00:00:00.000Today on the Malwell Show, first media matters had mass layoffs and now the Southern Poverty Law Center has followed suit.
00:00:05.080It's been a bloodbath for left-wing smear merchants in recent weeks.
00:00:08.620It's obviously a cause for celebration, but why is this happening and why now? We'll discuss.
00:00:11.920Also, Donald Trump is accused of saying unkind things about Milwaukee.
00:00:15.240The story is total nonsense, but it has forced the left to pretend that they love Milwaukee, which has been funny to watch.
00:00:20.420Plus, a major scandal in the world of professional sports and an alleged trad wife becomes a viral sensation after saying the N-word.
00:00:27.280It's an important story, we're told. We'll talk about that and much more today on the Malwell Show.
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00:01:59.460A couple of weeks ago, I covered the large round of layoffs at the left-wing activist group known as Media Matters.
00:02:05.420Many conservatives celebrated the news because, of course, Media Matters exists for the sole purpose of smearing the opponents of the Democratic Party.
00:02:12.300They misrepresent people's words, stalk them on social media, and so on and so on.
00:02:16.560But Media Matters' dishonest attack on Elon Musk and Twitter appears to have been a bridge too far.
00:02:22.040Elon Musk fought back with a massive lawsuit, which Media Matters' own management cited as one of the reasons for the layoffs.
00:02:29.120Now, for my part, I wasn't especially thrilled with Media Matters' collapse because, as I said at the time, they essentially function as my PR agency.
00:02:36.980They keep clipping segments from my show, broadcasting them all over the place, apparently thinking they've found a good gotcha moment.
00:02:43.640But really, it's always something that my own team was going to post online anyway.
00:02:48.220And they did all this without taking or even requesting any compensation whatsoever from me.
00:02:53.500In fact, I never even really thanked them for the pro bono services they provided dependably and, frankly, obsessively over the years.
00:03:00.780So Media Matters' downfall was something of a bittersweet moment for me and, I think, for many other people in conservative media.
00:03:08.680Fast forward just a couple of weeks, and yet another left-wing smear factory appears to be on the decline.
00:03:14.800This time, it's the Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC.
00:03:18.740And this is a collapse that I will openly celebrate because the SPLC is a substantially more effective organization than Media Matters could ever hope to be.
00:03:27.500More effective at actually advancing left-wing goals.
00:03:30.640Less effective as a de facto PR agency for us, so the worst of all worlds.
00:03:34.240And if Media Matters is kind of the B team of Democratic Party hatchet men, then the SPLC is the A team.
00:03:40.480And by that, I mean they're very evil, but they have a lot more influence.
00:03:45.060Thankfully, on Thursday, the SPLC announced it's laying off 60 workers, or roughly a quarter of its staff.
00:03:50.200The union at the SPLC, because for some reason a nonprofit has a union, has said the cuts will have a catastrophic impact on SPLC's day-to-day operations.
00:04:00.440They won't be able to, you know, save democracy and fight white supremacy anymore, we're told.
00:04:05.960This is an important story for two reasons.
00:04:08.440First of all, obviously we're just five months away from Election Day.
00:04:12.040Two of the Democrats' biggest propaganda outfits getting gutted at a pivotal time like this is a really bad sign for the party's messaging efforts and a great sign for the country.
00:04:23.040It also suggests that there might be a lot more internal discord within the party and on the left than we realized, which I'll get to in a second.
00:04:32.400But the other reason this is an important story is that the SPLC has a direct line to federal law enforcement and Joe Biden's DOJ.
00:04:41.040We know that because the SPLC was one of the sources for the FBI's memo last year proclaiming that, quote,
00:04:47.420radical traditionalist Catholic ideology has attracted, quote, racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.
00:04:53.640The FBI warned that these radical traditionalist Catholics, or RTCs, as we're now called, can be identified by their, quote,
00:05:02.680frequent adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology.
00:05:09.160The memo concluded by noting that these radical Catholic terrorists, quote, present opportunities for threat mitigation.
