May 9, 2025 - The Benny Show - Benny Johnson
01:45:13
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
While the DOJ is opening a formal criminal probe into New York Attorney General Letitia James over suspected mortgage fraud, Andrew Tchaikovsky is a former federal prosecutor and joins us now. | |
| And Andrew, James is saying basically that the law is on her side. | ||
| Listen here. | ||
| We're ready. | ||
| We're prepared. | ||
| Do not give in to fear. | ||
| We are fearless. | ||
| This is not the time to be afraid. | ||
| This is a time to stand up and fight back and to resist any temptation for them to divide us. | ||
| We're in this together. | ||
| The rule of law is on our side. | ||
| But a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia disagrees. | ||
| Andrew, how much trouble is she in? | ||
| Well, I think she's taking a play out of Donald Trump's playbook. | ||
| You just deny everything. | ||
| And claim that it's some sort of conspiracy. | ||
| The problem for Letitia James is this is no conspiracy at all. | ||
| The evidence is pointing straight at her for making false statements, for getting mortgages and engaging in home buying processes that seem to have been a clear violation of the law. | ||
| Now, that has to be deeply investigated. | ||
| Steps that need to be taken to ensure that responsible law enforcement tactics are done here and that it's not targeted at her because of her position, but rather because of the facts that support it. | ||
| So I think she's in big trouble. | ||
| And I think that the people of New York need to not be paying for that. | ||
| Hey, y'all, shut the F up. | ||
| It's fatletitia season. | ||
| Counting money and signing mortgages like a boss. | ||
| From rags to bags, I got enough to divorce my dad. | ||
| I got tips for your skinny ass. | ||
| First, don't live where you rule. | ||
| Queens rule over filth, but they don't live in the filth they rule over. | ||
| Second, accuse those of which you are guilty of. | ||
| You don't get to be a fat Letitia rolling in the dough with your rolls of dough unless you sue Trump. | ||
| You can't punch me below the belt. | ||
| You can't even see my belt. | ||
| Punch up fat queen. | ||
| Fat Letitia season forever. | ||
| I'm out. | ||
| you you Thank you. | ||
| Well, that's a good one. | ||
| Load that up on the Spotify mix. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| I would totally download that. | ||
| Let's do entire spoken word albums for Letitia. | ||
| Oh man, for Big Fanny. | ||
| I think Big Fanny could have a very successful recording career. | ||
| But what do I know? | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, I listen to country from the 90s. | ||
| My name is Benny Johnson. | ||
| This is The Benny Show and it's free for all Friday. | ||
| We're going to have a great show today. | ||
| We're going to end the week on a... | ||
| High note, there's been a lot of good things happening this week. | ||
| We're going to cover all of them. | ||
| Today is Friday, May 9th, 2025. | ||
| The FBI has officially launched an investigation into Letitia James. | ||
| Trump names Janine Pirro, Judge Janine, as DC attorney. | ||
| We'll do some of our greatest hits on the show. | ||
| Careful what you wish for. | ||
| They thought they were getting what they wanted by springing Ed Martin, but now... | ||
| Judge Jeanine drops the hammer. | ||
| We haven't dropped the hammer in the studio in a very long time. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Trump lawfare. | ||
| We still have our props, though, sitting on the desk. | ||
| We still have the hammer. | ||
| Raymond Arroyo will join the show. | ||
| You know him from Laura Ingraham's show on Fox. | ||
| And Mike Rowe will be on the show today. | ||
| The stream live with Mike Rowe. | ||
| Freaking awesome. | ||
| What a great show. | ||
| Let's get to it. | ||
| My name is Benny Johnson and this is The Benny Show. | ||
| We broadcast to you using our Patriot Mobile devices because Patriot Mobile is the only Christian conservative wireless provider in the entire country. | ||
| They're available on all three major networks and they are so consistent and so clean and so crisp. | ||
| It's just I can't speak to it enough because when we record in the studio or when we record on the road, we have our Patreon mobile phones and we are uploading a lot of the stuff that we do is done directly through our phones. | ||
| We have an entire production team here, but sometimes the best content is just letting it rip, right? | ||
| And we've got to be able to hit it. | ||
| And so if we couldn't do that on a network, I'd have to be on a network. | ||
| I have to be on a network that allows us to facilitate that. | ||
| And you do too. | ||
| You don't want to be stuck there with, like, the loading screen. | ||
| Neither do we. | ||
| Switching is simple, and you should do it today. | ||
| Faith, family, and freedom is what this company stands for. | ||
| They've been partners of us for a very long time. | ||
| Get your number activated in minutes with their 100% U.S.-based customer support team. | ||
| Right now, go to PatriotMobile.com slash Benny or call 972-PATRIOT and get a free month of service with the promo code Benny. | ||
| Make the switch. | ||
| Defend freedom with every single call or text that you make. | ||
| That's PatriotMobile.com slash Benny. | ||
| Call 972-PATRIOT. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I need to pivot here. | ||
| Where's that Ed Martin video? | ||
| Get me that Ed Martin video. | ||
| I gotta tell you something. | ||
| I'm a dog with a bone here. | ||
| Let's go, producers. | ||
| Sorry to spring this on you, but obviously this is something that has pissed me off a lot. | ||
| Ed Martin is somebody that we were going to the mat for. | ||
| For reasons that I don't understand, he was yanked. | ||
| Apparently this was Tom Tillis. | ||
| Who is a total and complete traitor, and I'm looking forward to his primary in North Carolina. | ||
| Maybe Laura Trump can jump in. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| She's from North Carolina. | ||
| But Tom Tillis sabotaged Ed Martin. | ||
| And then what happens next? | ||
| Ed Martin's standing in the middle of the street, and some feral lib goes and spits on him while he's just standing there doing an interview on Newsmax. | ||
| It's outrageous. | ||
| It speaks to something, though, that's really important. | ||
| I want to cover it off the top here. | ||
| Please pop up the video, shall we? | ||
| Is this the Newsmax broadcast? | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| So let me show you what happens. | ||
| Ed Martin's out front of the federal D.C. District Courthouse. | ||
| He is the acting district attorney in Washington, D.C. He still is. | ||
| Trump appointed Jeanine Pirro yesterday. | ||
| But here we have Ed Martin standing in the street doing a Newsmax interview. | ||
| He's on camera. | ||
| He's wearing his trench coat. | ||
| He's a Trump appointee. | ||
| He is the top law enforcement official in all of Washington. | ||
| And this happens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so we need to get really focused. | |
| So our friends at Newsmax. | ||
| We're live on an interview when this... | ||
| Shall we? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Let's try and pause it with a spit right in the middle of the air. | ||
| Now, what are the chances that this lib is an individual who was a COVID lunatic lockdown freak? | ||
| What are the chances that this individual was in favor of double masking? | ||
| And was in favor of slowing the spread? | ||
| And was in favor of you getting... | ||
| Experimental therapeutics that are totally untested. | ||
| You get the experimental jab. | ||
| Otherwise, you lose your job and your ability to exist in society. | ||
| What do you think of the chances? | ||
| I think it's probably 10 out of 10 that this feral lib who just spits on Ed Martin on camera is somebody who's Clearly a COVID lockdown was double masking for the last four years. | ||
| And now she's on camera vomiting voluntarily onto the top law enforcement official in Washington, D.C. Now, I'm only going to put my foot down on this. | ||
| I survived in Washington, D.C. the first four years of the Trump administration watching my friends, people that I know, people that I've worked with before, some of them very high profile like Ted Cruz or Sarah Sanders. | ||
| Get screamed on and chanted and marched out of restaurants. | ||
| This is how Marxists always do it. | ||
| It's communist pressure campaigns to make people feel uncomfortable. | ||
| They feel as though they can get away with anything in Washington, D.C. because they've so stacked the deck against law and order. | ||
| And it is a feral environment. | ||
| That has no rules if you are a Republican. | ||
| Republicans have their lives threatened regularly in Washington, D.C. And this is a good example. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| This is biological warfare. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Call it what it is. | |
| So this is a sickening thing that happened. | ||
| And I demand that this Karen, this left-wing animal... | ||
| That she go to prison. | ||
| I need her in handcuffs. | ||
| She needs to be charged now. | ||
| We must make an example of her now! | ||
| We're going to get to Letitia James. | ||
| I don't know if we have the identity of this person. | ||
| It shouldn't be hard to find at all with facial recognition technology. | ||
| Producers, let me know what we have on this individual. | ||
| But what she's doing is clearly breaking the law. | ||
| Let's put up the law, shall we? | ||
| What do we got? | ||
| What statutes is she breaking? | ||
| Mike Davis tweeted it, boys, this morning. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| 18, U.S. Code 111. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| So let's pull that up, please. | ||
| Let's rock and roll. | ||
| Why isn't she in prison? | ||
| Today. | ||
| We must prove that we have the will to power. | ||
| We must prove that there are consequences to your actions, and you're not allowed to do these kind of things. | ||
| And if you do them, then you will face horrible consequences. | ||
| Put it up! | ||
| 18 U.S. Code 111. | ||
| Assaulting or impeding certain officers or employees. | ||
| Forcible assaults resist and possess. | ||
| Imposes, impedes, intimidates, interferes with any person designated by the federal government while engaging in an account or performance of official duties like an interview on TV. | ||
| What are the penalties? | ||
| Highlight them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoever... | |
| Oh, okay, 20 years. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Okay, look at that. | ||
| They could face 20 years, especially if they inflict bodily injury. | ||
| Well, if you're spitting into someone's face, And you're a diseased animal, then clearly you're intending bodily injury. | ||
| Who knows what she could be giving Ed Martin? | ||
| Eight years, maximum 20. Wow. | ||
| Well, throw the book at her. | ||
| I've been on the phone with law enforcement officials this morning, attempting to, just asking, like, is there something going on with this person? | ||
| Let's put her face up one more time. | ||
| Maybe you can help us find out who this is. | ||
| Let's find out. | ||
| Unidentified so far. | ||
| There was an F around time. | ||
| That was like the last four years. | ||
| Where you could really get away with this. | ||
| And the left was emboldened. | ||
| Because there were never any consequences for behavior like this. | ||
| I don't want to live in a society with this woman. | ||
| I don't want to live in a society with this creature. | ||
| With this animal. | ||
| Because you know what? | ||
| If she does this, she'll do this to my kids. | ||
| And you know what's funny is that... | ||
| My wife and I were pushing our stroller once in D.C. and had to cross the street because some woman recognized me and started spitting at us. | ||
| Started screaming and spitting at us. | ||
| I have videos of me walking down the street trying to record videos and getting assaulted. | ||
| I have videos of watching Rand Paul get assaulted in the streets. | ||
| Rand Paul is a very famous senator. | ||
| He was bashed in. | ||
| Cops had to hold. | ||
| He was with his wife, Kelly Paul. | ||
| This happens all the time. | ||
| Sarah Sanders was famously shouted out and screamed out of a restaurant. | ||
| This has to end now! | ||
|
unidentified
|
No more cuck behavior! | |
| Lock her up! | ||
| We are going to use the full weight of this show in our audience, which is in the tune of 15 million, to advocate for the destruction of this woman's life rightfully. | ||
| Because she deserves to be hoisted up as a petard to show people that we are not messing around anymore. | ||
| If you do this, then you're going to get cooked. | ||
| Then you're done. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| If Hillary Clinton was standing in the street and somebody ran up and spit on her in the middle of Washington, D.C., I also would say no. | ||
