The Ben Shapiro Show - Woke Bill Burr Attacks Me AGAIN...PLUS A Russiagate SMOKING GUN?!

00:00:00.000 Alrighty, a big show coming up for you today.

00:00:02.000 Bill Burr is attacking me again.

00:00:04.000 He just can't get over the fact that I called him woke.

00:00:06.000 We will get into that.

00:00:07.000 Plus, Kamala Harris is making the rounds about her brand book and an actual real kind of smoking gun on Russia Gate that directly implicates Hillary Rodham Clinton.

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00:00:48.000 So, Bill Burr, you know, the comedian or maybe now ex-comedian is pretty angry at me still.

00:00:54.000 Like, he's still angry at me because all the way back in February, if you recall, I said that he had gone woke and he got really sad.

00:01:01.000 That was after he said that the healthcare CEOs of America might deserve to be murdered.

00:01:06.000 So, apparently, yesterday he did an interview with Vulture, which is a publication that allegedly still exists.

00:01:11.000 And here is what Bill Burr had to say: Ben Shapiro talked about going to one of your shows and complaining about you becoming woke, which sort of then crazy.

00:01:21.000 He doesn't even know what that word means.

00:01:23.000 Let me tell you.

00:01:24.000 His definition of woke is white liberals' definition of woke, and they didn't even know what it was.

00:01:28.000 They just took the word from black people.

00:01:30.000 That's the worst thing about our people: not only do we take from other cultures, we don't even take the time to understand the definition.

00:01:37.000 Yeah, he went there to be annoyed so he can then have something to talk about, and then he can make money off of dividing his own country.

00:01:47.000 Yeah, those people that it's treasonous, but they do.

00:01:50.000 Yes, but and it, but to be fair, or not to be fair, to uh, the fact is that it worked for what his goal is, which is then he became a thing online where then a certain portion of the right complain about how you're woke racists and were racist.

00:02:02.000 They're racist.

00:02:03.000 Yeah, they send pictures of monkeys to me and my wife.

00:02:05.000 They're horrible people, and they're cowards, and they never say it to your face.

00:02:09.000 What I'm finding is that people keep trying to categorize what it is that you're doing, like that idiot Ben Shapiro.

00:02:19.000 No, he's he's woke now.

00:02:20.000 He's like, I don't, that guy, someone came to me and goes, Hey, man, you should he was trying to bring me into his fold.

00:02:28.000 At one point, the guy liked me, yeah, yeah, you know, and then when I didn't, then all of a sudden, I'm a guy like he's an adult.

00:02:37.000 Do you feel misunderstood if people take you words one way or the other?

00:02:41.000 No, I'm not misunderstood.

00:02:42.000 I'm deliberately misunderstood.

00:02:43.000 Got it.

00:02:44.000 Ah, okay.

00:02:45.000 A couple quick housekeeping notes there.

00:02:47.000 First, I don't need to pay to go to your comedy show to be annoyed.

00:02:50.000 There's a lot of stuff in the world that annoys me.

00:02:52.000 And typically, I don't shell out hundreds of bucks and then take my wife and my friends to a show in order to be annoyed.

00:02:58.000 I'm sorry, you did a show and a bunch of people didn't laugh in Florida, and then you fussed like a child, and then you walked off the stage.

00:03:05.000 It was really ridiculous, and that's on you, my dude.

00:03:07.000 You probably should give the people refunds because they paid for Bill Burr at Red Rock and they got Joy Behar at the dive bar.

00:03:13.000 I mean, you used to do jokes like this.

00:03:16.000 Look at the WNBA, they have been playing in front of three to 400 people a night for a quarter of a century.

00:03:25.000 Not to mention, it's a male-subsidized league.

00:03:28.000 We gave you a league! 0.69

00:03:31.000 Where are all the feminists? 1.00

00:03:33.000 That place should be packed with feminists wearing jerseys, slashing their going nuts like the guys do in the upper deck with their big beards. 1.00

00:03:44.000 Am I on the Jumbotron?

00:03:47.000 Am I doing it?

00:03:49.000 Women failed the WNBA. 0.99

00:03:52.000 Ladies, ladies, name your top five all-time WNBA players of all time. 0.90

00:03:57.000 Come on.

00:03:59.000 That's it.

00:04:00.000 Name five WNBA teams. 1.00

00:04:02.000 Name the WNBTA team in your city.

00:04:04.000 You can't do it.

00:04:06.000 You don't give a fight.

00:04:12.000 They play night in and night out in front of nobody.

00:04:14.000 It's a tragedy.

00:04:19.000 Okay, that's what he used to be.

00:04:21.000 And now your latest material is like this.

00:04:25.000 They're talking about looting, but CNN and Fox News are not going to bring up the insurance companies that are just going to keep everybody's premiums and still give themselves a bonus.

00:04:34.000 That's free, Luigi.

00:04:39.000 For conservative people to act like they're not the biggest babies also is hilarious.

00:04:45.000 Have you seen this?

00:04:47.000 My people, Whitey, we're all upset.

00:04:50.000 There's enough of us to get it going, trending anyway.

00:04:53.000 We're upset about the new Cinderella movie.

00:05:01.000 The actress playing Cinderella isn't white. 1.00

00:05:05.000 There's no prince.

00:05:06.000 They changed the story.

00:05:09.000 What am I going to tell my kids?

00:05:17.000 That my people get upset about.

00:05:19.000 What am I going to tell my kids?

00:05:22.000 Well, talk around it the way you do.

00:05:24.000 We talk around the real history of this country.

00:05:29.000 Oh my God.

00:05:31.000 Oh my God.

00:05:32.000 I mean, I'm glad he's laughing at himself because nobody else is.

00:05:35.000 Man, what a fall.

00:05:37.000 Not liking your show isn't treason.

00:05:39.000 You do if you're not the president.

00:05:40.000 You're the guy who came in second in the Billy Corgan look-alike contest because he showed up sloppy drunk and forgot to shave again.

00:05:47.000 So here's what I mean by wokeness.

00:05:48.000 I actually do have a definition, and I've done it over and over and over on the show.

00:05:52.000 And it's not really my definition.

00:05:54.000 It's the definition that Richard Delgado and Gene Stefanchik, who literally wrote a book on critical race theory, laid out and explaining their basic principles, which match up with wokeness.

00:06:03.000 One, racism is ordinary, not aberrant.

00:06:06.000 And second, our system of white over color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material.

00:06:12.000 So you put those together.

00:06:13.000 And what that means is that the system of America, in short, is designed to create racially disparate outcomes.

00:06:19.000 Any proof of racially disparate outcomes is evidence of the malignancy of the system. 0.96

00:06:24.000 Now, there's another element of wokeness that is self-contradictory here: that there is a racial essentialism that Stops you from criticizing as unfactual the viewpoints of others.

00:06:34.000 You don't understand because you're not black, or you can't understand because you're not gay. 0.99

00:06:38.000 And this ends conversations.

00:06:39.000 And it contradicts the fundamental basis of wokeness because the basis of wokeness is that everybody is basically the same, which means all group outcomes should be the same, which means any inequality of group outcome is evidence of systemic inequity.

00:06:51.000 But then also, wokeness will posit that racial groups are so different that you can't even talk to one another.

00:06:56.000 You can't even criticize the viewpoints of members of another racial group.

00:06:59.000 It's a bizarre defense mechanism.

00:07:01.000 So I call Bill Burr woke because he is.

00:07:05.000 He believes that America is a deeply racist place and that it's embedded in all of our social systems.

00:07:10.000 And the evidence of that is our economic inequality.

00:07:13.000 And therefore, it's probably okay to shoot healthcare CEOs.

00:07:16.000 And also, if you criticize him as woke, it's because you don't really understand the term woke because black people invented that term. 0.98

00:07:22.000 And white people then use the term woke as a descriptor.

00:07:26.000 And that's cultural appropriation.

00:07:27.000 Oh, how times have changed.

00:07:29.000 This is the Bill Burr who used to tell, you know, like this joke.

00:07:34.000 I'm the black guy who brought up leg shaking.

00:07:36.000 Saying Elvis took leg shaken from us?

00:07:39.000 It's like, really?

00:07:40.000 Leg shaken?

00:07:41.000 No, nobody thought to do this.

00:07:44.000 Black people came up with that. 0.98

00:07:46.000 You telling me that?

00:07:47.000 I'll even give you that.

00:07:48.000 Let's say you came up with that, but where did that black dude learn how to do it? 1.00

00:07:51.000 Didn't he watch some older black guy do it? 0.82

00:07:53.000 But what?

00:07:54.000 Because he's the same color.

00:07:55.000 He's not stealing.

00:07:56.000 He's just carrying on the tradition.

00:07:57.000 But if Elvis does it, oh, what the f.

00:07:59.000 Now he's the biggest thief ever.

00:08:01.000 That doesn't make any sense to me.

