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Sept. 13, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

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Dan Bongino | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 98

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	You can get the two biggest scandals of our time wrong in the media.
	You can say Spygate was a hoax.
	It wasn't.
	And Collusion was real.
	It wasn't.
	And you get a Pulitzer Prize.
	If you regularly listen to conservative podcasts like you are right now, you almost certainly know of Dan Bongino's The Dan Bongino Show.
	Bongino, formerly a New York City cop and White House Secret Service agent, now hosts a successful daily show breaking down the news of the day and taking listeners places the mainstream media will not go.
	One of his top focuses the last few years has been the deep state war against President Trump, through its countless attempts to produce a scandal and corruption around the presidency.
	Along with frequent coverage in his show, he's published three books on the subject.
	The latest is Follow the Money, the shocking deep state connections of the anti-Trump cabal, which was just released this week.
	One of the biggest scandals from, as Dan puts it, swampy D.C.
	elite and wealthy Democrats is Spygate.
	That's a buzzword we've all heard a lot, and it can be a difficult story to unpack, but Dan makes it simple.
	In this episode, you'll hear him discuss with me this and other attempts to dismantle President Trump and his administration.
	We'll also discuss the Defund the Police movement from Dan's perspective as an officer in New York City when those streets were cleaned up, and the differences between serving as a Secret Service agent in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations.
	Hey, hey, and welcome to DNews.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special, this week featuring a very special guest, Dan Bongino.
	Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Dan.
	The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to go become a member.
	Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member.
	You'll have access to all the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
	Dan, thanks so much for stopping by.
	You know, what a pleasure.
	It's been so long.
	I'm always looking at you at the top of the charts.
	We see you.
	And then I look down there, and I'm like, uh-oh, he's coming.
	He's coming for me.
	You have a great show.
	It's great to finally see.
	We always kind of cross paths, but this should be an interesting conversation.
	Absolutely.
	So let's jump right in to the Trump issue.
	So a lot of folks in the media, I think, kind of get you wrong as just the Trump guy, because you've obviously been very pro-President Trump during his tenure.
	But it took you a while to get there.
	You weren't originally a Trump guy.
	So tell me about sort of the evolution from where you were on Trump to where you are on Trump now.
	Yeah, it's fascinating.
	I'd endorsed Ted Cruz and I remember calling around at the time to people trying to get them on board, law enforcement people and other folks with prominent public profiles saying, hey, you know, Ted's our guy.
	I still like Ted Cruz a lot, obviously.
	And I made one specific call to someone, let's say in the industry, who you know, but shall remain nameless for the purpose of this interview.
	And she said to me, I'm all about Trump.
	And I was stunned because this is a diehard conservative.
	And I said, really?
	I said, I don't know.
	I don't see it.
	You know, the Democrat history and all that other stuff.
	She said, listen to me.
	She said, this guy gets it.
	He understands.
	She said, I think the word was he can be transactional at times, but she made a great point to me.
	She said, you know, do you want a showman?
	And a guy who plays conservative and has all these people convinced and gets in there and doesn't do anything conservative, or a guy who gets it that conservatives were his way to the White House, and understands that conservatism is actually a path forward.
	Maybe it wasn't in his heart the entire time, but he's actually going to do conservative stuff.
	And I said, you know, let me check this guy out.
	And obviously, after he went, you know, and won the primary, you know, I was all in.
	I mean, the options there were President Trump or Hillary Clinton.
	And as the presidency wore on, I think the real deal-sealer for me was the Spygate scandal, which I just felt like, why do they see this guy as such a threat?
	I mean, it really, I think, was the biggest scandal of our time.
	It really sold me on that this guy is an existential threat to everything I found wrong with the proverbial swamp there.
	So let's talk about Spygate, because you were on that super early.
	So you were the main, maybe, progenitor of a lot of the information that was coming out.
	And I'll be honest with you, I was kind of following it tangentially, because I figured, okay, the information's going to come out at a certain point.
	I don't know what I don't know.
	I'm willing to kind of see where this leads.
	And, you know, I have a certain baseline faith in law enforcement.
	They weren't going to do what they obviously did.
	But you never really had that sort of faith in the system that they weren't going to do what they apparently did.
	So what led you originally to think, OK, this is like an actual scandal?
	Maybe for folks who don't understand, you can actually walk people through what Spygate constitutes, because it becomes sort of just this meme or slogan the left throws out there whenever they wish to dismiss something, sort of like the Benghazi across deck.
	So what exactly is Spygate and why should Americans care?
	I'm glad you started the question that way, because my wife's in the studio with me here.
	But, you know, I like your show.
	I enjoy your content.
	I couldn't believe early on you were a skeptic.
	And I was a skeptic, too.
	I was a Spygate skeptic.
	I know that sounds weird because, you know, it doesn't seem like you jumped right in, but I didn't.
	I haven't been a former Secret Service agent.
	I thought the whole case was BS, too.
	I said to myself, there's no way this could have happened.
	There were guardrails set up for this kind of stuff.
	I said this could not have... I had the same skepticism you did.
	We were in a hotel, my wife and I, in Dallas for doing another job out there, and I get a call from a source.
	He had tried to contact me multiple times, and honestly I thought he was just being hyperbolic, and he had insisted to me, Dan, you don't understand.
	The President of the United States and his campaign were spied on by insiders at the FBI who had no legal basis whatsoever to do it.
	The story sounded so ridiculous, but I figured let me just take his call finally.
	I spent about a half an hour on the phone.
	He walks me through everything, and the essence of it is very simple.
	You know, you can get lost in the wonkery, but it's really no more difficult than this.
	They had a political beef with the soon-to-be president of the United States at the time, candidate Trump.
	They had no legal mechanism in the United States to spy on him.
	So they fabricated it using a bunch of freelancers and former intel people who just made up stories, which then hijacked the Justice Department into getting a FISA warrant.
	They spied on them.
	The story's no more complicated than that.
	Now there's other foreign aspects to it and how they did it and the wonkery of it's quite interesting, but I, like you, I was a skeptic too.
