The Ben Shapiro Show - Devastating New Polling…For DEMOCRATS

00:00:00.000 Alrighty, folks, stacked show for you here today.

00:00:02.000 New polls show Democrats in serious, serious trouble.

00:00:05.000 Americans just do not like them. 1.00

00:00:06.000 We discuss also the young people.

00:00:08.000 Is everything copacetic with them?

00:00:10.000 Because there's some new poll data on the youngsters.

00:00:12.000 It's not amazing, plus, all your Epstein updates, Gaza updates, everything else. 0.75

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00:00:50.000 Well, folks, if you pay attention to the legacy media, President Trump is in serious trouble.

00:00:54.000 The only things happening in the world are the Epstein case and what's going on in the Gaza Strip and all the rest.

00:01:01.000 And we'll get to those topics in just a little while on the show.

00:01:04.000 But here's the thing.

00:01:05.000 Because the legacy media are aligned with the Democratic Party, they would like you to ignore the fact that the Democratic Party has literally never, never been less popular.

00:01:14.000 And some of that has to do with the maintained popularity of President Trump.

00:01:18.000 If President Trump were wildly unpopular, then the way that politics goes is to seesaw.

00:01:22.000 If Trump goes down, Democrats go up.

00:01:24.000 And so if Democrats are down, that means by necessity, President Trump remains up.

00:01:28.000 And the Democrats continue to be unbelievably weak.

00:01:31.000 According to Politico, President Trump's approval rating remains underwater, but Democrats are faring much worse, according to a new poll from the Wall Street Journal released on Saturday.

00:01:39.000 That new survey, conducted by Democratic pollster John Anzalone and Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, found Democrats' popularity at its lowest point in three decades, in 30 years of polling for the Wall Street Journal, with 63% of voters holding an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party.

00:01:57.000 Just 33% of voters hold a favorable view of Democrats.

00:02:00.000 A meager 8% hold a very favorable opinion of Democrats.

00:02:05.000 That means net negative favorability, 30 percentage points.

00:02:09.000 So whatever the media keep telling you about the unpopularity of Trump, Democrats remain way more unpopular.

00:02:15.000 Now, that doesn't mean that President Trump isn't facing stiff headwinds, some of his own making.

00:02:19.000 By 17 points, voters disapprove, for example, of President Trump's handling of tariffs, but they still trust Republicans on trade more than Democrats by seven points.

00:02:29.000 So here's the problem for the Democrats.

00:02:31.000 People may not like certain aspects of what President Trump is doing, but they do trust that Trump is going to be responsive to reality in a way that Democrats simply are not.

00:02:40.000 There are literally two policy issues where Democrats are favored over Republicans, two.

00:02:44.000 One is healthcare and the other is vaccine policy.

00:02:48.000 Okay, the president right now is negative seven points.

00:02:50.000 The GOP is negative 11.

00:02:52.000 But remember, the Democrats are negative 30, negative 30.

00:02:55.000 Now, Democrat enthusiasm, because we're going into a midterm election next year, is higher than Republican enthusiasm.

00:03:02.000 However, despite those poll numbers, Republicans are only down to Democrats in the generic congressional ballot by three points, which is basically a toss-up when that translates to individual congressional races.

00:03:16.000 At this time in 2017, Democrats had an eight-point advantage already in the midterm elections.

00:03:21.000 So Democrats are in serious trouble.

00:03:23.000 And the reason is because they are totally and completely out of touch.

00:03:26.000 There's a fascinating piece from the New York Times titled Inside the Rise of the Multiracial Right, written by Daniel Martinez-Hossang, a professor of American studies and political science at Yale.

00:03:37.000 And the whole piece is about the rightward drift of minority voters, about the fact that President Trump won a radically outsized share of minority voters, despite the fact that we have been told since basically 2008 that the Democratic Party was going to forge a brand new majority minority coalition that left white voters in the dust.

00:03:54.000 And actually, as it turns out, President Trump wins white voters, but he's also winning an outsized share of Latinos, blacks, Asian Americans.

00:04:02.000 The question is why?

00:04:03.000 And the answer is because the Democratic Party, as it took over all of America's institutions, disconnected itself from normal Americans.

00:04:11.000 The Democratic Party made a couple of major mistakes.

00:04:14.000 One of those is that it decided to implement an elite Ivy League agenda in terms of values at these institutions, that the only thing that mattered in the end was the most radical social values you could possibly imagine, anti-church values, anti-family values.

00:04:28.000 Yes, it turns out that the radical LGBTQ plus minus divided by side wing of the Democratic Party alienated an awful lot of minorities, many of whom are still very much ensconced in church and family.

00:04:40.000 And it turns out that if the price of moving along with the Democrats is that you have to believe boys can become girls, that is a major issue for a huge number of Americans.

00:04:49.000 And yet Democrats seem preternaturally obsessed with that issue, unable to abandon that issue.

00:04:55.000 And yes, that is a major obstacle for them.

00:04:57.000 But there's another problem too.

00:04:58.000 And that is that Democrats, because in the end, the elite of the Democratic Party remain upper crust white liberals and fellow travelers like Barack Obama, who again made common cause with those upper crust elite white liberals and felt very safe and comfortable in those particular circles.

00:05:14.000 He talks about this in Dreams from My Father.

00:05:17.000 Because of that, there was a tendency to believe that all minorities felt the same way.

00:05:22.000 There's a flattening of all minority racial groups into one giant blob, quote unquote, people of color. 1.00

00:05:28.000 And that's not the way anyone thinks of themselves.

00:05:31.000 Nobody thinks of themselves that way.

00:05:33.000 Hell, white voters don't even think of themselves that way.

00:05:36.000 If you ask a normal white voter, that white voter could be of Polish extraction, of Italian extraction now, of Jewish extraction, of German extraction, of Irish extraction.

00:05:46.000 And there's been an attempt in America to sort of flatten all of these distinctions out, but those distinctions are very real in terms of how people see themselves in terms of identity.

00:05:53.000 So when you tell an Asian American that their interests are identical to those of a black American or a black American, that his interests are identical to those of a Latino American. 0.80

00:06:02.000 Well, in some cases, the answer is yes, because we're all individuals.

00:06:05.000 But in some cases, the answer is very much no.

00:06:08.000 It may turn out, for example, that affirmative action policies that are designed to increase the number of applicants who are black who get into Ivy League colleges may cut directly against the interests of, say, Asian Americans who are outscoring their competitors on college tests.

00:06:23.000 And so pretending that essentially the coalition of minority groups, they all agree on everything because they're all quote unquote, people of color in opposition to white people. 0.73

00:06:32.000 That is not a winning argument.

00:06:34.000 This is the point of this piece.

00:06:36.000 At the very end, Ho-Sang writes: He's writing about a woman named Deja Davis who attended America Fest, which is a Charlie Kirk Turning Point USA conference.

00:06:47.000 He says at America Fest, weeks before Mr. Trump began his second term, I met a 25-year-old black Blexit member named Deja Davis.

00:06:53.000 Blexit is a movement originally started by Candace Owens to get black Americans to leave the Democratic Party. 0.96

00:06:59.000 Committed and idealistic, she projected a strong sense of racial identity and pride.

00:07:02.000 She told me she and the other black conservatives she works with care so deeply about our community.

00:07:07.000 They were setting up chapters of conservative groups at historically black colleges and hosting community events.

00:07:11.000 I believe the black community can do anything, she told me.

00:07:14.000 When I began this work, says Ho-Sang, it was difficult to imagine people of color, again, people of color, like Miss Davis, whose racial identity feels to her in no way out of line with her political one, becoming a major conservative political force in our country.

00:07:25.000 Yet with thousands of voters like her at the Turning Point Conference, that's exactly where we are.

00:07:30.000 For people like Ms. Davis, optimism and hope for the future come from the right, not the left.

00:07:34.000 Their racial identity is still at the core of their political beliefs, if anything.

00:07:37.000 So much of what these voters have told me comes from a pointed concern for their communities.

