The Ben Shapiro Show - What You Talkin’ Bout, Willis?

00:00:00.000 Well, folks, there's something called the Dunning-Kruger effect.

00:00:02.000 The Dunning-Kruger effect is a bias in the brain that you tend to think you are better at something than you actually are.

00:00:09.000 And the Dunning-Kruger effect is widely held across a wide variety of skill sets in the United States.

00:00:14.000 It's also held in general by a lot of people who think they are smarter than they actually are.

00:00:17.000 But it's particularly held by people who have been made untouchable by the system.

00:00:21.000 If you've been made untouchable by the system and you've just been rising through the ranks for years, Based on, say, your intersectional identity, you're going to think you're much better and more competent at things than you actually are, and they can get away with a lot more.

00:00:34.000 This is the story of Fannie Willis.

00:00:35.000 Fannie Willis is the Fulton County District Attorney.

00:00:39.000 She's the person who's brought charges against President Trump based on supposed violation of RICO law, which, as we've explained on the show, really does not apply in this particular case.

00:00:48.000 It's certainly a legal stretch.

00:00:49.000 She's attempting to make her name by getting Donald Trump Particularly in a state court, because if you can get Donald Trump on a state charge, well, then he can't pardon himself if he becomes president of the United States.

00:00:59.000 Well, things started to fall apart for Fannie Willis over the last couple of months.

00:01:03.000 She was a heroine in the media.

00:01:04.000 She was a hard-charging prosecutor who was going to finally get Trump.

00:01:09.000 And then it turns out that she is, like, key example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but with an intersectional twist, because she thought that apparently she could get away with, like, literally anything.

00:01:21.000 So just for background, let me play you a clip of Fannie Willis explaining, before she was elected D.A., why exactly she should be the D.A.

00:01:28.000 Here she is.

00:01:30.000 Because they deserve a D.A.

00:01:32.000 that won't have sex with his employees.

00:01:34.000 Because they deserve a D.A.

00:01:37.000 that won't put money in their own pocket when it should go to benefit children.

00:01:42.000 Because we deserve better.

00:01:46.000 Okay.

00:01:47.000 Now, as we are about to find out, the Fulton County people did not actually receive that DA, apparently.

00:01:54.000 According to Forbes, Willis faces accusations she violated state conflict of interest and public money laws over claims from a group of Trump co-defendants that she engaged in an improper clandestine personal relationship.

00:02:05.000 This would be a relationship with a man named Nathaniel Wade, who really had very little prosecutorial background but was appointed the special prosecutor to help her out in the Fulton County case against Donald Trump.

00:02:15.000 Wade and Willis apparently traveled together on two vacations, according to court documents, and state records reveal that Wade earned more than $650,000 working with Willis.

00:02:26.000 So, yesterday, there was a hearing about all of this.

00:02:30.000 It was an evidentiary hearing in court in which the defendant asked that she essentially be Removed from the case for conflict of interest.

00:02:42.000 And Fannie Willis, for some odd reason, decided she was going to testify.

00:02:47.000 Now this came after she had basically destroyed her own timeline.

00:02:50.000 So the question here was whether she had hired this guy because he was super competent and she had paid him and then they fell in love and they started going on cruises and having sex and all the rest.

00:03:01.000 Or whether she had known the guy for a while and she decided to bring in her lover to pay him state taxpayer dollars And then go on vacations with him with state taxpayer dollars.

00:03:11.000 And did that not based on the interests of the people of Fulton County, but based on her own personal interest in the guy she was shtupping.

00:03:21.000 Well, Willis and many of her employees had been subpoenaed to testify at the evidentiary hearing to determine whether she should be disqualified from the case.

00:03:28.000 And last week, she tried to stave off her testimony, and that completely failed yesterday.

00:03:34.000 So first, they called a bunch of Fannie Willis's employees, her pals.

00:03:40.000 So here is one of Fannie Willis's pals explaining that Fannie Willis actually was in a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, As early as, like, 2019.

00:03:52.000 Her name is Robin Yerte.

00:03:53.000 She was considered, as we will see, a friend of Fannie Willis, but then it got very gossipy and it kind of fell apart for Fannie Willis on the stand.

00:04:00.000 Here was the friend, a former staffer at the Fulton County District Attorney's Office, Robin Yerte, talking about the relationship between Willis and Wade.

00:04:09.000 You know, without going into all the painstaking details, there is no doubt in your mind that from 2019 until 2022, Ms.

00:04:16.000 Willis and Mr. Wade were in a romantic relationship.

00:04:21.000 What's the question?

00:04:23.000 You have no doubt that their romantic relationship was in effect from 2019 until the last time you spoke with her?

00:04:30.000 No doubt.

00:04:32.000 And that's based on your personal observations and speaking with them and seeing them together and things like that?

00:04:39.000 Yes.

00:04:43.000 Okay, so that's what she testified.

00:04:45.000 And really, there are two issues in this evidentiary hearing.

00:04:47.000 Issue number one is when Fannie Willis started dating Nathan Wade, if it was earlier than the appointment, which suggests, of course, that she appointed him because she was shipping him.

00:04:55.000 So that's question number one.

00:04:56.000 And question number two is even if she was dating him after they got together on the case, was she then expending taxpayer dollars on him in ways that she wouldn't any other employee?

00:05:08.000 That's question number two.

00:05:09.000 And Fannie Willis fails on both accounts.

00:05:11.000 We'll get to more on this in a second.

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00:06:06.000 That's expressvpn.com slash ben. So, they then call Nathan Wade.

00:06:11.000 And Wade tries to deny that he was dating Willis in 2020.

00:06:14.000 He tries to claim that because he had a form of cancer, it was not possible for him to have a romantic relationship because he was trying to isolate.

00:06:20.000 It didn't go over amazingly well in court.

00:06:22.000 He was sweating bullets, Nathan Wade, as you would imagine.

00:06:26.000 Yes, sir.

00:06:27.000 Yes, sir.

00:06:27.000 about hate bill.

00:06:29.000 Yes, sir.

00:06:31.000 Condo. Yes, sir.

00:06:33.000 And you indicated that prior to November 1st of 2021, you had spent time at the condo,

00:06:37.000 the hate bill condo.

00:06:39.000 Yes, sir.

00:06:41.000 With Ms. Willis, right?

00:06:43.000 Yes, sir.

00:06:45.000 And with someone else?

00:06:47.000 You said Ms. Yerte?

00:06:49.000 Ms. Yerte, yes, sir.

00:06:51.000 Okay, so you were not concerned that it was not a sterile environment, was it?

00:06:53.000 Are you inferring that Ms.

00:06:54.000 Yerde and D.A.

00:06:55.000 Willis is not sterile?

00:06:57.000 Of course it's a sterile environment.

00:06:59.000 It's a condo.

00:07:02.000 But don't you remember that I followed up and said, where else might you have been to show your cell phone records from Hakeville?

00:07:08.000 And you said, the airport?

00:07:11.000 Right?

00:07:12.000 Not a sterile environment though, the airport.

00:07:14.000 You agree?

00:07:15.000 It is not.

00:07:16.000 Okay, what about restaurants?

00:07:17.000 Not a sterile environment, right?

00:07:19.000 They are not.

00:07:20.000 And the Porsche, you said something about a Porsche, what?

00:07:23.000 The Porsche experience.

00:07:25.000 That doesn't sound very sterile to me.

00:07:27.000 Is that a sterile environment?

00:07:29.000 You're inside your vehicle.

00:07:32.000 Yeah, but don't you mingle with others?

00:07:35.000 You can.

00:07:36.000 Yeah, and you were doing all that in 2021 before November 1st.

00:07:40.000 That's what you testified to, correct?

00:07:42.000 Yes, sir.

00:07:43.000 So there's no reason why you couldn't be dating in 2021, is there?

00:07:49.000 Give me 2020, Mr. Sadow.