00:08:04.000 Okay, so now Bill Burr would presumably call that Bill Burr insensitive and unresponsive to the needs and definitions of black people, which all this amazing guys, because Bill Burr is whiter than a painting of a polar bear in snow on a white canvas.

00:08:18.000 So he's actually the most annoying form of a woke person.

00:08:21.000 A white lib, the kind he likes to criticize. 0.96

00:08:23.000 The white person who apologizes for being white by pretending that he can speak on behalf of black people about the systemic privileges of being white.

00:08:31.000 Oh, yeah, while pulling down millions of dollars to be an angry thumb of a human.

00:08:35.000 So Baldrumpel Stiltskin over here, who gets mad when you call him by his real name, is still pissed off.

00:08:40.000 I didn't enjoy his comedy show last year and he thinks that I and my friends and my wife, we all paid to attend his show just so that I could criticize him.

00:08:48.000 No, here's the thing.

00:08:49.000 On a random weekday night, if I'm going to a comedy show, I'm going because I want to laugh.

00:08:54.000 We paid to attend your show because you used to be funny.

00:08:57.000 And then you trans yourself and turned into a white, bald, allegedly male version of Sonny Hawson on the view, screeching at me about income inequality and racism. 0.96

00:09:06.000 There is some irony to the fact that as you lost your nuts, you morphed into a shriveled nutsack of a human.

00:09:11.000 And now you've decided that you're a victim and that everyone you know is a victim and that America is cruel and nasty and such and you're deliberately misunderstood just because you won't put on a great show anymore, which makes me sad because I enjoyed watching Bill Burr.

00:09:23.000 But now watching you is like watching Robin D'Angelo, but even whiter and even faker and less funny and with a screechy Boston accent to boot.

00:09:29.000 You turn into Billy, the pissed drunk woke leprechaun.

00:09:32.000 Good luck with that, my dude.

00:09:33.000 Listen, I hope you turn it around.

00:09:35.000 I really do because the world needs better comedians.

00:09:37.000 And I like a lot of comedians who disagree with me, Luis C.K., Dave Chappelle.

00:09:41.000 But, you know, we don't need 57-year-old men trying to earn street cred with the fellow kids by turning into a human embodiment of those retarded in this house lawn signs. 0.98

00:09:50.000 That makes me sad.

00:09:51.000 It does.

00:09:52.000 And yeah, you're being a woke jackass.

00:09:55.000 All righty, coming up, a smoking gun in the Hillary Rodham Clinton Russia Gate scandal, perhaps.

00:10:00.000 Matt Taibbi joins us to discuss.

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00:12:05.000 Okay, meanwhile, it seems that there is, in fact, a smoking gun in the Russia Gate scandal.

00:12:09.000 So one of the big allegations of the Russia Gate scandal is that the whole thing basically was cooked up by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

00:12:15.000 You'll recall there was a firm called Fusion GPS, and it worked with Hillary Clinton's campaign to concoct the steel dossier.

00:12:22.000 And then somehow, magically, that steel dossier ended up in the hands of the American intelligence agencies, where it became the basis for things like the Carter Page FISA warrant, may have become the basis for the entire RussiaGate scandal in the first place.

00:12:34.000 And this whole thing was whipped into a frenzy by Barack Obama's FBI, CIA, and DOJ.

00:12:39.000 But there's never been really kind of a smoking gun that said that Hillary knew that was going to happen.

00:12:43.000 Like that, that was a thing that Hillary knew.

00:12:45.000 Well, now we actually kind of have the smoking gun.

00:12:48.000 According to the New York Post, Hillary Clinton signed off on a plan hatched by a top campaign advisor to smear then-candidate Donald Trump with false claims of Russian collusion and distract from her own mounting email scandal during the 2016 campaign, According to explosive intelligence files declassified on Thursday, the 24-page intelligence annex was compiled from memos and emails obtained by the Obama administration in the lead up to Election Day that laid out confidential conversations between leaders of the DNC and liberal billionaire George Soros' Open Society Foundations.

00:13:16.000 The plot, the brainchild of Clinton's campaign, then foreign policy advisor Julianne Smith, included raising the theme of Putin's support for Trump and subsequently steering public opinion toward the notion that it needs to equate the Russian leader's political influence campaign with actual hacking of election infrastructure.

00:13:34.000 Smith then went on to serve as former President Joe Biden's ambassador to NATO.

00:13:38.000 Open Society Senior Vice President Leonard Bernardo was looped in on the scheme and laid out its intended effect in a series of emails in late July 2016.

00:13:49.000 Quote, Julie says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump.

00:13:54.000 There's an email July 25th, 2016, right before the election.

00:13:59.000 Now it is good for a post-convention bounce.

00:14:01.000 Later, the FBI will put more oil into the fire.

00:14:05.000 That's an explicit statement that they're going to start retailing this line.

00:14:08.000 And then the FBI, he knew, how do you know that?

00:14:10.000 How do you know the FBI was going to put more flame on the fire?

00:14:13.000 More oil on the fire.

00:14:13.000 How do you know that?

00:14:15.000 That would be the operative question.

00:14:16.000 And then two days later, Bernardo wrote, quote, HRC, there'd be Hillary Rodham Clinton, approved Julia's idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections. 0.98

00:14:27.000 That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level.

00:14:34.000 Bernardo also stated: the point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue.

00:14:38.000 In the absence of direct evidence, CrowdStrike and Threat Connect will supply the media, and GRU will hopefully carry on to give more facts.

00:14:45.000 What in the actual world?

00:14:47.000 What in the actual world?

00:14:49.000 Okay, if that, if those emails are real, then, I mean, that is a smoking gun of smoking guns.

00:14:55.000 That is a person associated with the Hillary Clinton campaign.

00:14:57.000 The Open Society Foundation, of course, is a George Soros left-wing group that was working for Hillary, essentially.

00:15:03.000 And he's explicitly saying all the things out loud.

00:15:06.000 That's crazy.

00:15:08.000 That's crazy.

00:15:09.000 Quote, HRC approved Julia's idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections. 0.72

00:15:14.000 That should distract people from her own missing email. 0.73

00:15:17.000 I mean, like, just saying all of it.

00:15:19.000 Because remember, one of the big campaign issues in 2016 was that Hillary Clinton had her private servers in a bathroom at her house in which she was storing classified information.

00:15:27.000 A lot of people were pretty upset about that because it exposed America's classified information to hack.

00:15:32.000 And then James Comey of the FBI changed the law in order to let her off the hook, you'll recall.

00:15:38.000 And so now you have people associated with the Hillary Clinton campaign openly saying that Hillary concocted an entire scheme to focus on Trump-Russia as a distraction from email gate.

00:15:48.000 That's insane.

00:15:50.000 John Durham consulted the FBI, which assessed the information was likely authentic, but couldn't corroborate exact copies of the Bernardo emails with Open Society Foundations.

00:15:58.000 The CIA also determined the intelligence was not the product of Russian fabrications.

00:16:02.000 Durham said Smith was at minimum playing a role in the Clinton campaign's efforts to tie Trump to Russia.

00:16:07.000 Now, again, what does that mean that they knew the FBI was going to put oil on the fire?

00:16:12.000 How would they know that if there was no coordination?

00:16:15.000 Where is that information coming from?

00:16:19.000 The Trump-Russia investigation, according to the New York Post, was part of what a March 2016 memo included in the annex described as a two-pronged Democratic Party opposition that is focused on discrediting Trump.

00:16:28.000 Among other things, the Clinton staff, with support from special services, is preparing scandalous revelations of business relations between Trump and the so-called Russian mafia.

00:16:37.000 This is insane.

00:16:38.000 The special services cited in one of the memos referred to intelligence activities of Obama's CIA and FBI, which may have included the work of Trump dossi author Christopher Steele.

00:16:48.000 The memos also claim that then President Barack Obama was putting pressure on FBI Director James Comey through AG Loretta Lynch to wrap up the probe of Clinton's use of a private email server to receive highly classified information while Secretary of State.

00:17:01.000 The March 2016 memo claimed the 44th president had, quote, sanctioned the use of all administrative levers to remove possibly negative effects from the FBI investigation of cases related to the Clinton Foundation and the email correspondence in the State Department.

00:17:15.000 Honestly, it's rare that you get like an actual smoking gun in public life.

00:17:19.000 Most people are smart enough to sort of hide the goods or they don't express it in the first place because they know that everything eventually will be discovered.

00:17:26.000 Here you just have the smoking gun.

00:17:28.000 I mean, it's just a smoking gun.

00:17:30.000 A.G. Pambondi, FBI Director Cash Patel, other members of U.S. intelligence declassified the Durham annex at the request of Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa.

00:17:39.000 Grassley said, based on the Durham annex, the Obama FBI failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton's political gain, which was ultimately done through the Steele dossier and other means.

00:17:52.000 These intelligence reports and related records, whether true or false, were buried for years.

00:17:56.000 History will show that the Obama and Biden administration's law enforcement and intelligence agencies were weaponized against President Trump.

