00:07:19.380I mean, Rand Paul, who I kind of like, is like this too, though.
00:07:21.740They will not play the game, part of which is getting the president's agenda done, you know?
00:07:26.660And so I just think Trump was like, be gone, you know?
00:07:31.000Yeah, and Michael, to your point, the reason you knew he was going to lose is because he started running a campaign where it was like, what if I have over podcast Nazis to my house?
00:07:47.080And so it was like that is not the move of a person who thinks he's long for the Congress.
00:07:50.880That is a person who is trying to steer into the dollars and sends a podcast and and making a future for himself.
00:07:57.120And by the way, I will point out the strange new respect he is likely to receive for this campaign from MSNBC and from New York Times and from all of these clowns is demonstrative of the fact that if you want to be accepted in left wing world, what you really should do is steer into the anti-Israel, anti-Semitism stuff.
00:08:36.780From Graham Plattner up in Maine to this insane House Democrat down in Texas, who is literally calling for me to go to an internment camp, like to be sent to an internment camp, and I have to be sent to an internment camp.
00:08:48.340But he has some bad policies, too, though.
00:09:00.780But, you know, what that says is that Massey, at a certain point here, I think when Trump came out against him, realized that he was going down and he was like, well, I'm going to launch a new movement that is that is sort of, you know, the horseshoe right and the woke left all together.
00:09:13.840And we will be best friends. And I think that that's that's really what the campaign became as far as the Jewish American money that came in.
00:09:20.040And it was not Israeli money. That's illegal. It was Jewish American money that came in to that race via APAC and via other super PACs.
00:09:27.040Well, yeah, the guy's wildly anti-Israel, and it turns out that a lot of donors would like to see him go because he opposed things that they like.0.98
00:09:33.960That's what happens in every race, but you'll notice that it was not until Trump actually started the process of kicking his ass out of Congress that that happened,
00:09:40.000because he won over 75% of the primary vote in 2020, 2022, and 2024, and it was only when he went up against Trump that things started to get really squirrely for him.
00:09:49.040Yeah, no, this is the key, Ben, I think, because, like, I don't mean to paper over it or gaslight.
00:09:53.220Obviously, there were a lot of pro-Israel donors who didn't like Massey, and Massey kind of earned
00:09:58.100their ire in many ways in a lot of his comments. But first of all, he's not the only congressman
00:10:02.420who voted against funding for Israel. The hypothetical I think of here is, had Massey
00:10:09.240voted for the Big Beautiful Bill, had Massey gone along with the White House and not liked Israel,
00:10:15.960voted against funding Israel, even made comments that were anti-Israel, if that were the case,
00:10:20.360I think he would still have his seat. In other words, it's not that the pro-Israel donors would
00:10:25.240like him or anything like that, but it's that Trump was this sort of catacomb figure. And it
00:10:29.460was when Trump said, hey, buddy, you're out. That was when all of the other political machinations
00:10:35.160really started to play out. And to be fair, Massey doesn't send anybody money.
00:10:39.480Yeah. But didn't Trump back his opponent? Massey has won before against a Trump backed opponent. I think I see this exactly the opposite as Michael Knowles.
00:10:54.980I think Americans, especially young people on the right, people on the right, people
00:11:00.000on the left are very comfortable criticizing Israel right now.
00:11:03.260But there is a line in the sand when it becomes obvious that it's not just Israel you have
00:11:08.760a problem with, which, you know, Rand Paul doesn't, you know, want to fund Israel.
00:11:13.300I don't ever feel like he's being anti-Semitic.
00:11:16.420There's a line where you cross that it's not just Jews and it's not just pro-Israel people.
00:11:20.680the American people have very little tolerance for anti-Semitism. And when you start saying
00:11:26.840that the Republican Jewish coalition, just Republican Jews are somehow undermining American0.69
00:11:33.760interests because they're trying to whip up support against you, that reads, I think,
00:11:40.400to average Americans as really anti-Semitic. And I think it's really off-putting. I think the fact
00:11:45.900that he, you know, the Trump piece obviously is a really big deal, but he won before against
00:11:51.000a Trump-backed candidate. I really think it was the tonal shift, the way that he talked about
00:11:56.660Israel. It stopped being the same as the way he talked about Ukraine. It stopped sounding like it
00:12:02.060was a principal opposition to funding and to war and started sounding like he was attacking American
00:12:07.500Jews. And I feel like average Americans, they're not so into Israel right now, but they are very
00:12:14.160protective of their Jewish neighbors. And I think that that just came off as so gross,
00:12:19.220like his opening to his concession speech where he said, I had to go find my opponent's phone
00:12:25.960number and he's in Tel Aviv somewhere. I think we have the clip. Do we have the clip?
