The Joyce Kaufman Show 8/12/26 - Acceptance of Socialism and Communism, Mamdani surtax on luxury second homes, nukes made the world safer? And more!

What's the secret recipe to making money topics interesting? I think you start off by relating money to your everyday life, like more vacations, more living, less worry about your next paycheck. And that's how we built the Stacky Benjamin Netanyahu Show, the personal finance show. It's full of good times, great laughs, and big lessons. Whether you're paying off debt, building wealth, or just trying to stop hemorrhging money at the grocery store. We got you. Find the Stacky Benjamin Netanyahu Show wherever you get your podcasts. The greatest money show on earth, now part of the Gamut Podcast Network. This is the Joyce Kaufman podcast, honest, straight, and unapologelic with your host, Joyce Kaufman. Well, it's hump day, right? Wednesday. It's the middle of the week. And I wish I could say that it's all like, you know, downhill sledding from here. But that's just not true. It's still what it is. And we still have to read the same horrific news stories. And we still have to, you know, act as if everything is going to be all right, although not many of us actually believe that anymore. Because it just seems to me that some things that used to be easy for me to understand aren't anymore. Like, when did it become not a bad thing? to be a communist. I mean, just as an example. You used to say that. You used to call somebody a communist, and it was like a huge insult. But... Now the Democratic Party's socialist wing doesn't even hide the radicalism, and it openly embraces policies that are communist. They reject capitalism. They want to seize private property. They want to dismantle all of the constitutional institutions that keep us free, you know, three branches of government. And they basically want to expand the control the government has over so many of the major sectors. I mean, you look at Zohran Mamdani in New York with this surtax on a second home as a like it's a punitive kind of revolutionary measure that publicly targets property owners. And instead of giving them the presumption of innocence, like maybe it's not a second home, you're supposed to just accept his version. You have Kamala Harris out there. She almost was the president of the United States. And she's out there talking about packing the court, adding states, ending the filibuster, abolishing the electoral college. That's now mainstream Democrats. That's insane to me. The idea that we're still arguing over whether or not you should be an American citizen to vote in our elections. You know, the left has been using the chaos at the border to build this sort of super dependent voting block.

and accelerate societal transformation. When did that become the norm? That's all I want to know. It really is, it is hard for me to digest the news when I'm so, it's so clear to me how much lying is going on. The more I hear about the Democratic Socialists of America, the more I'm puzzled by really good people that I know who consider themselves progressive, consider themselves left-leaning, considers themselves Democrats. Now they're perfectly comfortable being called socialists, communists, every policy they propose. They don't even pretend anymore. They have declared that capitalism is a failure. Think about that. How did we become so great in 250 years? If it's not directly attributable to capitalism, that's certainly a large part of it. And you got guys like the Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom. He says capitalism, as we know it, doesn't work. Really? The guy's a multimillionaire and has been a beneficiary of, you know, the wealthy guy, Gordon Getty, giving him tons of money for elections. He's done pretty well under capitalism. Why is it a failure? Why is it now suddenly normal to talk about confiscating private property? Because that's what Zohran Mamdani says. He'll do that if New York's landlords, in his opinion, are not good custodians of their own property. And then they talk about destroying the 238-year-old electoral college. And they brag that when they take over the Democrat Party and then they take over the nation, they're going to do, just like the good Bolsheviks, they're going to go all the way. They'll destroy the Senate, destroy the Pentagon, destroy prisons, destroy the police, and destroy our borders. They want to take over utilities and break up corporate agriculture. They want to own major industries. Apparently, socialists believe that with a snap of their fingers, they can destroy the most important elements of the U.S. constitutional order. Would these socialists... Even resent you calling their agenda communists? No. No, they've taken their cue for this kind of radical change from mainstream Democrats like Kamala Harris. She's talking about a third bid for the presidency. And I guess her attitude is now, if you can't beat them, join them. So she's promising that if she's elected, she'll pack the court. She'll admit two new blue states.

