The Ben Shapiro Show - May 22, 2025


Leftist Terrorist MURDERS 2 At Jewish Event In DC


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 11 minutes

Words per Minute

184.12299

Word Count

13,174

Sentence Count

968

Misogynist Sentences

5

Hate Speech Sentences

33


Summary

A young couple about to get engaged were gunned down outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. by a man shouting, "Free Palestine!" at the time of the shooting. This is a good indicator of what the pro-Palestine, globalized intifada movement actually is.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Well, folks, there was a terrorist attack last night outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. It happened about 9, 10 p.m.
00:00:07.000 According to Cassie Akiva writing for The Daily Wire, the attack occurred outside the Young Diplomat's reception for young Jewish professionals hosted by the American Jewish Committee.
00:00:16.000 Two staffers, one who's named Yaron Lashinsky, who's 30, and Sarah Milgram, who's 26, were shot at close range.
00:00:22.000 They were murdered.
00:00:22.000 They were murdered by a man who was shouting, Free Palestine, at the time.
00:00:27.000 In fact, here is a video of the shooter screaming, free Palestine, not just screaming it, by the way, chanting in full campus mode, free, free Palestine.
00:00:35.000 Which, by the way, this is a good indicator of what the free Palestine globalized the Intifada movement actually is.
00:00:41.000 This is the pro-Palestinian cause in a nutshell.
00:00:44.000 Standing for a presumptive terror state with genocidal intentions against Jews and Israelis is the stuff that's been happening on college campuses across America with the full aid and support of a compliant legacy media.
00:00:55.000 Here's the video.
00:00:56.000 of the shooter standing outside.
00:00:58.000 Apparently, he committed the shooting.
00:01:00.000 Then he went inside.
00:01:01.000 He looked a little bit shaken.
00:01:02.000 And so people inside didn't realize he was the shooter and started offering him refreshments and water before realizing that he was, in fact, the alleged murderer.
00:01:10.000 He then walked outside when he was arrested, whipped out a red keffiyeh, and started chanting this way.
00:01:15.000 Free, free Palestine!
00:01:30.000 Congratulations.
00:01:31.000 Thank you.
00:01:31.000 Thank you.
00:01:32.000 Okay, so this is a leftist activist, this shooter.
00:01:37.000 We'll give you some background on the shooter in a moment.
00:01:39.000 First, President Trump immediately released a statement saying these horrible D.C. killings are based obviously on anti-Semitism must end now.
00:01:46.000 Hatred and radicalism have no place in the United States.
00:01:48.000 Condolences to the families of the victims.
00:01:51.000 So sad that such things as this can happen.
00:01:53.000 God bless you all.
00:01:54.000 The Secretary of State Marco Rubio put out a similar statement.
00:01:56.000 We have information about the two people who were killed.
00:02:13.000 They were, in fact, a young couple who were about to be engaged to be married.
00:02:17.000 Apparently, the young man had just bought a ring to propose engagement.
00:02:25.000 To the young woman, Sarah Milgram.
00:02:28.000 Again, according to Cassie Akiva, the young couple was gunned down at close range.
00:02:32.000 They were leaving the American Jewish Committee's Access Young Diplomats reception.
00:02:35.000 Apparently, this included, by the way, a panel on how to get more humanitarian aid into Gaza.
00:02:40.000 The embassy spokesperson, Tal Mayim, called it an unbearable loss.
00:02:45.000 At a Wednesday night press conference, Israeli ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, talked about Lashinsky and Milgram.
00:02:53.000 Here's what he had to say.
00:02:55.000 The couple that was gunned down tonight in the name of Free Palestine is a young couple about to be engaged.
00:03:06.000 The young man purchased a ring this week with the intention of proposing to his girlfriend next week in Jerusalem.
00:03:14.000 They were a beautiful couple who came to enjoy an evening in Washington's Cultural Center.
00:03:24.000 Lashinsky, according to Cassie Akiva reporting, was a German-Israeli dual citizen and a devout evangelical Christian who immigrated to Israel at the age of 16 and served in the Israel Defense Forces.
00:03:33.000 He studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was fluent in German, Hebrew, English, and Japanese.
00:03:37.000 He moved to work as a political analyst at the Israeli embassy in 2022.
00:03:43.000 According to Israel's ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosser, he said that he was his master's student at Reichmann University.
00:03:49.000 He said he was a Christian, a true lover of Israel, served in the IDF, and chose to dedicate his life to the state of Israel and the Zionist cause.
00:03:55.000 He embodied the Judeo-Christian values and set an example for young people worldwide.
00:04:00.000 One of his teachers, Ronan Shoval, said Lashinsky moved to Israel based on his faith and decided to immigrate to Israel, serve in the IDF, and later dedicate his life to the state of Israel.
00:04:09.000 He was a Christian, a great lover of Israel, who immigrated to Israel, served in the army, and decided to dedicate his life to the state of Israel and Zionism.
00:04:15.000 A wonderful life story of a man with moral clarity, he said.
00:04:19.000 Lashinsky's LinkedIn page, again, this is the young man who was murdered, he wrote that he is an ardent believer in the vision that was outlined in the Abraham Accords and believed that expanding the circle of peace with our Arab neighbors and pursuing regional cooperation is in the best interest of the state of Israel and the Middle East as a whole.
00:04:33.000 To this end, I advocate for interfaith dialogue.
00:04:38.000 Again, none of that mattered to the shooter, obviously.
00:04:44.000 Milgram grew up in the Kansas City suburbs, the young woman who was murdered.
00:04:47.000 She was a full-time employee at the Embassy's Department of Public Diplomacy.
00:04:52.000 She got her Master of Arts at American University, and she was also a graduate of the University for Peace.
00:04:58.000 She talked in her About section on LinkedIn that her passion lies at the intersection of peacebuilding, religious engagement, and environmental work.
00:05:07.000 So, certainly, these were not members of the so-called political right, very clearly.
00:05:12.000 The shooter was clearly a member of the political left.
00:05:17.000 The shooter was apparently a member of a group known as the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
00:05:26.000 Ryan Morrow, who's an investigative researcher for Capital Research, he notes that that group is one of 150 pro-terrorism groups he identified as responsible for the anti-Israel protests in his marching towards violence study.
00:05:37.000 The group is Marxist-Communist, endorsed the October 7th attacks pro-Iran, as well as linked to China.
00:05:43.000 The shooter also released a manifesto that is replete.
00:05:46.000 With the same lies that you have heard from the quote-unquote free Palestine movement, which is effectively just a pro-terrorist movement, in this manifesto released by the shooter.
00:05:57.000 And again, the shooter is just a Marxist leftist.
00:05:59.000 The shooter is not Muslim.
00:06:01.000 The shooter appears to be secular, but is a member of the radical left.
00:06:07.000 He writes in his manifesto, the atrocities committed by the Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification.
00:06:14.000 At the time of writing, the Gaza Health Ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force.
00:06:19.000 Again, the Gaza Health Ministry would be Hamas.
00:06:22.000 He says the Gaza Information Office includes the 10,000 under the rubble with the dead in their own count.
00:06:27.000 He says like the Yemen death toll, which has been frozen at some few thousand for years under Saudi UK-US bombardment before being belatedly revealed to stand at 500,000 dead.
00:06:35.000 All of these figures are almost surely a criminal undercount.
00:06:38.000 I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the toll at 100,000 or more.
00:06:43.000 He then justifies his violence by saying, an armed action is not necessarily a military action.
00:06:48.000 It usually is not.
00:06:49.000 Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares with many unarmed actions.
00:06:53.000 Nonviolent protests in the opening weeks of the genocide, and again we'll note that word genocide, seem to signal some sort of turning point.
00:07:00.000 Never before had so many tens of thousands joined the Palestinians in the streets across the West.
00:07:04.000 Never before had so many American politicians been forced to concede that, rhetorically at least, the Palestinians were human beings too.
00:07:11.000 Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, writes the terrorist murderer, and the American government has simply shrugged, and they'll do without public opinion, then criminalize it when they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances.
00:07:21.000 They're doing all they can to restrain Israel, where it cannot criminalize protest outright.
00:07:26.000 And then the shooter, hat tips Aaron Bushnell, who is, of course, the soldier who set himself on fire based on propagandistic lies about Israel's actions in Gaza.
00:07:42.000 The shooter wrote, the impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion.
00:07:50.000 And he then suggests a word about the morality of armed demonstration.
00:07:54.000 Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity.
00:07:59.000 I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche, which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses even mediated through the screen.
00:08:06.000 But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, posaically human.
00:08:11.000 A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him, and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same.
00:08:21.000 And then he suggests that actually these sorts of shootings should have been taking place 11 years ago, well before October 7th and well before the October 7th War, during Operation Protective Edge, which he says, which was the time, quote, I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine.
00:08:37.000 So this person is, of course, a radical leftist who is promoting lies.
00:08:42.000 Of course, this person and his positions find some sympathy with the radical left, even in Congress.
00:08:48.000 Representative Ilhan Omar, who, of course, is rhetorically in the past a supporter of various terror atrocities.
00:08:55.000 Here she was, responding to the news of the shooting this morning.
00:09:00.000 Congresswoman Omar, can I get your reaction to the shooting that happened in D.C. last night?