| If an Obama or a Biden official were standing on the street just doing an MSNBC interview, I would say that looks terrible for our side. | ||
| Some guy in a MAGA hat comes up and just hawks a massive loogie on them. | ||
| I don't care who it is. | ||
| This is not the country I want to live in where that happened. | ||
| I've lived in that country. | ||
| I've lived in that city. | ||
| The reason I'm broadcasting in Florida is because I've lived in that city. | ||
| I'm not trying to belabor this, but it kind of ties nicely into the Letitia James conversation. | ||
| Because there cannot be... | ||
| Different rules. | ||
| You've got to give this individual the full January 6th treatment. | ||
| I'm talking about incarceration, pre-trial, solitary confinement for years, destruction of every last penny in her bank account. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It has to happen. | |
| I am calling it out right now on the show. | ||
| It has to happen. | ||
| We must destroy. | ||
| We must make an example. | ||
| It's on camera, man. | ||
| It's on camera. | ||
| She also abuses her dog there, right? | ||
| You can see her dragging her dog. | ||
| Listen, this is so brazen. | ||
| Some of this stuff happens in the dark of night, right? | ||
| This was done during an interview. | ||
| She wanted to be caught. | ||
| Let's give her what she wants. | ||
| She wants to be famous? | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Reminds me of the lady who falls with the MAGA hat. | ||
| Can we grab that, please? | ||
| She's trying to, like, grab the MAGA hat. | ||
| There's no video that makes me happier on Earth than the MAGA hat video where some lib woman looks just like... | ||
| There's, like, a phenotype, right? | ||
| Looks just like this. | ||
| A sad, like, translucent, pasty, like, clearly miserable, self-loathing, single... | ||
| And she's sitting there in the New York subway and she tries to grab a MAGA hat of some dude who's just like peacefully riding the subway in a MAGA hat. | ||
| And it's like perfect, instant karma. | ||
| And it makes me so happy. | ||
| And it helps me go through my day. | ||
| And I hope it'll help you. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a racist. | |
| How can I be racist? | ||
| He's a racist. | ||
| If you fucking voted for Trump, you're a racist. | ||
| He's a racist. | ||
| How can I be racist? | ||
| No, he's not racist. | ||
| By the way, this lady's not mentally ill. | ||
| Well, maybe, you know, I'm going to say she works in high fashion, okay? | ||
| She works as a marketing consultant in high fashion in Manhattan, right? | ||
| So it's like she's supposed to be a respectable member of society. | ||
| She's not some mentally ill, deranged person, although she may be both, in fact. | ||
| Did you see the Met Galley? | ||
| Maybe she is both, but what I'm trying to say here is that, like, she's supposed to be one of the respectable people, okay? | ||
| doing respectable things and it worked out great for her here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go! | |
| Go! | ||
| YOOOOOO! | ||
| YOOOOOO! | ||
| HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! | ||
| Oh, it's great. | ||
| Oh, you just love to see it. | ||
| And she face plants right into a puddle of bum piss in the city that her party made filthy and unsafe and disgusting. | ||
| And I, man, you just hate to see it. | ||
| And that's, ladies and gentlemen, how you get COVID. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| She's licking, literally licking the floor of the New York subway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh. | |
| Ah, disgusting. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, ladies and gentlemen, hopefully we're going to clean it all up. | ||
| The news that, let's just pivot really quickly here to D-Block, is that Judge Jeanine has been tapped as the new district attorney in Washington, D.C. Ed Martin is the acting district attorney. | ||
| She is, Judge Jeanine, is now the acting district attorney in Washington, D.C. after Trump had to pull that nomination. | ||
| And Fox News has made a big announcement about what will happen with Judge Jeanine. | ||
| Obviously, we are in support of this. | ||
| We think the most entertaining outcome is always the most likely. | ||
| Elon's razor. | ||
| Fox News saying, well, Judge is taking it, and we got a new judge in Washington, D.C. Here are some other headlines tonight breaking just minutes ago. | ||
| One of the co-hosts of The Five, Judge Jeanine Pirro, will be appointed Interim United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. | ||
| President Trump announced that on Truth Social just moments ago. | ||
| Jeanine was Assistant District Attorney for Westchester County, New York, and then went on to serve as County Judge and District Attorney, where she was the first woman ever to be elected to those positions. | ||
| She will be leaving Fox to take this position, and we obviously wish her well. | ||
| All right, ladies and gentlemen, law and order. | ||
| Judge Jeanine was a judge in New York. | ||
| New York stand tall because, well, New Yorkers are roasting and trolling Letitia James to her face as the FBI has now formally opened a criminal probe into the Attorney General Letitia James over mortgage fraud. | ||
| Now, this was happening while we were live yesterday. | ||
| And we wanted to cover it because, well, it's just too entertaining. | ||
| The FBI, U.S. Attorney's Office in Albany, have launched a criminal investigation to mortgage fraud claims against New York Attorney General Latisha James. | ||
| The investigation, first reported by the Albany Times Union, follows a request for the Justice Department to investigate James by the Federal Housing Agency Director William Plute. | ||
| To the Justice Department last month, New York's Northern District, where Plute's referral was steered, is led by U.S. Attorney John Sarkone III. | ||
| An ally, President Trump. | ||
| Well, there you go, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| You can see here, of course, some of the criminal behavior that Letitia James is engaged in, including, but not limited to, saying that she's married to her dad. | ||
| Which is something really unique for Democrats. | ||
| Something that we're starting to notice a little bit of a trend here, right? | ||
| Either you're married to your father or your brother. | ||
| She's lied about where she lives. | ||
| She's lied about her residence. | ||
| She's lied about her domiciles. | ||
| She's lied about how many domiciles she has in her apartment building. | ||
| She's done so much worse than what she tried to put Trump in prison for for the rest of her life. | ||
| And she's effed around. | ||
| And now she's found out. | ||
| This is like the eff around. | ||
| The eff around period was the last couple of years. | ||
| And we are now in the finding outest of times. | ||
| Letitia James has promised to put President Trump in jail, but now it's her who can't even go out in public. | ||
| This video broke just this morning. | ||
| The great ALX, our executive producer, was able to hunt it down. | ||
| Letitia James roasted last night to her face by her own constituents. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My question is for Tush James. | |
| Will you apologize to President Trump for wasting millions of dollars and the state of New York for a witch trial? | ||
| And how does it feel to know that you will be imprisoned for mortgage fraud? | ||
| Thank you for coming. | ||
| We want to thank him for coming. | ||
| We respect all opinions. | ||
| Everybody knows those allegations are baseless. | ||
| They're discredited. | ||
| And so we want to thank him. | ||
| Our next speaker. | ||
| Oh, we want to thank you. | ||
| We just want to thank you so very much. | ||
| The allegations are discredited, huh? | ||
| Well, why don't we go to Sam Annatar, who's been a regular on our program. | ||
| Who has talked us through those allegations. | ||
| A lot of these allegations, a lot of the evidence comes from independent investigative journalist Sam Annatar, who himself is a white-collar felon. | ||
| He knows how people rig the system. | ||
| He's on the program saying, no, sister, you're cooked, and they should start measuring the orange jumpsuits for you. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Just really quickly here, Sam, how cooked is Letitia James? | ||
| Should we expect the handcuffs that we've seen on various... | ||
| I don't know what will happen. | ||
| I can't predict the future. | ||
| But all I can say is whether or not they handcuff her, she's guilty. | ||
| The evidence shows that she's guilty. | ||
| Most likely they are going to handcuff her. | ||
| Most likely they are going to arrest her. | ||
| Most likely they are going to indict her. | ||
| Irrespective of that, the documentation speaks for itself. | ||
| And if they can't bring a case against them, shame on them. | ||
| They suffer the humiliation. | ||
| I stand behind all the research that I've done. | ||
| And all of the research that I've done shows that she's guilty of mortgage fraud, violating New York's state financial disclosure statutes, mail fraud, wire fraud, whatever you want to call it. | ||
| I'm not a lawyer. | ||
| But she is guilty. | ||
| She is guilty of signing documents that contain false information that she financially benefited from, and she can't get out of that. | ||
| The F-around period was back then. | ||
| We are now in the find-out period. | ||
| Now, Plute, who's a friend of us, who's somebody that we've worked with before, he now works at HUD, and he's the individual who pushed for this to happen, delivered the evidence to the DOJ. | ||
| He was on earlier this week saying, listen, this is an open and shut case. | ||
| She's guilty, and now the FBI is investigating, and he knows. | ||
| This is a man who knows where the bodies are buried. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| That makes it easy. | ||
| You also launched a public tip line to combat mortgage fraud, encouraging people to report any fraudulent activities. | ||
| What's the fraud going on there? | ||
| We have significant mortgage fraud in this country. | ||
| It doesn't matter who you are. | ||
| Nobody is above the law. | ||
| If you are committing mortgage fraud, you are a risk to the system, and we are going to take the appropriate steps within our statutory capability. | ||
| She's James for criminal activity to the Department of Justice. | ||
| Tell me about that. | ||
| Well, the letter speaks for itself. | ||
| I don't want to comment on any specific case. | ||
| But I will say that people claiming that they live in certain states that they don't live in, people claiming other representations that are maybe not necessarily true, these are very big concerns to the mortgage market. | ||
| It doesn't matter whether you're a welder, a plumber, a politician, an attorney. | ||
| If you commit mortgage fraud, you are a risk to the system. | ||
| And if we see it, we're going to have to say something. | ||
| And I encourage everybody, if they see mortgage fraud, say something. | ||
| We will take the appropriate action. | ||
| Well, do you? | ||
| So that's a very generous way to say that. | ||
| It's a very diplomatic way to say it. | ||
| He's, of course, in the official capacity. | ||
| Unfortunately, our friend Mike Davis is not in official capacity as Viceroy. | ||
| But fortunately for us in this audience, Mike Davis was on yesterday explaining what may happen to Tish James. | ||
| And just because we like doing a dunk from the free throw line here in our Jordans, we're going to play you Mike Davis. | ||
| Before President Trump was even sworn into office, on this program, predicting the future with perfect rings-like-a-bell clarity, okay? | ||
| Here's what Mike Davis told us five months ago about Tish James. | ||
| Boy, it's like he knew something. | ||
| Just say this to Big Tish James, the New York Attorney General. | ||
| I dare you. | ||
| I dare you to try to continue your lawfare against President Trump in his second term. | ||
| Because listen here, sweetheart, we're not messing around this time, and we will put your fat ass in prison for conspiracy against rights, and I promise you that. | ||
| So think long and hard before you want to violate President Trump's constitutional rights or any other American's constitutional rights. | ||
| Well, well, well. | ||
| And now you fast forward to today, the FBI has a full investigation, and the most respected investigators and federal agents are saying, no, she is guilty as charged. | ||
| Now Mike Davis, again, doesn't have an official role with the Trump administration, so he was on yesterday making quite a bit of news explaining where he thinks Tish James should serve her prison sentence. | ||
| I would say that she's either not doing well, or it could be this very wealthy and sophisticated woman is going ghetto. | ||
| To play to the jury pool, right? | ||
| This is what they do. | ||
| They go to their black churches and pretend like they're the victim of persecution. | ||
| This is all racism. | ||
| I would say that I'm very happy that President Trump is going to reopen Alcatraz because we could put big tish on Alcatraz and maybe we could plant hay and just let her go graze around Alcatraz. | ||
