The Ben Shapiro Show - CON INC: Bannon-Epstein Connection EXPLODES

00:00:00.000 Well, folks, Steve Bannon has now been totally exposed in the Epstein files.

00:00:03.000 We're going to get into what is actually in the Epstein files and why is it that the people who are like actual conspirators with Jeffrey Epstein, like people who are working closely with Jeffrey Epstein, are being overlooked in favor of a broad, broad conspiracy theory about all of society.

00:00:16.000 We'll get into all of that.

00:00:18.000 Plus, a big economic move from the Trump administration first.

00:00:21.000 The biggest story in the country right now remains the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie's mother, Nancy Guthrie.

00:00:26.000 Information continues to move unbelievably fast.

00:00:28.000 If you are trying to keep up, here is the answer.

00:00:30.000 Finding Nancy Guthrie.

00:00:31.000 It's the Daily Wire's first ever true crime podcast.

00:00:33.000 It's hosted by investigative journalist Lyndon Blake, and it brings you new episodes every day with the latest on the case, tracks the real leads, the real developments, what changed, what it means, and what is happening in real time.

00:00:43.000 No theories, no fan fiction, just the evidence.

00:00:45.000 This is the case that America is following, can't stop talking about.

00:00:48.000 Listen to Finding Nancy Guthrie, a Daily Wire true crime investigation streaming right now at dailywire.com and on that Daily Wire Plus app.

00:00:56.000 There is a palpable frustration out there in American politics, pretty clearly.

00:01:00.000 It's rooted in some ugly and unpleasant realities.

00:01:03.000 The reality that lots of our major institutions blew up their credibility on COVID-19 and BLM and RussiaGate, for example.

00:01:09.000 The reality that we don't really have any idea how AI is going to reshape the job market.

00:01:14.000 The reality that a ton of people in the political class have zero scruples and are totally willing to engage in open corruption.

00:01:20.000 But that frustration is turning into something else before our eyes in this country, and that thing is nihilism.

00:01:26.000 And that nihilism is rooted in a gigantic lie, a truly gigantic lie, that all of our problems in the United States are intractable.

00:01:33.000 That individual problems that you may have or I may have in the United States, that's all the result of an evil system, often led by cohesive groups of conspiratorial elites, that you cannot succeed unless you pierce that supposed matrix.

00:01:46.000 And that all of those who call for individual responsibility and dutiful decency, those people are actually part of this evil matrix.

00:01:53.000 Now, this stuff is not solution making.

00:01:55.000 It is thought preventing.

00:01:56.000 It is success-preventing.

00:01:58.000 It's a recipe for personal and national disaster.

00:02:01.000 And the result is an increasingly incoherent and unhinged politics and an entire generation of young men and women who go looking for meaning in all the wrong places and on the very fringes sometimes turn to violence.

00:02:13.000 There's a story in the Washington Post from a couple of days ago that highlights this by a guy named Peter Hariski.

00:02:18.000 He writes, quote, Amid a wave of high-profile killings and political violence in the United States, investigators have been confounded regularly by the absence of a recognizable agenda.

00:02:27.000 The assailants in several cases, shootings, a bombing, a planned drone attack, resisted familiar labels and categories.

00:02:32.000 They weren't Democrat or Republican or Islamist militant or Antifa or white supremacist.

00:02:37.000 There was something new.

00:02:38.000 In their manifestos, according to the Washington Post, these attackers declared their contempt for humanity and a desire to see the collapse of civilization.

00:02:46.000 Law enforcement officers and federal prosecutors have begun to describe these attacks as a contemporary strain of nihilism, an online revival of a philosophical stance that arose in the 19th century to deny the existence of moral truths and meaning in the universe.

00:03:00.000 Well, I mean, as the Washington Post suggests right there, that isn't actually anything new.

00:03:04.000 Societies that experience major dislocations are often the breeding ground for nihilism and violence.

00:03:09.000 That's been true going all the way back to Dostoevsky's notes from the underground, which he wrote in 1864.

00:03:14.000 But actually, if you reread notes from the underground, Dostoevsky goes further.

00:03:18.000 He says that nihilism doesn't just require social dislocations or economic problems, that nihilism can arise particularly in prosperous periods where everybody seems to be doing pretty well.

00:03:28.000 So he writes, quote, I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, apropos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity, a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical countenance were to arise and putting his arms akimbo, say to us all, I say, gentlemen, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds simply to send these log rhythms to the devil and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will?

00:03:54.000 That again, says Dostoevsky, would not matter, but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers, such as the nature of man, and all that for the most foolish reason, which one would think was hardly worth mentioning.

00:04:04.000 That is, that man everywhere and all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated.

00:04:11.000 What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.

00:04:16.000 And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.

00:04:19.000 In other words, convince people that they don't have any choices in life.

00:04:22.000 And what you are likely to get is a nihilistic retreat into barbarism, specifically because people want to lash out at their supposed lack of choice.

00:04:31.000 Now, you've heard me rail on this show, a lot of other places, against what I've called the conspiracy theory of society.

00:04:37.000 That's the idea that everything in life is controlled by systems you can't quite identify and that your problems are solvable only through violence or through some sort of pseudo-revolution.

00:04:47.000 Philosopher Karl Popper explained this again way back in the mid-20th century.

00:04:51.000 He said, the conspiracy theory of society is the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon.

00:05:01.000 Sometimes it's a hidden interest which has first to be revealed and who have planned and conspired to bring it about.

00:05:06.000 The gods are abandoned, but their place is filled by powerful men or groups, sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from, such as the learned elders of Zion or the monopolists or the capitalists or the imperialists.

00:05:18.000 And Karl Popper was writing this in the mid-20th century.

00:05:22.000 So none of this is new.

00:05:23.000 However, what we are experiencing right now in the United States is dangerous and stupid.

00:05:28.000 Of course, there are conspiracies out there, but conspiracies generally have specific people involved and evidence of their involvement and a plan effectuated.

00:05:36.000 The conspiracy theory of society, that everything in your life is out of your control, and that there is a group of manipulative elites who are getting together behind closed doors to figure out how to screw you.

00:05:46.000 That is something different.

00:05:47.000 And that conspiracy theory of society is finding unbelievably fertile ground right now.

00:05:52.000 And there are a lot of people who are promoting it for their own pure grift and greed.

00:05:57.000 They're doing it because of the con.

00:05:59.000 It turns out that this modern wave of nihilism is not entirely organic.

00:06:03.000 It is, as the kids might say, an op.

00:06:06.000 It is fomented by influencers and politicians who commit ideological arson so then they can pretend to be firefighters, people who manipulate their audiences into believing that their problems are unfixable unless they hand over more power and control to precisely those same influencers and politicians.

00:06:23.000 After all, influencers can get really, really rich off the nihilism of crowds.

00:06:26.000 Politicians can foment the change they seek by channeling nihilistic energy, at least temporarily, until they're eaten by the movement that they actually foster.

00:06:35.000 I'm bringing all of this up to discuss what I think is the biggest news story of the day, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and people we know were involved in it, because it shows the distinction between actual conspiracy and the conspiracy theory of society.

00:06:50.000 I'm going to get to what the point of all of this is in just a minute because it ties into a really big thing in the news that I think most people are just sort of glossing over for convenient reasons.