	I know you, you know, you're a patriot like me.
	You want to believe, come on, It's not a third world republic, it's the United States.
	But the guy was so convincing on the phone, and as I dug in with more sources, as this guy's telling me the truth.
	And that's, if you go back and read the original book I wrote on it, Spygate, which I wrote three and a half years ago, Read it.
	Everything's in there.
	Ukraine, what happened.
	I mean, there's nothing new.
	It could have been written yesterday.
	And that was all, most of it was from that original source.
	What was amazing about it is that, as you say, I was kind of slow on the uptake here because I was just throughout thinking, this can't be real.
	And at the very least, that maybe this was you know, predicated on legitimate suspicion, and then it just got to be confirmation bias.
	That at a certain point, it got to be, well, it's got to be true because I believe it has to be true, and therefore if I stretch the rules here, if I stretch the rules there, eventually it will be found to be true. Do you think that it was predicated on the basis that people actually knew nothing was going on and that they went forward with it anyway, or was it that they saw kind of some smoke, they saw Carter Page, who there had been suspicions about There was a FISA warrant against him in 2014.
	And they saw George Papadopoulos, and they had suspicions about him.
	And they sort of whipped themselves into a frenzy to the point where they were willing to, at the very least, bend the rules in order to go after people who are tangentially associated with the Trump campaign.
	I think it's all of that.
	How did it start?
	Well, it started from just pure political interest.
	They needed an October, November surprise in the 2016 election.
	And remember, they'd already tried this on McCain.
	As a matter of fact, my second book on the topic, Exonerated, I have a whole chapter on this.
	This, the Russians are behind this campaign, is not new.
	They had tried it against McCain.
	Now, most people don't remember that, and I always say to people, the reason you don't remember that is because who was in office when McCain was running?
	And the answer is George W. Bush.
	So he didn't let the CIA and FBI get hijacked into this whole ridiculous Spygate scandal.
	It stopped.
	But if you go back and look at the articles about McCain, if you Google McCain Russians, you'll see it's the exact same people saying, John McCain, he's corrupted.
	Look, he's got these lobbyists and they work with Russians.
	They tried it, it went nowhere.
	So the stories out there, they have the template.
	And then you have, you mix that, so you have the story there, okay?
	Part number two is you have very entrepreneurial people looking to make money.
	Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson.
	Glenn Simpson has this pre-packaged Russian narrative.
	There is a 2007, not 2017, 2007 Wall Street Journal article called Soviets try to woo Washington or something like that.
	By Glenn Simpson and his wife now, Mary Jacoby.
	You read that 2007 article.
	Glenn Simpson, of course, has fusion GPS.
	Hired by Hillary Clinton later on.
	It reads like the dossier.
	It's the exact same players.
	Manafort, Alperovitch, they're all in that same article.
	So now you have a political campaign looking for disinformation, a template that's been tried before.
	Hey, let's blame it on the Russians like we did with McCain.
	You have an Obama administration perfectly willing to play along.
	You have a former reporter, Simpson, who's already got the players lined up.
	Manafort's in that 2007 article.
	Manafort gets hired by the Trump team and you have this witch's brew, this perfect storm where they say, hey, if we can slap this fake information, because Simpson can't pitch it, because he's a former reporter, he's being paid by Hillary.
	The FBI is not going to believe that.
	They needed a patina.
	They needed a face.
	And someone said, I've got a bright idea here.
	We got this former Russia desk guy at MI6, Christopher Steele.
	Perfect!
	Let's say he said it.
	Steele didn't say any of that.
	The Steele dossier is a fabrication.
	It's the Steele-Halper Simpson dossier.
	They slapped it on him and all of a sudden you had a made-to-order scandal right there.
	So when you ask what was the motivation, the answer is some were mercenary, some it was money, some it was political, but it all came to this kind of tip of the spear, that arrow of Spygate.
	And really, just like I said, a witch's brew of disasters that all happened at the same time.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about the motivations of the people who are inside the government, because it makes sense when you're talking about, you know, motivated political actors outside the government who want to win an election.
	Sure.
	But the hijacking of the governmental, you know, auspices is really the big scandal here, and I want to ask you about that in just one second.
	First, let's be real about this.
	You've got a lot of information online, and lots of people would love to have that information, particularly if they are politically motivated.
	And that doesn't just mean hackers.
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	Let's talk about the government being hijacked to this particular cause.
	So, obviously, you see politically motivated players, the Peter Strucks and the Lisa Pages, and you see James Comey, who just looks like a radical incompetent throughout this entire process.
	How many of those people knew that this was all empty, and how many of these people were just convinced that because, again, there was some smoke, I mean, to pretend that there was no smoke is, I think, kind of silly.
	I mean, Manafort is obviously a character with some shady ties.
	Yeah, and I've never defended him in my book.
	Yeah.
	I'm talking about metaphor, too.
	Let's not pretend like this is all on the up-and-up here, either, because then we look like buffoons.
	Right, exactly.
	The only big revelation that really came forth through the entire investigation was the Trump Tower meeting in June, where it appeared that Donald Trump Jr.
	was willing to hear overtures from people who are connected to the Russian government about dirt they might have on Hillary, which, again, is not actually illegal.
	Information coming in and listening to information is not, in fact, illegal.
	It may be frowned upon, but it's not illegal.
	Let's say that you're a member of the FBI or the CIA and you have this information funneled to you.
	Did they know from the outset that it was all bullshit?
	Yes.
	A hundred percent.
	So you have these guys, right, who are running this.
	One, the FBI story that it started July 31st of 2016 is total garbage.
	We can just throw that out right now.
	The FBI gets the dossier information in the New York field office way before July 31st, 2016.
	We know that.
	Lisa Page has already admitted to that on the record.
	So have others.
	So they get this dossier information.
	The dossier is a total complete fabrication.
	Now, the FBI has this Woods file.
	Well, you know as a lawyer that, you know, you don't ask a question in court you don't know the answer to, right?
