Ted Cruz and Ben Ferguson discuss the FBI s latest cover-up, Joe Biden's cognitive decline, and Kamala Harris's anti-abortion rant in Texas. Plus, a look at why the deep state is doing exactly what it's doing.
00:01:18.820Immigration, we saw them do this deal with Mexico to make the numbers artificially go down in August and September going into the election.
00:01:28.780Going, see, we're securing the border.
00:01:30.740It's no different with the violent crime stats here.
00:01:33.460This is why so many Americans now don't trust the government, certainly the deep state, certainly, unfortunately, the FBI, and yet no one's going to get fired for screwing up their job this bad because it wasn't a screw-up.
00:03:17.220The FBI helps with kidnapped children.
00:03:19.720I mean, there is a very, very important law enforcement mission of the FBI.
00:03:24.020And I'll tell you, with first James Comey and now Chris Wray running the FBI,
00:03:29.520I think the integrity and the reputation of the FBI has been so profoundly tarnished
00:03:35.500that half the country wants to get rid of the damn thing altogether.
00:03:38.620That is really bad from a law enforcement perspective, from a perspective in stopping terrorists and stopping criminals.
00:03:46.100And I'll tell you, I have chewed out Chris Wray that when he circles the wagons and defends the hardcore partisans who have politicized the FBI,
00:03:56.920he is lighting on fire the FBI's credibility and its reputation.
00:04:02.400And I think if Trump wins, there needs to be a wholesale cleaning house getting rid of the wildly partisan career bureaucrats who burrowed into senior leadership positions at the FBI.
00:04:15.520All right, let's let's dive into this even on it on a more intense level, because this is one of those moments where I think there's a lot of voters that are listening right now.
00:04:26.480They're saying, OK, my worry is we've heard this before, that there's going to be a real draining of the swamp.
00:04:35.260What how different do you think a Trump administration will be this time compared to 2016 when there was a lot of people that were on a list?
00:04:46.000And you've done transitions. I've done it before when when people win.
00:04:51.260And what you go through is you say, OK, well, there's a certain group of people over here.
00:04:54.240These are nonpolitical. We don't mess with them. Right.
00:04:56.980They stay throughout administrations. And then here's your here's your political ones.
00:05:02.000And you can deal with them how you want. But there's these certain areas where you don't touch it.
00:05:06.720I think Donald Trump learned there's a lot of these, quote, nonpolitical positions that have become highly political.
00:05:13.600Yes. And and this is a great example of that.
00:05:17.220So do you believe that there is is the political will to actually clean house the way that many voters are expecting?
00:05:24.680And I say that I think there's a lot of voters are expecting it.
00:05:27.880They're like, OK, if we're going to put you back in there, Republicans, a.k.a.
00:05:32.900Trump, then you guys better do what you said you're going to do this time and clean house, because that's what we're voting for.
00:05:37.640Well, as you know, this is the topic of the third book that I wrote, which which is called Justice Corrupted, how the left has weaponized the legal system.
00:05:46.100And in the book Justice Corrupted, I lay out how Barack Obama weaponized the Department of Justice and the FBI and the IRS and the alphabet soup of federal agencies to target and attack his political enemies.
00:05:59.080And then when Trump became president, by that point, many of these hard partisans had burrowed into senior career positions in the agency.
00:06:08.140And they spent the four years of the Trump presidency waging war on Donald Trump.
00:06:13.240They hated him. They tried to destroy the president.
00:06:15.760They tried to to frustrate and oppose every aspect of his agenda.
00:06:19.880And now under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, they're brazen and out in the open.
00:06:23.380They are nakedly politicized, that they repeatedly are employed to target and persecute the political opponents of the White House.
00:08:24.880But we're seeing now that this is a real problem yet again, weeks before Election Day.
00:08:32.180Yeah, the Washington Post had an investigation that said that Instagram, which is part of Meta, buries political posts and it slashes the audience by 63 percent when the word vote is posted.
00:08:48.360And one influencer faced, faced, as I said, a 63 percent drop.
00:08:54.840And this is an investigation done by Washington Post tech columnist Jeffrey Fowler that showed that Meta across its platforms, including Instagram, Facebook and Threads, actively suppress content related to the upcoming 2024 election.
00:09:11.200And it affects partisan political posts, but it also just nonpartisan content like vote that they are suppressing it.
00:09:21.000And Fowler found that that that whenever an Instagram account creator named Mrs. Frazzled, whose real name is Ariel Fodor, whenever Fodor mentioned anything related to politics over the last six months, her audience size decreased by about 40 percent compared to her nonpolitical posts.