| And so it would be a perfect place for her. | ||
| She has a thick skin like an elephant. | ||
| And I'm very excited for justice to come here. | ||
| I'm very excited that the FBI has opened this probe. | ||
| Thank you to Kash Patel and Dan Bongino if they had anything to do with this. | ||
| But justice is coming because think about if justice did not come here. | ||
| If you have this very wealthy woman lying on a mortgage application and getting away with it, that seems like that wouldn't be a very effective deterrent for a lot of people who are applying. | ||
| for these home loans and lying on their applications and so nobody's above the law and big tish needs to be made an example out of and she needs to go to jail like tried to ruin President Trump and You live by the sword, you die by the sword, and that's just the way it goes. | ||
| How about some absolution? | ||
| How about we move from that block into something a little more peaceful? | ||
| How about we... | ||
| Head to the Vatican, shall we? | ||
| And welcome to the program somebody who's just returned from the Vatican, who could maybe bless and cleanse this show with some news about the first American pope and also some news about Fox News and Judge Jeanine getting that plum position in Washington, D.C. And shall we see justice after all? | ||
| The great Raymond Arroyo joins the show live now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The great Raymond Arroyo joins the show live now. | |
| you you you Raymond, we need you to exercise some demons on this program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A lot of news. | |
| Benny, you are over-promising. | ||
| This is way beyond my powers and capabilities. | ||
| Like, I can cleanse this. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| I've been watching the Letitia James. | ||
| Now you're throwing all... | ||
| No, forget it. | ||
| No. | ||
| I'll just report what I've seen in the Vatican. | ||
| Let's keep it there and maybe we'll stay out of trouble. | ||
| And not need an exorcism ourselves. | ||
| Please, this shocked us. | ||
| We were live yesterday as they announced the first American pope. | ||
| You were physically there. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| What was it like? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was. | |
| Well, look, anytime a new pope is elected, it's a thrill. | ||
| It's an amazing moment. | ||
| It's exciting. | ||
| To have an American be named, I never thought I would see that. | ||
| And here's why, Benny. | ||
| You know, I talk to so many of these cardinals going into the conclave, from Africa, from Asia, from Europe. | ||
| They're only, what is it? | ||
| Seven Americans, eight Americans who voted in this last conclave out of 133. | ||
| So it's not like they had a big block. | ||
| But the word inside the conclave was always, you have a superpower, you don't want that superpower having a pope. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| Now you do. | ||
| Robert Prevost, though, is probably... | ||
| You know, so I want to temper expectations here. | ||
| I know there was some reportage. | ||
| Charlie Kirk and others had things out that, oh, look, he's a registered Republican. | ||
| I wouldn't read too much into that. | ||
| He may be a registered Republican, but, you know, I don't think he's signing up for the MAGA rally in Illinois anytime soon. | ||
| In fact, he's an opponent of the president on immigration and some other issues. | ||
| You know, he sent some ex-posts attacking. | ||
| Vice President Vance. | ||
| So I don't know, Benny. | ||
| With a Pope, it's always a mixed bag. | ||
| And with this particular man, Robert Prevost, he seems to be more in the line of Pope Francis. | ||
| So if you liked Pope Francis, you'll probably like Pope Leo. | ||
| I would only offer this one little caveat. | ||
| There are things we're seeing in the way he's dressing, in the things he's saying in the first day or two, that indicate that the path might... | ||
| Tend slightly to the center and the right. | ||
| And that may be a good thing. | ||
| We need a corrective in the church. | ||
| We've seen some posts and we've seen some quotes from him and then listened a little bit to what he's had to say. | ||
| And I feel like this is very important because the Pope has, one, obviously is an iconoclast position for all Christendom, but then also, two, the Pope John Paul uniting with Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union. | ||
| And was able to all but defeat communism in our lifetime. | ||
| Now, sadly, it's making a bit of a resurgence. | ||
| And so there can be a lot of power in this. | ||
| How do you think Trump's going to approach the pope? | ||
| He seemed very pleased yesterday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think, look, there's something providential, maybe, Benny, about having an American pope because Americans have a practical can-do attitude that, frankly, other nationalities don't quite possess. | |
| They also... | ||
| John Paul II came out of that communist sieve. | ||
| He had suffered in the cauldron of communism in Poland. | ||
| So he knew what real communism looked like and what it did to people. | ||
| Now it crushed the soul and crushed freedom. | ||
| So when he became Pope, he was very sensitive to that and religious freedom. | ||
| And he and Ronald Reagan, though they didn't coordinate every day, they had a meeting of the minds and hearts on what needed to be done. | ||
| So through moral suasion and lighting up the nationalism in Poland, through the spirit, by the way, through the church and the preaching of the word, he was able to rouse his people there. | ||
| And that really began the dominoes, the fall of the... | ||
| Russian Empire. | ||
| And Ronald Reagan gave him air cover. | ||
| Information they traded through diplomatic posts. | ||
| They moved monies back and forth to fuel the resistance, the solidarity movement. | ||
| So look, we don't know what God's designs are, but the fact that you have an American pope who's a pretty practical man by all accounts and an intelligent man, a careful listener, maybe there's some openings here. | ||
| I think actually he's going to get on quite well with Donald Trump in a way that Pope Francis, because of the National differences and the personal gulf between those men. | ||
| You would never have had that closeness. | ||
| Let's see what happens in the days ahead. | ||
| And that's kind of my general... | ||
| You know, you mentioned something a moment ago. | ||
| You said how important the Pope is to Christendom. | ||
| I was kind of taken aback the other day when I watched them process out. | ||
| And you realize this basilica is built upon another basilica. | ||
| You know, beneath it, Benny, is the... | ||
| Third century Basilica of Constantine. | ||
| And he built that Basilica there to commemorate what's underneath it, which is a graveyard. | ||
| And in the middle of that graveyard, beneath the high altar of St. Peter's, are the bones of St. Peter the Apostle. | ||
| And I thought to myself, as this man came out, Robert Prevost, the 267th successor to that Apostle, St. Peter, they're literally standing on his bones. | ||
| And it really draws all Christians in, all of us. | ||
| Because it's the epicenter of our shared faith. | ||
| It was Jesus who gave Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven and the great commission to go out and share that gospel with the world. | ||
| And here you have a man in our own time being commissioned in the same way. | ||
| So look, it's always exciting. | ||
| All Christians should pray for the Pope. | ||
| And there's a reason he's that countercultural figure in the middle of the culture and should be. | ||
| And I pray he will be that. | ||
| We need a lot of doctrinal. | ||
| Clarity these days. | ||
| And the last pope, I think, was more ad hoc and improvisatory when it came to doctrine. | ||
| Maybe this guy being a canon lawyer will be a bit more clear. | ||
| And I think young men who are coming to the faith, they want clarity. | ||
| They want the eternal truths. | ||
| They want what Christ gave them, something to hitch their lives to that is ancient and real. | ||
| And this is as real as the bones that are beneath that altar at St. Peter's. | ||
| It's absolutely beautiful. | ||
| It's so important to know our history. | ||
| They're trying to disconnect us from our history. | ||
| There is no Western civilization without Christendom. | ||
| There is no Western civilization without Christian principles, specifically brought about by Christians wanting to go out and settle the earth. | ||
| And it is a beautiful thing. | ||
| It's something that, obviously, the popes are in... | ||
| It's infallible, right? | ||
| But I have a question for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Limited. | |
| That infallibility, Benny, is only limited. | ||
| They're not infallible when it comes to immigration policy or the stock market. | ||
| They're only infallible on faith and morals, the faith and morals teaching of the church. | ||
| That's a very narrow thing, and that infallibility is rarely invoked. | ||
| But go ahead. | ||
| Oh, of course. | ||
| As someone who's in New York, a New Yorker, right, how do you feel that he's a White Sox fan? | ||
| Because are they infallible on sports? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, definitely. | |
| Apparently not. | ||
| Because, yeah. | ||
| The sporting teams. | ||
| This is something that's got to be a huge, maybe a schism, you know, potentially happening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you'd expect the Pope to be a white socks fan. | |
| I mean, the only thing he wears is white. | ||
| So this is, maybe that was providential. | ||
| He was getting ahead of, this was the prophecy early on. | ||
| He had the white socks, he just didn't have the rest of the outfit. | ||
| Now he's got the whole package, the zacchetto, the cats, the socks. | ||
| He's set. | ||
| So I'm okay with that. | ||
| But there was something you said when you were talking about. | ||
| What men want particularly, and you know there are a lot of young men, you've been reporting on this, a lot of young men coming to faith, particularly this last Easter. | ||
| Thousands of them coming in the United States, in France, to be baptized. | ||
| That square where we watched all those people gather yesterday, that was the square where St. Peter was crucified upside down. | ||
| There is sacrifice that goes with this faith. | ||
| And the reason the Pope wore that red cape, they call it a mosetta, the reason he puts that red cape on is a sign that he's willing to shed his blood for the faith. | ||
| And the doctrine that he's there to protect. | ||
| That's a manly call. | ||
| That's a strong call. | ||
| And we've got to explain that to people again. | ||
| That's why this place has significance and people are coming from all over the world here to Rome to see this man they've never seen before come out on a balcony of a building that was, you know, that stands on the first century. | ||
| It's an amazing kind of thing when you step back from it, aside from all the hoopla and the buses and the good coffee and pasta. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Chicago gets a pope and New York gets a judge. | ||
| And Judge Jeanine will now be the top attorney in all the country. | ||
| The district attorney in Washington, D.C. is arguably the most powerful district attorney position in the country. | ||
| I know that you know her well. | ||
| I would love to get your take on this, Raymond. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, look. | |
| Look out criminals everywhere. | ||
| She's on the case. | ||
| You don't want to get on the wrong side of Judge Jeanine. | ||
| Look, she was a prosecutor in her early life, though. | ||
| I mean, this was, you know, she was a prosecutor and then a judge. | ||
| You know, the TV stuff was her, you know, slumming with us. | ||
| But so now I think in some way she's going back to form. | ||
| So God bless her. | ||
| I'm glad she's on the case. | ||
| Nobody could be better. | ||
| And when you talk about upright and just and people demanding law and order, just sort of like a larger zoom back takeaway. | ||
| You know, we watched Ed Martin, who... | ||
| Get spit on yesterday, just standing in the middle of the street. | ||
| We've seen the criminality and the behavior very sickening in some of our large cities. | ||
| And people are calling out for order and people are crying out, especially young people, for some semblance of law in our country where we don't just let – whether it's New York or whether it's Chicago or whether it's in Washington, D.C., where we don't just let criminals get away with it, right? | ||
| And this sort of ties into the Letitia James question in New York. | ||
| And so, you know, you've been giving a lot of advice to young men. | ||
| What's your takeaway from this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It all fits, Manny. | |
| It's one thing. | ||
| You know, we're talking about faith. | ||
| Now you're talking about law. | ||
