Ben Shapiro sits down with Dan Bongino to discuss Spygate, the Defund the Police movement, and the differences between serving as a New York City cop and a White House Secret Service agent in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. Ben Shapiro is a conservative commentator and host of the conservative podcast The Ben Shapiro Show. He is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard and has written for The Daily Beast, National Post, and National Post Magazine. He is also the author of three books and hosts a successful daily show on his show The Dan Boongino Show, where he takes listeners to places the mainstream media won t go. In this episode, Ben and Dan discuss the Spygate scandal and other attempts to dismantle President Trump and his administration, including Defund The Police, Defunding the Police, and other efforts to dismantle the Trump administration. This is a Sunday special, featuring a very special guest. The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member of Dailywire, where you ll have access to access to all the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests. Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code: DNDNews. Learn more about your ad choices. Become a supporter of the show: bit.ly/support-and-support-the-show. To find a list of our sponsors and get 10% off your first month with discount codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships@dailywire.co/thebenchrisandcrweedepay Subscribe to our newest ad-free version of The Dailywire.ee/thebigbenchips Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting tools! Learn how to rate and review our new episodes on the show? Connect with us on iTunes and rate our ad-and discuss our podcast on social media links on the Big Bird and other links to our social media platforms? The Big Bird Podcasts! We are giving away $5 and other products and other promo codes throughout the world? Thank you for listening to our podcast? Subscribe & review our newest episodes on The DailyWire Podcasts & more! Thanks for supporting the show! Subscribe and reviews on iTunes and shares the show on your thoughts and reviews Thanks and rating our work on the podcast on iTunes? v=1p&t=1s&skims
00:00:12.000If you regularly listen to conservative podcasts like you are right now, you almost certainly know of Dan Bongino's The Dan Bongino Show.
00:00:19.000Bongino, formerly a New York City cop and White House Secret Service agent, now hosts a successful daily show breaking down the news of the day and taking listeners places the mainstream media will not go.
00:00:29.000One of his top focuses the last few years has been the deep state war against President Trump, through its countless attempts to produce a scandal and corruption around the presidency.
00:00:38.000Along with frequent coverage in his show, he's published three books on the subject.
00:00:41.000The latest is Follow the Money, the shocking deep state connections of the anti-Trump cabal, which was just released this week.
00:00:47.000One of the biggest scandals from, as Dan puts it, swampy D.C.
00:00:50.000elite and wealthy Democrats is Spygate.
00:00:52.000That's a buzzword we've all heard a lot, and it can be a difficult story to unpack, but Dan makes it simple.
00:00:58.000In this episode, you'll hear him discuss with me this and other attempts to dismantle President Trump and his administration.
00:01:04.000We'll also discuss the Defund the Police movement from Dan's perspective as an officer in New York City when those streets were cleaned up, and the differences between serving as a Secret Service agent in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations.
00:01:58.000So let's jump right in to the Trump issue.
00:02:01.000So a lot of folks in the media, I think, kind of get you wrong as just the Trump guy, because you've obviously been very pro-President Trump during his tenure.
00:02:16.000I'd endorsed Ted Cruz and I remember calling around at the time to people trying to get them on board, law enforcement people and other folks with prominent public profiles saying, hey, you know, Ted's our guy.
00:02:26.000I still like Ted Cruz a lot, obviously.
00:02:28.000And I made one specific call to someone, let's say in the industry, who you know, but shall remain nameless for the purpose of this interview.
00:02:35.000And she said to me, I'm all about Trump.
00:02:37.000And I was stunned because this is a diehard conservative.
00:02:49.000She said, I think the word was he can be transactional at times, but she made a great point to me.
00:02:54.000She said, you know, do you want a showman?
00:02:57.000And a guy who plays conservative and has all these people convinced and gets in there and doesn't do anything conservative, or a guy who gets it that conservatives were his way to the White House, and understands that conservatism is actually a path forward.
00:03:10.000Maybe it wasn't in his heart the entire time, but he's actually going to do conservative stuff.
00:03:14.000And I said, you know, let me check this guy out.
00:03:16.000And obviously, after he went, you know, and won the primary, you know, I was all in.
00:03:20.000I mean, the options there were President Trump or Hillary Clinton.
00:03:23.000And as the presidency wore on, I think the real deal-sealer for me was the Spygate scandal, which I just felt like, why do they see this guy as such a threat?
00:03:33.000I mean, it really, I think, was the biggest scandal of our time.
00:03:35.000It really sold me on that this guy is an existential threat to everything I found wrong with the proverbial swamp there.
00:03:42.000So let's talk about Spygate, because you were on that super early.
00:03:44.000So you were the main, maybe, progenitor of a lot of the information that was coming out.
00:03:49.000And I'll be honest with you, I was kind of following it tangentially, because I figured, okay, the information's going to come out at a certain point.
00:03:55.000I'm willing to kind of see where this leads.
00:03:57.000And, you know, I have a certain baseline faith in law enforcement.
00:04:00.000They weren't going to do what they obviously did.
00:04:02.000But you never really had that sort of faith in the system that they weren't going to do what they apparently did.
00:04:07.000So what led you originally to think, OK, this is like an actual scandal?