00:05:16.600Now, the FBI's memo, which was written by the Richmond field office, then went on to directly cite the SPLC, quote,
00:05:22.480following are the nine RTC hate groups operating in the United States in 2021, as defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center,
00:05:30.540followed by the location of their organizational headquarters.
00:05:33.640The FBI then copy-pasted a web page from the SPLC.
00:05:37.020In other words, the SPLC functions a bit like the FBI's cutout.
00:05:41.060They produce agenda-driven threat assessments or whatever, and then the FBI, pretending the SPLC is some sort of impartial arbiter,
00:05:48.900cites the SPLC to go after groups that the Democratic Party doesn't like.
00:05:53.160Now, when he was asked about this under oath last year, the FBI Director Christopher Wray said that he was aghast that the agency had cited the SPLC.
00:06:01.480He said that he immediately had the memo removed from FBI systems.
00:06:10.740You've been there the last several years.
00:06:12.940Twenty years ago, if you looked at the list of groups the SPLC would have said were hate groups, those groups would have been proud to have been named by them,
00:06:19.760and I think most Americans would have agreed with the list that they put out.
00:06:24.100Today, they put out lists with names like the American Family Association and the Alliance Defending Freedom,
00:06:30.400and yet one of their attorneys was just recently charged in Atlanta with domestic terrorism.
00:06:36.460It bothers me to see them cited as a source from your agency on who is and is not considered a domestic terrorist.
00:06:46.800Can you speak to the relationship between the FBI and the influence that the SPLC has?
00:06:53.700Is it just a list that you look at from time to time, or is there coordination?
00:06:58.700Well, first off, just to be clear, I've considered Georgia my home since I first got married, you know, back in 1989.
00:07:08.520Second, as to the product that you're referring to, the intelligence product, when I first saw it, and I said this yesterday, I was aghast.
00:07:20.240It was a single piece of an intelligence product by one field office.
00:07:24.620It did not meet our standards, and I had it immediately removed and withdrawn, and we've taken steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.
00:07:31.620And one of the reasons I say that, one of the ways in which I say that, is the sourcing, to your question, the sourcing didn't meet our standards.
00:08:36.960In an interview a couple of years ago, Wray admitted that the FBI also regularly works with another partisan and totally discredited left-wing organization called the ADL.
00:08:45.360Here's Wray speaking directly with the head of the ADL.
00:09:43.500It's the FBI that works directly with the ADL every day, says the head of the ADL.
00:09:48.420And the FBI director agrees, saying that the ADL apparently participates in law enforcement investigations.
00:09:53.900This is the same ADL that sent out a memo warning about extremist parents at school board meetings who dare to question, quote, COVID-19 mandates and, quote, critical race theory.
00:10:03.540You might remember that Merrick Garland's DOJ then began investigating these school board meetings, coincidentally enough.
00:10:08.700This is the same ADL that published a definition on its website saying that it's impossible to be racist against white people.
00:10:13.560According to the definition that was on the ADL's website for several years, racism means, quote, the marginalization and or oppression of people of color.
00:10:22.500And white people have no color, as we have learned.
00:10:26.320I could give many more examples, including the ADL's political targeting of Elon Musk on behalf of the Democratic Party or their various calls to censor conservative commentators and their lies about the so-called Great Replacement Theory and so on.
00:10:37.060Now, the point is that this is not an organization that a nonpartisan FBI would ever dream of working with.
00:10:44.600So instead, the FBI director is openly bragging about working directly with left-wing activists to target the opponents of those left-wing activists.
00:10:53.860And he only apologizes when he's caught.
00:10:56.340Then he goes right back to doing the exact same thing.
00:10:58.380Now, decades ago, back in the 70s, you could make a plausible case that the FBI would have a reason to be working with groups like the SPLC.
00:11:07.420They were founded initially, supposedly, to fight various forms of discrimination in court with the goal of alleviating the root causes of southern poverty, hence the name, particularly in the black community.
00:11:18.280But about a decade in, the SPLC decided to give up the idea of solving southern poverty, which, as you may have noticed, is still quite pervasive.
