On today's show, we are joined by the great Darren Beattie of Revolver News to talk about the latest in the Hunter Biden scandal, and how the DOJ is working directly for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. Plus, a new poll that shows my father leading him by 4 points in the latest head-to-head matchup between him and Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, and a new report that shows Americans are losing a whopping 76% of their income in four years, despite the fact that inflation is not exactly keeping pace with the pace of inflation. Plus, the latest on the latest headlines surrounding Hunter Biden's indictment, and why I think Joe Biden should be fired from his position as Vice President. You don't want to miss it! Subscribe to our new show, Triggered, wherever you get your shows, to stay up to date on the happenings in the world of politics and everything else going on in it. Subscribe today using our podcast s hashtag and tag on social media using the hashtag , and find us on Insta to let us know what you thought of the latest episode! Subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts, and share it with a friend! Timestamps: 4:00 - Why Joe Biden is toast? 6:30 - Why I think Hunter Biden is a bad father 7:00 8:20 - Why my father is a better president than Hillary Clinton 9: My father is better than my mom 11: What would you do with money 13:00 | My father should be better than me? 16:00 -- My father would pay me $500,000 17: Why I don't pay $500? 18:30 -- What would I pay in half,000? 19:00 Why I would never pay in a day? 21:30 22:40 -- How much money I would I like to see Joe Biden make $50,000 more than my dad would I get? 26:10 -- I don t pay in $500 27:50 -- Why I'm not paying my mom's salary? 28:00 Is Joe Biden better than that? 29:00 How much do I get paid in a year? 31:00 My father's income? 32:00 What are you going to pay my dad? 33:00
00:06:09.000He's broken a lot of really interesting stories that no one else seems to want to cover, strangely.
00:06:15.000We wonder why that is. Every interview we've done with Darren has been a hit, and I'm sure this one will be too, because there's so much to talk about, especially with his background in academia as maybe the I guess the only, let's call it, academic for Trump back in 15 and 16, etc. So I think you're going to really like this one, guys.
00:06:33.000Make sure you like, make sure you share, make sure you subscribe so that you never miss any of these episodes.
00:06:39.000And remember, you can also find them all.
00:06:55.000So before we get to Darren, a quick rundown of all the latest headlines, the craziness from the weekend that we'll talk about with him as well.
00:07:04.000But we got to begin with everyone's favorite crackhead, Hunter Biden.
00:07:09.000Who is finally facing some actual felony charges.
00:07:13.000At least, you know, that's the optics they want you to believe right now.
00:07:17.000But on Thursday night, Hunter Biden, we talked about it a little bit on the show live there, but we didn't have any actual information.
00:07:23.000Hunter Biden was indicted on several tax charges for failing to pay $1.4 million in income taxes.
00:07:31.000The indictment details how Hunter spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on hookers, And drugs and took out $1.6 million from ATM machines in a four-year period of time.
00:07:47.000Now, that's pretty amazing in a largely cashless society.
00:07:51.000I imagine for me in that same period of time, it was probably like 10 grand.
00:07:54.000But, you know... Minor details, folks.
00:08:57.000Of all of the charges that Hunter Biden could be guilty of, all of the crimes we see the evidence of, and wire transfers, and links, strangely, nothing here has been linked to Joe Biden.
00:09:12.000This is not the DOJ... Getting justice and equal justice under the law and all the other nonsense.
00:09:19.000This is them working directly for Joe Biden and the Democrat Party, making sure to not go after the things to tie to his father.
00:09:30.000And of course, you have the leftists on the media and on Twitter saying, he's not an elected official.
00:09:35.000I know. He was just sending 10% to the big guy because he's not an elected official.
00:09:43.000The real story is not whether Hunter paid taxes, or the millions of dollars he made, or the banks questioning why he was getting money from the CCP entities despite not really actually performing any services, but why he made those millions of dollars.
00:10:02.000The indictment shows that in 2014, Burisma agreed to pay Hunter Biden a million dollars a year for a no-show job at an energy company of which he knows nothing about in a language he doesn't speak.
00:10:18.000However, in March of 2017, after Joe Biden left office and was no longer the vice president, Burisma magically cut Hunter's pay in half to $500,000.
00:10:35.000You think maybe, just maybe, they were buying access?
00:10:39.000No way! That would never happen, right?
00:10:42.000Joe Biden is toast, by the way, folks.
00:10:45.000We see that every day. The Wall Street Journal released a poll on Saturday showing my father leading him by four points in a head-to-head matchup.
00:10:52.000It must have killed the globalist journalists to read that.
00:10:57.000The reason is Biden's losing is simple, folks.
00:11:00.000People are poorer now than they were just four years ago.
00:11:05.000A whopping 76% of Americans told CBS News, not exactly conservative publishing, that their income isn't keeping up with the pace of inflation.
00:14:16.000Then, all of a sudden, the story magically disappears.
00:14:20.000When they're not caught, we're left assuming it had to be some sort of, you know, white supremacist because that's, according to the FBI, the biggest problem facing America today.
00:14:31.000No one seems to know any of these people or actually see them, but had it not been for the people that caught this lady, that's who would have been blamed because they're trying to sow discord.
00:14:43.000It's what they do because it's been very effective.
00:14:47.000The left and the media are going to push hoax after hoax after hoax next year in hopes of rigging the election in Joe Biden's favor and doing the bidding of the Democrat Party.
00:15:06.000But I do want to end on some good news before we get to the interview with Darren.
00:15:11.000Liz McGill is no longer the president of my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.
00:15:17.000While I've really been disappointed in my school...
00:15:21.000The place where I graduated and hold a degree from for leading the charge of putting men into women's sports.
00:15:28.000Remember Leah Thomas, esteemed female swimmer that just wasn't so good as a guy?
00:15:34.000That was Penn. That was my alma mater.
00:15:37.000We would have had a blast back in the day showing up at the swim meets with a keg just laughing about this, but today you'd get thrown out.
00:15:43.000Problem is, you won't seem to get thrown out for being anti-Semitic.
00:15:49.000You won't get thrown out for calling for the genocide Of an entire race of people and turning a blind eye to the anti-Semitic insanity that's going on.
00:16:00.000But at least their board was the first to act.
00:16:04.000While they've been first to act in a lot of really bad ways lately and leading the charge of woke insanity, at least the board showed some sense.
00:16:14.000There are repercussions for the lunacy that's taken over academia.
00:16:20.000Let's hope this is the beginning of that.
00:16:23.000Let's hope this is the start of many changes at universities.
00:16:29.000For far too many years, America's colleges have been breeding grounds for extreme leftism.