00:07:41.000 But their political decisions are driven more by the realities their racial communities face, collapsing social structures, economic uncertainties, and a sense that the status quo is untenable.

00:07:50.000 So those institutions the Democrats took over and then use the legitimacy of those institutions to promulgate far leftism.

00:07:57.000 It turns out people just lost trust in those institutions and have turned to a wrecking ball like President Trump.

00:08:03.000 Says Ho Sang, quote, absent a solution to these core problems, appealing to disaffected voters of color on their racial identity alone has rung hollow.

00:08:11.000 Grappling with the complexities of their frustrations, anxieties, and hopes will determine the next political chapter of this country.

00:08:17.000 All of which is, again, quite hopeful for Republicans, for sure.

00:08:22.000 And some of this has to do, again, with the anti-institutional nature of President Trump.

00:08:26.000 Chris Matthews, used to be an emissary said, comes back on.

00:08:30.000 Talk about Donald Trump.

00:08:31.000 He says Donald Trump is shockingly popular because he's actually quite a good politician.

00:08:38.000 He's very good at knowing your condition, your worries, your insecurities.

00:08:42.000 I mean, he'd be a great bully on a grade school, Catholic high school or grade school.

00:08:48.000 I mean, he'd be the scariest bully because he'd know everybody's weakness.

00:08:52.000 But he's really good at the moment.

00:08:54.000 I mean, he's out there watching television and keeping up.

00:08:58.000 And is this the right thing to do?

00:09:00.000 What am I going to do right now?

00:09:02.000 Biden couldn't do that in a million years.

00:09:04.000 Not in a million years.

00:09:05.000 Mondale couldn't do that.

00:09:06.000 They don't have the connection to the electricity of what's going on in the country culturally.

00:09:12.000 And he knows what works.

00:09:15.000 Not only does he know what works, President Trump has been the point of the spear in one of the things that Americans hate most, which is this belief that if you say something outside of the preserves, sort of the Hillary Clinton left, you ought to be canceled.

00:09:27.000 One of the effects of this has been a massive backlash.

00:09:30.000 And President Trump is both a symptom and a cause of this backlash against political correctness, wokeness, and cancel culture.

00:09:36.000 Now, I ought to define cancel culture here. 0.91

00:09:38.000 Not everybody being criticized is cancel culture.

00:09:41.000 Cancelation is when you lose a job or when you are removed from a platform, not for an opinion like you're pro-Nazi or something, from a platform or a job because you're outside the Overton window.

00:09:52.000 The problem for the left is that the left decreased the so-called Overton window, the window of acceptable discourse, so narrow that virtually everybody ended up being in danger of cancellation.

00:10:02.000 And President Trump fought back against that.

00:10:04.000 He has wildly blown open the Overton window to mostly good effect, but some negative effect, which we'll get to in a minute.

00:10:10.000 Well, one of the effects of that, of the ending of that Overton window dominance by the left, is that organizations that used to be quite powerful, like Media Matters, are now on the ropes, already coming up.

00:10:19.000 Media Matters may be going bankrupt.

00:10:21.000 Oh, man.

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00:12:41.000 So Media Matters is a left-wing organization originally funded by Hillary Clinton acolytes in order to go after right-wing media companies. 0.70

00:12:48.000 And what they would do is astro-turf boycotts against people like Rush Limbaugh.

00:12:52.000 So Rush Limbaugh would say something.

00:12:53.000 Media Matters would get on the horn to its activists.

00:12:56.000 Those activists would call up Rush Limbaugh's advertisers.

00:12:59.000 Those advertisers, Out of fear, would cancel on Rush Limbaugh.

00:13:02.000 Rush would lose millions of dollars.

00:13:03.000 Media Matters would declare victory.

00:13:05.000 Media Matters, for a while in this country, was so powerful that I personally, along with Jeremy Boring before we co-founded Daily Wire, we actually had an organization called Truth Revolt in order to fight back against Media Matters.

00:13:16.000 And we said openly, we're going to go after left-wing media and use the exact same tactics as Media Matters, not because we like those tactics, but because mutually assured destruction.

00:13:25.000 The minute Media Matters stops doing it, we will stop doing it.

00:13:28.000 And it turns out those tactics were, in fact, applicable against the left.

00:13:31.000 We went after, for example, Alec Baldwin's advertisers when he was on MSNBC and Martin Bashir's advertisers when he was on MSNBC and Al Sharpton at the time.

00:13:39.000 Okay, well, now Media Matters, because we now live in the post-Overton window era, Media Matters is basically dead in the water.

00:13:45.000 Fascinating article from the New York Times by Kenneth Vogel, Kay Conger, and Ryan Mack.

00:13:49.000 Quote, Media Matters, a nonprofit group that has played a key role in liberal politics, is struggling to withstand months of legal assaults by President Trump's allies, offering a glimpse of what might be in store for even well-funded targets of his retribution campaigns.

00:14:01.000 But it's not just about President Trump.

00:14:03.000 The fact is, people don't want to give to organizations that are specifically dedicated at canceling mainstream public opinions.

00:14:09.000 The organization, which is funded by some of the Democratic Party's biggest donors, has racked up $15 million in legal fees over the past 20 months to defend itself against lawsuits by Elon Musk, in addition to investigations by Mr. Trump's Federal Trade Commission and Republican state attorneys general.

00:14:24.000 And again, many of those investigations are warranted considering the sort of collusive impact of Media Matters.

00:14:32.000 The group has now slashed the size of its staff and scrambled to raise more cash from Skittish donors, according to documents and interviews with 11 people familiar with the organization's fight to survive.

00:14:40.000 That might not be enough.

00:14:42.000 Media Matters tried to settle with Mr. Musk by offering concessions, but the sides were far apart and talks fizzled.

00:14:48.000 Apparently, it has considered shutting, which would be very good for the country.

00:14:52.000 Angelo Corazon, the president of Media Matters, said, quote, unlike some major media entities that have recently caved to pressure, we understand this battle is larger than us.

00:14:59.000 That's why we continue to carry out our mission and fight in court.

00:15:03.000 But again, this is a dramatic downturn for Media Matters because they were part of that censorious left that basically said anything outside of the purview of the Democratic Party was unacceptable discourse.

00:15:15.000 Media Matters has originally funded by David Brock, who switched sides, became a left-wing radical enforcer for the Democratic Party.

00:15:24.000 That was clearly what they were about.

00:15:25.000 Media Matters is made up of two separate nonprofits registered under sections of the tax code, one for charities and the other for social welfare groups.

00:15:32.000 Some major donors include people like George Soros, as well as Stephen F. Mandel Jr., a hedge fund manager, Susie Tompkins Buell, clothing entrepreneur.

00:15:43.000 So again, they are in serious trouble, and it couldn't happen to a group of nicer people.

00:15:47.000 Seriously could not happen to a group of nicer people.

00:15:49.000 In May, the FTC launched an investigation into weather media matters and roughly a dozen other watchdog and advertising groups illegally colluded to dissuade companies from buying ads on X, among other platforms.

00:16:00.000 Again, this is a cause that Daily Wire has been leading literally since the first day that we started getting involved in this particular cause.

00:16:07.000 Like since Sin's launch, this has been one of our chief causes.

00:16:10.000 So the era of the censorious left, the upper crust Harvard liberal who speaks down and patronizes to minorities and then shuts the Overton window so nobody can speak different.

00:16:22.000 That day is ending.

00:16:23.000 And Democrats don't know what to do about it. 0.95

00:16:26.000 They are quite puzzled about what is the next step here.

00:16:30.000 It seems that they just want to rage against the machine.

00:16:32.000 Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post, he says the Democrats have to stand up and fight, but he's not providing a real playbook here.

00:16:39.000 Well, I think Democratic party faithful, they know that their leaders are in the minority, that there's not much that they can do.

00:16:47.000 But you're just going to sit there and just let this happen?