00:09:39.160And when she used the word vote in a caption across 11 posts, the average audience was 63 percent smaller and her experience is not isolated.
00:09:50.280Fowler, this is a Washington Post investigative reporter, found several other Instagram creators who noticed a similar pattern and it's not unique to individual accounts.
00:09:59.520There was a wider study by an advocacy group called Accountable Tech that quantified the audience drops for five prominent leftist Instagram accounts, including the Human Rights Campaign and Feminist.
00:10:11.420And over 10 weeks this spring, their average audiences fell by 65 percent.
00:10:16.320The study found that conservative accounts experienced a similar drop in engagement when discussing political topics.
00:10:21.520And meta suppression of political content happened when when Zuckerberg in 2021 decided to pull back on political content and and just just try to avoid politics.
00:10:37.520Now, look, I'd rather they avoid politics than then actively be biased, which is how they were in the 2020 election.
00:10:45.740But silencing the ability of citizens to talk about politics is a really bad dynamic.
00:10:51.580And you contrast that to X, which I think X with with Elon Musk's having purchased it is the new town square.
00:10:58.200But but Facebook and Instagram have huge reaches and silencing politics is really harmful for democracy.
00:11:07.480Now, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation, you can go back and listen to the full podcast from earlier this week.
00:11:13.960Canadian women are looking for more, more out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders and the world around them.
00:11:21.000And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
00:11:24.740I'm Jennifer Stewart and I'm Catherine Clark.
00:11:27.120And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.
00:11:36.620So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:11:39.620Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:11:43.960Now on to story number two, MSNBC pushes her on Joe Biden's cognitive state.
00:11:55.280Can you say that you were honest with the American people about what you saw in those moments with President Biden as you were with him again and again, repeatedly in that time?
00:12:02.860Of course, Joe Biden is an extremely accomplished, experienced and capable in every way that anyone would want if they're president.
00:12:20.200You never saw anything like what happened at the debate night behind closed doors with him?
00:12:43.820And my presidency will be about bringing a new generation of leadership to America that is focused on the work that we need to do to invest in the ambitions and aspirations of the American people.
00:12:57.240I mean, that's that's just a bad answer.
00:13:00.420Like, it's an answer that you're sitting there.
00:13:02.300And if you work on her staff, you can't think that this is going well.
00:13:06.560Well, and she continued to get pressed on the fact that Biden is obviously diminished and she dug in even more.
00:13:16.020Can the American people trust you in these moments, even when it's maybe uncomfortable for Americans to have to level with Americans in that way?
00:13:24.040And it sounds like what you're saying is you feel like you never saw anything like that from President Biden.
00:13:27.460I have worked with Joe Biden, whether hours and hours and hours over these four years, whether it be in the Situation Room or the Oval Office.
00:13:37.240Joe Biden is the one who was able to bring NATO together during a crisis where for the first time in 70 years, Europe saw and has seen war.
00:13:48.060Joe Biden has done the work that has been about being a leader on what we have done to fix so much of what has been broken in terms of the economy because of Donald Trump's mismanagement.
00:13:59.520I speak with not only sincerity, but with a real firsthand account of watching him do this work.
00:14:13.260She, by the way, was not happy at the end of that question because I think she knew this was a screw up for her.
00:14:22.300Well, look, in a lot of ways, it's an impossible question for her because let's assume for a second that that Kamala Harris hires Ben Ferguson to coach her on this question.
00:14:33.180And let's assume that Ben Ferguson, his brain is captured by body snatchers and he decides he's willing to work for Kamala Harris.
00:14:42.920I ask you in all seriousness, what would you tell her?
00:15:59.360I I I when you see somebody every day, sometimes you may not realize how much there is a decline.
00:16:05.420But when I watched him during the debate, many of us privately after that knew that we need to have a conversation.
00:16:11.400That conversation took place and and he did the right thing for the country.
00:16:16.000And that's why I'm sitting here in front of you today.
00:16:18.040But you also have to understand that she could give him smack that he did this well and this well and well and this well.
00:16:23.380And I think even now, Joe Biden understands it's time for him to retire.
00:16:26.660That's why I'm sitting in front of you.
00:16:27.880That would have been a better answer than just straight up lying to the American people saying, I saw nothing at all, because that's when they don't believe you.
00:16:34.500Yeah, look, hers is the the Sergeant Schultz answer from Hogan's hearing.
00:17:21.200Mine will not be a continuation of the Biden administration.
00:17:23.900I bring my own experiences, my own ideas to it.
