(upbeat rock music) - This is the Josh Hammer Show. - Between 60 and 65% of Americans, depending on the poll, say that the United States is currently heading in the wrong direction. If anything, it makes you scratch your head and wonder what kind of drugs the other remaining 30% or so are taking. I have no idea, but hook me up because that sounds like some good stuff. More generally speaking, when you start to go issue by issue as well, especially with all the issues that the American people consistently tell pollsters they care most about, the economy, inflation, immigration, and crime above all. When you go issue by issue, you start to see that the American people's approval of the current reigning Biden-Harris administration on those issues is invariably somewhere between 20 points below water to 30 points below water. On the handling of these really Palestinian conflict, it's actually even higher. It's like 35 points below water. This administration is catastrophically unpopular. There are a lot of people out there saying that Donald Trump and JD Vance are trying to tether. That's the new word you hear, tether. They're trying to tether Kamala Harris to Joe Biden. I'm sorry, she tether herself to Joe Biden. When Joe Biden cut an under the table sleazy backroom deal with South Carolina kingmaker Jim Clyburn in advance of the 2020 South Carolina primary, that was after Biden finished fifth in New Hampshire. His campaign was on the verge of death. He cuts his backroom deal with the black kingmaker in South Carolina, Jim Clyburn, says that, oh, if you endorse me in South Carolina, you get the black church vote. They will come out for me in exchange with that I will name a woman of color to my ticket. That turned into the Biden Harris 2020 ticket. That was when Kamala Harris tethered herself to Joe Biden. To this day, you go to whitehouse.gov. You see repeated references to the Biden Harris administration. I'm sorry, it is not Donald Trump and JD Vance that are connecting the dots that are tethering her to him. She has been there since day one. She talks a lot about how her day one will come in January 2025, God help us. No, your day one was January 2021. You have been there all along. If the Trump Vance campaign can frame this election as one against the status quo, they are the game changer. They will seek to return the prices of groceries and gasoline, the pump from December 2016 into January 2017 or January 2020. Over the course of those four years, they will return those historically low unemployment rates. They are the change agent. That is why the twin endorsements of RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard are so meaningful. RFK Jr. comes from maybe the single most iconic Democratic family in America. Does it get more iconic than the Kennedys? I'm not sure that it does. His exit speech, talking about how his father and uncle would not recognize today's Democratic party could not possibly have been more on point. JFK was actually a supply side tax cutter. He basically created the Laffer curve before art Laffer came up with the idea. He was a cold warrior who saw a stark moral and geostrategic dichotomy between the West and the Soviet-dominated Iron Curtain, the countries under the totalitarian albatross around the neck that was the Warsaw Pact. You're gonna tell me that that Democratic party, would recognize today's Democratic party, where you have a vice presidential running mate in Tim Walz who recently said that one man's socialism is another man's neighborliness? I'm sorry, you think JFK would recognize that? RFK Sr. for that matter, literally assassinated by a Palestinian Arab terrorist. You know, the Kennedys father, old Joe Kennedy, who made his fortune as a bootlegger in the '20s. He was actually a vicious anti-Semite, notorious, but his children, JFK and RFK, at least to their credit, were strong supporters of Israel, which is then a very young country. You wanna tell me that they would recognize today's Democratic party with the Hamas nicks outside the DNC in Chicago? Are you kidding me? Tulsi Gabbard. Well, she literally ran for president against Donald Trump in 2020. She was part of that very crowded primary. The same one where Joe Biden had to cut the sleazy backroom deal with Jim Clyburn, just as salvage his campaign. Tulsi and RFK, more generally, here's what is going on here. These are iconic high-profile ex-Democrats who are now endorsing the Trump vans take it on a handful of issues, perhaps above all, foreign policy sanity with an emphasis on the war in Ukraine, which this show has been outspoken on since the get-go. What you're seeing emerge is a contrast. A contrast before the voters on the ballot this November. Between on the one hand, the failed establishment status quo. That is the Biden-Harris-Wall's status quo, representing the party, the regime, and the ideology. That have been in power for most of my lifetime and likely most of your lifetime as well. On the other hand, you have an increasingly non-partisan, nationalist, populist grassroots uprising. That is saying, no, we are actually not going to take it anymore when it comes to neoliberal trade policy with our arch geopolitical foe in communist China. We're not going to take it more when it comes to the idiocy that was then Senator Joe Biden, who was probably the number one chief proponent of admitting China to