00:04:12.000Maybe for folks who don't understand, you can actually walk people through what Spygate constitutes, because it becomes sort of just this meme or slogan the left throws out there whenever they wish to dismiss something, sort of like the Benghazi across deck.
00:04:22.000So what exactly is Spygate and why should Americans care?
00:04:24.000I'm glad you started the question that way, because my wife's in the studio with me here.
00:04:45.000I said to myself, there's no way this could have happened.
00:04:47.000There were guardrails set up for this kind of stuff.
00:04:50.000I said this could not have... I had the same skepticism you did.
00:04:53.000We were in a hotel, my wife and I, in Dallas for doing another job out there, and I get a call from a source.
00:04:59.000He had tried to contact me multiple times, and honestly I thought he was just being hyperbolic, and he had insisted to me, Dan, you don't understand.
00:05:07.000The President of the United States and his campaign were spied on by insiders at the FBI who had no legal basis whatsoever to do it.
00:05:16.000The story sounded so ridiculous, but I figured let me just take his call finally.
00:05:20.000I spent about a half an hour on the phone.
00:05:22.000He walks me through everything, and the essence of it is very simple.
00:05:25.000You know, you can get lost in the wonkery, but it's really no more difficult than this.
00:05:29.000They had a political beef with the soon-to-be president of the United States at the time, candidate Trump.
00:05:34.000They had no legal mechanism in the United States to spy on him.
00:05:39.000So they fabricated it using a bunch of freelancers and former intel people who just made up stories, which then hijacked the Justice Department into getting a FISA warrant.
00:05:50.000The story's no more complicated than that.
00:05:52.000Now there's other foreign aspects to it and how they did it and the wonkery of it's quite interesting, but I, like you, I was a skeptic too.
00:06:00.000I know you, you know, you're a patriot like me.
00:06:02.000You want to believe, come on, It's not a third world republic, it's the United States.
00:06:06.000But the guy was so convincing on the phone, and as I dug in with more sources, as this guy's telling me the truth.
00:06:12.000And that's, if you go back and read the original book I wrote on it, Spygate, which I wrote three and a half years ago, Read it.
00:06:24.000And that was all, most of it was from that original source.
00:06:26.000What was amazing about it is that, as you say, I was kind of slow on the uptake here because I was just throughout thinking, this can't be real.
00:06:34.000And at the very least, that maybe this was you know, predicated on legitimate suspicion, and then it just got to be confirmation bias.
00:06:41.000That at a certain point, it got to be, well, it's got to be true because I believe it has to be true, and therefore if I stretch the rules here, if I stretch the rules there, eventually it will be found to be true. Do you think that it was predicated on the basis that people actually knew nothing was going on and that they went forward with it anyway, or was it that they saw kind of some smoke, they saw Carter Page, who there had been suspicions about There was a FISA warrant against him in 2014.
00:07:02.000And they saw George Papadopoulos, and they had suspicions about him.
00:07:05.000And they sort of whipped themselves into a frenzy to the point where they were willing to, at the very least, bend the rules in order to go after people who are tangentially associated with the Trump campaign.
00:07:35.000Now, most people don't remember that, and I always say to people, the reason you don't remember that is because who was in office when McCain was running?
00:07:49.000But if you go back and look at the articles about McCain, if you Google McCain Russians, you'll see it's the exact same people saying, John McCain, he's corrupted.
00:07:57.000Look, he's got these lobbyists and they work with Russians.
00:08:58.000Manafort gets hired by the Trump team and you have this witch's brew, this perfect storm where they say, hey, if we can slap this fake information, because Simpson can't pitch it, because he's a former reporter, he's being paid by Hillary.
00:09:27.000It's the Steele-Halper Simpson dossier.
00:09:29.000They slapped it on him and all of a sudden you had a made-to-order scandal right there.
00:09:35.000So when you ask what was the motivation, the answer is some were mercenary, some it was money, some it was political, but it all came to this kind of tip of the spear, that arrow of Spygate.
00:09:48.000And really, just like I said, a witch's brew of disasters that all happened at the same time.
00:09:51.000So in a second, I want to ask you about the motivations of the people who are inside the government, because it makes sense when you're talking about, you know, motivated political actors outside the government who want to win an election.
00:09:59.000But the hijacking of the governmental, you know, auspices is really the big scandal here, and I want to ask you about that in just one second.
00:10:07.000You've got a lot of information online, and lots of people would love to have that information, particularly if they are politically motivated.
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00:11:13.000Let's talk about the government being hijacked to this particular cause.
00:11:18.000So, obviously, you see politically motivated players, the Peter Strucks and the Lisa Pages, and you see James Comey, who just looks like a radical incompetent throughout this entire process.
00:11:27.000How many of those people knew that this was all empty, and how many of these people were just convinced that because, again, there was some smoke, I mean, to pretend that there was no smoke is, I think, kind of silly.
00:11:37.000I mean, Manafort is obviously a character with some shady ties.
00:11:41.000Yeah, and I've never defended him in my book.
00:11:50.000The only big revelation that really came forth through the entire investigation was the Trump Tower meeting in June, where it appeared that Donald Trump Jr.