00:09:05.000 I'm going to go for now.
00:09:09.000 She's gonna go.
00:09:10.000 She has nothing to say.
00:09:11.000 No reaction to the shooting.
00:09:12.000 Not even the sort of AOC bland assertion that the murder of two people walking away from a Jewish event is actually bad.
00:09:23.000 Nothing.
00:09:24.000 Nothing.
00:09:25.000 Of course.
00:09:26.000 And that, of course, is not any sort of shock at all because the radical left fully endorses violence against people that it considers less than human, monsters, so to speak, for not...
00:09:26.000 Of course.
00:09:38.000 Agreeing with them and their lies.
00:09:41.000 And these are lies, by the way.
00:09:43.000 Let's look into this lie because this lie actually has consequences.
00:09:46.000 Lies do have consequences, as it turns out.
00:09:50.000 Lies have consequences.
00:09:51.000 So begin with the actual definition of genocide according to the United Nations.
00:09:56.000 According to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
00:10:00.000 This, of course, was drafted by the UN member states in 1948 specifically to try and define what had happened in the Holocaust.
00:10:06.000 Quote, in the present convention, Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, such as killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, etc.
00:10:28.000 So, genocide requires intent to destroy, in whole or in part, an entire national group.
00:10:35.000 It simply does not apply Under these circumstances, not even close.
00:10:40.000 First of all, Hamas has a desire to obviously propagate this myth.
00:10:44.000 This is why Hamas was thanking the UK, France, and Canada for helping to propagate this myth.
00:10:49.000 This is why Hamas deliberately hides behind civilians.
00:10:51.000 The basic logic of Hamas is that they know that the Israelis don't want to kill civilians, which is the reason they hide behind them.
00:10:58.000 The whole goal is to get as many civilians killed as possible.
00:11:01.000 So as to then claim that Israel is purposefully killing the civilians when Israel is doing literally everything humanly possible in an urban warfare environment in which terrorists deliberately hide behind their own children.
00:11:11.000 By the way, Israel has done a remarkable job of that.
00:11:17.000 Hamas has been lying the entire time about its own casualty statistics.
00:11:21.000 They quietly, by the way, back in April, changed their own casualty statistics.
00:11:27.000 They completely reclassified an enormous number.
00:11:31.000 Of casualties in the war, they got rid of a certain number of deaths, like more than 3,400 deaths just disappeared off the rolls.
00:11:38.000 This is why Hamas will immediately start releasing death statistics before it is even possible that a count can be taken.
00:11:44.000 And the West simply buys into it because the West does not understand the mentality of Hamas, which is use whatever tool is at your disposal to destroy the state of Israel and kill as many Jews as possible.
00:11:53.000 And if that means killing their own children, they will 100% do it.
00:11:58.000 Israel has not only not engaged in genocide, Israel has engaged, In the most humane war in the history of civilization in an urban warfare environment in which the enemy has taken hostage 250 of their citizens, still is hiding dozens of those citizens in Gaza terror tunnels.
00:12:14.000 Today, deliberately hides its weaponry and its terrorists beneath hospitals and schools and in mosques.
00:12:20.000 And Israel has somehow achieved a civilian casualty to combatant ratio of about one to one.
00:12:27.000 Unheard of.
00:12:28.000 Totally unheard of.
00:12:29.000 It may be even better than one-to-one.
00:12:32.000 John Spencer, who's an expert on urban warfare, like a person who actually has spent his entire life studying it.
00:12:37.000 And yes, people actually spend their life studying this stuff and actually have an enormous amount of knowledge about this stuff.
00:12:42.000 And those are the people that presumably you might get answers from.
00:12:45.000 John Spencer points out in Newsweek that Israel has taken extraordinary efforts.
00:12:52.000 Quote, I've never known an army to take such measures to attend to the enemy's civilian population, especially while simultaneously combating the enemy in the very same buildings.
00:13:00.000 By my analysis, he says Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history, above and beyond what international law requires and more than the United States did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:13:12.000 As he points out, Israel gave warning in some cases for weeks for civilians to evacuate major urban areas of northern Gaza before it launched its ground campaign back in fall of 2023.
00:13:22.000 The IDF reported dropping over 7 million flyers, but it also deployed technologies never used anywhere in the world.
00:13:28.000 Israel made over 70,000 direct phone calls, sent over 13 million text messages, left over 15 million pre-recorded voicemails to notify civilians they should leave combat areas where they should go and what route they should take.
00:13:39.000 They deployed drones with speakers and dropped giant speakers by parachute.
00:13:42.000 They began broadcasting for civilians to leave combat areas once they hit the ground.
00:13:46.000 They announced and conducted daily pauses of all operations to allow any civilians left in combat areas to evacuate.
00:13:53.000 As far as humanitarian aid, Israel shipped in literally tons of humanitarian aid into the very same area where the hostages were being held, where civilians were helping to hold the hostages.
00:14:02.000 You may have noticed there's been no popular movement in the Gaza Strip to free the hostages.
00:14:08.000 Zero.
00:14:08.000 None.
00:14:09.000 It doesn't exist.
00:14:10.000 Even the protests that are out there against Hamas, our protests against Hamas, they are not protests to free the hostages.
00:14:16.000 Not one.
00:14:17.000 Zero.
00:14:18.000 And yet Israel has been supplying humanitarian aid.
00:14:21.000 throughout the war to that exact same population at the expense of its own hostages because Hamas routinely steals that aid and then uses it in order to prop itself up.
00:14:31.000 And the media, of course, have been complicit in this lie.
00:14:34.000 Zach Goldberg, an independent researcher formerly at the Manhattan Institute, points out a massive spike in the use of the word genocide with regard to Israel in reporting from every single outlet.
00:14:46.000 He points out that actually Coverage linking Israel to so-called genocide now exceeds that of every actual or widely recognized genocide of the last 40 years, including Rwanda, Darfur, Bosnia, Myanmar, and the Yazidis.
00:15:00.000 He points out, in the New York Times, the spike in 2023-2024 mentions of genocide along Israel is more than nine times larger than the peak for Rwanda in the mid-1990s and nearly six times the peak for more recent Darfur genocide.
00:15:15.000 These are lies.
00:15:16.000 They are clear and obvious.
00:15:18.000 Lies.
00:15:19.000 And yet these lies have become quite popular.
00:15:21.000 And it turns out that lies have consequences.
00:15:24.000 So, we understand why the genocide lie is so popular with those who wish to overtly destroy the state of Israel.
00:15:31.000 We get it, obviously, because it means they win the PR war.
00:15:34.000 Countries in the UN, for example, who are enthralled to their Muslim populations.
00:15:37.000 Yes, I'm looking at you, France and the UK.
00:15:39.000 Or countries who might want to please their Chinese paymasters who are seeking to foster anti-Americanism in the Middle East.
00:15:45.000 And yes, that would be you, like Canada and South Africa.
00:15:48.000 And I think we all get why Hamas is playing the genocide game.
00:15:52.000 It gives Hamas an excuse to continue to exist and to be as actually genocidal as they want to be.
00:15:57.000 I mean, their literal founding document calls for genocide.
00:15:59.000 But the real question here is why this genocide lie has become so popular in the West more generally.
00:16:05.000 And as we stated, it is in fact a lie.
00:16:07.000 By no definition is what is happening in the Gaza Strip a genocide.
00:16:11.000 The answer is because our civilization, largely speaking, Has fallen in thrall to a great conspiracy theory.
00:16:18.000 Conspiratorial thinking has become wildly popular on both the left and the right.
00:16:22.000 It crosses all political boundaries.
00:16:24.000 Now, there are, of course, actual conspiracies in real life.
00:16:28.000 Those conspiracies involve actual planning and implementation by actual human beings.
00:16:33.000 So, for example, there was a conspiracy among members of the Biden family and the White House staff to cover up Joe Biden's infirmities.
00:16:40.000 That's like an actual, well-substantiated conspiracy of people making a plan and then implementing that plan for a specific purpose.
00:16:47.000 There's a difference between a conspiracy, where there's evidence, people doing things, and then there are conspiracy theories.
00:16:54.000 These are not the same.
00:16:55.000 These are theories that are not rooted in evidence, but in a basic supposition that bad things that happen in the world must be the result of some sinister plot by some cleverly hidden group.
00:17:06.000 The philosopher Karl Popper spelled out a pretty good definition for this in his book, The Open Society and Its Enemies.
00:17:12.000 He says, quote, This view arises, of course, from the mistaken theory that whatever happens in society, especially happenings such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike, That's the great conspiracy theory.
00:17:42.000 And that great conspiracy theory has become insanely popular on both the left and the right.
00:17:47.000 So why on the left?
00:17:49.000 Well, in the left-wing great conspiracy theory, every group disparity is discrimination.
00:17:53.000 If, for example, black Americans are disproportionately lower income than white Americans, this has to be because of some actual conspiracy, systemic racism, white privilege, or...
00:18:04.000 Policy of discrimination without stating the actual policy.
00:18:06.000 Now again, it is possible to find policies in a wide variety of places and times across the world that do in fact victimize particular groups.
00:18:14.000 That's true.
00:18:15.000 That's not a conspiracy theory.
00:18:16.000 That's actual policy.
00:18:17.000 But if you cannot point to a policy or politician or institution that actually does the discriminating, you are now operating in the realm of conspiracy theory.