00:16:52.000 We need you to stand up and fight, give voice to the fear and the anger and the frustration that's out there in the country, not just among Democrats, but just Americans who see this chipping away at democracy that they don't like.

00:17:05.000 So you have to fight and don't worry about ticking someone off or hurting a certain constituency.

00:17:13.000 In the end, it's about saving the country, saving our democracy.

00:17:18.000 And then you can put the pieces back together later.

00:17:23.000 Yeah, good luck.

00:17:23.000 Good luck with that.

00:17:24.000 I love that David Brooks is sitting next to him on PBS News Your And this is just indicative of what the Democratic Party is.

00:17:29.000 Upper crust, highly paid media members of all races who agree with each other that the number one priority in America is saving people like them.

00:17:38.000 Here's David Brooks saying universities have to stand up and fight Trump.

00:17:43.000 The other option, which I thought we were going to have, is a broad coalition, not only of all universities, but all law firms, businesses, nonprofits, foundations, anybody in any sector that could be part of the extortion attempt.

00:17:56.000 And they were band together.

00:17:57.000 They're strength and numbers.

00:17:59.000 If they come for one of us, they come for all of us.

00:18:00.000 Sort of a domestic NATO.

00:18:02.000 Article 5.

00:18:04.000 Yeah, good luck.

00:18:05.000 They come for one of us.

00:18:07.000 If your party is Jonathan K. Part and David Brooks, you are in serious, serious trouble.

00:18:11.000 And so the Democratic Party is now turning to younger cadres.

00:18:14.000 But the problem is that all the young socialists are also people who are spoiled brats.

00:18:20.000 Typically, they are spoiled brats. 1.00

00:18:21.000 The best example being this amazing article from the New York Post.

00:18:24.000 Apparently, socialist New York City mayoral frontrunner Zoran Mamdani celebrated his recent nuptials with a lavish three-day affair at his family's ritzy secluded Ugandan compound, complete with masked security guards and a cell phone jamming system, according to the New York Post.

00:18:37.000 The gates of the bustling private compound, which sits in the wealthy Uziga Hill area outside the capital city of Kampala, were heavily guarded by military-style masked men this week, with guests streaming in and partying until midnight, according to sources in the town who wished to remain anonymous for security reasons.

00:18:52.000 Mamdani had eloped with artist and animator Ramaduaji, 27, in February.

00:18:56.000 He told his social media follower Sunday he was headed to his homeland to celebrate with his wealthy filmmaker mom and professor dad, who owned that Bouziga Hill property.

00:19:05.000 Apparently, the neighborhood is home to some of Uganda's richest, including billionaire businessman Godfrey Kirumira, a city tycoon with stakes in real estate, tourism, petroleum, and infrastructure, and houses the neighboring Mamzanis easily fetch more than $1 million, which in Uganda, by the way, is like a lot of money. 0.86

00:19:20.000 A $1 million home in the United States, you know, can be like a mid-sized home depending on where you are.

00:19:25.000 It could be a huge home, depending on where you are.

00:19:26.000 In Uganda, I promise you, that's going to be a really, really nice house Because the GDP per capita in Uganda is precisely $1,000 per capita.

00:19:37.000 So $1 million will buy you half the country.

00:19:41.000 I love the, you want to talk about limousine socialists?

00:19:45.000 That is what you're looking at right now.

00:19:47.000 Okay, so the Democratic Party is on the ropes.

00:19:49.000 They are on the ropes, but there is an increasing danger.

00:19:52.000 And that danger comes in the form of a splintering that is happening on the right.

00:19:57.000 So part of the problem with the destruction of the institutions by the left is that there are, in fact, no replacements for the institutions.

00:20:04.000 So there has been a split on the right between what Alana Newhouse of Tablet has called the brokenness, people who believe the institutions need to be completely torn down, ripped to the ground, new institutions built, and people who believe the institutions are fixable.

00:20:16.000 The area where the right generally agreed, however, is that institutions are necessary.

00:20:20.000 One of the problems with the death of the legacy media, and believe me, I'm a big fan of the death of the legacy media since we run a major media company here at Daily Wire.

00:20:29.000 And one of the things that's happened is that with distrust in institutions, justified earned distrust in the institutions, that has been replaced by a variety of sources, some which are good and some which are bad.

00:20:40.000 And unless people are trained in how to actually distinguish good sources from bad sources, they tend to intake an enormous amount of trash.

00:20:48.000 And that's what's happened with younger Americans.

00:20:50.000 So while I am quite optimistic about the future of the Republican Party, I am quite pessimistic about the nature of the quote-unquote younger generation.

00:20:58.000 There's a very interesting article by a guy named John Puri over at National Review.

00:21:03.000 He's a summer editorial intern at National Review.

00:21:05.000 He's a young guy himself.

00:21:06.000 He studies politics and history at Stanford.

00:21:08.000 He goes through some of the poll numbers about Gen Z. He says, there's an odd thing that many older liberals tend to say about America's youth.

00:21:15.000 As a member of Generation Z, which currently comprises those aged 13 to 28, I've often heard a similar refrain.

00:21:20.000 It's you young people who are going to save this country.

00:21:23.000 Some older liberals say such things because they seem to truly believe that young Americans are an especially enlightened demographic, that we purely by dint of our youth have a better understanding of the world than does everyone else.

00:21:33.000 Sometimes this assumption is translated into policy.

00:21:35.000 He points out the UK saying that 16-year-olds should vote.

00:21:39.000 However, he says, one small problem, Gen Z does not have some superior moral authority. 0.94

00:21:43.000 We do not understand the world better than everyone else.

00:21:46.000 Our political beliefs are not especially enlightened, quite the opposite, in fact.

00:21:49.000 The polling data reflect that we are largely morally and factually bankrupt.

00:21:54.000 So, for example, he cites the moral perception of the recent war between Israel and Hamas.

00:21:59.000 Apparently, according to a April 2024 Pew Research poll, Americans were asked whether Hamas's reasons for fighting Israel were valid.

00:22:08.000 An overwhelming majority of Americans said no.

00:22:10.000 For those aged 18 to 29, 34% said Hamas's reasons were valid compared to 30% who thought otherwise.

00:22:17.000 That age group was also the most likely to say that the way Hamas carried out its attack against Israel on October 7th, you know, a giant terror attack, the worst attack on Jews since World War II, they said 9% said that it was valid, double the number of any other age group.

00:22:32.000 A Harvard-Harris field survey after October 7th found similar results.

00:22:36.000 Those 18 to 24 concluded by a majority, 51 to 49, that Hamas's massacre, quote, can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians.

00:22:45.000 And it's not just that.

00:22:47.000 When it comes to, for example, the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, a poll of college students, Axios reported in January, found that half viewed the suspect extremely or somewhat favorably.

00:23:01.000 Asked with whom they sympathized more, Mangion the killer or Brian Thompson the victim, 45% said Mangion, 17% said Thompson.

00:23:11.000 Nearly a quarter of Americans aged 18 to 24 say they trust Russian President Vladimir Putin over Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

00:23:17.000 That is the highest number by far in the age group.

00:23:20.000 52% of U.S. college students say it may be acceptable to block other students from attending a speech on campus.

00:23:26.000 68% approve of shouting down a speaker they disagree with.

00:23:29.000 32% say using violence is appropriate.

00:23:33.000 Apparently, The Economist did a poll last year, and it found that one in five Americans aged 18 to 29 believe the Holocaust is a myth, and another 30% say they do not know whether the Holocaust is a myth, meaning like half of young Americans 18 to 29 either don't know whether the Holocaust is a myth or believe it is a myth.

00:23:50.000 28% said Jews wield too much power in America.

00:23:53.000 Now, the question is, where is all this coming from?

00:23:56.000 And the answer is a lot of this is coming from crap social media accounts.

00:23:59.000 It's coming from TikTok.

00:24:00.000 It's coming from X. A huge amount of news that is taken by young people is not coming from anything that looks like a vetted source or a source that actually cares about reality or eracity.

