Last night we told you the sad and bewildering story of Dr. Oz, a man with absolutely everything going for him — talent, decency, charm, money, name recognition, all the right endorsements — who is nevertheless losing by a big margin as a Republican in what should be a Republican wave election to a radical and incompetent Democratic lieutenant governor who has presided over the decline of the state and who, by the way, also has had a stroke and can no longer speak in complete sentences. That's happening right now.
Dr. Oz is getting crushed by a stroke victim who was already crazy. It's bizarre. The question is, why is this happening? We spent some time on the phone the other day calling around to various smart political people to find out why it's happening and we heard a lot of theories, almost all of which boil down to Dr. Oz is a bad candidate. Mitch McConnell, who is in charge of electing more Republicans to the Senate, gave virtually the same explanation yesterday at a Kentucky Chamber of Commerce lunch.
"Candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome," he said. In other words, it's not my fault they sent me bad candidates. OK, but before we accept that, before we accept that a Republican just can't win at a time when Democrats have completely discredited themselves, it's worth pausing to ask exactly what this means. What is a bad candidate? Well, there are no bad candidates just like there are no bad dogs. There's bad owners. There are no bad candidates. There are just candidates who are running on the wrong things, candidates who are talking about issues that people don't deeply care about.
A good candidate is the opposite of that. A good candidate is a candidate who promises to fix the problems that voters worry about most. Candidates like that tend to win elections because the message is bigger than the man. A candidate with a powerful message can overcome virtually any obstacle from multiple bankruptcies to universal media hostility to a dull, orange skin tone.
If voters believe you will make their lives better, they will vote for you, period. It's not complicated. Unfortunately, donors and party leaders often do complicate it. They want candidates to talk about issues that they care about, which are often very different from the issues that the public cares about. Remember, Republicans used to yell at you about entrepreneurship. That's the most important thing. Entrepreneurship? OK, sounds kind of amusing now, but basically that is still happening.
Consider Pennsylvania, the state where Dr. Oz is now losing. What do voters in Pennsylvania care about most? We haven't seen the most recent polls, but we would guess law and order is at the very top of that list. Why do we think that? Well, here's video from a story that a local television station, Fox 29, is doing tonight about murder in Philadelphia, the state's largest city. You're seeing the pictures on your screen right now.
Reporter Chris O’Connell went to a nearby cemetery and asked how things were going. Workers there told him, "We can't dig graves fast enough." That's how many young people are being murdered in Philadelphia right now. "We can't dig graves fast enough." When was the last time you heard that? We didn't hear it during COVID, the global pandemic that politicians told you is the worst thing ever to happen to America, but COVID wasn't the worst thing ever to happen to America and over time, people figured that out. They warned they had been lied to and that's one of the reasons so many Americans now hate politicians. They're tired of the lying and it's the very same reason that voters will tend to reward any candidate who tells the truth about what is actually happening and what actually matters.
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Here's one thing that actually is happening and actually matters — something that everybody sees but that candidates virtually never mention, and that is stealing. Suddenly there's a huge amount of stealing in the United States. It's everywhere. That's a problem because stealing is a crime, a moral crime. In fact, it's the first crime that most of us learn not to commit as children. Don't steal. Don't take what doesn't belong to you. It's immoral and it certainly is immoral. Yet somehow in the last few years, our leaders, Democrats mostly, but honestly, to some extent, both parties, our leaders have decided that stealing isn't really such a big deal. It's not really a crime, certainly not something we should be worried about.
In a country this rich with this much income inequality, how can you really tell people not to take from those who are better off than they are? That's their attitude. It's a decadent attitude, but that's what they really believe, even if they don't always say it out loud. So, without any sort of public referendum, the kind you would have in a democracy, cities around the country have effectively decriminalized stealing. So, what's been the effect of this? Well, more stealing — and stealing quickly metastasized into looting and then social collapse. That's happening right now everywhere. Here's footage from a grocery store in Los Angeles. That footage was followed by footage of a crowd of criminals storming a 7-Eleven.
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So, that's LA. It could be anywhere. We saw that on the internet this morning and we were shocked by it, transfixed by it, really. It's repulsive. There is no excuse that. No one in that crowd needed what they stole. They didn't need new ports to survive. No one starts in this country anyway, but they stole anyway. Why? Not because of us, but because of them, because they're greedy and piggish. Their parents never told them not to and most of all, because they could. Joe Biden's Justice Department will never say a word about what they did. Criticizing theft is an offense against equity, but that's happening.
Why isn't every Republican candidate in the nation running ads with that footage in it? No one is, as far as we know, most just ignoring the chaos, but that doesn't mean it isn't real. It is real and again, because it's not addressed, it's spreading. Starbucks just closed 16 stores nationwide because of increasing theft. It's going unpunished. Target has reduced its operating hours in six San Francisco stores. They used to close at 10 so people could buy stuff after work. Now they're going to close at 5. Why? Because of crime, stealing.