00:11:26.080And instead, the SPLC morphed into a smear factory.
00:11:29.580They've gone after pretty much everyone with a position on abortion or immigration or Islamic extremism or really any other subject that they disagree with.
00:11:37.700Some of the allegedly radical and hateful groups identified by the SPLC include such well-known domestic terror organizations as the Federalist Society, PragerU, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Immigration Studies,
00:11:50.520the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, the Family Research Council, which an SPLC follower targeted and attempted mass murder back in 2012, you may remember.
00:12:00.540These are all mainstream conservative organizations, as you probably know, but that didn't faze the SPLC.
00:12:06.280They've also targeted people like Ben Carson, Dennis Prager, Franklin Graham.
00:12:09.440Ben Carson, for example, appeared on the SPLC's hate list because he holds the radical, unthinkable view that marriage is between one man and one woman.
00:12:16.520And, you know, that tenet of Christianity that's also been a universal view for pretty much all of human history, almost everywhere in the world.
00:12:23.840They later half-heartedly apologized for the hit on Carson, saying that their smear job labeling him as an extremist didn't meet their non-existent standards.
00:12:30.800And not surprisingly, the SPLC also has a page on their website dedicated to exposing and cataloging the crimes of the dangerous extremist whose show you're watching right now.
00:12:41.800But all of those attacks pale in comparison to SPLC's efforts to defame Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Majid Nawaz.
00:12:48.800They appeared in the SPLC's Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists for the Crime of Denouncing Violent Islamic Extremism.
00:12:56.300Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the leading human rights activists alive.
00:12:59.540She suffered female genital mutilation at the hands of actual extremists, who are actually violent.
00:13:05.200But according to the SPLC, she has no right to criticize the people who did that to her.
00:13:11.300These claims were so absurd that the SPLC pulled its Field Guide on extremism entirely.
00:13:15.340They also publicly apologized for calling Nawaz an extremist, paid several million dollars in a settlement.
00:13:20.800Again, this is the group that the FBI apparently still relies on for investigative information.
00:13:25.020And that's why we should all celebrate the fact that the SPLC has been gutted.
00:13:29.660It may mean fewer coordinated left-wing assaults on pro-life organizations and pro-life activists, for one thing.
00:13:36.100Now, unfortunately, like Media Matters or any other form of highly invasive and malignant cancer, the SPLC probably will not entirely go away.
00:13:45.060It's not shutting down, at least not right now.
00:13:47.000And they don't appear to be having financial issues either, since they're historically very well funded.
00:13:51.980And they reportedly still receive donations from liberals who think defaming innocent people is some kind of public service.
00:13:58.060That's according to the SPLC's union, which tweeted yesterday, quote,
00:14:01.320Today, SPLC, an organization with nearly a billion dollars in reserves, given an F rating by the Charity Watch for hoarding donations, gutted its staff by a quarter.
00:14:11.640SPLC's decision has a catastrophic impact on the organization's work in support of immigrants seeking justice and its mission to dismantle white supremacy,
00:14:19.060strengthen intersectional movements, and advance human rights through support of educators.
00:14:23.720So there's a bit of infighting going on at the SPLC, and that post does raise an interesting question.
00:14:31.200If it's true the SPLC is financially sound, which, again, they probably are with all the donations coming in and all of the very wealthy funders that they have,
00:14:40.380why are they then firing a bunch of employees?
00:14:43.060Over at Hot Air, David Storm theorizes that SPLC is laying off the far-left fringe of its workforce
00:14:48.960because they've become unruly, uncooperative, inconvenienced.
00:14:54.340That would explain why the SPLC's union is lashing out at the SPLC right now on Twitter, quote,
00:14:58.960As Democrats rely more on radical activists, according to Storm, they can lose control of the messaging and direction.
00:15:04.820Younger folks who are now getting hired genuinely believe the world is on fire,
00:15:08.640that white supremacy is on the rise, that settler colonialists are oppressing the natives,
00:15:20.840I suspect that that's part of what's at work here.