00:18:04.000 John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA, said that the files showed, quote, a coordinated plan to prevent and destroy Donald Trump's presidency.

00:18:12.000 A spokesperson for the Open Society Foundation said in a statement, quote, the claim that the Open Society Foundations helped orchestrate an FBI investigation is an outrageous falsehood.

00:18:20.000 It is grounded in malicious disinformation traced to Russian intelligence and now weaponized as part of a politically motivated attack to campaign.

00:18:28.000 A spokesperson for the Open Society Foundation said in a statement, quote, the claim that the Open Society Foundations helped orchestrate an FBI investigation is an outrageous falsehood.

00:18:38.000 It is grounded in malicious disinformation traced to Russian intelligence and now weaponized as part of a politically motivated campaign to attack our leadership and our work to promote human rights.

00:18:48.000 The Durham report found no wrongdoing by our staff.

00:18:51.000 Now, they're not saying the emails are fake, you noticed.

00:18:53.000 They're not saying that the emails from this fellow Bernardo are actually fake.

00:18:58.000 And it is those emails that are particularly damning.

00:19:02.000 It's those emails that just spell out in full detail what exactly was going on.

00:19:08.000 That is an insane, insane smoking gun, truly crazy.

00:19:13.000 Truly and really insane.

00:19:17.000 So Caroline Levitt, White House press secretary, spoke to this yesterday.

00:19:20.000 She said, it's pretty obvious that Hillary Clinton approved the Russia hoax, which, again, if those emails are real, she did.

00:19:26.000 This should be a story every outlet in this room should be covering.

00:19:29.000 This is further Evidence that Hillary Clinton approved the Russia hoax against President Trump.

00:19:34.000 Her campaign financed it.

00:19:36.000 Again, she approved it.

00:19:37.000 And the FBI and the CIA were both weaponized to, as our director of CIA has said, accelerate this hoax against then candidates and former President Trump.

00:19:49.000 Senator Chuck Grassley, who is the person who requested the declassification of the Durham Report Annex, he explained why this is a big deal.

00:19:57.000 I think it's evidence of the great depth that the deep state will go to to cover up weaponization that was going on in the FBI and the executive branch of government generally under the Obama administration.

00:20:16.000 Again, this is totally crazy stuff.

00:20:18.000 It is totally crazy.

00:20:19.000 And it just demonstrates that, again, there are conspiracies in life.

00:20:23.000 They are backed by evidence.

00:20:24.000 And here is the evidence.

00:20:25.000 And my goodness, my goodness, Hillary Clinton should be brought to testify in front of Congress at the very least, knowingly promulgating false information about Trump-Russia to distract from her own email scandal and then coordinating with the FBI. 1.00

00:20:40.000 If that's not some form of obstruction of justice, I'm not sure exactly what is, really.

00:20:46.000 Astonishing.

00:20:47.000 Astonishing.

00:20:47.000 Meanwhile, again, members of the deep state, like John Brennan, he says there was no conspiracy.

00:20:52.000 We did everything absolutely right.

00:20:54.000 John Brennan has been accused of perjury for years based on things not related to Russia Gate, but he may have opened himself up to a perjury problem, given new revelations from all these documents.

00:21:07.000 That's a point that's made by Miranda Devine over at the New York Post.

00:21:10.000 Apparently, he said to be under renewed scrutiny by authorities over discrepancies between his sworn testimony to federal investigations and his written orders to underlings conducting the intelligence community assessment commissioned by Barack Obama in December of 2016 that found Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump.

00:21:26.000 That review found that Brennan insisted on the inclusion of the steel dossier over the strong objections of the CIA's two most senior Russia experts who said it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.

00:21:36.000 And then, of course, he suggested in his testimony that he did not push forward the steel dossier.

00:21:42.000 Here's John Brennan trying to claim that he did everything right.

00:21:46.000 Well, if the director of CIA and the director of national intelligence make referrals to the Department of Justice, I think the Department of Justice has to do something to respond to it.

00:21:54.000 So putting together an internal strike force, whatever, to take a look at this information, is certainly, I think, understandable.

00:22:00.000 But also, I'd like to think that professionals in the Department of Justice will dismiss any of these referrals because they're baseless.

00:22:07.000 They really are.

00:22:08.000 So again, I stand ready to continue to talk about the assessment and what we did during that period of time.

00:22:14.000 There was absolutely no conspiracy, and we continue to stand behind what it is that we have said publicly.

00:22:20.000 But do you worry at all that the Trump loyalists who are installed in those key positions could find a way, would find a way to punish you, regardless of what the evidence reveals?

00:22:32.000 Well, I guess they're going to do what they were going to do, Anna.

00:22:35.000 I just feel as though what we did was right.

00:22:37.000 It was legitimate.

00:22:38.000 It was based on our authorities and responsibilities.

00:22:41.000 We would have been derelict if we didn't do these things.

00:22:45.000 In fact, Brennan and James Clapper, they both came forward with an op-ed in the New York Times saying they did every single thing right.

00:22:53.000 They did an amazing job, as it turns out, with RussiaGate.

00:22:56.000 And again, that is just not true.

00:22:58.000 Already coming up, Kamala Harris is back and worse than ever. 1.00

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00:25:00.000 One of the people who's been on top of this the entire time is journalist Matt Taibi.

00:25:03.000 He joins us on the line now to explain.

00:25:05.000 He, of course, is an independent journalist and author, best known for his hard-hitting reporting on censorship, corruption, and political polarization over at Racket News on Substack.

00:25:14.000 He has been an absolute force regarding RussiaGate and covering it.

00:25:18.000 Matt, really appreciate the time.

00:25:20.000 Thanks for me on Ben.

00:25:23.000 So, Matt, let's talk about what the Durham Annex just released shows.

00:25:27.000 I mean, when I look at that just on a raw level, it does look like the closest thing I've seen to a smoking gun.

00:25:32.000 You have an email from a member of the Open Society Foundation, allegedly, that openly says Hillary Rodham Clinton agrees with the idea of misdirecting away from her email campaign and toward Trump-Russia collusion.

00:25:42.000 And oh, by the way, the FBI is going to put oil on the fire.

00:25:46.000 What do you make of this?

00:25:48.000 I think it's extremely significant.

00:25:51.000 It's now very clear what RussiaGate was.

00:25:54.000 It was a cover-up.

00:25:55.000 Hillary Clinton had a lot of problems early in 2016. 0.99

00:26:01.000 There obviously is some discussion about whether or not those emails are real.

00:26:06.000 But what's undeniably real is that the Russians had an enormous amount of material and analysis and that the FBI was aware of this as early as March of 2016.

00:26:19.000 They knew about these rumors that Hillary Clinton was going to cook up a plan to frame Donald Trump, essentially.

00:26:26.000 And what did they do?

00:26:27.000 Instead of investigating Clinton, they investigated Trump.

00:26:30.000 And to me, that's the smoking gun that this is a setup.

00:26:36.000 So, Matt, just to be clear about those emails, has anybody actually claimed that they're fake?

00:26:39.000 What I've seen is that people are upset that they've been released or they've said that it's a hit job or that it's disinformation.

00:26:45.000 But we've heard that routine about Hunter Biden's laptop before.

00:26:48.000 Has anybody actually overtly said these emails are just not real?

00:26:51.000 They have nothing to do with me.

00:26:53.000 The New York Times had a big article this morning disputing the authenticity of some of those emails.

00:27:01.000 And some of the principals have used language like, I don't recall saying that, or that doesn't sound like me.

00:27:09.000 There is a very amusing passage where Jake Sullivan is asked if there was a plan to distract from the campaign's problems by vilifying Donald Trump.

00:27:19.000 And he says that's ridiculous.

00:27:21.000 And then later he says, but that he can't completely rule it out either.

00:27:26.000 So, you know, these all sound like non-denial denials.

00:27:30.000 And also, we know that the FBI and CIA took this materials very seriously in previous instances.

00:27:42.000 James Coming was actually motivated to release word of ending the email investigation early because of the existence of this material.

00:27:51.000 So they clearly put some stock into it, whether they're saying so now or not.

00:27:58.000 So let's talk now about the intelligence community's internal debates and manipulations with regard to RussiaGate.

00:28:07.000 So there's an editorial that came out from John Brennan and James Clapper, who, of course, were both in the Obama IC at the time.

00:28:15.000 And they're claiming that basically they did everything right.

00:28:18.000 You read their piece, I'm sure, in the New York Times, claiming that everything was right, that all the reports basically exonerate them for any attempt to turn and twist information.

00:28:27.000 What did you make of their claims?

00:28:28.000 What did they do wrong?

00:28:30.000 So first of all, the 2017 intelligence community assessment that was released on January 6th of 2017, which concluded that Russia aspired to help Donald Trump out of a quote-unquote clear preference for him, was based on four pieces of intelligence, one of which was the steel dossier.

00:28:53.000 Three others were fragments previously discarded and rejected by the CIA, including by his own handpicked team.