00:07:51.000 No, say 2021.

00:07:52.000 Alright.

00:07:53.000 Correct?

00:07:56.000 Dating?

00:07:57.000 No.

00:08:00.000 No reason?

00:08:00.000 No reason.

00:08:01.000 Got it.

00:08:01.000 Thanks.

00:08:04.000 Okay, so he's basically blown up on the stand.

00:08:07.000 He says, okay, well, I couldn't have been dating her because I had cancer at the time.

00:08:11.000 He's like, well, you were pretty non-sterile that entire time, so I'm assuming that you could have been like in a room with her, dating her at the time.

00:08:18.000 Wade was then forced to explain about his sex life with Fannie Willis and things got awkward.

00:08:24.000 Have you had a personal relationship at all, and you know what I mean by that, after the summer of 2023?

00:08:31.000 Are you asking me if I had intercourse with the District Attorney?

00:08:35.000 I was trying not to, but I guess if you're going to characterize it as that, the answer would be... The answer would be no.

00:08:44.000 So, it's been purely professional since the summer of 2023.

00:08:47.000 So that's where we're having issues.

00:08:53.000 Okay, you'll have to explain because I don't know what the issue would be.

00:08:56.000 No, I will explain to you.

00:09:01.000 You say personal.

00:09:04.000 We're very good friends.

00:09:07.000 Probably closer than ever because of these attacks.

00:09:10.000 But if you're asking me about specific intercourse, the answer is no.

00:09:16.000 How about if I change it from intercourse to romantic?

00:09:24.000 No, okay, so then what the hell is he talking about?

00:09:27.000 Okay, so, Wade then admits that he was paid for a bunch of stuff that was really not appropriate.

00:09:36.000 He paid for things, apparently, using, you know, the taxpayer dollars he'd been paid for.

00:09:41.000 So let's say they went on a cruise.

00:09:42.000 He would pay for that using his business credit card.

00:09:44.000 And so the question is, well, was the state essentially paying him to then take her on romantic cruises and whatever?

00:09:50.000 He says, no, no, no, because she paid me back in cash.

00:09:52.000 That's going to be the excuse now, is that whatever state dollars flowed to their relationship inappropriately, it wasn't really inappropriate because she had fat stacks of cash in the safe.

00:10:02.000 I'm not kidding.

00:10:02.000 That's the actual defense that Nathan Wade and Fannie Willis try to use here.

00:10:07.000 You said in the affidavit that you roughly shared travel though, correct?

00:10:11.000 Yes, ma'am.

00:10:11.000 Okay.

00:10:12.000 So this roughly sharing travel, you're saying she reimbursed you?

00:10:15.000 She did.

00:10:16.000 And where did you deposit the money she reimbursed you?

00:10:19.000 It was cash.

00:10:20.000 She didn't give me any checks.

00:10:22.000 So she paid you cash for her share of all these vacations?

00:10:25.000 Mr. Schaffer, you'll step out if you do that again.

00:10:27.000 Yes, ma'am.

00:10:28.000 Okay.

00:10:29.000 And so all of the vacations that she took, she paid you cash for?

00:10:33.000 Yes, ma'am.

00:10:35.000 And you purchased all of these vacations on your business credit card, correct?

00:10:39.000 Yes, ma'am.

00:10:40.000 And you included those in deductions on your taxes, correct?

00:10:44.000 No, ma'am.

00:10:44.000 No, you did not.

00:10:47.000 Okay, so, again, his claim, and this goes to claim number two, right?

00:10:51.000 Claim number one is that he was dating her before he was actually hired.

00:10:54.000 Claim number two is that they were taking business trips That's air quotes for those listening, around the world.

00:11:01.000 And that he was paying for them, basically using taxpayer dollars, and then she was reimbursing him for her half in cash, right?

00:11:07.000 So that it didn't look as though they were basically scamming the government out of money.

00:11:12.000 That's essentially the claim that she's making.

00:11:14.000 The countervailing claim would be that she paid him $650,000 to be a prosecutor in an area where he has no qualifications, in order so that they could go on romantic Vacays together.

00:11:23.000 So, at this point, Fannie Willis decides she must testify.

00:11:27.000 Now, first of all, let me just be clear.

00:11:29.000 Anytime you are the subject of any sort of court proceeding, it is almost invariably a horrible idea to say you want to testify.

00:11:37.000 This is why every defense counsel ever will tell you, do not get on the stand.

00:11:41.000 Very few people are good witnesses in their own defense.

00:11:44.000 They're really bad witnesses.

00:11:46.000 Fannie Willis happens to suffer from two things.

00:11:48.000 One, she's not telling the truth.

00:11:49.000 And two, she also happens to be one of the most off-putting witnesses in human history.

00:11:54.000 The Dunning-Kruger effect that I discussed at the very top here.

00:11:58.000 That effect is so obviously present with Fannie Willis, it is almost beyond comprehension.

00:12:03.000 This lady thinks she's good at her job.

00:12:05.000 She thinks that she's convincing.

00:12:06.000 She thinks that she comes off as honest and forthright and righteous.

00:12:10.000 And she comes off as precisely the opposite.

00:12:12.000 She comes off as obnoxious and lying.

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00:13:31.000 So this begins with her saying that she's going to testify against the Advice of Council.

00:13:36.000 And then suddenly, he's changing it. She files her financial declarations, same problems.

00:13:42.000 We need her in here to go over all of this and to explain exactly what happened.

00:13:47.000 So we would ask the court that the court allow Ms. Willis to be called.

00:13:54.000 So she gets up and she's just standing there.

00:13:57.000 And I will, too, Your Honor.

00:13:59.000 Just a moment, Ms.

00:14:00.000 Willis.

00:14:02.000 So, Ms.

00:14:03.000 Cross, I don't know if you want to speak with Ms.

00:14:05.000 Willis now.

00:14:05.000 It's sounding like maybe they're withdrawing the objection to the motion.

00:14:09.000 I believe the motion to... Or does Ms.

00:14:12.000 Miss Wills want to take the lead here.

00:14:14.000 I'll draw up a motion to quash Miss Wills.

00:14:18.000 Please don't move.

00:14:20.000 I'll make that.

00:14:21.000 OK, so the position of the district attorney at this point is that she's no longer contesting the subpoena.

00:14:28.000 Ms.

00:14:28.000 Mershin is called as the next witness.

00:14:31.000 So she had tried to not testify, and now she's going to testify.

00:14:34.000 And so she strides up aggressively to the witness box, and now is the moment.

00:14:38.000 So first, she starts off by suggesting that making her even answer questions is contrary to democracy.

00:14:43.000 Which is weird, because it seems like it actually is well within the boundaries of democracy to ask whether the DA who is prosecuting Donald Trump for political reasons is, in fact, A corrupt person who's having sex with the other prosecutor and paying him vast quantities of taxpayer cash while taking vacations with him.

00:15:01.000 So here she is getting very, very self-righteous about the whole situation.

00:15:06.000 Isn't it true that you met Mr. Wade October 2019 at a judges conference?

00:15:10.000 We haven't gotten to the point where Ms.

00:15:11.000 Willis should be treated hostilely.

00:15:13.000 I think we have Ms.

00:15:13.000 Willis.

00:15:14.000 I very much want to be here, so I'm not a hostile witness.

00:15:16.000 I very much want to be here.

00:15:18.000 Not so much that you're hostile, Ms.

00:15:19.000 Willis.

00:15:19.000 You'd be an adverse witness.

00:15:21.000 Your interests are opposed to Ms.

00:15:22.000 Merchants.

00:15:24.000 Ms.

00:15:24.000 Merchants' interests are contrary to democracy, Your Honor.

00:15:29.000 Not to mine.

00:15:32.000 I mean, okay, so first of all, she's a terrible lawyer.

00:15:34.000 That's not what a hostile witness is.