00:15:22.840The SPLC isn't going broke, so it's likely that they're dumping the most troublesome employees under the guise of a restructuring.
00:15:30.100Now, if that's the case, then, unfortunately, SPLC will probably stick around.
00:15:34.060But at least, like Media Matters, they'll have to orchestrate their smears from now on with a lot less manpower.
00:15:40.180And that means I will have fewer unpaid PR representatives going forward, spreading clips of my best moments all over the Internet.
00:15:46.860And yes, that's kind of a bummer, for me at least.
00:15:49.580But it also means that without the SPLC running at full capacity, Joe Biden's DOJ will have a harder time cooking up fake justifications to harass their political enemies.
00:15:59.620And with just a few months to go until the election, that is unquestionably a big win for the quote-unquote democracy that Media Matters and the SPLC pretend to care so much about.
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00:17:22.760So we have a new fake Trump controversy.
00:17:24.940It's been three days since the last one, so this is right on schedule.
00:17:27.460A fake news journalist named Jake Sherman reported yesterday that Donald Trump said to House Republicans in a meeting, this is what he said, supposedly,
00:17:35.520Milwaukee, where we're having our convention, is a horrible city.
00:17:56.560House Republicans are refuting a report that former President Donald Trump on Thursday disparaged Milwaukee, the host city for the Republican National Convention, in July.
00:18:05.240Punchbowl News founder Jake Sherman posted on X about the comments.
00:18:10.560Media were not present for the meeting, so Sherman would have heard this secondhand.
00:18:14.440However, he did not attribute the comment to any source, even an anonymous one.
00:18:19.280And then we have a bunch of other representatives who are in this meeting who have since come out and said that they were in the meeting and it didn't happen.
00:18:33.640So several people that were in the meeting actually there saying that he never said those words.
00:18:39.720So people who were not in the room and who haven't even been named, anonymous people who were not there say that he said it.
00:18:48.200People who were in the room say that he didn't say it.
00:18:51.020And that kind of gives you the answer.
00:18:53.180But the Democrats, increasingly desperate as they are, of course, can't let any fake controversy, no matter how fake it may be, no matter how unimportant and silly it may be, they can't let it go to waste.
00:19:06.160So leftists have spent much of the last 24 hours attacking Trump for this thing that he didn't say,
00:19:14.100while also performatively expressing their love for Milwaukee.
00:20:35.280It has some nice parts, and the nice parts are also surrounded by dangerous crime-riddled cesspools that you wouldn't even want your dog to walk through, like so many other major cities.
00:20:47.120So it's similar in that way to other major American cities.
00:20:49.560But even aside from the violent crime, you know, it's fine.
00:21:32.440I'm just saying it's like if Trump allegedly said that Applebee's is a terrible restaurant, and then all the Biden drones came out and said, we love Applebee's.
00:21:44.360Applebee's is the greatest restaurant.
00:21:56.360And the funny thing about this is that they're trying to make themselves seem like normal people, like the common man, by talking about how much they love Milwaukee.
00:22:09.300That just makes them seem even more out of touch than they already are, because normal people don't go around talking about how much they love Milwaukee.
00:22:17.940It's like if you wanted to prove that you are a working-class American, so you went to Walmart and started walking around and marveling at it.
00:23:40.320In Chicago, NBC15 reports, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has spent over $30,000 in campaign funds on expenses related to personal grooming, according to financial disclosures reviewed by the National Desk.
00:23:55.240Mayor Johnson was elected in April 2023.
00:23:58.780His latest disclosure lists a payment of $4,000 to Anthony Jones Salon for event expenses.
00:24:06.660Campaign manager Bill Neidhart clarified to the Chicago Sun-Times the money was actually given to AJ Styles Barber and Beauty Salon and said the filing would be amended to reflect this.
00:24:19.520The expense is one of several over the last year and a half devoted to grooming.
00:24:25.680Another report from the end of 2023 discloses 13 transactions with makeup magic, amounting to almost $7,000.
00:24:37.740Disclosures throughout 2023 show Johnson's campaign made repeated trips to this location and others amounting to over $30,000 in makeup expenses since taking office.