00:11:58.000was willing to hear overtures from people who are connected to the Russian government about dirt they might have on Hillary, which, again, is not actually illegal.
00:12:06.000Information coming in and listening to information is not, in fact, illegal.
00:12:09.000It may be frowned upon, but it's not illegal.
00:12:12.000Let's say that you're a member of the FBI or the CIA and you have this information funneled to you.
00:12:16.000Did they know from the outset that it was all bullshit?
00:12:46.000Well, you know as a lawyer that, you know, you don't ask a question in court you don't know the answer to, right?
00:12:50.000They ask questions they didn't know the answer to and they never bothered to verify the answers afterwards.
00:12:54.000So you have this Woods file and things that came up like, hey listen, he was in Russia with these prostitutes, the famous, you know, peepee hoax as I call it.
00:13:02.000The story was so outrageous that you would think they'd, you know, go to the hotel, try to find tapes or something.
00:13:08.000It was so ridiculous they made no efforts.
00:13:10.000So they knew from the start that I'll even be nice to them, which they weren't to us, of course.
00:13:14.000Even Peter Stroke today on Twitter is like taking shots at everyone, which is bizarre.
00:13:18.000You'd think he'd kind of like slither away.
00:13:20.000But even being nice, say you thought there was a scintilla of credibility to this, right?
00:13:26.000Within a week or two, you could have figured out the story was entirely BS.
00:13:31.000I mean, we had the Michael Cohen going to Prague story, totally made up.
00:13:34.000Now, again, even giving them a pass, say through the summer of 2016, they're trying to verify it.
00:13:43.000They're absolutely no later than January of 2017.
00:13:47.000They know this case to be a total fabrication.
00:13:50.000Because Steele, who's attributed all the information in these phony dossiers to a guy named Shedonchenko, his primary source, The FBI interviews Danchenko in January of 2017.
00:15:38.000But he says everything he said about that meeting is factually correct.
00:15:43.000This is just months after the January meeting with Danchenko.
00:15:47.000So they know, absolutely no later than January, February, March of 2017, the whole thing's fake and they renew the FISA three more times anyway.
00:15:58.000I mean, that was the original question.
00:15:59.000Not to go on too long, but Comey, I think, is just trying to keep his job as FBI director.
00:16:04.000Comey's shown himself to be, again, the mercenary in the deal.
00:16:07.000He's almost no different than Manafort, who damaged the Trump campaign by joining with all this baggage.
00:16:11.000Comey damaged the entire FBI by taking the director spot with all his egomaniacal, almost sociopathic baggage.
00:16:19.000But Brennan's motivations are different.
00:16:21.000Not to get off on a tangent with Mike Flynn, but Flynn's a part of this whole process as well.
00:16:26.000And Flynn had been almost a sworn enemy of the swampy part of the intelligence community for years.
00:16:32.000Even Stanley McChrystal had praised him, saying, hey, this guy's a great intel officer.
00:16:36.000But in his intel work, he had attacked some of the battlefield intel when Flynn was a three-star general, saying, hey, you're getting our guys killed.
00:16:43.000You're not going in these communities and talking.
00:16:45.000You're doing all this stuff from, you know, a base in Arlington.
00:16:52.000So when you ask about the motivations for Brennan and others, I believe it was to make sure that Mike Flynn was never to take a position of authority in the Trump administration, because the dirty laundry was definitely going to start to stink really bad when he brought it out.
00:17:08.000I mean, the contention on behalf of the Obama administration is that this was relegated to Comey and the intelligence portions of the government, that Biden and Obama really were not in on it, that if they were that it was really more tangential in nature.
00:17:22.000You've heard sort of a split story from Sally Yates, who is the acting deputy attorney general at the time.
00:17:27.000She said she was sort of surprised that Obama was in on it and kind of knew about it.
00:18:56.000There's no reason for him to lie about that.
00:18:57.000We have these infamous texts where Stroke and Page, while they're in the context of a larger communication about this whole scandal, they say the White House is running this.
00:19:07.000Now, the leftists panicked over that tweet, uh, text, excuse me, and they said, oh no, no, they're talking about a China thing.
00:19:35.000So now you have three data points, right?
00:19:37.000That the White House was thoroughly involved in this.
00:19:39.000There's an even worse email between Andy McCabe and Lisa Page.
00:19:43.000It's right around that November time block there to October, November.
00:19:47.000And McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI, and his lawyer there, Lisa Page, his lead lawyer, they're emailing each other about a presentation about the case they're going to do with the White House.
00:19:58.000And they're talking about the CIA and the number two, a guy named Cohen, and they say in the email, hey, we really need to go in there and have our, like, one voice.
00:20:06.000In other words, like, the president must have been asking questions about what the CIA and the FBI were doing and they're confused.
00:20:12.000So, you know, you have another one, the obvious Susan Rice email, you know, the buy the book, which always reminds me, have you ever seen that movie G.I.
00:20:53.000I believe he marshaled it in conjunction with Brennan.
00:20:55.000And I believe Comey was just really too dumb to figure it out.
00:20:58.000I mean, this whole thing obviously is an incredibly large scandal.
00:21:01.000I mean, the idea of an outgoing administration spying on a candidate of the opposite party, if you're talking about George W. Bush doing this in 2008 to Barack Obama, it's a world-breaking scandal.