00:06:59.000 First, you know, I was not sleeping in my bed last night.

00:07:02.000 I got to be honest with you.

00:07:02.000 I'm extremely tired.

00:07:04.000 One of the reasons I am so tired is because I did not have my mattress.

00:07:06.000 When I'm out of town and I'm not sleeping on my mattress, it is so much worse because my mattress was made just for me by Helix and you can do the same thing.

00:07:14.000 Sleep is really important, I know, especially when I'm missing it.

00:07:17.000 And so you really should go take that sleep quiz from Helix Sleep right now and they will personalize a mattress just for you.

00:07:23.000 Finding the right mattress does not have to be complicated.

00:07:25.000 Helix has basically removed all the guesswork.

00:07:27.000 You take that sleep quiz that I talked about.

00:07:29.000 You answer a few questions about how you sleep on your side, back from soft.

00:07:32.000 I'm a stomach sleeper.

00:07:33.000 They match you to the mattress that's actually right for you, not a one-size-fits-all situation.

00:07:38.000 This isn't just another mattress brand making big promises.

00:07:40.000 Helix is the most awarded mattress company out there.

00:07:42.000 They've got top reviews from places like Forbes and Wired.

00:07:45.000 These people actually test things.

00:07:46.000 I've met the founders.

00:07:47.000 They're the real deal.

00:07:48.000 We've been sleeping on a Helix mattress for years.

00:07:50.000 The difference is amazing because when I sleep, I'm telling you, when I sleep at other places, I just don't sleep as well.

00:07:55.000 So head on over to Helix Sleep right now because you will be sleeping better.

00:08:00.000 Helix ran a study where 82% of participants saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle while sleeping on that Helix mattress.

00:08:05.000 Deep sleep is the stuff that actually helps your brain function, which is pretty important to me.

00:08:09.000 And yes, my wife is banking on as much quality sleep as possible because, you know, lots and lots of kids. 0.98

00:08:15.000 Helix makes it really easy.

00:08:16.000 Head on over to helixleep.com/slash Ben for 27% off site-wide.

00:08:19.000 That's helixleep.com/slash Ben for 27% off.

00:08:22.000 Make sure you enter the show name at checkout so they know that we sent you again, helixleep.com/slash Ben.

00:08:29.000 Also, there are a lot of bad people out there.

00:08:31.000 I mean, we talk about them on the show all the time.

00:08:33.000 You don't need bad people at your company.

00:08:34.000 You need good people at your company.

00:08:35.000 We are constantly hiring here at Daily Wire, and we use ZipRecruiter to help us do that because when you post a job on ZipRecruiter, they're not just going to throw it into the void and hope for the best.

00:08:45.000 Their platform actually suggests screening questions to help you quickly identify candidates who are genuinely right for the role.

00:08:51.000 It's efficient, it's practical, it saves you from sorting through a pile of resumes that were never a fit in the first place.

00:08:56.000 ZipRecruiter's matching technology works fast to surface candidates who meet your criteria.

00:09:00.000 You can filter for people who have been active recently, meaning that they're actually looking for a job.

00:09:04.000 That's a big reason why ZipRecruiter is the highest-rated hiring site on G2.

00:09:09.000 And we use it.

00:09:10.000 You should use it as well.

00:09:11.000 So if you want the best people, you know, not the kind of people at your company who might be trading emails with Jeffrey Epstein, as we'll discuss shortly, then head on over to ZipRecruiter and get the best people.

00:09:19.000 Ask the right questions, hire faster with ZipRecruiter.

00:09:21.000 Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/slash dailywire.

00:09:24.000 That's ziprecruiter.com/slash daily wire.

00:09:26.000 Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

00:09:28.000 Ask key questions.

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00:09:35.000 Try it for free.

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00:09:37.000 That's ziprecruiter.com slash daily wire.

00:09:40.000 Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

00:09:42.000 So let's begin with what we know.

00:09:43.000 Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused underage girls.

00:09:46.000 In fact, he pled guilty in 2009 to state charges of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.

00:09:52.000 He was arrested again in 2019 on charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors.

00:09:58.000 And so was Ghelane Maxwell, his longtime partner in crime.

00:10:02.000 Now, we know that Jeffrey Epstein had longtime relationships with many rich and famous people.

00:10:06.000 It appears, according to extensive in-depth reporting from the New York Times, that Epstein made his money through Grift.

00:10:12.000 He scammed rich people into giving him money, and then he used association with those rich people to find other rich people to scam.

00:10:19.000 Here's what the New York Times writes: quote, in his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar.

00:10:27.000 Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune.

00:10:36.000 A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals, and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money.

00:10:45.000 He started small, testing his tactics, seeing what he could get away with.

00:10:49.000 His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road.

00:10:52.000 Again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power.

00:10:58.000 Wrung by wrung, says the New York Times, Epstein climbed a social and financial ladder, often using young women as a potent form of currency.

00:11:04.000 His girlfriends, lovers, and even exes helped elevate his status inside a bank, got him hired to track down missing assets, and gained him entree to prestigious organizations.

00:11:14.000 And says the New York Times, deliberately or not, some of them enabled him as he constructed a sex trafficking operation that would later ensnare hundreds of teenage girls and young women.

00:11:22.000 Now, here has what has been alleged in the public square: that Epstein had a list of clients, like an actual list, famous and rich people to whom he trafficked underage girls.

00:11:32.000 It has been alleged in the public square that he blackmailed those clients with pictures and videos of them with said underage girls.

00:11:38.000 It has been alleged that he was working for foreign intelligence services online.

00:11:42.000 That's usually said to be mossad.

00:11:44.000 Sometimes it's the CIA or MI6 or the KGB in order to manipulate the levers of both economic and political power.

00:11:50.000 Those theories remain unsubstantiated by the evidence.

00:11:55.000 Evidence is our guide here.

00:11:57.000 Those theories have yet to be substantiated by the evidence.

00:12:01.000 That is not for lack of trying.

00:12:02.000 According to ABC News, prosecution memos, case summaries, and other documents made public in the department's latest release of Epstein-related records show that FBI agents and federal prosecutors diligently pursued potential co-conspirators.

00:12:15.000 Even seemingly outlandish and incomprehensible claims called into tip lines were examined, according to ABC News.

00:12:20.000 The only person in this case who truly alleged sex trafficking to men beyond Jeffrey Epstein was Virginia Jufre, who was found by prosecutors to be non-credible.

00:12:29.000 As ABC News reports, Jufrey acknowledged writing a partly fictionalized memoir of her time with Epstein containing descriptions of things that didn't take place.

00:12:36.000 She had also offered shifting accounts in interviews with investigators, they wrote, and had engaged in a continuous stream of public interviews about her allegations, many of which have included sensationalized, if not demonstrably inaccurate, characterizations of her experiences.

00:12:49.000 Those inaccuracies included false accounts of her interactions with the FBI, they said.

00:12:54.000 Now, listen, maybe more will be uncovered.

00:12:57.000 And if it is, then we'll cover that.

00:13:00.000 For example, Glenn Maxwell just yesterday took the fifth in her congressional testimony.

00:13:05.000 Here's what that sounded like.

00:13:08.000 Ms. Maxwell, were you a close friend and confidant of Jeffrey Epstein?

00:13:14.000 I would like to answer your question, but on the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer this question and any related questions.