00:17:26.280And it has informed a number of my areas of focus, most of which are, on to your point, lowering costs.
00:17:33.000So part of my plan includes what we need to do to bring down the price of groceries, including the work I will do dealing with price gouging, something I dealt with when I was attorney general, something I will deal with going forward.
00:17:43.660Then why do you think that's not landing with voters?
00:17:45.520Because in the numbers, it's the opposite.
00:17:47.180Former President Trump leads you on this issue.
00:17:48.800Well, when I'm out, this is why I'm going out to Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, excuse me, just got in late this morning, actually, but going to three states yesterday, and I'm going to continue being on the road.
00:18:49.520Senator, one other question I want to ask you about this interview with Harris is they say that she took a day off.
00:18:57.120When you ran for president, did you ever take a day off in the last two weeks when you're running in a primary to get ready for an interview?
00:19:06.700The whole entire campaign right now seems to be in at least a strategy in shambles.
00:19:13.920Like you're coming to Texas where you're not competitive because you want to highlight abortion issues.
00:20:06.680And so I actually think it matters to take a down day, to be with your family, to unplug, to sleep in, to go to church at home, to sleep in your own bed.
00:20:16.520And I find you come back a better candidate.
00:20:20.240So on that piece, I'm not particularly critical.
00:20:24.040I think almost every candidate you're better off, if you just grind yourself to where you can't see anymore, it ends up doing more harm than good.
00:20:32.360Well, and the last thing I want to ask you is the news that has come out, and it's quietly broken.
00:20:37.300The mainstream media is not talking about it.
00:20:39.560But Harris's town hall moderator admitted the questions were, quote, predetermined.
00:20:45.900The moderator, Maria Shriver, admitted that the questions, again, were predetermined.
00:21:17.820This whole thing was a ruse from the very beginning.
00:21:20.060It wasn't an authentic or real town hall.
00:21:23.100Well, look, I can tell you I've done hundreds of town halls.
00:21:27.880I don't think I've ever known the questions before in any of them.
00:21:31.900It is not 100 percent clear from what Maria Shriver said whether they were determined, predetermined by the network or by the Kamala Harris campaign.
00:21:42.820It is possible that she's saying, no, no, no.
00:21:46.280We, the network, picked which one of the audience questions we want asked because we wanted to divvy up the topics and not have 19 questions on abortion.
00:21:55.220We wanted to talk about something else.
00:21:58.280And that might be more understandable.
00:22:00.300But I'll tell you, if that's the case, they certainly haven't clarified it.
00:22:03.580It absolutely raised the inference that the Kamala Harris campaign had information about what the predetermined questions were.
00:22:12.120And if that's true, then it completely it makes a laughingstock about what is supposed to be journalism, because that's certainly not like any town hall I've ever done.
00:22:22.560As before, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation on this topic, you can go back and download the podcast from early this week to hear the entire thing.
00:22:31.140Canadian women are looking for more, more out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders and the world around them.
00:22:38.340And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
00:22:44.460And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.
00:22:53.960So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:22:56.940Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:23:02.900I want to get back to the big story number three of the week you may have missed.
00:23:07.220This is, I do believe, going to be the Achilles heel for her on Election Day.
00:23:11.760And that is this overall lack of cohesion of ideas.
00:23:16.480I think the flip flopping is hurting her, which brings me to what she's doing today in Texas.
00:23:24.740She's not coming to campaign necessarily in Texas because I don't think she believes she's going to win in Texas.
00:23:31.260She is coming, however, to attack Texas and Texas laws to say to the rest of the country,
00:23:38.460better vote for me so that you don't have people and things and ideas that actually are brought to light like they've done in Texas that go against what we believe in,
00:23:48.020which is, for example, abortion on demand.
00:23:50.600This is a very interesting and radical strategy all at the same time.
00:23:58.460And I think, Kamala, one of the things the left has decided is that they're going to describe Texas as this horrible hellhole
00:24:04.340and like her message is going to be, vote for me to avoid America becoming like Texas.
00:24:10.440And I got to say, you do have sort of facts and reality that crashes into that, which is for more than a decade, Texas has had over a thousand people a day moving to our state.
00:24:33.900They come from states that have adopted these high tax, high regulation, terrible environment for small businesses, terrible environment for jobs, and then soft on crime.
00:24:47.560And by the way, all right, let's listen to her answer when she was confronted about her soft on crime policies.
00:24:54.820Let's listen to what she says on that.
00:24:56.520On the issue of law and order, as you mentioned, I think there's just a whole lot of misinformation, to be honest with you.
00:25:02.840I have personally prosecuted very serious crime.