00:29:02.000 The only thing that I can get out of that editorial by Brennan and Clapper is that they're throwing the FBI under the bus because there's a key line in there which says we only included the steel dossier at the behest of the FBI, which isn't true.

00:29:19.000 They pushed it as well.

00:29:20.000 So it's just more excuse making.

00:29:23.000 Every time these guys say anything, it takes us a little while.

00:29:26.000 We knock it down and they come up with something else.

00:29:31.000 So obviously the Trump administration has really been pushing a lot of these revelations with regard to RussiaGate.

00:29:36.000 The DNI Tulsi Gabbard had her sort of revelation of that House Intel report that uncovered what you're talking about, all the details suggesting that essentially the conclusion that Russia definitely wanted Trump was gamed and it wasn't true and that it was fostered by an intelligence community and perhaps Barack Obama directly that wanted that conclusion.

00:29:56.000 How significant is all of this?

00:29:58.000 Because we've known a lot of this for a long time.

00:30:00.000 You've been on this for a very long time.

00:30:01.000 RussiaGate is, of course, nothing new.

00:30:03.000 Some people like you were on it very early, but I think it's been pretty well accepted over the course of the last several years that there was an attempt to undermine the Trump presidency and the Trump campaign by pushing this sort of information.

00:30:13.000 The recent stuff, is it big?

00:30:14.000 Is it small?

00:30:15.000 Do you think it's being overblown or is it being underplayed?

00:30:18.000 No, it's big.

00:30:20.000 And as somebody who worked for a long time, I spent a month and a half last year on, for instance, that House intelligence report that just came out last week.

00:30:31.000 What's new about all this is that the shift in public attention is going to go from a flawed investigation into Donald Trump into a manipulated investigation.

00:30:46.000 And now it's abundantly clear from all these details that it wasn't even really an investigation of Donald Trump.

00:30:52.000 It was a setup designed to distract from an internal scandal involving Hillary Clinton. 0.56

00:30:59.000 The whole thing was fraudulent from the very beginning.

00:31:02.000 It wasn't just thin or badly sourced or incompetent.

00:31:07.000 It was a setup.

00:31:09.000 And if you go back and look, you will find countless examples of essentially an effort to set up members of the Trump campaign, offering them dirt on Hillary Clinton through FBI informants, that sort of thing.

00:31:26.000 This was a hit job by the intelligence services on behalf of the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton.

00:31:34.000 So what do you think the next steps are?

00:31:36.000 Obviously, it's great that the American people are seeing more of this stuff.

00:31:38.000 There's been talk by Daniel Gabber that there might be prosecutions, that the FBI ought to look into it.

00:31:43.000 It's unclear to me what sort of statutes could be called in in terms of a criminal investigation.

00:31:48.000 Certainly Congress has the ability to subpoena and put under penalty of perjury people who are going to come and testify.

00:31:54.000 What do you think needs to be done next?

00:31:57.000 Well, I think you're correct to identify that this is the big unknown at the moment.

00:32:03.000 I've been told from the start that they're looking at various forms of conspiracy charges.

00:32:10.000 I don't think they're aiming for perjury.

00:32:12.000 I think they're aiming for something higher than that.

00:32:15.000 But what exactly that is is not clear.

00:32:18.000 I've been told pretty conclusively that they're looking at conduct that isn't just rooted in 2016 and 2017 that extends all the way through the Biden administration And things that happened at the very least early in the Biden term.

00:32:35.000 They're looking at patterns of conduct.

00:32:38.000 So they're talking a big game about making court cases.

00:32:42.000 And I think at this point, it's not a hearts and minds thing anymore.

00:32:46.000 The media is obviously not going to cover it in the way that we would have hoped years ago.

00:32:52.000 This has to end in prosecutions for it to be effective.

00:32:55.000 And I think they know that.

00:32:57.000 So the fact that they're even doing this suggests to me that that's the plan all along.

00:33:04.000 Well, that is Matt Taibi.

00:33:05.000 He's been on top of this since the beginning.

00:33:06.000 You can follow his coverage of all of this over at Racket News on Substack.

00:33:09.000 Matt, really appreciate the time and the insight.

00:33:12.000 Thanks so much, Ben.

00:33:13.000 Meanwhile, the Trump administration, you know, it is their job to ensure that people who are complicit in the Russia hoax, who are working on the Russia hoax, don't actually work for the administration.

00:33:22.000 And thankfully, that is now happening.

00:33:24.000 It took a little while and a little investigative reporting by our own Luke Roziak over at the Daily Wire.

00:33:29.000 There's a woman named April Doss, who is working as the top NSA lawyer.

00:33:33.000 And it turns out that her background was that she had worked for Senator Mark Warner of Virginia when he was serving as the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel.

00:33:41.000 And she was basically serving in order to tie Trump to Russia. 0.79

00:33:44.000 Well, the Trump administration found out about it.

00:33:46.000 They fired her. 1.00

00:33:46.000 So yesterday, I spoke with Luke Roziak, the reporter who originally broke the story on April DOS. 1.00

00:33:51.000 Here's what it sounded like.

00:33:52.000 Luke, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:33:54.000 Really appreciate it.

00:33:55.000 Thanks for having me, Ben.

00:33:58.000 So let's talk about the story of April Doss.

00:34:00.000 Who was she? 1.00

00:34:01.000 And when I say who was she, it's because she's now been fired.

00:34:03.000 What was the story surrounding April Doss?

00:34:06.000 She worked for Mark Warner on the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Donald Trump, trying to tie him to Russia.

00:34:14.000 And then she went on to become the general counsel of the National Security Agency, which is in charge of cybersecurity, very much along the lines of investigating the DNC hack and everything that precipitated Russia Gate.

00:34:28.000 And so after she worked for the Democrats, she went to become general counsel of the NSA in the Biden administration in 2022.

00:34:38.000 Now, the Democrats concealed her hire at that time because they had actually blocked a Republican with a very similar background from having that position during the Trump administration.

00:34:48.000 They said it would be inappropriate to have somebody who had previously worked for Republicans being in this position.

00:34:53.000 But somehow, when the shoe's on the other foot, it's all well and good.

00:34:56.000 You can hire a former Democrat operative into this position.

00:35:00.000 So she's now been fired, not just because she worked for Democrats, but because, you know, the Russiagate investigation was profoundly unethical.

00:35:08.000 It wasn't like they were just trying to get Trump and Trump doesn't like that.

00:35:10.000 They were trying to get him through extremely Machiavellian and dishonest maneuvers that were totally in violation of what we would expect from unbiased investigators.

00:35:23.000 And on top of that, she's done a lot of writing talking about how Trump is an insurrectionist, which, by the way, nobody was ever charged with insurrection in January 6th, but somehow Trump is an insurrectionist.

00:35:35.000 She's talked about, she's really advocated for the weight of the intelligence state to clamp down on people for wrongthink, even though now with a couple of years of hindsight, when we look back at her writing, we can see that she was very much the one who was wrong.

00:35:50.000 Talking about COVID vaccines, talking about the garm censorship stuff that you've been involved in, you know, corporations need to be censoring people because of all these reasons that turn out to be fake.

00:36:02.000 The Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping, she said, we got to crack down on QAnon because of that.

00:36:08.000 Well, it turns out her buddies in the FBI probably entrapped those people.

00:36:13.000 So this is a lady that not just is a Democrat operative, although she is that, she's also a lady who's been wrong again and again, who's invoked a vicious clampdown on free speech because she doesn't like what people are saying. 1.00

00:36:28.000 And, you know, it's totally out of step with the Trump policies.

00:36:31.000 And so unsurprisingly, she's now fired.

00:36:35.000 So, Luke, obviously, the media have now jumped into action, claiming that she was fired wrongly.

00:36:41.000 The media have suggested that the real reason that she was fired is because Laura Loomer put out a post in which she quoted your original Daily Wire story.

00:36:48.000 And then the media completely ignored the actual allegations in the Daily Wire story, basically suggesting that Laura Loomer did a loyalty test for Trump.

00:36:55.000 She didn't fulfill the loyalty test and thus she has been fired while noting any of the actual details in your story.

00:37:01.000 Yeah, that's a great point.

00:37:03.000 The Times adopted this idea that Laura Loom, and it's funny because they're writing about a retweet.

00:37:09.000 Like I did this story, and I think they were already working on firing her when I initially contacted this agency, brought her to their attention.

00:37:16.000 After the story comes out, Laura Loomer retweets it, which is great.

00:37:20.000 But the New York Times decides to focus the whole story on the fact that Laura Loomer retweeted something.

00:37:25.000 She had this prestigious paper of record writing about literally somebody clicking the retweet button on their phone, but they can't say it that way.

00:37:33.000 So they call it like a far-right conspiracist echoed calls.

00:37:37.000 But what they mean when they say echoed calls, because it sounds like such dramatic language, is literally just clicking a retweet button.