00:15:36.000 So the way that it works in a criminal trial, or a civil trial, actually, is a hostile witness, when you've seen it on TV, there's someone saying, permission to treat the witness as hostile.

00:15:45.000 And what that means is that when a witness is, say, a witness for the defense, and a prosecutor is prosecuting, then they can cross-examine the witness.

00:15:53.000 And they can ask more adversarial questions because they're not a friendly witness.

00:15:57.000 It doesn't mean, like, your affect is hostile or not hostile.

00:16:00.000 Like, she doesn't even know what that means.

00:16:01.000 And she's the DA of Fulton County.

00:16:04.000 I love that.

00:16:04.000 The defendants' interests are contrary to democracy because the claim is that the defendants tried to overturn an election.

00:16:10.000 Therefore, she is completely scot-free on the question of whether she is, in fact, a corrupt public servant.

00:16:15.000 And then, she goes full out.

00:16:17.000 She goes full Al Pacino in And Justice For All.

00:16:20.000 You're out of order!

00:16:21.000 You're out of order!

00:16:21.000 This entire court is out of order!

00:16:22.000 Here we go, Fannie Willis.

00:16:25.000 Well, no, no, look, I object to you getting records.

00:16:28.000 You've been intrusive into people's personal lives.

00:16:31.000 You're confused.

00:16:32.000 You think I'm on trial.

00:16:33.000 These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020.

00:16:36.000 I'm not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.

00:16:40.000 Well, I mean, it's an evidentiary hearing to determine whether you should be disqualified.

00:16:43.000 So technically, in this particular portion of the trial, your actions are on trial.

00:16:49.000 But guess what?

00:16:50.000 Brazenness is not going to substitute for actually being innocent in this particular case.

00:16:54.000 It gets worse and worse for her.

00:16:56.000 So she starts yelling about the media.

00:16:57.000 She says the media lied about her, which is weird because, again, she's the one who apparently lied a lot.

00:17:05.000 And I heard someone yell, this testimony is done.

00:17:09.000 It only made sense to me.

00:17:11.000 That I would be your next witness.

00:17:13.000 And I've been very anxious to have this conversation with you today.

00:17:16.000 So I ran to the courtroom.

00:17:19.000 So as soon as you heard that Mr. Wade was done testifying, that's when you just assumed you would be the next witness?

00:17:24.000 It only makes sense.

00:17:26.000 Did you listen to any of the testimony?

00:17:28.000 I'm in my office pacing, ma'am.

00:17:30.000 Did you listen to any of the arguments?

00:17:32.000 I did hear the arguments this morning.

00:17:34.000 It's ridiculous to me that you lied on Monday, and yet here we still are.

00:17:38.000 And I did listen to that argument.

00:17:43.000 Alright, so that was it.

00:17:44.000 Just the argument.

00:17:45.000 No testimony.

00:17:46.000 Right, I listened to the argument this morning where Adam Abadi, I thought, did an excellent job pointing out how dishonest you were with the court on Monday.

00:17:55.000 And I'm actually surprised that the hearing continued.

00:17:59.000 But since it did, here I am.

00:18:02.000 Wow, what a heroine.

00:18:04.000 Here she is.

00:18:05.000 She throws her friend under the bus.

00:18:06.000 Remember Robin Yerte, her former friend, who testified that she and Nathan Wade were romantic in 2019, and here she is throwing her friend under the bus.

00:18:15.000 For the last ten years, or five, whatever you'd like to classify it as, have you been friends with her?

00:18:21.000 I have not spoken to Robin in over a year.

00:18:25.000 I certainly do not consider her a friend now.

00:18:28.000 I think that she, you know, There's a saying, no good deed goes unpunished, and I think that she betrayed our friendship.

00:18:39.000 Oh, she betrayed the friendship by apparently talking about what this lady was doing outside of school.

00:18:44.000 Okay, then she gets to the question of the cash that she gave to Nathan Wade.

00:18:48.000 She says, don't worry.

00:18:49.000 That cash was never that serious.

00:18:51.000 You know, there's no— So what, I gave him cash.

00:18:53.000 Well, I mean, it's a little weird, is it not?

00:18:57.000 Okay, here we go.

00:18:58.000 Same with Aruba.

00:18:59.000 You don't know where that cash came from either, right?

00:19:01.000 Ma'am, you are mischaracterizing my testimony greatly.

00:19:05.000 I'm not going to allow you to mischaracterize my testimony.

00:19:08.000 I know that I keep money in my house.

00:19:11.000 The amounts of money I gave Mr. Wade, it was never that serious.

00:19:15.000 I don't think I've ever handed him more than $2,500 in a reimbursement.

00:19:18.000 So we're not talking about $20,000 in cash.

00:19:21.000 I don't have $20,000 in cash right now.

00:19:25.000 The most I ever gave him, I know I gave him $2,500 when we went to Belize because we went to one hotel Okay, so then she was asked, um, so why did you pay him back in cash?

00:19:35.000 Like, there's no record of you actually reimbursing him for your half of the travel.

00:19:39.000 Again, that looks like a kickback, right?

00:19:40.000 trip, the one that you described with his mom, I think I gave him about $2,000 for that

00:19:46.000 trip for like total.

00:19:47.000 Okay, so then she was asked, so why did you pay him back in cash?

00:19:51.000 Like there's no record of you actually reimbursing him for your half of the travel.

00:19:55.000 Again, that looks like a kickback, right?

00:19:57.000 If I hire my wife and or anybody else.

00:20:01.000 And that person is in a close personal relationship with me and I pay them a lot of money and then we take cruises together that the other person is paying for.

00:20:09.000 The idea is that I'm supposed to pay for my half to demonstrate that I'm not actually stealing money from the government.

00:20:15.000 But there's no record of her having paid back Nathan Wade.

00:20:17.000 Instead, she says, that she paid him back in cash.

00:20:20.000 So she was asked, why exactly you paid back Wade in cash all the time?

00:20:24.000 And here was her not very convincing answer.

00:20:27.000 The money that you paid Mr. Wade, the cash, in October of 2022, you do not know where that money came from.

00:20:34.000 I do know where it came from.

00:20:35.000 It came from my sweat and tears.

00:20:37.000 You know which job it came from.

00:20:39.000 Her sweat and tears.

00:20:40.000 Did it come from a private job?

00:20:41.000 It came from... I don't... I'm not... What are you talking about?

00:20:44.000 So it could have come from a private job because before I was VA, I was in private practice.

00:20:50.000 So I earned money during that time period that's probably in there.

00:20:52.000 You don't know where it came from?

00:20:53.000 What do you mean I don't know where it came from?

00:20:55.000 I absolutely do.

00:20:55.000 I understand the situation.

00:20:57.000 We can move on.

00:20:57.000 You never wrote him a check?

00:21:01.000 Ma'am, I don't have checks.

00:21:03.000 Okay.

00:21:04.000 Um, so you have no proof of any reimbursement for any of these things because it was all cash, right?

00:21:08.000 The testimony of one witness is enough to prove a fact.

00:21:11.000 So my question was, do you have any proof?

00:21:12.000 Are you telling me that I'm lying to you?

00:21:13.000 Is that what you're intimating right here?

00:21:15.000 I'm asking if you have any proof that you paid him any of these monies.

00:21:18.000 The proof is what I just told you.

00:21:20.000 You have no written proof.

00:21:21.000 Is that correct?

00:21:26.000 So I have some, um, Probably some transactions like in Belize.

00:21:32.000 I probably spent $500 on my card.

00:21:38.000 So she has no proof that she actually paid Wade back.

00:21:42.000 And I love that the lawyer's like, so do you have any proof of that?

00:21:44.000 She's like, well, I just gave you the proof.

00:21:45.000 I said it.

00:21:45.000 That's not proof that there's evidence that you said it.

00:21:50.000 But the whole question is whether you're lying or not.

00:21:52.000 Like, we can't just take at face value that you claim the thing.