00:12:31.220I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede. And it took a while to
00:12:44.160I did get the call. I have called and conceded the race. We've been honorable the whole time0.99
00:12:54.620and we're going to stay that way. He's been honorable the whole time.
00:12:59.180I wish you were right, but I don't think that's true. I mean, I think that people in America,
00:13:11.260People tend to be tolerant. They tend to be fairly accepting as long as you leave them alone.
00:13:16.300But I don't think that that's what brought him down. I mean, Trump stomped on the guy.
00:13:20.160It was a curb stomping. And it was kind of unfair. I mean, I don't think Massey has actually been
00:13:25.360that bad. If you just consider him as a series of votes, I don't think he's been that bad.
00:13:29.520No, he's been quite good in a lot of ways.
00:13:31.240Yeah, no. Yeah, a lot of ways he's fine. I mean, I just think he got up Trump's nose.
00:13:35.560People are just really sick of a Congress that cannot accomplish anything. And I think that
00:13:40.800i think there's something else way it's going to be yeah i think there's something else there
00:13:44.240with massey too uh one is yes he is the most obstructionist congressman on the right i mean
00:13:49.160there's no question he was a consistent no vote for every major agenda item that trump was pushing
00:13:53.920which pissed trump off but there was something else that we're ignoring here which is that
00:13:57.040massey decided to make it his chief goal in life to drag trump through the mud with a bunch of0.92
00:14:02.320bullshit about jeffrey epstein right he and roe connor decided that they were going to run an op0.90
00:14:06.680going after trump right he was going to reach across the aisle and suggest that trump was0.99
00:14:10.460covering for a child sex trafficking ring and there he was he was on video i mean naming people
00:14:15.620in the files who were guilty of nothing which they then later had to admit and he decided he
00:14:20.020was going to ramp this up so i i think that actually the anti-semitism as always is the
00:14:24.120symptom not the cause i think that that he started thinking in very conspiratorial ways about american
00:14:28.580politics and grievance-based ways about american politics he started attributing that to weird
00:14:33.680cliquish conspiracies like the the quote-unquote epstein class and all this stuff and trump read
00:14:38.260that. And he's like, listen, it's one thing for you to vote against me sometimes. It's another
00:14:41.580thing for you to vote against me always. It's another thing for you to go on MSNL and talk
00:14:45.560about how I'm covering up child sex trafficking. The answer here is no. And it just turns out that
00:14:51.000the crossover between believing all of those former things and also believing that the Jews0.74
00:14:55.340are deciding on your fate at their Friday night dinners, the crossover there tends to be almost0.59
00:14:59.860100%. If you're a conspiratorial thinker who does grievance-based politics and also opposes
00:15:05.580every element of Trump's agenda, the chances that you are going to, you know, be wandering around
00:15:11.540outside in the rain, ranting about the Uden is pretty high. Yeah, no, you know, there was this
00:15:16.740clip that was going around. It was one of the last real knocks on Massey, you know, 11th hour.
00:15:21.380And it was him being interviewed by a hostile journalist saying, hey, why do you oppose Trump?
00:15:25.720And why have you voted against the GOP on these crucial votes, whatever? And he said, hey, hey,
00:15:29.140I vote with the Republicans 91% of the time, but 9% of the time I don't vote for them because0.90
00:15:34.300they're covering up for pedophiles. And I thought, okay, hold on, wait, that doesn't even make a
00:15:39.580coherent political position. So you agree with the pedos and the pedo protectors 91% of the time?0.96
00:15:45.580I don't want to agree with them on any percent of the time. And so what he represented to me,
00:15:50.560if you kind of zoom out from these individual issues or the individual donors or whatever,
00:15:54.560is he had two problems going for him. One, he voted a little over 77% of the time with the GOP
00:16:01.360in Congress this term, which is way below the median GOP congressman who voted 95% of the time.
00:16:07.680This was also down from Massey last term, who was voting 91% of the time GOP, which itself was down
00:16:12.960from the previous term when he voted 95% of the time GOP. So you can say, look, I hate the GOP.
