Joe's Star Spangled Breakfast Cereals!

Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio the George Washington Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty.

Arm Strong and Getty and no he Armstrong and Getty.

It's like you right now should come out and be like, you know what, the young man who's about to win the state championship in the long jump in female sports, that's that that shouldn't happen. You as the governor should step out and say no, no, And I appreciate, and but like, would you do something like that, would you say no men in female sports?

Well, it's I think it's an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that.

What are you talking about? He didn't even say anything there. How did it become controversial and he got attacked from the left for betraying the transgender community.

He didn't.

He went wishy washy on that.

Well, although he broke cranks. It was like the far left, the intersectionality crowd. It's like, you know, the the Russian soldiers on the front in Ukraine. If say so much as turn in the wrong direction their own people shoot them. And Gavin showed signs of betraying transgender women.

And you can't betray anybody.

The Eskimos need to stick with, the transgenders need to stick with, the immigrants need to stick with. The Palestinians need to you know.

Now I heard he walked with that back over the weekend.

Do we have that anywhere? Has anybody got that in written or audio form? I meant to look that up, that he walked that back after getting blasted by a number of your more woke democrats in the country. And again he didn't even make a strong declarative sentence there. He just said, oh, no, I agree, it's an issue of fairness, okay, and you think it's fair to what allowed transgender girls unfair exactly sicily you still haven't said.

Right, right, yeah, and yet that was way too much for their crowd. But anyway, that whole you know, NATO of intersectionality, whatever you want to describe it, that's how you end up with something as patently absurd as queers for Palestine. I mean, what could be more idiotic then? You know, people who would be immediately tortured, killed, throw off buildings, et cetera, rallying in favor of Islamism. Anyway, Speaking of Gaviy Newsome, his state of kel Unicornia. How

Now?

US News and World Report appears to exist only for ranking various things these days, and their methodology is certainly worth griping about. But I think generally speaking, if you're ranked, say, forty seventh in education, you're not great at it. Can we all agree on that, at least broadly speaking. But your top state overall, ladies and gentlemen, think about it. Lowish crime, solid economy, good education that's probably not real,

Ten for overall all criteria.

Yeah, your top ten mass counting up to number one, Massachusetts, Florida, Washington, Vermont, Iowa, Idaho, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire utah of your body.

Really small and or low population states. There, not all of them, but a lot of them.

Yes, I would agree, Yeah yeah, and some right, some left, some center, blah blah blah. Again, you could certainly quibble with the various methodologies.

I always keep dougging into it.

I mean, because if you have, for instance, like Illinois, Let's see where do they rank in education? Because Illinois got a number of eminent universities, they ranked quite high, sixteenth in education. But I guarantee you elementary through high school education is unforgivably horrifically.

That's a state and that's what I want ranked.

Yeah, yeah, really in a lot of ways, because that there's a direct correlation between that and whether they're they're teaching the basics. Actually, here are allegedly your worst states, and these might surprise as well. Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Michigan, Oklahoma, South Calabama leading the country and shooting criminals in the chest right well, and population growth as a percentage, so it ain't that crappy. Alabama, Alaska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi, New Mexico.

And wah wah wah.

Sad Marty Ga trombone for Louisiana. It's a funny punch line if I hadn't stumbled over it. But some of these numbers, I mean, like South Cakilac, which I know pretty well, is nineteenth for environment.

What does that even mean?

I don't know?

See, And that's the trouble I have, Especially.

If you get into overall ratings, you'd throw in a whole bunch of squishy numbers and come up with one big, giant squishy number the environment.

I don't know.

And it's quite possible that I would rank them completely upside down on their criteria for whether I want to live there or not.

You know what I mean.

If they say that they rank it high because they have better recycling programs with the garbage, I don't care.

So I would have an inverse relationship with that. Yeah, let's see. Yeah, I'm looking.

Actually, I think the whole looking at their methodology might be interesting then more interesting than the actual the results.

You know. I'm on this.

I have been for a long time, this kick of public education and how we're failing so much that should be we should be talking about that all the time. How many people are graduating from your local grade school or high school?

That can read or do math.

That should everybody should know that off the top of their head those numbers, right.

Yeah, I would agree. I would agree completely. Who's doing the measuring and what are their standards? That's what you need to know. Oh, that reminds me on a completely different topic of the sky rocketing rate of autism diagnosis in the United States, and Alicia Finley, I think it was wrote a really interesting piece. And I have a kid, an adult child now, who's autistic, and I'm fairly up on this sort of thing, and I certainly have a.

Sympathetic view of it.

