Experts Were Wrong. The Economy’s Strong—But the Fed Won’t Budge.

 

I’d like to talk about the economy here at the beginning of August. We’ve just finished July. We have some of the July reports, but mostly, they’re still from June. If you look at the three or four main categories that adjudicate the health or the malady of an economy, they’re pretty good.

GDP came in at 3.0. That was not predicted to be that high. The inflation rate may have just come out for July. There are different reports, but it’s about 2.7%. It was 2.6% in May. January was 3.0%. For the year, it’s about 2.4%. So, inflation is still tolerable. It’s not growing—an annualized rate at 2.4%.

So, you have a good GDP, you have a good inflation rate, you have a good jobs report. We’re at about 4.1% unemployment in the month of June. We picked up 150,000 new jobs—that wasn’t predicted. As far as money coming into the Treasury and going out, we had a historical May. We’ll wait and see what June and July are like, but we actually had more money coming into the Treasury than the government spent.

I want to gauge the reaction to this good news. Of course, we expect the Left to discount it. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that these figures are all bogus, even though they’re from non-administration sources, government bureaucracies. We also had a member of Congress come on and say that Donald Trump fudged them.

On the GDP, we had The Wall Street Journal say, that’s just because GDP is measured also by imports and exports, and we had fewer imports and more exports. But isn’t that good? But they said that was an aberration.

So, we’ve had people attack this. Most of the people said, as far as more money coming in than going out, that’s only because of May, and it will never be true again.

Well, we’ve had Mays in 2024 or 2023, all the way back to 2017, the first year of the Trump administration. This was the only one in which we had more money coming in—a surplus.

Then we get to the question of Jerome Powell. He’s the head of the Federal Reserve. Usually, the Fed cuts rates when they’re worried about political and economic instability, and that means, basically, a recession.

Now, remember that The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and our main media organs all told us in May when Donald Trump was talking about “art of the deal” tariffs, “I’m gonna announce a high tariff, then negotiate down to 10 or 15%,” which is precisely what he did.

But nevertheless, they said at the beginning of August, midsummer, we were going to have high inflation or stagflation, bad job growth, static GDP, and a trade war along with a Wall Street collapse. Basically, a recession.

Well, Wall Street stock prices are at historical highs. Every one of those predictions was wrong. So, if they were wrong and the economy is not booming but strong, why would Powell keep interest rates at that 4.5% fed rate that translates into almost over 6% and near 7% 30-year mortgages?

After all, the Fed is supposed to lower rates when we have recession. With all this recessionary talk, you thought that he would lower rates. Now, he says he’s looking at the economy and he’s not lowering rates because he doesn’t yet see a recession?

But he’s been told that he was worried about the economy. If he’s worried about a trade war and tariffs and soft job growth—which was predicted but didn’t happen—why doesn’t he lower interest rates?

And the fact is, that if you look at the interest rates that he did cut right before the 2024 election and his all-over-the-map attitude toward interest rates today, there is no logic.

So, now he’s rejected the earlier prognosis that we were in a recession. It makes no sense.

Why is this important? Why is this important when the Washington Post says that the numbers are rigged or we’re really not as strong as we think we are with GDP, or Powell can’t be consistent and adjudicate rates going up or down based on recession or boom?

We’re paying $3 billion a day in interest. A day. Our defense budget costs less—that trillion-dollar defense budget—than the interest payments, per year. Donald Trump is trying to cut taxes and deregulate and grow the economy without increasing the deficit he inherited at about $2 trillion.

He thinks that eventually, an expanded economy will bring in new revenue—sort of supply-side economics—but in the short-term, he does not want to grow that deficit by giving tax cuts. So, what is he doing? He thinks the tariffs will bring in—without hurting GDP here or abroad—about a third of a trillion dollars.

He thinks if he can decrease the interest rate by a point or a point and a half, he might get another third of a trillion—maybe cut the interest cost by $1 billion a day down to $2 billion from $3 billion. So, you’re about one-third of the way to cut the deficit. That’s pretty good when you had tax cuts.

That won’t happen if the interest rates stay high and the economy stays solid and doesn’t give you any reason or worry over an inflationary spiral, which it hasn’t so far. Bottom line, things are going very well. All of the experts were wrong, and yet the experts do not admit they were wrong.