00:37:43.000 But you're right, they needed that because they had to redirect the focus from the facts, which are this woman's long record of things that are really objectionable, not just the fact that she's a Democrat to a far-right conspiracy.

00:37:58.000 So then you have Mark Warner, the Democrat who hired her to begin with, lashing out and saying, how dare you fire her, which only affirms the fact that she's very close to these Democrats.

00:38:09.000 But yeah, it's funny, once the New York Times adopted this, you know, basically they just kind of made up out of thin air that Laura Loomer was responsible for all this.

00:38:19.000 Then all the other media adopted the exact same framing.

00:38:23.000 So it is fascinating how they just kind of invent these narratives.

00:38:26.000 And again, no disrespect to Laura Loomer.

00:38:28.000 It's just the New York Times kind of was like, they wanted to give her the credit because it helped them paint a certain narrative.

00:38:38.000 Well, that's Luke Roziak, investigative reporter over at the Daily Wire, doing solid work.

00:38:42.000 Luke, really appreciate the time.

00:38:43.000 Thank you, Ben.

00:38:44.000 Meanwhile, Democrats continue to struggle for a wave forward.

00:38:47.000 Kamala Harris is back.

00:38:49.000 Now, not that back.

00:38:50.000 She said just yesterday that she didn't want to run for governor of California, which of course is a wise move because if she were to run for governor Calvin, I'm not sure she wins a primary.

00:38:57.000 She's just not very popular among Democrats, But she has announced that she has a brand new book coming out, and it is exciting, exciting stuff.

00:39:05.000 I mean, just Stellar.

00:39:07.000 She says that she has a book called 107 Days about the shortest presidential campaign in modern history.

00:39:12.000 It comes out in September.

00:39:14.000 So I trust, my listeners, that when her book comes out, we will elevate lines and scavengers above her book on the bestseller charts just to dunk on her once more.

00:39:21.000 But here was her announcement.

00:39:25.000 Just over a year ago, I launched my campaign for president of the United States.

00:39:29.000 107 Days, traveling the country, fighting for our future.

00:39:35.000 The shortest presidential campaign in modern history.

00:39:38.000 It was intense, high stakes, and deeply personal for me and for so many of you.

00:39:46.000 Since leaving office, I've spent a lot of time reflecting on those days, talking with my team, my family, my friends, and pulling my thoughts together.

00:39:56.000 In essence, writing a journal that is this book, 107 Days.

00:40:06.000 Sure to be a bestseller, but if she can't make it a bestseller by telling you about it, perhaps she can make it a bestseller by doing a TikTok trend about it, because there is nothing that more says you're in touch with the kids than being, you know, a 60-year-old person who is doing TikTok trends.

00:40:23.000 Everyone thinks you've been kicking back, drinking margaritas on the beach, but really you've been hard at work writing a book, meeting with leaders, thinking about the future of our country.

00:40:36.000 Who said that?

00:40:40.000 Oh my God.

00:40:43.000 Oh my God.

00:40:44.000 You mean a self-aggrandizing TikTok trend?

00:40:46.000 Where she's been hard at work, guys.

00:40:48.000 She's been so hard at work.

00:40:49.000 We thought that she was just day drinking, like she appeared to be doing during the campaign.

00:40:52.000 And it turns out that she's both been day drinking and also writing this book for what she for sure had no ghostwriter.

00:41:00.000 Yeah.

00:41:01.000 Okay, then.

00:41:02.000 Well, if you're trying to sell your book, obviously the place to go is Stephen Colbert, who is another comedian who is no longer a comedian.

00:41:10.000 He is just a lawn sign in human form.

00:41:13.000 And by the way, he doesn't have that many viewers.

00:41:15.000 So I asked our sponsors over a comment that is Perplexity's brand new web browser what Stephen Colbert's ratings look like versus, say, Greg Gutfeld.

00:41:23.000 Greg Gutfeld's show, Gutfeld, currently averages more viewers than Stephen Colbert's late show, with Guttfeld drawing about 3.29 million viewers versus Colbert's recent average of 3.06 million at his own ratings peak, but typically more around 2.42 million in recent months.

00:41:36.000 Guttfeld's average in the second quarter of 2025 was 3.289 million total viewers, making it the biggest late night ratings winner, even though it also airs at 10 p.m. with less direct competition from the other network late night shows.

00:41:48.000 By comparison, the late show with Stephen Colbert averaged 2.417 million total viewers for the first run episodes during the same period.

00:41:56.000 So he's gotten like a brief surge because it's basically a dead cat bounce.

00:42:00.000 But suffice it to say, he is an unsuccessful host and he's unsuccessful because he's not very good at his job, because he brings you humor like this.

00:42:07.000 Here he was with Kamala Harris last night.

00:42:12.000 You know, when I was young in my career, I had to defend my decision to become a prosecutor with my family.

00:42:20.000 And one of the points that I made is: why is it then when we think we want to improve the system or change it, that we're always on the outside on bended knee or trying to break down the door?

00:42:32.000 Shouldn't we also be inside the system?

00:42:36.000 And that has been my career.

00:42:38.000 And recently, I made the decision that I just, for now, I don't want to go back in the system.

00:42:46.000 I think it's broken.

00:42:49.000 Now, the system is so broken, she doesn't want to go back into it because she didn't win.

00:42:53.000 It must be because of the broken systems.

00:42:54.000 So she's decided the systems are all unfixable because people don't like her.

00:42:58.000 But why wouldn't people like her?

00:42:59.000 She's so delightful.

00:43:00.000 I mean, do you see that charming, winning, joyous brat personality?

00:43:06.000 How could she possibly have lost to Donald Trump and gotten whomped by him actually in election?

00:43:10.000 It's a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

00:43:13.000 Well, she didn't stop there. 0.97

00:43:14.000 She was asked about Joe Biden's health by Stephen Colbert, and it got awkward.

00:43:19.000 It did not go well.

00:43:20.000 Spoiler.

00:43:20.000 It did not go well in that debate.

00:43:23.000 Therefore, you became the candidate.

00:43:24.000 At what point in the say month that followed that did people start saying you might need to be prepared for this?

00:43:33.000 Let me say something about Joe Biden.

00:43:37.000 I have an incredible amount of respect for him.

00:43:40.000 And I think that the way that we should be thinking about where we are right now is to remember that we had a president of the United States who believed in the rule of law, who believed in the importance of aspiring to have integrity and to do the work on behalf of the people.

00:44:04.000 And that's where I'll leave that.

00:44:09.000 Vogelgrind and also Joe Biden was dead.

00:44:15.000 No follow-ups there from Colbert, by the way.

00:44:17.000 She's just completely misdirects to Joe Biden.

00:44:19.000 It was a wonderful, wonderful man who was so wonderful for the country.

00:44:22.000 And yeah, she was asked who the Democratic leader is.

00:44:26.000 And of course, she has no answer to that because the answer to that is they don't really have a leader other than the kind of wild insanity of Bernie Sanders' arm on Donnie and AOC.

00:44:35.000 Who's leading the Democratic Party?

00:44:37.000 I'm just curious.

00:44:38.000 There are lots of leaders.

00:44:40.000 There's generally a leader of the Democratic Party.

00:44:43.000 You know, like, oh, that's the leader of the party.

00:44:45.000 Who comes to mind?

00:44:46.000 I think there are a lot of, I'm not going to go through names because then I'm going to leave somebody out and then I'm going to hear about it.

00:44:53.000 But let me just, let me say this.

00:44:55.000 I think it is a mistake for us who want to figure out how to get out and through this and get out of it to put it on the shoulders of any one person.

00:45:09.000 It's really on all of our shoulders.

00:45:13.000 Oh my God.

00:45:15.000 Oh my God.

00:45:15.000 This is her comeback.

00:45:17.000 It is not going amazing.

00:45:18.000 And if that wasn't enough to sell you on Kamala Harris, she also cackles. 1.00

00:45:22.000 Can I add a cackle in for a 25% discount?

00:45:25.000 Here we go.

00:45:29.000 I mean, There's a lot of personal stuff in the book.

00:45:32.000 I mean, poor Dougie.

00:45:34.000 You're blowing the lid off of Doug?

00:45:40.000 For example, my birthday's in October.

00:45:44.000 The election's in November.

00:45:46.000 You see where I'm going.

00:45:50.000 And Dougie kind of dropped the ball on my big birthday.

00:45:54.000 He didn't get you anything.

00:45:56.000 Oh, you have to read the book.

00:46:01.000 All right.

00:46:02.000 Tell me the page.

00:46:04.000 Tell me the page.

00:46:08.000 Even Stephen Colbert is like, that's the big secret you're going to drop in 107 days is that Dougie didn't do an amazing job for your birthday.

00:46:15.000 I mean, like, a really amazing spoiler would be like a secret would be like, where Dougie's living now, which is kind of far away from Kamala Harris, if the rumors are true.

00:46:25.000 But yes, she's back.

00:46:26.000 The Democratic Party is in serious trouble.