	They ask questions they didn't know the answer to and they never bothered to verify the answers afterwards.
	So you have this Woods file and things that came up like, hey listen, he was in Russia with these prostitutes, the famous, you know, peepee hoax as I call it.
	The story was so outrageous that you would think they'd, you know, go to the hotel, try to find tapes or something.
	It was so ridiculous they made no efforts.
	So they knew from the start that I'll even be nice to them, which they weren't to us, of course.
	Even Peter Stroke today on Twitter is like taking shots at everyone, which is bizarre.
	You'd think he'd kind of like slither away.
	But even being nice, say you thought there was a scintilla of credibility to this, right?
	Within a week or two, you could have figured out the story was entirely BS.
	I mean, we had the Michael Cohen going to Prague story, totally made up.
	Now, again, even giving them a pass, say through the summer of 2016, they're trying to verify it.
	They weren't.
	But say they were.
	I'm trying to be generous here.
	They're absolutely no later than January of 2017.
	They know this case to be a total fabrication.
	Because Steele, who's attributed all the information in these phony dossiers to a guy named Shedonchenko, his primary source, The FBI interviews Danchenko in January of 2017.
	Danchenko says, I didn't say that.
	He says, I didn't say that, number one.
	What he did say, I said, is just bar talk and rumor.
	And third, this stuff sounds like kind of hyperbolic nonsense to me.
	I don't want anything to do with it.
	The source totally walks away from it.
	They have nothing, Ben, zero.
	They don't have one verified fact other than Carter Page traveled to Moscow.
	Nothing.
	I mean, you know how evidence works?
	There is a probable cause standard.
	It's not 9 out of 10.
	If probable cause is a 10, and reasonable suspicion is a 5, you need 10 to get a warrant.
	You need probable cause.
	You can't say, oh, I have 9.6.
	You understand they had zero.
	They had nothing!
	Carter Page's trip to Moscow was evidence of nothing!
	It's not... I've been to Moscow.
	Twice!
	It's not... My producer did.
	He adopted a sign from Moscow.
	Is he under investigation?
	They know no later than January of 2017 the case is a total fraud.
	But just to make things worse...
	I think Don Jr., having a decent relationship with him now, we'd say, listen, all right, that meeting was a bad idea.
	Probably shouldn't have done it.
	I don't think anybody's going to say, oh, hey, great idea, right?
	But here's the catch about even the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr.
	The emails were bad, but he released them, which we can't say for Hillary.
	I don't want to play whataboutism, but he released them.
	Obviously had nothing to hide.
	He said, here, look at them.
	Might have been a bad idea, but here's my email transactions about that meeting.
	And what's fascinating is they interviewed the translator at the meeting, this guy, Samit Shornoff.
	Samat Chornoff has no dog in this fight at all.
	He's a translator.
	Matter of fact, he tells the FBI during the interview, I don't even like Don Jr.
	I can't stand the guy.
	But he says everything he said about that meeting is factually correct.
	This is just months after the January meeting with Danchenko.
	So they know, absolutely no later than January, February, March of 2017, the whole thing's fake and they renew the FISA three more times anyway.
	What are their motivations?
	There are a lot.
	I mean, that was the original question.
	Not to go on too long, but Comey, I think, is just trying to keep his job as FBI director.
	Comey's shown himself to be, again, the mercenary in the deal.
	He's almost no different than Manafort, who damaged the Trump campaign by joining with all this baggage.
	Comey damaged the entire FBI by taking the director spot with all his egomaniacal, almost sociopathic baggage.
	But Brennan's motivations are different.
	Not to get off on a tangent with Mike Flynn, but Flynn's a part of this whole process as well.
	And Flynn had been almost a sworn enemy of the swampy part of the intelligence community for years.
	Even Stanley McChrystal had praised him, saying, hey, this guy's a great intel officer.
	But in his intel work, he had attacked some of the battlefield intel when Flynn was a three-star general, saying, hey, you're getting our guys killed.
	You're not going in these communities and talking.
	You're doing all this stuff from, you know, a base in Arlington.
	They hated him for it.
	So Flynn was public enemy number one.
	So when you ask about the motivations for Brennan and others, I believe it was to make sure that Mike Flynn was never to take a position of authority in the Trump administration, because the dirty laundry was definitely going to start to stink really bad when he brought it out.
	So how high up did this go?
	I mean, the contention on behalf of the Obama administration is that this was relegated to Comey and the intelligence portions of the government, that Biden and Obama really were not in on it, that if they were that it was really more tangential in nature.
	You've heard sort of a split story from Sally Yates, who is the acting deputy attorney general at the time.
	She said she was sort of surprised that Obama was in on it and kind of knew about it.
	So how high did this go?
	This went to the top, I have no doubt.
	Matter of fact, John Brennan right now is starting to panic.
	Brennan's being interviewed by Dorham, and a lot of people missed it, but I actually covered it on my show today.
	He writes an op-ed just a few days ago, I think it was August 30th or so.
	He writes an op-ed in the Washington Post, John Brennan, and halfway down through the op-ed...
	He drops a bombshell that, you know, unsurprisingly was ignored by everyone in the media, that he briefed Obama on the Russia information.
	Remember, the whole thing's a hoax.
	The Russia thing is a hoax.
	There is no Russia information.
	I need everyone to understand.
	There is not a scintilla of evidence that the Russians wanted to help Donald Trump.
	None.
	It's all made up.
	That they interfere in our elections is a fact.
	They always do that.
	To help Trump is made up.
	He drops this bombshell in the Washington Post op-ed where he says, oh, I briefed Obama on it July 28th.
	Really?
	As days before it was even opened at the FBI.
	Nobody picked this story up.
	Now that's fascinating and I think he's doing it because Brennan knows he's finished right now.
	Brennan knows he's the source of a lot of these leaks or believed to be.
	These felony leaks.
	So Brennan could be in a lot of legal trouble if he is in fact found to be the source.
	He's taken the whole place down with him.
	He's not going down alone.