00:21:55.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

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00:22:55.000 So, the question is where she got the money, right?

00:22:58.000 In the middle of this proceeding, Fannie Willis basically admits to a campaign finance violation, apparently.

00:23:02.000 She says that she took money from her campaign and kept that, which I don't believe you can do for personal use, last I checked.

00:23:09.000 So my question was, where did that cash originally come from?

00:23:11.000 If it didn't come out of the bank?

00:23:13.000 Cash is fungible.

00:23:15.000 I've had cash for years in my house.

00:23:18.000 So for me to tell you the source of where it comes from, when you go to Publix and you buy something,

00:23:22.000 you get $50, you throw it in there.

00:23:24.000 It's been my whole life.

00:23:26.000 When I took out a large amount of money on my first campaign, I kept some of the cash of that.

00:23:31.000 What now?

00:23:33.000 I can't.

00:23:34.000 Again, first rule of criming, folks, don't admit to the criming.

00:23:37.000 So yeah, that was great.

00:23:38.000 That was really, really good.

00:23:39.000 She concluded with an explanation that she doesn't like wine, she likes very good.

00:23:43.000 I mean, again, this went amazingly well for Fannie Willis and for the anti-Trump team in this particular case.

00:23:48.000 Here she was.

00:23:48.000 I mean, she just blows up on the stand here.

00:23:51.000 It's wild.

00:23:53.000 Much less cash that time, probably four or five hundred dollars.

00:23:56.000 And then I paid for a bunch of stuff.

00:23:59.000 I think we did two different wine tours that you do, which are pretty expensive.

00:24:06.000 I think I bought him.

00:24:08.000 He likes wine.

00:24:09.000 I don't really like wine, to be honest with you.

00:24:10.000 I like Grey Goose.

00:24:13.000 Hmm.

00:24:14.000 She likes Grey Goose.

00:24:14.000 Well, that's the important thing, as you expend $650,000 taxpayer money on the guy you're snipping.

00:24:19.000 Yeah, that's the important thing.

00:24:21.000 Even MSNBC was like, oh no.

00:24:24.000 So there goes the Georgia case.

00:24:26.000 MSNBC had on a former federal prosecutor named Chuck Rosenberg who said, it may be time for Fannie Willis to leave.

00:24:33.000 If it's determined that they have apparently misled, even before the judge rules in this case, do you think we should reach a point where, for the interest of protecting the trial, the entire Fulton County trial, that they should voluntarily step aside?

00:24:48.000 It's a great question.

00:24:49.000 So, this is not going well for the state.

00:24:53.000 It could turn out okay, and it might turn out worse, to your point.

00:25:00.000 It might be appropriate for Ms.

00:25:03.000 Willis to consider removing herself from this case now and turning the reins over to a senior official in the district attorney's office and let him or her handle it.

00:25:16.000 It's worse than that, because Donald Trump's attorneys are going to be able to make the very obvious and clear case that Fannie Willis ginned up this entire case so she could hire, in high-profile fashion, the guy she was stripping so she could go on expensive cruises with him.

00:25:28.000 That's going to be a very easy case to make.

00:25:30.000 And I'm not the only person making that case.

00:25:32.000 Over on MSNBC, there's an analyst named Carolyn Polisi.

00:25:34.000 She says the same thing.

00:25:35.000 She says, this case against Trump is pretty much dead in the water.

00:25:39.000 Don't let the legalese fool you.

00:25:41.000 This is epic.

00:25:42.000 This is monumental.

00:25:43.000 If things are going in the direction we think Fannie Willis lied to the court, it's game over for her.

00:25:50.000 She will be disqualified if they had a relationship prior to when they represented to the court.

00:25:57.000 It's a huge deal.

00:25:58.000 I can't overstate it.

00:26:00.000 Okay, yep.

00:26:01.000 So, um, this is a problem.

00:26:03.000 This is a problem.

00:26:04.000 So let me just make clear one thing.

00:26:06.000 For all those who wish to be associated with or to target Donald Trump, Donald Trump is the monkey's paw.

00:26:11.000 The monkey's paw is a short story in which people discover a magical monkey's paw where if you actually make a wish upon it, you get your wish, but in the worst possible way.

00:26:21.000 So that is exactly Donald Trump.

00:26:23.000 Fannie Wells got her wish.

00:26:24.000 Donald Trump made her famous.

00:26:25.000 Donald Trump made her prominent.

00:26:27.000 Donald Trump may end up putting her in jail, which is just hysterical the way this is working out.

00:26:32.000 So we bid a fond farewell to Fannie Willis, whose career is basically over because, once again, the Dunning-Kruger effect undefeated for a lot of people.

00:26:39.000 And the reason it exists is specifically because of the intersectionality here.

00:26:42.000 I mean, the same day that this is going on, the New York Times ran an entire piece titled, Why the Case Against Fannie Willis Feels Familiar to Black Women.

00:26:50.000 And I just have a question.

00:26:50.000 Why should that feel familiar to black women?

00:26:52.000 Are black women routinely Misappropriating funds in order to pay off the person they're stooping?

00:26:57.000 That seems a little racist.

00:26:58.000 But according to the New York Times, Tangala Hollis Palmer felt a sense of pride when she learned that Fannie Willis, the DA of Fulton County, Georgia, and one of the nation's few elected black female prosecutors, would lead the election interference case against former President Trump.

00:27:11.000 But that pride would be tempered by dismay as news emerged of Ms.

00:27:14.000 Willis' personal relationship with a fellow prosecutor, Nathan J. Wade, an outside lawyer she hired to help run the case.

00:27:20.000 Ms.

00:27:21.000 Hollis Palmer, a black 40-year-old attorney from Mississippi, is mostly upset at critics trying, she said, to discredit Ms.

00:27:26.000 Willis.

00:27:26.000 At first, she was skeptical of the allegations.

00:27:28.000 But when Ms.

00:27:29.000 Willis herself conceded the relationship, Ms.

00:27:30.000 Hollis reserved some disappointment for the prosecutor, who should have used a little more discretion and a little better judgment, she said.

00:27:38.000 So, again, the idea here is that the reason that she's being targeted is not because she is, in fact, corrupt, it's because she is black.

00:27:45.000 And that is why, by the way, there's all these questions about DEI surrounding people like Fannie Willis, about affirmative action surrounding people like Fannie Willis, about people like Kamala Harris, incompetence at their jobs, suddenly vice president of the United States, and heir apparent to the White House.

00:27:58.000 I mean, there are a lot of people out there who are very incompetent in a wide variety of spheres, and if the entire society tells them they are not subject to the meritocracy, that's how you end up with Fannie Willis as the district attorney in Fulton County blowing up whatever case she was going to bring against Donald Trump in the first place.

00:28:12.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

00:28:14.000 First...

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00:29:16.000 Meanwhile, when it comes to Donald Trump's legal issues, the Hush Money trial is apparently going to start with jury selection in March, late March, March 25th, according to a New York judge.

00:29:25.000 That, of course, is the idiotic Alvin Bragg case against Donald Trump.

00:29:29.000 Claiming that Donald Trump, for some odd reason, violated state campaign finance laws by violating federal campaign finance laws by paying Stormy Daniels payoff money to be quiet about their affair.

00:29:42.000 That is that case.

00:29:43.000 It's foolish.

00:29:43.000 There's really no basis for it, but that trial is going to move forward in New York City.

00:29:48.000 So, that is the latest on that.

00:29:50.000 Meanwhile, there is a DOJ case that is currently being brought by Special Counsel David Weiss against a former FBI informant.

00:29:58.000 This would be the informant who claimed that President Joe Biden and son Hunter were involved with Burisma Holdings.

00:30:04.000 The person who they are now prosecuting is a guy named Alexander Smirnoff.

00:30:07.000 He is facing charges in connection with lying to the FBI and creating false records, according to CNN.