00:16:18.000I'm glad he bucked the party. I like that he's independent, whatever, but that's not going to
00:16:21.460win you support with the party. And then the other issue was, and this gets to your point, Ben,
00:16:26.040you know, when you're palling around with Ro Khanna, one of these unctuous left-wing figures
00:16:31.180who's just constantly taking shots at the right, when you're calling your colleagues and the people
00:16:36.440who are supposed to be on your team pedophiles, essentially, I mean, what you're expressing
00:16:40.580is not just independence from the party, you're expressing a kind of contempt for the party and0.74
00:16:45.880a contempt for the leader of the party. And it just, at that point, the vice president put it
00:16:49.240very well. He said, look, I've gotten along with Thomas in the past. We've agreed on a lot of
00:16:53.740things, but if you're going to go against the party in such a brutal way, you can't expect the
00:16:59.360party to back you. I think that kind of backs what Ben was saying. Sorry, go ahead, Drew.
00:17:06.440No, I think that kind of backs what Ben was saying, that the Jewish issue is really part0.53
00:17:11.860and parcel of this horseshoe where the right meets left. I mean, I cannot see the difference0.83
00:17:17.520between most of the people who are spouting this stuff. I can't see the political difference.
00:17:21.760They all seem to be on the same side.0.58
00:17:24.200And the worst of the kind of hatred and the Jew hatred that comes out is in the New York Times, you know, which has always kind of been in that position.0.54
00:17:31.940So I do think that there is this way that this guy just drifted out of the mainstream of the right, which actually doesn't adhere to a lot of that stuff.
00:17:39.740Well, you know what I like to do is drift out of consciousness so that I can go take a nice sleep on my Helix mattress.
00:21:54.120So, you know, we're talking about Tom Massey's future prospects.
00:21:57.160I mean, one of the other things here is that if you if you go out in a blaze of glory shouting about how you've started a movement, maybe you run for president or sponsors over at CalShare, estimating like 36 percent odds that Thomas Massey tries a 2028 presidential run.
00:22:09.900Not totally crazy. Honestly, I think that that's that's actually that might be low because somebody is going to have to try and be the avatar of the of the psycho woke right movement.
00:22:19.700and it's not going to be, I think, Joe Kent or Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Massey MTG ticket,
00:22:25.900man, that could do serious double-digit numbers of voters.
00:22:46.940The other thing that's kind of interesting, because Massey's now a Republican, I think he's still a Republican, who's in opposition to Trump, is if Trump is doing really, really well, you saw Rubio once again saying he would back J.D., Trump reasserting control over the party, if it's like J.D. Rubio, if that ticket, they keep floating from the White House, if that's the ticket, if Trump's doing really, really well, there you go, you got it.
00:23:08.740But if the Trump administration does collapse for whatever reason, then the Republicans who are going to have a better shot are the ones who are not tied to the administration.
00:23:16.880So all of a sudden then, the Ron DeSantis candidacy starts to look pretty interesting, assuming he doesn't join the admin.
00:23:23.480Or, I'm not saying Thomas Massey or Rand Paul are going to be president, but all of a sudden, they actually do get a little boost to their prospects.
00:23:30.120Yeah, but this is the place where AOC comes in.
00:23:32.160This is my nightmare, that if the Trump administration really tanks, which I don't think it's going to do, actually.
00:23:36.720I think it's going to come out of smelling like a rose.
00:23:38.920But if it does, I think AOC is the most dangerous person in the country.1.00
00:23:42.460A woman is a pretty, an idiot, and a fascist.1.00
00:23:46.140I mean, it's an almost perfect combination to win over the left.1.00
00:23:49.820Mr. Dominic, you're in, and we turn back to the other Ben.
00:25:30.040And then theory number three is that people like Massey spend an awful lot of time online and you just get brain worms.
00:25:35.700And once you get those brain worms online, it is very difficult to excise them in real life because, let's be real, again, this was a district in northern Kentucky in which Thomas Massey made his number one issue a small Middle Eastern state halfway around the globe, which is, again, only understandable if you have brain worms or if it's on purpose or if it's on purpose a different way.
00:25:56.400So I kind of want to know which theory of those three you buy.
00:25:58.540I'll give a more charitable view, which is, how did it start? It could have started from a real
00:26:05.160principled opposition to wars in the Middle East. I actually think it might have started a little
00:26:10.180earlier than that. But let's say it started there. There's no doubt that a ton of pro-Israel Jews
00:26:16.320really wanted to get Massey out. And Trump, again, we were talking about it earlier, but I think
00:26:21.780Trump was really the factor that made the difference. But nevertheless, it could well be
00:26:26.660the case that even if Massey didn't start out like smacking at the Jews or, you know, he obviously
00:26:32.120had his Tel Aviv comment last night. It might just be the case that when he saw that his big
00:26:37.920opposition was going to be coming from pro-Israel Jews, it just accelerated whatever trend was going
00:26:44.340on there. You know, in other words, like he had a problem. So it wasn't strategic, it was emotional.