00:24:13.000 In fact, 63% of Generation Z, quote, does not believe in moral absolutes, but thinks what is morally right or wrong depends on what an individual believes.

00:24:20.000 So what is right changes over time based on society.

00:24:23.000 Only 34% of Generation Z believe lying is morally wrong, which is lower than any other generation.

00:24:29.000 Now, why do I point this out?

00:24:30.000 Because if you want to know why conspiratorialism has soared, again, there are good reasons to distrust all these institutions.

00:24:36.000 It is a good thing that people look at institutions hollowed out by the left wing with radical skepticism and look to build new institutions or restore those institutions by kicking the left out of those institutions and actually regaining credibility.

00:24:49.000 However, if the substitute for this is an atomized society in which you go to TikTok for your information or x.com for your information, you're going to end up with some pretty bad information.

00:24:59.000 And this is why conspiratorialism has soared on every side of the political aisle.

00:25:03.000 And that is dangerous because conspiratorial nonsense, again, there are conspiracies.

00:25:08.000 We've talked about many of them.

00:25:09.000 Russia Gate was an actual conspiracy.

00:25:12.000 The media attempting to shut down the Hunter Biden laptop story, actual conspiracy.

00:25:17.000 Like these are things that actually happened in real life.

00:25:19.000 The thing about conspiracies that are real, as I've said a thousand times on the show, is there is evidence of them.

00:25:23.000 You can name the people involved.

00:25:26.000 Conspiratorial thinking, however, speculates that there is an unnamed group of people who you can't put a finger on, but you know they're there.

00:25:34.000 And behind closed doors, they must be doing something nefarious and terrible.

00:25:37.000 And therefore, you are not in control of your own life.

00:25:38.000 And you get to be very angry at someone.

00:25:41.000 That sort of thinking is not good for society.

00:25:43.000 It's not good politically.

00:25:44.000 It's not good at all.

00:25:45.000 It is bad for you as a human to engage in that sort of thinking because it means that you are essentially saying that you are not in control of your own future.

00:25:52.000 You are not in control of your own life.

00:25:54.000 And there's no prospect that you will be because the shadowy forces control everything.

00:25:58.000 All righty, coming up, all your Epstein updates the story that, unlike Jeffrey Epstein, apparently won't die.

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00:27:04.000 Also, as we celebrated Independence Day earlier this July, we're reminded of the freedoms our founders fought to protect, like, you know, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.

00:27:11.000 Here's something that might surprise you.

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00:28:09.000 And so much of this is now being projected into what is going on on the Jeffrey Epstein score.

00:28:13.000 Now, again, I will say it for the thousandth time.

00:28:16.000 People have a right to be angry about how the Jeffrey Epstein story was handled.

00:28:20.000 Everyone believed, based on sort of the gestalt of the story, for literally a decade, people believed that Jeffrey Epstein was engaged in taping of and blackmail of very, very prominent figures by sex trafficking minors to them.

00:28:33.000 That was the story.

00:28:34.000 That's what everybody thought the story was.

00:28:36.000 And that story was fomented by a lot of people in media who sort of picked up on a hint there or a clue there and put it all together and wrapped it up in a ball and then promoted the idea that certainly when we got access to the files, there would be something there.

00:28:49.000 And that included the attorney general, Pam Bondi.

00:28:51.000 I mean, it did.

00:28:52.000 It included Pat Cashmatella at the FBI.

00:28:54.000 It included a lot of people who were speculating.

00:28:55.000 And again, speculating in the absence of evidence.

00:28:59.000 I'm not anti-that.

00:29:01.000 If you want to ask questions in the absence of evidence, of course, you should.

00:29:04.000 Skepticism is warranted.

00:29:06.000 Once the evidence is made available or once people you trust, the people who are asking those same questions get access to the evidence and they say, we looked, we tried, and we found there wasn't as much there.

00:29:16.000 There wasn't what we thought was there.

00:29:18.000 Once that happens, if you are still maintaining that same position, you have to call those people liars or complicit in all of this.

00:29:25.000 And this is why President Trump is so annoyed, because President Trump is like, listen, President Trump has humored pretty much all of the just asking questions that it's possible to humor in American life.

00:29:35.000 President Trump is not somebody who has quashed conspiracy theorizing.

00:29:40.000 President Trump is very much in favor of investigating all of those things.

00:29:43.000 And yet President Trump is now being told that because his DOJ and FBI went through the evidence and came to a conclusion different than they thought they would come to, he now must be complicit.

00:29:52.000 And now he has to answer all these Epstein questions.

00:29:54.000 And so he's annoyed.

00:29:55.000 And again, a lot of this is being fomented by those disparate sources of information and left-wing media.

00:30:00.000 So there is a horseshoe that's happening right now.

00:30:02.000 You have people inside the Republican Party, I've termed pseudo-MAGA, who are attempting to wrest control of the MAGA movement away from President Trump by claiming that he is in fact a corrupt figurehead who is covering up a child sex rape ring.

00:30:15.000 And then you have people on the left who are perfectly willing to say the same thing because they want MAGA to die.

00:30:21.000 And they are joining hands right now.

00:30:24.000 So here's President Trump yesterday being asked about Epstein, and he's obviously annoyed.

00:30:29.000 Mr. President, it's a part of the rush to get this deal done.

00:30:32.000 It's a normal Jeffrey Epstein story.

00:30:34.000 Oh, you got to be kidding me.

00:30:37.000 No, had nothing to do with it.

00:30:39.000 Only you would think that.

00:30:40.000 That had nothing to do with it.

00:30:44.000 And there's been an attempt by the administration, by Speaker Johnson, by everybody else to basically say, fine, transparency.

00:30:50.000 Let's try to get as much information as we can.

00:30:53.000 This has refocused the administration away from important things that are happening, which we'll actually get to in a moment, and onto things like, let's go interview Ghelaine Maxwell, who is Jeffrey Epstein's paramour complicit sex trafficker sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex trafficking young girls for the pleasure of her boyfriend and of herself, apparently.

00:31:12.000 Well, on Thursday and Friday, according to the New York Times, Justice Department officials interviewed Maxwell, who's currently serving that 20-year sentence.

00:31:18.000 Her lawyers said she answered questions about a host of people, but it was unclear what information she provided.

00:31:23.000 Todd Blanche, the deputy AG who brokered the meeting, said on Thursday the department will share additional information about what we learned at the appropriate time.

00:31:30.000 She's obviously gaming for a pardon. 1.00

00:31:32.000 What she's now attempting to do is say, I know a bunch of people who are not President Trump or other people, and I'm going to spill the beans on them.

00:31:39.000 All you have to do is pardon me.

00:31:41.000 Well, Speaker Johnson correctly says, listen, she is a sex criminal and a pervert and a pedophile. 1.00

00:31:46.000 She should have a life sentence, not a 20-year sentence.

00:31:50.000 If you're asking my opinion, I think 20 years was a pittance.

00:31:53.000 I think she should have a life sentence at least. 1.00

00:31:55.000 I mean, think of all these unspeakable crimes.

00:31:58.000 And as you noted earlier, probably a thousand victims.

00:32:01.000 I mean, you know, it's hard to put into words how evil this was and that she orchestrated it and was a big part of it, at least under the criminal sanction, I think is an unforgivable thing.

00:32:15.000 And again, there are a bunch of people inside the Republican Party who are saying that she's sort of the key to the whole thing.

00:32:20.000 You're seeing a lot of right-wing influencers saying she's the key to the whole thing.

00:32:23.000 The big problem here is that you do have the possibility that, you know, the convicted sex trafficker, pervert, and liar, That she might be lying about some of this stuff.

00:32:32.000 And so you actually need extraneous evidence in order to prove her allegations because that's just the way the system works and ought to work.

00:32:39.000 Speaker Johnson says, I certainly hope she's telling the truth, but she has some ulterior motives.

00:32:44.000 Well, I mean, look, it's a good question.

00:32:46.000 I hope so.