	And I think this is the first crack in the dam.
	But to answer your question about how high it goes, I have zero doubt Zero, that it goes right to the top at Obama.
	And obviously we have now the July 28th briefing, before the FBI even opens the case.
	That's Brennan's words, not mine.
	So we know that happened.
	There's no reason for him to lie about that.
	We have these infamous texts where Stroke and Page, while they're in the context of a larger communication about this whole scandal, they say the White House is running this.
	Now, the leftists panicked over that tweet, uh, text, excuse me, and they said, oh no, no, they're talking about a China thing.
	That's totally ridiculous.
	Look at the, it's nonsense.
	Look at the context.
	There's another one, another text.
	I believe it's in November.
	The POTUS, of course an acronym, President of the United States, Obama at the time.
	The POTUS wants to know everything we're doing.
	Again, what are they talking about?
	They're not talking about, you know, Lego Miego.
	They're talking about Spygate.
	POTUS wants to know everything we're doing.
	But there's another one.
	It gets even worse.
	So now you have three data points, right?
	That the White House was thoroughly involved in this.
	There's an even worse email between Andy McCabe and Lisa Page.
	It's right around that November time block there to October, November.
	And McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI, and his lawyer there, Lisa Page, his lead lawyer, they're emailing each other about a presentation about the case they're going to do with the White House.
	And they're talking about the CIA and the number two, a guy named Cohen, and they say in the email, hey, we really need to go in there and have our, like, one voice.
	In other words, like, the president must have been asking questions about what the CIA and the FBI were doing and they're confused.
	So, you know, you have another one, the obvious Susan Rice email, you know, the buy the book, which always reminds me, have you ever seen that movie G.I.
	Jane?
	It's one of the worst movies ever done.
	Don't waste your time.
	But there is one good line in it, you know, Demi Moore is trying to be a Navy SEAL and she walks in and she wants to make a statement.
	And she says, I don't want to make a statement, but...
	So the guy comes back and says, people who don't want to make statements don't make statements about not making statements.
	So that's what that email was.
	People who want to make a statement would say, hey, let's do everything by the book.
	You just do it by the book.
	You don't write an email.
	Not on the last day, like right as you're about to leave.
	Right as you're about to leave.
	It was all by the book, guys.
	All by the book.
	And you know, the CC myself, just to make sure I have this for the record.
	So yes, Obama was intimately involved.
	That is going to be the biggest part of this scandal.
	He knew.
	I believe he marshaled it in conjunction with Brennan.
	And I believe Comey was just really too dumb to figure it out.
	I mean, this whole thing obviously is an incredibly large scandal.
	I mean, the idea of an outgoing administration spying on a candidate of the opposite party, if you're talking about George W. Bush doing this in 2008 to Barack Obama, it's a world-breaking scandal.
	It happened to Donald Trump, so of course the media have completely downplayed it or suggested that it was not really a big deal, it was all done in good faith.
	So, Do you think that the American people care about this?
	Do you think this is an election issue?
	Because obviously Trump hasn't taken it on too much, and it may be too complicated for people to follow.
	The media obviously have very little interest in laying it out.
	You know, what I want and what I think are two different things.
	I would hope the American people largely would care.
	It is only the biggest political scandal of our time, and it's not that I don't have credibility on this either.
	I mean, when I ran for office myself, I ran against the Patriot Act, which was signed by George W. Bush.
	I thought it was a bad idea.
	I thought the roving wiretaps were a bad idea.
	I thought maybe outside of the lone wolf provisions, the business records provision was a bad idea.
	I didn't care that George W. Bush signed it.
	I'm actually concerned with, you know, little things like liberty and freedom that seem to have gone by the wayside.
	So I did have credibility on this.
	But I read an interesting tweet before I came over this morning, I was on the plane flying out here, and there's a woman on the ground, she writes for a leftist outlet, but she's on the ground in Wisconsin, and she tweeted out this thread, and the gist of it, which was, you know, really interesting, she said, I've spoken to every single person I can for the last four days in Kenosha, numbering in the hundreds.
	She goes, all you DC bubble dwellers talking about your politics, she said, these people give negative S-words about it.
	They don't care.
	They care about their own legitimate kitchen table stuff in their kitchen, which is even odd because when we talk about kitchen table issues, you and I are talking about different stuff.
	They're talking about their actual kitchen, like what matters to them on the ground in their neighborhood.
	And she said, I'm warning you, you guys are setting yourselves up for another Trump win here because you're totally out of touch.
	And that's why I'd answer your question.
	I don't really think the Spygate story resonates because for some, Especially people like me who find it interesting because of my law enforcement background, the wonkery of it is overwhelming.
	You know, you start talking about FISA, how it works, the jurisdictions, overseas, the GCHQ and the Brits being involved, and people, even my wife, who nobody knows it better than her, she produces my show with me.
	Sometimes I'll do a segment on the show and she's like, my head's spinning right now.
	It's complex.
	And that's why when you asked me in the beginning, I tried to boil it down to a very simple thing.
	The President of the United States and a candidate was spied on.
	I really hope it aggravates people, Sadly, I'm not optimistic that it'll motivate anyone to vote for anything.
	I think you're locked in on either side now.
	So looking at the election, how do you ballpark that?
	So I've been following it the same way you have been.
	And I always thought from the outset that Trump was a bit of an underdog for re-election simply because George W. Bush lost the popular vote by 500,000 in 2000, and then he had to win an additional 10 million votes in order to win in 2004 in a fairly close election with John Kerry.
	Trump lost the popular vote by 2.5 million, and he would have to pick up presumably somewhere between 12 and 14 million new votes in order to make up that lost ground.
	That he has, you know, he obviously broke Hillary Clinton's blue wall, It was a, I mean, really a through the needle thing, the eye of the needle sort of thing.
	80,000 combined votes in three states.
	And the map has expanded pretty wildly for Democrats given 2018.
	And so I always thought that he was a bit of an underdog.
	I thought that, you know, maybe before the COVID pandemic, I thought that it was basically 50-50.