They say, “We were wrong,” privately, “but we’re going to be proved right because either we hope or we expect the economy to do poorly.”

My guess is, even if the economy cools down and does poorly, Powell will not cut interest rates. He has a personal stake in this. He feels aggrieved. He feels he has to be vindicated and he’s stubborn and he will not show the same flexibility he did during the campaign year 2024.

Leftist Elites Seek to Divide Us by Race

 

Recently, a large group of black youths began pummeling several white adults in downtown Cincinnati.

The original altercation apparently broke out between a black and white male in he-said/he-said fashion. But that dispute soon turned into a virtual free-for-all.

Numerous male and female black youths sucker-punched a middle-aged woman and a man. Others continued to kick or body slam the victims, who were sprawled on their backs and seemingly unconscious.There were many disturbing aspects to the beat-downs.

One, the violence broke out along racial and age fault lines. After the initial one-on-one dispute, groups of black youths swarmed solitary older white bystanders to pound them.

Two, the surrounding assembled group of black youths not only failed to intervene to restrain the bullies. They also recorded the beatings for social media and were heard cheering on the one-sided violence.

Three, there was neither a police presence nor any timely Good Samaritan interventions.

Instead, what ended the attacks was simply the fact that at least two of the targets appeared nearly comatose. So their assailants apparently concluded that their agenda of beating whites into unconsciousness was mostly complete.

Four, oddly few of the usual black spokespeople who habitually comment on interracial violence were to be seen.

During the fake Jussie Smollett attack, self-appointed leaders from Al Sharpton to Kamala Harris immediately issued warnings about so-called systemic white racism that had reared its ugly head to victimize Smollett.

Yet when it was revealed Smollett had concocted the entire charade—and even hired his own assaulters—there were few if any retractions from those once so eager to shout “racist!”

Such demagoguery is a well-known pattern dating back to the days of the Tawana Brawley rape hoax, the Duke Lacrosse charade, the Covington kids ruse, the Michael Ford “Hands-up-Don’t Shoot” fabrication, the “pseudo-transformation of George Zimmerman into a ‘white Hispanic,’” or the NASCAR noose fable.

Racialists too often concoct white racist attackers and go silent when the evidence proves fabricated—only to be primed to manipulate the next hoax.

Five, the media and authorities did their best to either hide or play down the violence.

City leaders, the chief of police, and the media variously blamed the mass black-on-white violence on 1) social media, 2) the original one-on-one dispute, 3) alcohol, 4) the lack of civilian intervention to stop the violence, and 5) a festival atmosphere—anything except endemic racial hatred shown toward whites from the crowd of black youths.

Six, had a gang of white toughs beat middle-aged African-Americans senseless, recorded it, and cheered on the violence, there would have been immediate national outrage.

Nor did anyone wish to raise the taboo topic of inordinate black crime rates, disproportionate to respective demographic realities. In rare interracial violent crimes, the asymmetrical ratio of black-on-white versus white-on-black assaults ranges from three to five times greater.

Seven, the quiet of the left-wing media to the reprehensible violence stands in marked contrast with their usual rush-to-judgment racialism in two near-simultaneous incidents.

When a shooter of mixed African-American heritage recently entered a New York City corporate headquarters and executed four innocents, CNN falsely raised the speculation that a “white male” was perhaps responsible—despite the photograph of the suspect, who was as clearly male as he was not white.

Media and municipal officials jumped to explain the violence as due to the killer’s alleged past traumatic brain injury or because of his access to a semi-automatic weapon—or anything other than his hate-filled plan to murder an NFL executive.

Actress and model Sydney Sweeney just cut a jeans commercial in front of a poster that said, “Sydney Sweeney has great genes” —with “genes” crossed out and replaced with “jeans.” The left then exploded, alleging the ad was a supposed Hitlerian reference to white eugenics.

Yet the eugenics movement in America was mostly a product of left-wing progressives, from Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger to Democrat president Woodrow Wilson.

And the ad’s sponsor, American Eagle, had previously used all sorts of models from all racial backgrounds. All might agree that the ad simply shows both tight, sexy jeans and a naturally attractive wearer—period.

The country is descending into a tribal morass of double standards and racial fixations.