So he created a list of his targets, including their addresses, and published it. To the extent that many properties really were second homes, Zohran Mamdani has now made sure that all New Yorkers, including the jealous rubberneckers, the would-be squatters, and the hardened criminals know exactly where they might target a sometimes vacant home. And second, he wants to force a massive fire sale of second homes that will crash home values in general. And that's a way to redistribute new affordable houses to those people who Zohran Mamdani considers victims of capitalism. And apparently he thinks they're more deserving of these properties, even though the people who own them worked for them. You know, there was a cable news show where the national co-chair of the DSA, this Megan Romer, was asked a whole bunch of questions about the published agenda, the one that Bill Maher read on his show. And far from denying that it's radical and it's communist, she, like, was happy to confirm it all. Yeah, let's destroy the border. Let's end prisons. Get rid of the military. Get rid of the police. But, you know, I know what happens when you have these socialists when they finally get in power, especially when they are hated. You know, you got this prime minister in Spain, Pedro Sanchez, very unpopular. And he's given amnesty to 600,000 illegal aliens. Yeah, yeah. 60,000 Muslim men from North Africa in a single day swarmed over the Moroccan coast at Sueda. Demanding amnesties, demanding free subsidized passes into European Spain. and looting and vandalizing businesses and attacking the Spanish people. So answer me this. Why do European socialists and American leftists do that? Why do they create conditions of mass chaos and welcome in millions of illegal aliens? Most of whom are poor, a lot of them are angry, and they're definitely unassimilated and plan on staying that way from the third world. Well, that's how you get rid of the capitalists and they're bourgeois hirelings. You've got to have violence, you've got to have upheaval. And they import a huge victim class. And then they virtue signal, oh, we're better. They spend lavish social or jests upon these people. And in quid pro quo fashion, that underclass becomes a welfare state and they'll vote for them. It just goes on and on. To make a new socialist America, you first have to destroy everything that made America. Everything that we hold dear. Unbelievable. But that's where they are. That's where we are. And like I said, nobody's even trying to play it down or say it's not so.

There's a braggadocia about it. That's amazing to me. Anyway, don't forget to download that 850 app on your cell phone, laptop, Chromebook, wherever you want it. That way you could be listening to the new No Restraint podcast or Stephen Deener's Unidentified Alien podcast, whatever. You can have it accessible right there on your device. But if you want to do that, at least visit our website, 850WFDL.com, and you get access to all that stuff and breaking news stories. Let me take a quick break. You just hold on, stay right where you are. A couple of days ago, I was reading an article in The Spectator, and I wish I could put my hands on it. I took some notes. Thank goodness I do take notes when I am, you know, when I'm trying to remember. where I hear something, and I jotted down that it was in The Spectator, and apparently it was an article that was written by someone named Alex Shears, who I am not particularly I don't know much about. I don't know that I've ever read his columns before in The Spectator, but this one was really riveting. And the title, I think the title is how nukes made the world safer, which is a pretty tough thing to wrap your mind around, right? And, you know, he talked about how on that day in August of 1945, you know, it was just a normal day in Hiroshima, Japan. But by 8.15 that morning, an American B-29 bomber, the Anola Gay, reduced Japan's seventh largest city to cinders. And then two, three days later, on August 9th, yeah, three days later, Nagasaki would suffer the same fate. And that was the first and only time in human history that atomic bombs were used in anger. 81 years on from the atomic bombings of Japan, the uncomfortable truth is that nuclear weapons are actually the reason that World War III has been avoided. But according to the latest survey, which is what this article had focused on, and I think he was, yeah, I wrote down Pew Research Center, something like... Let me look. 69% of the American public thinks that nuclear weapons make the world less safe. And the reality is that the world would be a much more dangerous place without the bomb. Because of course you should have disdain for nuclear weapons. I mean, when you close your eyes and you think of like, you know, mushroom clouds and fireballs in the sky and vaporized islands and the over 100,000 instantaneous deaths that were inflicted by those two bombs in Japan, you know, that'll haunt you.