00:16:35.000I wish the boards of these universities woke up earlier, but it's better late than never.
00:16:42.000Changes need to come at Harvard as well, where pro-Hamas university president Claudine Gay is refusing to resign.
00:16:53.000Journalist Chris Ruffo reported yesterday that it seems gay plagiarized entire sections of her PhD thesis.
00:17:02.000If she can't get fired after refusing to punish calls for genocide or plagiarizing her thesis, then DEI is truly unstoppable.
00:17:13.000Just a few hours ago, 500, I believe it was, other academics at Harvard signed a letter
00:17:27.000She's not the author of numerous articles.
00:17:30.000She's barely had a presence in academia, but because she is, I believe, gay, because she
00:17:36.000does check off a couple boxes, she can assume the leadership at Harvard.
00:17:44.000It's unbelievable, but it's just the beginning.
00:17:48.000College campuses are important because what happens there spreads to the rest of society.
00:17:53.000This week in Fresno, California, hundreds held a rally where they raised the Palestinian flag and chanted from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
00:18:06.000They raised that flag in replacement of the American flag that belonged on that flagpole.
00:18:13.000Radical colleges means a radical country.
00:18:19.000It's not just the president of Harvard or the president of MIT, the 500 people that stand in solidarity with her despite, again, apparently no real accomplishments, despite backing and standing up for a radical insanity.
00:18:40.000Despite plagiarism and being called out for that, they're just fine with it because they don't actually care.
00:18:46.000These are no longer merit-based places.
00:19:51.000They'll answer all of your questions, and they'll walk you through the whole process so you can educate yourself and make an informed decision.
00:20:16.000While you're at it guys, don't forget to also check out the great folks over at Patriot Mobile,
00:20:20.000America's only Christian conservative wireless provider.
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00:20:30.000So have your cell phone with Patriot Mobile where you put America first with every call while getting the same nationwide coverage as the major carriers.
00:20:39.000Those same major carriers whose parent companies tried literally canceling conservative programming on cable and elsewhere.
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00:21:05.000So for free activation, it's fast, free, and easy.
00:21:08.000Go to patriotmobile.com slash triggered, just like the show.
00:21:16.000Again, you can have your hard-earned dollars work towards companies who believe what you believe in and are putting their money where their mouth is, or you can give your hard-earned dollars to companies that hate your guts and will actively take your money and use it to push the woke causes that hate you, that you hate, and who would put you in the gulags.
00:21:37.000The choice is pretty simple to me, folks.
00:21:39.000Support those who are with us in this fight.
00:21:42.000Go to patriotmobile.com slash triggered.
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00:21:50.000With that, guys, joining me now, guys, great friend of the show, Revolver News founder, Darren Beattie.
00:21:59.000But your academic background as the founder and only member of Academics for Trump, Back in 2015-2016.
00:22:11.000Literally the only person probably who took a salary at a university in America.
00:22:17.000We saw what's going on over the last couple weeks.
00:22:20.000The University of Pennsylvania president has now stepped down.
00:22:24.000That's my alma mater. They've been leading the charge in woke BS, with Leah Thomas pushing that, leading the charge of men in women's sports.
00:22:34.000But now we're learning that The president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, was caught up in a plagiarism scandal stemming from her, you know, PhD work.
00:22:44.000Can you lay out what we're seeing in academia right now?
00:22:47.000Because it seems like, you know, if you become the president of Harvard, at any other time you would say, you have all these qualifications.
00:22:52.000But it turns out, like, she's not written a book.
00:22:56.000She's only taken part in a handful of academic studies.
00:22:59.000It seems like she's plagiarized some of those.
00:23:03.000How do you become the president of Harvard without actually having seemingly any actual academic credentials?
00:23:12.000I mean, I get that she, I believe she's gay, you know, and she's black, but like, is that enough these days?
00:23:24.000What's going on? Well, being both gay and black is a tremendous credential in academia these days, and it's kind of ironic because my understanding is her name is actually gay, and she's also a gay black woman.
00:23:39.000It's like, if this were a South Park episode, you know, you could hardly...
00:23:45.000This one has to be, you know, this has got to be on their radar at this point, and they haven't missed much lately.
00:23:51.000Yeah, I mean, it's the whole thing is like on one hand is hilarious.
00:23:55.000On the other hand, it's just very sad because, you know, American academic excellence, the fact that America possesses the top universities in the world has always been, you know, one of its major comparative advantages and something that we could rightfully be proud of.
00:24:12.000And so we're just seeing another example recently with This unfortunate anti-Semitism issue that you see across the bureaucracies and of course in the student populations as well.
00:24:25.000I mean, let's not forget that the anti-Semitism you see or tolerance for anti-Semitism at the bureaucracies in the higher level is basically an appeasement strategy for the more radicalized student populations and student groups.
00:24:42.000Someone like Professor Gay, I mean, I'm sure that she's, you know, left-wing in orientation, but these university presidents understand they have a very fine line to walk on because, on the one hand, they don't want to do something like, you know, end up like UPenn where they have to resign.
00:25:00.000Yeah. But also they don't want to say something that leads to weeks and weeks of riots and protests and sit-ins and so forth.
00:25:08.000So part of it is just the environment that's allowed to develop and metastasize within the universities that has led to such a disastrous thing.
00:25:18.000but this goes so far beyond anti-Semitism, which is the recent boiling point and has
00:25:24.000gained the attention of some people like Bill Ackman, who in other contexts wouldn't necessarily
00:25:31.000be too concerned about expressions of wokeness at the university. So it's good that people like
00:25:37.000that are now at least attentive to the wider issue, and I hope they become more so. But
00:25:43.000the political radicalization of the university is something that's been going back since the 60s,
00:25:49.000and we're really seeing the fruits of that in such a disastrous way.
00:25:54.000And as for the plagiarism issue, like it is funny, you know, and I think this is not unique to Professor Gay or Dr.
00:27:38.000You're perhaps one of the bigger beneficiaries of DEI policy, if these things are true, certainly.
00:27:43.000You're right about, yes, they have a PhD in underwater basket weaving, therefore you must respect them, because what do you know, peasants?
00:27:52.000You're a mechanic, so you actually probably have a far greater skill set, but they got their doctoral thesis in underwater basket weaving, and therefore they're a doctor.
00:28:45.000But does that matter to the 500 people that are signing on in support of someone that seems to have no business there?
00:28:52.000And again, maybe I'm wrong, but this reporting seems to be fairly accurate.
00:28:56.000You're right. She doesn't have a degree in nuclear physics.