The diversity/equity/inclusion industry, the defund-the-police madness, and the perpetual left-wing hunt for “white racism/white privilege/white rage” —from the prior Pentagon hierarchy to the lunatic fringe of Jasmine Crockett, Joy Reid, and Zohran Mamdani—have all legitimized double standards while lowering the bar of the once unacceptable.

When our careerist left-wing elites seek to divide us by race and make it essential, not incidental, to our identities, that tribalist message filters throughout communities.

The ensuing signal is that “payback” violence is OK—on the expectation that there are no consequences for interracial violence—as long as the victim is white and the assaulter is not.

The Left Doesn’t Hate Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans. It Hates Beauty.

 

There’s been a recent hysteria over a provocative commercial, a jeans commercial by American Eagle.

It portrays the young blond model Sydney Sweeney—she’s also an actress—putting on or taking off a pair of tight, tight jeans, and the background lettering or messaging is “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” and the gene “G,” as in chromosomes, is crossed out, replaced by J-E-A-N-S. And the message is that she’s a natural beauty, but that she’s a natural beauty in part because she has on American Eagle jeans. End of story—not quite.

The Left went hysterical. And they said this was objectifying whiteness, that we were privileging white people over people of color, we were talking about eugenics because of the word genes. And they just thought this was intolerable. And they even compared it to Hitler, and they were off to the races, to the Hitler Third Reich comparisons.

But this is what’s odd about it. We have all sorts of models that pose for jean commercials. American Eagle has had black women, people, Hispanics, everybody.

And do you remember the ad by Levi’s for Beyonce? Levi’s has her portrayed with a cowboy hat, a yellow wig, and in a country-western setting with Levi jeans. I thought it was wonderful. She’s beautiful. She has the same type of figure as Sydney Sweeney.

Nobody objected, nobody said, “Beyonce is objectifying whiteness because, as an African American, she’s got a blond wig on. She is emulating the white cowboy, country-western modern culture, and she’s got these tight jeans and it’s then appealing to a particular audience.”

No one said that, of course, because that’s not what Sydney Sweeney was doing. So, what was she doing? No. 1, she was telling people that she’s attractive and that you can be attractive. Maybe not to the same degree as Sydney Sweeney if you put on American Eagle jeans, but it will help you to be more attractive. And indeed, people are going out and buying more American Eagle jeans on the theory of the advertisers that you too can be Sydney Sweeney. And that’s the essence, isn’t it, of all advertising?

The second thing that was going on, she’s also sending a message to the younger generation: We gotta get back to classical beauty. Aristotle said, “Beauty is based on proportion, mathematics, and it’s imprinted on our brains.” He’s talking about architecture, landscape, trees. Why is a tree beautiful?

And in terms of women, it’s imprinted on our brains that women are thinner than heavier, more wash beast figure than not, more buxom than not. And we have tried to say that that’s not fair, that everybody can’t be like that. Therefore, we’re not gonna do that. We’re not gonna portray it. We’re not gonna emphasize that.

She’s saying to the younger generation, “You react to me because it’s imprinted on your brains that I have a thin waist and ample posterior and I’m well endowed. I have a big bosom and that appeals to you and I’m going to show you.”

That’s all it was.

The other ironies about it, when you want to go down the “everything is race” category, you have to be very careful to know your history. They kept saying, “This is eugenics. You mentioned genes.” What was the eugenics movement? It was a late 19th-century, early 20th-century progressive movement. It wasn’t Democrat or Republican, it was progressive, the idea that we’re going to use science to determine gene pools and then breed people accordingly, supposedly.

And who were the great practitioners? Well, they were progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt, but Woodrow Wilson was a stalwart, Helen Keller. But most famously, Margaret Sanger, the creator of Planned Parenthood, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Supreme Court justice. Remember, she, in a New Yorker interview, remarked that she didn’t understand the objections to abortion because, she said, “Aren’t we aborting, basically, the right people?” “Right” meaning—I don’t know what she quite meant, but selectively.

So, eugenics is a left-wing historical phenomenon and it’s very ironic for the Left to accuse someone who’s not a eugenicist, the makers of this ad, with eugenics, when they could look to themselves and maybe in the age of erasure, get rid of Margaret Sanger’s association with Planned Parenthood.