Only 35% of Americans believe that the August 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified compared to 85% when it happened, you know, immediately afterwards. But the advent of nuclear weapons in the hands of big nations like ours was a game changer. just because it shifted the power and the strategies that politicians had when it came to warfare. And it made everybody stop and say, well, maybe restraint is a better idea than fighting. And you've got all these, you know, well, I think back to the... pre-nuclear age, and of course I only know of it from what I've read. But you would have these big disputes over territories and economic interests, and they got settled on the battlefield. Until 1945, the main preoccupation of the great power military establishments like ours. was figuring out how to win wars. But since 1945, we know how to win wars. Nuclear bombs win wars. But the chief purpose of a military should be to avert wars. And think about that, how nuclear weapons, that's what the whole Cold War was about. If you fire a nuclear weapon at Russia, Russia's going to fire a nuclear weapon back at you. It's still true today. And that's not to say that the Cold War was a, you know, a harmonious time. Far from it. The period between 1946 and 1991 had a bunch of crises, a bunch of standoffs, the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was in 1962 and the Middle East crisis in 1973. But in the past, before 1945, those would have surely led to war. But because nuclear weapons are now part of the equation, They try to de-escalate before they do war. Listen, I never thought I would be saying that nuclear weapons are a good way of preventing war. But they are. Nobody wants to fight a nuclear war. And the great nuclear powers, they get it. They've pretty much adhered to the logic. of deterrence. They get it. They've pretty much adhered to the logic of deterrence. The problem, of course, is these rogue players who now have nuclear weapons.

You know, to have nuclear weapons in the hands of Kim Jong-un. Pretty scary. But there are roughly 12,000 nuclear warheads around the globe. And that number increases every day. Now, granted, Russia and the United States, we still have the bulk of them. And we're adding to our inventories all the time. But China, China's been dramatically increasing their nuclear arsenal. When Ji Ping became the leader in 2013, China had 250 nuclear warheads. Today it has over 600. And the Pentagon says it'll have 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035. That's a rapid expansion. And it has certainly made Washington politicians pretty anxious about what is it that Beijing intends to do. So, you know, now we have a nuclear, tripolar competition beginning. It's not just Russia and America. It's now Russia, America, and China. And then the rogues. I don't know. You know, I like to envision a world. in which there were no nuclear weapons, but I think there would be carnage. And World War III would lead to levels of death and destruction far surpassing those that we witnessed during all the walls, or the walls, if you put them all together during the 20th century. You know, the combined... fatalities of World War I and World War II were more than 80 million deaths. But with all the new stuff we have, the modern warfare technologies, the weapons are deadlier, they're more precise than they'd ever been. Now add nuclear weapons to that battlefield, and World War III would lead to levels of death and destruction like you can't even imagine. So unless we forget that on the upcoming anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you know, one of the things preventing a breakout of global, all-out, great power war has been and remains the sobering presence of nuclear weapons. Never thought I'd be thinking that. But here I am. And if you're a thoughtful person, and I know you are, you listen to this show, then you know, I'm right. Anyway, let me take a quick time out. We come back, I've got to talk about Francesca Hong's defeat, because I think too many people were cheering and thought, oh, this will end the DSA madness in this country, and I beg to differ. Please stay right where you are. I'll be right back. So I, of course, would prefer to talk about just about anything else, but I have to talk about this Francesca Hong. Because I hear too many people who think, oh, you see, the American people rejected the lady who wanted to cancel Thanksgiving. That's a good thing.

But you know what? Come November, few Democrats will be happy with the way their parties voting systems are working. Maybe they don't want to cancel Thanksgiving, but I think they're going to be a little concerned with, A, how far off the polls were. You know, apparently she's not going to be our first avowedly socialist state governor. She lost an extremely tight primary to this David Crowley, who's a Milwaukee County executive. And what you're hearing, every time I turn on any station, left, right, doesn't matter. is that it's a major blow for the Democratic Socialists of America and their bid to take over the Democratic establishment. But I think you have to think about this differently. First and foremost, pollsters are very bad at figuring out what's going on in Democratic primaries. And Democratic primary officials are pathetic at tallying votes. The primary ended in, it was like a farce early this morning as the Milwaukee County workers had to recover five USB sticks with vote counts on them only for those sticks to apparently be blank or something. Nobody seems even entirely sure what happened. But I'll tell you what is certain. is that the Wisconsin polls, which were predicting a comfortable victory for Hong, were wildly wrong. And they did not take into account some of the very peculiar dynamics of the race. Crowley only became the moderate choice late in the process. And so the mainstream voters, maybe they flock to him over Hong, because she was such a proud DSA member with such a long record of crazy opinions. But polling companies did not identify that shift in the voters. They made a similar mistake in not identifying the late trends in last week's Senate primary in Michigan, which ended up being a much narrower victory. for Abdul El-Sayed than they were predicting. The real story isn't how Hong lost. It should be how on earth she came so close to being the Democratic choice for Wisconsin in a very high turnout primary in such an important swing state. I mean, she didn't make any bones about wanting to abolish the police. Because she said law enforcement agencies uphold white supremacy. She said she was uncomfortable at the fact that her biracial son gives her a, and these were her words, you know, these weren't words conservatives and made up. She said that he gives her a proximity to whiteness. I'm still trying to.