the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s and then making them most favored nation status for the United States. That was Joe Biden, perhaps above all. The outsiders, this nonpartisan grassroots, national populist coalition saying, "Nuh-uh, we're not taking it anymore." It's time to slap some big bad boy tariffs on the Beijing Polybira. We need to start reassuring manufacturing. We need to start making stuff again here in America. How's that for common sense? Ironically, the Democratic Party today has become the party of the military industrial complex. They are the party of subsidies to Boeing, North or Grumman, the various defense contractors. They are the party of this internal conflict in Eastern Europe right now. They own that. Let them own it. What a contrast it is, by the way, from the Democratic Party of the 1960s, the campus radicals, all of that, the activists were protesting Vietnam. Back then, the Democrats were the party of the cool young kids against the establishment. Smoke and dough hooking up at Woodstock. They were going up against the machine and the regime. Nowadays, the script is completely flipped. On policy, it is flipped. The Trump Vance Republican Party is not the party of the endless moralistic boondoggles in Afghanistan and Iraq. That, by the way, is why you have 200 former Bush McCain and Romney officials now going out and endorsing the Harris-Walls ticket. The media is trotting this out as if it is some sort of flex. Got you guys. Dude, pretty sure that's a self-own. Do you really want to claim the Bush Forum policy legacy? Do you really want to claim? The Forum policy legacy of John McCain, who never saw a dictator that he did not want to topple in the name of, quote, "our democracy"? Really? Is that really the card that you guys think it is? That is the challenge, though, as we head towards this pivotal, pivotal sprint to the finish after Labor Day. That is the challenge for the Trump Vance campaign, is to make this election a referendum on the status quo, on the establishment. With Tulsi and RFK, the script basically writes itself, guys. This is a nonpartisan grassroots populist uprising, an agent of change against the dilapidated catastrophic failures of the last four years and of 12 out of the last 16 years more generally, including the eight Obama years. That is the challenge. If Trump Vance can rise to that challenge, I do predict they will win the election in November. This season, Instacart has your back to school, as in they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow. Let's face it, we were all that kid. So first, call your parents to say I'm sorry, and then download the Instacart app to get delivery in as past as 30 minutes all school year long. Get a $0 delivery fee for your first three orders while supplies last, minimum $10 per order, additional term supply. 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We had so-called special counsel, Jack Smith, a scud missile for the Democrat lawfare complex, the hitman of the mafia-esque organization that begins the top with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and trickles down to Merrick Garland. Jack Smith, the so-called special counsel who has been prosecuting Donald Trump in both Washington, D.C. and Florida. He is basically a street-level assassin for this Cosinostra-esque mafia. Well, he filed a superseding indictment in Washington, D.C. this past week. He's trying to get around the legal confines of the Trump versus United States immunity case. In that case, the court said that for "core, plenary, constitutional functions" for the commander-in-chief for the executive, "you cannot be prosecuted period full stop end of story." Think here about military functions, about communications with your own executive branch, your emails, your phone calls to your own attorney general, treasury secretary, whatever. That's core. Article II, constitutional function, can't be prosecuted for it. So what Jack Smith basically tried to do in his superseding indictment in Washington, D.C., this is the marquee case for the Democrat law fair complex, by the way. There were four prosecutions. Jack Smith has two at the federal level. He has this one in D.C. in the classified documents case, which is currently stalled in Marlago. And then you have the so-called "touch money" case in New York City, which we'll get to here in just a second. And then the Georgia case, which is also stalled. But this case in D.C. has been their marquee case, because it pertains the 2020 election. It pertains January 6. It gets to the very heart of their argument to the extent that you can call it that, which is that this election presents a referendum, not along the lines of how I just painted it, but along the lines of totalitarianism versus democracy. Yes, that is really how they're framing it. So Smith sends this superseding indictment, essentially just making cosmetic changes, removing some various fact patterns and allegations that do pertain to that kind of plenary article two function that I just described, mostly pertaining to literally internal emails and phone calls that Trump made to people in his Justice Department, in his Department of Homeland Security. But the indictment remains the same. There were four counts before, there are still four counts now. In fact, there are two counts, two of the four, that pertain to 18 U.S. Code