00:13:25.000 My habeas petition is pending in the Southern District of New York.

00:13:29.000 I therefore invoke my right to silence under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

00:13:37.000 So maybe more will come out.

00:13:39.000 But given the evidence, here's what we do know.

00:13:42.000 There was, in fact, a Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy with actual humans.

00:13:46.000 We know about it.

00:13:47.000 It involved Jeffrey Epstein working with rich and powerful people to make money for himself, to boost his friends in order to ingratiate himself to them as well.

00:13:55.000 Some of this involves potentially serious criminal activity, which is why the prime minister of the UK, Kier Starmer, may now lose his job because he selected as his U.S. ambassador a man named Peter Mandelson, who allegedly forwarded classified information to Epstein years before.

00:14:09.000 Much of it involved untoward emails and likely trafficking of overage women to other men.

00:14:14.000 But that conspiracy, you know, the one that the evidence shows, ugly and hideous as it is, is not the one that's lighting up the internet and animating the political discourse.

00:14:22.000 It is the big blown-up conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theory that involves everyone at all times, child trafficking to the most powerful people in the world, blackmail allegations on the basis of foreign intelligence services.

00:14:33.000 That is the big conspiracy theory that's making the rounds.

00:14:36.000 That presumably is why Representative Thomas Massey, for example, keeps talking about the men he's going to name who are allegedly involved in this sex trafficking ring.

00:14:44.000 Here is Thomas Massey with Rokana grandstanding. 0.99

00:14:48.000 But what I saw that bothered me were the names of at least six men that have been redacted that are likely incriminated by their inclusion in these files.

00:14:59.000 So that's the first thing that I saw.

00:15:01.000 It took some digging to find them.

00:15:03.000 We went in there for two hours.

00:15:05.000 There's millions of files, right?

00:15:06.000 And in a couple of hours, we found six men whose names have been redacted who are implicated in the way that the files are presented.

00:15:17.000 Okay, now one thing is very clear.

00:15:19.000 Thomas Massey has what's called congressional privilege.

00:15:21.000 If he wishes to name the men, he can simply go on the floor of Congress and announce them.

00:15:26.000 He could do that today.

00:15:27.000 He is not doing that for some reason that I cannot discern if he truly believes the allegations that he is making.

00:15:32.000 Presumably, this is why the deputy AG Todd Blanche is calling out Massey and suggesting that he's participating in grandstanding.

00:15:40.000 It's not just obviously Thomas Massey.

00:15:42.000 The sort of big conspiracy theory of society is why Democrats are suggesting that the Epstein scandal is indicative of the way our entire civilization works.

00:15:50.000 John Ossoff, the embattled senator from Georgia, Democrat, he's out there suggesting that the Epstein class rules the country. 0.99

00:15:58.000 But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich.

00:16:03.000 It is the wealthiest cabinet ever.

00:16:05.000 This is the Epstein class ruling our country. 1.00

00:16:15.000 They are the elites they pretend to hate.

00:16:19.000 Okay, now, I've covered all of this before on the show.

00:16:22.000 I'm sure we'll cover it all again.

00:16:23.000 But there's a reason I'm talking about it today because amidst all the hubbub, amid the great conspiracy theory, the big, broad conspiracy theory, there's a person who's escaped scrutiny, which is sort of astonishing because his name is Steve Bannon.

00:16:34.000 Steve Bannon, of course, is chief advisor to President Trump during the very beginning of his first term before he was kicked out on his ass by the president, being called sloppy Steve.

00:16:42.000 Steve Bannon was deeply in bed with Jeffrey Epstein.

00:16:47.000 He was.

00:16:48.000 And that's really important because it is emblematic of this type of op.

00:16:53.000 It's not just about what Bannon did, it's about what Bannon has been doing.

00:16:56.000 Bannon is a person who promotes the great conspiracy theory of society while directly benefiting from it and while being directly implicated in specifically the kinds of conspiracy he supposedly decries.

00:17:08.000 So, for example, here is Steve Bannon, who knew everything at TPUSA talking about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal in the broadest possible way.

00:17:17.000 Epstein is a key that picks the lock on so many things, not just individuals, but also institutions, intelligence institutions, foreign governments, and who is working with him on our intelligence apparatus and in our government.

00:17:35.000 This grifty McGriff-faced grifter, my goodness. 1.00

00:17:39.000 Wait until we get into the details of Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein.

00:17:42.000 He stands up there in front of a crowd at SAS at TPUSA last year and says that this is the skeleton key that picks all of the locks.

00:17:48.000 Steve Bannon was in the room.

00:17:50.000 Steve Bannon was working with Jeffrey Epstein, as I suggested in my speech at TPUSA late last year to the chagrin of Steve Bannon.

00:17:57.000 So let me start off with this.

00:17:58.000 Who the hell is Steve Bannon?

00:18:00.000 Steve Bannon is a lifelong grifter.

00:18:01.000 He grifted his way up the political food chain by making crappy documentaries.

00:18:05.000 First, he made a crappy documentary about then-Representative Michelle Bachman.

00:18:08.000 Then he made a similarly crappy documentary about Sarah Palin.

00:18:11.000 He would use one documentary to then make the next documentary.

00:18:14.000 And then he used that to make a crappy documentary about Andrew Breitbart, a person with whom I was pretty close personal friends.

00:18:20.000 And he happened to be giving office space to Andrew Breitbart when Andrew died.

00:18:26.000 And the leadership at Breitbart decided to hand him outsized influence at Breitbart over my very strong objections at the time.

00:18:33.000 He then proceeded to use Breitbart as a way to leverage himself into Trump's orbit.

00:18:37.000 And then he parlayed that into his false Svengali image as chief strategist and putting himself on the cover of magazines and leaking to Maggie Haberman at the New York Times.

00:18:46.000 And then he was fired by Trump and called Sloppy Steve.

00:18:49.000 That was his career trajectory.

00:18:52.000 Steve Bannon is the kind of person who, while he was at Breitbart, Breitbart had an embassy.

00:18:57.000 The embassy was on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.

00:19:00.000 It was a fairly large building.

00:19:03.000 And Steve literally took up residence there so that he could live there rent-free.

00:19:08.000 Steve is the couch surfer of American politics who has somehow grifted his way up the chain.

00:19:14.000 He also then spent years subsequently allegedly defrauding people.

00:19:20.000 He was prosecuted and pled guilty in a case in which he allegedly defrauded people who were supposed to have been donating money to build the wall.

00:19:32.000 The DOJ prosecuted him in 2020, along with several other defendants in the We Build the Wall scheme that raised more than $25 million.

00:19:41.000 The DOJ alleged at the time, defendants defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars under the false pretense that all of the money would be spent on construction.

00:19:52.000 Well, that didn't happen, as it turns out.

00:19:55.000 In truth, Bannon and his compatriots received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds from We Build the Wall, which they each used in a manner inconsistent with the organization's public representations, according to the DOJ.

00:20:08.000 But don't worry, there was more there.

00:20:10.000 Then, of course, he had a very bizarre relationship with a person named Guo Wengai, who was suspected for a very long time of basically being a front for the CCP.

00:20:21.000 He was found guilty in July 2024 on multiple charges, including fraud and money laundering.