00:30:11.000 He was arrested Thursday in Las Vegas.

00:30:15.000 Apparently, the indictment alleges that Smirnoff's story to the FBI was, quote, a fabrication and amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings and contacts that had actually occurred, but at a later date than he claimed, and for the purpose of pitching Burisma on the defendant's services and products, not for discussing bribes to Joe Biden when he was in office.

00:30:31.000 So there are a bunch of FBI memos that contained his talk about how Burisma wanted to pay Joe and Hunter five million bucks apiece and all the rest of it.

00:30:41.000 And now the FBI is saying that he lied about it and they are going to prosecute him over this.

00:30:48.000 So the question the Democrats are making, the one they're bringing, is they're suggesting that because Smirnoff was lying, this discredits everything related to Burisma and Hunter and Joe, which of course it does not.

00:30:58.000 That was supplementary material that supported a lot of the allegations that were made about Hunter and Joe.

00:31:03.000 And it was very direct, but again, unsupported by sort of further evidence about actual payments of $5 million to Joe Biden.

00:31:09.000 But it doesn't end all of the questions about Joe Hunter and trafficking in the Biden business name.

00:31:15.000 So that raises questions as to whether the DOJ is actually targeting this guy because he lied to the FBI or whether they're targeting him in an attempt to basically get Biden off the hook for the second time in the last couple of weeks.

00:31:26.000 He did violate classified document statutes, but they also said he's senile.

00:31:29.000 So that is the way Joe Biden is being let off the hook.

00:31:32.000 Okay, meanwhile, in what I think is far more important news than any of these legal developments, the leading critic of Vladimir Putin has now been found dead in prison or has died in prison under unspecified circumstances.

00:31:44.000 This is an actual important world event.

00:31:46.000 Alexei Navalny was an anti-corruption campaigner who is widely seen as the chief rival to Vladimir Putin in Russia.

00:31:55.000 Unclear how he died.

00:31:56.000 He was merely 47 years old.

00:31:59.000 He had been sentenced on a bunch of trumped-up charges to a penal colony penalty of more than 30 years.

00:32:07.000 So he had been behind bars since January of 2021, according to the Wall Street Journal, when he returned to Russia from Germany, where he was recovering after he'd fallen ill during a flight inside of Russia.

00:32:17.000 So he got sick while he was on this flight inside of Russia.

00:32:21.000 He then flew to Germany to seek treatment.

00:32:23.000 And upon reaching Germany, doctors concluded that he had actually been poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent called Novichok, which is, again, one of the things that Vladimir Putin does.

00:32:33.000 He tends to poison his critics.

00:32:35.000 Navalny, for years, was a large-scale critic of Vladimir Putin up until his arrest.

00:32:40.000 He came back from exile.

00:32:41.000 He was immediately arrested by Vladimir Putin's team, and then he was sentenced, and then he was moved to an Arctic prison so remote that, at first, nobody knew where the hell he was.

00:32:51.000 I mean, for literally weeks, they shuttled him around so that nobody could find out where he was.

00:32:55.000 And then finally he released a message saying that he was in a place that was extremely cold, far in the north, where all he could see were some dogs and some snow, basically.

00:33:05.000 Here is footage of Navalny from yesterday in a court appearance.

00:33:07.000 And as you can see, he looks alive and well.

00:33:09.000 Now, he looks skinny, obviously, but this does not look like somebody who is on the verge of death,

00:33:21.000 obviously.

00:33:23.000 This is him literally yesterday.

00:33:30.000 As the Wall Street Journal reports, Navalny's death practically extinguishes the last real

00:33:34.000 political opposition that still remained inside Russia following Vladimir Putin's invasion

00:33:38.000 of Ukraine, his crackdown on free speech, and the passage of increasingly draconian

00:33:42.000 laws aimed at stamping out any dissent.

00:33:44.000 .

00:33:45.000 Navalny's time in jail reflected the worst excesses of a judicial and prison system that has increasingly been used to punish Putin's political opponents.

00:33:53.000 He had suffered alarming health ailments in prison, issues that had worsened in recent months.

00:33:59.000 His lawyers were basically cut off from all access on him.

00:34:02.000 He was growing increasingly emaciated in video appearances in court.

00:34:08.000 So, again, everyone suspects, because people get suicided regularly, and death by natural causes regularly, if they are opponents of Vladimir Putin, that the Putin regime finally had enough of Alexei Navalny, and they felt the threat from the outside, or from Navalny, or from maybe the inside of Russia, and so it was just a convenient time to get rid of Alexei Navalny.

00:34:29.000 And Navalny, again, large-scale critic of the Kremlin.

00:34:33.000 In 2020, Navalny did an interview on 60 Minutes, and here he was on 60 Minutes talking about his poisoning.

00:34:41.000 I said to the flight attendant, and I kind of shocked him with my statement, well, I was poisoned, and I'm going to die, and I immediately lay down under his feet.

00:34:51.000 Alexei Navalny was on a flight to Moscow from Siberia, where he'd been campaigning against Putin's party in a local election when he collapsed with no pain, but knowing he was dying.

00:35:04.000 Actually, every cell of your body just telling you, that's body, We are done.

00:35:10.000 And I gather they suspected poison right away?

00:35:14.000 Yes, of course.

00:35:15.000 Meanwhile, his team in Siberia searched his hotel room, collecting things Navalny may have touched, like this water bottle, which the doctors in Berlin sent along with a blood sample to a German military lab.

00:35:29.000 To see exactly what the poison was.

00:35:32.000 And the answer was Novichok.

00:35:34.000 They discovered Novichok, this nerve agent, in my blood, inside of body, on my body, and all this bottle from the hotel.

00:35:44.000 So that's why we now we know that I was poisoned in the hotel because I Well, again, it's just a pure speculation because no one knows what happened exactly.

00:35:56.000 But I think that when I was maybe put some clothes with this poison on me, I touch it with the hand and then I sip from the bottle.

00:36:07.000 So this nerve agent was not inside of a bottle but on the bottle.

00:36:11.000 Novichok is a highly toxic nerve agent said to be 10 times more potent than sarin gas.

00:36:17.000 Labs in France and Sweden corroborated the finding.

00:36:21.000 There's no doubt it was military-grade Novichok.

00:36:26.000 In just one second, we'll get to more on Alexei Navalny's death, almost certainly killed in prison.

00:36:31.000 We'll get to that in a second.

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00:37:02.000 Okay, meanwhile... So the question, of course, is why was Navalny poisoned in the first place?

00:37:07.000 Navalny was on 60 Minutes, and here he was explaining why Vladimir Putin tried to kill him.

00:37:12.000 But why would Putin want to poison Alexei Navalny?

00:37:16.000 When we first met Navalny three years ago, he was running against Putin for president.

00:37:21.000 He had made a name for himself by getting his hands on incriminating internal financial documents related to high-level officials and posting them on a blog.

00:37:31.000 Did these documents that you got prove corruption?

00:37:35.000 Absolutely.

00:37:35.000 I work as a whistleblower, and I'm not afraid to announce the names.

00:37:41.000 He says he found that the Kremlin's inner circle was accumulating vast amounts of wealth and published pictures of multiple homes and yachts.

00:37:50.000 He moved on to airing documentaries on YouTube with video of the officials' lavish lifestyle.

00:37:57.000 And it's something very special about Mr. Putin, that he's crazy about money, personal money, about his family being rich, his friends, like all his people who served with him in the KGB.

00:38:13.000 All of them, they are billionaires.

00:38:15.000 That's why fighting corruption means for him that he's fighting me.

00:38:20.000 Okay, and now he has fought him to the point where Navalny is dead.

00:38:24.000 I mean, the reality is that Vladimir Putin is a vicious dictator who kills his political opponents.

00:38:28.000 I mean, the list is as long as your arm of people that Vladimir Putin has killed, ranging from journalists to fellow oligarchs to dissidents who have challenged him in any sort of way, at home and abroad, by the way.