00:26:48.540Basically he saw a bunch of Jewish money coming in. Can I make a vote here for brain worms? Can I0.99
00:26:54.000make a vote here for brain worms because i know i know who thomas massey used to be and he basically
00:26:59.020was this like hippie libertarian who was also uh somebody who would you know build these chicken
00:27:04.940coops and and make them controlled by bluetooth and stuff like this he was just sort of uh weird
00:27:10.400and eccentric but he really was not leaning into any of the crazy stuff that he leaned in all the
00:27:16.020way up to this and that's why it doesn't really it makes it makes no sense that he would you know
00:27:20.440steal the rocket ship directly into the sun, you know, based on prior behavior and the way that he
00:27:25.960was just kind of this, you know, this loner who was kind of off on the side, you know, and the0.97
00:27:30.240fact that he would pair up with Ro Khanna to deal in all of this bullshit going after Trump. Look,0.98
00:27:36.560there are four things on my Mount Rushmore of hate. It's communist, it's anti-Semites,0.64
00:27:43.080it's Karens, and it's hippies. And by the end of the day, he was hanging out with three or four of0.68
00:27:47.980those and and doing it all the time so who does that you know someone who was a libertarian who
00:27:53.700has any kind of rural libertarian principle or something like that who has the kind of pro-life
00:27:58.040record that massey had the kind of pro-gun record that he had in the past stuff like that you just
00:28:02.900don't anticipate him going in that direction and so i think the last couple of years of him he just
00:28:07.300went crazy and he started hanging around with the worst of the crazies i think my vote is for a
00:28:12.700combination of the two theories that one is the brain worms that he went crazy it was exacerbated0.97
00:28:17.140by the fact that Jewish money was pouring into the campaign against him. But also, people do tend
00:28:24.200to look for an exit strategy. And it wouldn't surprise me whatsoever is as he started to go
00:28:28.860nuts, he started to see that little light at the end of the tunnel that ends up in Podcastistan
00:28:33.340and making good money and with a big audience. So I think there might be a combination of the
00:28:38.420passion and the greed, because he did seem to really lose his whole personality.
00:28:43.820You know, if it is the greed, I think that that does speak to kind of where the Republican Party is.
00:28:47.620In other words, the anti-Semitism and the conspiratorial muddiness and sort of the Tucker wing of what's going on, that is an excellent exit strategy, and it's a very poor entry strategy.0.91
00:28:57.800And I think people are mistaking an exit strategy for an entry strategy, meaning that we've seen a bunch of candidates who are endorsed by Tucker, who are getting their asses just handed to them in election after election.
00:29:06.900whether it's Casey Putsch against Vivek Ramaswamy up in Ohio, James Fishbeck is about to get crushed0.65
00:29:11.960by Byron Donalds down here. You have Massey, who's now lost his seat. MTG has lost her seat.
00:29:17.640You're seeing this happen over and over and over and over. And so you're seeing people exit and
00:29:22.560presumably make more money and get the strange new respect on the other end. But if you're a
00:29:25.980politician who is looking to get into a position of power in the Republican Party, is your best
00:29:31.080way of doing that, as an elected official, to steer into crazy land? Or does it turn out that
00:29:36.180actually normie land is the way that you get in and crazy land is the way that you get out with
00:29:39.760money. No, that's a good observation. There's also one, uh, sort of emotional aspect here
00:29:44.840because my theory is still like a lot of this was exacerbated emotionally and kind of understandably,
00:29:49.880but the part that we haven't talked about is he, he started to fall afoul of Trump and get a little
00:29:55.820bit more eccentric than usual right around the time his wife died. I mean, to what degree is
00:30:00.900this just his wife of decades died and he got kind of emotionally unmoored and it upended his
00:30:06.000political career. Is that too much psychobabble for political analysis? I don't know him well
00:30:10.920enough to know that. I just know that he became unrecognizable to a lot of us who interacted with
00:30:15.740him over the years. He, again, went from being this kind of country libertarian type who was
00:30:22.560always smiling and kind of happy and knew that he was basically irrelevant to being someone who was
00:30:27.080aggressively going after the most important person in politics in America, not just in his party,
00:30:33.020and doing so in ways that repeatedly involved him lying blatantly about all these sorts of things
00:30:39.140related to the Epstein files, as Ben was saying earlier. So I think that there is something to
00:30:45.340that, Michael, but I haven't had him on the psychoanalysis couch personally.