00:20:30.000 He, of course, had been close friends with Steve Bannon.

00:20:33.000 They'd appeared on a boat together where they had declared that they were going to create an alternative government of China, who allegedly defrauded many, many people to the tunes of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

00:20:46.000 Steve was in his orbit, and that's who Steve Bannon is.

00:20:50.000 And so, is it any surprise that Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein were palling around?

00:20:55.000 Here are images.

00:20:57.000 Again, the reason this is important is not just because Steve is a trash human.

00:21:01.000 The reason that this is important is because Steve is a person, and there are many people in this industry, in the influencer and political industry, who will tell you that things that they themselves are participating in, Steve Bannon, that these are gigantic conspiracies, and that these gigantic conspiracies are why you should give them more power while he is actively working with Jeffrey Epstein.

00:21:22.000 Hey, that is that's crazy.

00:21:25.000 I mean, the sad part is that it's not crazy, but this is the op.

00:21:30.000 The op is Steve Bannon working hand in glove with Jeffrey Epstein and then turning around and telling you that it's an intelligence op that encompasses all the highest levels of government and it's a child sex trafficking ring, and who knows better than Steve Bannon?

00:21:43.000 What a bunch of demoralization op bullshit.

00:21:46.000 Seriously, those are pictures of Epstein with Steve Bannon.

00:21:50.000 You know, I know a lot of people who don't have pictures with Jeffrey Epstein.

00:21:54.000 In fact, the vast majority of people that I know, even in the political industry, do not have pictures with Jeffrey Epstein.

00:21:59.000 A search of Steve Bannon in the DOJ's Epstein Files library produces 2,879 unique results.

00:22:06.000 A search of Epstein's email box populates 526 results for Steve Bannon.

00:22:12.000 Steve Bannon was planning to produce a pro-Epstein documentary literally the day that Epstein was arrested for sex trafficking, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

00:22:23.000 According to the Hollywood Reporter, the Epstein-funded doc was to feature interviews with luminaries across media, academia, and politics to reshape the narrative.

00:22:31.000 Among the high-profile participants mentioned was Michael Wolf, an Epstein pal and avid chronicler of the Trump presidency, who was advising Epstein at the time on how to handle dealings with the presidency.

00:22:42.000 So there is some two hours of the video have been released.

00:22:44.000 He apparently interviewed Epstein for 15 hours, did Steve Bannon.

00:22:48.000 Again, this is the guy who is telling you he's the skeleton key that unlocks everything.

00:22:52.000 What a true grift.

00:22:53.000 What a true con.

00:22:55.000 Because, of course, the solution to all of this is that you need Steve Bannon to illuminate the Matrix for you and guide you out of the wilderness as he launches a quixotic presidential run in 2028.

00:23:06.000 Early 2020 or 2019, Steve Bannon sits with Jeffrey Epstein for 15 hours.

00:23:10.000 We only have about two hours and 15 minutes of the tape.

00:23:12.000 Here he was asking Epstein about his fiscal expertise.

00:23:16.000 When I say no one understands the system better than I do, it doesn't mean I always sound like a doctor.

00:23:22.000 Your friend is going to get sued for giving a thing.

00:23:24.000 Yeah, you're not taking on any liability.

00:23:26.000 There's no contingent liability here for you.

00:23:29.000 But the word understand is the problem.

00:23:31.000 Don't understand the system.

00:23:33.000 So that's, I don't understand the financial system.

00:23:35.000 Please stop.

00:23:36.000 You cannot sit here and tell me.

00:23:38.000 No, what we just went through, I'll go through again.

00:23:40.000 The hedge fund managers, the money managers, the central bankers, the commercial bankers, the heads of the investment banks, the heads of all the trading desks, the top economists, and I'll throw in the business school lectures of Stanford.

00:23:52.000 Of all the top 200, 250, you can't name at the top of your head, the guys are at least at your level.

00:23:58.000 You have to understand it somewhat.

00:24:01.000 No.

00:24:03.000 We all don't understand it.

00:24:03.000 Sorry.

00:24:05.000 No one understands it.

00:24:07.000 It's a miracle.

00:24:09.000 That's part of the problem.

00:24:12.000 It's impossible to understand.

00:24:14.000 That word understand simply means if this happens here, that will happen there.

00:24:20.000 It's predictable.

00:24:21.000 Understanding means it's predictable.

00:24:23.000 It's not predictable.

00:24:24.000 That's the problem.

00:24:25.000 It's very in complex systems.

00:24:27.000 That was the fascination.

00:24:28.000 Is there a way to tease out some level of predictability?

00:24:33.000 The whole purpose of this interview was to rehab Jeffrey Epstein.

00:24:36.000 Steve Bannon asked Epstein about his ethics.

00:24:38.000 Here's what that sounded like.

00:24:41.000 We walked into that clinic where they're giving that money out to these people that are in the most dire straits of poverty and sickness and told them that the money was coming from a, what are you, class three sexual predator?

00:24:55.000 Tier one.

00:24:56.000 What's tier one is the highest and worst?

00:24:58.000 No, the lowest.

00:24:59.000 I'm the lowest.

00:24:59.000 You're the lowest.

00:25:00.000 Okay, tier one, you're the lowest.

00:25:02.000 But a criminal.

00:25:03.000 Yes.

00:25:04.000 That the money came from.

00:25:05.000 What percentage of people do you estimate?

00:25:08.000 I understand you don't like probabilities.

00:25:09.000 Do you estimate would say, I don't care.

00:25:12.000 I want the money for my children.

00:25:13.000 I would say, everyone said, I want the money for my children.

00:25:16.000 Did they know where the money came from?

00:25:18.000 I think if you told them about the devil himself.

00:25:22.000 The devil himself said, I'm going to exchange some dollars for you for your child's life. 0.68

00:25:26.000 Do you think you're the devil himself?

00:25:30.000 No, but I do have a good mirror.

00:25:33.000 It's a serious question.

00:25:35.000 Do you think you're the devil himself?

00:25:37.000 Why would you say that?

00:25:37.000 I know.

00:25:38.000 Because you have all the attributes.

00:25:40.000 You're incredibly smart.

00:25:41.000 You remember the devil is somebody who's not the devil's brilliant.

00:25:46.000 You read Milton's Paradise Lost.

00:25:47.000 No, the devil scares me.

00:25:50.000 Oh, my God.

00:25:51.000 This is what Steve Bannon was doing with his time after he was ousted from the Trump administration, was figuring out ways to rehab Jeffrey Epstein.

00:25:57.000 They had some deep thoughts, by the way, about Bannon and Epstein on Socrates, which is what you need to hear from a guy who is trafficking in minors and a lifelong grifter.

00:26:06.000 Potentially, one of the bad things to teach children is how to write.

00:26:13.000 Writing, reading, and arithmetic was supposed to be, everyone's supposed to be taught.

00:26:16.000 But writing forces you into a very narrow channel of thinking.

00:26:20.000 You have to write in a certain form in a certain way in a certain linear pattern.

00:26:26.000 So your thinking becomes somewhat narrow.

00:26:29.000 The reason I brought up writing is one of the recent discoveries of mine with respect to Socrates, Plato's, and Aristotle is they never wrote anything.

00:26:38.000 They spoke, and people around who could write wrote.

00:26:44.000 Socrates could think.