00:21:11.000It happened to Donald Trump, so of course the media have completely downplayed it or suggested that it was not really a big deal, it was all done in good faith.
00:21:18.000So, Do you think that the American people care about this?
00:21:21.000Do you think this is an election issue?
00:21:22.000Because obviously Trump hasn't taken it on too much, and it may be too complicated for people to follow.
00:21:28.000The media obviously have very little interest in laying it out.
00:21:31.000You know, what I want and what I think are two different things.
00:21:33.000I would hope the American people largely would care.
00:21:38.000It is only the biggest political scandal of our time, and it's not that I don't have credibility on this either.
00:21:42.000I mean, when I ran for office myself, I ran against the Patriot Act, which was signed by George W. Bush.
00:22:07.000But I read an interesting tweet before I came over this morning, I was on the plane flying out here, and there's a woman on the ground, she writes for a leftist outlet, but she's on the ground in Wisconsin, and she tweeted out this thread, and the gist of it, which was, you know, really interesting, she said, I've spoken to every single person I can for the last four days in Kenosha, numbering in the hundreds.
00:22:24.000She goes, all you DC bubble dwellers talking about your politics, she said, these people give negative S-words about it.
00:22:33.000They care about their own legitimate kitchen table stuff in their kitchen, which is even odd because when we talk about kitchen table issues, you and I are talking about different stuff.
00:22:41.000They're talking about their actual kitchen, like what matters to them on the ground in their neighborhood.
00:22:46.000And she said, I'm warning you, you guys are setting yourselves up for another Trump win here because you're totally out of touch.
00:22:51.000And that's why I'd answer your question.
00:22:53.000I don't really think the Spygate story resonates because for some, Especially people like me who find it interesting because of my law enforcement background, the wonkery of it is overwhelming.
00:23:02.000You know, you start talking about FISA, how it works, the jurisdictions, overseas, the GCHQ and the Brits being involved, and people, even my wife, who nobody knows it better than her, she produces my show with me.
00:23:13.000Sometimes I'll do a segment on the show and she's like, my head's spinning right now.
00:23:18.000And that's why when you asked me in the beginning, I tried to boil it down to a very simple thing.
00:23:22.000The President of the United States and a candidate was spied on.
00:23:24.000I really hope it aggravates people, Sadly, I'm not optimistic that it'll motivate anyone to vote for anything.
00:23:30.000I think you're locked in on either side now.
00:23:32.000So looking at the election, how do you ballpark that?
00:23:35.000So I've been following it the same way you have been.
00:23:38.000And I always thought from the outset that Trump was a bit of an underdog for re-election simply because George W. Bush lost the popular vote by 500,000 in 2000, and then he had to win an additional 10 million votes in order to win in 2004 in a fairly close election with John Kerry.
00:23:51.000Trump lost the popular vote by 2.5 million, and he would have to pick up presumably somewhere between 12 and 14 million new votes in order to make up that lost ground.
00:23:59.000That he has, you know, he obviously broke Hillary Clinton's blue wall, It was a, I mean, really a through the needle thing, the eye of the needle sort of thing.
00:24:08.00080,000 combined votes in three states.
00:24:09.000And the map has expanded pretty wildly for Democrats given 2018.
00:24:12.000And so I always thought that he was a bit of an underdog.
00:24:15.000I thought that, you know, maybe before the COVID pandemic, I thought that it was basically 50-50.
00:24:21.000After the COVID pandemic, I thought it was about 65-35 for Biden.
00:24:23.000I'm now thinking it's more like 55-45 for Biden, given the violence in the streets and the fact that Joe Biden may not be alive.
00:24:29.000Well, how do you ballpark the election?
00:24:32.000I would have told you two, three months ago, I would have gone into where I would have said 70-30 Biden, because I thought it was just overwhelming.
00:24:38.000I mean, this no one had been forced to deal with this just meeting of just almost apocalyptic type events at the same time, this massive recession we've never seen.
00:24:48.000I mean, who talking about 20 percent GDP drops?
00:24:51.000You would have laughed at a number like, come on, stop.
00:25:10.000And anyone who tells you anger is not a motivator is the only motivator.
00:25:14.000It's totally full of crap, like, has never run for office.
00:25:17.000You know, I've run three times, sadly unsuccessfully, but, you know, that's total nonsense.
00:25:22.000When you knock on doors and talk to people, they'll vote just because they hate another guy.
00:25:26.000So those three million Obama voters will be there, and obviously we lost the popular vote, you know, pretty handily.
00:25:31.000So, that's kind of the downside to it.
00:25:34.000The upside, some anecdotal, some statistical.
00:25:37.000If the Democrats lose a significant swath of the black vote, so President Trump got 8% of the black vote, if he scores 12, I mean, let's get out of the area of ridiculous.
00:25:46.000I've heard people, he's gonna get 40%!
00:26:17.000Another pro, which is anecdotal granted, and anecdotes, anyone can find an anecdote.
00:26:22.000But Ben, people in my own family circle, who shall remain nameless, who listen to your show, but they don't listen to mine, they listen to your show, right?
00:27:15.000He's like, I got to tell you, Dan, about 85% of them love Trump.