| The founders of the country, read Adam, read Sam Adams, read Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. | ||
| They all say the republic was built. | ||
| For a moral and an informed people, those things fit together. | ||
| We have to have morality to keep our homes civil and then the wider order civil. | ||
| But if you're not informed and you have no morality, this system cracks. | ||
| The law has no effect or meaning. | ||
| So we've got to start there, but then insist that our public leaders follow through. | ||
| Enforce the law as it's written and protect the innocent. | ||
| And that, even in a place like New York, is not done often enough or with enough regularity. | ||
| And I hope that the feds at this point will lean on the localities and maybe, maybe give us some semblance of law and order. | ||
| But it's a tall order. | ||
| It's hard to do. | ||
| Very hard to do. | ||
| You've got a wonderful family. | ||
| You're a wonderful father. | ||
| Shout out to your great kids. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One of whom's a huge fan of yours. | |
| I won't say who. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, shout out, what's up, Salty Army? | ||
| I did want to say maybe you could end here, Raymond, with a message to the criminal element that will be seeing Judge Jeanine's gavel. | ||
| Maybe just a message of warning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, look, anybody who sat opposite Judge Janine and tried to oppose her viewpoint, they usually got stomped and then bulldozed real fast. | |
| And that's just we dumb TV types. | ||
| So God help you criminals. | ||
| This is going to make Judge Judy look like a cheap dress rehearsal when Janine's back on the prowl. | ||
| So God bless her and God have mercy on you criminals out there. | ||
| What an American century, man. | ||
| We got the World Cup. | ||
| We got the Olympics. | ||
| We got the Pope. | ||
| We got Trump in office. | ||
| It's everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You got it all. | |
| Now you got to keep it. | ||
| Now you got to keep it. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| The great Raymond Arroyo, you should check him out. | ||
| He's got a brand new YouTube show. | ||
| It's up on his channel. | ||
| It's up right here as well. | ||
| And you can find him here on X. He's got 184,000 subs and his brand new Arroyo Grande show podcast on YouTube and iHeart. | ||
| Where you can get all of the Conclave series. | ||
| Raymond is the man here. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, my friend. | |
| So great to be with you. | ||
| Talk to you soon. | ||
| you you We were going to say, we normally say Godspeed at the end of our interviews, but he doesn't need it, right? | ||
| He doesn't need it. | ||
| He's been sitting in the Vatican. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Very interesting. | ||
| Very interesting times. | ||
| We did want to cover some of the fascinating things that have been happening inside of Congress that we've missed because we've been too locked in with some of the more breaking news, whether it be the Epstein news from this week or the Vatican, or yesterday we had just an absolutely slam-packed show, Ed Martin in a new position. | ||
| I did want to cover this. | ||
| Ed Martin's new position. | ||
| Hey, Alex, can you grab me that Trump truth on that, please? | ||
| Because Ed Martin, who's a friend of us and who I want to get on the show badly, Ed Martin wasn't, he's not like being thrown to the curb by Trump. | ||
| He was spit on yesterday. | ||
| But hopefully he'll be able to prosecute those crimes. | ||
| We are pushing so hard for it. | ||
| Ed Martin has got an amazing new position, according to President Trump. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Obviously, ring the bell with the good news here. | ||
| Ed Martin has done an amazing job. | ||
| Interim U.S. Attorney will be moving to the Department of Justice as the new Director of Weaponization. | ||
| Associate Deputy Attorney General and Pardon Attorney. | ||
| Good for him. | ||
| These are plum positions. | ||
| These highly important roles. | ||
| Ed will make sure that we finally investigate weaponization of our government under the Biden regime and provide much-needed justice for the victims. | ||
| Congratulations, Ed. | ||
| You know, this means that Ed Martin... | ||
| Is somebody who could do this kind of investigations that John Durham couldn't. | ||
| You know, John Durham is special counsel. | ||
| He had these major limitations on him, and he had major restrictions, major chains put about him. | ||
| Ed Martin won't. | ||
| He's in charge of the government weaponization working group inside of the DOJ. | ||
| He is going to be able to use the full weight and force of the DOJ in order to go after deep state criminals. | ||
| Okay, well, we'll hold him to it, and we'll have him on the show. | ||
| Very, very soon. | ||
| A fast-growing career for Ed Martin and for Judge Judy. | ||
| We love to see it. | ||
| Also, if you're into fast-growing things, you should check out my friends at Fast Growing Trees. | ||
| Fast Growing Trees is the biggest online nursery in the United States of America. | ||
| They have thousands of different trees to choose from and two million happy customers in this country. | ||
| They have all the plants that you need to fill your yard with leafy shade for the... | ||
| Coming summer, it's summer already here in Tampa. | ||
| You can already feel it out in the air. | ||
| It's already a little bit sticky, right? | ||
| But also, everything looks more beautiful with trees. | ||
| One of the biggest, I think, crimes where I come from, right, in Iowa, is that they cut down a ton of trees and then they put, like, you know, cul-de-sacs and soybean fields. | ||
| Leave those trees, baby. | ||
| I'm not, like, I'm not going to ever chain myself to a tree. | ||
| I'm not some, like, bloody green activist here. | ||
| But neighborhoods are so much more beautiful with nice, big, stately trees, nice, big oak trees, and so will your yard be. | ||
| If you contact Fast-Growing Trees, they make it easy for you to get your dream yard, order online, or get your plants delivered directly to your door within days without leaving your home. | ||
| Get the support that you need from their trained plant experts, and their Alive and Thrive Guarantee will make sure that your trees stay locked and loaded. | ||
| Loaded if you get fruit trees, like I did. | ||
| I got orange trees, because, you know, Florida, right? | ||
| I guess we ought to see. | ||
| So call today. | ||
| They have a spring deal, 15% off your first purchase when using the code Benny at checkout. | ||
| That's an additional 15% off fastgrowingtrees.com. | ||
| Use the code Benny at checkout, fastgrowingtrees.com. | ||
| Code Benny. | ||
| Now is the perfect time to plant. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, Cash Fatale has been planting straight hooks into the faces of libs in Congress. | ||
| We haven't been able to cover what's been going on in kind of these committee hearings. | ||
| I mean, under... | ||
| In a less intense news cycle, we'd probably take them live. | ||
| But Kash Patel brought major hammers to both the House and the Senate. | ||
| And so, let's go. | ||
| Some of the better clips was when Libs decided to try and claim victim status on Kash Patel. | ||
| To say that, like, Kash Patel is weaponizing government. | ||
| Against them. | ||
| Which is incredible. | ||
| Which is a wild thing to say. | ||
| This is Donald Trump's... | ||
| Make sure I have the right clip here, please. | ||
| This is Donald Trump's impeachment manager, Madeline Dean. | ||
| Madeline Dean decided to cry a river and say, You're targeting me! | ||
| You're targeting me! | ||
| And Cash Retail just freaking dropped the hammer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gang cases. | |
| 3,000 cases against violent criminals. | ||
| Well, that's not my question. | ||
| We know that you... | ||
| Well, you asked if I was weaponizing the FBI, and I am not. | ||
| I'm giving you the hard, concrete examples of the men and women putting handcuffs on bad people, doing harm to our children, and innocent Americans. | ||
| I do not see weaponization. | ||
| But you have placed on leave FBI employees responsible for the investigation of January 6th. | ||
| That sounds political to me. | ||
| I have not placed anyone on leave who has not violated their ethical obligation or their oath to the Constitution. | ||
| So if they were investigating January 6th, you believe they were violating an ethical obligation? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| I think the common theme here is you putting words in my mouth, and I'm not going to tolerate it, nor will the men and women of the FBI. | ||
| Well, you did place on leave an analyst responsible for investigating Russia's meddling in the 2016 election. | ||
| Is that politicization? | ||
| Is that retribution? | ||
| No, not if she broke the law or the ethical guidelines. | ||
| I don't know which case you're talking about, but that's the standard. | ||
| And we will hold ourselves inwardly accountable. | ||
| And we will not be strayed from our mission because people think we are politicizing the Bureau. | ||
| If you want to talk about someone who was attacked by a weaponized Bureau, you're looking at him. | ||
| And now he's the director of the FBI and he's cleaning it up. | ||
| Well, I would just say to everyone who's listening that the FBI needs to be focused on its mission to keep the entire country safe. | ||
| It should not be weaponized for partisan political gain. | ||
| Thank you, Chairman. | ||
| Senator Kennedy. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That was not Madeline Dean. | ||
| That was Senator Patty Murray. | ||
| But we let the clip play because they're so dumb. | ||
| They do the same thing over and over again. | ||
| That was Senator Murray. | ||
| Madeline Dean, from the day before, did the exact same thing, fell into the exact same trap. | ||
| Now, I don't want to play these. | ||
| ALX, let me know if these are really long clips. | ||
| I want to just play the section where she gets bodied. | ||
| So, ALX, tell Klein which clip it is, please. | ||
| Is it M2? | ||
| If it's M2, that's the one where he's talking about weaponization. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| This one's delicious. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I am concerned. | |
| That your eagerness, a childlike giddiness to carry out the President's revenge tour, you've shown yourself to be unserious in your statements before you were sworn in and some after. | ||
| You've shown yourself unfit to lead this important agency. | ||
| I was an impeachment manager for President Trump's second impeachment. | ||
| It was a sad, solemn duty. | ||
| And so I wanted to ask you about that. | ||
| Mr. Patel. | ||
| As you and the President continue to weaponize and investigate his perceived enemies, as you follow this blueprint, when can I, a former impeachment manager, expect the FBI at my door? | ||
| Ma 'am, you want to know who was targeted by a weaponized FBI? | ||
| Me. | ||
| You want to know how and why? | ||
| You want to know what I'm doing to fix it? | ||
| Let me move on. | ||
| Well, you should read the book because there's no enemies list on that book. | ||
| There are people that violated their constitutional obligations and their duties to the American people, and they were rightly called out, and you should give that book to every one of your constituents so they can read about it. | ||
| I won't be doing that. | ||
| That's their loss. | ||
| There's a number of clips like these that have completely nuked, but Kash Patel clearly bringing a very different energy to the FBI director position and was not taking. | ||
| And he asked from Democrats in Congress who were trying to get campaign ad snippets, which is exactly what this is. | ||
| And Cash called them out to their face for doing this. | ||
| I can't tell you how exceptional it is to see an FBI director doing that, like calling out the game live on camera. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
During your Senate confirmation hearings. | |
| You repeatedly denied having any involvement as a private citizen in the firing of FBI officials who engaged in the prosecution against January 6th insurrectionists. | ||
| The violent rioters who beat and killed Capitol Police officers and whom you refer to as political prisoners. | ||
| Since then, multiple whistleblowers have come forward and we know that you likely committed perjury. | ||
| At the same hearing, you claimed you were not familiar with Stu Peters. | ||
| An anti-Semitic Holocaust denier, despite the fact that you appeared on Mr. Peter's podcast eight separate times. | ||
| Eight times. | ||
| And you claimed not to recall. | ||
| Mr. Patel, my second question is, should we worry more about your memory or your veracity? | ||
| We should worry more about your lack of candor. | ||
| You're excusing me of committing perjury? | ||
| Tell the American people how I broke the law and committed a felony. | ||