00:29:00.000This is one of those sort of, like, Let's make up a concentration to say that we're the expert and we have a PhD, amongst other things, but it doesn't actually generate or create any real value other than to perpetuate the nonsense of the DEI cycle.
00:29:18.000The DEI people love DEI because it's guaranteed employment.
00:29:21.000They find problems that don't really exist because only they can solve them.
00:29:26.000The donors are now saying they've had enough, but Is anything going to really happen in the long run, or is academia too far taken over?
00:29:57.000But, you know, the underlying question that you pose is really critical, and it's hard to answer because things can go in a number of ways.
00:30:04.000I think it is fair to say that the donor influence is not negligible.
00:30:11.000I mean, we've seen the fruits of that in the recent resignation at Penn, and there could be follow-up issues At MIT and Harvard.
00:30:21.000But there's certainly real leverage that has been brought to bear that has not, unfortunately, I would say, in previous cases, been brought to bear when it comes to Just vicious and general anti-white indoctrination within the universities, which is also a broader issue.
00:30:40.000And it's the issue that frankly underlines the anti-Semitism.
00:30:44.000The anti-Semitism is acceptable because anti-white racism is acceptable.
00:30:51.000And within the sort of broader dynamic of, say, the Israel-Palestine situation, the Israeli Jews are considered to be white within that paradigm as opposed to the colonially impressed, oppressed Palestinian people.
00:31:07.000That's precisely why the framework plays out the way it does.
00:31:11.000So I think to the extent that people have only taken an interest now because it involves anti-Semitism or think that somehow that can be I think that some people are starting to realize that that is unrealistic.
00:31:29.000But I think that's going to be a very tempting compromise because these donors do have leverage.
00:31:43.000Yeah. And somewhat attractive short-term compromise would be, okay, we are going to incorporate antisemitism issues into the broader DEI framework.
00:32:09.000Yeah, but we're not going to address sort of the anti-white side of that, which still seems to be okay.
00:32:14.000I mean, I was looking, it was another, I think it was another Ivy or, you know, certainly top sort of 20 university.
00:32:20.000I was looking at, you know, if you took, basically the statistics were crazy.
00:32:24.000Like if you, you took the same student, you got rid of skin color.
00:32:27.000And you took it, if you were white, you had like a 30% chance of getting in, but with the exact same credentials, if you checked off one of the other, white and Asian actually, Asian was actually discriminated more against than even white, but only, you know, only a couple of points.
00:32:42.000But if you took that same person and put any other demographic, Hispanic had a significantly, you know, greater chance.
00:32:48.000And then if you were African American, beyond that, it was like, you had like a 96% chance of getting in.
00:32:53.000But if you were a white or Asian with the exact same credentials, You were at like 36% acceptance rates.
00:33:00.000It was mind-boggling, so you're right.
00:33:02.000I mean, is that going to be the compromise?
00:33:04.000You'd say, okay, we'll allow Jews to come into this fold because we're going to keep discriminating against everything else, and it's a small enough thing that maybe it doesn't matter.
00:33:14.000Right. And I think that's the easy solution.
00:33:18.000And I can imagine it being attractive to some donors whose particular focus is the antisemitism issue.
00:33:28.000But I think it's a failed course because, like I said, the whole reason that the antisemitism thing is acceptable is that it exists within the broader framework In which anti-white discrimination and racism is acceptable, and it just happens to be that within the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Jews are considered white, and therefore they're the bad guys in this framework.
00:33:55.000So that's the difficult aspect of your question, is there is a short-term compromise, and people are very attracted to short-term Well, they're trying to get out from under fire, right?
00:34:10.000We keep talking about Harvard, Penn, MIT, just because they were the ones that were, whether they were sort of, you know, forced into testimony, but they're the ones that failed miserably under question answering some pretty basic stuff.
00:34:22.000I mean, it's literally hard to believe.
00:34:24.000I guess they had Wilmer Hale, like, you know, Or Snow, Wilmer, whatever it was, one of the big law firms giving them crisis management.
00:34:31.000And I mean, they do that knowing what's coming, and they still fail so miserably.
00:34:37.000Their feelings and what they said out loud is not just relegated to those three schools.
00:34:44.000It's probably across virtually 100% of academia, with maybe the exception of Liberty University and Hillsdale College.
00:34:54.000You carve those out, and it's probably just common academic thought these days.
00:35:00.000There's no diversity of thought in these institutions.
00:35:03.000They only want diversity in color, not in thought.
00:35:07.000And so, you know, the problem is definitely broader.
00:35:13.000Absolutely. And, you know, I think it's important to be clear about, you know, what the context was in this congressional testimony that caused this controversy.
00:35:23.000You know, people on the one hand, you know, the one version of the controversy is Oh, these university officials refuse to, say, condemn these hypothetical incidents of calls for genocide of Jews and so forth, whether that violates the speech codes at the universities.
00:35:43.000Now, it would be one thing, though, and I think Jeb Rubenfeld actually had, I saw a clip of his that I think expressed this point very well.
00:35:52.000It would be one thing if there were an Actually, consistently applied principle defense of free speech in the sense that, look, whatever speech is protected by the First Amendment, that speech is going to be protected on university grounds.
00:36:11.000to the extent that calls even for something as horrific as genocide, if it's not a harassment,
00:36:17.000or if it's not an actual call to immediate violence, if that's protected by the First Amendment,
00:36:23.000it's protected on campus, and that applies to any type of speech. If that were the actual posture,
00:36:28.000it would be one thing. But obviously, we know that's not the case, because whenever somebody,
00:36:34.000even as mild as Charles Murray wants to give a speech at one of these universities,
00:36:45.000Like, I mean, you know, yes, we got to be clear.
00:36:47.000The recovery, the attempted recovery was about free speech, but the issue was never about free speech, right?
00:36:53.000When Elise Stefanik questioned her, you know, Congresswoman from New York questioned it, it was about, does it violate their code of conduct?
00:37:02.000Because, and by the way, let's also not pretend it was ever about free speech, because I believe Harvard was ranked literally like the place that you could least express freedom of speech.
00:37:13.000These are the same people who led the charge for, you know, words are violence, and I have a feeling if it was me, even 25 years ago at Penn, okay, uh, Saying, you know, calling for even hypothetically the genocide of the trans community before people lost their minds, then or today. If it was me and like my frat boy buddies from the lacrosse team, if we said that today, we'd be out...
00:37:39.000Like that. There would be no ambiguity.
00:37:43.000There would be no chance for congressional testimony.