00:30:51.220You're right. It's interesting, though, that Tucker's lack of influence is the exact opposite
00:30:56.800of what Tucker himself predicted, and that almost everything that Tucker predicts turns out to be0.87
00:31:01.120the opposite, which I think is, is proof that God is a gigantic, invisible Jewish man with a long
00:31:05.960white beard. I think he's just screwing with Tucker. It is just the demon. I actually like1.00
00:31:13.340looking at the way these, these things have shaken out here. One, there are two things that make me
00:31:18.300feel really good about it. One, even again, it's like, I'm not, I'm not a huge Massey hater. I
00:31:22.300think for a lot of his career, he was great. It just irritated me when he was really turning away
00:31:26.640and kind of, I don't know, opposing the party and the president. But nevertheless, the two great
00:31:32.780affirmations are, one, Twitter's not real life. Sometimes I worry about that. Sometimes I think
00:31:36.760maybe Twitter is becoming real life or it's obviously, but no, there's a huge distinction
00:31:40.200between those things. And there's a big chasm between the hardcore politics on the ground
00:31:45.740and the political media. And so, you know, if the podcasts conducted the election, the results would
00:31:50.860all be different, but they didn't. You know, it was conducted by voters in districts around the
00:31:54.940country. And we have so many data points. We have the Indiana data point, which again, that issue
00:31:59.160was redistricting. We have the Georgia data point. That issue was really the election of 2020. We
00:32:05.340have Bill Cassidy. We have that data point. We now have Massey. So it just, it seems to me that
00:32:10.680the guardrails hold and politics is actually a little different than the entertainment products.
00:32:15.280I have to break in here. I'm sorry. I have to break in here. I have to break in here with a
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00:32:29.600middle of this conversation. I could just fall off my chair and it's gone. And I want to make sure
00:32:33.300that the people that I care about, you know, there's only like one or two of them that they
00:32:37.460are taken care of. And I think for all the stuff we remember, we often forget that that's an
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00:34:28.120As long as I don't have to have a health checkup because I never blast those for some reason.
00:34:32.160So I just wanted to add, you made a comment about political media. I think that if we had a functional political media that wasn't just interested in carrying water for the Democrats, the narrative after last night would be that Republicans are way more unified than Democrats are.
00:34:49.420Over the course of the past couple of months, we've seen Democrats prevail in multiple primaries.
00:34:54.460We've seen the situation play out in Maine.
00:35:16.660The fact is that they're only united by the fact that they all loathe Trump.
00:35:21.280And it's just a contest of how much they loathe him between them.
00:35:24.880And that's, I think, the real story of what's going on on the left today, which is far more divided than the right after everything that's played out in these primaries.
00:35:32.940And it's clear that unity really is a political virtue.
00:35:36.300You know, I think one of the real points of pride for Massey, and it's a point of pride among libertarians, is they love to point out how different they are.
00:35:43.840how they're willing to stand up to their party or how they, I don't know, how special they are.
00:35:48.040They love that. Individualist political ideologies do that. But unity really matters. It's one of
00:35:54.080the four marks of the church per the Nicene Creed. And it's important in your home. It's important
00:35:58.320in your country. And it's certainly important in political parties. And so it's not just,
00:36:02.880look, you don't want to blindly follow the leader of a party and the Republicans do a bunch of dumb0.86
00:36:07.500things that we should try to fight against. But I can't help but going back to this clip that has
00:36:12.760been going viral, of a journalist with an activist outside New York courthouse talking about Luigi
00:36:18.100Mangione and the killing of Brian Thompson. And this girl said, you know, his kids are better off
00:36:23.060without him. It's this guy, you know, he deserved to die. And you know, those kids, they can enjoy1.00
00:36:27.280the blood money. And what I keep coming back to, and we've seen this time and time again, obviously
00:36:31.380with Charlie's assassination and with the near assassination of Trump, is that the left, mainstream
00:36:36.340swaths of the left have been telling us for over a year now, really for much longer, that they would
00:36:41.080want to kill us and will mock our kids when they have succeeded. They keep telling us that. And in
00:36:46.580the face of that, we need party unity, not to be lemmings, not to be blind followers, not to be
00:36:51.780NPCs, but we need, we can duke it out in the primaries, but then we need to get in line,
00:36:56.200follow the leader and win elections. And to your point, Ben, I think that that really comes out
00:37:01.360pretty cleanly last night. There was a clear leader of the political party. There was a clear
00:37:05.180party apparatus, funding, media, organizing, and looking ahead to the midterms in 2028,
00:37:11.720the stakes are very, very high. And I'll take unity as a virtue.