00:38:37.000 He has had people killed well outside the borders of Russia.

00:38:42.000 And this is why I have to say it is pretty wild that Tucker Carlson didn't just interview Putin, which was fine, as I talked about on the show at length.

00:38:50.000 When Tucker interviewed Putin, I thought he did a fine job.

00:38:53.000 All he did was let Putin talk, and I thought it was illuminating and interesting.

00:38:56.000 And then Tucker went on to essentially act as a propagandist for Vladimir Putin in Russia.

00:39:02.000 He went on to act as a as a sort of Walter Durante, Bernie Sanders knockoff.

00:39:07.000 So he has spent the days since his interview with Putin gallivanting around Moscow and doing what pretty much appears to be almost identical to Bernie Sanders level propaganda on behalf of the Russian regime.

00:39:20.000 I say this because here, for example, is a Bernie Sanders circa 1988 talking about the magic of one of Moscow's train stations.

00:39:27.000 Just to give you sort of a background here.

00:39:29.000 Here is here is Bernie.

00:39:32.000 The stations themselves were absolutely beautiful, including many works of art, chandeliers that were beautiful.

00:39:39.000 It was a very, very effective system.

00:39:41.000 So, Tucker began his tour of Moscow by going to one of the train stations in Moscow.

00:39:49.000 A few things here.

00:39:50.000 He said before that Moscow's train stations are clean, they aren't homeless, that you're not worried about being pushed in front of a train.

00:39:55.000 And I actually defended that statement to the extent that I think that major American cities have done an awful job with crime.

00:40:01.000 I mean, I was just in Camden, New Jersey, which is one of the crime capitals of the United States.

00:40:05.000 It is a fact that American cities have done a terrible job in terms of cracking down on crime.

00:40:09.000 That happens to be true, but that's not what Tucker is doing here.

00:40:12.000 Tucker is doing something a little different, which is suggesting that the entire regime upon which The train station is based.

00:40:20.000 He goes to a train station and basically says, because this train station is nice and has chandeliers, people in Russia are living wonderful lives under the tutelage of Vladimir Putin.

00:40:29.000 And he keeps saying that sort of thing over and over and over again, which is strange because he doesn't actually need to make that claim.

00:40:36.000 If he wants to claim that the Ukrainians should not be supported by American taxpayer dollars, you can make that claim without actually going full Duranty.

00:40:44.000 But as Robert Downey Jr.

00:40:47.000 might say, never go full Durante.

00:40:48.000 In any case, here was Tucker at the Moscow station.

00:40:54.000 One of the ways you understand a society is through its infrastructure, the places where people gather, the places where they go to travel.

00:41:00.000 You've got a lot of people in one place, it tells you a lot about the people.

00:41:03.000 So with that in mind, we're standing in front of the Kyivskaya metro station, and there's a train station next to it.

00:41:08.000 Now the metro station was built by Joseph Stalin 70 years ago.

00:41:12.000 And the question is, how's it doing now, after 70 years?

00:41:17.000 So we went into it to take a look, and what we found shocked us.

00:41:22.000 Now, that's not an endorsement of Stalin, who was bad, obviously, nor is it an endorsement of the current president, Vladimir Putin.

00:41:28.000 You may not like him either.

00:41:31.000 But it doesn't change the reality of what we saw or, more precisely, didn't see.

00:41:35.000 There's no graffiti.

00:41:36.000 There's no filth.

00:41:37.000 There are no foul smells.

00:41:39.000 There are no bums or drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you.

00:41:45.000 No.

00:41:46.000 It's perfectly clean and orderly.

00:41:49.000 And how do you explain that?

00:41:50.000 We're not even going to guess.

00:41:52.000 That's not our job.

00:41:53.000 We're only going to ask the question.

00:41:55.000 And if your response is to shout at us slogans dumber than the slogans we used to call Soviet and mock, that's not really an answer.

00:42:04.000 How does Russia, a country we're told is a gas station with nuclear weapons, have a subway station that normal people use to get to work and home every single day that's nicer than anything in our country?

00:42:17.000 We're not going to speculate.

00:42:20.000 We're just going to raise the question and wait for someone in charge to give us an answer.

00:42:24.000 What is the answer?

00:42:26.000 So we'll stop the lecture and let you take a look for yourself at what the Kievskaya metro station in Moscow, Russia looks like today.

00:42:35.000 Okay, now pause it for one second.

00:42:37.000 So he's not going to speculate on what the answer is here.

00:42:38.000 OK, I'll give you the answer.

00:42:40.000 The answer is very clear.

00:42:41.000 Every dictatorship has certain areas that are extremely clean where they bring a foreign journalist to show them how clean those areas are.

00:42:48.000 In fact, that's precisely why this train station was built.

00:42:51.000 In 1935, this particular train station was opened.

00:42:55.000 It was originally created by a guy named Lazar Kaganovich, who happened to be one of Joseph Stalin's right-hand men.

00:43:01.000 The way that the train station was built is they hired a bunch of people who'd actually built the London Underground.

00:43:04.000 They had to go to the West to get people to build it for them.

00:43:07.000 And then, they basically jailed all those people because they knew how the Moscow train stations were working.

00:43:12.000 And also, in order to fund this thing, they had to, you know, bring in a bunch of workers, and they had to pay those workers.

00:43:17.000 Well, how exactly did they pay those workers?

00:43:19.000 They needed hard currency to buy all of the instruments in order to build this particular train station.

00:43:25.000 So, how did they get all that stuff?

00:43:27.000 Well, the answer is, they went over to Ukraine, they stole all the grain, and they murdered all the kulaks.

00:43:31.000 The Haladzmar is actually one of the reasons why you have a beautiful train station right here, but that doesn't even answer why it's nice now.

00:43:37.000 The answer why it's nice now is because dictators have always been able to clean up particular train stations.

00:43:43.000 That's not an answer as to whether the country itself is in good shape.

00:43:46.000 The country itself is in pretty terrible shape, actually.

00:43:49.000 If you go to Pyongyang, there are beautiful pictures of some of the subway stations in Pyongyang.

00:43:54.000 That's in North Korea.

00:43:56.000 North Korea is a sh**hole.

00:43:58.000 This bizarre notion that you can go to one train station and then suggest that something is being done right overall by the regime because the one train station is nice.

00:44:08.000 Again, I fully take the critique and agree with the critique that the train stations in the United States are run like garbage in big cities like New York and that they're too dangerous.

00:44:17.000 There's been no one more pro-cop than I have been on these issues.

00:44:20.000 But that's not the argument that Tucker's making.

00:44:21.000 He's making the argument that somehow the regime overall is bizarrely legit.

00:44:26.000 And it's all done by implication, right?

00:44:28.000 I'm not even going to speculate.

00:44:29.000 I'm not even... Well, I mean, you could just say what I say.

00:44:32.000 I mean, you don't have to speculate.

00:44:34.000 The reason the train station is nice is because Vladimir Putin spends dictatorial resources on keeping that train station nice.

00:44:40.000 And the reason the rest of Russia is in really bad shape is because Vladimir Putin spends all of the resources making the train station nice and killing his political opponents like Alexei Navalny.

00:44:47.000 This is all happening the same week that he killed Alexei Navalny, in all likelihood, in prison after jailing him on specious charges, by the way.

00:44:53.000 And then, just to make sure that it's not commentary, you get the actual full-scale propaganda b-roll from the Moscow railway station.

00:45:01.000 Here we go.

00:45:03.000 Today, February 2024, in the middle of a war.

00:45:07.000 Here it is.

00:45:08.000 It's a beautiful train station.

00:45:25.000 So is the one in Pyongyang.

00:45:26.000 So, in fact, were the highways in Germany in 1936.

00:45:28.000 It turns out that pretty much every di- There's places in Beijing that are super nice.