00:37:51.000If this was about anyone else other than, again, Jews, likely to your point, because they are also considered white and therefore it's okay to discriminate against them, if it was about any other of their favorite protected classes or sort of check marks, You would not be having this conversation because the people guilty of it would not have even had a chance before they were thrown out on their asses.
00:38:19.000This is very clearly not an issue of some kind of brave and principled defense of free speech, saying, okay, the boundaries of speech encamp is the First Amendment, and that sort of informs their answer to these congressional inquiries about genocide and so forth.
00:39:15.000I've been fighting for that, but that's not the way it works, right?
00:39:18.000Everything's a problem. The work I've done with Michael Seifert in Public Square, literally trying to create an alternate economy.
00:39:25.000How dare they? I was like, excuse me, you've been canceling anyone on the right forever.
00:39:29.000Now that we simply don't want to give our hard-earned dollars to a woke company that's been funding left-wing causes and hates your guts and would put us in the gulags, like, wait, now it's an extreme concept.
00:39:41.000And that's just voting with your wallet.
00:39:43.000It's whether we talk about the sponsors of this show or, you know, build your own.
00:40:18.000And, you know, another question looming over this is, you know, we've identified these elite universities are a major component of American soft power.
00:40:28.000I think to such a degree that I have had sort of war game like conversations with people as to
00:40:35.000what were the various metrics and inflection points that would define whether China has in
00:40:42.000a meaningful respect surpassed the United States, not just in.
00:40:46.000Yeah. That would be a major metric to say, okay, US is left in the dust.
00:41:02.000These universities are very important.
00:41:05.000We see all this woke nonsense, but there's also real stuff going on.
00:41:10.000Harvard, for better or worse, and MIT, they have first picked of the most talented people in the world.
00:41:18.000They can get away with a lot of this nonsense because of that.
00:41:22.000There's a question of how sustainable is this?
00:41:41.000Enterprising and creative as to how to exploit this issue.
00:41:46.000I think if the Chinese were to say, OK, we're dedicating hundreds of billions of dollars to creating universities that will be a safe haven for otherwise castaway academics, highly talented academics.
00:42:01.000So instead of going to Harvard and getting canceled and or if you're a really talented white guy who got denied because of the DEI policies, Come to the Chinese University.
00:42:10.000We'll give you a full scholarship and this or that.
00:42:13.000If they really implemented a serious long-term plan along those lines, it could be very bad for us.
00:42:18.000And we're already at the stage where we're seeing the fruits of this sort of DEI-inflected culture.
00:42:28.000This is a while ago, 10 years ago, not too long ago.
00:42:32.000America canceled its most distinguished living scientist, James Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA. We literally canceled him.
00:42:40.000He was banned from his own laboratory.
00:42:42.000In fact, he was beaten down to such a state of impecuniousness that he had to auction off his Nobel Prize.
00:42:50.000And it was actually a Russian who took such pity on him, some Russian oligarch, who bought his Nobel Prize and gave it back to him.
00:42:59.000It's such a sad story of what America has done, but it's symbolic and it indicates this really dangerous direction we've gone in that's hostile to merit and free expression.
00:43:11.000And yes, we still have a lot of comparative advantages, but those don't last forever if we continue along this trajectory.
00:43:17.000Yeah, Fauci is the leader of medicine in America.
00:43:20.000Now, he's clearly, you know, at best, a journeyman scientist.
00:43:23.000He was just better at being a bureaucrat.
00:43:26.000He was better at snaking and screwing someone else who maybe came up with something else.
00:43:30.000Or he pulled their funding so that they could never surpass whatever he was doing.
00:43:35.000It was, you know, no more obvious example than Wuhan lab leak theory.
00:43:39.000Like, of course it came from the lab that studies the virus and questioned it, you know.
00:43:42.000But if you said that as an academic...
00:43:44.000You know, your funding was pulled, your research grants were gone, and therefore he'd get to control the narrative.
00:43:49.000He was probably always at best average.
00:43:56.000But if you played the game, you know how to work the cameras, you know how to work a soundbite, and you're willing to screw other talent to maintain that hegemony at the top, it wouldn't matter.
00:44:08.000And so we're definitely screwing ourselves in the process because of these things, and I think he's the perfect example of that.
00:44:16.000And sadly, he's not the only example by any means, but he is a particularly aggravating example to be sure.
00:44:24.000So you've obviously been at the top of a lot of other things with Revolver News.
00:44:28.000You've been at really the center uncovering the January 6th, what I call the Fed-surrection, right?
00:44:35.000I mean, it's been a while since you were on, but man, the sound bites I hear every week, you know, Well, the FBI, we don't want to release the videos because it would show way too many of our officers, like, in the crowd.
00:44:49.000I'm like, wait a minute, so you're there? You're there.
00:44:52.000We're to believe you weren't instigating, but you also did nothing to prevent anything from happening.
00:45:14.000We understand why they never wanted the video out, because...
00:45:18.000The exculpatory evidence would be useful to the prisoners who've been denied due process, but it would also show what everyone's been saying.
00:45:25.000Yet another conspiracy theory turned out to be 100% true because it was always the most plausible.
00:45:31.000They've always been the bad actors, but we just can't actually show it.
00:45:36.000Can you tell us what's been going on there?
00:45:39.000Absolutely. You know, this is one of the first major pieces that we published on this Fed's erection.
00:45:49.000But we opened up the piece with an exchange between Senator Klobuchar and Christopher Wray.
00:45:56.000In which Klobuchar asks, right, she's kind of a rhetorical type question.
00:46:02.000She says, you know, don't you guys just kick yourselves that you didn't have any informants in place and you weren't able to stop it.
00:46:12.000Christopher Wray answers in a very kind of lawyer-like way to seem like he's accepting the premise of her question, that they didn't have any.
00:46:21.000But he says, look, you can be darn tootin' though.
00:46:27.000We wish we could have stopped this and so forth.
00:46:30.000But as you point out, Through the years now, we've learned time and time again, going all the way back to a years-long report from the New York Times acknowledging that just in the one Proud Boys organization, the Militia Group, There was extensive infiltration and that, in fact, there were informants going into the Capitol and informing to the FBI in real time as to what was going on.
00:47:00.000There's another major case that I believe we've Talked about the last time I was here, the case of Jeremy Brown, who had a misdemeanor trespassing charge that the aggressive DOJ was able to transform into a felony charge for which he's facing seven years.
00:47:18.000And they only added on that stuff Over a year later, what did he do to aggravate them so much?
00:47:27.000He published footage he had of Joint Terrorism Task Force agents trying to recruit him months before January 6th.