Think about what that's going to mean for that child growing up. Because now those comments are public record. And she was uncomfortable about her own child. That to me is profound. She supported the abolition of the Senate. She supports publicly owned grocery stores and publicly owned banks. And she's against Valentine's Day. Yeah. She said, it's just crazy. Crazy world. On CNN a few weeks ago, she wouldn't even disavow the Thanksgiving comment. insisting I was a chef or I don't know I know all about bringing people together to celebrate blah blah blah and I'll tell you what you look at Hong and then you look at Abdul El-Sayed she makes him look almost I don't know like a political professional he's more like a Barack Obama than he is like a DSA candidate But she came within a whisker of being the Democratic nominee for governor in a state that Donald Trump won twice. And none of this means the party's voters are going to return to the establishment on either side of the aisle, really. What it suggests is that successful Democratic candidates are now the ones who can bridge the gap between the hard and the soft left of their own party. That's what Abdul El-Sayed did in Michigan. That's what Peggy Flanagan did in her Minnesota Senate primary last night. Flanagan's not a DSA member, but she was a progressive choice. She was backed by Bernie Sanders. who's now apparently the socialist statesman. She won by 20% in a primary cycle that was dominated by debates about immigration enforcement. And she's now the strong favorite to win against Michelle Tofoya, which when they say she's the strong favorite, and I look at the polling results, not so fast. I think Michelle Tofoya has a deep base that nobody's thinking about. Any guy who ever, you know, spent hours watching the NFL knows Michelle Tofoya. And, you know, just a couple of years ago, any Republican strategist would have said Flanagan is a far-left lunatic. But see, now they have to compare her to Francesca Hong and all these other popular DSA people. And she seems like a reasonably sensible choice. Imagine. Because that's where we are. You don't have to imagine it. Just open your eyes and maybe smell the coffee. You know, I look around at all of these

Members of the Trump administration that came in quietly and have turned out to be remarkable diplomats. I mean, released Russian prisoner yesterday. And one of the ones that really is so appealing, I believe, to the public, is Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary. I mean, he's more than just a Treasury Secretary. He's like a diplomat now. He goes out there and he uses our financial muscle in pretty interesting ways all over the world. This week, we joined the Japanese government in an intervention to prop up the yen. This is the first time America and Japan have done that since, what, 1998, which was the height of the Asian financial crisis. And you can hear, I hear it already, financial analysts are all real critical of the move, especially because he promised to do whatever it takes. Those are his words, to support Japan's currency. And he's willing to lift the $60 billion cap on the emergency facility. The fear is that at a time when the Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh is trying to tighten the balance sheet, Scott Bessent is ready to take on more debt. But I think what you're seeing is that America wants to create a new mechanism using financial power instead of military power all the time. And that turns this Scott Bessent into a diplomat. And definitely a political partner to the president. Because just as China uses sovereign debt to buy up control in all these struggling nations, Trump's America is trying to shore up their allies in need, especially any ally that's willing to back our industries and build factories here and get fairness in our import-export. So with one hand, Team Trump imposes tariffs, or sometimes even more punitive stuff, and then with the other, it gives currency boosts if you're a useful partner like Japan. The White House likes this prime minister, the first female prime minister of Japan. The country has committed to large investments in our country in the last couple of months. And the success of Japan, which is, of course, China's neighbor and rival, that's a pretty crucial piece of the White House's strategy for containing the influence of Beijing. And not to mention the aggressive military action, fending off some of the Chinese encroachments in Latin America, Venezuela. Great example. In October last year, Scott Bessent was the one who moved to bolster the Argentinian peso, which enabled the libertarian guy, Montmillae, to bring down inflation and then he was able to win some crucial elections. And after starting the Iran War,