00:27:19.000These are constituencies, and this is why I think the polling, candidly, I think you can scrap it.
00:27:23.000I almost think it's a useless data point at this point.
00:27:26.000Because when you look at that, constituencies, they've had a really tough time measuring in the past with Republican support, and you marry it up with the fact That we've never had such white working class support in our lives.
00:27:39.000We've always had, you know, white college educated folks as well.
00:27:42.000So you get an increased minority vote, you get union voters, you get police officers in droves, probably going to win the military vote.
00:27:48.000Combine that with white working class voters that we've, in numbers we've never seen before.
00:27:53.000And right now, I think if the economy holds, I think it's 55-45 Trump.
00:27:57.000But, you know, I predicted the last win.
00:29:22.000So in a second, I want to ask you about how you think the election is going to shake out just in terms of the logistics of it, because that obviously has become a major mess.
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00:30:46.000Okay, so let's talk about how the election shakes out.
00:30:50.000The reason I put it at 55-45 Biden is just because there's so many states that are up for play that there would have to be a massive statistical error in order for Trump to really be up in all these states where the polls say he's down.
00:30:59.000But that could happen, and this is why I've ballparked it this way, because I agree with you.
00:31:03.000I think that he has not performed well in the suburbs in 2018.
00:31:22.000And you could certainly see the same thing from Trump.
00:31:24.000We could see voters in places like Kenosha who simply have not voted in the past who are now motivated to go out and vote because of everything that is going on.
00:31:31.000One of the things that the Democrats are doing and that the media are doing is this sort of tacit threat thing where if Trump wins, they're basically suggesting that the world will burn down.
00:31:40.000And then as part of that tacit threat, they're actually effectuating that threat in major cities across the country right now.
00:31:44.000right now that because Trump is president, we're gonna go on riot.
00:31:46.000And Joe Biden has explicitly said that if he's president, there won't be any more riots, which is a fairly obvious blackmail tactic, given the fact that we may not actually know who won the night of the election.
00:31:57.000I mean, it may be that we get the immediate results from the tabulated voting places, but the mail-in ballots may take a week to count.
00:32:05.000What do you think are the prospects of serious conflict after this election?
00:32:22.000Guy calls in, and just really upset at the whole process.
00:32:26.000He told me he was a conservative, but he's like, listen, he said something to the effect of, you know, I'm ready to go get my gun.
00:32:31.000And, you know, you're on in the open air, and you're like, oh gosh.
00:32:34.000So instead of just immediately hanging up and trying to kind of diffuse this situation on the air, I said to him, I said, you know, do you know who your local state rep is?
00:32:50.000I said, I don't know how to rub it in, but do you know who your state senator is?
00:32:53.000I said, so just to be clear, you're ready to go get your gun, but you don't even know who, like it didn't, and I wasn't trying to be condescending, I was trying to tell the audience, like number one, this is obviously illogical, insane stuff.
00:33:20.000We live in the wealthiest, most prosperous country, not on Earth, in the history of Earth, since sentient beings... Matter of fact, unless we find life anywhere else in the entire cosmos, the best place to live is here.
00:33:50.000But I am terrified that, whereas I think conservatives... See, you and I have an emergency break, and the emergency break is our ideological leanings and our faith.
00:34:00.000Our emergency break as conservatives are, our political opponents have God-given big R rights, even though we disagree with them.
00:34:20.000And secondly, we believe in a Bill of Rights.
00:34:22.000We believe that everybody has those big R God-given rights.
00:34:25.000What worries me about the radical left, not all Democrats, a lot of Democrats tired of this nonsense too, or else Biden wouldn't be coming out against it.
00:34:31.000The radical left, there's no question, there's no emergency brake whatsoever.
00:34:36.000That's what terrifies me about after the election.
00:34:38.000If you saw what me and my wife saw, leaving the acceptance speech at the White House, Ben, I know you've been subjected to harassment.
00:35:53.000I mean, obviously it's a dopey question, but can you ever imagine losing an election to Obama, showing up at his nomination speech at the White House, Ben, and foaming at the mouth, calling an 80-year-old man's wife a prostitute, telling him you're going to kick his...
00:36:08.000I mean, what kind of a lunatic does that?
00:36:10.000And it's precisely because conservatives have the emergency brake and liberals don't.
00:36:23.000So let's talk about the breakdown of law and order, because obviously that's become a key component of the Trump campaign.
00:36:28.000It's really shifted the nature of the campaign to the point where it seems like Biden is very much on the defensive, as we record this.
00:36:33.000Biden has been forced to exit the basement and go to swing states, which suggests that he's got some internal polling that differs pretty widely from the public polling.
00:36:40.000And he's taken the sort of halfway position between Lawlessness and law and order where he says, well, you know, the vast majority of police officers are good people, but the system is systemically racist.
00:37:17.000So, what's interesting is these allegations of systemic racism are only emerging from cities run by systems that are dominated monopolistically by liberals.
00:37:26.000So, I don't get, one, what system you're talking about.
00:38:29.000And, and I think where the Biden campaign made a huge mistake here is obviously, you know, the sister soldier moment that saved Bill Clinton's campaign where he, the sister soldier had this very controversial song.