00:47:38.000So they clearly knew they were trying to recruit him to inform on the Oath Keepers month before, and it was clear from the context of the conversation, they knew something was going down.
00:47:49.000Now we're getting all sorts of information about all sorts of agencies, not just the FBI, but the DHS, but military organizations and so forth, local police organizations.
00:48:04.000They've heard all of this chatter from all of these groups about things going on in January 6th.
00:48:10.000We reported on the Hippies for Trump bus.
00:48:13.000There was a bus stop the day before January 6th, on the 5th, with explosives and other material.
00:48:20.000And one of the people on that bus was an active participant in January 6th.
00:48:26.000They weren't Detained, clearly, because he was at January 6th.
00:48:31.000And even when things like that happened, this was right by the Department of Justice building on the day before, Nancy Pelosi and her crew continued to deny Trump's repeated requests for additional security on that day.
00:48:47.000So just all of these components that have been around for a long time for people paying attention are just getting reinforced and corroborated over and over and over again as new material comes to light, all adding up to a renewed sense of invigorated sense of confidence that this is indeed, it's not an insurrection, it's far worse than that, it's a fedsurrection.
00:49:10.000And it's not simply that they knew about it and didn't do anything, which would be bad enough, but all evidence points to the role of critical provocateurs who enabled this otherwise rally to turn into a riot through certain critical actions.
00:49:31.000So it's a fedsurrection, and I think it's important to understand the context that the regime Put so much stock in this.
00:49:40.000The stakes are so high because the narrative of the domestic terror insurrection of MAGA people.
00:49:47.000It was going to be the basis, the pretext for accelerating the weaponization of the national security state against us, the weaponization of the security apparatus against us.
00:50:00.000So the stakes couldn't be higher for that.
00:50:03.000And unfortunately, the truth has come out.
00:50:05.000I'm proud to have played a part in that.
00:50:09.000And it has severely disrupted this narrative in which the regime has invested a tremendous amount of time and energy to shove their version of events down our throats every day for years.
00:51:04.000And when they're on, they're saying, oh, we couldn't possibly release the video of the FBI agents literally not just being there, but doing nothing.
00:51:13.000And worse, instigating, pushing people in a crowd, getting them fired up, doing this, and then doing nothing.
00:51:18.000Opening the door, but running with the narrative for two years that they somehow broke at the door.
00:51:34.000You know, these people pushing, literally, Darren, it's worse than 9-11.
00:51:39.000Enter! Pearl Harbor, since we just had the anniversary of that a couple of days ago.
00:51:43.000I mean, it's significantly worse than all of that.
00:51:45.000I'm like, I don't know. The only person that was killed was Ashley Babbitt by someone who, in my opinion, clearly didn't know how to use a firearm and panicked, who had a long record of bad firearms handling and who probably wasn't qualified and all of these things.
00:51:59.000You're not allowed to say that because they paraded him out there as a hero.
00:52:03.000Like, that guy might as well have been awarded the...
00:52:06.000It received the Congressional Medal of Honor, even though it's clear based on anything we've seen.
00:52:12.000It's all been a big lie, but other than you, other than me, other than a couple people perhaps here on Rumble, no one's talking about it.
00:52:19.000They're not even willing to have that conversation yet, which is scary because it means we're too far gone to actually get it back.
00:52:28.000And this gets to an issue that I've experienced is there's, you know, there's something I call the playpen.
00:52:34.000The playpen is the space of safe discourse, even kind of safe, partisan debate and criticism.
00:52:42.000And I think overwhelmingly, most Republican elected officials, they want to stay in the playpen of safe issues.
00:52:50.000And you know, That can involve some of those safe issues are also important.
00:52:55.000Like I think, you know, attacking socialism, that's kind of a safe issue for an elected Republican, but it's also important.
00:53:02.000And then it's also kind of the performative stuff of saying like, well, look at, you know, AOC's dress and this kind of stuff.
00:53:09.000But then there's stepping outside of the playpen.
00:53:12.000And the fedsurrection story has always existed outside of the playpen, because it, To address it involves stirring up the hornet's nest, and it gets to the complicated relationship that Republicans have with the security state.
00:53:34.000And it's not an accident that most of the elected officials who have been brave enough to address this also happen to kind of be the MAGA coroner.
00:53:43.000With some exceptions, like Thomas Massey, I wouldn't consider him a MAGA official, but to his credit, he's been at the forefront of pushing the Fed's direction stuff, pushing the Ray Epp stuff, pushing the pipe bomb stuff.
00:53:57.000And so I commend him. What about simultaneously the 702 stuff that's coming up, right?
00:54:01.000I mean, that was the apparatus by which all of this started.
00:54:06.000And there's Republicans, well, no, we got to continue it.
00:54:09.000We just got to let it roll. I'm like, wait a minute.
00:54:10.000If you want to spy on Iran and our enemies, do whatever you want.
00:54:14.000But when you leave every possible window open to do it on American citizens, after the total lack of goodwill that you should have with the American citizens based on the abuse of said power...
00:54:51.000Absolutely. And, you know, it gets into the general question of the relationship between Republican Party, Republican elected officials, and the national security state, which is a complicated relationship.
00:55:03.000I mean, so much of what we now recognize as the national security bureaucracy, including a host of NGOs, We're set up under the Reagan administration to prosecute the Cold War.
00:55:17.000And so that, you know, the National Endowment for Democracy, you know, what all of these sort of democracy type groups
00:55:23.000that are obsessed with Russia now, most of them were set up under Reagan's tenure
00:56:32.000And you mentioned sort of Bush, but, you know, Dick Cheney, arguably one of the biggest architects of that disaster and the Iraq War and all of these things, his daughter, they're giving...
00:58:08.000But her whole biography, perfectly instantiated, this is what they wanted.
00:58:13.000This is what the evil, horrible Trump robbed them of because Nikki Haley was supposed to be This story, Nikki Haley was supposed to be the future.
00:58:29.000If it hadn't been for Trump, they're thinking, oh, Nikki Haley would be it.
00:58:34.000And then they say, okay, we have to make some concessions to Trump just by virtue of his sheer popularity.
00:58:43.000So even though we really love Nikki Haley, we have to make some concessions.
00:58:47.000So let's do this thing called we'll tell...
00:58:50.000We'll tell the plebs, we'll tell these uninformed plebs, we'll tell them it's still Trumpism, but just without Trump.
00:58:57.000And we'll get DeSantis and we'll give him the script.
00:59:01.000And then, you know, we'll have to hold our nose a little bit because some of the things he says will be, you know, too much for us.