But this is a classic example of trying to understand what's happening in the modern world and plawing through the layer after layer of statistics and trying to figure out what's true and not. I believe firmly that there is a rise in autism in the United States. I have no idea what's costing with doubt actual cases of kids with the characteristics that.

Describe autism. Okay.

On the other hand, there have been all sorts of changes in diagnosis and in the financial rewards.

For school districts.

For instance, for kids diagnosed they get extra money and so to rely on any of the statistics. Well, Trump throughout the other day that we've gone from one in ten thousand kids it's diagnosed with autism, now it's one in thirty six.

There's something wrong, one in thirty six.

He said, A large measure of that statistic is just changes in incentives and diagnosis, but not all of it. And so I'm not leaping to some fist pounding, angry talk show host conclusion here. I'm just saying it's really difficult to figure out what's actually going on into what extent.

Yeah, and then, if I'm going to be fair, even though I complain, we complain constantly about how many layers of administration they've added to schools clear across the country, which is also true, all kinds of people that don't need to be there making a living in your school, getting the tax money, as opposed to getting into the classroom. If you got way more kids with autism and all

But do they really.

Yeah, and then if you I know, I know a lot about this, But it wants the infrastructure to deal with that is, the human infrastructure is huge and very expensive.

Right right, And where he's needed a beautiful example of a compassionate society, in my opinion, where it's legitimate.

Yeah, well, you know, you don't need all those layers of DEI chieftains and their and their armies.

That's a completely different thing. But was I gonna say.

I was gonna say, they're talking about you get down there their kids, and then the teachers, and you get all thets.

I forgot what I was gonna say. It's probably being out Trump. I mean.

The upside is I can uh hide my own Easter eggs. You know, I can watch the same sitcom over and over again, laugh every time because I never heard.

I don't remember the joke. The downside is I don't remember.

I was about to say, maybe we could get an official diagnosis out of you and get some gunman money for the show. Michael can be your minder. Michael, we'll cut you in on the profits. Were fair.

That sounds fine, fair minded. This is really bothering me. I can't think of this because this is an important topic.

It was a complex and last diagnosing more kids with more things, and so you got to have the humans there to deal with it.

And I don't know one more thought.

Bill Cassidy was a doctor, medical doctor, not a fake doctor like Jill Biden. He's a Republican senator and an r f K Jr. And he were disagreeing leading up to RFK Junior's hearings, right what do they call it, you know, consent hearings and and and RFK kept saying, hey, you show me the science that says these inoculations are not related to autism, and I will change my tune.

I will believe it.

And Bill Cassidy says, I brought him absolutely sterling, silver science, huge studies, carefully controlled, peer reviewed blah blah blah, that made the case. And he dismissed it out of hand and said, now I don't believe that stuff.

Oh really, I didn't hear that.

Yeah, and so Cassidy's really frustrating, frustrated with him that and and one of the reasons R F. K. Junior said, I don't believe that because of this paper here. Cassidy said that that paper has been discredited in every which way, And I have no horse in this race. It's just it's the methodology was terrible, but Harf Cages wouldn't believe it.

So it's, you know, tough to get to the truth these days. Yeah, it is.

And I have spent a lot of money and a lot of time, including this past weekend, on dealing with one kid that's got a variety of the problems that exists in this world.

But I'm not concerned they came from the vaccine. So that's just me. Send your emails to Joe if you have a different thought on that. I'm more on the way here.

If fetanyl ends, I think these will come off. But if fetanyl does not end, or he's uncertain about it, they will stay this way until he is comfortable. This is black and white. You got to save American lives. So with respect with respect to fetanyl, this is about the border and fetanyl.

That's Howard Lutnick to the Secretary Commerce talking about the tariffs, the fentanyl, the precursor chemicals at the very least, which come from China then flow through Mexico and to a lesser extent Canada in.

The United States.

And speaking of China, really interesting analysis I came across and troubling from a handful of the writers and analysts in the Wall Street Journal. Umbrella. It's about China's projection. They're waging a gray zone campaign. And here's what they mean by that, and it's, you know, the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, even up into the Himalayas. They're operating in the hazy zone between war and peace to extend their power.

Here's what it looks like.

Beijing carefully calibrates each move with the aim of staying just below the threshold of action that.

Could trigger outright conflict.

But step by incremental step, it is pushed deeper into contested areas, exhausting opponents and eroding their strength with a thousand cuts. What they're talking about is probes by warplanes, maneuvered by kost guard ships, or the creeping construction of new civilian settlements. They push you in the region right to the brink of war, over and over and over again, and they carefully calculate what's going to bring a shooting war on and calibrate just below that, over and over again.

And it's interesting.