00:32:47.000 I hope that she would want to come clean.

00:32:49.000 We certainly are interested in knowing everything that she knows.

00:32:52.000 And as you'll note, in our House Republican majority, we're working towards that.

00:32:56.000 Chairman Comer and our oversight committee has already issued their own subpoena.

00:33:00.000 They want to bring in Elaine Maxwell as well.

00:33:03.000 I hope she's telling the truth.

00:33:04.000 She is convicted.

00:33:06.000 She is serving a 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking.

00:33:09.000 And so her character is in some question.

00:33:11.000 But if she wants to come clean now, that would be a great service to the country.

00:33:15.000 And we'd like to know every single bit of information that she has.

00:33:18.000 I certainly hope she's telling the truth.

00:33:22.000 Again, listen, as much transparency as legally possible would be excellent here.

00:33:26.000 As much verified information and credible information as legally possible should be released.

00:33:30.000 I mean, this is obviously a matter of significant public interest and has been for, as I say, years and years and years and years at this point.

00:33:37.000 With that said, there is a politically motivated attempt to damage President Trump.

00:33:41.000 It's coming from both the right and the left.

00:33:42.000 And pretending it's not there is just being silly.

00:33:45.000 Obviously, it's there.

00:33:46.000 It is there from a right that disagrees with President Trump on policy and is seeking to undermine his credibility and what he is doing right now in order to wrest control of the Republican Party away from him and leave unscathed other people around him, other members of the administration, for example.

00:34:02.000 Thomas Massey continues to accuse the GOP leadership of hiding something in the Epstein Files.

00:34:07.000 Does he really believe that?

00:34:08.000 What does he think is being hidden?

00:34:09.000 I'd love to hear him theorize.

00:34:10.000 What is the thing that he says is being hidden?

00:34:13.000 Is it Trump personally?

00:34:15.000 Who's doing it?

00:34:15.000 Is it Cash Patel?

00:34:16.000 Is it Dan Bongino?

00:34:17.000 Is it Pam Bondi?

00:34:18.000 Who's doing it?

00:34:19.000 Here was Thomas Massey, who's been, again, joining hands with Roe Khanna, the radical left congressperson from California, to suggest that the administration is engaged in a cover-up.

00:34:30.000 What is your response to the concern that releasing these files could ultimately hurt the victims, Congressman Massey?

00:34:39.000 Well, look, that's a straw, man.

00:34:40.000 Roe and I carefully crafted this legislation so that the victims' names will be redacted and that no child pornography will be released.

00:34:50.000 So they're hiding behind that.

00:34:52.000 We're trying to get justice for the victims and transparency for America.

00:34:56.000 And so, you know, we've redacted things before.

00:34:59.000 We don't want to hurt the victims.

00:35:01.000 We're doing this for the victims.

00:35:03.000 I think it's just something that they're hiding behind.

00:35:08.000 And again, Massey, who is they?

00:35:10.000 Who is they?

00:35:11.000 Who's the they who's doing the hiding? 0.84

00:35:13.000 Meanwhile, the Democrats are joining hands with Thomas Massey.

00:35:16.000 Democratic Representative Mark Veacee of Texas says that President Trump is hiding something.

00:35:22.000 Oh, Donald Trump is obviously trying to hide something.

00:35:25.000 That's why he's acting so guilty over this.

00:35:27.000 And the other thing that's really disturbing about that is that Maxwell was interviewed outside of prison.

00:35:34.000 There was no reason why she needed to be transported away from a federal lockup when he just could have gone there and met with her and her attorney.

00:35:42.000 And so, yeah, I think that something is really shady here.

00:35:44.000 And just everything around the whole Epstein file since Trump has found out that he's been in the files in May has just been 100% shady.

00:35:55.000 When Republicans find themselves hugging Rocana and VZ, then you might want to think what the motivation is.

00:36:02.000 Why is that happening?

00:36:03.000 What is the thing that is happening there?

00:36:05.000 And here's the thing.

00:36:06.000 There are actual real conspiracies.

00:36:07.000 Again, conspiracies exist.

00:36:09.000 The question is, do you have evidence for those conspiracies?

00:36:11.000 So over the weekend, Dan Bongino, who's the deputy director of the FBI, put out a statement, quote, based on my tenure here as the deputy director of the FBI, I've repeatedly relayed to you things that are happening that might not be immediately visible, but they are happening.

00:36:24.000 The director and I are committed to stamping out public corruption and the political weaponization of both law enforcement and intelligence operations.

00:36:30.000 It is a priority for us, but what I've learned in the course of our properly predicated and necessary investigations into these aforementioned matters has shocked me down to my core.

00:36:37.000 We cannot run a republic like this.

00:36:38.000 I'll never be the same after learning what I've learned.

00:36:40.000 We are going to conduct these righteous and proper investigations by the book and in accordance with the law.

00:36:44.000 We are going to get to the answers we deserve.

00:36:47.000 As with any investigation, I cannot predict where it will land, but I can promise you an honest and dignified effort at truth, not my truth or your truth, but the truth.

00:36:54.000 God bless America and all those who defend her.

00:36:55.000 Respectfully, Dan.

00:36:57.000 And what is he talking about right there?

00:36:59.000 Well, I assume what he's talking about is more Russagate information, more of the intelligence community manufacturing of information surrounding the supposed collusion between Trump and Russia, or Russia wanting Trump to be president.

00:37:11.000 CIA Director John Ratcliffe was on Fox with Maria Bardaromo, and he says there will be an annex to the so-called Durham report, which booked into all of this coming very soon.

00:37:20.000 What hasn't come out yet and what's going to come out is the underlying intelligence that I have spent the last few months making recommendations about final declassification and sent that to the Department of Justice that will come out in the John Durham report classified annex.

00:37:39.000 And what that intelligence shows, Maria, is that part of this was a Hillary Clinton plan, but part of it was an FBI plan to be an accelerant to that fake steel dossier, to those fake Russia collusion claims by pouring oil on the fire, by amplifying the lie and burying the truth of what Hillary Clinton was up to.

00:38:03.000 Now, again, while all of this is going on, President Trump is still winning actual victories, which is why his approval rating remains extremely steady, despite all of the conspiracies, actual and conspiracies that, again, are being ramped up by actors who do not like President Trump and are antipathetic to his actual agenda.

00:38:22.000 And meanwhile, there are victories being won by the Trump administration on trade.

00:38:26.000 So President Trump, as we say, has been using tariff threats as leverage.

00:38:30.000 Howard Luttnick on Sunday, he said on Fox News Sunday, August 1st is when the tariffs kick in.

00:38:36.000 And in advance of that, people are coming in there making deals, which obviously is true.

00:38:40.000 Here's the Commerce Secretary.

00:38:42.000 Okay, so no extensions, no more grace periods.

00:38:45.000 August 1st, the tariffs are set.

00:38:47.000 They'll go into place.

00:38:49.000 Customs will start collecting the money and off we go.

00:38:53.000 Obviously, after August 1st, people can still talk to President Trump.

00:38:57.000 I mean, he's always willing to listen.

00:38:59.000 And between Now and then, I think the president's going to talk to a lot of people.

00:39:03.000 Whether they can make him happy is another question, but the president's definitely willing to negotiate and talk.

00:39:10.000 Well, President Trump over the weekend reached a deal with the EU.

00:39:14.000 There's a lot of worry that there would not be a deal with the EU.

00:39:17.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, he said he reached a trade agreement on Sunday with the EU, avoiding a damaging trade war with the United States' largest trading partner and marking his biggest deal so far.

00:39:26.000 Apparently, the United States will set a baseline tariff of 15% for European goods, including automobiles.

00:39:31.000 He said the EU had also agreed as part of the deal to buy $750 billion of energy products from the United States and invest an additional $600 billion in the United States.

00:39:40.000 He said, I think it's going to be great for both parties.

00:39:42.000 Here was President Trump announcing that EU trade deal with the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

00:39:48.000 And with NATO, as you know, they're going up to 5% from 2%, and the relationship is very strong with NATO.