| Have the audacity to actually put the facts forward instead of lying for political banter so you can have a 20-second donation hit. | ||
| The answer is both. | ||
| So you agree with the president when he says he doesn't know if he should uphold his constitutional duty? | ||
| If you want to just keep putting words in my mouth, the TV cameras are outside. | ||
| I thank you. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| Again, this is an unserious moment, sadly. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Cash is... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cash is cooking. | |
| We're so excited. | ||
| We're going to be doing more with Cash. | ||
| We're going to be telling more of the story of what he's doing at the FBI. | ||
| We have some really great hooks and some inroads there. | ||
| And hopefully we'll be able to deliver some news later today that the FBI or the feds are looking into... | ||
| The feral left-wing lib woman who has assaulted and maybe committed biological warfare against Ed Martin in the streets of D.C. I'm a dog with a bone. | ||
| I will not let that one go. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, it's a dirty business. | ||
| Kash Patel knows it. | ||
| That's why he's... | ||
| I love seeing him act. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| It's just like so great to see it shoved back in their face. | ||
| But man, it's a filthy, dirty business in politics. | ||
| It's a dirty... | ||
| You're getting spit on. | ||
| You're getting mudslinged. | ||
| Cash Patel's having a shadow box there in Congress and roll with the pigs, right? | ||
| Somebody who's rolled with a lot of dirty people and a lot of dirty jobs is the great Mike Rowe. | ||
| Mike Rowe, who is an Emmy award-winning TV host, New York Times bestselling author, storyteller, and has a brand new YouTube show called The People You Should Know. | ||
| Mike Rowe is somebody I'm looking forward to getting to know. | ||
| Mike Rowe joins the show live. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| you you you you you Such an honor to have you on the program, Mike. | ||
| We really appreciate you being here. | ||
| Dirty Jobs is one of my all-time favorite shows. | ||
| And I feel like, by extension, just a little bit, we do a dirty job here talking about politics day in and day out. | ||
| It was a very, very dirty election. | ||
| There were a lot of dirty tricks. | ||
| And it's a filthy industry. | ||
| And I know that you probably cruise and touch the third rails of that industry here. | ||
| Do you think there's anything filthier than, like, manhole cover guy or political consultant? | ||
| Which is filthier job? | ||
| They're not even adjacent. | ||
| You know, the way I think of it is there are two levels of vocational grime. | ||
| There's the kind... | ||
| That you can correct with a hot shower or two. | ||
| And there's the kind that no amount of soapy, sudsy hot water will save you from. | ||
| The only one I know, the only job I can think of that is immune to all attempts at hygiene, corrective maintenance, and basic bathing is politics. | ||
| You just can't get clean. | ||
| Once you wallow around in that end of the pool, you will be wrapped in a never-ending funk that will stick with you for eternity. | ||
| Not to relitigate all this, but could you just truly imagine going out and having to tell the American people, no, man, Joe Biden's good. | ||
| He's good, right? | ||
| He's of sound mind. | ||
| There was a viral clip of Elizabeth Warren going around. | ||
| Where she was called out on this, right? | ||
| And she was like, but he was on his feet. | ||
| That's quite a standard, Mrs. Warren. | ||
| It's not a compliment. | ||
| Let me get this straight. | ||
| He was putting sentences together? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| I'm sure he saw it. | ||
| Like, what level of moral ambiguity and cognitive dissonance does it take to go out to the American public and say, the guy that you just saw fall ass-backwards down the stairs? | ||
| The guy that you just saw fall across a flat stage, right, at a Navy graduation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, the guy that couldn't remember his own name in the debate with Trump, like, that guy's good. | ||
| You know, he's good. | ||
| Don't believe your lying eyes. | ||
| Look, it's not new, man. | ||
| I mean, there's no such thing as an old joke if you're hearing it for the first time, right? | ||
| And what we just experienced, like, what's happening, I think, right now in real time, I felt like I was one of the early ones to make this analogy. | ||
| I've heard it a thousand times since, but it's the emperor's new clothes. | ||
| You know, that's the story. | ||
| And that story about a kid and a crowd of people who points out the fact that the emperor is naked is often told from the point of view of the emperor or the kid. | ||
| But it's really a story about the townspeople. | ||
| It's really a story about how thousands of people can look at a thing and all see the same thing, but not acknowledge it at the same time for all sorts of reasons. | ||
| And that's where we are. | ||
| And it doesn't matter if you're talking about the example you just raised or Will, what's his name, the swimmer, standing there on the podium with his phallus clearly visible through the spandex of his woefully inadequate bathing suit. | ||
| When you're asked to ignore the obvious existence of a member right in front of you, Yeah, you've entered a fable, and you have to ask yourself, who are you in the crowd? | ||
| Are you the kid who tells the truth, or are you just going to nod quietly and say, nope, that is not a penis? | ||
| It feels like, yeah, you could absolutely start, you could sell merch, right, based on that tagline. | ||
| Mike, this is a brilliant idea. | ||
| You fast forward. | ||
| It's my gift to you. | ||
| Bumper stickers coming soon, not a penis. | ||
| It was a slap one on every Tesla. | ||
| Okay, so Tesla, fast forward to the end result of the collapse of a fraudulent system, right? | ||
| And you get Trump. | ||
| And you get Trump because working class people voted Trump. | ||
| And they like that authenticity. | ||
| And I think they wanted a little bit of hope that maybe, maybe... | ||
| Whistling Dixie here, you could get manufacturing back in America. | ||
| Now, there's been like a, it's been a brawl over the last couple months, over this point, and many boomers are out there saying it can't be done. | ||
| But still, the working class abandoned 70 years of support for the left of the Democrat Party and decided to vote en masse for Donald Trump. | ||
| And now Donald Trump is trying to deliver. | ||
| And so it's a two-part question. | ||
| Is that faith? | ||
| Grounded? | ||
| And do you think Trump can deliver? | ||
| Well, in 1980, when I graduated from high school, 80% of the clothing worn by American citizens was made in America. | ||
| Today, it's 2%. | ||
| Clothing is different than medical supplies. | ||
| And medical supplies are different than various automotive gadgets in an incredibly complicated supply chain. | ||
| And I hear a lot of economists spending a lot of time. | ||
| Frankly, I haven't met an economist that believes tariffs are a good idea in general, either short or midterm. | ||
| But economists have to... | ||
| Argue from the perspective that the economy is the most important thing in the room all the time. | ||
| And I think part of what's going on, Benny, honestly, is that we're having two different conversations. | ||
| People are disagreeing about the likelihood of a resurgence in manufacturing based on a tariff strategy for economic reasons. | ||
| And then there's another group of people who are saying, well, wait a minute. | ||
| Is there ever a time in our history when something is more important than the economy? | ||
| And the answer, of course, is yes. | ||
| Not often, but yes. | ||
| I mean, in 1870, a lot of smart people were saying, you can't outlaw slavery, dude. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Do you have any idea what that'll do to the economy? | ||
| And it was a valid argument, economically speaking. | ||
| But there eventually became a moment where we said, okay, look, there might be something more important to the country than our economy. | ||
| I think that's happening here. | ||
| I think that a lot of people, in many cases, the cohort you're referring to, who voted for Trump, who maybe otherwise wouldn't, understand in some primal way that something fundamental is going on that goes beyond their 401ks, their stock portfolios, or even the cost of their favorite goods. | ||
| And that has to do with our identity as a country. | ||
| It has to do with the degree that we've become reliant on countries who really don't like us. | ||
| I just interviewed a guy on my podcast about organ harvesting. | ||
| 80,000 to 100,000 organs are being removed from people in prisons in China. | ||
| They build hospitals next to the prisons, Benny. | ||
| You can schedule a heart transplant. | ||
| No one wants to really talk about it. | ||
| No one really wants to talk about the Uyghurs. | ||
| You can see people getting escorted out of an NFL or, sorry, an NBA game because they're holding a sign that says Google Uyghurs. | ||
| And, right, that can't happen. | ||
| So, sorry for the rant, but fundamental to your question is this other... | ||
| Set of circumstances that's informing the entire conversation that economists aren't talking about. | ||
| Who are we as a people? | ||
| How reliant do we want to be on companies or countries who hate us? | ||
| And can we reinvigorate manufacturing? | ||
| And if we do, what will that mean for our identity? | ||
| I think those questions deserve answers. | ||
| Two years ago we went to East Palestine. | ||
| Four days after a toxic train explosion that was brought about and ordered by the Biden administration, sending poison chemicals into the air and ground and water. | ||
| And when I reviewed what had happened to that city, the true bomb actually happened 20 years earlier when the final textile plant closed in a little hamlet of East Palestine that used to be bustling. | ||
| And have a fantastic 70-year textile industry tied to it. | ||
| That led to the growth of the entire place and led to the train passing right through the town. | ||
| Why does the train pass right through the town? | ||
| So that they could ship the textiles that was so desirable, the plates and the cups and the spoons and everything that was being made there. | ||
| And the true poison that was injected in that community happened through globalism long before the train explosion. | ||
| Train explosion is like a sad afterthought of what really happened there. | ||
| It was truly profound and very depressing to see. | ||
| When you travel those streets, man, and you talk to those people, it was radicalizing for me. | ||
| Well, look, again, what is it that people suspect is true that they didn't before? | ||
| And it's really nuanced to get into it and kind of vague. | ||
| But it has to do, I think, with... | ||
| Real importance and value to the business of making a thing that doesn't have anything to do with the value of the thing or the transactional reality of the economic argument, in other words. | ||
| I had this conversation the other day with a guy named Bayard Winthrop, who owns a small textile company called American Giant. | ||
| They make sweatshirts. | ||
| They make t-shirts and so forth. | ||
| They've been doing it for 15 years. | ||
| And he gets very emotional. | ||
| You know, he makes what Slate Magazine called the best hoodie ever made. | ||
| It's not cheap, but it's done down in South Carolina. | ||
| Every single step of the process. | ||
| He does this with flannel shirts, too, that are all yarn dyed. | ||
| Everything is hand spun with cotton that is grown in this country. | ||
| Like, the entire thing, right? | ||
| And so on the one hand, yeah, it's just a sweatshirt. | ||
| And how excited can people get about a sweatshirt? | ||
| On the other hand, you're talking about hundreds of jobs in a factory town that's alive and well, as in not East Palestine, right? | ||
| And the importance, the relevance of a perfectly made sweatshirt has been completely arbitraged out of the conversation, where we now say, I just heard somebody on the news. | ||
| Somebody, some economist basically saying, it's just not in our interest to make that stuff because we can get a similar product that's almost as good for a fraction of the price from China or Vietnam or someplace else. | ||
| And again, I just, I hear that and I think of the blind man who grabbed the tusk of the elephant and concluded that the entire animal was made of ivory. | ||
| Because that's the only thing he touched. | ||
| Meanwhile, there's a trunk and there's a tail. | ||
| And their legs. | ||
| And there's a lot of other things that make an elephant an elephant. | ||
| Beyond the tusk, you know. | ||
| There are a lot of things that that sweatshirt represents that go beyond its cost. | ||
| And, yeah, we gave away something that was primal and fundamental. | ||
| And we're either going to get it back or we're not. | ||
| Final thought. | ||