00:26:46.000 So that was Jesus of Nazareth was the same way, right?

00:26:49.000 Never wrote anything.

00:26:51.000 I thought he was a carpenter.

00:26:53.000 He was a carpenter.

00:26:54.000 Didn't he need like a little carpenter?

00:26:56.000 I don't get those.

00:26:57.000 But at least his written recognition.

00:26:59.000 Deep thoughts with these geniuses.

00:27:01.000 Deep thoughts with these with these moral exemplars.

00:27:03.000 By the way, there are a lot of accompanying texts, all in the Epstein files, showing the deep relationship, the abiding relationship between Bannon and Epstein, including April 2019, Bannon scheduling media trading with Jeffrey Epstein.

00:27:14.000 Again, April 2019, Bannon laying out the film process, how it would work.

00:27:21.000 And then again, April 2019, Jeffrey Epstein asking if Woody Allen could join his media training.

00:27:28.000 And then again, April 2019, Steve Bannon coaching Jeffrey Epstein on how to handle questions from Alan Dershowitz.

00:27:37.000 And then again, May 2019, Steve Bannon booking plane tickets to the island.

00:27:44.000 And then again, July 2019, Bannon asking Epstein if they could film on the island.

00:27:51.000 Remember, this is a person who then went out and retailed that the skeleton key to all politics was there.

00:27:57.000 He knew what was there because he was part of it.

00:28:00.000 This is the difference between the giant conspiracy theory that is a demoralization op where you don't have control of your life because there's a group of elite people behind the scenes controlling things and real conspiracies, meaning people combining for a nefarious purpose.

00:28:14.000 Jeffrey Epstein and Steve Bannon were combining for a nefarious purpose, the rehabbing of Jeffrey Epstein.

00:28:19.000 And by the way, Epstein was strategizing with Bannon on how to rehab Bannon after Bannon got his ass kicked out of the administration.

00:28:26.000 In December 2018, there are texts between Epstein and Bannon, in which Epstein texts him.

00:28:31.000 If you Google a picture of the word idiot, a picture of Donald Trump comes up.

00:28:35.000 And Bannon texted back pop-up picture signed.

00:28:38.000 Remember, this is the great Trump loyalist, the person who says Trump is going to run for a third term.

00:28:42.000 Epstein wrote, if you have a moment, you should meet my friend Nicole.

00:28:44.000 She is great.

00:28:46.000 And Bannon wrote back, who?

00:28:47.000 And Epstein wrote back, Nicole Junkman, Countess.

00:28:49.000 And Bannon wrote back, where does she reside?

00:28:51.000 And Epstein said, London.

00:28:53.000 And he says, next time I'm there, certainly.

00:28:54.000 Love converting Aristos to our righteous cause.

00:28:59.000 And then later in the same day, Epstein texted, Donald Trump Jr. says his dad is a re-gifter.

00:29:04.000 I think he should have said re-grifter.

00:29:06.000 And Bannon wrote back, brilliant, which is one of Bannon's favorite words.

00:29:10.000 Then in March 2018, texts in which Epstein says, I received a bunch of calls that Donald is losing it.

00:29:16.000 And now people are worried or usually quite calm, more than worried.

00:29:19.000 And Bannon wrote back, today was embarrassing.

00:29:20.000 He had no idea what was in the bill and tried to back out of it.

00:29:24.000 And then they talk about reinvigorating Davos.

00:29:28.000 And then you have Epstein trying to advise Bannon on exactly how to get back in.

00:29:35.000 And then, of course, you have the gross texts between Bannon and Epstein.

00:29:39.000 Early 2018, Steve Bannon, quote, hell is Paris Fashion Week.

00:29:42.000 Jeffrey Epstein, quote, there's nothing left in my testicles, but a speck of dust and a puff of air.

00:29:47.000 Steve Bannon, I'm putting up a poster of you in my apartment.

00:29:52.000 November 2018, Jeffrey Epstein.

00:29:54.000 Short notice for Jet Charter, but we can for tomorrow morning to Paris, lunch in Paris, then fly you to wherever.

00:29:59.000 Steve Bannon, what a life.

00:30:00.000 You are a pretty good assistant.

00:30:03.000 Jeffrey Epstein, massage is not included.

00:30:07.000 Just disgusting.

00:30:09.000 Just truly disgusting.

00:30:12.000 December 2018, Jeffrey Epstein, I should start my own reality TV show.

00:30:16.000 Bannon says, Trump is reality TV.

00:30:18.000 You are film.

00:30:19.000 Epstein, it makes Lion King look like a PBS documentary.

00:30:22.000 Bannon, you and the pride.

00:30:24.000 Jeffrey Epstein, the pride of Eastern Europe.

00:30:26.000 Bannon, Mother Russia would argue Ukraine is Russian.

00:30:32.000 Okay.

00:30:34.000 And the reality, of course, is that all of this was allowing Bannon to live higher on the hog than he otherwise would have.

00:30:39.000 It was an attempt to rehab Jeffrey Epstein.

00:30:40.000 And then he was going out just a couple of years later and pretending like he wasn't in on this and that he knew nothing about it except for the gig, except he knew everything, including the entire gigantic conspiracy theory that has now become the big ball of wax on X.

00:30:55.000 So what is all of this?

00:30:58.000 What is all of this?

00:30:59.000 It is a demoralization op.

00:31:01.000 That's what all of this is.

00:31:02.000 It is an op that is designed to make you believe that great conspiracy theory of society, that your life is not in your own control.

00:31:08.000 It's why people are ignoring the actual conspiracies that are in the Epstein files, the conspiracies between Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein, the conspiracies between Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein.

00:31:20.000 The conspiracies between other foreign officials like in the French government and Jeffrey Epstein, the stuff that actually there's evidence for.

00:31:28.000 It's an op designed to make you believe that great conspiracy theory of society.

00:31:33.000 And it is being run by literally the same people in on the conspiracy with Jeffrey Epstein in the case of Steve Bannon.

00:31:39.000 It is a con and it is a scam.

00:31:42.000 Now, that con and scam aren't relegated to Steve Bannon, of course.

00:31:46.000 The pool right now is really, really warm for tons of influencers and politicians who wish to promote the idea that society is rigged and that if you follow their particularly crappy advice and give them attention and therefore cash, you will somehow break the matrix and your life will become better.

00:31:59.000 It's a lie.

00:32:01.000 Again, it's not relegated to Steve Bannon.

00:32:02.000 We live in a time that is rife with the con, which brings us to one of the sad stories of the day.

00:32:09.000 A person who calls himself Clavicular has been arrested.

00:32:14.000 Clavicular is better known, you know, at least in his ID, as Brayden Peters.

00:32:20.000 He is a 20-year-old.

00:32:22.000 And Brayden Peters, who seems like a truly sad human being, he has 700,000 followers on TikTok.

00:32:29.000 And he spends his days punching himself in the face, taking meth, self-sterilizing, and then calling it looks maxing.

00:32:37.000 And he makes a lot of money off of his kick stream, apparently.

00:32:42.000 It is all about vanity for him.

00:32:44.000 And again, it is all about demoralization.

00:32:46.000 The idea is that women are all horrible people. 1.00

00:32:48.000 You should not aim for getting married and having a family.

00:32:50.000 That's a sucker play.

00:32:51.000 That's a loser play.