Section 1512, which is a part of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, that the Supreme Court two months ago in the Fisher case, just held, literally just held, that you actually cannot use this statute to shoehorn in a January 6th indictment, because the Sarbanes-Oxley Act had to do with corporate fraud and shredding documents. And the court just held in Fisher that now you're trying to apply this to obstruction of an official proceeding in Congress, the counting of the electoral votes? No, that's not how the statute works. Apparently, Jack Smith didn't even read the Fisher case. You know, Jack Smith, from one lawyer to another, dude, you're not very good at this whole lawyer thing. Maybe you should go try to be like an architect or a plumber or something to try a different profession. You're not very good at this one. But you have to understand that what he is doing here is not being that of a neutral law enforcement agent. He is not even trying on his own terms to be a modern-day eliteness, the famed law enforcement agent who got Al Capone in Chicago almost a century ago. Jack Smith is there for one purpose and one purpose only, which is to tear down and break down Donald Trump and to try to affect the outcome of this election. That has all along been the only purpose for the DOJ not launching these two indictments until 2023, the year before the election. They had two years, all of 2021, all of 2022, to get this ball rolling if they really wanted to. This particular indictment in Washington, D.C., didn't get going until August 2023. What a joke. You know, the U.S. Department of Justice also has longstanding internal protocols. It is standard operating procedure at the DOJ. That a prosecutor of any stripe, a special counsel or not, cannot bring a prosecution that has political salience close to an election if it will even have the perception, the perception of affecting the outcome of that election. No politicized prosecutions. Okay, I guess we just don't care about that one anymore. What a joke. Meanwhile, Donald Trump facing upcoming sentencing for the ludicrous so-called hush money case. That sentencing is set to happen on September 18th. In the meantime, the judge there, Wanna Mershan, who lest we forget, donated $20 to the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020 and specifically earmarked that donation to, quote, "get Trump." Well, two days prior to the sentencing, he's actually going to rule on September 16th as to whether or not this thing has to be a mistrial in the first place. It actually should be thrown out as a mistrial if Mershan is going to follow the law correctly. Why? Well, according to the Trump versus United States immunity case, you cannot even introduce as evidence at trial, material pertaining to core article two constitutional conduct. But here, they brought in, that is Alvin Bragg and the Soros funded prosecutors in the Manhattan DA's office. They brought in Hope Hicks and Madeline Westerhout to former Trump White House employees to testify about exactly that, about internal communications within the White House. You can't do that. That irrevocably taints the trial. So it should be thrown out. It's not going to because Mershan has a hack. It's not going to. That leads to the final question in New York City. Is Trump going to jail? Well, if Mershan does not do the right thing, it does not toss this case, and I don't predict that he will. Is he actually going to sentence Donald Trump to jail on September 18th? A lot of very smart people think, yes, Andy McCarthy says, yes. Andy McCarthy, former federal prosecutor, long-time national review writer, he says, yes. I am at least somewhat skeptical. At least somewhat skeptical. If not for abstract reasons, these people have no compunction whatsoever, but for the very basic nitty gritty reason, that the president has 24/7 secret service protection. And when you actually look at the New York City penitentiary system, places like Rikers Island, you actually literally cannot have a gun anywhere near a prisoner. So I'm not sure how they square that circle, but if there's a will, there's a way they will try to make it happen. All of this is horrific. I continue to think though, that when all is said and done in November, American people are not going to stand for it. Trump should fight back in the debate, say, no, it is you guys trying to incarcerate me. How's that for our democracy? This is the Josh Hammer Show. Getting the smile and confidence you've been dreaming about, all from the comfort of your home, isn't a total mystery with bite clear aligners. Just don't be surprised if all your friends start asking, "What's your secret?" Begin by ordering your at-home impression kit today for only $14.95. Bite clear aligners are doctor-directed and delivered to your door. Treatment costs thousands less than braces, plus they offer flexible financing, accept eligible insurance, and you can pay with your HSA FSA. Get 80% off your impression kit when you use code WONDERY at bite.com. That's B-Y-T-E dot com. Start your confidence journey today with bite. Hey, Prime Members! Have you heard? You can listen to your favorite podcasts ad-free. Good news! With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts included with your Prime Membership. To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free, or go to amazon.com/adfreepodcast. That's