00:24:47.240So makeup and hair and makeup are the two things.
00:24:51.340Now, at the time of this report, the mayor's office had not responded to a request for comment, but the mayor did finally respond to a question about it.
00:25:07.180There will be the awkward elephant in the room, and that is about the Sun-Times story last week about your spending of $30,000 from your campaign fund for hair and makeup.
00:25:16.960Can you respond to that and explain why you think that's an appropriate use of the campaign dollars to what to many people seems like a lot of money?
00:25:28.060I think it's always appropriate to make sure that we're investing in small businesses, especially minority-owned, black-owned, women-owned businesses.
00:25:40.360We support black and brown-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, printing.
00:25:45.780There are a number of things that my campaign spends dollars on.
00:25:49.900And I'm so committed to supporting small businesses that even as mayor, we just made another announcement of another $34, $35 million available for small businesses.
00:26:03.100That's important to people, that we lift up small businesses that, in particular, don't always get the attention and support that they deserve.
00:26:13.020And so we're going to continue to do that as a city, and we'll make sure that, you know, I encourage all of you in this room, support small businesses.
00:26:23.500Go get your hair and makeup done by black people in particular.
00:29:13.140He also doesn't need to come up with one, and he knows that.
00:29:16.540Because there will be no accountability.
00:29:18.640And even if there is, eventually, it's not going to improve anything in Chicago.
00:29:25.680Because that's the other part of this, is that Brandon Johnson is everything bad about Lori Lightfoot, but worse.
00:29:32.380He even has the same kinds of scandals that she had.
00:29:37.860So they got rid of her and replaced her with a worse version of herself.
00:29:42.600And now Chicago is in even worse shape than it was.
00:29:45.460And its leadership is an even bigger joke than it was.
00:29:49.420And that's how these things generally work.
00:29:51.020Here's a report from the Tennessee Star as we continue to follow the revelations about the covenant shooter.
00:30:03.480And, of course, we had our report a few days ago based on writings that were obtained by the Daily Wire making the motives of the covenant shooter,
00:30:18.240as the motives become clearer and clearer, and also the motives for covering it up also become clearer and clearer.
00:30:54.520This is in addition to the four medications previously reported by the Tennessee Star.
00:30:59.200The image of the prescription bottles obtained by the Star, from a source familiar with the covenant investigation,
00:31:04.780depict four orange, semi-transparent prescription bottles with blue lids and white labels.
00:31:10.140All of the bottles are prescribed to Audrey E. Hale and bear the name of a psychiatric nurse practitioner who runs a practice based in Nashville.
00:31:17.020An additional image of a receipt suggests at least one medication was prescribed by a Nashville psychiatrist who also operates his own practice.
00:31:25.720The third and fourth prescription bottles bear the names of medications the Star reported after obtaining the Metro Nashville Police Department affidavit used to obtain a search warrant for Vanderbilt University Medical Center,
00:31:36.260where Hale was a 22-year mental health patient.
00:31:40.660However, the second prescription bottle is labeled Lorazepam, which is also known as Ativan, an anti-anxiety medication.
00:31:48.500Hale was not previously known to be taking this medication and the partially visible instructions shown on the prescription bottle in the photograph suggests Hale took one tablet daily.
00:31:56.780It was previously established by the Star that Hale was prescribed the anti-anxiety medication Buspirone, the allergy and anti-anxiety medication Hydroxazine,
00:32:07.360and the antidepressant Lexapro under its generic name is Scatalopram.
00:32:12.740Okay, so this is prescription number five, and this is a drug, again, known to be associated with mania, hostility, and irritability.
00:32:26.740Five prescriptions this person was on that we know of.
00:32:32.580And all of them, or the majority of them that we know of, were apparently supposed to be helping with mental health issues.
00:32:53.560And at the same time, these are also drugs, at least in particular this latest one, that has known side effects.
00:33:02.580And one of the side effects is hostility.
00:33:08.120You know, we've talked about this plenty of times on the show.
00:33:10.340I did a big monologue about it several months ago.