00:18:27.000 And that's what the left does, both nationally and internationally.
00:18:31.000 Crime rates are bad in the black community because all cops are bastards.
00:18:34.000 White supremacy lies behind every corner.
00:18:37.000 Racism is clearly the reason for disproportionate poverty.
00:18:41.000 When you take that logic to the international stage, you end up with anti-Americanism because America is disproportionately successful and there are lots of other places that are not successful.
00:18:50.000 You also end up siding with Hamas.
00:18:52.000 You end up chanting free Palestine.
00:18:54.000 In fact, support for Hamas is like the apex case of the left-wing theory, the great conspiracy theory.
00:19:00.000 If the Palestinians, who collectively as a group, have made every single bad choice it is possible to make as a political body by embracing and supporting terrorism, rejecting peace agreement after peace agreement, channeling funding toward violence and hatred rather than economic development, educating their own kids that wiping Israel off the map ought to be a lifelong goal and all the rest.
00:19:20.000 If they live in a failed state, both in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria, if no other country will take them, specifically because they are shot through, With enormous support for terrorism, then that's not their own fault.
00:19:33.000 That must be the result of the more developed democracy on its borders, even if, by the way, that developed democracy is one-fifth Muslim.
00:19:39.000 And if the Muslims in that developed democracy have the highest levels of political and civil freedom of any Muslims anywhere in the world, and, by the way, some of the highest incomes in the region.
00:19:47.000 If Hamas spends billions of dollars to line its own pockets, live in five-star hotels in Qatar, build terror tunnels, if they fire rockets at Israel for nearly two decades, and then launch a genocidal attack on Jews.
00:19:59.000 An actual genocidal attack, like by UN definition, designed to exterminate a part of a larger whole for which Hamas seeks mass murder, and complete with the taking of hundreds of hostages, again, dozens of whom are still, after a year and a half, being held in Gaza.
00:20:13.000 Then, the left responds by excusing Hamas, because after all, the great conspiracy theory suggests they are poorer, supposedly browner, they of course ignore the 45% of Israelis whose parents and grandparents are from Arab countries and are in fact brown, and less successful.
00:20:28.000 This is why there were left-wing protests in solidarity with Hamas before Israel even responded to October 7th, before the response, like on October 8th.
00:20:38.000 The genocide charge from the left is a fig leaf.
00:20:41.000 Israel's very existence is the problem to the radical left, just as the existence of America is a problem, because the successful are by nature the exploiters according to the left.
00:20:49.000 That's the great conspiracy theory.
00:20:51.000 And then there's the right.
00:20:52.000 There is a horseshoe theory of the right that shares many of the same basic conspiracy theories as the left.
00:20:57.000 You can hear it on a wide variety of supposedly right-wing or heterodox podcasts these days.
00:21:02.000 This theory, again, is there a group of victims, often lower-income whites or Christians, who are being victimized by a shadowy group of people.
00:21:10.000 Now again, there are absolutely 100% policies that do victimize white people or Christians right here in America.
00:21:16.000 We talk about them on the show a lot, actually.
00:21:19.000 Say affirmative action on race or anti-Christian, anti-discrimination regulations.
00:21:25.000 That are directed at the little sisters of the poor.
00:21:27.000 These are actual policies, for example.
00:21:29.000 Policies directed at Jack Phillips for baking, for not wanting to bake a transgender cake, for example.
00:21:35.000 Those are all real things, like an actual conspiracy.
00:21:38.000 That's not a conspiracy theory.
00:21:39.000 If you can't point to a policy or politician or institution that is making that conspiracy happen, you are now in the realm of conspiracy theory.
00:21:48.000 And what these conspiracy theorists often do is they target a shadowy group who they say are running the system.
00:21:53.000 The shadowy group of people is often characterized as clannish or cosmopolitan or rootless, deracinating in some peculiar way.
00:22:01.000 And the supposed policy that is somehow victimizing the conspiratorial rights victim class is either with regards to foreign policy or capitalism.
00:22:09.000 So on the foreign policy front, you'll hear these folks claim that American foreign policy is being run by AIPAC, which is an absurd claim.
00:22:16.000 AIPAC is one of the least effective organizations in America.
00:22:19.000 or that capitalism is being run by a conspiratorial elite who just so often have these Jewish laws.
00:22:26.000 So why is the conspiratorial right now embracing the genocide in Gaza lie and very often making common cause with Hamas propaganda?
00:22:34.000 Well, here's the thing.
00:22:35.000 The problem for the conspiratorial right when it comes to Israel is that Israel factually happens to be the only state in the Middle East where Christians live safely and openly.
00:22:44.000 Israel is also clearly responding to a Muslim genocidal terror assault.
00:22:48.000 And those same people...
00:22:49.000 Hate Americans and hate Christians.
00:22:51.000 Hamas is not a fan of America or Christians.
00:22:53.000 And this is why the conspiratorial right, unlike the conspiratorial left, didn't immediately start tearing into Israel on October 8th.
00:23:00.000 They just went peculiarly silent.
00:23:02.000 None of them had anything to say.
00:23:03.000 They just went totally quiet.
00:23:04.000 Nothing on their Twitter feeds.
00:23:05.000 Nothing.
00:23:06.000 No comment.
00:23:07.000 Nothing.
00:23:07.000 For a moment.
00:23:08.000 Then, the minute that Israel responded, they jumped into action.
00:23:11.000 You see, the conspiratorial right needed a reason for why actually the same people who supposedly control American foreign policy and capitalism Are the actual bad guys in the Middle East, too?
00:23:22.000 And that's why they're fond of chattering about genocide in Gaza, despite the fact that there is no genocide.
00:23:27.000 If you can claim that Israel is a genocidal state, and the same people on the conspiratorial right who claim this also tend to claim that Israel is anti-Christian, a giant lie, and spend their days trying to dig up bad translations of the Talmud, then you can maintain your own great conspiracy theory, in which this shadowy group of rootless cosmopolitans is in control of all the bad things in your life.
00:23:47.000 The genocide lie is just as valuable to the conspiratorial right as it is to the conspiratorial left.
00:23:53.000 So why does this matter?
00:23:54.000 Well, because lies have consequences.
00:23:58.000 Lies have consequences.
00:24:00.000 This doesn't mean that we have to buy into the theory of stochastic terrorism that the left so often promotes.
00:24:05.000 It doesn't mean that opinions ought to be censored or deplatformed.
00:24:09.000 Let me say that again.
00:24:10.000 For the morons in the room, this does not mean opinions ought to be censored or deplatformed.
00:24:14.000 No one is calling for people not to be on X. Or on YouTube, or on Facebook, or anything like that.
00:24:20.000 And this terrorist is responsible for his own actions.
00:24:23.000 Of course he is.
00:24:25.000 Just as the congressional baseball shooter was responsible for his own actions.
00:24:29.000 Or the Dallas police shooter back in 2014 was responsible for his own actions.
00:24:33.000 Just like Hamas is responsible for its own actions.
00:24:36.000 However, lies change the way people think and act.
00:24:40.000 Again, if I have to explain this to you, I would suggest that you're mentally deficient.
00:24:46.000 Of course, lies change the way people think and act.
00:24:50.000 That is what they are designed to do.
00:24:52.000 If you keep saying over and over again, for example, that Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler, it's not a giant shock when someone, actually multiple someones, tries to assassinate Donald Trump.
00:25:02.000 If you keep saying all cops are bastards over and over and over again, it should not actually be a shock when someone tries to shoot cops.
00:25:08.000 And if you keep claiming or implying that the Jews run the world and engage in genocide, it should not be a shock when someone murders people at a Jewish event in Washington, D.C. In other words, take some damned responsibility for the things you say and the positions you take.
00:25:23.000 I know, responsibility.
00:25:23.000 I know, I know.
00:25:24.000 It's a bad word now.
00:25:26.000 Yes, you have responsibility for the things that come out of your face.
00:25:30.000 It is worthwhile to be responsible in how we speak about issues and engage with the world.
00:25:38.000 Speech sphere focuses a lot on rights, and of course we should because the violation of rights is bad.
00:25:42.000 But there are also duties, like duties to the truth and to facts and to speak into reality.
00:25:49.000 Again, I know responsibility makes people feel all icky when people say responsibility.
00:25:52.000 I get it.
00:25:53.000 I get that a lot of people over the past couple of decades have improperly used the Overton window, the so-called acceptable range of useful discourse, to crush debate and dissent.
00:26:04.000 Hell, I personally have been censored on a variety of platforms.
00:26:07.000 By exactly that movement for saying basic things like men aren't women for years.
00:26:12.000 It cost my company millions of dollars.
00:26:14.000 So I get it.
00:26:16.000 I get the impulse that says we ought to pretend no one has any duty to be responsible in the language they use or the questions they ask or the arguments they make.
00:26:23.000 But just because bad people abuse the word responsibility to suggest that true things were lies does not mean that lies don't exist and that responsibility does not exist.
00:26:34.000 They absolutely do.
00:26:36.000 And lies have consequences.
00:26:39.000 So, back to this case.
00:26:41.000 Propagating absolute lies about genocide in Gaza and then spewing that out into the world over and over raises the temperature.
00:26:48.000 Vomiting N-word Heil Hitler into public discourse raises the temperature.