| The risk, to your first question, do I think Trump can do it? | ||
| I'm certainly rooting for him. | ||
| But full disclosure, I was rooting for Obama in 2009 with the Highway Infrastructure Act when he talked about three million shovel-ready jobs. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| And I was like, hey, man, I wrote him an open letter. | ||
| You can find it online. | ||
| And I said, look, Mr. President, I'm rooting for you. | ||
| But if you're going to sell three million shovel-ready jobs, you should understand you're talking to a country that's not all that enthused about picking up a shovel. | ||
| And that's just the way it is. | ||
| And President Trump, if you're serious about creating a couple million manufacturing jobs that currently don't exist, you're going to have to grapple with the fact that in January, there were 482,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector that were open. | ||
| And there's no workforce there to fill them. | ||
| So it's all going to trickle down to that. | ||
| That's going to be the fundamental problem. | ||
| And I've been at it since, there's the letter. | ||
| Yeah, that went out, what's it say? | ||
| March? | ||
| 2009. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| That's when I started. | ||
| January 30. Man, you wrote that on his inauguration. | ||
| I did. | ||
| And it was an honest letter. | ||
| And I offered the resources of my foundation and whatever use I could be. | ||
| But I simply said, look, man, you can't think. | ||
| I know I'm over my skis, and I was probably fooling myself. | ||
| But I'm like, just because you create a job. | ||
| Doesn't mean you're going to fill it. | ||
| You've got 7.6 million open positions today, Benny. | ||
| 7.6 million. | ||
| Most of them don't require a four-year degree. | ||
| They require training. | ||
| And you've got 6.9 million able-bodied men who are not only not working, they're not even looking for work. | ||
| That's never happened before in peacetime. | ||
| There's something going on in the country that really doesn't have anything to do with a lack of opportunity. | ||
| You talk about a skills gap. | ||
| What you really have is a will gap. | ||
| It's real, and it's got to be dealt with. | ||
| And I don't hear any economist talking about that. | ||
| How do you reinvigorate that working man attitude? | ||
| And I say this as someone who has experienced this once in my life profoundly. | ||
| We went to coal country at the height of the Green New Deal. | ||
| And I said, we're going to just go do a documentary, and we're just going to talk to coal miners, right? | ||
| I didn't really have anything booked. | ||
| I just went to the heart of coal country and started talking with people. | ||
| Got invited into homes, got invited into factories, got down into the mine, right? | ||
| Put it all together on documentary. | ||
| Documentary was four years ago. | ||
| To, like, humanize these people. | ||
| Like, who are they? | ||
| And there's one thing that they all told me, Mike. | ||
| And I'm sure you have 100,000 anecdotal stories just like this. | ||
| But they all told me this. | ||
| They told me my grandpappy's grandpappy's grandpappy. | ||
| It was down in that effing mind. | ||
| And that getting coal for Christmas was like a compliment. | ||
| It was how we grew up. | ||
| And it was honorable. | ||
| I watched my father do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they still got... | ||
| I saw initials carved into wooden beams. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like from their forefathers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was like, man. | ||
| To kill this industry, not only would you be obviously killing something that we need, fossil fuel, coal-burning power plants. | ||
| Every electric car is actually a coal-burning car because that's where all the power comes from. | ||
| But more importantly, you'd be destroying a family tree. | ||
| You'd be destroying a legacy of human dignity here. | ||
| It would almost be a crime against humanity, which is how I put it way back in the day when we did this project. | ||
| Well, it's a crime against identity. | ||
| It's a crime against a man's identity, a family's identity, a generation's identity, a town's identity, and ultimately a country's identity. | ||
| If you just strip away every single thing from that job, except for some component part, it's like trying to talk about beauty. | ||
| What makes that beautiful woman beautiful? | ||
| Are you really going to talk about lips and eyes and structure? | ||
| And hips and legs. | ||
| It's like, wait a minute. | ||
| Beauty is greater than the sum of its parts and so is a job. | ||
| And that documentary you worked on was very different from Dirty Jobs in format, but it was identical in purpose. | ||
| My whole reason for doing Dirty Jobs was to give miners and farmers, primarily, a chance to make a case for their vocation. | ||
| In a totally unscripted way that never involved a second take. | ||
| And that show has been on the air every single day for 22 years. | ||
| We did 350 of those things. | ||
| And it wasn't just about mines. | ||
| That's me at a place called Ebenex, by the way. | ||
| Sure, looks like a coal mine. | ||
| No, you know what that is? | ||
| That's bone black. | ||
| That's an ancient... | ||
| Process of charring buffalo bones that Indians used to do on the High Plains. | ||
| They would use the black powder. | ||
| It's almost like a gypsum for all kinds of different applications. | ||
| Today, it's a big part of women's makeup. | ||
| And it's a big part of like virtually every lubricant has some measure of bone black in it. | ||
| I'm so sorry, Mike. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| You are going to get canceled after this for doing blackface. | ||
| I realize that. | ||
| I didn't mean to do this to you, Val. | ||
| Well, as long as we're going there, have your producer Google micro, let's see, strump charcoal. | ||
| That's the one that nearly got me destroyed, man. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| We got you. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Ten seconds here. | ||
| We got you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it was a... | ||
| I mean, geez, that was back in 2005. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| That's a day working in a charcoal. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Lump charcoal. | ||
| It looks like you're about to drop the hottest album of the summer. | ||
| That's right, man. | ||
| That's my boy band phone. | ||
| But look, I mean, Dirty Jobs was fun because first and foremost, it was a love letter to, you know, hard work. | ||
| And it was lighthearted. | ||
| But when you start stitching together adventures like that, one after the next after the next, you start hearing the same stories, whether that's worm grunting down in Florida, charcoal making in Missouri, bituminous coal and anthracite and borax and opal. | ||
| I just heard the same story from 350 different people in as many different vocations. | ||
| And it's all rooted in pride. | ||
| It's all rooted in work ethic. | ||
| And it's all rooted in some measure of skill that doesn't require a four-year degree. | ||
| You can either make that a punchline or you can make it a rallying cry. | ||
| You know, Trump's making it a rallying cry right now. | ||
| And I hope it works. | ||
| What do you say to the contention? | ||
| And I just want to thread the needle here. | ||
| How do you re-inspire that in a man, specifically? | ||
| I'm going to leave the ladies out of it. | ||
| Refer right now. | ||
| How do you re-inspire? | ||
| How do you re-light that coal burn in a man? | ||
| To go and work hard. | ||
| Because it seems like all of society is designed around softening the man. | ||
| Making him as addicted to porn as possible. | ||
| As addicted to booze as possible. | ||
| As addicted to drugs as possible. | ||
| As addicted to video games as possible. | ||
| As addicted to snackable, meaningless brain rot as possible. | ||
| And that really cuts the dick off a man, you know? | ||
| Metaphorically, I know that that's happening physically, but metaphorically, that's what's actually happening to men in America. | ||
| I think it's worth a follow-up. | ||
| How do you strip mine and get back to masculinity? | ||
| Let me tell you how you don't do it. | ||
| No lectures, no sermons, no scolding. | ||
| They can't hear you. | ||
| And you wind up looking like another old man on the porch. | ||
| Shaking his fist at the kids, right? | ||
| It's not going to work. | ||
| Obama, I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but Obama literally did this. | ||
| Obama went and scolded all these young black men for not liking Kamala Harris. | ||
| And it was the biggest, it was arguably the biggest backfire. | ||
| It just didn't work. | ||
| Of 2024, yeah. | ||
| Well, look, what is persuasive is the question. | ||
| In a time when every institution has been just relegated to... | ||
| A farce. | ||
| Like, there's nothing persuasive about a traditional lecture. | ||
| There's nothing persuasive about a traditional spokesman. | ||
| And there's nothing persuasive about a traditional host. | ||
| So what does that mean to the answer to your question? | ||
| How do you persuade 7 million men who, according to Nicholas Eberstadt in his excellent book, Men Without Work, 7.2 million men currently not working or looking for work. | ||
| What would be persuasive to them? | ||
| And Benny, I don't know if you've read the book, but you made the point perfectly. | ||
| It's not just, well, Nick says, what are these men doing if they're not working? | ||
| Again, let me tell you what they're not doing. | ||
| They're not volunteering at the local church. | ||
| They're not involved with the JCs or the Kiwanis Club or the 4-H Club or the Boy Scouts of America or the Lions Club. | ||
| They are on their screens over 2,000 hours a year. | ||
| So, you know, how do you reach that guy? | ||
| Well, maybe you get on their screen. | ||
| And maybe you slap them upside the head with a truth bomb that they can't ignore. | ||
| The only thing, honestly, that I've seen work, and I don't know if it will work with them, because what you're really asking me is, okay, you've dragged the horse to the water. | ||
| You got him to the water. | ||
| How do you make him drink? | ||
| And I don't think there's an answer. | ||
| All you can do is prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's water in the oasis and that there's hope. | ||
| In that hole. | ||
| And you then show them people. | ||
| I've got 2,200 of them that we've helped at Microworks, people who have prospered as a result of learning a skill. | ||
| And you just say that, look, in the end, it's your call, dude. | ||
| But don't tell me that the opportunities don't exist. | ||
| They do. | ||
| Don't tell me that you don't have the capability. | ||
| You do. | ||
| You can tell me you don't have the will. | ||
| You can tell me you don't have the ambition. | ||
| And then I might look around at policy and elected officials and say, are we doing anything to enable this guy to be able to take that attitude? | ||
| And of course the answer is, well, yeah, we are. | ||
| And now the issue becomes politicized, as all things do, and now I'll be rendered deaf to half the country because I'll sound like a scold for saying that these guys are fundamentally lazy. | ||
| When you have 70 million people on the other side saying, no, wait a second, they're not lazy. | ||
| Why should they work for that greedy, rapacious capitalist who's going to pay him a crap wage? | ||
| So forth and so on. | ||
| So what do you do, man? | ||
| If you're me and you run a foundation, you make everybody who applies for a scholarship sign a sweat pledge. | ||
| You make them jump through hoops, knowing full well that many of them won't. | ||
| And then you focus on the people who want to be helped, and you do your best to help them. | ||
| And hope to God the memo goes out to the others, and sooner or later... | ||
| They come to the inescapable conclusion that spending 2,000 hours a year scrolling left to right ain't going to get it done. | ||
| I guess the most apt metaphor, and I don't do this professionally, right? | ||
| I'm proud of the little business that we've built here as entrepreneurs, but I don't know how to scale it, Mike. | ||
| And I guess this is just an open conversation. | ||
| But I didn't play varsity football. | ||
| I was no good. | ||
| But I didn't put myself through football with the end result being homecoming, right? | ||
| I mean, if you're really good, maybe you go to college for it. | ||
| Most don't. | ||
| I mean, if you're really, really good, you go to the NFL. | ||
| But there's sort of this societal projection that there's greatness at the end of this struggle. | ||
| And that there's something worth the two-a-days for in the atrocious Iowa summers. | ||
| Which are, there's nothing. | ||
| There's nothing. | ||
| I feel like I've... | ||
| I hope I go to heaven. | ||
| I feel like I've already been through hell. | ||