	After the COVID pandemic, I thought it was about 65-35 for Biden.
	I'm now thinking it's more like 55-45 for Biden, given the violence in the streets and the fact that Joe Biden may not be alive.
	Well, how do you ballpark the election?
	Interesting.
	I would have told you two, three months ago, I would have gone into where I would have said 70-30 Biden, because I thought it was just overwhelming.
	I mean, this no one had been forced to deal with this just meeting of just almost apocalyptic type events at the same time, this massive recession we've never seen.
	I mean, who talking about 20 percent GDP drops?
	You would have laughed at a number like, come on, stop.
	That's ridiculous.
	Never going to happen in our lifetime.
	But now I'd say almost 55-45 Trump.
	And I'll give you the pros and the cons.
	Like you, I'm a numbers guy, right?
	So 3 million Obama voters didn't show up in the last 2016 election.
	They'll be here now.
	I mean, I think that's obvious.
	They're not voting for Biden.
	They're voting against Trump.
	And anyone who tells you anger is not a motivator is the only motivator.
	It's totally full of crap, like, has never run for office.
	You know, I've run three times, sadly unsuccessfully, but, you know, that's total nonsense.
	When you knock on doors and talk to people, they'll vote just because they hate another guy.
	So those three million Obama voters will be there, and obviously we lost the popular vote, you know, pretty handily.
	So, that's kind of the downside to it.
	The upside, some anecdotal, some statistical.
	If the Democrats lose a significant swath of the black vote, so President Trump got 8% of the black vote, if he scores 12, I mean, let's get out of the area of ridiculous.
	I've heard people, he's gonna get 40%!
	He's not gonna get 40%!
	Okay, stop, please stop the insanity, like Susie Powder.
	He doesn't need to get 40%, number one.
	But if he gets, say, 12 to 15%, which is in the realm of possibility, I'd say at the high end, 15%.
	There's no mathematical path to them in states like Pennsylvania with Philadelphia, Michigan with Detroit.
	He's not going to win Maryland, but Maryland could even be a five or six point race.
	So that's the pro.
	Another pro, which is anecdotal granted, and anecdotes, anyone can find an anecdote.
	But Ben, people in my own family circle, who shall remain nameless, who listen to your show, but they don't listen to mine, they listen to your show, right?
	They're like, oh, you have a show?
	I'm like, you're in my family.
	You listen to Shapiro?
	What are you doing?
	You gotta listen to my show, too.
	But people in my family, you may have convinced them.
	And you're not even really what we'd consider a pro-like, real MAGA guy.
	They love you.
	They're voting for Trump because they've seen the power of ideas when expressed like you can.
	They've come out, die hard, die hard, but I thought to be liberals.
	And my father's like, nah, she's voting for Trump.
	What?
	Are you crazy?
	Like, that's not even... My brother, he doesn't care if I mention it.
	Union electrician in New York.
	Never voted for a Republican.
	It's like heresy.
	You could be branded with the... You could be a Hester Prynne.
	You get the scarlet letter on your forehead.
	My brother called me before the last election.
	And he's like, I'm voting for Trump.
	I said, you're doing what?
	I was astonished, because I was still on board for Cruz.
	He's like, the union loves this guy.
	He's like, I got to tell you, Dan, about 85% of them love Trump.
	These are constituencies, and this is why I think the polling, candidly, I think you can scrap it.
	I almost think it's a useless data point at this point.
	Because when you look at that, constituencies, they've had a really tough time measuring in the past with Republican support, and you marry it up with the fact That we've never had such white working class support in our lives.
	We've always had, you know, white college educated folks as well.
	So you get an increased minority vote, you get union voters, you get police officers in droves, probably going to win the military vote.
	Combine that with white working class voters that we've, in numbers we've never seen before.
	And right now, I think if the economy holds, I think it's 55-45 Trump.
	But, you know, I predicted the last win.
	Yeah.
	I certainly didn't.
	I lost money on the last election.
	I figured if it's going to be a bad election for Republicans, I might as well make a little bit of money.
	So it's a good election for Republicans.
	You ever see CRTV or the Blade Dan Horowitz?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Dan's a good guy.
	So Dan and I, on election night, we're there.
	Dan and I, like, almost, we were screaming at each other.
	Dan's like, he's going to lose!
	We're going to lose 48 states!
	This is going to be a mess!
	I said, Dan, I had run in that cycle.
	I lost the primary.
	I said, Dan, I knocked on doors in Florida.
	I predicted every state on my podcast the night before.
	It's still on SoundCloud because I knew it.
	Quick, one more quick ad.
	This is another one of those anecdotal stories.
	This is how I knew he was going to win.
	I'm knocking on doors in Florida, District 19.
	You get a walk list of Republican voters for a primary.
	So I got this walk list and I'm calling up my campaign manager because I'm walking around Cape Coral with all these canals.
	So you have to keep getting back in your car.
	You don't want to skip a house or else you're going to get in your car, which is a pain in the butt.
	I'd see a Trump sign.
	Not on the list!
	So I call Marie, I go, why are you wasting my time?
	You're missing all the, what kind of data do you have?
	This is crap!
	You're making me walk past all these Trump houses.
	She goes, Dan, they don't vote.
	She said, my data is good, they don't vote.
	She goes, do a test, go knock on the doors.
	So I did.
	Trump signs.
	You know what?
	She was right.
	Probably four out of ten of them had never registered to vote in their lives.
	But they were like, I'm voting now.
	And I said to her, Maria, this guy's going to win Florida.
	He called Florida like that.
	Polls went down at nine in the panhandle.
	Race was over.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about how you think the election is going to shake out just in terms of the logistics of it, because that obviously has become a major mess.
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	Okay, so let's talk about how the election shakes out.
	I tend to agree with you.
	The reason I put it at 55-45 Biden is just because there's so many states that are up for play that there would have to be a massive statistical error in order for Trump to really be up in all these states where the polls say he's down.
	But that could happen, and this is why I've ballparked it this way, because I agree with you.