00:26:52.000 As does treating with absolute credulity a variety of specious claims ranging from Hitler's well-intentioned oopsies in Europe to Israeli genocide to conspiratorial Jews and their Talmud running the banking system and Hollywood.
00:27:06.000 Stop with the bull about just asking questions.
00:27:10.000 Just asking questions doesn't cut it.
00:27:12.000 The whole purpose of a question is to seek an answer.
00:27:14.000 The people you listen to should be seeking answers.
00:27:18.000 Getting answers is better than just asking questions.
00:27:21.000 Let me say that again.
00:27:22.000 Getting answers is better than just asking questions.
00:27:27.000 If you want to live a better life, if you want to improve yourself and the world, you need actual answers to hard questions.
00:27:34.000 Responsible people.
00:27:35.000 Base those answers on evidence, facts, reality.
00:27:40.000 They don't just ask questions or ignore actual answers in favor of a pseudo-ignorance masking itself as a sort of semi-retarded profundity.
00:27:48.000 I don't know the answers.
00:27:49.000 All I know is what we've been told is insufficient.
00:27:52.000 Or pretend that answers given by people we trusted a moment ago are now insufficient because those people aren't giving us the answers we want.
00:27:59.000 Dan Bongino must be lying about Jeffrey Epstein because they probably got to him.
00:28:02.000 People who do this sort of stuff.
00:28:08.000 They say they want answers when they absolutely positively do not want answers.
00:28:15.000 In fact, they want to prevent you from getting actual answers because the evidence and the facts and the real answers too often debunk their theories.
00:28:23.000 Such people, left and right, do not want you to have answers.
00:28:26.000 They want you to be satisfied with their leading questions, which all lead to one gigantic false conclusion.
00:28:33.000 That in the world of conspiracy theories, you are a victim.
00:28:36.000 And by the way, only they, the real askers, can guide you toward the light.
00:28:41.000 Only they can be trusted.
00:28:43.000 This stuff is demagoguery of the highest order, and it's ugly.
00:28:46.000 It's ugly because it not only is a lie, it makes your life worse.
00:28:50.000 Because in the end, their argument is actually really simple.
00:28:52.000 It's not a question, it's an argument.
00:28:53.000 Someone else is responsible for problems that you can solve.
00:28:58.000 That argument is bad for you.
00:28:59.000 It makes you dumb.
00:29:01.000 It makes you useless.
00:29:02.000 It makes you vicious.
00:29:03.000 It's bad for your soul.
00:29:04.000 It's bad for America.
00:29:06.000 It's bad for the world.
00:29:07.000 Meanwhile, yesterday, President Trump met in the Oval Office with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
00:29:13.000 Ramaphosa was looking for what he called a reset in relations with the United States.
00:29:18.000 President Trump has pointed out repeatedly that South African land expropriation policy is a disaster area that is, in fact, racist and is going to have racist effects.
00:29:27.000 And you want to talk about actual racist policy?
00:29:30.000 The land expropriation policy in South Africa is designed to be racially discriminatory.
00:29:34.000 It is.
00:29:35.000 The Expropriation Act of 2024 replaces the prior Land Act of 1975 in South Africa.
00:29:42.000 And it says that land can now be seized for a public purpose and that compensation does not need to match fair market value, especially in cases of what is called public benefit.
00:29:51.000 This is the text of the act.
00:29:54.000 No compensation, meaning no compensation, is possible when it is, quote, just and equitable.
00:30:00.000 So what exactly does all that mean?
00:30:02.000 Well, the law itself defines public interest to include, quote, In other words, because of apartheid, the argument goes, a disproportionate amount of land in South Africa is owned by white people.
00:30:23.000 This means that if South Africa decides that for purposes of fairness, In order to, quote, redress the results of past racially discriminatory laws or practices, that land should simply be seized from the white farmers who own it and then redistributed, that that's okay under the Expropriation Act of 2024.
00:30:40.000 And we keep being told that, well, you know, the judiciary will protect it.
00:30:43.000 The South African judiciary is going to protect it.
00:30:45.000 So that's what you trust.
00:30:46.000 That's who you trust.
00:30:47.000 And people who are attempting to draw distinctions between, for example, Zimbabwean land expropriation policy, which ended with the complete destruction of that country.
00:30:54.000 And what's happening in South Africa are relying on some slim reads, shall we say.
00:30:59.000 We'll get some more on this in just a moment.
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00:33:04.000 So President Trump faced down South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa.
00:33:08.000 Of course, the South African...
00:33:10.000 ANC party has been linked to significant corruption.
00:33:14.000 They themselves have accused others of genocide unfairly, including an ICC case in which they accused Israel of genocide, as we've discussed.
00:33:20.000 That is absolute nonsense.
00:33:22.000 So here is President Trump confronting Cyril Ramaphosa about this.
00:33:28.000 Excuse me, turn the lights down.
00:33:31.000 Turn the lights down and just put this on.
00:33:34.000 It's right behind you, Johan.
00:33:37.000 There's nothing this parliament can do.
00:33:39.000 With or without you, people are going to occupy land.
00:33:43.000 We require no permission from you, from the president, from no one.
00:33:51.000 So he's playing clips here of Julius Malema.
00:34:02.000 We played clips of Malema on this show.
00:34:03.000 We've covered pretty extensively what's going on in South Ernst Rhodes, who's the head of Afroforum, among other organizations in South Africa, we've covered it pretty significantly on the show for the past several weeks, and actually we covered it even going back a couple of years.
00:34:16.000 Well, those clips, obviously, of Malema are very bad, and President Trump said, this is very bad.
00:34:22.000 These are people that are officials, they're saying kill the white farmer and take their land.
00:34:26.000 Here's President Trump making that claim yesterday.
00:34:29.000 You're taking people's land away from them.
00:34:32.000 And those people, in many cases, are being executed.
00:34:36.000 They're being executed.
00:34:37.000 And they happen to be white, and most of them happen to be farmers.
00:34:42.000 And that's a tough situation.
00:34:43.000 I don't know how you explain that.
00:34:45.000 How do you explain that?
00:34:48.000 So, President Trump has used the suggestion, or people around him have suggested, that white genocide is taking place in South Africa.
00:34:56.000 Now, as Roots suggested on the show, white genocide is not actually a good description of what's happening in South Africa.
00:35:01.000 What is happening in South Africa is horrifyingly bad government policy that is discriminatory against white people.
00:35:06.000 That's just a reality.
00:35:08.000 There are over 140 laws on the books in South Africa that are racially discriminatory.
00:35:12.000 That is a reality, and President Trump is totally right to call that out, obviously.
00:35:17.000 President Trump said we have many people that feel they're being persecuted.
00:35:19.000 They're coming to the United States.
00:35:21.000 So we take from many, many locations if we feel there is persecution or genocide going on.
00:35:25.000 Now, again, the use of the word genocide is not accurate in this context, but there certainly is persecution going on.
00:35:31.000 In South Africa, pretty clearly.
00:35:34.000 Ramaphosa tried to claim that he had nothing to do with Julius Malema.
00:35:38.000 He has, in fact, made overtures to Malema.
00:35:40.000 Malema was a member of his party originally before he moved on to found a more radical left-wing group called the EFF.
00:35:45.000 Malema, for his part, by the way, responded by suggesting that he was going to double down on this sort of stuff.
00:35:50.000 So President Trump played a clip that we've played on the show of Malema jumping in front of, like, tens of thousands of people at a rally shouting, kill the boar, kill the farmer, shoot to kill, and other incendiary slogans.
00:36:00.000 He put out on X the following statement.
00:36:02.000 A group of older men meet in Washington to gossip about me.
00:36:05.000 No significant amount of intelligence evidence has been produced about white genocide.
00:36:08.000 We will not agree to compromise our political principles on land expropriation without compensation for political expediency.
00:36:16.000 And then his party issued a statement in which it declared to kill the boar, kill the farmer.
00:36:20.000 Victory is certain.
00:36:22.000 So is that movement afoot?
00:36:24.000 Certainly in South Africa.
00:36:25.000 Of course.
00:36:26.000 The EFF won about 10% of the vote in the most recent.
00:36:30.000 Well, the media came out in defense of Ramaphosa and the government of South Africa suggesting this was a good day for white nationalists and that songs like Kill the Boer aren't actually literal.
00:36:53.000 Here is CNN reporter Larry Madowow making those claims.
00:36:58.000 This was a good day for white nationalists in South Africa.
00:37:01.000 This was a good day for AfriForum.
00:37:04.000 This is the white African lobby group that's considered a white nationalist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center because these were the talking points that President Trump has repeatedly said from the platform of the Oval Office.
00:37:18.000 So they've gotten the best possible validation they could have imagined.
00:37:22.000 This is a historical anti-apartheid song that many black South Africans grew up singing, and they saw it as not a literal call to kill the farmers, but as a song against white supremacy.
00:37:32.000 See.
00:37:34.000 Oh, so it's a song about white supremacy, killing the farmers and killing the boars.
00:37:38.000 Well, I mean, again, I've heard these sorts of arguments before.
00:37:41.000 They are not particularly convincing or good.
00:37:44.000 Ramaphosa in the room decided to knock Trump about taking the Qatari jet.
00:37:49.000 Here he was yesterday in the Oval.
00:37:50.000 Thank you.