Walgreens shut down 17 stores altogether. Stores now losing an average of $45 million a day because of theft. What does that add up to? The disintegration of society. That's not an overstatement. You see it everywhere, robbery up dramatically in New York. It's so bad in New York that grocery stores are locking spam and ham in anti-theft cases. Robberies up 12% in San Francisco, 20% in L.A. Motor vehicle thefts are also up by similar numbers. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, arrests for theft and motor vehicle theft have actually been going down. Oh, so the incidence of crime rises, but the punishment of crime falls. Prosecutors in California have stopped enforcing the law, but it's not just California. It's at the federal level as well. Joe Biden's DOJ has done nothing to stop the crime wave and so it is accelerating everywhere. Illinois and Washington state, for example.
CHICAGO, IL: Some high-end stores along the Gold Coast have hired security guards to usher in customers one at a time because of videos like this where a handful of criminals come in at a time. In this case, the theft ring made off with over $100,000 worth of Louis Vuitton items.
SEATTLE, WA: This may be the most brazen shoplift you'll ever see. After singling out a $600, 70-inch TV, police say... the man in blue, puts the TV on a shopping cart and starts to wheel it through Seattle's downtown target. Court documents say he's stolen from this target 21 times before.
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SAN FRANCISCO: Suspects running to the streets of San Francisco. Arms full of loot. A trio of thieves violently smashing and then grabbing $20,000 worth of watches.
BELLEVUE, WA: Snatch and run. Within seconds, thieves swiped $93,000 worth of merchandise from Louis Vuitton in Bellevue.
SEATTLE, WA: Customer stepped outside and then returns with a pistol jabbing at the employee and demanding all the bills from the register. The gunman takes the cash and runs out. Police think he's done it before.
Makes your heart beat faster watching that. What country is this and why is no one stopping them? You've seen videos like this. They are all over the internet. When there's a security guard, the security just stands there haplessly doing nothing. Some of them are cowards probably. Some of them aren't, but none of them know, none of them believe they're going to be backed up by the government, local, state or federal, if they intervene and try and stop someone from stealing. So, people steal with impunity, why wouldn't they? Their parents don't tell them not to. And what happens then?
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If you allow people to loot stores, it will not be long before they are sticking guns in your face and pulling the trigger. Disorder leads to violence every single time. We've seen this movie repeatedly, and once violence begins and the state does nothing to stop it, in fact, in some cases encourage it, what happens then? People become desperate and left with no other choice, they take the law into their own hands. That is already happening. We have law enforcement and courts to prevent this so people won't have to do this, but they're not functioning, so people are doing it. Watch this Las Vegas smoke shop owner defend himself with a knife when a robber dressed in all black and a mask suddenly vaults the counter.
JOHNNY NGUYEN, SMOKESTROM SMOKE SHOP OWNER: Why are you guys wearing masks like that?
ROBBER: Say what?
JOHNNY NGUYEN, SMOKESTROM SMOKE SHOP OWNER: Can you guys just leave?
ROBBER: Nah.
JOHNNY NGUYEN, SMOKESTROM SMOKE SHOP OWNER: Take the money in it. Can I just keep the coins? I need the coins.
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We cut out the rest of it. He stabbed that man until he fell down and didn't resist. The store owner's called Johnny Nguyen. He told reporters no embarrassment, "I don't think he planned on getting stabbed that day, but if you try robbing a store, you are taking a risk." That's the message people who robbed stores have forgotten, but they're going to be reminded of it very soon as more store owners find they have no choice but to defend their lives and property with force, with knives or guns. That's going to happen.
Do we want that? In some cases, those people will be arrested. In other cases, they'll become local celebrities, but in all cases, we're putting the onus of law enforcement on the individual when that is the core duty of the state, but the state's given up and again, in a lot of cases, in the case of the Biden administration, they're encouraging it. So, again, more store owners are doing exactly what that man did, defending themselves and their livelihoods. That's even happening in California, where despite the strictest gun control in the country, a man with a rifle tried to shoot and kill a store owner in July and here's what happened next.
CRAIG COPE, NORCO STORE OWNER: He just pointed his gun directly at me and I wasn't waiting any longer, I fired.
GINA SILVA, KTTV REPORTER: After taking on four armed robbers, 80-year-old Craig Cope is back at work at Norco Market and Liquor. Investigators say four men in a stolen vehicle with stolen weapons backed into the parking lot.
CRAIG COPE, NORCO STORE OWNER: Pulled over to here.
GINA SILVA, KTTV REPORTER: Inside, Craig was alone watching the security cameras. Craig grabbed his shotgun, knowing he would have to defend himself.
CRAIG COPE, NORCO STORE OWNER: But I was trying to make sure I hit what I was pointing at.
GINA SILVA, KTTV REPORTER: One of the men was shot in the arm. You can hear him screaming in the video.
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So, the Biden administration is constantly lecturing you about civil rights. Crime is the most basic violation of civil rights and they're doing nothing. If they cared, instead of sending tens of billions of dollars to corrupt oligarchs in Ukraine, more money for Zelenskyy, maybe they could send the money to immigrant convenience store owners for security, but they're not. They could investigate the prosecutors who are refusing to enforce the law in violation of our Constitution and their oaths of office. That would be a start, but they're not doing that either.
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The DOJ isn't even acknowledging this is happening. Instead, they're focusing all of their energy on phantom White supremacy threats, people who complain about the sexual mutilation of children. They're the ones feeling the heat from the DOJ, and where's the other side?
Once again, if every Republican office-seeker, every Republican candidate in the United States focused on law and order and equality under the law, there would be a red wave.