This article is illustrated visually in a way that I wish we could show you well. Post it at an armstrong in getty dot com under hotlines. It'll probably get paywall, I don't know, but it shows the actual tracking of ships for instances little lines, and where there have been a bunch of ships circling an island or whatever, it becomes a very thick, heavy line. So you can look at what China's doing physically satellite images and plane tracking

Now I'm endlessly fascinated with the whole China thing, and I think everybody should be, because yeah, they're hell bent on taking over the world. Do you think there would be you could have when do we have the Beijing Olympics coming some medy google that real quick.

When we have the Olympics of Beijing? Wasn't that long ago? I remember, I was shocked that it happened. I didn't think it was like twenty twelve or something like that. But anyway we can look it up. That'll that'll never happen again. What do you got there? Oh no, No, the Winter Olympics isn't either.

Yeah, Putin promised he wouldn't evade during the Olympics.

It's what twenty two, Yeah, so it was right before the war in Ukraine. But I remember thinking then that I can't believe we're participating. I mean, the whole world is going to China and acting like they're just a regular country.

Surely we wouldn't now, but maybe we would. I don't know.

The un is ridiculous, Yes it is, and it's worth reviewing that whole system of little islands they created in the South China Sea, where they built them up but swore they wouldn't militarize them, then built you know, landing strips and said, but don't worry, we won't put weapons systems on them. And the reason that's been even more important than anybody realized is because now all those islands

That is really interesting.

I have things to say about that, but maybe some other time, because this topic will be around for a very long time.

Armstrong and Geeddy, now.

Look, I can't have you two at each other's throats, Okay, after all, I have a perfect record. Everyone who's ever worked for me has left on good terms and then gone on to write a book called The Man.

Who Ruined Everything.

So you too need to start acting like mature adults.

Okay, so let's begin with Marco Parno.

No Eli, I'm trying to talk to MARCOO.

What is that? What's this? What's this? Doing this? What's this? Nobody knows? Okay, it's his little dance. We let him do it. It's his least unsettling trick.

So that's from Saturday Night Live, which, weirdly, I'd like to actually talk to Lorden Mark Michaels about this. I mean, he's a genius of keeping that thing relevant over a half a century, but the opening thing is always so off putting to those of us who don't agree with his politics.

Then the rest of the show is sketch comedy. But you got like a big chunk of the country that can't get past your open every week.

So you're a sketch comedy that's just about any topic.

It's non political. The show is mostly.

Non political, but for a whole bunch of Saturday Night Live haters in this country, it's a political show because.

I only see your opening segment. Stop with it? Would you just stop?

Well, when your opening segment is a loud declaration of you're not welcome here every week.

It's an odd marketing.

Maneuver, right, But anyway, Elon now being portrayed by Mike Myers and I come back Saturday Night Live, and just the idea that Elon is now such a villain of the left is man who saw that coming ten years ago?

No, nobody, nobody. I mean, he was the leader of.

We need to go electric with cars, climate changes our biggest problem, you know, all that sort of stuff, and a hero of the left, and you know, I live in a part of the country, or people buying were buying Tesla's even though they didn't make sense, and we're way too expensive virtue signaling. Now it's flipped completely the opposite direction, as we all know. Over the weekend, hundreds of New Yorkers swarmed and shut down the Tesla dealer in Manhattan. They shut down a major car dealership, an

I saw a video.

I mean it was just one nut job running out of the street and pounding on a cyber truck in traffic.

I don't know what this is going to do to the value of Tesla's.

I almost want to buy a cyber truck now, just as a giant middle finger to the people who ate eln so much, because it's such a noticeable thing, just like blon so the folks who pull this.

Sort of thing. Back in twenty twenty.

Two found that twenty two percent of car shoppers surveyed said they would definitely consider a Tesla for their next vehicle, purchased twenty two percent. By last summer, the percentage you dropped to seven percent, dropped by more than two thirds, roughly in line with Lincoln.

But it's now more popular with Republicans than Democrats. Even though they're not actually probably going to buy the car, their view of it is higher.

Yeah, yeah, it's It's definitely an unprecedented alignment of a product with a political point of view in a way that you know, it's not like, I mean, Target was selling repugnant items for confused adolescents during their whole up with trans thing. Okay, Tesla's just you get in it, you go to the store, and then you come back home again. It's not like it's plays Trump speeches and that you can't turn them off or.

It'll you know, it'll only take you.

To the the VA, you know, any and not to the ballet or.

The self driving system runs over government workers if it.

Sees them right.

It's an agnostic product. It's just but uh, well, more on that in a second. Would there's a we got some sort of protest locally you have, Katie, There was a protest at the Tesla dealership on Arden Arcade on Saturday. More than one hundred protesters showed up and they lined both sides of the thoroughfare. One hundred's a pretty good turnout on a Saturday for a car dealership because you don't like the politics of the guy who started it.