| And you go through that, you know, it's like when the cornfields are like, when the cornfields are producing water in the air, right? | ||
| When it's trapped. | ||
| I've been in Dyersville. | ||
| I've detasseled gold in Dyersville. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| Yeah, you put on the helmet. | ||
| The point is like, what is the hardest physical thing I've done with my life? | ||
| Well, like that, actually. | ||
| And why did I do it exactly? | ||
| I wasn't getting paid. | ||
| I was losing money. | ||
| Like, I'm losing time. | ||
| But like, I did it. | ||
| Because it was aspirational. | ||
| There was something good. | ||
| There was something that society respected at the end of it, right? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| And you wear that jersey and you walk around the grocery store in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and people are like, good for you. | ||
| You made the varsity team. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| It was like a sign. | ||
| It was like societal respect. | ||
| And maybe that's it, man. | ||
| Maybe it's like just bringing back the working, like honoring the working man again. | ||
| It could be the goal in and of itself? | ||
| Well, that is the goal. | ||
| And I think what you're really saying, and this is the other part of what I try to do at Microworks. | ||
| And shameless plug in case I forget, but we're giving away $3 million this month in work ethic scholarships. | ||
| And the enrollment period will be done in a week. | ||
| So if you want some, go get it. | ||
| But aside from that... | ||
| Life gets a lot easier if people are properly gobsmacked by the miracle of illumination when they flip the switch. | ||
| And life becomes a lot simpler when they flush the toilet and the crap goes away and they go, my God, that's a freaking miracle. | ||
| And if the 330 million people who live here have a genuine appreciation for the miracle of one and a half percent of the population, that's the farmers, feeding us three times a day. | ||
| Day after day after day. | ||
| If we're not blown away by that, then why in the hell would anybody get in the farming business? | ||
| If we're not blown away by what our skilled tradespeople do, it's a heck of a lot harder to inspire the next generation of skilled tradespeople. | ||
| So that level of gratitude, that is super important. | ||
| And I try with the shows I work on. | ||
| Dirty jobs, and somebody's got to do it, and now people you should know, they're all attempts to tap the country on the shoulder and say, hey, what about him? | ||
| What about her? | ||
| Get a load of that. | ||
| And if you're not blown away by that, or if you're not even interested in it, I can't help you. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's a longer conversation than we have time for now, but man, I think it's something pernicious in culture that decided that... | ||
| The man was going to go from, like, Leave it to Beaver's dad to Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin. | ||
| And suddenly every dad became, you know, Stan Marsh from South Park, right? | ||
| In culture. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And we all became, like, fathers became, the iconoclast of a father became, like, fat and lazy and a joke. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Everybody loves Raymond. | ||
| Everybody loves Raymond. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| That, to me, was the first time I really saw it. | ||
| And with great respect to Ray Romano, he's brilliant. | ||
| And the show was funny. | ||
| But he was, what's the word? | ||
| Hapless. | ||
| Always hapless. | ||
| And always the proximate cause of some problem. | ||
| And the solution was either his wife or his mother. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| It was very rarely him. | ||
| And I don't want to make too big a deal of it. | ||
| It's just a sitcom. | ||
| But if you believe that a war has been waged on work, as I do, and if you think an attendant skirmish is a war on traditional values of masculinity and fatherhood, as I also do, then part of the evidence that demands a verdict are the shows you're talking about. | ||
| And it's in our advertising, right? | ||
| I mean, a plumber, in many people's minds, is still a 300-pound dude with a giant butt crack, you know? | ||
| That's just the way it is, because that's the... | ||
| Now we call that a feminist. | ||
| Times change, but the work doesn't. | ||
| The work still needs to be done. | ||
| We call that a trans activist. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| You can get it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I want to talk about this new channel and the new show, but I want to do it with a hook here about my final... | ||
| The most annoying, infuriating thing that I heard, actually, in L.A. when we were doing interviews on the street. | ||
| And we just got back. | ||
| And the libs that we would talk to in Santa Monica were like, you know, I was asking them about Trump's immigration policies. | ||
| And I kept hearing this, dude, and I cannot believe it. | ||
| Who's going to pick our fruit? | ||
| Like, I kept hearing it. | ||
| And, you know, you don't just hear it as we set up the B-roll for this, like, project that we're doing. | ||
| You don't just hear it from the libs on the street. | ||
| You can hear it from the highest echelons of the Democrat Party, right? | ||
| Like, if we deport all of the usury labor, right, the exploitative slave labor, then no American will ever do the job. | ||
| I just don't know how you don't... | ||
| I mean, it's such an obvious link. | ||
| Who's going to pick our fruit in 2025 is no different. | ||
| Then who's going to pick our cotton in 1860? | ||
| It's the same goddamn question. | ||
| Pardon me, but it's the same question. | ||
| The degree to which that guy's a slave or that's an indentured servant or that's an alien who were, right? | ||
| All of those things require us to stick our head in the sand and be okay with the fact that the clothes we're wearing were made possible by a workforce that has been horribly misused. | ||
| You're either okay with it or you're not. | ||
| My office is in Santa Monica. | ||
| I don't get there much, but I know exactly where you were, and I know exactly the people you were talking to. | ||
| But you don't have to go there to hear that sentiment. | ||
| You can hear it on the streets of D.C. You can hear it anywhere. | ||
| People have enough understanding to know that their bread's being buttered someplace else. | ||
| They just really don't want to know. | ||
| They really don't want to see. | ||
| The Chinese doing the organ harvesting, right? | ||
| I make this point everywhere I go, Benny. | ||
| It's better to look squarely at a thing. | ||
| You like hamburger? | ||
| You like steak? | ||
| Go to a slaughterhouse. | ||
| I did. | ||
| I still eat hamburger and steak, but I think you owe it to the animal, you know? | ||
| Are you really in favor of capital punishment? | ||
| Watch a hanging. | ||
| Watch an electrocution. | ||
| I have, and I still favor it, but I'll tell you, it makes you a lot less glib, right? | ||
| Fill in the blank. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Abortion, slavery, whatever it is. | ||
| Those kids you were talking to in Santa Monica, they're not looking squarely at the thing. | ||
| And they're also sure as hell not interested in picking their own fruit. | ||
| I'll be perfectly honest with you, Mike. | ||
| I'm not sure they had the physical power to pluck an orange off a tree. | ||
| I don't think they could physically bend over and... | ||
| Pull a melon out of a field, right? | ||
| And then do a medicine ball routine like you see here. | ||
| I don't think they could actually... | ||
| I'm not sure they could have done it. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you, it kicked my ass. | ||
| And my real job on Dirty Jobs was truly to try my best. | ||
| I don't care if you're humping melons or detasseling corn or picking fruit or pollinating date palms or whatever it is. | ||
| And I... | ||
| I mean, to be honest, I thought for a while I was going to play it up. | ||
| I thought for a while, well, I'm going to make this look slightly harder than it is, whatever it is, in order to create the disparity that I wanted to between a trained, experienced worker and myself. | ||
| I didn't have to. | ||
| My butt got kicked. | ||
| I was basically the before photo in every working construct. | ||
| It was like, this is what an apprentice looks like who's doing his best, and this is what a pro looks like. | ||
| And, you know, that's what the viewer gets to see, and they can assign whatever meaning they want to that. | ||
| So you just likened what's happening right now with exploitative criminal alien labor to slavery. | ||
| And if you follow that to a logical conclusion, then we should ban that labor because it is immoral and against human dignity itself. | ||
| Do you agree with that? | ||
| I believe before we ban it, We should show it. | ||
| We should make it clear that people understand exactly how the machine works. | ||
| For instance, I know in Australia, I was down there years ago, and I was stunned by a commercial I saw whose purpose was to discourage drunk driving. | ||
| We have commercials that do that, but in Australia, they're two minutes long. | ||
| They're miniature movies, and they are heart-wrenching. | ||
| They're bloodbaths. | ||
| You meet the kid who got drunk, who killed the girl on the way home. | ||
| You meet the family. | ||
| You go to the court. | ||
| When you're done watching that commercial, you're simply not going to drink and get in a car. | ||
| Same thing with smoking. | ||
| They'll take diseased lungs out of a cadaver and hold them up to the camera to show you what smoking does. | ||
| We won't do that in this country. | ||
| I'm not going to mouth off and say, yes, we should ban this type of labor. | ||
| I'm saying, let's have a conversation about who's buttering our bread and what it looks like and what we're paying for. | ||
| Let's really understand it. | ||
| Mostly, I'm saying, let's do it with China. | ||
| I mean, people ought to know about the Uyghur thing. | ||
| They really ought to know. | ||
| They ought to know about the organ harvesting that's going on. | ||
| And then they can decide if they want to be in business with them. | ||
| But until you see that, what do you know? | ||
| You don't know anything. | ||
| You walk around saying questions like, well, who's going to pick our cotton? | ||
| Who's going to pick our fruit? | ||
| How are we going to get through the day? | ||
| So that's just going la-la-la, hands over the ears, stick your head back in the sand. | ||
| You don't want to know. | ||
| You're blissfully ignorant. | ||
| Sounds like a perfect episode for People You Should Know, your new show on your YouTube channel. | ||
| Oh, thank you for that. | ||
| Look, if Dirty Jobs was a rumination on work... | ||
| People You Should Know is just a rumination on the neighbors you wish you had. | ||
| This is a love letter to bloody do-gooders. | ||
| But it's not as earnest as I just made it sound. | ||
| This is really the making of the show. | ||
| That's my old friend, Sarah Yargrow. | ||
| She really is a bloody do-gooder. | ||
| I'm older than I've ever been, beaten and broken. | ||
| Sarah takes me around the country, introducing me to people who are doing really great things in their community. | ||
| We go there under the guise of making a documentary, and then we show up at the end with an elaborate surprise. | ||
| The town comes out. | ||
| There's a parade. | ||
| Everybody cries. | ||
| It's really sweet. | ||
| And the viewer, hopefully, gets a chance to see that, you know what? | ||
| It's so easy to not be an asshole. | ||
| It's so easy to get involved in your own community and do something great. | ||
| That woman, Judalyn Cassidy, she's a plumber teaching young girls. | ||
| How to be plumbers. | ||
| That woman is Lindsay Phillips. | ||
| She's a recovering method who is now working with a company called Care Portal. | ||
| And this thing, Benny, is unbelievable. | ||
| Anybody can go to careportal.com and at a glance see people in need in their community. | ||
| And it could be as simple as donating diapers or a bed. | ||
| They've helped hundreds of thousands of people, including Lindsay. | ||
| Who now works for them full-time. | ||
| This is incredible work, Mike, and I wish that we had more of it. | ||
| I believe that this is what America First actually is, and not to really go political here, but people are starving, ravenous, in fact, for Americans helping Americans in this country. | ||
| If you go online, you log online, the only conversation you will ever hear is about What our stances should be on foreign countries? | ||
| And it's something that to no end enrages me because all of these dinks and all of these childless simps are online shrieking about Israel or Ukraine or China or whatever when I have four American kids and there is a massive pothole in front of my house that will not get filled. | ||
| Like, what is their future actually going to be first? | ||