00:46:29.000 They really, really are.

00:46:30.000 And they are in even more serious trouble, given the fact that the Republicans in Texas are likely going to gerrymander the map.

00:46:37.000 Now, gerrymandering is a normal part of politics.

00:46:39.000 State legislators typically draw the congressional lines for various elections.

00:46:44.000 And the Supreme Court does have the capacity under one man, one vote to say that those lines are absurd, that they are leaving people out, that they are doing a bad job representing the public.

00:46:52.000 You can't draw kind of snake-like districts that encompass certain populations in order to minimize their impact.

00:46:57.000 The Supreme Court will step in under that doctrine.

00:47:00.000 But typically speaking, it has been the long-standing policy in the United States that the various state legislatures draw the congressional district.

00:47:06.000 That is particularly true right now when, as it turns out, the last census, I've talked about this extensively on the show, the last census was just wrong.

00:47:14.000 The Census Bureau admitted this in 2021.

00:47:16.000 The 2020 census was wrong.

00:47:17.000 It undercounted people living in places like Texas and Florida and Arizona, and it overcounted people living in California and New York.

00:47:24.000 So that meant that actual congressional allocation, as well as electoral college allocation, was just wrong.

00:47:30.000 If the census had been done right and actually reflected the population of the various states, Donald Trump could have won the last presidential election without winning any of Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania.

00:47:40.000 That's how badly the census got it wrong.

00:47:42.000 And so Ron DeSantis, he's been calling for a redo of the census.

00:47:46.000 Here's the governor of Florida.

00:47:49.000 They should do it and count people that are legally allowed to be here.

00:47:54.000 How many seats would California lose if you only counted lawful people, us citizens?

00:48:01.000 They would lose a lot of seats because they're a sanctuary state.

00:48:05.000 For us, you know, we would stand to gain because we did not spend money to try to try to count illegals because I don't think that that's constitutionally proper.

00:48:16.000 The analysis that even Biden's people had to put out showed without question that we should have a different count.

00:48:26.000 Okay, well, the Democrats are now complaining about the congressional gerrymandering in the state of Texas.

00:48:31.000 Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, who could theoretically be deprived of the House majority, he's pissed about it, obviously.

00:48:40.000 Donald Trump has ordered Greg Abbott and compliant Texas Republicans to race back to Austin, have a special session in order to rig the congressional map and undermine the ability of Texans to have a free and fair midterm election.

00:49:01.000 That is wrong.

00:49:05.000 Okay, but at the same exact time that Hakeem Jeffries is complaining about that, J.D. Vance is quite properly complaining about the fact that California Governor Gavin Newsom is also attempting to radically gerrymander California.

00:49:14.000 He points out of their 52 congressional districts, nine are Republican.

00:49:18.000 That means 17% of their delegation is Republican when Republicans regularly win 40% of the vote in that state.

00:49:25.000 So in other words, this is the way the system works.

00:49:27.000 The system is frequently used by the party in power in order to increase their vote share in terms of Congress.

00:49:36.000 Harry Enton over at CNN, he points out this could make actually a relatively large difference in the Congress.

00:49:42.000 He says that if Texas redistricts the way that they're talking about right now, Texas could actually increase its seat difference by five.

00:49:50.000 Yeah, it could make a huge difference.

00:49:52.000 This, in fact, could win or maintain control for the Republicans in the House of Representatives.

00:49:57.000 What are you talking about?

00:49:57.000 Well, Texas has 38 congressional districts.

00:49:59.000 Look at those that Trump won last year by at least 10 percentage points.

00:50:03.000 Under the current lines, it's 25.

00:50:05.000 Under the proposed lines, it's 30.

00:50:07.000 That's one, two, three, four, five, five potential pickup opportunities for the Republican Party.

00:50:13.000 They are playing hardball at this particular point.

00:50:16.000 And right now, it seems to me that Democrats are actually playing close to the Little League peewee.

00:50:22.000 Okay, well, California, they're going to try the same thing.

00:50:24.000 The problem is they've so radically redistricted over and over and over in California, there aren't that many more seats that they can gain through redistricting in California.

00:50:32.000 So again, the way that this tends to work is Democrats redistrict like mad, and then they complain when Republicans do the same thing.

00:50:37.000 Well, it's good for the goose is good for the gander.

00:50:40.000 One of the people hardest hit here is Jasmine Crockett, the new hot, fresh face, so fresh, so face, even more fresh in face than AOC. 0.99

00:50:47.000 She's very upset.

00:50:47.000 She says they're trying to dilute the voices of the majority in Texas, by which she means that she could theoretically lose her congressional seat or have to run inside a district where she doesn't actually live.

00:50:58.000 They want you to say, oh, it's all about partisan politics.

00:51:01.000 Texas is a majority minority state and they are trying to dilute the voices of the majority in this state.

00:51:12.000 Well, hard to say that they're trying to dilute the voice of the majority in the state when Trump won it by 10 and has a Republican legislature and a Republican governor and two Republican senators.

00:51:20.000 So you're actually in the minority politically in your state representative.

00:51:24.000 Meanwhile, Democratic hopes seem to be fading, but they have one hope, and I've been saying this for a long time.

00:51:29.000 Their only hope is that the economy weakens under President Trump.

00:51:31.000 That is their big hope.

00:51:32.000 This is why I've been critical of the tariff war.

00:51:35.000 I think that economically speaking, it is not a good idea.

00:51:37.000 Now, is it going to lead to long-lasting inflation?

00:51:40.000 The answer is probably not.

00:51:41.000 So Milton Friedman, as I've said before on the show, says that inflation is anywhere and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

00:51:47.000 What does he mean by that?

00:51:48.000 What he means is that if you increase taxes, for example, that might increase pricing temporarily, but then demand goes down and then the pricing goes back down.

00:51:55.000 So you can do things that temporarily increase prices, like, for example, tariffs.

00:51:59.000 But what happens is that as the prices go up, then demand goes down and the prices come down.

00:52:05.000 That is a normal working of the economy.

00:52:07.000 Bad policy can kill demand because it's basically an interference in the economy, but it's not going to lead to long-lasting inflation.

00:52:15.000 Well, at least a long-lasting inflation is what Joe Biden did, which is just hose money, fire hose money all over the American public.

00:52:20.000 If you do that, if you treat it as though it's a game show and everybody's stuck inside the phone booth and we're just going to drop money on them, then the prices go up because you just have a higher supply of money and a higher supply of money with the same amount of goods means higher prices for everybody.

00:52:33.000 So that is why Donald Trump is calling for Jerome Powell to lower those interest rates.

00:52:37.000 But lowering the interest rates isn't going to solve the problem of what actually pushes an economy forward.

00:52:42.000 What pushes an economy forward is not continued consumption.

00:52:45.000 What pushes an economy forward is, in fact, innovation, investment, smart investment.

00:52:52.000 And what you're seeing right now is that the economy is, in fact, slowing in certain ways.

00:52:56.000 So we talked about that GDP report that came out yesterday.

00:52:59.000 That GDP report that came out was a 3% GDP growth.

00:53:04.000 But a large chunk of that GDP growth was in exports over imports.

00:53:08.000 So exports minus imports is one way of measuring your gross domestic product, the stuff you produce inside the United States.

00:53:14.000 So if you just cut off the imports and you leave the exports the same, you're going to get GDP growth.

00:53:19.000 That's just a weird thing about the stats.

00:53:21.000 It's something pointed out by the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

00:53:23.000 Well, if you start to kill demand, if you start to create bumps in the economy, what you're going to get is lower investment and lower job growth.

00:53:32.000 And you're starting to see that materialize.

00:53:34.000 According to the U.S. Labor Department, the U.S. added just 73,000 jobs in July.

00:53:41.000 Not only that, there was also a major downward revision in May and June.

00:53:46.000 So there were some reports that came out in May and June that suggested that there was fairly substantial job growth.

00:53:50.000 Apparently, employers added 258,000 fewer jobs in those months than previously estimated, which is not exactly great.

00:53:59.000 Again, one of the things that's happening here is that the fundamentals of the economy could be fine if you just remove the shackles.

00:54:04.000 And in some areas, Trump is removing the shackles, deregulation, particularly with energy.

00:54:09.000 We talked about that just earlier this week with the Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright.

00:54:13.000 In other areas, he is revising the rules of the road to make it easier to invest.

00:54:17.000 He just did this with the Genius Act with regard to stablecoin, for example.

00:54:20.000 AI companies are booming under President Trump.

00:54:23.000 The problem is that, on the other hand, you have things like, for example, a gigantic tariff war with the rest of the world, which is in fact going to limit supply coming into the country, sending prices up temporarily.

00:54:34.000 That is going to crush demand.

00:54:35.000 Demand will go down and then the prices will come down.

00:54:38.000 And you can say, okay, well, we'll artificially stimulate demand by essentially firehosing money into the economy.

00:54:45.000 But that leads again to more of an inflationary bubble.