00:45:33.000 Every single dictatorship on planet Earth has great places to show foreign journalists.

00:45:38.000 Wow, they have chandeliers in the sub- I mean, Alexei Navalny's not gonna see those anytime soon, but they do have chandeliers in the subways, and that's the important thing, isn't it?

00:45:46.000 That it's well-lit, and that this one train station is great.

00:45:50.000 Okay, this isn't even the best sort of bizarre video from Tucker that he has released in the last three days.

00:45:56.000 He also released a video in which he went to a Russian supermarket.

00:46:01.000 Now, honestly, what this video shows to me more than anything else, and again, the entire idea here is that you're supposed to be enraged at the United States because you went to a Russian supermarket.

00:46:09.000 He actually says that in this video.

00:46:11.000 And I will point out many things about this particular video because it's truly kind of an astonishing video.

00:46:18.000 So, remember, this is while Russia is in the middle of invading a sovereign country in Ukraine.

00:46:24.000 The war in Ukraine has killed a couple hundred thousand people on the Ukrainian side and probably 300,000 people on the Russian side.

00:46:29.000 The Russian economy is really, really weak.

00:46:33.000 The dissidents in Russia are imprisoned or killed, or both, as in the case of Alexei Navalny.

00:46:38.000 But Tucker did go to a grocery store so that he could talk about how bad America is.

00:46:43.000 In the weirdest way possible.

00:46:44.000 So here is Tucker.

00:46:46.000 So a longstanding feature, maybe the longest standing feature of Cold War propaganda in the West, was the Soviet grocery store.

00:46:55.000 No products, no choices, shoddily made things.

00:47:02.000 And it wasn't actually propaganda, it was real.

00:47:03.000 And you can look up the pictures on the internet if you want.

00:47:06.000 So we thought it would be interesting to take a look at a contemporary, modern day, 2024 Russian grocery store, two years into sanctions.

00:47:15.000 Here we go.

00:47:18.000 All right.

00:47:19.000 Here we go.

00:47:20.000 So I guess you put in 10 rubles here and you get it back when you put the cart back.

00:47:28.000 So it's free, but there's an incentive to return it and not just bring it to your homeless encampment.

00:47:35.000 Okay.

00:47:35.000 This is the, uh...

00:47:37.000 Grocery cart escalator.

00:47:39.000 This is designed, I'm figuring this out now, where the wheels don't move, they lock on the grocery cart escalator.

00:47:46.000 Look, Ma, no hands.

00:47:51.000 Retail placement here is a little bit different.

00:47:53.000 It's like walking through Macy's to get to Whole Foods.

00:47:56.000 Okay, we've gotten through the perfume section to get to the grocery store.

00:48:00.000 So we're gonna try and buy what a family of four would buy every week, and we're gonna see what the selection is, and we're gonna see what it costs.

00:48:07.000 Now, Russia is famous for its bread, which is one thing I can assess pretty well.

00:48:13.000 The low-carb lifestyle has not swept Russia.

00:48:16.000 Thank heaven, because, I mean, look at that.

00:48:19.000 It's fresh, too.

00:48:20.000 Look at that!

00:48:23.000 Come on!

00:48:25.000 Unicorn and Minnie Mills.

00:48:28.000 All right Some kind of Russian wheat cookies

00:48:39.000 Ooh, we need coffee.

00:48:41.000 Don't we?

00:48:43.000 I don't know if this is sugar or flour, to be honest with you, but it looks like a staple, so we should get it.

00:48:49.000 It's a very good-looking package.

00:48:51.000 It's gotta be flour, right?

00:48:53.000 And this is Russian wine.

00:48:54.000 It's from Crimea, which not only has the warm-water naval base, but also is the source of most of the grapes in this part of Russia for wine.

00:49:05.000 So it's apparently pretty good.

00:49:10.000 Cheese puffs?

00:49:11.000 You check out of a grocery store and you've got gum, razor blades, and candy.

00:49:16.000 Actually, they hide the razor blades because we steal them.

00:49:19.000 But these all seem to be Western products.

00:49:21.000 Mars, Twix, Snickers, Milky Way, Bounty, Gillette, Paul's Cough Drops, Mentos.

00:49:32.000 It's pretty non-sanctioned to me, but what do I know?

00:49:37.000 I went from amused to legitimately angry.

00:49:42.000 So we were guessing what this would cost.

00:49:44.000 Everybody here is from the United States, buys groceries.

00:49:46.000 And we didn't pay any attention to cost as we were just putting in the cart where we would actually eat over a week.

00:49:51.000 And we all came in around 400 bucks, about 400 bucks.

00:49:56.000 It was $104 US here.

00:49:59.000 And that's when you start to realize that ideology maybe doesn't matter as much as you thought.

00:50:04.000 Corruption.

00:50:06.000 If you take people's standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation, and they literally can't buy the groceries they want, at that point, maybe it matters less what you say or whether you're a good person or a bad person.

00:50:20.000 You're wrecking people's lives and their country, and that's what our leaders have done to us.

00:50:24.000 And coming to a Russian grocery store, the heart of evil, And seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders.

00:50:33.000 That's how I feel, anyway.

00:50:35.000 Radicalized.

00:50:36.000 We're not making any of this up, by the way.

00:50:39.000 Two things that are worth noting here.

00:50:40.000 One, the idea doesn't matter if you're good or bad or how corrupt it is, so long as, you know, there are no homeless people at the subway station.

00:50:47.000 So you can kill Alexei Navalny, but as long as you can still get bananas at the grocery store, like, does anyone really, should you complain, really?

00:50:54.000 Number one, there's that, which is absurd on its face on a moral level.

00:50:58.000 And then, you just have the basic misunderstanding of how economics works.

00:51:02.000 Like a really, really basic misunderstanding of how economics works.

00:51:05.000 So, little secret about supply and demand.

00:51:08.000 If it turns out that you're in a poor country, if you're a rich American, everything looks super duper cheap.

00:51:14.000 I know it's amazing.

00:51:15.000 If I go to Venezuela, whatever I have in my wallet will probably buy half the country right now.

00:51:19.000 Is that because Venezuela is like an amazing economy?

00:51:22.000 Products are so cheap there.

00:51:24.000 It's like amazing.

00:51:26.000 Or is that because I'm a rich American and the exchange rate means I can get pretty much whatever I want.

00:51:30.000 I can do that in any poor country in the world.

00:51:32.000 I can walk.

00:51:33.000 Why do you think American tourists are upcharged on everything?

00:51:36.000 If you go to like the Shuk in Israel or an Arab market anywhere.

00:51:41.000 And you're an American and you're negotiating with a guy and they realize you're American, they will up the price.

00:51:45.000 Why do you think that is?

00:51:46.000 Because they know you have money.

00:51:48.000 That is the whole thing.

00:51:49.000 That's the whole thing.

00:51:50.000 By the way, there's so many things that are wrong with what Tucker is saying here.

00:51:53.000 It's going to radicalize you that you go to a poor country and things are cheaper, which is like.

00:51:58.000 How does he think that the wage base in the United States has been undercut by foreign competition because wages in other countries are cheaper?

00:52:06.000 Is that because things are amazing in, say, China?

00:52:09.000 For those wage laborers, after all, they can get their food even though we're paying them nothing.

00:52:16.000 In order to radicalize yourself off of the fact that food is cheaper comparatively in Russia than it is in the United States for an American, I say for an American because I'm going to get to how expensive it is if you're Russian in a second.

00:52:28.000 You have to want to be radicalized.

00:52:29.000 You have to want to do the propaganda work.

00:52:31.000 And again, Tucker didn't have to do any of this.

00:52:33.000 All Tucker had to do... And if he steps outside of Moscow, by the way, things are way worse.

00:52:37.000 He's being led to, like, the nicest areas of Moscow.

00:52:40.000 He's being taken to the Bolshoi Ballet, and he's being taken to the Moscow train station, and to, like, the really nice upscale supermarket.