00:39:57.000 So I just want to congratulate you.

00:40:01.000 I think it's great that we made a deal today instead of playing games and maybe not making a deal at all.

00:40:07.000 I think it's, I'm going to let you say, but I think it's the biggest deal ever made.

00:40:11.000 Thank you very much.

00:40:14.000 Okay.

00:40:15.000 And the EU is at least relieved that didn't kick up to a 30% tariff.

00:40:18.000 Now, would I prefer that the tariffs be lower?

00:40:20.000 Of course, because again, tariffs are a tax on American consumers.

00:40:23.000 Does this provide a level of at least certainty and stability, given the fact that this is a deal going forward as opposed to it's going to go up, it's going to go down, it's going to be all around?

00:40:31.000 Yes.

00:40:32.000 And certainty is the thing the economy is looking for right now.

00:40:35.000 Vondra Leyen said today's deal creates certainty in uncertain times.

00:40:39.000 The 15% level, she said, is the best we could get.

00:40:41.000 And again, this is not unexpected because President Trump had suggested that there would be sort of a flat rate tariff applied to everybody.

00:40:47.000 But this is an avoidance of something significantly worse.

00:40:51.000 For his part, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant, he announced the first June budget surplus since 2015.

00:40:58.000 The U.S. is taking in massive amounts of tariff income.

00:41:02.000 We had the first June budget surplus since 2015 last month.

00:41:11.000 We reported it this month.

00:41:13.000 And so we are taking in substantial income.

00:41:18.000 Okay, so again, all of this is not bad for President Trump.

00:41:21.000 Much of it is very good for President Trump.

00:41:23.000 And while the media tried to say that President Trump is going to lead to a government shutdown, that's actually not what's going on.

00:41:28.000 So right now, there's a big discussion that's happening over rescission.

00:41:31.000 Rescission is a process whereby Congress can now go and confirm cuts that are being made via Doge in the executive branch.

00:41:38.000 According to the Washington Post, the Senate took a tentative first step this weekend towards striking a deal to avoid a government shutdown this fall.

00:41:44.000 Republicans in Congress last week approved President Trump's request to cancel $9 billion in foreign aid and funding for public broadcasting, giving the administration a victory in its ongoing battle with lawmakers over the power of the purse.

00:41:55.000 And the White House is going to look for more rescissions.

00:41:58.000 Democrats are going to need to sign on to a continuing resolution to continue to fund the government.

00:42:02.000 And they are threatening that they are not going to sign some sort of continuing resolution if Congress then comes back and by pure majority, without the filibuster in the Senate, can simply rescind funding that the executive branch wants rescinded.

00:42:14.000 Well, there's only one problem with that argument for Democrats.

00:42:16.000 Republicans are saying clean CR.

00:42:18.000 Clean CR.

00:42:19.000 We'll just continue to fund the government at current levels.

00:42:21.000 If Democrats say no to that, they're going to have to explain to the American people why they're saying no to that.

00:42:26.000 Why are they saying no to that?

00:42:27.000 In order to preserve more spending on foreign aid, more spending on federal education or something?

00:42:34.000 So the White House has come up with a rather clever strategy here, frankly.

00:42:38.000 And that strategy is we will use rescuions to make cuts, but we will continue on top line to fund the federal government at current levels.

00:42:46.000 The Office of Management and Budget Director, Russ Vogt, he says, sure, of course, we're going to continue to look at potential decision options.

00:42:54.000 Is that the plan?

00:42:55.000 Are you seeking to claw back education funds in a rescissions package?

00:42:59.000 And if so, when are you sending that up?

00:43:01.000 We maybe were always looking at potential rescission options.

00:43:04.000 This is a set of funding that we wanted to make sure got out.

00:43:08.000 We did our programmatic review.

00:43:10.000 We wanted to make sure it got out before the school year, even though it's multi-year funding.

00:43:13.000 This is not funding that would expire at the end of this year.

00:43:17.000 We are looking to do a rescissions package.

00:43:19.000 We're always gauging this extent to which the Congress is willing to participate in that process.

00:43:25.000 And we'll be looking at a lot of different options along those lines.

00:43:31.000 Okay, so again, this is a smart strategy by President Trump and by his team.

00:43:35.000 And as far as the government shutdown goes, he says, well, actually, listen, we would like to have ACR.

00:43:41.000 We don't want another gigantic omnibus bill.

00:43:44.000 We are not laying the predicate for a shutdown.

00:43:47.000 We are laying the predicate for the fact that the only thing that has worked in this town, the bipart appropriations process is broken.

00:43:54.000 It leads to omnibus bills.

00:43:56.000 We want to prevent an omnibus bill, and all options are on the table to be able to do that.

00:44:04.000 So, again, smart stuff from President Trump.

00:44:06.000 These are big victories.

00:44:07.000 They are.

00:44:07.000 Recision is a big victory.

00:44:09.000 The EU signing a trade deal is a big victory for President Trump.

00:44:12.000 Things are actually getting done.

00:44:14.000 Now, as I say, there are a lot of actors out there who have an interest in ensuring that President Trump is unpopular and also are perfectly willing to lie in order to foment that.

00:44:22.000 Now, the biggest liars on planet Earth are, of course, Hamas. 0.83

00:44:24.000 So you've seen an enormous amount of coverage of what's going on in the Gaza Strip over the course of the last week.

00:44:30.000 And as it turns out, an enormous amount of that coverage is false.

00:44:33.000 Okay, so what's actually happening in the Gaza Strip?

00:44:36.000 Yes, it turns out that many Gazans cannot get food aid.

00:44:39.000 Why?

00:44:39.000 Because the UN literally refuses to ship food in if they are escorted by the IDF, because the UN wants to fund Hamas.

00:44:48.000 Hamas is stealing the aid.

00:44:49.000 Hamas then sells the aid to fund itself.

00:44:52.000 The reason the war has not ended is because Hamas has continued access to all of this aid, which they then steal and either resell or use themselves. 0.73

00:44:59.000 That is the reason the war has continued. 0.68

00:45:01.000 And so what Israel did is along with the United States, they set up, as we talked about last week, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

00:45:06.000 Johnny Moore, the head of the GHF, joined us on the show last week.

00:45:09.000 The GHF operates to try to weed out members of Hamas from actual Gazan civilians and providing millions of meals, millions of pounds of food into Gaza.

00:45:21.000 And so naturally, Hamas doesn't want the GHF to do that.

00:45:24.000 And the good news for them is they have Democrats who are always willing to do their dirty work.

00:45:27.000 For example, Senator Chris Van Hollen, He comes out, Chris Van Hollen, over the weekend of Maryland, who's awful, and he says that actually the United States should defund the GHF and allow a bunch of organizations that work hand in glove with Hamas to have the aid again.

00:45:42.000 Today, I'm sending a letter to Secretary Rubio, signed with 20 of my colleagues, calling for more information, but also calling for defunding this.

00:45:53.000 American taxpayers should not be spending one penny to fund this private organization backed by mercenaries and by the IDF that has become a death trap. 0.63

00:46:05.000 Over 1,000 people have died from being shot and killed as starving people crowd to try to get food at just these four sites.

00:46:16.000 Okay, so let's be clear.

00:46:17.000 The reason people are being shot and killed is because Hamas is literally firing rockets at GHF.

00:46:22.000 That happened last week.

00:46:23.000 They've been using the crowd as cover to shoot at IDF soldiers, stealing aid.

00:46:28.000 They've been shooting Palestinians themselves who are trying to get aid.

00:46:30.000 And Chris Van Holland's solution is, what if we continue to allow the United Nations, which we also fund, by the way, the United Nations to continue to push aid to Hamas?

00:46:39.000 The only way the war in Gaza comes to an end is if Hamas is extirpated.

00:46:42.000 If the leadership goes into exile, the hostages are released and some form of safe zone is actually set up in the Gaza Strip to ensure that Palestinians can get their food aid.