00:41:05.000And I think this is going to be his downfall.
00:41:07.000I mean, I'm shocked that the Trump campaign has not, as of yet, really gone even more aggressive on this particular point.
00:41:13.000I mean, Joe Biden went and visited Kenosha, and while visiting Kenosha, he made a phone call to Jacob Blake, the man who was shot by the Kenosha police.
00:41:22.000The reason that the police were there is because they were called to the scene by a woman who alleged that he digitally raped her with her child in the room.
00:41:28.000And there was Joe Biden suggesting that the officers Who had to shoot him because he was resisting arrest and went around to the driver's side of his car and tried to pick a knife up off the floorboards.
00:41:38.000They shot him and Biden's response was to call Jacob Blake with condolences, an alleged rapist, and to suggest that the officers be arrested.
00:41:47.000I don't know how that has not become the focal point of the Trump campaign at this point, frankly.
00:41:53.000Yeah, you know, I was doing an appearance, and I mentioned this the other day, that isn't it so bizarre that the social fabric has just collapsed to such a point where, remember when we were kids, you played cops and robbers, and nobody wanted to be the robber?
00:42:04.000Like, that was like the kid you didn't like in the neighborhood.
00:42:12.000Everybody wants to be the robber and not the cop, and you think, The damage they've done to our culture, where they've unmoored us from any objective values of what's good.
00:42:22.000You know, I read this great piece in the journal, forgive me, I can't remember, it was an op-ed about a week ago.
00:42:31.000But it was such a wonderful piece, how When you accept this idea that, oh, all ideas have equal validity than none do, because it's absurd.
00:42:42.000Like, there's unquestionably, top of the totem pole, bad ideas that should be absolutely categorically disregarded.
00:42:49.000Like, the police are generally good, law and order's a good thing, rioting is bad, but now we see this new book, like, In Defense of Looting.
00:42:56.000I mean, this is what happens, and this is how you get a society where people want to be the robber now and not the cop.
00:43:02.000Which, ironically, that book, one of my friends put out a tweet the other day which was hilarious, the In Defense of Looting book, where again, all ideas are worth hearing, which you and I both know are not, like, socialism's not worth hearing out.
00:43:13.000Whoever tells you that's a moron with no context for history at all.
00:43:17.000The In Defense of Looting book, if you go to the back of the front flap, it has a copyright thing where you need permission to print this book.
00:44:06.000And the left is... The left, really, through their academic institutions, has dismantled any sense right now of objective good to the point where a guy running for president meets with the guy accused of this disgusting crime and nobody... I mean, Ben, really, is it even a scandal?
00:44:22.000I want to talk to you about it in one second.
00:44:23.000I want to ask you about the media coverage of this race, because the media coverage over the last few years, they have beclowned themselves in such grandiose fashion.
00:44:30.000I've never seen anything remotely like it.
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00:45:49.000So let's talk about the media coverage of all of this stuff.
00:45:51.000So obviously you've created a very large media persona for yourself.
00:45:56.000You've even created a sort of response to the Drudge Report called the Bongino Report.
00:46:00.000And you were one of the first people to publicly say what everybody sort of knew, which is that Matt Drudge is off the train.
00:46:04.000So Matt Drudge was a driving force behind Donald Trump's primary victory.
00:46:08.000He really covered him in extraordinarily positive fashion during the primaries in 2016.
00:46:12.000Uh, and throughout the election cycle, he was pretty positive toward Trump in 2016.
00:46:16.000And then sometime in 2017, 2018, it seems like the coverage of Drudge Report has basically mirrored that of the New York Times to the point where nearly every headline looks like it's almost originating from Biden HQ at this point.
00:46:37.000I hate even saying it, but it's out there if you Google it.
00:46:41.000He's so reclusive, nobody can ever get a quote from him, so nobody really knows what happened with Drudge.
00:46:45.000People who've known him in the past, who worked with him, have told me that he can be very kind of mercenary himself, that he just runs with the headlines.
00:47:11.000I have to live my life in the real world.
00:47:13.000Um, and, and, you know, I do show prep like you do.
00:47:16.000And I found the Drudge Report to be increasingly useless.
00:47:19.000It was just nonstop corona hysteria, you know, Orange Man bad, Trump is awful, you know, finally we found the collusion, and I was like, this is just a waste of my time.
00:47:30.000So we did Bongino Report, and it took off fab.
00:47:33.000I mean, it's just people we're looking for.
00:47:35.000And there's a number of others that do it too, as well, that do a really terrific job.
00:47:38.000And I give them hat tips all the time.
00:47:40.000Because like I said, it's really not about, for me, the money, the projects I choose to get involved with.
00:47:44.000I always get involved with, because I'm passionate about them.
00:47:46.000You know, I do the same thing with social media, with some projects I'm involved in there.
00:47:50.000But with the media, you know, it's stunning.
00:47:53.000Like you and I, if we get one nugget of a fact wrong, matter of fact, I'll put meat on the bone, I'll give you an actual example.
00:47:58.000I'm running for office in Florida, and I had, I said something during a debate that education spending, since I was born in the 1970s, has gone up 400%, and yet our international results have flatlined.
00:48:11.000So obviously the correlation between money and education results aren't there.