00:32:52.000 You should look smacked like this moron.

00:32:55.000 That way you can mog people, which is to say that you can humiliate them or over.

00:33:01.000 You're the alpha male if you treat yourself like an extraordinarily effeminate man at a salon 27 hours a day and then go out drinking and look depressed in the corner so that you're not gesture maxing.

00:33:17.000 I know there are people who actually are doing this sort of stuff and following this sort of stuff.

00:33:21.000 If you think that i'm exaggerating when I when I discuss Clavicular, who again was arrested and the reason he was arrested is because, as a 20 year old, he was apparently carrying around fake id and prescription drugs, and we'll see how the justice department works for him.

00:33:36.000 Well, it turns out that the gesture maxing didn't work.

00:33:40.000 He has now been jail maxed and anyway, here he was explaining looks max.

00:33:44.000 For those of you who speak English, looks maxing means making yourself look good, but the way that you do that is apparently by hitting yourself in the face with a hammer. 0.72

00:33:50.000 I'm not even kidding you.

00:33:51.000 We live in a society so stupid and nihilistic that people who are admired by a great many young people hit themselves in the face with hammers.

00:33:59.000 I wish I could make this up.

00:34:00.000 It is not possible to make this up.

00:34:02.000 Here he was explaining looks maxing.

00:34:05.000 Well, the objective is to get better looking because that's going to allow for more opportunities, allow for better overall treatment.

00:34:12.000 You know just that subconscious bias in people that you're leveraging by.

00:34:16.000 You know becoming better and better looking is really worth all the effort that you put in.

00:34:22.000 Yeah, the effort apparently includes taking crystal meth so that you are very skinny and also steroiding yourself to the tune of auto sterilizing uh, which is, which is apparently a thing that he did.

00:34:32.000 He's self-sterilized because he took so many, so many of these uh drugs.

00:34:36.000 He also has a very deep philosophy.

00:34:38.000 His philosophy is nihilistic idiocy.

00:34:41.000 He explained that, that political philosophy, to Michael Mows.

00:34:45.000 This next election cycle, who's gonna win?

00:34:47.000 It's gonna be Gavin Newsom against Jd Vance, because Jd Vance is subhuman and Gavin Newsom Mugs is.

00:34:54.000 Jd Vance is subhuman.

00:34:56.000 Yeah, what makes you say that?

00:34:58.000 Uh, he's got a very short total facial width to height ratio.

00:35:02.000 He's obese uh, very recessed side profile, whereas Newsom is like 6'3 Chad.

00:35:09.000 So you're, Jd is very tall.

00:35:11.000 Jd's got to be well still on 363.

00:35:14.000 Gavin Newsome obviously mogs him to death.

00:35:16.000 So you're a Newsome head.

00:35:18.000 You prefer Newsom to the vice president.

00:35:19.000 I'm just telling you who's going to win.

00:35:21.000 Do you prefer him, though?

00:35:25.000 Honestly, it's hard to say, but Newsom being that much more of a mugger and like having a president who's like fat and especially that young.

00:35:38.000 I don't think he's fat.

00:35:39.000 I would say he's a bigger guy for sure.

00:35:41.000 It's just like, it's just embarrassing.

00:35:42.000 Like, how are you?

00:35:44.000 You fat and you expect to like lead a country.

00:35:46.000 You can't even be in shape, you know?

00:35:48.000 So you like you got, let's say you got a vote.

00:35:51.000 It's 2028.

00:35:52.000 I'm voting for Gavin Newsome.

00:35:53.000 You're voting for Gavin Newsome.

00:35:55.000 You can't be that.

00:35:55.000 You can't be that subhuman.

00:35:57.000 Yeah, Clavicular, a great moral linchpin of our society.

00:36:01.000 Here he was talking about how Charlie Kirk wouldn't have been murdered if he were better looking.

00:36:06.000 Would Charlie Kirk have gotten assassinated if he were Chad?

00:36:09.000 Well, probably not.

00:36:09.000 And here's why.

00:36:10.000 Good looking people experience something called the halo effect.

00:36:12.000 So it's quite possible that if Charlie were to be better looking, someone wouldn't have hated him enough to assassinate him.

00:36:17.000 What happened to him is quite terrible.

00:36:19.000 And this might be an insensitive video to make, but I'm really trying to bring awareness to how brutal the black pill is. 0.89

00:36:24.000 Looks really are going to determine the quality of your life to a high degree.

00:36:27.000 So if you're not doing everything you can to maximize them, you're missing out.

00:36:32.000 Yeah, notice the black pill.

00:36:33.000 The black pill is the big thing these days.

00:36:35.000 The black pill, whether it's Steve Bannon or whether it's Andrew Tate or whether it's Clavicular or whether it is a myriad of influencers and politicians.

00:36:41.000 The idea that you are not in control of your own life and the only way to get out of that is to give these people your money and watch their crappy content and join their crappy scams and give them more power.

00:36:51.000 And then they will go out there and tell you how now you have escaped the matrix while you are legitimately giving them money to do so.

00:36:57.000 I mean, it is a con from beginning to end.

00:37:00.000 And again, this is very big in the world of the internet, which is why you should definitely keep your teenagers off the internet and off of social media.

00:37:09.000 Andrew Tate spent this week explaining why he doesn't read books because, you know, in the real, because the real world is a big conspiracy.

00:37:15.000 It's just, there's a gigantic conspiracy out there, and no one can succeed unless you give him money at his real world scam factory.

00:37:24.000 If you do that, then maybe you can succeed and you can be just like Andrew Tate, a miserable man who wanders the globe trying to evade criminal charges while renting cars that he pretends that he owns and occasionally gets hit with yet another charge.

00:37:38.000 Exciting stuff.

00:37:39.000 Exciting stuff.

00:37:40.000 Here was Andrew Tate explaining just yesterday, I believe, why he doesn't read books and why books are for losers.

00:37:48.000 Basically, I'm too smart for books.

00:37:52.000 Let's hit the road.

00:37:54.000 Yeah, I'm too smart for books.

00:37:56.000 So Twitter's upset about that.

00:37:58.000 There's always some broke dude who reads books, who's really upset by the fact that I have a $110 million car collection and $400 million of property around the world.

00:38:12.000 I'm one of the most well-known, relevant people.

00:38:15.000 I'm one of the most famous people on the planet.

00:38:19.000 I get asked to do politics.

00:38:20.000 This is the shtick.

00:38:21.000 Right.

00:38:21.000 This is the shtick.

00:38:22.000 First of all, the inflation of the wealth is insane.

00:38:24.000 There have been full investigations into how much money he actually has, but I have no doubt that he can find an enormous number of disaffected young men who believe the world is stacked against them and therefore wants to buy into what he calls the real world, which I believe is his new name for Tate University or Hustler University.

00:38:39.000 He keeps retitling it.

00:38:41.000 You are running out of time.

00:38:43.000 You are going to wake up one day at some point in the future and you're going to hate yourself because by the time you realize how important that was, it is going to be too late.

00:38:50.000 We tell you how to get rich now.

00:38:52.000 Earn money the same day you join.

00:38:53.000 You will have money in your bank within 24 hours.

00:38:56.000 This is your chance.

00:38:57.000 Time is running out.

00:38:58.000 Join the real world now and start making money today.