	I think that he has not performed well in the suburbs in 2018.
	He's lost a lot of urban areas.
	There could be massive rural turnout, particularly among first-time voters.
	And this was actually the Obama model.
	In 2012, he didn't win as many votes as he did in 2008, and he won again.
	But the reason he did is because he got first-time black voters to show up at the polls, and they had not been polled.
	And so a lot of the polls were wrong.
	And you could certainly see the same thing from Trump.
	We could see voters in places like Kenosha who simply have not voted in the past who are now motivated to go out and vote because of everything that is going on.
	One of the things that the Democrats are doing and that the media are doing is this sort of tacit threat thing where if Trump wins, they're basically suggesting that the world will burn down.
	And then as part of that tacit threat, they're actually effectuating that threat in major cities across the country right now.
	right now that because Trump is president, we're gonna go on riot.
	And Joe Biden has explicitly said that if he's president, there won't be any more riots, which is a fairly obvious blackmail tactic, given the fact that we may not actually know who won the night of the election.
	I mean, it may be that we get the immediate results from the tabulated voting places, but the mail-in ballots may take a week to count.
	What do you think are the prospects of serious conflict after this election?
	I'm terrified.
	You know, I've said on my show repeatedly, and I'll continue to say, you know, once, I used to host a radio show in DC.
	as a sub once in a while, and I'll never forget this call.
	I was in on the weekend.
	Guy calls in, and just really upset at the whole process.
	He told me he was a conservative, but he's like, listen, he said something to the effect of, you know, I'm ready to go get my gun.
	And, you know, you're on in the open air, and you're like, oh gosh.
	So instead of just immediately hanging up and trying to kind of diffuse this situation on the air, I said to him, I said, you know, do you know who your local state rep is?
	And he said, no.
	And I said, do you know who your congressman is?
	And he said, no.
	I said, I don't know how to rub it in, but do you know who your state senator is?
	He said, no.
	I said, so just to be clear, you're ready to go get your gun, but you don't even know who, like it didn't, and I wasn't trying to be condescending, I was trying to tell the audience, like number one, this is obviously illogical, insane stuff.
	But secondly, it's like there are a plethora of options to effectively move the country in the right direction.
	Like, that obviously was the last one available to us in the revolution.
	There was no other place to go.
	We're not even, like, close to that.
	We live in the wealthiest, most prosperous country, not on Earth, in the history of Earth, since sentient beings... Matter of fact, unless we find life anywhere else in the entire cosmos, the best place to live is here.
	Folks, I get it.
	I like the President.
	I don't mind his bravado.
	I'm from Queens.
	I know it bothers people.
	It doesn't bother me one bit.
	It's exactly... Me and my wife both are from Queens.
	Everyone was like that.
	I get it.
	Some other people don't like it.
	This is not the end of the world.
	But I am terrified that, whereas I think conservatives... See, you and I have an emergency break, and the emergency break is our ideological leanings and our faith.
	Our emergency break as conservatives are, our political opponents have God-given big R rights, even though we disagree with them.
	I have no right to assault them.
	I have a right to argue with them, but I have no right to hurt them, to wound them, to damage them, to bankrupt them maliciously.
	I don't have a right to do that.
	One, it's morally wrong.
	And secondly, we believe in a Bill of Rights.
	We believe that everybody has those big R God-given rights.
	What worries me about the radical left, not all Democrats, a lot of Democrats tired of this nonsense too, or else Biden wouldn't be coming out against it.
	The radical left, there's no question, there's no emergency brake whatsoever.
	That's what terrifies me about after the election.
	If you saw what me and my wife saw, leaving the acceptance speech at the White House, Ben, I know you've been subjected to harassment.
	I've seen it.
	Everybody's a tough guy, by the way, which is kind of hilarious.
	Everybody's with 30 people around.
	But we walked out of the acceptance speech at the White House into, I don't even know how to describe it, savages?
	Animals?
	People, I mean, legitimately, like foaming at the mouth, spitting on you, calling my wife a prostitute, but not in such nice terms.
	Believe me, that's being nice.
	What else did they call you?
	A B?
	A?
	It was kind of like when you did that hilarious segment about that song.
	W-A-P and you had a W-E-F-P-P-W.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I can't even say the words.
	It's a family-friendly show.
	Give me a letter and I'll tell you the word they put behind it.
	I mean, this went on for two miles.
	They followed us to the hotel.
	I'm gonna kick your ass.
	I'm gonna find you at the hotel in the morning.
	If it wasn't for the five or ten or so border patrol guys that saw me and were staying at the same hotel.
	They said, Dan, walk with us.
	I honest to God don't know what would happen.
	That's why when Rand Paul said they would have killed me and everybody laughed at him, believe me, I wasn't laughing.
	I saw it.
	These people were lunatics.
	I've never seen anything like it.
	I mean, obviously it's a dopey question, but can you ever imagine losing an election to Obama, showing up at his nomination speech at the White House, Ben, and foaming at the mouth, calling an 80-year-old man's wife a prostitute, telling him you're going to kick his...
	I mean, what kind of a lunatic does that?
	And it's precisely because conservatives have the emergency brake and liberals don't.
	I'm very sorry.
	Again, it's not all Democrats.
	I'm not putting... I don't stereotype people.
	The ones I've run into, these maniacs, have no emergency brake whatsoever.
	It's frightening.
	So let's talk about the breakdown of law and order, because obviously that's become a key component of the Trump campaign.
	It's really shifted the nature of the campaign to the point where it seems like Biden is very much on the defensive, as we record this.
	Biden has been forced to exit the basement and go to swing states, which suggests that he's got some internal polling that differs pretty widely from the public polling.
	And he's taken the sort of halfway position between Lawlessness and law and order where he says, well, you know, the vast majority of police officers are good people, but the system is systemically racist.
	Now, you were a police officer.
	Yeah.
	What do you make of the argument that the police are systemically racist?
	Well, like you, I believe in the English language and the power of words that mean something.
	I don't know what that means.