amazon.com/adfreepodcast to catch up on the latest episodes, without the ads. It's hammer time. Bite & Harris Administration is requiring a DEI ideological litmus test on NASA innovation funding. So, NASA hosts DEI Training for its staff to become, quote unquote, anti-racist. They want their staff to understand, quote, "white supremacy culture" throughout the NASA workplace. You know, look, I have one criterion and one criterion only when it comes to NASA. And by the way, this is not a good time to be talking about DEI when it comes to NASA with the disaster currently happening with Boeing at the International Space Station. What an absolute mess there. You know, how about America gets back to the America of the Space Race, the America that actually first landed on the moon? I mean, I'm pretty sure we didn't get there. I mean, Neil Armstrong didn't get to land on the moon from anti-racist training at NASA. No, Neil Armstrong got to land on the moon because he was very, very good and well-trained and successful at his job. How about we get back to that? How about we get back to actually just caring about merit and success and how good you are at your job and focusing on the mission at hand there? All of this is garbage here. The Biden-Harris administration has been ground zero of the push for DEI throughout the levers of government, more generally speaking, a good campaign issue, by the way, for Trump advanced to pound if it comes up on the campaign trail. California School District tried to hide anti-Semitic and ethnic studies courses from Jewish taxpayers. This is a brand new lawsuit that comes out of the Santa Ana Unified School District in Southern California. They appear on the hired consultants who conspired to keep Jewish community members in the dark about a so-called ethnic studies course on the grounds that as Jews, they are inherently racist and would disrupt plans to enlighten the student body. My God. Well, this is a lawsuit that has been brought by a handful of Jewish groups along with Covington and Burling, which is the well-known D.C. law firm. It's actually where Eric Holder, the former Obama attorney general, is also a partner nowadays at Covington and Burling. Look, I'm actually writing this stuff right now in my book manuscript, shameless plug, be on the lookout come March 2025. Israel and civilization, the fate of the Jewish nation and the destiny of the West. I've actually just been drafting the chapter on all of this, on wokeism, on ethnic studies, and how it pertains to the people of Israel and the state of Israel and whatnot there. Long story short, wokeism is just Marxism by any other name. Marxism divided society from the proletariat and the patricians, the bourgeois. There was this economic classes divide. So too do the woke divide society in this or arbitrary dichotomous fashion between the oppressor class and the oppressed class. Somehow, I'm still not entirely sure how, the Jewish people, the single most discriminated against and oppressed people in all of human history, somehow end up on the oppressor side of the ledger. Probably because this is a Marxist analysis and Jews, at least in America, are disproportionately wealthy. Over the past century, they've done well for themselves. But that is somehow how they end up on the wrong side of the bargain. What that means is that from an so-called ethnic studies perspective, all of Jewish civilization, by the way, also all of Christian civilization, somehow ends up being oppressor. It's total garbage there, but the fact they're trying to hide it from the parents, my God. I mean, that makes this a bad story and it just makes it a vile and outright evil story. I really hope the plaintiffs out there in California succeed in this case. Chicago Pro-Life Pregnancy Center is vandalized after the DNC. So the name of this pro-life clinic is called Aid for Women. They help pregnant women and pursuant to Catholic teaching, they do not abort unborn babies or refer mothers to get abortions. Well, on Thursday night, after the DNC had just ended, one of their clinics was vandalized, apparently with the intention of stopping them from opening up on Friday morning. I mean, unfortunately, this is somewhat old hat at this point. I think back to the lead up to the Dobbs case in June 2022, especially in the aftermath of the leak of the Dobbs case, the prior month in May 2022. If you think back to them, there were any number of pro-life pregnancy centers throughout America. I distinctly remember one in Buffalo, New York, one in Wisconsin that were just outright vandalized. Here's my question, and here's a good question that the folks who try to defend are blatantly two-tier system of justice might want to ask themselves. Where are the prosecutions? Seriously, where are the prosecutions? Merigirland at this Department of Justice is literally suing grannies for praying outside of abortion clinics, for praying outside of Planned Parenthoods that these people rethink the homicide of their unborn baby that they are about to make. You know, if this is anything remotely resembling the equal application of the rule of law in this country, the people who vandalize those who actually stand on the side of unborn life, they will face punishment for these actions as well. Whether it happens at the federal or the state level, I am somewhat agnostic. But man, if you want