00:54:48.000 That is the game that's being played right now.

00:54:50.000 It is why I'm not a big fan of artificially induced bumps and hiccups in the economy.

00:54:56.000 Now, as I've said before, President Trump does stick and move with the economic news.

00:55:01.000 So yesterday, for example, President Trump on Truth Social announced that he had extended his deadline for Mexico and the United States to reach some sort of trade deal for 90 days.

00:55:11.000 And he's doing that because he understands that if there were to be a radical increase in the tariff on Mexico, that would, in fact, have a negative downward impact on demand in the United States.

00:55:19.000 It could create economic stagnation or the conditions therefore.

00:55:22.000 Again, one of the things that's happening here, globally speaking, is that America still remains the best bet on the block, but you don't want people to invest in America just because it's better than the other countries.

00:55:31.000 You want them to invest in America because it's actually an amazing place to invest.

00:55:35.000 Because if they're just doing it because right now we're the best, some other country could come in and drink our milkshake.

00:55:40.000 That is one of the problems here.

00:55:41.000 President Trump put out a statement: quote, I've just concluded a telephone conversation with the president of Mexico, Claudia Scheinbaum, which was very successful in that more and more we are getting to know and understand each other.

00:55:52.000 The complexities of a deal with Mexico are somewhat different than other nations because of both problems and assets of the border.

00:55:58.000 We've agreed to extend for a 90-day period the exact same deal we had as for the last short period of time.

00:56:03.000 Namely, Mexico will continue to pay a 25% fentanyl tariff, 25% tariff on cars, and 50% tariff on steel, aluminum, and copper.

00:56:10.000 Additionally, Mexico has agreed to immediately terminate its non-tariff trade barriers, of which there were many.

00:56:15.000 We'll be talking to Mexico over the next 90 days with the goal of signing a trade deal somewhere within the 90-day period of time or longer.

00:56:21.000 Present at the meeting with Vice President J.D. Van, Secretary of Treasury Scott Besant, Rubio, Lutnick, the whole team.

00:56:27.000 There will be continued cooperation on the border as it relates to all aspects of security, including drugs, drug distribution, and illegal immigration into the United States.

00:56:34.000 Thank you for this attention to this matter.

00:56:36.000 So, again, that is President Trump pushing the can down the road to try and reach an off-ramp with Mexico.

00:56:41.000 However, to pretend that there is going to be no economic impact by multiplying the tariffs that American citizens effectively have to pay for in temporarily increased pricing and domestic manufacture, to pretend that's going to have no impact if you quadruple or quintuple those things, it's going to have some impact, obviously.

00:57:00.000 Now, I think that many of the economically sophisticated players are hoping that President Trump, again, finds more off-ramps, that as we move forward, as it becomes clear that the economy is stagnating more than it otherwise would, he's going to look for an off-ramp, presumably provided by the Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant.

00:57:15.000 Jamie Dimon, who's recently in good standing with President Trump, he's been praising President Trump for the thoughtful tariff policy.

00:57:23.000 We started tariffs.

00:57:24.000 We didn't know what they're going to be.

00:57:25.000 And now we kind of know, and they're more moderate and thoughtful and more carefully done.

00:57:30.000 And hopefully they'll help some companies export.

00:57:33.000 Maybe some people move manufacturing back here.

00:57:36.000 So, you know, so far, so good.

00:57:39.000 Okay, but fewer burdens on the American economy would be good.

00:57:42.000 And this goes to the question of the White House threatening prescription drug makers with price controls.

00:57:48.000 Okay, you cannot just dictate to people what the price of goods and services are.

00:57:51.000 It doesn't work that way.

00:57:52.000 Price control is a left-wing policy.

00:57:54.000 Suggesting that the federal government has the unique capacity to simply dictate what things cost is not a good policy.

00:58:00.000 It's just a bad policy.

00:58:02.000 And in fact, what it leads to is a crimp in the supply, which artificially ends up boosting the price.

00:58:08.000 Again, the notion that the government can sort of willy-nilly interfere in free trade and private property and pricing, centralized government power here does not achieve its sought-after goal.

00:58:21.000 And yet there is the White House trying to promote the notion that it could unilaterally lower prescription drug prices by diktot.

00:58:27.000 There's Caroline Levitt at the White House saying so.

00:58:30.000 The president is determined to solve this problem and took further action today.

00:58:35.000 He has signed 17 letters to pharmaceutical companies' CEOs.

00:58:39.000 And I would like to read you one of these letters to the CEO of Eli Lilly.

00:58:43.000 On May 12th, 2025, I signed an executive order delivering most favored nation prescription drug pricing to American patients to stop global fleet freeloading and guarantee that Americans pay the same prices enjoyed by other developed nations.

00:58:58.000 I'm calling on Eli Lilly and company and every manufacturer doing business in our great country to take the following actions within the next 60 days.

00:59:06.000 Extend the most favored nation pricing to Medicaid, guarantee most favored nation pricing for newly launched drugs, return increased revenues abroad to American patients and taxpayers, provide for direct purchasing at most favored nation pricing.

00:59:21.000 But if you refuse to step up, we will deploy every tool in our arsenal to protect American families from continued abusive drug pricing practices.

00:59:33.000 Now, again, I wouldn't like this from Barack Obama or Joe Biden.

00:59:35.000 I don't like it from the Trump administration.

00:59:36.000 You cannot tell companies what they can price their product at because you do not have that information.

00:59:42.000 Not only do you not have that information, if you try to dictate prices, what you end up doing is crimping RD.

00:59:47.000 There's a reason the vast majority of pharmaceutical patents happen right here in the United States, and that is because the United States is absorbing the cost from all the other countries in terms of its pricing mechanism.

00:59:58.000 The actual solution here would be for President Trump to make pharmaceutical pricing a piece of his tariff war. 0.74

01:00:03.000 He should be using the tariff wars in order to force other countries to open their markets to American drugs at free market prices.

01:00:11.000 That's what he should be doing.

01:00:12.000 It shouldn't be most favored nation status, meaning like Americans pay what Canadians pay.

01:00:16.000 It should be Canadians pay what Americans pay. 1.00

01:00:19.000 Because if you have a broader group of consumers who are now having to pay fair market prices, like free market prices, as opposed to using government cramdowns in these various countries and then essentially pushing all of the pricing into the American bubble, if you do that, you will get lower prices for Americans.

01:00:35.000 The price distribution mechanism on drugs is totally unfair because other countries actually are screwing Americans.

01:00:41.000 And this is where President Trump should actually be using tariff policy and trade policy to force other countries to pay their fair share when it comes to prescription drug pricing, for example.

01:00:50.000 But just telling these companies they have to lower their prices arbitrarily, that is not going to work.

01:00:55.000 Now, there are some things, again, there are many things that the Trump administration is doing well when it comes to the economy.

01:01:00.000 One of those is something called the Trump accounts.

01:01:03.000 This is the $1,000 accounts that have been created by the one big beautiful bill.

01:01:08.000 Those accounts essentially are a basic form of a health savings account or a social security account, but tied to the market, which means people will actually be invested in the market.

01:01:18.000 Now, you can make the case as on a very free market approach.

01:01:21.000 It is a more free market approach than just giving people welfare.

01:01:24.000 It is a way of getting people to understand that as the markets go, very often so goes their quality of life.

01:01:31.000 So, Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerzner, who's been a big moving force behind the so-called Trump accounts, he explained on June 9th exactly what these are supposed to be.

01:01:42.000 And the Trump accounts, right, that everybody in this room are here and we've been working so hard on, but would never come to fruition without your leadership.

01:01:51.000 Those will change the game forever.

01:01:54.000 It makes America an ownership society again. 0.84

01:01:57.000 You are giving the shot for every American to feel like they're in the game again.

01:02:02.000 Part of America with that economic mobility, that dream that led Michael Dell to start Dell Computer in his dorm room, Dara to feel like he had a shot after coming here from Iran, and a couple poor kids from Missouri and Indiana to make it to where we are today.

01:02:16.000 So thank you.

01:02:20.000 And again, this seems to me like a, if you're going to have the federal government involved in this sort of policy at all, it seems like a pretty salutary piece of policy.

01:02:27.000 Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, got himself into a little bit of hot water the other day because he said this is basically almost like a replacement for Social Security, meaning you put money in right now, it garners a return on the SP 500.

01:02:38.000 And then 50 years later, it's worth a lot more money than it originally was.

01:02:42.000 He wasn't saying Social Security is going away.

01:02:44.000 He's saying that if you were to have a privatized version of Social Security, it would outperform, which obviously is true.

01:02:52.000 Also, at the end of the day, that I'm not sure when the distribution level date should be, whether should it be 30 and you can buy a house, should it be 60.

01:03:04.000 But in a way, it is a back door for privatizing Social Security.

01:03:09.000 Like Social Security is a defined benefit plan paid out that to the extent that if all of a sudden these accounts grow and you have in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for your retirement, then that's a game changer, too.