00:46:50.000 The good news for Hamas is always and forever, they have the help of the legacy media. 0.97

00:46:54.000 I mean, truly have the help of the legacy media.

00:46:56.000 So you may have seen an image that was on the front page of the Daily Express in Great Britain.

00:47:02.000 It was a picture of a Palestinian mother holding a child.

00:47:06.000 It's a horrifying picture.

00:47:07.000 It's a child who is skeletal, like absolutely skeletal.

00:47:12.000 It was also on the front page of the New York Times, CNN, Sky News, BBC, The Guardian.

00:47:18.000 Okay, so there are a bunch of problems with this particular picture and set of pictures.

00:47:22.000 Okay, so one, here's the biggest problem.

00:47:26.000 This kid who is clearly suffering is a medically vulnerable child.

00:47:32.000 And what I mean by that is not that this is a normal kid who's starving.

00:47:34.000 That's not what's actually happening here.

00:47:36.000 In fact, this child, his name is Muhammad al-Matuk.

00:47:41.000 Apparently, there are other images of Muhammad al-Matuk and his mother holding him.

00:47:45.000 Here, for example, is an image that the media chose not to use, according to reporter David Collier.

00:47:50.000 Okay, this is a picture of him being held by his mother.

00:47:53.000 You may notice something in the background.

00:47:55.000 Oh, yes, it's another child, his three-year-old brother, Jude.

00:47:58.000 His three-year-old brother, Jude, looks fed and healthy, certainly not skeletal that way.

00:48:04.000 Why?

00:48:05.000 Well, because it turns out that Muhammad has cerebral palsy and hypoxemia and was born with a serious genetic disorder.

00:48:10.000 He has required nutritional supplements since birth.

00:48:13.000 There's a medical report issued in Gaza in May 2025 that confirmed all of that.

00:48:16.000 Not a single major outlet ran that.

00:48:18.000 They pretended that this was like a normal, healthy child who's just suffering from starvation.

00:48:23.000 Now, again, there are starvation problems in Gaza, but this sort of insane media coverage is designed to elicit a feeling that whatever happens, it's Israel's job to make sure that Hamas be damned, that everybody gets aid, even if it means that Hamas extends the war by another two years and continues to maintain its control over the Gaza Strip and uses it as a hub for terrorist attacks.

00:48:49.000 You know, again, there are people who are having nutritional problems in Gaza.

00:48:53.000 That's why Israel itself, again, in an unprecedented act of wartime charity is literally shipping in millions of pounds a day into the Gaza Strip to the very people who are currently holding hostages, Israeli citizens.

00:49:08.000 By the way, the media also said that Muhammad, this kid from this picture, had no father because he'd been killed by the Israelis while out looking for food.

00:49:16.000 The problem is that he was killed in an area where terrorists were attacking Israelis in October of 2024.

00:49:24.000 There's actual video from the area where this was happening last year, where he was supposedly out looking for food.

00:49:30.000 Terrorists were out targeting IDF troops.

00:49:34.000 So again, what this is a propaganda war in which the media are engaged.

00:49:37.000 The UN is engaged in it too, because the UN is basically a tool of Hamas at this point. 0.78

00:49:41.000 That wasn't the only intentionally misleading photo that was shown.

00:49:45.000 There's another intentionally misleading photo that was making the round.

00:49:49.000 Publication, for example, in Italy called Ilfato Quotidiano, put out a picture of a child against skeletal looking like something out of the Holocaust, saying Gaza horror.

00:50:00.000 There's only one problem.

00:50:00.000 The kid's name is Osama Al-Rakab.

00:50:02.000 He has cystic fibrosis, a serious genetic illness.

00:50:05.000 And he's been in Italy receiving treatment since June 12th.

00:50:08.000 Israel enabled his medical transfer from Gaza.

00:50:11.000 Why does all this matter?

00:50:12.000 Because again, the goal here for Hamas is to create an emotional feeling that no matter what, no matter how long the war lasts, no matter how many hostages are held, that Israel has a duty and obligation to ship aid into Hamas using Hamas's preferred aid distribution mechanisms. 0.71

00:50:27.000 Now, Israel does and should attempt to facilitate humanitarian aid into Gaza, but only to people who are truly innocent, who are not working for Hamas, who are not stealing the aid and setting up food markets.

00:50:41.000 And this is why it is deeply frustrating when columnists like Ross Duthat write pieces in the New York Times that are utterly and completely misinformed.

00:50:50.000 So Ross Duthat, who is good on a wide variety of issues.

00:50:52.000 Here he says, quote, there are tests that Israel is failing.

00:50:55.000 The first one is the hardest to assess because every protracted war yields inevitable civilian suffering.

00:51:00.000 And an urban war against an entrenched enemy, especially, will have casualties that can't be refined away.

00:51:04.000 Such a war cannot be fought exclusively with precision strikes.

00:51:07.000 The soldiers fighting it cannot be prevented from making terrible mistakes.

00:51:10.000 And war crimes are inevitably committed, even in righteous conflicts.

00:51:12.000 So there's no way to look at the rubble in Gaza and the death toll estimates and offer a mathematical proof that Israel is failing to exercise adequate restraint.

00:51:19.000 I just think it's true.

00:51:21.000 Okay, well, I just think it's true is not a standard for literally anything.

00:51:26.000 Evidence is the standard.

00:51:27.000 The statistics that you adamantly say you do not have would be the standard.

00:51:31.000 I just think it's true is not a thing.

00:51:34.000 Ross Duthat would not say the same thing with regard to, for example, police activity in inner cities.

00:51:41.000 I just think it's true doesn't cut it.

00:51:43.000 It goes on.

00:51:43.000 It says deaths from famine are a clearer matter, which is why the threat of starvation is leading even some of Israel's strongest supporters to warn its government something must be changed.

00:51:50.000 By the way, Israel has been declaring 10-hour breaks in the fighting in order to facilitate the entry of more aid.

00:51:57.000 Israel has been asking Arab governments to airdrop aid into Gaza.

00:52:02.000 The UN is facilitating Hamas. 0.56

00:52:04.000 Period.

00:52:05.000 Quote: The UN says it cannot accept Israeli offers to secure aid convoys because of its principle of neutrality in armed conflicts.

00:52:13.000 So the UN is refusing to ship in trucks filled with aid because it's afraid that Israel might facilitate its entry to actual Palestinian civilians.

00:52:20.000 Back to Rostafat.

00:52:22.000 He says, Israel has made a strategic choice trying to separate food distribution from a system that it argues Hamas was exploiting for its own purposes. 0.52

00:52:29.000 But if your strategic choice leads to children dying of starvation when the food is available to feed them, a civilized nation has to make a different choice, even if that makes things easier for its enemy to some degree.

00:52:39.000 Okay, again, this is utterly principle-free.

00:52:41.000 If this were the case, then the United States would have had an obligation during World War II, when starvation was a real thing in many areas of the globe, to ship in aid at the cost of the death of thousands of American soldiers.

00:52:53.000 That is not how war works at all.

00:52:57.000 That's not how war works.

00:52:59.000 Now, Ros Staffat goes out of his way to then disown America's warfighting of the past, which is really, it must be nice to be able to sit on top of a mountain where wars are fought absolutely antiseptically and then pretend that when the cost isn't yours, you get to just have others bear it.

00:53:15.000 He says, right now, if I were predicting an endgame for the struggle, it would involve Israel finally stepping back in exhaustion, cordoning off the Gaza Strip again, watching bloody power struggles play out in an isolated Gaza and accepting that some kind of terrorist threat will be harbored there for years to come.

00:53:28.000 If that's the outcome, then fighting on for another year to end up there is an unjust waste of life.

00:53:33.000 Well, so I'm just going to point out that you are calling for them to do it now.

00:53:37.000 That is not Israel's plan.

00:53:38.000 That is not the United States' plan.

00:53:40.000 If you wish for a better future for Palestinians, they cannot live under the tender mercies of Hamas.