	I'm not trying to be an idiot.
	I'm not being stupid or silly or coy.
	So systemically racist, meaning there is a system That has a systemic problem.
	That's racist.
	So, what's interesting is these allegations of systemic racism are only emerging from cities run by systems that are dominated monopolistically by liberals.
	So, I don't get, one, what system you're talking about.
	Then they say, oh no, no, no.
	When they start talking about amorphous blobs, you know they have no point.
	Like, Sowell's great at dismantling these arguments.
	Thomas Sowell, he's a legend at it.
	Where he tries to pinpoint people down to actual specific ideas that are refutable.
	You know, the whole essence of science, facts and data are ideas that are refutable.
	If you have an idea that's not refutable, that's maybe faith, but it's certainly not science or data.
	Nobody can tell you what the system that's racist is.
	When you point to it, they're confused.
	Like I say in New York, it's a majority-minority police department.
	Now, again, it would be absurd to suggest there aren't isolated examples of police misconduct, brutality.
	In some cases, you know, we've had abject criminality.
	There's no question.
	But we have systems set up for that.
	We have civilian complaint review boards, obviously the criminal process, the administrative procedures.
	Do you notice they never suggest any kind of legitimate fix?
	It's always, uh, dismantle the police, defund the police.
	They're systemically racist.
	It's never, it's never real.
	And, and I think where the Biden campaign made a huge mistake here is obviously, you know, the sister soldier moment that saved Bill Clinton's campaign where he, the sister soldier had this very controversial song.
	He came out and said, listen, Wrong.
	You can't talk like that.
	This is bad.
	And, of course, the left wing went nuts and Bill Clinton wound up handily winning an election and smoking it in the next election.
	I'm not defending Bill Clinton.
	I'm just saying, like, it was Biden's moment to come out and say, listen, this has to stop today.
	Period.
	I am unequivocal in this.
	Our police are generally very good people policing cities for very little money.
	We have these examples of misconduct.
	But the second part of law and order is order.
	And order, the essence of order, is process.
	And we have a process.
	If you have suggestions for fixing the process, I'm your president and I'm willing to listen.
	We can repair and fix those processes.
	And everybody would have been on board.
	Nobody sat there and defended what happened to this guy in Minnesota.
	Nobody!
	I was one of the first people on TV like, no, no, no, no.
	But we had a process.
	The guy got arrested and he'll be tried.
	That's how this works.
	Biden didn't do that.
	He passed and he made the same mistake David Dinkins did in New York.
	I'll leave this point with this because I lived through this in New York City.
	New York City was, at that point, 3-1 Democrat to Republican.
	You were never going to get another Republican mayor again.
	Or so we thought.
	The city descended, Ben, into total madness.
	Madness.
	Thousands of homicides a year.
	I mean, my wife and I tell horror stories.
	Your car, it wasn't even a matter of getting broken into.
	It was only a matter of how many times.
	I used to joke about, they had that device, the club, the steering wheel lock, and then the criminals learned how to take the club off.
	They would ice it with Freon spray, so then they had the club cover.
	So they couldn't cut the steering wheel?
	And then they told people, no, no, put the club cover on backwards so they can't hammer the club.
	That's how bad the problem was!
	They had like a multi-layered club so they wouldn't steal your car.
	It was such an embarrassment.
	It was like, when am I going to get mugged?
	Not, is it going to happen?
	Giuliani comes in, runs on a strict law and order message.
	I mean, that's basically, I'm going to cut taxes, law and order.
	That's his entire message.
	He wasn't a very socially conservative guy.
	The people forget that.
	He comes in, I've lived through this entire thing.
	He slides by, loses the first time, wins the second time, slides by.
	Runs for re-election.
	Everybody's like, this guy's got no shot.
	The city's almost entirely cleaned up.
	Disney moves into Times Square.
	He wins by 18 points in New York City.
	How Biden didn't see this coming?
	I mean, it was the biggest, you know, warning sign, exclamation point in the middle of it I've ever seen.
	And he blew it.
	He's never had that moment.
	And he won't.
	And I think this is going to be his downfall.
	I mean, I'm shocked that the Trump campaign has not, as of yet, really gone even more aggressive on this particular point.
	I mean, Joe Biden went and visited Kenosha, and while visiting Kenosha, he made a phone call to Jacob Blake, the man who was shot by the Kenosha police.
	Jacob Blake is an alleged rapist.
	The reason that the police were there is because they were called to the scene by a woman who alleged that he digitally raped her with her child in the room.
	And there was Joe Biden suggesting that the officers Who had to shoot him because he was resisting arrest and went around to the driver's side of his car and tried to pick a knife up off the floorboards.
	They shot him and Biden's response was to call Jacob Blake with condolences, an alleged rapist, and to suggest that the officers be arrested.
	I don't know how that has not become the focal point of the Trump campaign at this point, frankly.
	Yeah, you know, I was doing an appearance, and I mentioned this the other day, that isn't it so bizarre that the social fabric has just collapsed to such a point where, remember when we were kids, you played cops and robbers, and nobody wanted to be the robber?
	Like, that was like the kid you didn't like in the neighborhood.
	Make him the robber!
	We don't like him.
	You know, poor guy.
	Poor guy, well, I don't want to be the robber anymore.
	Now it's the opposite.
	Everybody wants to be the robber and not the cop, and you think, The damage they've done to our culture, where they've unmoored us from any objective values of what's good.
	You know, I read this great piece in the journal, forgive me, I can't remember, it was an op-ed about a week ago.
	It was on the weekend.
	I can't remember the author, which I hate.
	I should give him a hat tip.
	But it was such a wonderful piece, how When you accept this idea that, oh, all ideas have equal validity than none do, because it's absurd.
	Like, there's unquestionably, top of the totem pole, bad ideas that should be absolutely categorically disregarded.
	Like, the police are generally good, law and order's a good thing, rioting is bad, but now we see this new book, like, In Defense of Looting.
	I mean, this is what happens, and this is how you get a society where people want to be the robber now and not the cop.
