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00:00:30.000I've been to this dinner before, the White House Correspondents Dinner, and I will tell you,
00:00:38.660I did not really enjoy my time there. My husband and I, I'll put a picture on screen. Look at us,
00:00:43.900we look so young. We went back in 2023 under President Biden. Didn't really enjoy it. Did
00:00:50.980not have a good time. Was kind of underwhelmed, truthfully. For those of you who don't really
00:00:55.260know what this night is. It's kind of like a night for all media to let loose. Like there's
00:00:59.680jokes being cut, left-leaning, right-leaning, everything in between. It's just a night for
00:01:04.060good fun. I don't know if it's like the competitor in me, very driven. I don't like to lose. I did
00:01:10.860not like hearing the comedian on stage and President Biden and his administration make
00:01:15.060jokes towards conservatives. So I kind of vowed right then and there that I wasn't really interested
00:01:20.840in going again. Roll around to the next year, 2024, was invited, didn't go. Same thing in 2025.
00:01:27.560Same thing even just this past weekend. And boy, let me tell you, I'm glad I did not go.
00:01:34.520Before we get into this episode, which we're talking to someone who was there, who was in
00:01:39.500the room, who witnessed all of the chaos unfolding, let me just make it very clear where I stand.
00:01:46.020political violence is never okay. I mean, sue me. It seems to be a controversial take
00:01:53.760nowadays. If you have found yourself in some way justifying what happened this past weekend,
00:01:59.580again, a third assassination attempt on the president. And for that matter, anyone who was
00:02:04.680in this wannabe assassins way of getting to the president, whether that was, you know,
00:02:10.260the shooter was MAGA. I've seen that online. Whether that was, this was all stage, whether
00:02:14.500it's, you know, this was just an excuse for President Trump to build his ballroom, whatever
00:02:19.500it was, then I have nothing in common with you. I honestly don't even know how we coexist.
00:02:26.620After the three assassination attempts on President Trump, after watching what happened
00:02:31.220to my dear friend, Charlie Kirk, after Kavanaugh, Scalise, and more, I wake up every single day with
00:02:39.020a knot in my stomach thinking about the future, the trajectory of this country. All of that and
00:02:45.140more with one of the funniest people I know, Jimmy Fallon. Well, Jimmy, Trump seems to ruin
00:02:51.400everything. Now you can't even be in a room with him without fearing for your life, fearing you're
00:02:56.320going to get shot. You were there at that White House correspondence dinner. First and foremost,
00:03:03.000can you give us a little context on what the dinner really is, what it's supposed to be about?
00:03:07.640and then I want you to kind of take us through the moment you heard the shots what that was like
00:03:12.760the chaos in the room okay I mean traditionally the dinner is a celebration of the media which
00:03:21.700is kind of ironic you know what I mean imagine if the captain of the Titanic dumped the Gatorade
00:03:27.300on himself at the end of the game like what a good job we did you see the way we took that iceberg
00:03:32.460You know, it's always been a little ironic, but it is the Super Bowl of the D.C. party circuit because D.C., of course, runs, you know, on a high octane level of activism.
00:03:44.520And obviously there's a big media presence. So the correspondence dinner is the conflation of those two things.
00:03:49.660And traditionally, it involves the president and a bit of an off ramp like a detente between the president and the press.
00:03:56.900that's usually a lot of good-natured joking.
00:03:59.340But as you know, Trump hasn't gone at any point in his presidency
00:04:03.160because the relationship between him and the media,
00:04:06.660Trump and the media get along as well as a bathtub gets along with a toaster.
00:15:25.840What do you make of the fact that this guy is a teacher?
00:15:30.320I mean, none of us are shocked by that.
00:15:32.620We saw the whole pronouns in the bio and the potential Kamala donation.
00:15:36.840These are the people, and it's worth pointing out, okay, there are a lot of people on the left that are kind of like, you know the term they use, suicidal empathy, to describe man's migration in Europe like that?