00:39:02.000 Wow.

00:39:03.000 What a pitch.

00:39:04.000 What an amazing pitch.

00:39:05.000 By the way, his past efforts, for example, Hustler University, it turns out they're gigantic alleged scams.

00:39:12.000 Here's the thing.

00:39:13.000 If you follow these people and they've created little media empires for themselves and they've created little echo chambers for themselves and in some cases, large echo chambers for themselves based on their scam.

00:39:22.000 If you listen to what these people say and you do what they recommend, you are likely to be miserable in your life.

00:39:26.000 I'm not directing this at Steve Bannon or Clavicular or at Andrew Take because I don't give a shit about those people, but there are a lot of young men, particularly young people generally, who are buying into this miserable thought process.

00:39:39.000 Truly miserable, because the people you're watching are miserable losers, truly.

00:39:43.000 Miserable losers.

00:39:44.000 Steve Bannon is a thrice-divorced couch surfing con artist who cannot properly wear a non-wrinkled shirt.

00:39:50.000 Clavicular is a misguided 20-year-old high on drugs and apparently self-sterilized who punches himself in the face in order to look smacks while spending his evenings hanging out with low IQ, racist dullards, the very definition of hell. 0.84

00:40:02.000 Andrew Tate is a career con artist who artificially inflates his own wealth in order to sucker demoralized young men into giving him more of their money and attention, and who to date has made approximately zero lives markedly better and who has to pretend that he's experiencing a true sense of life fulfillment by renting expensive cars and walking around shirtless with a cigar in a made-over Bucharest industrial warehouse.

00:40:26.000 Here is what is going to make you happier.

00:40:27.000 And this is why all of this matters.

00:40:29.000 Here's what's going to make you happier.

00:40:30.000 Stop listening to these chaos and demoralization agents.

00:40:34.000 Instead, we all need to understand that we are privileged to live in the greatest country in the history of the world.

00:40:39.000 Take the white pill.

00:40:40.000 Your choices are in front of you.

00:40:42.000 Yes, life has obstacles.

00:40:44.000 And in politics, it's our job to overcome them collectively.

00:40:46.000 We can do that.

00:40:47.000 But most of the obstacles in your own life are things that you can overcome.

00:40:51.000 The biggest decisions in your life, getting married, it's a thing you can do.

00:40:54.000 Having kids, it's a thing you can do.

00:40:56.000 Taking care of your own kids, that's a thing you can do.

00:40:58.000 Joining a church, that's a thing you can do.

00:41:00.000 Bettering your skill set to get a job.

00:41:02.000 Starting your own business, being a useful part of society and a fulfilled human being.

00:41:06.000 The vast majority of those decisions are decisions that you can make, which makes you one of the more fortunate human beings on planet Earth in its history.

00:41:13.000 Do not get taken in by this conspiracy industrial complex, much of which is being promoted specifically by people who are conning you over it.

00:41:21.000 Steve Bannon just being exhibit 1A in the pantheon of con artists who are attempting to blackpill you for their own specific benefit.

00:41:29.000 All righty, meanwhile, in other news, the president of the United States has now repealed landmark climate findings from the EPA.

00:41:38.000 This is a very, very good thing.

00:41:40.000 The Trump administration, according to the Wall Street Journal, is planning to repeal the Obama-era scientific finding that serves as the legal basis for federal greenhouse gas regulation, according to U.S. officials in the most far-reaching rollback of U.S. climate policy to date.

00:41:53.000 The reversal targets a 2009 endangerment finding, which concluded that six greenhouse gases posed a threat to public health and welfare, which was a way for the EPA to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions.

00:42:04.000 They said that clean air, the Clean Air Act, somehow was connected with carbon, that carbon was endangering people, which is really, really stupid.

00:42:13.000 EPA Minister Lee Zeldon quite properly said this is the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.

00:42:19.000 So this removes the regulatory requirements to measure, report, certify, and comply with federal greenhouse gas emissions standards for motor vehicles and repeals associated compliance programs, credit provisions, and reporting obligations for industries, according to administration officials.

00:42:32.000 Now, this won't apply to rules governing emissions from power plants or oil and gas facilities.

00:42:38.000 The reason this is good is because those regulations are costing the American taxpayer and industries legitimately tens of billions of dollars every single year.

00:42:47.000 Now, that doesn't mean every company is going to take advantage of the new set of freer regulations because many of them are worried that the minute a Democrat gets elected, these things go right back in place.

00:42:56.000 But for the moment, it does relieve pressure on a lot of the companies that are attempting to operate efficiently in a modern economy.

00:43:04.000 So President Trump had already moved toward that.

00:43:07.000 Officials say the rollback equates to more than $1 trillion in regulatory cuts.

00:43:11.000 They said that rescinding the finding would result in an average per vehicle cost savings of more than $2,400.

00:43:16.000 You want to lower costs?

00:43:17.000 You want to make things more affordable?

00:43:18.000 Get rid of useless regulations that do not actually achieve that which they seek to achieve.

00:43:23.000 So that is a big move by President Trump and the administration.

00:43:26.000 A welcome move.

00:43:28.000 President Trump, I think he's throwing out outsized numbers, but I'd rather that we shoot for the stars.

00:43:34.000 And if we miss, then we still end up with a moonshot economically.

00:43:39.000 Here was the president with Larry Kudlaw on Fox Business talking about the growth rates that he is pursuing.

00:43:45.000 We should be at 15%.

00:43:48.000 I'll tell you, if our new head of the Fed, who I think is going to be great, and he's a really high-quality person, but if he does the job that he's capable, we can grow at 15%.

00:44:02.000 I think more than that.

00:44:04.000 Now, again, that is highly unlikely.

00:44:07.000 The United States has not grown at 15% any year that I can remember.

00:44:12.000 I think historically, it's just not really possible since we're such a gigantic economy.

00:44:16.000 With that said, obviously, deregulation is a huge part of what President Trump is trying to do, and that is a very, very good thing.

00:44:22.000 Now, it'll be interesting to see what the newly selected Fed Chief Kevin Warsh will do if he is in fact confirmed as the new head of the Federal Reserve.

00:44:30.000 According to the Washington Post, President Trump's choice to lead the Federal Reserve has spent years criticizing the central bank's enormous bond portfolio.

00:44:37.000 Any push to significantly shrink the Fed's $6.6 trillion balance sheet of bonds and mortgage-backed securities could actually push mortgage rates higher, working against the president's goal.

00:44:45.000 That would amount to him taking assets that the Fed currently owns and pushing them back out to the broker middlemen, which essentially leads to a sort of deflation in the dollar and higher interest rates.

00:44:57.000 So the question is whether that can be solved for by generally lowering the overnight interest rates.

00:45:02.000 He's sort of push-pulling with regard to the economy, and it'll be interesting to see whether that works or not.

00:45:07.000 That is Warsh's entire strategy is to shrink the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve while simultaneously lowering the interest rates at which banks are lending out the money.

00:45:15.000 That is the goal that he is attempting to solve for.

00:45:18.000 And what that really is, is a bet that more liquidity in the economy while simultaneously divesting the Federal Reserve of a bunch of government subsidies.

00:45:27.000 That what that's going to do is cause more investment in the private sphere.