00:37:51.000 But Boeing's a little bit late, unfortunately.
00:37:54.000 So why did they give us a plane to the United States Air Force?
00:37:58.000 That's what that idiot talks about after viewing a thing where thousands of people are dead.
00:38:03.000 I'm sorry, I don't have a plane to give you.
00:38:05.000 I wish you did.
00:38:08.000 I would take it.
00:38:09.000 If your country offered the United States Air Force a plan, I would take it.
00:38:12.000 Okay.
00:38:15.000 And by the way, we should not take United States planes from South Africa either.
00:38:19.000 It's a general policy.
00:38:20.000 We should not take planes from literally anyone as a foreign gift unless it is cleared by Congress.
00:38:26.000 And we certainly shouldn't take planes from Qatar, which is an Iranian cutout, or South Africa, which is increasingly an Iranian Chinese cutout.
00:38:33.000 Just a general policy consideration right there.
00:38:36.000 It's one of the reasons why President Trump shouldn't do that is because it leaves him open to precisely that criticism from bad characters like Cyril Ramaphosa.
00:38:45.000 The fact that President Trump was willing to raise these issues with Ramaphosa is a particularly good thing.
00:38:49.000 That is definitely worthwhile, so good for President Trump along those lines.
00:38:53.000 Meanwhile, in huge news for President Trump, the Trump tax bill has now been passed in the House.
00:38:58.000 It passed by an extraordinarily narrow vote of 215.
00:39:01.000 2-2-14.
00:39:02.000 One lawmaker voted president.
00:39:05.000 That's a major win, of course, for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who had to somehow maneuver this very complex piece of legislation through the process.
00:39:12.000 Obviously, you had people on the right who were criticizing the bill for not cutting spending enough.
00:39:15.000 People on the left who were criticizing the bill for not raising salt deductions enough.
00:39:20.000 As the Wall Street Journal reports, the passage of the big, beautiful bill marked a major win for Trump and Johnson, who again found the formula.
00:39:27.000 It steered a course between hardliners who wanted deeper spending cuts.
00:39:30.000 And moderates who worried the bill would hurt their districts, hospitals, and clean energy projects.
00:39:34.000 Thursday morning's vote was a significant step toward extending Trump's expiring 2017 tax cuts and cementing other conservative priorities while trimming spending on Medicaid and food aid.
00:39:42.000 It again showed the president's power to unite fractious House Republicans whose narrow majority meant any handful of dissidents could have sunk the bill.
00:39:48.000 Now again, one of the weird things about very narrow majorities is very often they're actually more durable than big majorities.
00:39:53.000 Well, because you can tell who the outliers are.
00:39:53.000 Why?
00:39:56.000 If you have 220 votes, as opposed to 240 votes, 240 votes, you might have a block of 30 people who all vote against the bill, and it goes down in flaming defeat.
00:40:04.000 But who exactly do you blame for that?
00:40:06.000 30 people voted against it.
00:40:07.000 If it's like three people, you know individually who to blame.
00:40:11.000 The only Republicans who did not vote for the bill were Representatives Andy Harris, who voted president.
00:40:17.000 Representatives Andrew Garbarino of New York and David Schweiker missed the vote.
00:40:22.000 And of course, Thomas Massey voted against the bill as well.
00:40:26.000 So Massey and another representative, Warren Davidson in Ohio.
00:40:30.000 Every Democrat was opposed.
00:40:32.000 There were some late breaking updates on the bill.
00:40:35.000 Those include an acceleration of the Medicaid work requirements to December 2026 from 2029, which makes the cuts effectuate faster because the Medicaid work requirement, again, the fact that this is controversial on any level is insane to me.
00:40:49.000 Of course, if you are able-bodied, And just poor, you should have to work in order to receive Medicaid.
00:40:57.000 That, like, 80 hours a month.
00:40:59.000 Again, that's 20 hours a week.
00:41:01.000 That's four hours per workday.
00:41:04.000 My kids are in school for, like, twice that length of time.
00:41:07.000 It's ridiculous to suggest that you are entitled to Medicaid if you are unwilling to work.
00:41:11.000 That's silly.
00:41:13.000 Also, it's going to end certain tax credits for wind energy and solar energy by 2028 instead of 2031.
00:41:19.000 So those were the concessions to the fiscal hawks.
00:41:22.000 The updates also locked in a $40,000 cap on state and local tax deductions starting this year, up from a $30,000 cap in the prior plan.
00:41:30.000 Again, that was designed to satisfy people in New York and New Jersey.
00:41:35.000 So Johnson was able to shepherd this through.
00:41:37.000 Now, a completely different bill is likely to pass in the Senate, and then those two bills will come together.
00:41:43.000 Now, the CBO is saying that, effectively speaking, this is going to eventually cause cuts to Medicare.
00:41:49.000 Now, the bill doesn't cut Medicare.
00:41:51.000 It doesn't.
00:41:51.000 There's nothing in the bill that cuts Medicare.
00:41:53.000 Why is the CBO claiming that the bill is going to cut Medicare?
00:41:56.000 Well, because the idea is that it adds so much to the national debt that it would force cuts in Medicare beginning in 2026.
00:42:03.000 Because it would officially add, apparently, $2.3 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office projects.
00:42:12.000 That would force budget officials to mandate across-the-board spending cuts over that window that would hit Medicare, the legislation, Significantly, as to the national debt, when it exceeds $36.2 trillion, it triggers sequestration or compulsory budget reductions.
00:42:27.000 In that scenario, Medicare cuts would be capped at 4% annually or $490 billion over 10 years.
00:42:36.000 So, again, those reductions, by the way, are not a foregone conclusion.
00:42:39.000 So when the CBO says Medicare will be cut, that's not a foregone conclusion.
00:42:42.000 In all likelihood, by the way, it won't be.
00:42:44.000 In all likelihood, it would just take out some more debt.
00:42:46.000 Congress can simply instruct.
00:42:48.000 The CBO to disregard the reconciliation package's debt impact, pass new legislation to reduce the deficit, or change federal budget scorekeeping rules.
00:42:55.000 So again, this is a stretch by the CBO.
00:42:58.000 Again, it's all provisional.
00:42:59.000 It's like, oh, well, if everything got left in place and nobody changed anything, then maybe there would have to be cuts.
00:43:03.000 Okay, that's ridiculous.
00:43:04.000 All these things are going to change.
00:43:05.000 Congress will move to stop cuts to Medicare.
00:43:07.000 We all know that's going to happen.
00:43:08.000 The real question here is not that.
00:43:10.000 The real question is not cuts to Medicare.
00:43:13.000 The real question is what the hell do we do about our debt?
00:43:16.000 And that is a real question.
00:43:18.000 The American national debt is a disaster area.
00:43:21.000 There's a reason why the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 800 points yesterday, and that's because of a weak bond market.
00:43:27.000 So again, what does that mean?
00:43:28.000 It means that people have very little faith that in the future, 20, 30 years from now, they're going to be able to get back their money if they buy a bond from the U.S. government.
00:43:38.000 A bond just means essentially you're loaning money to the U.S. government at a rate of interest for a period of time.
00:43:42.000 That's what a bond is.
00:43:43.000 And so if people don't want to buy bonds, that's because either they believe they're not going to get their money back, or they believe that it's going to be paid back in inflated dollars.
00:43:52.000 And that was sort of the evidence from a bond auction that happened yesterday.
00:43:57.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 817 points, or 1.9%, leading indices lower.
00:44:05.000 Longer-term U.S. Treasury yields rose again, with the 10-year yield approaching 4.6%, and the 30-year surging above 5%.
00:44:12.000 That was the highest in the 30-year bond since October of 2023.
00:44:16.000 Yields extended their gains in the afternoon after a $16 billion auction of 20-year treasury bonds attracted soft demand from investors, selling at a higher yield than traders had anticipated.
00:44:25.000 A higher yield just means a lower price.
00:44:27.000 And the yield is the difference between the interest rate on the bond and the price that you're paying for the bond.
00:44:33.000 That's the yield.
00:44:34.000 So if the yield increases, that is a reflection of there not being a lot of desire for people to buy the bonds.
00:44:40.000 And that's why the markets are freaking out because they're saying, okay, maybe at some point the debt is going to become a serious real issue.
00:44:49.000 So again, the Wall Street Journal has a pretty good explanation as to why the yields are actually increasing.
00:44:54.000 Some are not bad.
00:44:55.000 I mean, for example, people run to bonds when they're unsure about the economy.
00:44:58.000 They run to stocks when they think the economy is going to go up.
00:45:00.000 So as people worry less about recession, they're not running as much to bonds.
00:45:03.000 But there is persistent inflation anxiety.
00:45:05.000 You don't buy a bond if you believe that your gains in the bond are going to be inflated away.
00:45:10.000 If I lend you $100, expecting to get back $105, but I know you have a money printing machine in your basement that's going to just print out counterfeit bills that are indistinguishable from the real ones, I'm not going to lend you the money.
00:45:21.000 That's essentially why you have a problem.
00:45:23.000 People believe that eventually the American government is going to inflate its way out of all of this.
00:45:29.000 And again, there are also rising yields overseas because everybody is now doing debt-led growth at this point in time.
00:45:38.000 It is a serious, real crisis.
00:45:40.000 It's a debt spiral that is beginning to occur in the United States.