00:59:08.000But that's the best we can get, of course.
00:59:10.000But don't worry, we got a billion dollars that will change his mind in three days as soon as it's been weaponized against the MAGA, you know, actually...
00:59:23.000Revolver News, your agency, also did a deep dive, and this one's truly scary, into the worsening
00:59:29.000aviation safety crisis. I mean, there's been a huge spike in near collision at airports around
00:59:37.000the country. It's these kinds of stories that clearly aren't being covered. What's going on
00:59:43.000there? I imagine it's DEI strikes again, and then some. We've seen it at the airlines. We're seeing
00:59:50.000it with air traffic control. And, you know, I don't know. I don't care if my pilot is green,
00:59:56.000if they're purple, if they're blue. If they're the best pilot, that's who I want in charge
01:00:02.000of the stick if something goes wrong when I'm at 36,000 feet.
01:00:06.000And given that I do, you know, a couple hundred thousand miles a year in travel, you know, this is something that, you know, the odds are I run into before the average traveler.
01:00:16.000What is going on in aviation and just how bad is it?
01:00:22.000One of our major pieces in the past several months is called Crash Landing.
01:00:28.000And as you say, it does a deep dive into a very, very disturbing development within the aviation industry in the United States, particularly within the air traffic control system.
01:00:41.000And the interesting thing about that is, you know, most of these problems affecting the country, you could say, okay, well, the 1% or whatever you want to call it, they can get out of these problems.
01:00:53.000They, you know, public transportation is destroyed in the United States.
01:00:57.000Well, you know, people can just have their own private cars and such.
01:01:02.000The airlines are, you know, gone to crap.
01:01:05.000Oh, you can just fly private and this sort of thing.
01:01:07.000But the interesting thing about this issue Nobody can get out of it because even if you're flying a private, you're still beholden to the decisions of air traffic controllers.
01:01:19.000As a licensed pilot myself, if they run you into a pattern that's full, it's a problem.
01:01:25.000If they have you land on a runway that's not clear because they didn't think or can't multitask or whatever, that is a high-stress job.
01:01:41.000I mean, nor should it be, but it doesn't seem to matter.
01:01:44.000Like, it's not DEI, you know, hey, we can talk about academia, I guess, you know, whatever.
01:01:50.000It's going to affect our children and their learning, but like, you know, people aren't going to run into a wall going 500 miles an hour.
01:01:56.000Right. No, I mean, the reason I mentioned that this affects everybody, including, you know, the very wealthy flying private, is that, you know, there's this theory that I think in some context is partially true that, you know, the DEI thing is kind of a let them eat cake type issue.
01:02:13.000Okay, we'll let We'll let the lower classes suffer the negative effects of the DI, but the people with money and connections can kind of cordon themselves off from most of the negative consequences.
01:02:27.000And so there's an inference from that that there's not really genuine belief behind the madness.
01:02:33.000And again, I think there's some partial truth to that.
01:02:35.000But the fact that we've allowed The DEI disaster to erode the basic standards behind air traffic control and therefore affect everyone's safety, including the people flying private, including all these, you know, elites and so forth, shows just how insane it's gotten because you'd think If it were more of this kind of cynical approach to things, you say, OK, well, we'll save the DEI stuff maybe for the airline commercials.
01:03:06.000We'll save it maybe for the basket weaving courses.
01:03:09.000But when it comes to the maintenance of critical infrastructure, like having airplanes not collide into each other, that's a special exception we'll make and just higher on the basis of merit.
01:03:21.000But no. Obama actually is responsible for a complete overhaul in the vetting and hiring standards applicable to air traffic controllers, such that they used to have a pure merit-based sort of SAT system.
01:03:35.000They revolutionized it in order to implement what they call bio-questionnaires, which is just this really dumb method of ensuring that you test nothing.
01:03:47.000And there have been PhDs who have proven the remarkable thesis that the less substantive things you actually test, the fewer, the less disparate impact you have racially.
01:04:01.000So when you get to the point where the tests actually test nothing— So what are some of these diversity initiatives?
01:04:05.000I mean, I got to hear about, like, what it— I read about that Obama test.
01:04:10.000I don't know enough about the details, but it was literally like, if you dropped out of school, like— You got more points.
01:04:20.000Like, again, you know, everyone wants those people to have a job, but maybe not guiding aircraft moving through space at 500 miles an hour, you know, in close proximity to one another.
01:04:32.000Right. No, I mean, you're thinking, you know, at second thought, maybe we should let them into, you know, Disney World, because at least they're not in the air traffic industry.
01:04:41.000Maybe they can do less damage, you know, playing Mickey Mouse or something like that.
01:05:46.000And it showed that there's actually an order of magnitude worse in terms of loss of life years under the lockdown policies of Fauci.
01:05:55.000But in that, we didn't even take into account the possibility of things like COVID hiring freezes could ultimately result in the next major aviation disaster.
01:06:05.000And the numbers behind these are quite dramatic.
01:06:08.000In the past 10 years, there's been a doubling of what they call near runway incursions of two airplanes nearly colliding into each other in the runway.
01:06:19.000And there's been a similar increase of near mid-air collisions.
01:06:23.000And so just given the numbers, it's only a matter of time.
01:06:26.000And in fact, the New York Times to its credit has taken an interest in this issue and in
01:06:31.000particular one near miss situation in the Austin airport, which is had particularly
01:06:46.000But the thing is, there's this one air traffic controller.
01:06:49.000And these aren't like, you know, it is a complicated job, but this guy made a very simple, egregious error that came within milliseconds of costing hundreds of people their lives.
01:07:07.000He's still working. I mean, it's really, and you can guess, I'll just say it's a likely diversity hire based on the profile.
01:07:17.000Yeah, and that's the reality. I mean, I imagine if you track down the statistics and the increase, the 50% up or the doubling of these incidents, it's not from the people who've been there for 25 years, who are pilots themselves, who have been doing it and who were hired under a merit-based system.
01:07:31.000And just one really funny anecdote from a former spokesperson who has given us the party line, which is frankly ridiculous across all dimensions.
01:07:40.000But the funniest thing he said was because we were talking to air traffic controllers like, oh, the quality is, you know, crap.
01:07:46.000Everything's, you know, really going downhill here.
01:07:49.000So we asked the former spokesperson and his answer is, no, actually, these new cohorts we're hiring are more qualified because they grew up Playing more sophisticated video games.
01:08:15.000Are you seeing any broader shifts away from wokeism in major institutions?
01:08:21.000Maybe the best example is Elon Musk taking direct aim at media matters.