00:15:52.740I believe there are decent people that truly believe they're helping the world, but what they don't get is they've made an emotional investment in a fallacy, meaning they believe they're helping the world by killing Donald Trump because he's Hitler.
00:17:31.260I saw this week where Hassan Piker, who I guess is a Twitch streamer,
00:17:36.420was, I don't know what the format was, I think he was talking to the New York
00:17:39.360Times actually, and said that murder, specifically
00:17:43.220in talking about the UnitedHealthcare CEO, that murder was
00:17:47.340justified because he had committed what he called social murder. We've got a clip of it here. Let's
00:17:53.180play it really quick. Engels wrote about the concept of social murder. And Brian Thompson,
00:18:02.880as the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder, the
00:18:10.100systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit paywalled
00:18:19.960system of healthcare in this country. And the consequences of that are tremendous amounts of
00:18:28.380pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of deaths. And that was a fascinating
00:18:34.260story from for me because americans are very draconian about crime and punishment they're
00:18:40.460very black and white on this issue and yet because of the pervasive pain that the private health care
00:18:49.820system had created for the average american i saw so many people immediately understand
00:18:57.780why this death had taken place so many big words draconian pervasive i thought it was so telling
00:19:06.560you have these new york times reporters or journalists or hosts or whatever this setting
00:19:11.220was who are kind of just like nodding and smiling along seemingly agreeing never pushing back on
00:19:16.560this what do you make of it well you know what i think i think it there's like an emotional
00:19:22.080convenience as psychotic as it sounds to agree with something so psychotic because it's easier
00:19:28.200to tell yourselves hey this health care ceo is an evil dude harming people than it is to go hey
00:19:34.380i consistently voted for the party that made this health care so unaffordable that gave them so
00:19:41.260much money and so many subsidies and in the process reduced all the consumer choice from
00:19:46.380the market that's causing the very hardships this guy tried to avenge. I mean, the Democrats passed
00:19:52.160Obamacare without a single Republican vote. Those Obamacare subsidies that they passed during COVID
00:19:59.280happened without a single Republican vote. So if you are bearing the brunt of the inadequacies in
00:20:05.580our healthcare system and you're a Democrat voter, isn't it easier to say Brian Thompson was evil and
00:20:10.820Luigi's a good guy than it is to go, you know, if only there was some choice in the market and some
00:20:17.140competition for your healthcare dollar, they're never going to do it. And that's the biggest
00:20:21.620challenge we face is there's a lot of people and you know this, and this comes back to the
00:20:25.340assassination. Everybody watching this has friends who absolutely positively dislike something about
00:20:33.100themselves in a severe way. So they've outsourced it to Donald Trump. Okay. It is convenient to buy
00:20:39.900Whatever the narrative is, threat to democracy, threat to women, threat to minorities, Jim Crow on stories, it's so much easier to peddle that and traffic in that every day than it is to look inward at that one thing you don't like about yourself.
00:20:53.740And that's where the Hassan Pikers of the world and the members of the media are doing that thing where they sound like their pool of knowledge is a mile wide, but it's like not even a quarter of an inch deep.
00:21:04.240But it doesn't need to be because that person looking for that convenient outsource.
00:21:08.920Oh, Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare has got all this leverage over my life.
00:21:12.620Yeah, if you look an inch deeper, you realize you voted to give them that power.
00:21:16.940That's the biggest problem we face right now.
00:21:20.220Okay, you know the George Orwell book, Animal Farm.
00:21:23.200I read it in my freshman year of high school.
00:23:57.520Isn't that kind of how they created the divide between what people believed to be true and what they were willing to say in public when it came to men convening against women?
00:24:08.660You think of how many people were fearful during COVID to admit they weren't vaccinated or how many people got those fake cards because they didn't want anyone else,
00:24:16.160their peers or their friends or their family not knowing they actually weren't vaccinated.