00:45:31.000 Again, all of this policy is having an incredibly salutary effect on, for example, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which closed at over 50,000 for the first time over the weekend and is now trending up toward 51,000, which is pretty unbelievable.

00:45:46.000 And whether that's reflected in the labor markets is going to be the big question for President Trump.

00:45:50.000 And this is something that, honestly, all the people who are big AI advocates, they really should start talking pretty openly about what happens to the job markets.

00:45:58.000 There's an enormous amount of dyspepsia and concern about the transition of the jobs markets.

00:46:04.000 People in white-collar jobs, particularly, are feeling very worried that they're not going to be able to have a job because AI is getting so good.

00:46:10.000 It's going to replace their jobs. 0.98

00:46:11.000 Now, listen, this has happened before, giant technological changes.

00:46:14.000 New jobs that we have never even heard of will be created and other jobs will go away because the cost of production will drop to zero.

00:46:22.000 If you see some of the new video technology that's being made right now, the cost of producing a movie is going to drop so radically, it's going to shred entire industries in Hollywood, just to take a quick example.

00:46:32.000 And you're seeing this with regard to the legal industry as well.

00:46:37.000 Maybe it's too early for the AI experts to sort of predict what's going to happen, but if they want less dyspepsia and less risk of over-regulation, then they probably should start retailing right now what the future economy looks like in terms of jobs.

00:46:50.000 I mean, on the negative side of the ledger, the president did threaten on Monday not to allow the opening of a new bridge connecting Canada with Detroit, which that I don't get.

00:46:58.000 Seems like if you build a bridge, it should probably be open.

00:47:00.000 The Gordie Howe International Bridge is close to completion after nearly eight years of construction paid for by Canada.

00:47:05.000 That cable state bridge, according to the Wall Street Journal, running 1.5 miles, marks a new piece of trade infrastructure to alleviate congestion at the Detroit-Windsor-Ontario Gateway, which is the busiest commercial land crossing in the United States.

00:47:17.000 And President Trump says that he's basically going to keep that bridge closed until he's able to leverage some concessions out of the Canadians.

00:47:26.000 And this seems counterproductive to me.

00:47:29.000 It is cutting off your economic nose to spite your face.

00:47:32.000 And at a time when you're seeking economic growth, cutting off our chief trade partner, because Canada is our number one trade partner, that still seems like an own goal for no apparent reason.

00:47:41.000 And meanwhile, it seems that, as I've been saying for years at this point, any party that wishes to win, all they have to do is just be normal.

00:47:50.000 And yet, that seems like a very difficult thing for every party.

00:47:53.000 I don't know why it's so tough, but apparently it's very tough for any of these parties to program into Normie Land.

00:48:00.000 Texas right now looks to be shaping up as a real doozy, the Texas Senate race.

00:48:06.000 So that one could theoretically tip the position of the Senate in 2026.

00:48:10.000 Right now, if you were to sort of give odds, you would suggest that Democrats are the favorites in North Carolina.

00:48:15.000 They are the favorites in Maine, and they are the favorites likely in Ohio.

00:48:18.000 That one's pretty close.

00:48:20.000 And then they need to pick one more off.

00:48:21.000 And so is that going to come from Texas?

00:48:22.000 Will it come from Iowa where Joni Ernst is stepping down?

00:48:25.000 Is it going to come from Alaska where Dan Sullivan is seen as somewhat vulnerable?

00:48:29.000 Texas, the Democrats seem to be on the verge of nominating possibly Jasmine Crockett as their Senate nominee, which Republicans can only pray for.

00:48:37.000 She would be an awful, awful Senate nominee. 1.00

00:48:40.000 It's pretty astonishing that she is even competitive.

00:48:44.000 According to a new poll from the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs, she has 47% support ahead of state rep James Tallarico, who's sort of the latest hot thing for the donor class.

00:48:55.000 He's like the beta ork of this election cycle.

00:48:59.000 Crockett has strong favorability among likely Democratic primary voters.

00:49:04.000 The chances, by the way, that she wins a general election pretty low, but could only be boosted by Republicans then embracing a candidate with a lot of dirt to him.

00:49:13.000 That candidate would presumably be Ken Paxton, the attorney general of the state, over John Cornyn, the multi-term senator.

00:49:22.000 There's a three-way primary that is occurring right now in Texas between John Cornyn, Representative Wesley Hunt, and Ken Paxton.

00:49:30.000 It's a very narrow race.

00:49:32.000 That same hobby school poll showed Paxton holding a seven-point lead over Cornyn, 38% for Paxton, Cornyn at 31, Hunt at 17%.

00:49:43.000 Now, the reality is that the polls seem to consistently show that if it were Tallarico versus Paxton, for example, that is a much closer race than Tallarico versus Cornyn.

00:49:52.000 Again, it is possible that this just ends up being another bear trap for Democrats, and they pour billions of dollars into a race that they can't win.

00:49:59.000 At the same time, why Republicans would seek the less electable candidate for the Texas Senate seat?

00:50:07.000 That is a move that I do not fully understand.

00:50:09.000 Then again, again, the Democrats are doing the same thing.

00:50:11.000 The Democrats refuse to divide off from their more insane positions.

00:50:15.000 Kentucky Governor Andy Bashir, who wants to run for president in 2028, no one understands why.

00:50:20.000 He continues to be radical on the trans issue.

00:50:22.000 It is amazing to me that Democrats cannot divide off from the single most toxic issue in their portfolio.

00:50:29.000 But we rarely talk about the why.

00:50:31.000 People want to know what drives us, especially in a world with social media where everyone's looking for the next authentic thing.

00:50:37.000 For me, that's my faith.

00:50:39.000 Most of the decisions I make are based on that golden rule that says we love our neighbor as ourself.

00:50:44.000 And that parable of the Good Samaritan that says everyone is our neighbor.

00:50:47.000 And so when I've taken actions like vetoing the nastiest piece of anti-LGBTQ legislation that ever came through my state, I described it in those terms.

00:50:55.000 I said, my faith teaches me that all children are children of God.

00:50:59.000 And I didn't want people picking on those kids.

00:51:03.000 Now, again, what he is talking there is about the transing of the children. 0.76

00:51:05.000 Good luck to Democrats if they decide to embrace this position.

00:51:08.000 All Americans want is some semblance of normalcy.

00:51:11.000 They are begging for it, and no one will give it to them.

00:51:13.000 And that is why, among many other reasons, there is so much political dyspepsia at the moment.

00:51:17.000 All righty, folks.

00:51:18.000 Coming up, we'll get into a little bit of foreign policy.

00:51:22.000 The Chinese were handed control of Hong Kong by the British.

00:51:25.000 It turned out that was a really bad decision.

00:51:26.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

00:51:28.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

00:51:29.000 Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

00:51:32.000 Click that link in the description and join us.

00:51:34.000 Okay, no not even close Two.

00:51:51.000 Great.

00:51:52.000 Whatever.

00:51:52.000 You know what?

00:51:53.000 Two, four, three, six, four.

00:51:56.000 And now.

00:52:02.000 I cannot believe we're back here again, Ben.

00:52:04.000 If the Ben Shapiro shows a mom, then Ben After Dark is a cool mom.

00:52:10.000 Jay.

The Ben Shapiro Show - February 10, 2026

CON INC: Bannon-Epstein Connection EXPLODES

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