It's now a publicly traded company.

I mean, it's just I mean, boy cutting bud light because they had the trans person on there. You know, yeah, okay, I'll drink a different beer that tastes exactly the same or whatever.

I mean.

It's just there's so little but telling your car or attacking the dealership just seems.

So I don't know what.

The other aspect of it that we point out many times and we'll continue to is that the Trump voter is about half of America, or at least you know, Conservatives, Republicans, whatever it is, it's half of America. So you're saying that something that is aligned with half of the country is so repugnant and outrageous. I won't even be seen in it, even if it's a fabulous product. The whole up with trans thing is a tiny percentage, So again, it's just a poor comparison.

I think.

Yeah, And then you have the weird aspect that's unique that Tesla's main appeal was too progressives to start with, right, because it was more of a gesture than a reality of you were perfectly okay with the car you had before. You're not actually affecting climate change by getting a Tesla.

But you know that whole thing.

So the Washington Post has an article anger at Elon Musk turns violent with molotov cocktails and gunfire at Tesla dealerships, and uh, here's one of the breakdowns of the story. Anger at Elon Musk is turning violent. People are burning his cars and shooting his stores, leaving front like Tesla workers and ordinary vehicle owners to bear the brunt of the anger incited by Musk's politics. Is how they write it. He incited this. They have no coneyway.

What am I supposed to do? He incited me?

And that's in the New York Post, Washington Post, a Washington Post.

Okay, yeah, elon Musks because he is a fiscal conservative and supports Trump, has incited you to shooting up a Tesla dealership.

That's an interesting way good left wing journalism right there.

Yeah, unbelievable. See what they did, well caught? Yeah, I said, well I should dig this up because this is really good. Go ahead in a way.

It's kind of ironic that and we've been saying this for a long time, and this, I think this is proof that the whole electric vehicle thing is not clearly a net positive for the environment. Even if you are staunchily in favor of doing whatever is best environmentally, it is far far from indisputable that electric cars do anything good because the battery and the weight and the tires and the excavation and the materials and the rearers.

And the mining and blah blah blah, blah blah. We've all gone over that many times.

But isn't this proof that since it was just symbolic anyway, well you might as well stop buying them because it was just symbolic anyway.

Right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean Tesla is the most is the most valuable car dealership in the world because of symbolism, not because there are no numbers to back that up.

It doesn't make.

Any sense to one as soever. It's such a tiny number of cars. That's fine motor car indeed. But somebody made the point. I remember who it was. Can you imagine if MAGA was vandalizing electric vehicles across the what a news story it would be and how it would be portrayed right as a bunch of science denying poltroons. But when lefties are attacking an electric car dealership at they were incited by the evil.

Hitler want to be Elon Musk.

They are incited into mostly peaceful protests. Yesh, And we mentioned this earlier in the show. Tesla's stock has dropped forty five percent since December. That is extraordinary, and it's still valued at eight hundred and forty seven billion dollars, more than any other car company.

Which is inexplicable.

Yeah, the percentage of Democrats had said they consider buying a Tesla declined from twenty three percent last summer to I guess those two summers ago, twenty three percent to thirteen percent.

Recently.

Over that period, the percentage would be Republican buyers grew from fifteen to twenty six percent.

That's funny, isn't that something?

And again that is a would consider because I don't think Republicans are gonna buy Tesla's. Most of the places Republicans live is not that handy a vehicle for them.

Is this the inevitable fallout of a society that's gone from hardly thinking about politics at all to obsessing about it all the time and identifying ourselves as one thing or another might be?

So it is worth telling you, I gotta.

Start, you know, Joe's star spangled breakfast cereals.

Then we'd expanded Jim shoes.

Of course Trump has already kind of done that, but Joe's star spangled, but be the brand. We'd have star spangled poasters.

Pens, clothing, This reminding nasal spray for allergy season. I'm stealing this from Sarah. I isger of the Dispatch, so all credit to her for bringing this to my attention. I'm not pretentding I caught onto this on my own, but she was talking about it on the Dispatch podcast.

The other day.

So down in Texas, this guy pranked one of his friends and it worked, which gets to your point. So this this dude claimed to a bunch of people there's a Texas chili cookoff going on sort of thing, and claim to the friends that you know, beans in chili is a woke thing, and how real chili only ever had meat in it, and back in the day the wolkester is trying to get us off of meat and convince us that we needed to eat beans, got it into chili and made all this different sort of stuff.

But anyway, so this chili guy.