to somehow restore this country to a place of equal enforcement of the rule of law, that would be a darn good place to start. Robin D'Angelo plagiarized minority scholars. A complaint to Letchus. Robin D'Angelo is the best-selling author of "White Fragility" and Robin D'Angelo, apparently, over the course for a PhD, apparently just repeatedly cited minority figures without actually citing them. So just plagiarizing many of them throughout her doctoral thesis. I mean, it's hard just not to burst out laughing at this. By the way, what a coup for Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire, who has this brand new film, "Amiracist," which goes after Robin D'Angelo, among others. But how many times do we need to see some variation of this story play out before we realize that these people are just a bunch of stinking hypocrites? I mean, I'm old enough to remember it was literally under a year ago that Claudine Gay was chased out of the Harvard University presidency for very similar plagiarism allegations. By the way, those very similar plagiarism allegations that also involved, at least disproportionately, plagiarizing other minority scholars and not giving credit to them in the formal citation process. So these people are just loathsome hypocrites. They are not deserving of even the smallest modicum of your respect. MIT is revealing a racial shift in its first-year class profile following the fall of affirmative action. While MIT recently revealed their racial data pertaining to the inbound class of 2028-- by the way, wow, that makes me feel old. The class of 2028, my goodness. In any event, the racial composition has dramatically changed from the final year before the Supreme Court formally ended race-conscious emissions programs, commonly known as affirmative action. That was in the Students for Fair Emission versus Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill cases. So according to MIT, their new entering freshman class is 47% Asian. It is a 5% black, 11% Hispanic, and 37% white. So the white number is essentially unchanged. The Asian number predictably went up quite a bit to 47%. The black and Hispanic numbers predictably also went down a little bit. So it's going to be really interesting to try to stay on this and try to keep on watching the data pour in. Another interesting thing is now that MIT is first out of the gate there, are these other universities going to feel some sort of pressure to make sure that their data are roughly mirror this, lest they be sued for violating the ban on affirmative action? I don't know. What I do know is that any university that can still get away with discriminating on the basis of race is going to continue to discriminate on the basis of race. And this situation, more generally over the next 5, 10, 15 years, is going to call for constant, constant vigilance. Lowe's rolls back DI initiatives amid a MAGA backlash. So this is the massive retail chain Lowe's. They are formally rolling back their DI initiatives, falling backlash from Robbie Starbuck. Robbie Starbuck, we actually just discussed him on our show last week. Robbie Starbuck also is behind Harley Davidson pulling a 180. Robbie Starbuck quickly establishing himself as one of the most effective grassroots conservative activists in America. He ran for Congress. The congressional run came up short, but he is quickly rebounding here and probably, frankly, having even more impact on the public conversation that he would have had had he actually gone to the United States Congress. So another huge win for Robbie Starbuck. Kudos to you, sir. Keep up the good work. Finally, the disgraced former UPenn president is joining Claudine Gay at Harvard University. So Liz McGill, you remember her? Well, Liz McGill was the former president of the University of Pennsylvania. She was one of the three ladies who infamously testified before Congress last December, 2023, where she said that calls for the genocide of the Jewish people on her Ivy League campus and the permissibility thereof, quote, "depends on the context." Well, she resigned from the presidency shortly thereafter. She was actually out within days. It was just a few weeks before Claudine Gay made a similar resignation at Harvard. Well, now Liz McGill is actually joining Claudine Gay at Harvard. Unfortunately, this is one of the least surprising stories I've ever seen. These people will never ultimately learn. And by these people, I mean the administrators, the president, the provost, the people who actually make the faculty hiring decisions, the personal decisions at these Ivy League universities and similar so-called elite schools. The only way, the only way that they will ever, ever, ever, ever feel any kind of consequences is brute market force and bottom line. If you are an employer, the way to try to effectuate change is to announce a hiring boycott. Get out there and say that you will not hire students. You will not hire graduates from certain universities that do XYZ things. My former boss, Judge James Z. Ho of the Fifth Circuit, admirably, admirably has tried to do that from his law clerk hiring perspective when it comes to his boycott of Yale Law School and Stanford Law School. But more generally, we need some more bulge bracket firms to step up there. Say that you are not going to recruit from certain schools. Bill Ackman has been lean the way we need much, much