00:45:43.000 Neither party is willing to take it on.
00:45:44.000 That is just a reality.
00:45:46.000 It is just a reality.
00:45:48.000 Neither party is willing to take that on.
00:45:49.000 And that is a disaster area.
00:45:50.000 That is a failure of your politicians.
00:45:52.000 But let's be real about this.
00:45:53.000 This is a representative democracy.
00:45:54.000 This is a failure of the American people.
00:45:56.000 The American people have come to expect that the government is going to pay extraordinary amounts of their bill.
00:46:01.000 And if you believe that, then you can't be surprised when the government has to take out extraordinary amounts of debt.
00:46:06.000 And that means later, either extraordinary cuts, extraordinary inflation, or extraordinary tax increases.
00:46:11.000 Those are really the only options.
00:46:13.000 And this is a point made by William Galston over at the Wall Street Journal today.
00:46:18.000 He says, the Congressional Budget Office in March issued a report on America's long-term fiscal situation.
00:46:23.000 If current laws remained generally unchanged, the 2017 tax cuts would expire at the end of this year, and discretionary spending would shrink as a share of GDP.
00:46:31.000 Under that scenario, the annual budget deficit in 2035 And we would add more than $20 trillion to publicly held government debt between 2025 and 2035, raising debt as a share of GDP from about 100% to a record 118%.
00:46:48.000 And he says, of the increase in federal spending as a share of GDP over the next decade.
00:47:08.000 These demographic and political realities point to the same conclusion.
00:47:11.000 Increased revenue will be needed to secure these programs for the long term.
00:47:15.000 And so what is coming is probably a tax bomb somewhere along the line here.
00:47:19.000 Either a tax bomb or an inflation bomb or austerity measures.
00:47:23.000 Those are the only choices.
00:47:24.000 There are no other choices.
00:47:25.000 Because at a certain point, you can't just sell your debt into a market that doesn't want to buy your debt.
00:47:30.000 That may not be the short-term concern.
00:47:32.000 But it certainly is a mid- to long-term concern and really, really should be.
00:47:37.000 There's more on this in a moment.
00:47:38.000 First, choosing SimpliSafe for my studio, really, really easy decision.
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00:49:54.000 And meanwhile, in a bit of shock news, apparently Donald Trump Jr. is now hinting that he wants to run for president at some point in the future.
00:50:01.000 Here he was yesterday.
00:50:03.000 Would you consider picking up the rain?
00:50:05.000 Would you run for office?
00:50:06.000 Here we go.
00:50:06.000 Well, oh boy.
00:50:12.000 Well, it's an honor to be asked and an honor to see that some people are okay with it.
00:50:16.000 Those are just our friends in the front row, by the way.
00:50:17.000 That's probably just a couple people we know.
00:50:19.000 Those are the tickets we got.
00:50:22.000 You never know.
00:50:25.000 Okay, again, that would be Omid Malik and Don Jr. sitting at the Qatar Economic Forum in a session that was originally titled Monetizing MAGA.
00:50:33.000 Not a great look.
00:50:35.000 Not a great look.
00:50:36.000 By the way, Tucker Carlson.
00:50:38.000 Who is funded by Omid Malik and Don Jr. at 1789 Capitol has said, not a particularly good look.
00:50:44.000 He's right about that.
00:50:45.000 It is not, in fact, a good look.
00:50:48.000 I'm just going to put it out there right now.
00:50:50.000 No.
00:50:52.000 No.
00:50:53.000 Okay, dynasties are un-American.
00:50:56.000 They are not good.
00:50:58.000 George W., after George H.W., was not great for the country.
00:51:04.000 The idea of Michelle Obama for Barack Obama, not great for the country.
00:51:08.000 The idea of Hillary Clinton for Bill Clinton, not great for the country.
00:51:16.000 No.
00:51:17.000 We elected Donald Trump for a reason, but connection with President Trump's name does not mean that you should be President of the United States.
00:51:25.000 President Trump ran against dynasties when he opposed Jeb Bush in 2016.
00:51:29.000 This was literally one of his leading gambits, was attacking Jeb Bush for being part of a political dynasty.
00:51:36.000 Why the American obsession with political dynasties?
00:51:39.000 And that's not a critique of Donald Trump Jr. as a person or as a future politician.
00:51:42.000 That's just a reality that dynasties in American politics are typically bad.
00:51:46.000 Kennedy dynasties, Bush dynasties, none of this is good.
00:51:50.000 And when you combine that with the fact that many of the organizations that Donald Trump Jr. is connected to are making an enormous amount of money during this period of time when his father is president, which raises awkward questions, certainly, about Trump administration policy.
00:52:03.000 Ranging from Trump mean coin to World Liberty Financial to gigantic real estate deals in Qatar, none of this is an amazingly good look.
00:52:14.000 It's...
00:52:15.000 This administration is doing too many important...
00:52:17.000 I'll say it again.
00:52:18.000 This administration is doing too many important things to be bogged down with conversations about how members of the Trump family or the Whitcoff family or any of the other families surrounding the administration are making bank while President Trump is president.
00:52:33.000 That is not a good thing.
00:52:37.000 At the very least, it is not a useful thing.
00:52:41.000 Meanwhile, President Trump seems to be coming to better conclusions with regard to Vladimir Putin and Ukraine, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:52:48.000 On a call Monday, President Trump told European leaders Russian President Vladimir Putin isn't ready to end the Ukraine war because he thinks he's winning, according to senior European officials familiar with the conversation.
00:52:57.000 Good.
00:52:58.000 That is actually a realization of reality.
00:53:02.000 From President Trump.
00:53:04.000 Obviously, that's true.
00:53:06.000 In a statement after an earlier version of this article from the Wall Street Journal, Caroline Leavitt disputed the account saying that President Trump says he believes Putin is winning the war, but he never said Putin isn't ready to end the war.
00:53:16.000 Leavitt said that Trump said several times during the call that he believes Putin wants peace and wants the war to be over.
00:53:22.000 One of the officials who was on the call said Trump began the discussion by saying, I think Vladimir does not want peace.
00:53:26.000 Well, I certainly hope the Europeans are right and Caroline Leavitt is incorrect here because Putin does not want peace.
00:53:31.000 I would like to see one single solitary piece of evidence that Vladimir Putin wants peace.
00:53:35.000 Seriously, like one.
00:53:36.000 That's all.
00:53:37.000 That's all I'm asking for.
00:53:38.000 Like one sign.
00:53:39.000 One indicator.
00:53:41.000 President Trump lives in reality.
00:53:43.000 I'll say it again.
00:53:44.000 And reality never lies.
00:53:46.000 Reality is reality.
00:53:47.000 And the reality is that Vladimir Putin obviously does not want peace, which is why he's avoiding direct negotiations and has been for months, while Vladimir Zelensky in Ukraine is literally doing every...
00:53:56.000 President Trump says to Zelensky at this point, jump.
00:53:58.000 And Zelensky says how high.
00:54:00.000 That is the relationship between the United States and Ukraine, clearly.
00:54:05.000 Apparently, Trump held an earlier call with European leaders on Sunday, a day before his two-hour conversation with Putin.
00:54:11.000 It indicated he could impose sanctions if Putin refused to ceasefire, according to officials.
00:54:15.000 By Monday, he shifted again.
00:54:16.000 Instead, he said he wanted lower-level talks between Russia and Ukraine at the Vatican.
00:54:23.000 So, Europe is seeing some upside here.
00:54:26.000 The entire process is showing.
00:54:28.000 That Vladimir Putin actually is not particularly interested in serious negotiations, which, of course, he is not.
00:54:34.000 Putin is waiting everybody out.
00:54:35.000 That's all.
00:54:36.000 America's enemies are waiting America out, which, by the way, not a bad strategy.
00:54:41.000 Traditionally speaking, waiting America out in Afghanistan, in Iraq, anywhere, is a good strategy.
00:54:47.000 The American people get bored and they get tired, and their presidents like pulling them out of places, even if it ends in ignominious defeat, as it did in, for example, Afghanistan.
00:54:55.000 Speaking of ignominious defeat and ignominious people, The scandal surrounding Joe Biden continues.
00:55:02.000 Who knew what when?
00:55:04.000 Jake Tapper has been making the round with his new book, Original Sin.
00:55:07.000 Say what you will about Tapper's coverage of the president's infirmity over the past several years, and you can say a lot.
00:55:13.000 Tapper is now saying many true things, okay?
00:55:15.000 That is just the reality.
00:55:16.000 And Tapper was on MSNBC, where he told Joe Scarborough that actually Joe Biden was almost singularly focused on convincing Joe Scarborough that he was not senile.
00:55:26.000 When David Ignatius wrote that column in, I think, August 2023, saying that Joe Biden should not run for re-election because of what he had been hearing, and he came on this show, and you guys had a robust conversation about this.
00:55:38.000 You largely agreed that you had been hearing things about this, but that there was really no alternative, that Kamala Harris was not up to the job.
00:55:45.000 That's what Democrats were telling you behind the scenes.
00:55:47.000 Joe Biden saw that.
00:55:49.000 Joe Biden said to staffers that he wanted to convince you that you were wrong.
00:55:55.000 And he focused on you like you were a constituency, like you were farmers in Iowa, like you were the Kiwanis Club in New Hampshire.
00:56:02.000 And he made sure that you thought...