00:53:45.000 But basically, Rastut is saying that Israel should essentially back off and let Hamas run the place.

00:53:50.000 Okay, well, great.

00:53:52.000 So that's the plan.

00:53:54.000 I got to say the amount of misinformed commentary here and deliberately misleading commentary is truly astonishing.

00:54:01.000 Barack Obama is the best case in point of this.

00:54:02.000 Barack Obama, who is awful on this issue as he is on virtually all other issues, he says, while a lasting resolution to the crisis in Gaza must involve a return of all hostages and a cessation of Israel's military operations, these articles underscore the immediate need for action to be taken to prevent the travesty of innocent people dying of preventable starvation.

00:54:21.000 So in other words, Israel should just let its hostages molder in tunnels and hand aid to Hamas. 0.86

00:54:26.000 According to Barack Obama, there's a shock.

00:54:27.000 Couldn't have predicted he would be there, except for, of course, he would.

00:54:30.000 Of course he would.

00:54:31.000 President Trump is actually the only person with a morally clear view of the situation.

00:54:36.000 He says that Gaza is a mess.

00:54:37.000 Hamas is stealing the food, which is true. 0.99

00:54:41.000 Well, it's terrible.

00:54:42.000 You know, when I see the children and when I see, especially over the last couple of weeks, and people are stealing the food, they're stealing the money.

00:54:50.000 They're stealing the money for the food.

00:54:53.000 They're stealing weapons.

00:54:54.000 They're stealing everything.

00:54:55.000 It's a mess.

00:54:56.000 That whole place is a mess.

00:55:01.000 He is right about all of that.

00:55:03.000 Speaker Johnson says Israel is trying to ship in the food.

00:55:06.000 Hamas is stealing it, and they've made $500 million by stealing it and reselling it. 0.92

00:55:09.000 This is the source of the problem.

00:55:11.000 Israel's solution and the GHF's solution has been, let's get a supply line in there that only gets it to Palestinian civilians because that brings an end to the war. 0.78

00:55:20.000 And Hamas is fighting back the best way it knows how by creating massive amounts of human misery and suffering and then blaming Israel for it, hoping the rest of the world will then cave to Hamas' demands.

00:55:28.000 Here's Representative Johnson.

00:55:30.000 This is important to note.

00:55:32.000 Israel, since this war began, has supplied over 94,000 truckloads full of food.

00:55:38.000 It's enough food to feed 2 million people for two years, trying to get that into Gaza. 0.60

00:55:42.000 But Hamas has stolen the food, a huge amount.

00:55:47.000 In fact, in 2024, the numbers are that Hamas profited over $500 million in stolen food aid that was supposed to go to these poor people who needed it.

00:55:56.000 That's half of their budget.

00:55:58.000 So this is a broken system.

00:56:02.000 That is exactly right.

00:56:04.000 That's exactly right.

00:56:05.000 In order to fix the system, you at least have to acknowledge the problem with the system.

00:56:09.000 And it is incredible to me that if you acknowledge the problem with the system, meaning Hamas stealing the aid, and then your solution is to let Hamas steal the aid, thus to prolong the war and ensure that Hamas remains in control. 0.81

00:56:20.000 That's your solution.

00:56:20.000 That is not a solution at all.

00:56:22.000 It's not a solution that should be acceptable to anyone, obviously.

00:56:26.000 And meanwhile, other controversial news.

00:56:29.000 So apparently there was something called the Cincinnati Jazz Festival.

00:56:34.000 And the Cincinnati Jazz Festival, of course, was a large agglomeration of jazz musicians and fans.

00:56:39.000 And a fight broke out.

00:56:41.000 We don't know sort of the origins of the fight, but it ended with, again, there's no way to do this without discussing the racial angle to this, with a group of black men beating the living hell out of a white man, curb stomping him, essentially.

00:56:52.000 And then when his girlfriend comes to try and protest, knocking her out.

00:56:56.000 Oh, oh, oh, oh.

00:57:03.000 This guy's running away.

00:57:05.000 A group of young black males who are attacking him, knocking him to the ground, punching him, kicking him, beating him senseless on the ground. 0.65

00:57:14.000 And people just filming it.

00:57:15.000 And you can hear them yelling in joy and exaltation.

00:57:20.000 Now, let's just be very clear.

00:57:21.000 If the only thing, we don't know the full circumstances of this assault.

00:57:26.000 We don't know what led to it.

00:57:28.000 We don't know the condition of the people involved.

00:57:30.000 We don't know any of this.

00:57:32.000 So I'm saying that up front.

00:57:34.000 If the suspects' races were reversed, if everybody involved, the races were reversed, we know this would be a national news story for days.

00:57:41.000 It would be.

00:57:41.000 If this were a group of young white men beating the living hell out of a black man, and then the black man's girlfriend had come up and confronted the white men, and one of them had cold cocked her and knocked her to the ground so that she was lying on the ground bleeding profusely.

00:57:55.000 This would be a national news story.

00:57:57.000 Instead, it is a local news story with literally zero national news coverage.

00:58:01.000 If you search for more information on it, it is almost impossible to find.

00:58:04.000 Cincinnati police chief sent a statement about the incident.

00:58:07.000 It's only been covered very briefly by WKRC in Cincinnati.

00:58:11.000 Quote, police said they were investigating a large fight that occurred on 4th Street Friday night.

00:58:15.000 Videos circulating on social media depicts a man being punched by multiple people and falling to the ground, where he is then repeatedly kicked.

00:58:21.000 A woman is also seen being attacked and knocked to the ground.

00:58:25.000 Authorities are working to gather more information about the incident.

00:58:27.000 The Cincinnati police chief sent a statement, quote, I am In complete disgust, waking up to the viral video many of you have now seen.

00:58:33.000 The behavior displayed is nothing short of cruel and absolutely unacceptable.

00:58:36.000 Our investigative team is working diligently to identify every individual involved in causing harm.

00:58:41.000 It's also important to clarify: this is a sudden dispute between individuals following a verbal altercation.

00:58:46.000 It was not connected in any way to the music fest.

00:58:48.000 Okay, that's all fine and dandy.

00:58:50.000 The real story here, of course, is not the actual incident, which, of course, should be news, and we should have more information on what exactly happened here.

00:58:59.000 The real story is the dramatic lack of news coverage.

00:59:03.000 And it just demonstrates, as we've been discussing, the death of the legacy media is self-inflicted.

00:59:08.000 It is a suicide.

00:59:09.000 Their inability to cover in any level of equality racial incidents, regardless, by the way, of the prevalence of the racial incidents, because it is significantly more common for a black person to assault a white person per capita than for a white person to assault a black person.

00:59:25.000 Now, again, as I mentioned, with regard to these specific statistics, it's also way more common for a black person to assault a black person and a white person to assault a white person.

00:59:33.000 And not every cross-racial incident is about the race.

00:59:36.000 But for a media that always makes it about the race, when it's white on black, when it's black on white, to completely ignore it, it just demonstrates why the credibility of the media is absolutely in the toilet.

00:59:48.000 And again, I'm looking at it right now.

00:59:50.000 There is literally no media coverage of this in the national media, none.

00:59:55.000 And we know that it would be precisely the opposite if the races were reversed.

01:00:00.000 The hatred that Americans have for institutions, a hatred that, again, in some ways is salutary because it means that we are more skeptical of the narratives being retailed.

01:00:09.000 And in some ways, incredibly dangerous.

01:00:10.000 Because if you're not skeptical of other narratives, then you end up buying into a bunch of BS.

01:00:16.000 All of that is earned by the legacy media.

01:00:18.000 They've earned all of it.

01:00:19.000 They've earned all of it.

01:00:20.000 All righty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.

01:00:22.000 We'll jump into the mailbag and answer some of your questions.

01:00:24.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

01:00:26.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

01:00:27.000 Use code Shapiro.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - July 28, 2025

Devastating New Polling…For DEMOCRATS

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