00:37:15.240I mean, I agree with that. But I think that what happened here and what's been happening is that
00:37:18.580there are lines drawn, right? Unity has to be around a thing. Right now, the unity in the
00:37:23.260Republican Party is around the thing of the Trump administration, right? And so you can say, well,
00:37:28.620you know, Massey was more of a principled conservative when it came to spending, which,
00:37:31.920by the way, I agree with. I was very praiseworthy of Massey's positions for most of his career
00:37:35.660when it came to the role of the federal government, for example. But the reality is that there were
00:37:40.180lines that were drawn, and then Trump is legitimately excising people from those lines.
00:37:44.360He's not just saying, blanket unity, come hug me. He's saying, listen, here's where the line is.
00:37:48.740And if you're on the other side of that line, you're on the other side of that line. The point
00:37:51.500that you're making about the Democrats is a good one. It also is demonstrative they have embraced
00:37:56.680the worst parts of themselves. I mean, legitimately the worst parts of themselves.
00:38:00.740Hassan Piker talking about social murder with The New York Times, about Brian Thompson.
00:38:05.020And then Hassan Piker, no shock, endorsing people like Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate Democrat
00:38:10.580would-be nominee in Michigan, who's probably going to end up with the nomination, who's
00:38:13.980like a full-scale terrorism supporter.
00:38:16.040And by the way, Hassan Piker endorsing, wait for it, Thomas Massey.
00:38:19.000Again, so there is this horseshoe that has taken place.
00:38:22.000But I think Baia's earlier point is right.
00:38:24.260The part of the right-wing horseshoe that is horseshoeing is being actively excised from
00:38:28.480the party by president trump which is a pretty amazing thing actually you know it's always the
00:38:33.320theory of the guys on the furthest edge of a party that if they would only allow them to do their
00:38:39.540thing they would win everything the democrats are going to test that theory i mean they've been
00:38:43.460testing it and these dsa guys are going to get out there and it's going to be interesting to see how
00:38:48.100much you know leverage they have because there is a move to the left and a younger cohort of voters
00:38:53.600usually who usually don't vote so it's we've been safe from them but they do get excited over a guy
00:38:58.380like mamdani i think i think he is the only politician that i think of as actually being
00:39:02.940evil mamdani i think he's an actual uh bad guy you know an actual only one well i mean there's
00:39:10.280a lot of corruption a lot of that stuff but this guy's an actual destroyer platner's
00:39:14.200platner's legitimately evil i mean some of the stuff that platner is posted
00:39:18.340the stuff that platner is not in office yet i was talking about office holders oh yeah yeah for
00:39:23.560sure no i know what you mean but platner is again another guy who's being fully endorsed and
00:39:27.860legitimized by the entire Democratic Party infrastructure. You have members of the
00:39:31.600Democratic media who are out there massaging a guy who was saying on Reddit like a couple of
00:39:35.680years ago about how happy he was to watch a video of an American military member literally being
00:39:40.200killed. I mean, Plattner is disgusting, disgusting. And the Democratic Party is hugging him with both0.99
00:39:46.580arms right now. I mean, legitimately saying, I mean, there are people who are saying that he
00:39:50.820should run for main Senate and then he should run for president. And the only saving grace of
00:39:55.180he wasn't born in america so he can't run for the presidency but graham plattner can and there are
00:39:59.720a bunch of people in the democratic party who are rising and the next generation of the democratic0.73
00:40:03.560party is psychotic i mean fully damned crazy like they are not remotely anywhere in the neighborhood
00:40:09.120of the same and so you know i get asked the question a lot do we think that there's going0.98
00:40:13.240to be a reversion to a sort of normal politics after this i mean the only way that that happens
00:40:18.200if the democrats get absolutely shellacked and i think that unfortunately because of the polarized
00:40:22.260nature of the political system right now, the chances that they get totally shellacked
00:40:50.200But I think, like, I don't know why it hasn't gotten more attention that there have been multiple attempts on Sam Altman's life, that the AI phenomenon is now creating, and the demonization of billionaires that Bernie Sanders talks about, that is echoed by so many, not just on the DSA left, but just on the left generally.
00:41:10.680That's going to create a climate in which these people, they're not going to be able to live and work and have the kind of roles as captains of industry that they've had in the past without having the fear of the kind of backlash that these radical demonizing elements of the left really, I think, believe in truly in their hearts.