And so, finally, a final warning or a piece of advice from Aristotle: We act to beauty by proportion and mathematics. As I said, Beyonce is beautiful, not because she’s black or not because she’s not white, or Sydney Sweeney is beautiful, not because of her skin color, but because she has, as Aristotle would say, perfect symmetry.

And that’s a universal idea that translates into appreciation of young women with figures like that. And it transcends the hysteria and the madness of our contemporary, racially fixed culture.

Uncharted Territory: Conservatives Face Unprecedented Challenges

In that 1960s version of the original “Star Trek,” James T. Kirk—William Shatner—the captain of the Enterprise, remember, he went out to explore deep outer space. And the mission statement was, in part, “to go boldly where no one else has gone before.” And then, each week, you met weird things that no one had anticipated.

This counterrevolution is sort of like that.

All of the expert opinion hasn’t had a good track record, simply because they tried to apply old logic to new explorations that they weren’t sure what was happening or why they were happening or if they’d ever seen it before.

So, we were supposed to have a recession, a stock market collapse, poor gross domestic product, reduction in income. We didn’t have that, partly because we’ve never seen a tariff applied across the board to countries, especially that were running surpluses with the United States. And apparently, we can lower—and we never thought we could—this $1 trillion deficit.

We don’t know the implications on the budget. We don’t know the implications on the economy. Our secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, has announced that we may have $15 trillion in foreign exchange. We’ve never had anything approaching that number.

What are the economic implications of that, as far as job growth, new factories, new economic activity? We don’t know. We’re all worried that President Donald Trump’s inherited $2 trillion annual budget deficit will not be reduced, at least in the foreseeable future, if not raised by the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” But on the other hand, we’ve never seen anybody try to cut $200 billion, which may be actualized at the end of the year, from the federal budget.

Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, thinks there might be $300 billion in additional revenue. You get up to $500 or $600 billion taken away from the deficit and you’re almost, you know, at a $2 trillion—you’re almost over a quarter of the way there.

So, we’ve never seen anybody do that with that amount of tariff revenue. We’ve never seen anybody do that with that amount of federal cutting.

As far as the universities, we don’t know what the effect will be of taxing the endowments. Everybody’s shrilling and very shrill and saying, “This is terrible. It’s gonna wreck the universities. We don’t know the effect of reducing the surcharges on federal grants from 50% to 60% down to 15%. We don’t know the effect of saying to the universities, ‘You’re violating the civil rights statutes of the 1960s, and especially, the 2023 Supreme Court ruling by having segregated dorms, segregated safe spaces, segregated affinity graduations.’”

But what if we can’t expect, we can’t anticipate what might happen, and what might happen might be very good?

Maybe if you stop fixating on race, people will get along better. Maybe they’ll assimilate better. Maybe they’ll be integrated if they live together and race is incidental, not essential, to where they sleep every night or where they go on campus. You know, get rid of safe spaces.

Maybe the university will cut the legions of administrators, that big administrative bloat, if they cannot charge the government 55%. Maybe they’ll learn how to run their labs or their computer stations or something on 15%.

Maybe if we tax endowments, the universities will say, “Well, you know, our faculty, we’re 95% left-wing. The curriculum that we impose in the general education is all slanted. Maybe just to restore our tax-exempt status, we should try to be more enlightened, more disinterested.”

And the same thing, finally, on the border. There is no illegal immigration right now. And we were told that was impossible. The experts said, “You have to have comprehensive immigration reform.” But we’ve never tried it before, the way that Donald Trump did.

We’ve never said, “We’re gonna build a wall through the entire border space, from the Gulf to the Pacific.” We’ve never said that we’re going to stop catch and release, together with making people apply for refugee status before they get to the United States. We never said, “If you come across the United States, you will be deported.” We’ve never said, “Here are the incentives for self-deportation.” And a million people took it up.

What am I getting at? On the budget, on the economy, on the universities, on the border—and I could apply this as well to the radical changes in military recruitment, in DEI—no one has ever said, “We’re going to actually do what conservatives and Republicans have promised for a half-century.”

And when you do that, and you actually carry through your promises, you’re in unknown territory, you’re “boldly going where no one has gone before,” and traditional wisdom is not only correct in predicting what will follow.

 

Revenge or Justice?

 

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard just released a trove of apparently once-classified documents—with promises of much more to follow.