00:56:05.000 Okay, well, I mean, that's pretty amazing.
00:56:09.000 It's also amazing that Scarborough fell for it.
00:56:12.000 Meaning, I mean, Biden didn't have the ability to string together two sentences.
00:56:18.000 And no matter how strong the PR operation is, I'm not sure how you get that past somebody like a Scarborough.
00:56:25.000 By the way, all these revelations from the book are pretty incredible.
00:56:28.000 According to Axios, needing video of then-President Biden speaking sharply and fluidly in a freewheeling setting, his campaign staged a close to the press town hall with a friendly audience in April 2024.
00:56:38.000 The resulting footage was unusable.
00:56:42.000 That's unbelievable.
00:56:43.000 So they literally staged a fake town hall for him so he would look like he could talk and they couldn't use any of it in April 2024.
00:56:50.000 And then the part that just boggles the mind.
00:56:52.000 Is that then they allowed him on camera to challenge Donald Trump to a debate.
00:56:56.000 Now, I don't know what they thought.
00:56:57.000 Did they think that Trump wouldn't take him up on it?
00:56:59.000 Of course, Trump had to take him up on it.
00:57:01.000 What was he going to do?
00:57:01.000 Not debate Biden?
00:57:02.000 Of course he was going to debate Biden.
00:57:04.000 Like, that was red meat for President Trump.
00:57:07.000 Are you kidding?
00:57:08.000 Like, that's the part that's astonishing.
00:57:09.000 And I think the only plausible explanation for some people buying into the idea that Biden wasn't quite as senile as it seemed was, you would have to be insane to trot a senile man out.
00:57:21.000 In the middle of a campaign to do a debate with his chief opponent who is a debate bulldog, like just rips people apart.
00:57:28.000 Bulldog jaws on President Trump in debate.
00:57:31.000 Like the meanest debater of all time.
00:57:32.000 He's a mean man when he debates.
00:57:34.000 There's no question.
00:57:35.000 Like putting him in the debate ring with challenging Trump to debate.
00:57:38.000 A lot of people must say, oh, well, maybe he's better than he looks.
00:57:40.000 I mean, you'd have to be like a complete nut or maybe senile in order to, you know, challenge Trump.
00:57:46.000 And then he did it.
00:57:47.000 According to the book.
00:57:49.000 The event at a high school gym in Biden's home state of Delaware was supposed to be the basis for a campaign commercial.
00:57:54.000 The idea was to create scenes of Biden taking off-the-cup questions from voters that could be used in ads.
00:57:59.000 The campaign had a pre-screened list of questions the voters would ask.
00:58:02.000 The cameras rolled for 90 minutes with Biden on stage.
00:58:06.000 Apparently, some blamed the lighting.
00:58:08.000 The problem was not the lighting.
00:58:09.000 The problem was, I'm sure, his performance.
00:58:11.000 The campaign regularly needed recorded remarks from Biden that could be played at events or used in fundraising pitches.
00:58:17.000 But the candidate was often unable to tape even mundane remarks without botching the lines.
00:58:21.000 When supportive groups requested a taped five-minute video address from Biden, the White House would respond by saying the video could be one or two minutes.
00:58:29.000 What?
00:58:33.000 What?
00:58:34.000 As a workaround, Biden would be filmed with two cameras instead of one.
00:58:37.000 So any flubbed lines could be smooth with jump cuts.
00:58:40.000 And by the way, we knew this, right?
00:58:41.000 We were covering this on the show.
00:58:42.000 We literally play tape of Biden.
00:58:44.000 And then we would have like a...
00:58:46.000 A counter in the corner of the screen going like 1, 2, 3, 4, 8 jump cuts in 13 seconds.
00:58:52.000 Because that's evidence that the dude couldn't speak words from his face hole.
00:58:59.000 Unbelievable.
00:59:00.000 Staff, apparently, according to the book, blamed Biden's inability to find words or stay on a train of thought, not his stutter for the issue, despite the fact that the media kept claiming that it was a stutter.
00:59:11.000 Thompson and Tapper write, every shoot was anxiety-inducing for Biden's team.
00:59:16.000 Meanwhile, Jill Biden continues to push back.
00:59:19.000 The Biden spokespeople are not commenting on any of this.
00:59:22.000 Shocker there.
00:59:23.000 Of course they're not commenting on any of this.
00:59:24.000 The minute they comment, they're finished.
00:59:27.000 Meanwhile, it's fun to watch Democrats scurry around trying to avoid the consequences of their own complicity.
00:59:32.000 It's really, really funny.
00:59:35.000 According to Politico, 24 hours after the Sunday announcement that President Biden has an aggressive form of prostate cancer, one of his staunchest supporters, Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, said Monday he had yet to connect with him.
00:59:46.000 Another Close Hill ally, Senator Chris Coons, had not spoken with Biden as of mid-afternoon on Tuesday.
00:59:52.000 Biden's longtime friend, Bill Bob Brady, the former House member from Pennsylvania, who's known Biden for decades, said he still had not talked with Biden.
01:00:01.000 Again, Biden is not hearing from anybody.
01:00:03.000 Ain't nobody hearing from Biden.
01:00:05.000 Most Democrats are still trying to pivot from Biden's health to stay on message.
01:00:11.000 Representative Gabe Ammo of Rhode Island.
01:00:13.000 Who is a former Biden White House aide.
01:00:15.000 He's now in Congress.
01:00:17.000 Faulted Biden's critics for capitalizing on what he called the politics of the moment.
01:00:20.000 Yeah, we're back to the Republican pounces.
01:00:22.000 Nonsense.
01:00:24.000 Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas, who is a Biden reelect co-chair, says, quote, we are living through a historic, terrifying backsliding of our democracy.
01:00:31.000 I'm so profoundly uninterested in talking about this issue.
01:00:34.000 Yeah, I noticed you guys are profoundly uninterested in talking about the biggest presidential cover up in history.
01:00:40.000 Like literally the only one that would even be remotely close.
01:00:43.000 Would be the cover-up of Woodrow Wilson being completely feeble and feeble-minded by the end of his administration.
01:00:48.000 And to be fair to the media, that happened in 1919, as over 100 years ago.
01:00:54.000 What a media fail.
01:00:55.000 What a gigantic media fail.
01:00:57.000 Meanwhile, speaking of cover-ups, The Daily Wire is now reporting, according to a Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, that Biden administration officials knew as early as February 2021 that the vaccines for COVID-19 were associated with myocarditis.
01:01:12.000 And pericarditis.
01:01:14.000 Myocarditis is the inflammation of the heart muscle itself.
01:01:17.000 Pericarditis is inflammation of the thin sac that surrounds the heart.
01:01:21.000 They waited to warn the public until June while they continued to push the backs.
01:01:26.000 The report concluded that U.S. health officials knew about the risks of myocarditis, downplayed the health concern, and deliberately delayed informing the public about the risk.
01:01:33.000 That is insane.
01:01:35.000 That is legitimately insane.
01:01:38.000 Senator Ron Johnson, who chairs that committee, He said, in being concerned about vaccine hesitancy, they violated the inviolable principle of informed consent.
01:01:46.000 Well, yes.
01:01:49.000 He says that Israeli officials were informing the United States as early as February 2021 about side effects they were noticing from the vax.
01:01:56.000 In late February, there was a CDC official named Lori Markowitz, who co-led the Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group, who sent an email concerning draft minutes and summary report from a call.
01:02:07.000 And apparently that call included an update about This is totally insane.
01:02:32.000 And honestly, if you covered that up, that should be a prosecutable offense.
01:02:36.000 If you know about legitimate...
01:02:38.000 Well-researched risks, and you don't inform the public about those legitimate, well-researched risks, that should be a prosecutable offense.
01:02:44.000 For sure.
01:02:45.000 Without a doubt.
01:02:47.000 Massive scandal.
01:02:48.000 Truly amazing.
01:02:49.000 But this was an administration of cover-ups.
01:02:51.000 That is for sure.
01:02:53.000 Meanwhile, the time has come.
01:02:55.000 It's time for a Diddy update.
01:02:57.000 I know you've been waiting with bated breath for me to actually, you know, get back into the trial of Diddy.
01:02:57.000 I know.
01:03:03.000 And again, it's sort of fascinating on a prurient level.
01:03:05.000 It's also fascinating because, once again, the gap in American perception between the illegal and the immoral has, I think, never been wider.
01:03:13.000 It's very bizarre.
01:03:14.000 In any case, according to the Washington Post, the government is working through its list of witnesses in the second week of testimony at the Sean Diddy Combs trafficking and racketeering trial in New York.
01:03:25.000 Special Agent Gerard Gannon continued testifying on Wednesday, describing finding gun components, platform heels, and a ton of baby oil, apparently.
01:03:32.000 When the Department of Homeland Security raided Combs' mansion in Miami last year, a forensic psychologist also testified that domestic abuse victims often love their partners, abuse drugs, and repress memories.
01:03:42.000 Testimony that recalls Cassandra Ventura's account of her 11-year relationship with Combs.
01:03:47.000 Thursday, apparently, we'll see more testimony from a former assistant to Combs who said that Ventura quit after he saw his boss abuse her.
01:03:56.000 Prosecutors also hope to call five new witnesses that will include Kid Cuddy, Kudai, Kudai, I don't care.