00:41:29.800And that's something that is so evil and so atrocious in terms of American history. We've seen things like this happen in the past, and it led to bombings, it led to assassination attempts, it led to things that were absolutely terrible for our fabric. And to see this happening in the 250th anniversary of America really is depressing to me.
00:41:47.980Well, one of the things that actually is unique, and Ben, you're pointing it out here,
00:41:50.920is that in the history of the United States, when there are assassination attempts,
00:41:54.960typically it is people who are involved directly in the business of politics, right?
00:41:58.580It's RFK getting shot or MLK getting shot, or even Charlie in the line of MLK, right?
00:42:03.940Just being a political activist and not to say they were saying the same thing or anything.
00:42:07.760But the reality is that it is now extended out to almost Russian Revolution-style violence,
00:42:14.580Like going after people who are just captains of industry, as you say, people who are running companies, people who are just engaged in the marketplace, like the actual marketplace.
00:42:23.740If you had said to me 15 years ago that there would be an assassination attempt on the president, I said, OK, that's kind of like, unfortunately, a relative norm in American political life.
00:42:31.860Even if you had said to me there would be an assassination of a high level political activist like Charlie, I said that that's that's unique and horrifying, but not totally unexpected.
00:42:40.380If you would say to me that we would be at a point where, you know, people like a Jeff Bezos or a Mark Zuckerberg or a Sam Altman, that these are people who have to walk around with 24-7 security for the crime of creating products and services that people want to buy.
00:43:12.060You know, Ben, we should also point out, this has happened before, and we kind of forget about it in American history.
00:43:17.320But you think about the Palmer Raids, you think about the early part of the 20th century, you had anarchists and communists who were setting off bombs on Wall Street, who were setting off bombs and shooting people in the Capitol.
00:43:27.980You had a Marxist professor from Harvard in 1915, of course it was Harvard, shooting up or setting off a bomb in the Capitol.
00:43:33.260You did have these kinds of anarchist bombings almost exactly 100 years ago.
00:43:38.840You're seeing them begin to crop up again. The last time that that happened, the federal government came in and curtailed civil rights and put these people in prison, deported these people, got them out of our country. Whether or not we have the ability to actually exert that kind of political authority or the desire to do so right now, I'm not so sure.
00:43:57.180But we have seen this play out before. And the only way that we were able to survive it right around the time of the Russian Revolution, when Russia did not survive it, is because we wielded federal authority in a very, very strong way.
00:44:09.720And if we don't do that now, I fear that the problem won't resolve itself on its own.
00:44:15.460Well, we'll get to more on that in just one second. First, we need to talk about how you talk. And I mean like actually talk, like on your phone.
00:44:22.500And one of the weirder financial habits people have is you will spend hours comparison shopping
00:44:26.440for a plane ticket that saves you like $12, and then you'll continue paying $80 or $90
00:44:30.160a month for wireless service without any question.
00:44:32.420And at a certain point, you have to ask yourself, why am I doing that?
00:44:34.720Especially now that companies like PureTalk exist.
00:46:34.580I know we're all here just, you know, babbling and cackling and giggling,
00:46:38.640whereas you are not only helping to lead, you know, health in the country,
00:46:43.000but also rooting out all of that terrible fraud, which we have not talked enough about.
00:46:48.800Well, maybe I can put it in the context of affordability, because I think for a lot of
00:46:52.180Americans, it's what they're most concerned about. And if you just took the fraud out of
00:46:56.340Medicare and Medicaid, and we estimate there's probably $100 billion of fraud on the programs
00:47:01.700that the government pays for you to get better health, that would allow us to double the life
00:47:05.820expectancy of the Medicare trust fund. So to put that in context, if you're working your tail off
00:47:10.400right now watching the show, and you're worried Medicare is not going to be there for you when
00:47:14.460you reach the ripe old age of 65, it's the parachute that's going to catch you and deal
00:47:19.020with your health issues without costing you an arm and a leg, so you can keep your arms and legs,
00:47:23.160then you should be pretty much with us on this fraud issue. Because by doubling the life
00:47:27.700expectancy of the program, we'll make sure it's there for you and for your grandkids. And that's
00:47:31.480the kind of discussion we need to be having in earnest with each other, because the fraud is so
00:47:35.720large, it's so weaponized that we have to start asking ourselves, is this really a flaw for state
00:47:41.600leadership, for governors? Or maybe there's a feature here we had not noticed before,
00:47:45.940which is why they've allowed it to go unimpeded for so many years.
00:47:50.980Can you explain what kind of fraud is taking place exactly?