00:48:16.000Well, the next day there was an article in the Naples Daily News.
00:49:02.000Nobody—Ben, no career damage at all.
00:49:05.000Maggie Haberman, Adam Goldman, Natasha Bertrand, David Corn.
00:49:11.000I mean, the list goes on and on of people who have never apologized, not one moment, for this scandal, have promoted the two biggest hoaxes of our time, and they got Pulitzer Prizes for this thing.
00:49:21.000Meanwhile, you and I, you get a decimal point wrong, and we're finished.
00:49:26.000You know, the only good news to that, because that sounds very macabre...
00:49:30.000You know, you look at polls, and you see who are the trusted sources of information, and it's guys like you, me, and Fox News, and nobody trusts them.
00:49:37.000So the answer is, who's really winning?
00:50:05.000Because like Rachel Maddow, I love this topic.
00:50:07.000How do you watch this show for three years knowing this woman's been lying to you, or if not lying, is so incompetent that she promoted a hoax, the collusion hoax, and you don't wake up one morning and go, Wow.
00:50:21.000I spent an hour every night at 9 o'clock on a show, Eastern Time.
00:51:07.000One of the things that's truly amazing is that it's pretty obvious that social media has allowed avenues for, you know, people like you, people like me to get our message out there.
00:51:15.000And when those messages become popular, the old media immediately jump in to attempt to control social media.
00:51:20.000So you've seen this mostly from people like Kevin Roos at the New York Times.
00:51:28.000Every single day he posts the Facebook statistics showing that your page is popular, that my page is very popular.
00:51:33.000And then he, the implication of course being that Facebook is putting out this information.
00:51:37.000It never seems to occur to him that maybe the reason people like our information is because the New York Times won't report the kind of stuff that we talk about on a daily basis and instead denies entirely these narratives.
00:51:46.000And this is, I think, the blind spot for the media and it's the reason they've lost so much credibility.
00:51:51.000I think they've Move themselves into a box canyon where they can't get out, because if they acknowledge that the narratives that you and I pursue on a daily basis and talk about, because we'll talk about all the same stuff they're talking about, but we will also talk about these other narratives that they won't talk about, right?
00:52:03.000I mean, you talked about Spygate and you talked about the Russia hoax and all of that for years on your program.
00:52:09.000I talked about it and I was actually more friendly toward, I tried to give your point of view, but also talked about what the New York Times was saying on a daily basis, and that still wasn't good enough for them.
00:52:18.000But then we would talk about other narratives that were in the news that get completely ignored.
00:52:21.000And instead of the New York Times starting to cover some of those other narratives, or hire a conservative journalist, or hire somebody their op-ed page who might disagree with somebody once in a while.
00:52:29.000Instead of doing that, they've decided that they actually want to hijack the social media networks and try to pressure them into shutting off access to information conservatives provide.
00:52:41.000So now they basically just have to double down on what they have.
00:52:44.000Because if they ever acknowledge that maybe we're providing information that is useful, then they have to acknowledge they've been doing it wrong all these years.
00:52:49.000And simultaneously, if they acknowledge that we're successful because people want that information, then they have to acknowledge that social media is not biased.
00:52:57.000It's just that they're not performing their jobs particularly well.
00:53:00.000That's a huge story, and I'm so glad your audience is going to get a kick at this, because there's no two better people to talk about than me and you.
00:53:07.000You and I, on any given day, there's a Twitter account, Facebook's Top Ten, and it monitors via CrowdTangle the most popular posts of the day.
00:53:15.000There's not a day during the week that either you or I aren't on that.
00:53:29.000It bothers him so much that a writer, I believe for the New York Times, that guy Roush, who monitors the Facebook top ten, he only does it to pressure Facebook to say, listen, these right-wing provocateurs are posting content that we just don't ideologically like.
00:53:44.000Matter of fact, there was an article in The Week about me and you by this other clown, not Bruce, but suggesting somehow that we're promoting disinformation, which is incredible, because again, Facebook has an army of fact-checkers literally dedicated to destroying the lives of conservatives.
00:53:59.000And I hate literally, because it's literally the most overused word in the English language, but I literally mean that.
00:54:03.000They have an army of fact checkers deployed that just target almost exclusively conservative pages.
00:54:11.000If what we're saying is false, because we get it about once a month, we'll get one of these fake fact checks, which is really an opinion piece.
00:54:20.000And what bothers them more is that there's an interesting thing about your page and my page, that they never tell the story.
00:54:27.000Most of the posts on our... Yeah, we'll put clips, Kayleigh McEnany, Donald Trump, whatever.
00:54:31.000You know, everybody has a few newsy clips.
00:54:33.000You know, you put a little spicy headline, whatever.
00:54:36.000But 50, 60, 70% of the material is material we write, like Daily Wire stuff you guys put together.
00:54:42.000And my clips from my show, So if what I'm saying on my show is false, then where are your army of fact-checkers calling me out?
00:54:50.000So what they're saying is they're bothered by the truth.
00:54:52.000And it's really stunning, and I don't think the audience really gets, behind the scenes, how much pressure... You guys get it more than I do, because The Daily Wire has its own... distinct from Ben Shapiro, has its own distinct... I mean, you guys, you know, you work for The Wire and all, and with them, but you guys have a multiple different, like, layers of success on Facebook.