01:08:27.000They're not an organization that's checking advertisers.
01:08:30.000No, they've designed to weaponize to hurt their political foes with advertiser boycotts.
01:08:36.000I mean, do you see any parallels between the ethos of the America First movement and what Elon Musk is doing at X? Absolutely.
01:08:47.000There are not only parallels, but there are also, I think, really powerful complementarities because I think Elon shows what can get done within the private sector.
01:08:57.000There are inherent encumbrances that come with trying to make change through Elon.
01:09:02.000And Trump experienced that more than anyone, that these bureaucracies are viciously resistant to any type of change.
01:09:13.000And so that's its own sort of ballgame, is trying to change things from within government.
01:09:20.000One approach would be through government trying to restore free speech on the internet.
01:09:25.000Elon took the kind of Hostile takeover approach to Twitter, which I think has not been perfect, but it's been a major positive.
01:09:35.000So I think next to Trump, Elon's sort of political awakening, his acting upon that awakening and his being one of the very rare billionaires, your father being the other one, It's very rare.
01:09:48.000That's the one thing that's so frustrating to a lot of people to see.
01:09:52.000Just you think the more money you have, the more bold you are.
01:09:55.000But with most people, the more money they have, the more they have to lose.
01:09:59.000And why rock the system when you're already doing very well?
01:10:03.000So there's actually a reluctance to shake things up because very few people, even with a lot of money, aspire to a glory Oh, and they're They're trying to take them out like they did Trump.
01:11:15.000We need to sort of band together to make sure that doesn't happen.
01:11:18.000You can't do that with one, two, three, 12, 20 powerful people.
01:11:24.000You need 150 million Americans also getting behind them to prevent it from happening, to get that message out there,
01:11:32.000to make sure that people are aware and that they see it.
01:11:35.000Otherwise, they'll keep taking those people out.
01:11:37.000They'll keep taking out the Trumps of the world.
01:11:39.000They'll keep trying to take out the Elons of the world, which will create even more incentive for no one else to ever attempt to rock the boat.
01:11:45.000And that's when we get into apathy and a serious problem.
01:11:58.000If you step into the arena, you will face what I call the pain box.
01:12:03.000And, you know, most people are not psychologically constituted to face.
01:12:08.000I think one of, you know, your father's remarkable in many respects, but I think one of the maybe most unusual traits he has is this just...
01:12:17.000It's superhuman ability to withstand stress coming from all sides as though it's nothing.
01:12:42.000Yes, you can be very wealthy, but there are other things.
01:12:46.000There are higher levels to that, the levels of glory, the levels of fighting for civilization, not just on Earth, but Elon's thinking in galactic terms.
01:12:58.000Unless we figure out the DEI question here, we have no chance of getting to Mars.
01:13:04.000All of these things are very connected.
01:13:15.000If we had dedicated since in the past half century, the same amount of time, the same amount of resources, the same amount of just focus, On building civilization as we had, you know, trying to force diversity in every place.
01:13:33.000It's remarkable to think where we could be.
01:13:35.000Yeah, we'd probably be on Mars already.
01:13:37.000Exactly. But we ain't getting there with, you know, DEI astronauts and third-rate physicists and, you know, bad mechanical engineers, and it's just not going to happen.
01:13:49.000But, you know, but that's where we are today.
01:13:53.000Right. And it's one of these weird things.
01:13:56.000DEI is clearly driving things into the ground.
01:13:59.000And I think a lot of the more sophisticated people behind DEI understand that.
01:14:04.000And I think some of them think that emerging technologies will be powerful enough to make up the difference.
01:14:11.000So maybe there's a DEI collapse in quality at air traffic control, but once AI is sophisticated enough, you won't really need competent people.
01:14:39.000And we're going to make sure that, you know, we give someone the added benefit of the doubt because they've been somehow magically oppressed along the way.
01:14:47.000And you see that happening even in AI. And I know Elon, if we're talking about him, he was concerned about the future of AI. And I think it's very scary.
01:14:56.000But I don't think our enemies, whether it's Russia, China, or Iran, they're not going to hamstring AI with DEI requirements like we would here in the United States.
01:15:06.000And that would leave us in the dust, the way this is developing and how quickly that's developing.
01:15:14.000And my understanding is China, in certain key respects, has already surpassed us in AI. Oh, I'm sure they have.
01:15:21.000And they have inherent advantages just because AI is largely sort of data-driven, and they have billions of people to work with, and they're even more of a surveillance state than we are, albeit slightly.
01:15:35.000Yeah, we're much worse than we realize, but I think people are waking up to that every day.
01:15:41.000Yes, yes. Darren, how do you view the 2024 race right now, if we're going to talk about that?
01:15:46.000Because a big part of that and a big part of our future is going to be dependent on sort of what happens there.
01:17:05.000So that's where we are on the Republican side.
01:17:08.000But on the Democrat side, it's arguably even worse for the Democrats because they're caught in this situation where Biden's increasingly a liability.
01:17:20.000It's less and less plausible, just the imagination, to think of somebody like that actually running for president again, much less serving a second term in the Oval Office.
01:17:32.000But as I pointed out, they face a very difficult strategic problem because
01:17:38.000the more the Hunter stuff comes to the fore, ironically, the more Joe Biden wants to cling
01:17:47.000to the presidency and the pardon power that comes with it.
01:17:51.000So to the extent that people thought that they could intimidate him out of office by
01:17:56.000sort of amplifying the Hunter stuff, it has the opposite effect, I would think. That's a really
01:17:59.000good point. I've never thought about it. Obviously, he's going to pardon him, he's going
01:18:02.000to sit there. But if some of these things drag out longer than that, which by any reasonable
01:18:09.000That creates a serious problem for him.
01:18:11.000And again, right now, it's not a problem for him because I think the DOJ is doing Hunter a favor, as I sort of stated in my opening monologue tonight.
01:18:19.000All of the things that Hunter bided, the only things he's not charged with are literally the dozens of things where Joe is a recipient, a participant, someone who got 10% for the big guy, someone who's getting wire transfers.
01:18:49.000But the very possibility that they could.
01:18:52.000I think it makes Joe Biden more kind of jealous of the powers of the presidency, so to speak.
01:19:00.000And then there's the problem that the heir apparent, should Biden step aside, is completely untenable, and that is Kamala Harris, and everybody knows that.
01:19:11.000But Passing her over creates a whole host of difficulties with, you know, the fact that she's a woman of color and this could aggravate the Democrat base on top of Biden already stirring up the base by being perceived, believe it or not, as too pro-Israel from the perspective of a lot of the radical base on the left.