more of that. Unless employers start trying to shift incentives on the back end, and parents start trying to shift incentives on the front end by discouraging, if not outright, outlawing their students from applying to these woke adult institutions. Unless we get both of those things working in tandem, I fear that you will just see more and more of these ex-girlfriend headlines, such as Liz McGill joining the Harvard University faculty. What makes a life a good one? Is it the adventure you have or the friends you find along the way? Maybe it's pursuing your passion while striving to protect, defend, and save what you believe in every single day. So what makes a life a good one? In the Coast Guard, we think it's all of the above and more. You'll have to find out for yourself. Visit gocoastguard.com to learn more. University of Wisconsin Law School mandates reorientation DEI training. So the students were recently taught there that believing in "colorblindness" or rugged individualism, or dare I say even saying in that "people of color can be racist." Apparently, these are itself all forms of racism that should be challenged, and perhaps should even be verboden at the University of Wisconsin Law School. This is a fascinating, fascinating window into a battle between raw political power and woke bureaucrats in higher education. The state of Wisconsin, at least at the level of the legislature, is still quite conservative. Unfortunately, liberals took over the Wisconsin Supreme Court last year. That was a huge, huge election that I fear could have tangible ramifications for the 2024 presidential election if Wisconsin is very close later this year. But the legislature is still controlled by Republicans. And recently, they passed very strong legislation there that would force the flagship university right there, the university of Wisconsin, to wind down its DEI bureaucracy. And as many publications like the Wall Street Journal have reported, they actually have done exactly that. So the university of Wisconsin is slashing its DEI bureaucrats. What Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute very aptly refers to as the "diversity" crafts. University of Wisconsin is cracking down on that. And in turn, actually, they're even starting a new taxpayer-funded center for center-right thought. So the contrast here is between what the legislators in Madison are saying and what the leaders of the law school there in Madison are doing. This is setting up some sort of grand clash. And it really does shine a prism on something that has been a late motif of this show ever since we launched it a couple of years ago, which is in a situation like this to my fellow conservatives where you hold political power in a state capital like Madison, Wisconsin, you have a responsibility. You are the people's representatives. You have a responsibility to effectively wield that power, if need be, to shape the culture and to tamp down the excesses of civilizational arson, to translate that into very concrete terms here. Where the University of Wisconsin Law School is mandating reorientation DEI training. That is wholly irreconcilable with what you are simultaneously trying to do to get the broader university to cut DEI bureaucrats. This is something that should not legally survive. It obviously is morally abominable in the extreme. The notion that, quote, "people of color," the notion that simply saying that somehow people of color can be racist is itself racist. I mean, this is obviously just the Ebraw-Mex-Kendy, justify racism on grounds of anti-racism grounds. You guys know the spiel by now. This is disgusting stuff. The point there is that Madison, the state legislators have power. They ought to wield it to gut this utter toxic nonsense from our public discourse and our way of life. On a similar note, in my state of Florida, the Florida bar is getting rid of its diversity and inclusion committee. So the Florida Supreme Court directed the state bar of Florida to remove funding for diversity and inclusion from its upcoming budget. This would be a perfect example of what I just said, which is actually using political power in a state where you have it to implement cultural change in a healthy, salient direction. That is exactly what is happening here in the state of Florida. It is great news that the state bar of Florida is gutting its DEI committee. It raises the obvious question as to why there ever was a DEI committee in the first place. Unfortunately, I have to assume that most state bars have some sort of committee along these lines. In fact, I know that the state bar to which I belong, the state bar of Texas, I actually know that the bar of Texas has all sorts of woke idiotic nonsense as part of it because I actually was a plaintiff suing the state bar of Texas a few years ago. That case was ultimately resolved at the level of the Fifth Circuit. We will see, ultimately, guess the Supreme Court in the future years, but good for the Florida state bar. Hopefully, other state bars and states where Republicans have a super majority in the legislature, like we have in Florida. Hopefully, they will continue to follow suit. Religious Nuns are now the largest single group in the United States. As a new study from Pew Research, when Americans are asked to check a box indicating their religious affiliation, 28%, now check none. This has been a