00:55:21.000But I think the guy I work with on Facebook who helps me produce the content.
00:55:27.000He's like, just milk it as long as you can, because you won't be here long.
00:55:30.000You know, I will say that, you know, I think that not all these companies operate the same way.
00:55:35.000I think that Twitter is more of a threat to conservatives, just by statistics, than Facebook is.
00:55:41.000Listen, I've said it before, I think that Zuckerberg seems to have an ideological commitment to the idea, at least, of people being able to get their opinion out there.
00:55:49.000It may be imperfectly applied by his company, but he at least is mouthing those words, and I think he actually does care about that stuff.
00:55:55.000That the precise opposite applies to people like Jack Dorsey, who brutally wants to shut down anybody who disagrees with him.
00:56:21.000I mean, there are people who are out there every day trying to get you demonetized, getting people like Steven Crowder demonetized on YouTube.
00:56:27.000There are people out there every single day who are trying to pressure these companies into literally kicking off the pages, who are trying to get our advertisers to drop us because the advertisers have to be pressured.
00:56:37.000And that's a serious thing that the right has not done.
00:56:40.000And it's put me in the position of basically saying, listen, if you guys continue this, at a certain point, we're going to have to engage in mutually assured destruction.
00:56:47.000Like, I think that Anybody should be able to advertise on whatever program they damn well please.
00:56:51.000And if Acura wants to advertise with Rachel Maddow, enjoy.
00:56:54.000But if it's going to come to the point where nobody's allowed to advertise on your show or advertise on my show, and if they buy an ad on the Sunday special, then the leftists swarm them, then there will come a point where the right is just going to say, listen, we'll do the exact same thing to your advertisers, and then nobody will have advertising revenue, and then we'll see how you like this.
00:57:10.000Gosh, I could talk to you about this whole topic for hours, but a couple things.
00:57:52.000That's not how we think of the conservative ecosystem.
00:57:55.000No, yeah, and I've never thought of it that way.
00:57:57.000I've always thought, you know... I've promoted your work.
00:57:59.000Yeah, I mean, I had Michael on my show and we were laughing upstairs.
00:58:03.000He had a great weekend after that with subs because I love his show and I think there's There's space in people's lives for between four to six hours of content.
00:58:11.000I mean, Hannity, Rush, and Levin have dominated.
00:58:14.000That's nine hours of content for years.
00:58:56.000Again, not to get into specifics, but we've written into contracts that people are not allowed to just willy-nilly be pressured by the leftist ecosystem into pulling their advertising.
00:59:04.000No, I mean, they're asking us to voice their pride, which we're very specific, but we don't just sell anything.
00:59:10.000No, listen, they trust us to talk about their product in an honest way, and we trust them not to undercut our shows.
00:59:15.000I mean, this relationship does go both ways.
00:59:18.000And not only that, I mean, I think that the right needs to stick together when any of us get boycotted, right?
00:59:21.000I mean, when people go after Tucker, when people go after Sean, when people go after Rush.
00:59:26.000That's a routine thing, is to try and knock advertisers out and, you know, There will come a point where the right decides that they've had enough of this, and the eventual answer is going to be launching of right-wing companies in exactly the same areas that don't actually care anymore.
00:59:39.000I mean, you've seen this with Black Rifle Coffee, one of our sponsors, right?
00:59:42.000Black Rifle looked at Starbucks, and they said, okay, well, if you guys are going to market to the left, then we're going to market to the right.
00:59:47.000We'll put a gun on our cover, and people will buy our coffee, and they do an awful big business.
00:59:51.000You know, Roger Ailes, who, whatever you think his problems were or not, when I was an instructor in the Secret Service Academy, a guy who was graduating in the class knew him.
01:00:14.000He said, I was sitting there in my house one day and I thought, gosh, there's this underserved market in America called 51% of America, that like, he was joking, I was like, why isn't there a conservative news station?
01:00:25.000So what you're saying about a whole conservative ecosystem of social media, products, advertising companies, ad reps, everything, it's emerging now, we're seeing it now on Aaron.
01:00:40.000Even companies like YouTube, who've decided it's a good idea to demonetize anything I say, and they don't demonetize almost any leftist channels.
01:02:05.000I don't think he cares what you think.
01:02:08.000I think he'd kick you off tomorrow if he felt like it.
01:02:11.000And I think he'd flip you two middle fingers and say, have a nice day.
01:02:14.000And matter of fact, I would not be stunned.
01:02:16.000Again, I'm not in the predictions game.
01:02:17.000I'm just saying I would not be shocked at all if there's some adverse action against the president close to or after election day, depending on who wins.
01:02:25.000I wouldn't, where he's just suspended, and then I think people are going to start to really wake up.
01:02:31.000I would never get rid of my Twitter account.
01:02:34.000Full disclosure, I have an ownership stake in Parler, so your audience is not in any way confused.
01:02:46.000I just want to make sure you have a home base somewhere else where you can go to Twitter and play with the liberals all you want, but understand that your time is limited there.
01:02:54.000And I believe again on Facebook, I think my time is limited too.