The Treasury cooked up a scheme to boost the United Arab Emirates Durham with dollars. It's not just about market mechanics. It's also about supporting and rewarding countries who support Washington over China. Bessence is playing a big role. And he has been since before the war in ramping up sanctions against Iran. He calls it Operation Economic Fury. And it was his talk this week of a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz that lifted the stock market. Arguably, it was Scott Bessent's comments. It wasn't President Trump's remarks on truth social. And none of this is to say that Scott Bessent is his own man. President Trump is the ultimate decision maker. But Scott Bessent. is, and Marco Rubio, these guys are attempting to carry out Trump's sometimes confusing agenda, often radical agenda, without collapsing the global economy. And that's going to make Scott Bessent a historically significant figure. He's played a larger diplomatic role than Treasury secretaries normally do, and he's still negotiating a new tariff settlement with the Great Dragon in the East. These are stories that are not getting sufficient coverage. When you look at Francesca Hong and that story, what's happening behind the scenes? All over the world. We can get so laser focused on the Democratic Socialists of America that we don't see the forest for the trees. Well, I do. And that's my job, is to make sure you get to hear that. Don't forget, coming up after me is Guy Benson, followed by Will Kane, then it's Joe Pags, Lars Larson, and the overnight guys until 6 a.m. tomorrow morning when Jennifer Ross and Stephen Deiner will be back with the South Florida Morning Show. They're followed by Brian Kilmeade at 9, Eric Erickson at noon, and the crazy lady who seeks out the stories nobody else wants to talk about at 3 o'clock. That would be me. But I still have a segment left in today's program. So please stay right where you are. So I got to do this story. And believe me, it's the last thing I want to do. I've talked about it before. But, you know, there was a commentary by Candace Buckner that really just, well, it encapsulated everything I've been feeling. And, you know, she talked about how the WNBA has got all of our attention right now. You know, you've got these powerful women, Caitlin Clark, Olivia Miles, Brianna Stewart, you know, Asia Wilson, I think is her last name. And all of a sudden you look at this and it's spiraled into a rinse and repeat drama.

You know, the NBA has proved that it can keep us watching it ever since the Caitlin Clark effect introduced a whole new audience to the game and generated ratings. But with more and more moments like Saturday's meltdown between the Indiana fever and Chicago Sky, it's like exasperating. I don't want to watch it anymore. It's every politician shilling for votes off the jet stream of Clark's fame, every troll who couldn't tell the difference between Chelsea Gray and Alicia Gray, but suddenly they have hot takes about the league. It's the conversation, a trap, really, that hasn't grown past black versus white, conservative versus liberal, straight versus trans, are gay. And more than any other sports fan base, you have a new and broader audience that consumes the WNBA. They just want basketball. They want it to be simple. They don't want... all of this stuff that's going on, with people clashing against each other, with the players, you know, getting on social media platforms and saying crazy things. And that's, believe me, in my opinion, it's happening on both sides, the liberals and the conservatives, the black and the white, both sides. Sophie Cunningham choosing to get involved in discussing transgender athletes in women's sports. Does she have a right to? Yes, she does. But now look at the mess. You know, is it really that big a deal in the WNBA? I don't think so. I don't think there's a bunch of transgendered people in there. And then you got Dijunet Carrington already, you know, posting about race, white privilege. And, you know, people like me, we just wanted to watch some B-ball. We just wanted to watch some ball. And now I don't want to watch it anymore. They all have a right to stand up for whatever they believe, but you know what. It's the same thing I said about the NFL and the NBA. That's not why I turn on the sports to discuss LGBT and racism. Not at all. Anyway, thank you for your time this time. Until next time, my plan is to be back here tomorrow at 3. If it be his will and he delays his coming. What lies behind us and we lies ahead of us are for tiny matters compared to what lies within us. So wherever you are, just be yourself. Everybody else is taken. And then, of course, may God bless you. May God bless Israel. And may God bless the United States of America. And could all you athletes just shut up and play ball? See you tomorrow at 3. This has been the Joyce Kaufman podcast. Available everywhere you get your podcasts.