00:52:47.000 If he took, like, a three-mile ride outside of Moscow, things would look very, very different.

00:52:52.000 But that's the kind of amazing thing about all of this.

00:52:55.000 Let me just tell you something about how it works.

00:52:57.000 If you are a Russian, if you're a Russian, Russia has a per capita GDP of $13,000.

00:53:02.000 A per capita GDP of $13,000.

00:53:04.000 The per capita GDP of the United States Today is $70,000, 7-0 compared to 13.

00:53:15.000 It's worse than that, by the way, because per capita GDP does not tell you even remotely the entire story of who has all the wealth in Russia.

00:53:22.000 About 500 oligarchs have pretty much all the wealth in Russia, like legitimately all of it.

00:53:27.000 In fact, the median salary, which is a good representation of sort of the average person in Russia, ranges anywhere from about 590 bucks per month in July of 2023, according to Spanner Index, to about 750 bucks a month.

00:53:40.000 Now do the quick math.

00:53:41.000 You're talking about like less than $8,000 a year would be the median salary.

00:53:45.000 In fact, according to studies, 60 plus percent of Russians spend half their salary on food.

00:53:51.000 Half of it.

00:53:53.000 That is not remotely what Americans spend on food.

00:53:55.000 Because you know why?

00:53:56.000 We're real rich over here.

00:53:58.000 And that means that we can support higher prices.

00:54:01.000 That they can't support in Russia.

00:54:03.000 So in other words, Tucker's over there being like, oh my God, look how cheap this is.

00:54:05.000 And every Russian is looking at that bill and they're thinking to themselves, that is like a lot of, that's a lot of money.

00:54:12.000 And he says this would support, that what he had in his cart would support a family for a week, right?

00:54:16.000 That's what he suggests.

00:54:17.000 And that costs like a hundred bucks.

00:54:19.000 And to him, that's really cheap.

00:54:21.000 But as I just said, the average monthly salary of a Russian, the median monthly salary is like 600 bucks a month.

00:54:29.000 So it's a hundred bucks to feed a family for a week.

00:54:32.000 There are four weeks in a month last I checked.

00:54:34.000 That means you're spending well in excess of two thirds of what you earn in any given month just on food in Russia.

00:54:42.000 And in fact, when he suggested, well, they don't have inflation over here because I mean, look how cheap things are.

00:54:46.000 It's the opposite.

00:54:48.000 It's the opposite.

00:54:49.000 The exchange rate to the ruble has skyrocketed.

00:54:53.000 In other words, an American dollar goes way farther in Russia than it would in the United States, specifically because everybody in Russia is so much poorer.

00:55:01.000 In fact, you can even see it in the video.

00:55:02.000 Tucker shows footage.

00:55:05.000 From the supermarket cash register of how much that cost.

00:55:08.000 And it was something like 9,481 rubles.

00:55:09.000 And he says that comes out to like $104.

00:55:10.000 81 rubles and he says that comes out like a hundred and four dollars.

00:55:13.000 In other words, the exchange rate right now is one one dollar is 92 rubles.

00:55:20.000 In 2010, one dollar was.

00:55:22.000 So if you're talking about inflation and bad economies, Russia has inflation and a bad economy.

00:55:27.000 In fact, just over the course of 2023, consumer price inflation was 8%.

00:55:32.000 In 2022, it was 13.8%.

00:55:35.000 And for particular products like cabbage or oranges, the increase in prices was in excess of 70%.

00:55:43.000 Life in Russia is not good under Vladimir Putin.

00:55:46.000 Don't be fooled by like the train station with the chandeliers.

00:55:51.000 Full-on 23% of the Russian population does not have indoor plumbing.

00:55:56.000 If you head out to the rural areas, not to the center of Moscow, the richest area, what you'll find is that 48% of Russians in those areas still use outhouses.

00:56:05.000 18% additionally, so like two-thirds of Russians who are living in rural areas do not have indoor plumbing.

00:56:11.000 18% have zero sewage system, not even an outhouse.

00:56:13.000 They only have like a pit.

00:56:16.000 That is how things are working in Russia today.

00:56:19.000 And as for the supposed joys of living in Russia, they have a 21% alcoholism rate in Russia for men and women, about 500,000 abortions per year in Russia.

00:56:29.000 Russia's population right now is approximately 143 million.

00:56:34.000 The United States population right now is approximately 331 million.

00:56:40.000 So we have about a million abortions a year in the United States, which is awful and horrifying and terrible, and everybody, including Tucker, hates that.

00:56:46.000 Russia's abortion rate is far higher than that of the United States.

00:56:50.000 Well under 10% of Russians actually attend church on a monthly basis.

00:56:55.000 Forget about a weekly basis, a monthly basis.

00:56:58.000 In other words, propagandizing for this regime is a lie.

00:57:03.000 It is bad.

00:57:04.000 It is wrong.

00:57:06.000 And Tucker also went to a McDonald's over in Russia.

00:57:08.000 It's a McDonald's that had been transferred over to Russian control because McDonald's decided that they couldn't actually make money in Russia.

00:57:13.000 He does the same thing.

00:57:14.000 He's amazed by the quality of the food.

00:57:16.000 It's amazing.

00:57:16.000 It's just the same as McDonald's.

00:57:17.000 Well, yeah, because, I mean, it was a McDonald's.

00:57:19.000 And then they just turned over this particular chain to the Russian CEO of McDonald's.

00:57:25.000 They sold it to him.

00:57:26.000 What Tucker neglects to tell you is that for several months in, say, 2022, they didn't have French fries because the potato harvest was not good enough, as reported by the Associated Press at the time.

00:57:36.000 Now, why is any of this important?

00:57:38.000 Because the juxtaposition of what Tucker is doing to prop up Russia as some sort of wonderful model to emulate for the United States, which is what a lot of these videos are about.

00:57:50.000 Again, specific critiques of the United States when it comes to our positions on crime, for example.

00:57:56.000 I agree with that.

00:57:57.000 That's not what Tucker is doing here.

00:57:59.000 It's clearly not what Tucker is doing here.

00:58:01.000 He continues to say he's being radicalized by things like low prices in Russia because it's a poor country.

00:58:06.000 Or that he's amazed by the fact that they have things that are commonplace in the United States.

00:58:09.000 Well, one thing I noticed is that when it comes to population migration, not a hell of a lot of people from America migrating to Russia, a lot of people from Russia migrating to the United States, and that is for a reason.

00:58:20.000 The question of what is indicative of how Vladimir Putin rules, the death of Alexei Navalny, or the fact that they still have chandeliers in the Moscow train station, it's pretty clearly the death of Alexei Navalny.

00:58:31.000 And that's without any political reference to what's going on in Ukraine.

00:58:35.000 There's this strain that's grown on both the right and the left that suggests that America is somehow not the greatest place in the world, that America is actually quite terrible, and that if you go to other countries, these other countries are better.

00:58:45.000 There are certain things about other countries that you could say are superior to the United States.

00:58:49.000 You could.

00:58:50.000 You can say that there are certain educational systems that are run better than those of the United States.

00:58:53.000 You can say that a train station in Moscow is cleaner than a train station in New York City.

00:58:59.000 But the broad-based political critique that somehow it doesn't matter how you run the government so long as the trains run on time, or it doesn't even matter if the trains run on time.

00:59:08.000 America is just kind of inherently bad.

00:59:10.000 That's incredibly problematic.

00:59:11.000 It's incredibly dangerous.

00:59:13.000 And it's hard to see how it's super America first.

00:59:16.000 All right, you guys, the rest of the show continues right now.

00:59:18.000 We're going to be getting into Joe Biden's senility.

00:59:20.000 The media are covering it up.

00:59:22.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

00:59:23.000 Use code Shapiro.

00:59:23.000 Check out for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - February 16, 2024

What You Talkin’ Bout, Willis?

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