, but your cost will increase, that means places where you can raise the rent likely will be up and higher than it should be.

... please continue on this one

...

I, I think it's great that, that, that Pete in, uh, or, in New Jersey called, uh, to, to weigh in, because one of the problems right now with online, uh, discourse, that for- surveys show 40% of Americans are, are too shy to post because they fear retribution.

They fear getting shouted down by all those jerks in their mom's basement exercising keyboard courage.

So to call in like this- And weighing like this is so important, right? Because what good is the First Amendment and free speech if we don't bother to exercise it? And, you know, y- nothing will change unless you complain and push back.

Nothing can get better.

And yet if all you do is complain, and that's what we have from the other side, that's what we have from socialists, they keep talking about how bad America is.

I mean, what's there to say? Because, uh, Nick said, I think, a, a very profound bit of information there for the audience.

We're a representative democracy, right.

We are seeing, you know, the, the, the fruits of seeds planted by anti-American forces 30, 40 years ago in academia, in education, in K through 12.

You know, in Oregon, the kids, you know, the fourth graders, they rank 48th in the nation and 46th in math and re- a- and, uh, a- and English, you know, reading.

Uh, uh, they're way down there, though they spend almost $20,000 per student, and it's because the school system and the unions there are not teaching the, America's history.

They're not teaching that we are the greatest nation on earth, and we are.

They instead are teaching, oh, stolen land, and LGBTQ, and, uh, s- special intersectionality, and political correctness.

Oh, my gosh.

Exactly.

Does there have to be a majority vote? Can the can the chair make the decision on his own? Who decides the interest rates ultimately?

It is that committee.

And that's why by Trump's just appointing one guy, it's not like he's going to be able to change everything.

And so Warsh is now working on a personal campaign to build up rapport, I would imagine, with his fellow committee members.

I really think, though, that this will be temporary because all of the inflation data we're seeing is driven by the oil.

And and I studied this 30 or 40 years of data previously.

And the higher oil prices do not lead to long term inflation because we end up spending our money on gasoline and we can't spend it on higher prices for other goods.

Where does it all go?

Is she mental?

I mean, that thing was put on by 100,000 people were crazy enough to sign that petition.

But that's going to be on the ballot about Oregon craziness, basically, at a time when she's trying to get reelected.

So I think that's another factor.

Christine Drazen, the Republican, this is a rematch.

But in 2022, you had a third candidate, the wonderful Betsy Johnson.

I just love her.

make sense for me.