01:19:34.000So he's already kind of in the doghouse for that.
01:19:36.000Yeah. To step over Kamala is another problem.
01:19:40.000And then there's a question of even if you were to step over, who do you put in her place?
01:19:45.000And so there's no elegant solution to this as of yet, at least that I could think of.
01:19:51.000And I think if they'd have thought of it, they would have implemented it now.
01:19:54.000So the question of how that all works out is one of the big ones.
01:19:59.000And then the question of What else are they going to do to Trump now that all of the stuff they've already done hasn't worked?
01:20:06.000Those, I think, are the two critical questions here in relation to 2024, because I think it's fair to say, if the election were today between Trump and Biden, Trump would win, you know, just hands down.
01:20:18.000Yeah, so my father, you know, they've been doing this, you know, he's going to be a dictator, according to Liz Cheney, the daughter of Darth Vader, you know, and the Atlantic and the mainstream media and the Washington Post.
01:20:31.000I mean, they've been doing that dictator narrative.
01:20:33.000I think he dispels it, you know, very quickly.
01:20:35.000He had it sort of perfectly, did it perfectly in the Hannity Town Hall where he's like, no, I'm not going to be a dictator.
01:20:40.000Just on day one, where we shut down our border and we start drilling again to, you know, save our energy and save us from the insanity that's going on down there.
01:20:48.000Can you give us, you know, what else would be part of your sort of day one agenda for a second Trump administration?
01:20:58.000The irony of the whole dictator thing is that a dictator in its original Roman context is precisely what we need.
01:21:07.000There was actually accountability for dictators, and the left and the regime, they're the ones who enjoy a complete lack of accountability.
01:21:18.000So even a dictator would be a vast improvement over what we actually have now in the precise sense of the term.
01:21:26.000But as for, you know, what Trump should do, I think, you know, his policy proposals, his policy speeches have all been excellent.
01:21:35.000He knows what to do in terms of addressing the censorship issue.
01:21:40.000I think one of the main things he's going to have to do is address the lawfare that's coming from the regime and take that very seriously because we can't be in a position where every You know, president running as a Republican who threatens to actually change things has to face criminal indictments.
01:23:22.000And yes, I think the mainstream media has definitely weakened and suffered reputational damage, and deservedly so, particularly since Trump came into the scene and correctly identified them as fake news.
01:23:37.000But now that I'm thinking about it, the distinction occurred to me between a I think it's a kind of credibility crisis, which I think they have, and a legitimacy crisis.
01:23:49.000Credibility crisis pertains to whether people actually believe anymore what they're told by the media, and I think that is a real thing.
01:23:56.000I think there is a certain amount of legitimacy crisis, but not as much as you'd think.
01:24:04.000That even if people don't really buy what the New York Times is saying, there's still a sense that once the New York Times says it, now it's been properly admitted into the domain of consensus discourse.
01:24:18.000It's only when the New York Times says it that it becomes...
01:24:21.000We could all know it well in advance, but the New York Times still has that legitimacy in terms of functioning as the stamp of approval that allows it to become sort of common domain consensus such that we can all talk about this thing as though it were real.
01:24:39.000And that type of legitimacy is perfectly compatible with You know, dwindling credibility, plummeting credibility.
01:24:49.000And I think that dynamic hasn't been sufficiently explored.
01:24:53.000And I think that applies to varying degrees across the mainstream media, although New York Times is sort of the flagship of that, which is why I use them as an example.
01:25:03.000And then sort of at the conservative side, I still think, unfortunately, that Fox News has a tremendous amount of power and it's almost sort of by default.
01:25:14.000And again, it's like this is the default thing.
01:25:17.000A lot of, you know, older folks in particular, they just watch and it doesn't matter what's on the table.
01:25:22.000And so I think there are two versions of the story.
01:25:26.000You can tell a perfectly valid story that Fox News has taken a hit, and that's true.
01:25:30.000But then there's also the story of how remarkably robust it is, given how much it's screwed up.
01:25:38.000And that's a robustness that comes simply by virtue of the power of cable television.
01:25:46.000So that would be my sort of mixed answer to that question.
01:25:51.000Okay, so I saw what Fox News clearly did for Ron DeSantis for two years, right?
01:25:58.000I'll call it maybe the greatest all time fluffing in the world and yet it doesn't seem,
01:26:04.000who knows, we're still 30 something days out from Iowa caucuses, who knows,
01:26:07.000maybe he pulls off the miracle they're all hoping for.
01:26:09.000But it didn't seem to move the needle much for him there or it did initially and then it sort of faded away
01:26:15.000because eventually you have to sort of stand up on your own.
01:26:17.000Does Ron DeSantis have a future in politics after sort of this campaign, after the flip-flopping,
01:26:22.000after, if he doesn't magically overperform, what happens next?
01:26:30.000No, I think, Notwithstanding what I just said about the tremendous power of Fox News, even Fox News can't make Ron DeSantis an attractive candidate.
01:26:43.000I was watching, I was like, what are you talking about?
01:26:45.000Like, you know, I knew he wasn't, you know, because I said, hey, in 2018, I did like 30 events with him.
01:26:50.000I opened for him, I closed for him, I did that.
01:26:52.000And it's like, just wait till you see him in long form.
01:26:54.000I mean, they anointed him president before he had spoken for more than 15 seconds in front of a real crowd.
01:27:00.000And you realize like, oh, wait a minute, he doesn't have that You know, on your feet, you know, sort of responses that Trump has or that, you know, frankly, so many of the other, you know, candidates have.
01:27:09.000You see that in sort of the debate performances.
01:27:17.000So yeah, for DeSantis, I mean, I can't really prognosticate other than to say that he has no presidential future, you know, as to whether, you know, and it's sad, because look, you know, I thought he was a good governor of Florida, and he should have stayed governor, and I wish he had realized that, and because it's such a waste, because you see someone who could do well, you know, relative, I know he wasn't a perfect governor and all that, but who could do well in a relative context if he understood I think we're good to go.
01:28:26.000For now. But, you know, and the thing is, is that, you know, it's, I give them credit for the COVID stuff to a degree, just because, but when you think about it, it's such a low standard.
01:28:35.000It's like, you become a great governor by not completely destroying the economy unnecessarily.
01:28:40.000It's only by virtue of the other governors being so, like, incredibly It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand.
01:28:50.000You don't shut down the state over COVID. That's not rocket science.
01:28:56.000That should just be common sense to everybody and apply across the board.
01:29:00.000But the unfortunate reality is it wasn't.
01:29:02.000And he, to some degree, stood up to that.