The new material describes the role of the Obama administration’s intelligence and investigatory directors—purportedly along with former President Barack Obama himself—in undermining the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. In addition, their efforts extended to sabotaging the 2016-2017 presidential transition and, by extension, the first three years of the Trump presidency.

The released documents add some new details to what over the last decade has become accepted knowledge.

Congressional committees, special prosecutors, and the inspectors general had all previously issued reports that largely confirmed the general outlines of the skulduggery that began in 2015-16.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign, later aided by the top echelon of the FBI, CIA, and the director of national intelligence, sought—falsely—to seed a narrative that Donald Trump had colluded directly with Russia to win unfairly the 2016 election.

When that campaign gambit failed to alter the 2016 results, the Obama administration doubled down during the transition to undermine the incoming Trump presidency.

Next, special counsel Robert Mueller’s “all-star” legal team found no evidence of direct Trump-Putin collusion to hijack the election. But his investigation did sabotage 22 months of Trump’s first term, marked by constant leaks and hysterical rumors that Trump was soon to be convicted and jailed as a “Russian asset.”

By 2020, the frustrated intelligence agencies and former “authorities” now absurdly further lied that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop had “all the earmarks”—once again—of Russian interference.

So, what could be new about Gabbard’s latest release?

One, after the 2016 election of Trump but before his inauguration, Obama convened a strange meeting with his outgoing intelligence and investigatory heads—CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, national security adviser Susan Rice, and a few others.

Contrary to a four-year Democratic Party narrative that “18 intelligence agencies” had long claimed Russian collusion, the top directors apprised Obama that their expert colleagues had found no such evidence of Trump-Putin collusion.

Yet outgoing President Obama allegedly directed them to ignore such an assessment. Instead, they began spreading narratives that President-elect Trump had been colluding with the Russians.

Leaks followed. Media hysteria crested. And soon Mueller and his left-wing “dream team” of lawyers targeted Trump.

Further new information may confirm that Brennan’s CIA—and those he briefed in the Oval Office—had known for some time that the Russians themselves were confused about why they were falsely being accused of colluding with Trump to rig the election.

Of course, Russian operatives, like their Chinese counterparts, often seek to cause havoc in American institutions, such as hacking emails or spreading online disinformation. But they may have been nevertheless curious why Clinton was making such false accusations that they were working directly with Trump, and why the Obama administration was acting upon them.

Obama has now claimed these new charges are outrageous and beneath the dignity of the presidency.

He did not, however, flatly contradict the new information. He should have issued an unambiguous denial that he had never ordered his intelligence chiefs in December 2016 to ignore their associates’ assessments and instead to assume Trump’s collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

These sustained efforts of the Clinton campaign, Obama appointees, and ex-intelligence chiefs and their media counterparts between 2015 and 2020 severely undermined the 2016 Trump campaign.

They bushwhacked the 2017 presidential transition.

They hamstrung the Trump presidency.

And they may well have hurt Trump’s 2020 election bid.

Summed up, here is the damage caused by the Trump-Putin collusion lies:

1. They emboldened “experts” in 2020 to again lie blatantly and shamelessly to the American people that the incriminating Hunter Biden laptop was yet another fake product of Russian interference to help reelect Trump.

2. The media were equally guilty. Journalists partnered with current and ex-Obama appointees by disseminating fake documents like the Steele dossier and working with giants like Twitter and Facebook. During the 2020 campaign, the FBI and social media sought to censor accurate news stories that the laptop was indeed authentic and already verified as such by the FBI.

3. These operations may have had serious consequences for U.S. foreign policy. Dictatorial Russia is an adversary of the U.S.

But by needlessly and falsely claiming that Russia had intervened in two elections directly to partner with Trump, Obama-era officials and Clinton-campaign activists destroyed Trump’s own credibility to sustain a workable relationship with a nuclear Russia.

In addition, the lying and extra-legal operations of the FBI and CIA only further convinced the paranoid Russians that they could not trust the U.S. government—given it had been engaging in the very conspiracy lies that were more akin to its own than America’s.

Obama, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and others will likely never face legal consequences for the damage they’ve done to our institutions and foreign policy.

But that does not mean they should be exempt from an ongoing and disinterested effort to find and finally expose the whole truth.