Started taking beans out of the chili, making the declaration that I'm not this is not woke chili. And then the dude had to go to the other dude and say, I was just kidding, that was a joke. I was that isn't true, and then he got very very angry.

Yeah.

If somebody convinced me that only progressive was like tomato sauce on pizza and that grape jelly is really the conservative way to go, I'm still eating the hole right, Okay, it doesn't make me a transgender or or whatever woke or you know, the sanctuary said, I'm for good pizza and cars that run.

And yeah, it's just what's the matter with everybody calmed down? Yeah, makes it difficult, makes it difficult. Oh, I know I shouldn't mention. We're not a stock show. But this is, in all fairness.

The way that Tesla could drop forty five percent since December is he had a huge bump after the election. Tesla stock shot through the roof after the election. He was already high, but so that has been erased since the election, and now it's.

Back to where it was already very very high before.

So ah, oh, an important asterisk right there.

Yeah, fair to mention, But that other stuff about how popular it is among the republics and Democrats.

That's all true. We got a lot more in the ways today.

Here there are battles, I mean intense battles taking place.

There's video of Russians.

Making their way through abandoned gas pipes to try and get to the Ukrainians to fight of drone strikes on Ukrainian tanks in that area of Kursk. Why is that so intense? Why is it so important? Because Ukrainians hope to hold that ground in order to negotiate a swap of some kind of territory, territorial swap. I mean, that's what we perceive the Ukrainians want to do. Now, if they lose that ground and the Russians are clearly determined

Now that's a very good question, Cure Simmons of NBC, and we're I don't quite understand some of the strategy. Ucia really went hard at Ukraine over the weekend. Probably worth playing this back and forth with Trump and a reporter. Do you, as a president, think that Vladimir Putin is taking advantage of the US pause right now on intelligence and military aid to Ukraine.

I actually think he's doing what anybody else would do.

I think he's.

I think he wants to get it stopped and settled. And I think he's hitting him harder than he's been hitting him, And I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now. He wants to get it ended, and I think Ukraine wants to get it ended. But I don't see it's crazy. They're taking tremendous punishment.

I don't understand that position at all, nor do I doesn't make any sense to me. Well, the Ukrainians resisted the invasion of a hostile.

Neighbor, so they wouldn't die anybody else would have done and live under the thumb of a dictator, and so we stopped. Now today Trump has said, oh, we're going to start the intelligence sharing up real soon again.

So maybe we are.

I don't know, but we stopped sharing intelligence, which I guess is more important than practically anything else. You know, several days back sharing intelligence with Ukraine, Russia attacks the be Jesus out of him. Trump's asked about that, he says, well, Putin's doing what anybody would do. He wants to end this thing, so he's gonna kill as many innocent Ukrainians as possible so they'll submit and he gets to take as much of their country. I don't I don't get

Yeah, I was kicking around social media over the weekend. Always a mistake, but and it was funny because there was kind of like an overlap between the situation in Syria right now where the new regime which is the former al Kada guys are fighting tooth and nail and all sorts of people are being killed in the streets

If at some point it becomes clear that we're really sticking it to Putin behind the scenes, or about to really stick it to Putin, and this was all part of a strategy or whatever, I will openly admit that, I promise, But right now, when ya ever gonna say anything that even hints at Putin being a bad guy or he did something he shouldn't have done that is awful as opposed to well, Putin's doing what anybody would do.

He's trying to end this.

I would like to see a little more effort out of Ukraine and trying to end this. So the guy who's bombed a hotel over the weekend and killed people.

Is trying to end the war.

The side that is continuing to defend itself and doesn't want to just give up is the problem.

Yeah.

I read one analyst trying to explain how that was five dimensional chess to bring Putin to the table or something. But the idea that weakening Ukraine will bring Putin to the table sooner is bizarre to me.

Right, I don't understand why, And so far there's been no real word out of Putin's side that he Everybody likes this idea, but Putin, Why would I if I'm Putin?

Stop now?

Okay, the United States is finally tired of this with all their support.

Cool.

Now I got a chance to actually get what I originally wanted the whole damn country.

Yeah.

Well, this guy's point of view is that Putin is so much weaker domestically speaking than people are talking about that ending it would be great for him.

See there you go. That's the sort of thing. And if that turns out to be true, I'm more than willing to say Trump new things. We didn't know it was three dimensional chess. Brilliant blah blah, blah, But I don't know that that's the case. And again, you got this whole giant idea of China, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, Greenland, everything, that big face of influence that people keep talking about. Are we gonna be allowed to uh have a national debate about that at some pointer?

I don't know how that's gonna play out. Yeah, yeah, don't know. Man.

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