01:04:03.000 Kudai, whatever.
01:04:03.000 A rapper who briefly jaded into her while she was involved with Combs.
01:04:07.000 Miss Kudai's car, that would be Kid Kudai, exploded after a jealous Combs threatened to blow it up.
01:04:14.000 If you threaten to blow up a car and then it blows up, that's kind of an indicator that maybe had something to do with it.
01:04:18.000 It's kind of weird.
01:04:19.000 Cars don't tend to blow up all that much, just like randomly.
01:04:23.000 So, again, this case, what I'm curious to know...
01:04:27.000 is whether it fulfills the definition of the federal crime.
01:04:29.000 Again, the defense is going to claim that he's just as bad as you say he is.
01:04:33.000 Was it trafficking on a federal level?
01:04:35.000 And I'll be interested to hear what the actual charges for trafficking are.
01:04:40.000 It'll be fascinating.
01:04:42.000 And meanwhile, speaking of Diddy, there are all these sort of, again, when we talk about conspiracy theories that are sort of being put out there, again, I think that you can plausibly ask a question about which there is no evidence.
01:04:57.000 But when you do it over and over and over again, I start to get a little suspicious.
01:05:01.000 So, podcaster Patrick Pet David, he went after the Diddy case, suggesting that Diddy has been working with intelligence agencies.
01:05:10.000 Maybe, maybe.
01:05:12.000 Again, anything is possible, but anything is possible usually is not my standard for sort of airing a theory, because anything is indeed possible.
01:05:20.000 I mean, if you have evidence of this, then you could show it, as opposed to just speculating.
01:05:26.000 Maybe it's true, but like evidence, please.
01:05:31.000 The story has it that Diddy's father was an FBI informant leaking a lot of information to the FBI.
01:05:36.000 These types of behaviors, you're going to pick it up from somebody, some kind of bad influence, somebody that taught you how to be an informant.
01:05:43.000 Nobody wakes up one morning and just becomes Diddy.
01:05:46.000 There's a lot of things that taught you, could be trauma, could be bad habits, and you're like, look, if this works effectively on me, I'm going to use this exact system on other people.
01:05:54.000 And maybe he did.
01:05:58.000 I don't even know what we're talking about now.
01:06:00.000 So his dad worked for intelligence?
01:06:02.000 I mean, Tucker Carlson's dad worked for the intelligence community.
01:06:06.000 So what?
01:06:07.000 What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
01:06:07.000 Who cares?
01:06:09.000 Again, I'm not defending Diddy from anything.
01:06:11.000 I'm just wondering, at some point when we hear all of these theories, could we hear a shred of evidence that doesn't involve a distant relative?
01:06:18.000 The reason this is irritating to me is because people should actually sort of demand And when people make outlandish claims or outsized claims, they have outsized evidence to back those outsized claims.
01:06:29.000 And I've named several conspiracies on the show today that actually existed.
01:06:33.000 The conspiracy to cover up Joe Biden's mental health problems.
01:06:37.000 The apparent conspiracy now evidenced by Senator Ron Johnson at the highest levels of the Biden administration to not report to the public what they knew, for example, about myocarditis in patients who are using the Pfizer vaccine.
01:06:49.000 Those are actual, real conspiracies.
01:06:50.000 But that's because I'm citing evidence to you of those things happening.
01:06:55.000 I mean, again, you can play these theoretical games all day.
01:06:57.000 I suppose if it floats your boat, that's fine.
01:06:59.000 Where I start to get even more uptight is when you start impugning the honor of people that I know, like friends of mine, because you believe that your specious conspiracy theories are somehow more important than the people who actually see the evidence.
01:07:13.000 So, Dan Bongino, of course, a friend.
01:07:16.000 Dan's great.
01:07:17.000 Dan is now the Deputy FBI Director.
01:07:18.000 He did an interview recently.
01:07:20.000 In which he stated that Epstein killed himself.
01:07:24.000 Now again, if Dan says it, I'll take his word for it because Dan's seen the evidence and I ain't.
01:07:28.000 I've seen the same evidence everybody else has.
01:07:30.000 The same evidence that Patrick Pat David has seen.
01:07:32.000 Unless Patrick Pat David has evidence that I don't know about.
01:07:34.000 I trust that Dan is not lying to me.
01:07:37.000 Because, again, I know Dan.
01:07:39.000 And so when I hear this kind of junk where people suggest that government officials are being pressured by various agents to suppress information.
01:07:47.000 Okay.
01:07:48.000 Again.
01:07:49.000 Anything is possible, but anything is possible should not be your standard of reportage.
01:07:54.000 Look what happened with all the guys that said, day one, I'm going to release all the Epstein files, all the this and all the that and all the this, and then they go in and it's like, you know, I saw this stuff.
01:08:03.000 There's nothing there.
01:08:04.000 He killed himself.
01:08:04.000 He committed suicide.
01:08:05.000 You're like, wait, what?
01:08:07.000 These are friends of ours.
01:08:08.000 These are not people that we're not supportive of.
01:08:11.000 We're excited for them.
01:08:12.000 They do great work.
01:08:15.000 You know, something happens when you get a certain job at a level of clearance that the rest of the world does not have access to.
01:08:22.000 We don't know.
01:08:24.000 We can speculate and say what happens when you walk into that room after you get a job.
01:08:27.000 There's a briefing.
01:08:30.000 Let's talk about Epstein.
01:08:31.000 This is a big job.
01:08:31.000 You not got the job.
01:08:32.000 How important is it for you to make sure America stays free as the greatest country in the world?
01:08:37.000 Very.
01:08:37.000 Well, guess what?
01:08:38.000 There's a few things you have to do now that you have this job.
01:08:40.000 You're going to get a briefing from five people that are going to come in.
01:08:43.000 They're going to tell you exactly what intel we have and why it's important for us to make sure the story stays aligned because we have enough inventory to hold 220 very powerful people in the world hostage.
01:08:54.000 And if we don't and we can't blackmail them, then guess what?
01:08:58.000 A lot of deals are not going to get done.
01:09:00.000 And one of our assets that's another secret intelligence agency has also a lot of assets on this that That could expose their relationship and their history, and we can't do this right now, and you need to be aligned with that.
01:09:12.000 Can we count on you doing that?
01:09:13.000 Yes, sir.
01:09:14.000 All right, great.
01:09:15.000 Here's what we need you to say to the media.
01:09:16.000 I foresee a conversation like that taking place.
01:09:20.000 I foresee, okay, do you have any evidence of a conversation like that taking place?
01:09:24.000 Like at any level?
01:09:25.000 Or is that you're just impugning Dan Bongino and saying that Dan's lying?
01:09:29.000 Sure, he's lying for the good of the country.
01:09:31.000 Sure, he's lying for the good of the intel, but he's lying.
01:09:32.000 That Dan's a liar.
01:09:34.000 I know Dan.
01:09:35.000 I don't believe that Dan's a liar.
01:09:36.000 And by the way, if Dan had come out and said Epstein did not kill himself, all these people would be like, yes, because Dan's a truth teller, because Dan is in fact a truth teller.
01:09:43.000 But if your definition of a truth teller or a liar comes based on their confirmation of the theories that you are spinning out in your own head, I'm sorry, this is just, it's unintelligent and it is not useful.
01:09:55.000 Speculation without any evidence whatsoever.
01:09:57.000 I'll bet there was a conversation that took place between Dan Bongino and Jimmy Hoffa in the back room.
01:10:06.000 Over at the FBI, in which Jimmy Hoffa, who they've been hiding in the back room for 30 years, came out and told Dan Bongino that he definitely needed to cover up the involvement of foreign intelligence agencies in the assassination of JFK.
01:10:19.000 And Dan Bongino said, yes, sir, I could totally foresee a conversation like that happening.
01:10:22.000 What evidence do you have that Dan Bongino is a liar?
01:10:24.000 What evidence do you have that Dan is somehow lying to a public that he has spent years informing and talking to?
01:10:31.000 That he's lying to his own audience, by the way.
01:10:32.000 You think Dan doesn't know?
01:10:33.000 What his audience is speculating about with regard to Jeffrey Epstein?
01:10:36.000 You think Dan is unaware of that?
01:10:38.000 Dan had one of the biggest audiences in this entire space.
01:10:43.000 Honestly, this is just...
01:10:45.000 If you fall for this kind of garbage, truly.
01:10:48.000 Sure, it's fun.
01:10:49.000 It's always fun.
01:10:51.000 After dinner, drunk conversations about who killed JFK.
01:10:54.000 Fine.
01:10:54.000 It's fun.
01:10:55.000 It's enjoyable.
01:10:55.000 I get it.
01:10:56.000 But if we're going to pretend this is like a source of useful and good information, I'm just wondering on what basis.
01:11:01.000 But conversations like this.
01:11:03.000 Not everything Patrick, Patrick, Pat David says.
01:11:05.000 Conversations like this one.
01:11:06.000 How is that useful or good?
01:11:08.000 And the answer is, it's not.
01:11:10.000 It's stupid.
01:11:11.000 And it's useless.
01:11:12.000 And it's counterproductive.
01:11:13.000 Because it makes us unable to distinguish fact from fiction or speculation from reality.
01:11:18.000 Alrighty, the show continues in a moment.
01:11:20.000 With the vaunted Ben Shapiro show, Mailbag.
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