rising trend for a very long time. That's been a rising trend for 20, 30 years. There are two ways to look at this. They might seem like they are in some sort of tension with one another, but there are two simultaneous trend lines going on. One is that you haven't had a necessarily massive, massive decline in the percentage of Americans who actually say that they do not believe in God. Now, you have had a decline, for sure. The percentage of Americans who believe in God now is certainly lower than it was 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. No doubt about that, but the decline is not as stark as some people sometimes might think it is, but you do have this rise of people who are not religiously affiliated with a formal house of worship, whether it is a formal Christian church, a Jewish synagogue or something else. One possible explanation for that is that the younger generation, the millennials, the Gen Zs, even those who do still profess to believe in God, who still do profess to believe in some sort of lower case, or orthodox conception of a monotheistic faith, one reason is that they're simply not finding a good fit for it. Now, interestingly, when you actually look at the sex of both Christianity and my own faith, Judaism, that are both going up and down over the past five, 10 years or so, what you see is that is the more theologically conservative, the more orthodox strands of both faiths that have seen absolute explosions in new membership and people coming to the pews and people congregating in prayer to find community, to find a sense of family and obviously shared faith towards God Almighty above, you see the exact opposite trend when it comes to theological liberal strands of both Christianity and Judaism. Now, you do have a slight increase again in the percentage of Americans who claim to be atheists or agnostics, but I think, honestly, the biggest explanation for this, above all, would be that you have a mismatch, a mismatch between where young Americans in the Gen Z and millennial class are trying to find a home and the house of worship that are on tap available to them. To me, when I see data like this, this actually strikes me above all as something of a supply and demand problem. We need more authentic houses of worship to get younger people into the pews, stop identifying as nuns, go with those authentic house of worship. Major Cornell donor calls for president's ouster over anti-Semitism and DEI. So, it's one of the largest donors to Cornell University. He's pulling his funding to the school and calling on the president of Cornell to resign as Cornell continues to embrace DEI. So, Cornell University has a massive Jewish population. It is roughly 25% give or take on an annual basis of the university. They have had all sorts of horrible incidents there, Cornell, ever since the Hamas Holocaust of October 7, 2023. You had a professor there by the name of Russell Rickford who gave a speech in New York City about a week or two after the slaughter where he was unambiguously praising Hamas. He was saying that he was happy, that he was celebrating as they went about their task. You had during finals period while students were just in the library trying to study for finals there in Cornell University back in December. You had so-called pro-Palestinian activists. I would call them anarchists and anti-western civilization misanthropes. You had them just marching through the library holding signs saying all the usual slogan ears, "Oh, from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free into Fada, globalized into Fada." So, yeah, it's really bad at Cornell. By the way, by the way, have you noticed that it is these elite institutions, the Cornells, the pens, the harbors of the world that have these massive problems? You know what universities do not have problems like this? Alabama, Georgia, Ole Miss, right here in Oxford, Mississippi, where I'm actually broadcasting this show from, these major public universities where you have good God-fearing Christians, you know, funny. You don't actually have these problems there. Where you have these problems is in these overly secular, oftentimes disproportionately atheist or agnostic, far left, higher upper-income echelon Ivy League schools. Curious how that works. Finally, Oregon County acts as diversity office that costs nearly $1 million a year. So, the officials here in Clackamas County and Oregon, they're dismantling. They're nearly $830,000 a year, DEI office. This is despite the outcry from some who are opposing these initiatives. Oregon's a fascinating state is obviously a very blue state when it comes to most statewide elections. There are certainly many deep, deep red parts of the state there. Portland has been ground zero of the Cultural Revolution for a long time now as anyone who saw the fire bombings, the federal courthouse, the horrific incidents of vandalism and property destruction back during the summer of love, shall we say, the summer of 2020. So, good for the officials there in Clackamas County. Again, DEI more generally seems to be an issue that we on the right are winning on. We are winning on DEI. We are winning on ESG. Fight the left with fire on this. We are in the right. They are in the wrong. We are a color blind society. That is the way it is. They want to see race. We should not let them do so. This is the Josh Hammer Show.