00:47:55.640I'll give you three examples. So South Florida, where you guys have some affinity,
00:47:59.180is a state that has generally done okay on fraud, waste, and abuse. But in the area of
00:48:04.320durable medical equipment where, you know, the wheelchairs and canes, these companies have now
00:48:10.680grown so quickly that we have twice as many of these durable medical equipment suppliers as
00:48:16.300McDonald's in South Florida. It's impossible that that many people want to sell you wheelchairs.
00:48:21.280But that's the norm. We think the Cuban government's involved because many of the
00:48:24.940perpetrators actually flee back to Cuba. Even worse, one third of all hospices in the entire
00:48:30.620country are in Los Angeles, not California, and actually specifically the city of Los Angeles.
00:48:36.280Now, that would imply a very high death rate in LA. And no matter what we might say about Los
00:48:40.540Angeles, that's just not the truth. And so if you have one third of all of the hospices taking care
00:48:45.540of people at the end of their life with dignity in one city, then we would have to assume most
00:48:50.360of those folks are fraudulent. In fact, half of the people in Los Angeles, the hospice centers,
00:48:55.460we do think are fraudulent, and we have stopped paying almost half of them already. And here's
00:49:00.580the craziness of all this thing, 800 of these hospices we've stopped paying. We've had maybe
00:49:04.760two dozen complain. So most of these guys say, all right, the gig's up. They came looking for
00:49:09.560a man. We know one day we'd be out of business. We're going to go defraud somebody else. But the
00:49:13.160fact that that could have occurred under the watch of Gavin Newsom, even though he was warned
00:49:16.880four years ago by the state auditor general that there was widespread fraud and really just did
00:49:22.280performative things to pretend he was dealing with the crisis. Why should the federal government
00:49:26.840have to come in and clean up the mess. Well, unfortunately, it's federal dollars they're
00:49:30.440spending. So literally, New Mexico, another blue state, and Mississippi, a red state,
00:49:35.520their tax bills are higher because those folks who don't have the income of people in California
00:49:40.360are paying extra federal taxes so we can transfer it right to Los Angeles, where the unmitigated
00:49:45.840disaster of fraud, not just in hospice, but in other programs exist. Let me give you a third
00:49:50.160example, and then we can come to the why question, which is always the most important one. New York
00:49:54.900City, New York State. These are big, prosperous areas. The number one job growth, in fact,
00:50:01.160the number one job of all in New York State is a personal care service attendant. Now,
00:50:06.200what does that mean? That means we're paying someone to carry your groceries up the stairs
00:50:10.120to your kitchen. That person is often your child or the neighbor's kid. And your neighbor's kid's
00:50:14.780driving you to the doctor's office. So all these services that historically your family would do
00:50:19.760for you. We're not paying someone to do for you. It's become a jobs program. Let's take it to the
00:50:25.620why question. Why would it be that you would allow that much growth? Why is California have twice the
00:50:31.540amount of money being spent on these same personal care services than the national average? It's
00:50:35.900because if you're not making jobs yourself and you want to pretend like you're creating jobs and you
00:50:40.200want to be able to get federal tax dollars to pay for those jobs and then tax that income so you
00:50:46.100have more state revenue. Well, you'd create personal care services. It's literally exactly
00:50:50.420what they have done in New York and in California. And here's the part that's really getting me.
00:50:54.060They're unionizing those workers, which means we're going to help the union that's the big
00:50:59.360service workers union in New York double in size. All that union dues and all the taxes on that,
00:51:06.060that all flows back potentially for political patronage purposes to support the single
00:51:10.880dominant party in New York State and California. So, Dr. Oz, other than sort of the rooting out
00:51:17.420of the fraud that's happening, what systemic changes do you think need to be made to how
00:51:22.220the federal government deals with Medicaid at the state level? I know there have been a lot of
00:51:25.720critiques of the block grant program because it basically removes a lot of the incentive for
00:51:29.780states to actually police their own fraud because if you're just getting a chunk of change, it
00:51:32.840doesn't really matter to you whether or not you identify the fraud or not. The chunk is the same.
00:51:37.360What sort of systemic changes do you think need to happen?
00:51:40.880Oh, this is very addressable. First of all, you need a federal government that wants to do their job. The prior administration gutted the Medicaid program integrity. And I'm going to be clear about this. There were six people left that we're aware of that were working in Medicaid program integrity for the country at CMS, the agency that I run for the president. And that basically means we're not serious about this.
00:52:01.400We just want you to enroll as many people as possible into the Medicaid program.