01:03:28.000 He got all sorts of flack for this comment.

01:03:31.000 And then yesterday he walked it back.

01:03:32.000 He said, I'm not talking about getting rid of Social Security, you doofs. 1.00

01:03:35.000 I'm talking about as a compliment to Social Security, duh.

01:03:40.000 The Democrats hate this program because it brings capitalism and markets to every American, not just their constituents at the upper end.

01:03:54.000 And over time, the compounding is going to be an incredible supplement to Social Security, not a replacement.

01:04:04.000 It is a compliment.

01:04:07.000 And what I said was Social Security will continue as it is.

01:04:14.000 It is intact.

01:04:15.000 Everyone will get their check every month.

01:04:18.000 But it's very exciting to me that there could be a big payout at the end of when people turn 59 or 60.

01:04:30.000 Of course, he's totally right about all of that.

01:04:32.000 And it does underscore.

01:04:33.000 Let's be real about this.

01:04:34.000 I wish they were talking about privatizing Social Security.

01:04:36.000 They are not.

01:04:37.000 If people would actually talk about that, that would be a much better solution to our systemic debt problems than what we are currently talking about.

01:04:45.000 And again, the third rail of American politics remains extremely electrified.

01:04:49.000 But also at some point, Americans are going to have to grab that third rail because otherwise you're going to hit by the train.

01:04:54.000 That really is, those are the only two choices.

01:04:56.000 Well, meanwhile, it is a Friday, and that means it's time to do a little bit of lighter cultural news.

01:05:00.000 Joining us on the line to discuss is Emily Austin.

01:05:02.000 She's a journalist, TV host, and political commentator who, of course, began her career in sports media, hosting for MTV, Sports Illustrated, DAZN.

01:05:09.000 She's contributed to Newsweek and all the rest.

01:05:11.000 Well, she's here to inform me what is going on in the world of culture, because as you know, I tend to cover the serious news.

01:05:17.000 So, Emily, thanks for taking the time.

01:05:18.000 Appreciate it.

01:05:20.000 Of course, good to be here.

01:05:23.000 So, let's start with the Sydney Sweeney controversy.

01:05:25.000 I cannot believe that we are fully a week into a controversy over whether a good-looking young blonde woman is somehow a Nazi symbol.

01:05:33.000 But give me the latest.

01:05:34.000 I know.

01:05:35.000 So, the latest is people are still mad, Ben, and people are going to stay mad.

01:05:38.000 But I can assure you, I've did some deep digging into this.

01:05:42.000 Everyone who's mad is fat or ugly.

01:05:44.000 So, rest assured, they have serious jealousy problems.

01:05:46.000 On a serious note, though, I think not to make everything political, but they are.

01:05:51.000 Look, Sidney Sweeney being hot is now Nazism.

01:05:53.000 Everything under Biden's administration rewarded victimhood, rewarded being always a minority, always, you know, if you're trans, you're better than straight people.

01:06:02.000 And if you're a minority, feel bad for yourself instead of promoting winning and being successful and getting out of that, you know, woes-me mentality.

01:06:10.000 So, with that, people really have to make everything about themselves.

01:06:14.000 It's like they look at they looked at Sydney's picture, they squinted a little bit too hard and they said, How do I make this about me?

01:06:20.000 Well, I'm a person of color and she's white, so that's racist now. 0.98

01:06:24.000 And it really comes from a point of narcissism.

01:06:27.000 How do you make everything about putting yourself in the victim seat?

01:06:31.000 But that's where we are.

01:06:32.000 But what they don't understand is everyone's rolling their eyes.

01:06:35.000 American Eagle sold out of their denim collection.

01:06:38.000 We want to make America hot again, America winning again.

01:06:42.000 Nobody likes fat and unattractive, neglected people.

01:06:45.000 So, I'm glad we're returning to a sense of normalcy.

01:06:48.000 And American Eagle is sold out.

01:06:50.000 So, this victimhood mentality is starting to evolve into a winning mentality.

01:06:56.000 By the way, it is kind of fascinating because American Eagle, like virtually all of the clothing manufacturers, is going to have to deal with higher tariffs.

01:07:02.000 And so, they've been facing that.

01:07:03.000 They've also been facing the possibility that Amazon, I believe, is starting its own jeans production line.

01:07:08.000 And so, they're concerned about having to compete with that.

01:07:10.000 This is the most successful remarketing brand that I've seen.

01:07:13.000 It's sort of the opposite of what happened with Dylan Mulvaney.

01:07:16.000 Bud Light decided to treat a man as a woman and totally tanked their brand. 1.00

01:07:20.000 American Eagle decided to treat a woman as an attractive woman.

01:07:23.000 And it turns out that a bunch of people like to buy products associated with attractive people.

01:07:27.000 Who knew?

01:07:28.000 I mean, great, great shots in the advertising world.

01:07:30.000 Now, meanwhile, apparently, Shannon Sharp has now departed ESPN.

01:07:36.000 What's the story with this?

01:07:37.000 Because we've seen a lot of these sorts of cases.

01:07:40.000 Obviously, there was a very controversial video of Shannon Sharp where he was on his phone went live while he was engaged in some untoward activity at one point, I believe.

01:07:48.000 But what is the actual story surrounding Shannon Sharp here?

01:07:51.000 So, Shannon was with a much younger woman who, you know, towards the end or after the relationship decided to come out with a sexual allegation charge against him.

01:08:01.000 They settled for many, many millions.

01:08:04.000 She settled the case.

01:08:05.000 She retired from her very prestigious OnlyFans career and is carrying on with her now wealthy life from squeezing the money out of this man.

01:08:15.000 Now, I won't comment on whether or not the man's innocent.

01:08:18.000 I don't care about him enough to try to speculate, but I just find it ironic that after Shannon Sharp was with the woke mob, the mob that was quick to cancel people, now he's on the other side of it.

01:08:30.000 And it just shows you that no matter how much you preach social justice and, like I said, go into that victim mentality and paint the I'm a black man picture, you are still not safe from that woke mob of cancellation.

01:08:43.000 And what's the reality is that this is a hit for ESPN.

01:08:46.000 You love the guy, you hate the guy, you believe it, you don't.

01:08:49.000 He was ESPN's biggest personality.

01:08:52.000 Like him or not, he's on the internet.

01:08:54.000 He keeps things spicy.

01:08:56.000 And now they're going to have to fill that void.

01:08:59.000 So good luck to ESPN on that.

01:09:01.000 But as a sports broadcaster, I can attest you walk a very thin line balancing between this is my work.

01:09:08.000 This is sports and entertainment.

01:09:09.000 This is my personal life.

01:09:10.000 This is my advocacy.

01:09:12.000 And now the business has to make an analysis.

01:09:14.000 Well, at what point does this TV personality's advocacy or personal life overshadow their talent on air?

01:09:21.000 Now, as a sports fan, I could tell you, I don't think anyone cares.

01:09:25.000 They love seeing Shannon Sharp.

01:09:27.000 He's one of the most entertaining people on air.

01:09:30.000 But it's interesting to see now him on the other side of this cancel culture.

01:09:34.000 And one of the things that's always fascinating about these sorts of issues is that Shannon Sharp was not convicted of anything in court.

01:09:40.000 There was no conviction.

01:09:41.000 He didn't even lose a lawsuit.

01:09:42.000 He settled the lawsuit.

01:09:43.000 When it comes to a lot of these cases, if you're a very rich and famous person, you will settle these things out of court without an admission of guilt, specifically in order so that you can move on with your life.

01:09:53.000 And so if the new system is basically that an allegation and settlement is tantamount to guilt, such the network is going to fire you, a lot of people are going to get fired over to ESPN in the future.

01:10:04.000 Right.

01:10:04.000 No, of course.

01:10:05.000 I think it sets a really bad precedent.

01:10:07.000 And what likely will happen is Shannon's going to go and start his own show that might get more viewers than it did on ESPN because anyway, traditional television is starting to die down and digital media is picking up.

01:10:18.000 So if he wants to get his dream revenge plan, he should definitely go start a podcast.

01:10:23.000 Like Stephen A. Smith has a podcast and he's an on-air personality, but Shannon would crush it because again, personal business aside, when I'm watching TV, I really do very little care about what that person does at home, what he does with women, if he's gay, if he's straight.

01:10:38.000 It's not really my issue.

01:10:39.000 If I'm turning you on to watch sports and you're talking about sports, an OnlyFans model who accuse you of something isn't my priority.

01:10:46.000 Well, that's Emily Austin.

01:10:47.000 You can go check out all of her work over at X.com among other sources.

01:10:51.000 Emily, appreciate the time and thanks for the information as always.

01:10:55.000 You got it.

01:10:56.000 All righty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.

01:10:59.000 We have news on immigration on GAS.

01:11:01.000 We'll get to all of it.

01:11:02.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - August 01, 2025

Woke Bill Burr Attacks Me AGAIN...PLUS A Russiagate SMOKING GUN?!

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