| And so highlighting the way that we can help each other in this country is incredibly refreshing. | ||
| Look, the only way I know how to stay out of the fray, and it's not really that I want to be out of it, but I've worked hard not to be subsumed by it, is to focus on ideas and topics that are still apolitical. | ||
| Work. | ||
| I mean, at the guts of Dirty Jobs, that was a rumination on hard work and learning a skill that's in demand. | ||
| Somebody's Gotta Do It was more about avocations and people who are passionate about their play. | ||
| Very personal things, right? | ||
| People You Should Know is a rumination on basic decency and kindness. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think the way I think about it, and to make your point in a slightly different way, is to say that the macro gets all the attention. | ||
| What are the macro effects on this economic policy? | ||
| What are the macro effects on Gaza? | ||
| What's going on on the world stage? | ||
| It's the micro of it all, no pun intended. | ||
| It is the pothole in front of your own house. | ||
| It's the problem with your neighbors. | ||
| It's the tragedy down the street. | ||
| It's not the catastrophe on the other side of the world. | ||
| It's not that we should ignore one at the expense of the other. | ||
| We've got to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. | ||
| But, man, if we can't properly celebrate the people who are making a difference right in front of us, I just don't know what hope we have. | ||
| You know, I just talked to a guy, not to radically change subjects, but one of the episodes coming up concerns a forge. | ||
| Black Horse Forge, it's called. | ||
| It's run by a veteran who nearly punched his own ticket years ago when he came home with a broken back and he lost his eye. | ||
| And this guy was an interior designer before the war. | ||
| And rather than kill himself, he decided to start making knives and bending metal. | ||
| Worked on a forge. | ||
| And it saved him. | ||
| It got him so out of his head he became convinced that other veterans who were struggling... | ||
| 22,000 people have gone through his forge. | ||
| Zero suicides. | ||
| It's one of the greatest success stories I've ever seen in this whole PTSD debacle. | ||
| And what a privilege to tell his story. | ||
| You know, I can't wait to share that next month. | ||
| I mean, I know I sound ridiculously earnest, but look, people are at each other's throats. | ||
| And I think part of my job, if I have one... | ||
| Is to put people out there who are unassailably decent and something that both sides can look at and go, yeah, I wish he was my neighbor. | ||
| Well, Mike, I know that you're in New York right now. | ||
| I hope you don't have to be there for long. | ||
| Same with Santa Monica. | ||
| But man, I'm telling you, when we met in D.C., I was about to do an interview with Pam Bondi and I had an untied shoe. | ||
| And Mike got down and tied my shoe. | ||
| I have it on camera. | ||
| I have it here. | ||
| And I have the proof of it. | ||
| So this is probably the dirtiest job possible. | ||
| And got the dad vibe here with the new balances. | ||
| And there it is. | ||
| So I have proof that you're very lucky if you have Mike Rowe as a neighbor. | ||
| I have to confess something, Benny. | ||
| I didn't realize that was you. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| I like low-key racism around here. | ||
| Doughy white guys are all kind of the same. | ||
| We all kind of look the same. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I've watched the original Peter Pan. | ||
| I show it to my kids. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| All right? | ||
| Like, that was back when a Disney movie meant it was a Disney movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay? | |
| I am. | ||
| That gets a green light around here. | ||
| Well, do me a favor. | ||
| If that's the kind of content your family's in, check out the old Mary Poppins and play the slow-motion part when she slides up a banister. | ||
| It'll change your world. | ||
| Mary's Poppin', Mike. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I think you got it. | ||
| Yeah, let's go back to the old ways, all right? | ||
| When in doubt, people, if you're not sure what to do, you just... | ||
| Every now and then, you drop to your knees and you tie your neighbor's shoe if he needs it. | ||
| And if that neighbor turns out to be Benny and he's got a show or whatever the hell this is, next thing you know, you'll be talking about it two months later. | ||
| It all comes together. | ||
| You know, we can't all slide up banisters, but damn it, we all can take the time to lace up and overprice New Balance and count our blessings. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I look forward to you. | ||
| I look forward to your hottest track of the summer, Mike. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| I think there's one man who is truly uncancelable and has proven that over the past two decades and more of creating content than it is certainly Mike. | ||
| And you must follow him and his brand new show. | ||
| He's got millions of subscribers on YouTube, hundreds of thousands on X, and he is just a man who knows what it means to work. | ||
| Godspeed, Mike. | ||
| Thank you, Benny. | ||
| And think about loafers in the future. | ||
| They'll simplify your life. | ||
| Oh, man, I'm glad I know. | ||
| Mike Rowe. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Check out his new channel and his new show. | ||
| Godspeed, Mike. | ||
| Adios. | ||
| you you you you you It's such an amazing time to get a chance to speak. | ||
| With these incredible people, you know, I've been like watching Raymond Arroyo and Mike Rowe on TV for a very long time to see the way that where the world's moving. | ||
| And wait till you see what we have cooking this program coming up to see the way that the world's moving. | ||
| It's just really exciting. | ||
| It's really exciting. | ||
| It's very entertaining and it's fun to be part of it. | ||
| And we thank you for helping build with us. | ||
| Ask Benny anything. | ||
| Here we freaking go. | ||
| This is our Ask Benny Anything of the Week. | ||
| Exclusive for Brigade members. | ||
| Benny Brigade, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| You can join at BennyJohnson.com. | ||
| From Brian Hammock. | ||
| Kings and queens of old were often exiled to the Tower of London. | ||
| And do you think Prince Andrew should be considered a repeat of that history? | ||
| I am all for going back to the old ways, Brian. | ||
| And I want Prince Andrew. | ||
| Yes, to be exiled. | ||
| Although I think the Tower of London is too nice of a position for him to be in, I would much rather Guantanamo Bay or potentially worse. | ||
| Prince Andrew obviously committed crimes against young girls and then potentially suicided them. | ||
| Virginia Roberts must be avenged. | ||
| And, you know, we're a dog with a bone. | ||
| We're not going to let go. | ||
| We're a bulldog. | ||
| So we're going to keep asking the questions. | ||
| And we'll see. | ||
| We'll see what happens next. | ||
| But, yeah, how are they allowed? | ||
| You know, he was stripped of his title. | ||
| He was stripped of all his little castles. | ||
| But he deserves, like, you know, he deserves much worse than that. | ||
| Thank you for the question, Brian. | ||
| Juiced Griffin! | ||
| Juiced, what's up? | ||
| Would you interview Kamala about AOC potentially running about her plans? | ||
| You know, I feel like the show's getting big enough. | ||
| We're getting enough subscribers. | ||
| We're getting, like, a large enough audience that... | ||
| We will definitely be doing interviews with Democrat presidential candidates. | ||
| And it's going to be wild. | ||
| Like, they won't be able to ignore us. | ||
| And it'll be fun. | ||
| And we'll do our best to be fair, right? | ||
| But, like, just like everything, we're going to ask questions. | ||
| We're going to ask them the same questions, right? | ||
| Why did you try and kill Trump? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, why did you cover up for Epstein? | ||
| Like, they never get asked these kind of questions. | ||
| Bill and Hillary Clinton do, like, hundreds of hours of interviews every single year. | ||
| And they never get asked questions about Epstein. | ||
| I've never once caught them on tape getting asked a question about Epstein. | ||
| Why? | ||
| There's going to be a major crashing. | ||
| There's going to be a major crash out where they're so used to being insulated and protected by corporate media, getting the questions in advance and so on. | ||
| And they've all realized that Trump won by going off script and by speaking with independent real audiences. | ||
| And so they're going to try and do that. | ||
| It's going to have disastrous consequences. | ||
| Mark my words. | ||
| Jennifer Magnuson says, are you coming up to Sacramento? | ||
| Sadly not, but probably soon. | ||
| We're going to be doing more work out in the field. | ||
| We're going to be doing more speeches. | ||
| We have a lot of stuff lined up. | ||
| But I like being in the studio because I can be next to my kids, and then it's also easier to cook here, right? | ||
| It's easier for us to make the content and cover the news. | ||
| And so, Jennifer, maybe? | ||
| Sacramento's a very pretty city. | ||
| It's very nice there. | ||
| We always end up going to California and going to the most wretched and awful possible areas. | ||
| We have our Benny on the Block. | ||
| We've asked people in California what they think of Kamala Harris running for governor. | ||
| That'll be out this weekend, so you'll see our work there. | ||
| We were in Huntington Beach and Santa Monica Pier. | ||
| That's where we are. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right, ladies and gentlemen, we have a press conference. | ||
| We'll be covering live when it goes live. | ||
| We thought we'd be doing that earlier in the week, and they canceled it. | ||
| So we hope that doesn't happen this time. | ||
| But we'll see. | ||
| This has been a rowdy week for us. | ||
| We thank you for marching with us. | ||
| We thank you for obviously being part of the brigade, part of the chat, and part of what we're building here. | ||
| We have some very fun things to announce very, very soon. | ||
| And hopefully we'll be able to announce to you criminal investigations into the woman, the feral animal who spit on Ed Martin live on a Newsmax interview. | ||
| A wild time. | ||
| And it's just a, it's just an, it's just, we're just, we're still tickled by all of it. | ||
| We're still just like so thankful that we've been able to build all of this together. | ||
| The Salty Army, the Brigade, the chat. | ||
| It's been really exciting. | ||
| And we've got more to come. | ||
| So lock in. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend. | ||
| And this is the greatest country on Earth. | ||
| verse of the day psalms one three nine for you created my innermost being you knit me together in my mother's womb Just remember that God made you for a purpose. | ||
| And to get that purpose, you just need to lock in with God. | ||
| Say your prayers in the morning. | ||
| Read your Bible. | ||
| And I'm just a simple Christian. | ||
| We've covered some big questions of faith on the show this week. | ||
| Had a lot of debates. | ||
| That's how you find your purpose. | ||
| You connect with your creator. | ||
| You were created. | ||
| You're not having a spiritual experience in physical form. | ||
| You're a spirit that's having a physical experience. | ||
| And so lock in. | ||
| And when you do that, man, it's amazing how you watch green lights and doors open. | ||
| And we've seen it ourselves. | ||
| So we're very, very hopeful. | ||
| We're very thankful for you. | ||
| And it's your boy, Benny. | ||
| We're marching on to victory. | ||
| See you in a little bit when Carolyn Levitt is live for a press conference. | ||
| That might be a very fun way to end the week, but you never know when those go. | ||
| So, ladies and gentlemen, we'll redirect the live to the press conference. | ||
| Should be happening here in maybe the next 30 minutes. | ||
| Stick around. | ||
| It's your boy Benny. | ||
| See ya. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fight for the rights of every man. | |
| I am a real American. | ||
| When it comes crashing down and it hurts inside. | ||
| Run Shadowfax. | ||
| Show us the meaning of haste. | ||
| Hey y'all, shut the F up. | ||
| It's fatletitious season. | ||
| Counting money and signing mortgages like a boss. | ||
| From rags to bags, I got enough to divorce my dad. | ||
| I got tips for your skinny ass. | ||
| First, don't live where you rule. | ||
| Queens rule over filth, but they don't live in the filth they rule over. | ||
| Second, accuse those of which you are guilty. | ||
| You don't get to be a fat Letitia rolling in the dough with your rolls of dough unless you sue Trump. | ||
| You can't punch me below the belt. | ||
| You can't even see my belt. | ||
| Punch up fat queen. | ||
| Fat Letitia season forever. | ||
| I'm out. | ||
| We're number one. |
Export Selection