	Which, ironically, that book, one of my friends put out a tweet the other day which was hilarious, the In Defense of Looting book, where again, all ideas are worth hearing, which you and I both know are not, like, socialism's not worth hearing out.
	Whoever tells you that's a moron with no context for history at all.
	The In Defense of Looting book, if you go to the back of the front flap, it has a copyright thing where you need permission to print this book.
	So don't loot that book!
	Right?
	Don't loot my book, just loot everybody else's book.
	And this is the left.
	They've unmoored us from any sense of objective good.
	And when you think about it, you know, the reason why they do that is quite simple.
	I mean, the whole essence of socialism is a...
	is a subjective interpretation of at any given moment what's good or bad for the collective.
	If you have a set of bedrock ideas and big R constitutional rights, socialism can't exist.
	Because the essence of it is to treat people unequally, right?
	These are the bad guys.
	These are the good guys.
	The next day, no, no, those are the bad guys.
	These are the good guys.
	Take their... These are the farmers that... No, they were good guys yesterday.
	No, no, they're bad guys today.
	Steal their stuff.
	That's what socialism is.
	It requires subjectivity.
	And the left is... The left, really, through their academic institutions, has dismantled any sense right now of objective good to the point where a guy running for president meets with the guy accused of this disgusting crime and nobody... I mean, Ben, really, is it even a scandal?
	No.
	Nobody's even mentioned it!
	I want to talk to you about it in one second.
	I want to ask you about the media coverage of this race, because the media coverage over the last few years, they have beclowned themselves in such grandiose fashion.
	I've never seen anything remotely like it.
	We'll get to that in one second.
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	So let's talk about the media coverage of all of this stuff.
	So obviously you've created a very large media persona for yourself.
	You've even created a sort of response to the Drudge Report called the Bongino Report.
	And you were one of the first people to publicly say what everybody sort of knew, which is that Matt Drudge is off the train.
	So Matt Drudge was a driving force behind Donald Trump's primary victory.
	He really covered him in extraordinarily positive fashion during the primaries in 2016.
	Uh, and throughout the election cycle, he was pretty positive toward Trump in 2016.
	And then sometime in 2017, 2018, it seems like the coverage of Drudge Report has basically mirrored that of the New York Times to the point where nearly every headline looks like it's almost originating from Biden HQ at this point.
	You've called that out publicly.
	What do you think has happened with regard to places like Drudge?
	You know, I don't know which Drudge specifically.
	There's rumors, obviously, he sold the site.
	I can't confirm.
	I hate even saying it, but it's out there if you Google it.
	He's so reclusive, nobody can ever get a quote from him, so nobody really knows what happened with Drudge.
	People who've known him in the past, who worked with him, have told me that he can be very kind of mercenary himself, that he just runs with the headlines.
	I don't know.
	Um, but I didn't do it for the money.
	I mean, I know that's like the worst line, but it's true.
	I really didn't.
	I just didn't like drudge everyone.
	I mean, you woke up, everyone is like, everybody's going to die from the Corona.
	Don't go out in public.
	It's, it's, uh, not only is it airborne, but it's 10,000 times more infectious than any disease.
	And I was like, listen, I want facts.
	Okay.
	I have to live my life in the real world.
	Um, and, and, you know, I do show prep like you do.
	And I found the Drudge Report to be increasingly useless.
	It was just nonstop corona hysteria, you know, Orange Man bad, Trump is awful, you know, finally we found the collusion, and I was like, this is just a waste of my time.
	So we did Bongino Report, and it took off fab.
	I mean, it's just people we're looking for.
	And there's a number of others that do it too, as well, that do a really terrific job.
	And I give them hat tips all the time.
	Because like I said, it's really not about, for me, the money, the projects I choose to get involved with.
	I always get involved with, because I'm passionate about them.
	You know, I do the same thing with social media, with some projects I'm involved in there.
	But with the media, you know, it's stunning.
	Like you and I, if we get one nugget of a fact wrong, matter of fact, I'll put meat on the bone, I'll give you an actual example.
	I'm running for office in Florida, and I had, I said something during a debate that education spending, since I was born in the 1970s, has gone up 400%, and yet our international results have flatlined.
	So obviously the correlation between money and education results aren't there.
	Well, the next day there was an article in the Naples Daily News.
	No, it's not true.
	When you adjust it for inflation, it's not 400%.
	It's like 372.6%.
	He's definitely lying.
	And I looked, and I remember I got into a big fight with you.
	And I'm like, why am I even bothering?
	This is clownish.
	But that's the environment you and I live in.
	We have to be perfect all the time.
	Or else we're conspiracy theorists.
	And we're never to be... The tinfoil hats come out.
	Ben Shapiro, oh my God.
	Look at this guy.
	He dared to say that there was $2 million in federal spending, and it was $2.6.
	He doesn't know what he's talking about.
	But what's totally bizarre about this is you can get the two biggest scandals of our time wrong in the media.
	You can say Spygate was a hoax.
	It wasn't.
	And Collusion was real.
	It wasn't.
	And you get a Pulitzer Prize!
	Nobody—Ben, no career damage at all.
	Maggie Haberman, Adam Goldman, Natasha Bertrand, David Corn.
	I mean, the list goes on and on of people who have never apologized, not one moment, for this scandal, have promoted the two biggest hoaxes of our time, and they got Pulitzer Prizes for this thing.
	Meanwhile, you and I, you get a decimal point wrong, and we're finished.
	You know, the only good news to that, because that sounds very macabre...
	You know, you look at polls, and you see who are the trusted sources of information, and it's guys like you, me, and Fox News, and nobody trusts them.
	So the answer is, who's really winning?
	And it's us.
	I mean, we have enormous audiences.
	We're like, you and I are like the Wonder Twins.
	I mean, you're always one.
	I've never, ever beaten you, ever.
	Your show's amazing.
	People show up at book signings.
	For me, they don't even know I have a show.
	They see me from Fox, and I say, oh, you listen to Piper?
	Yeah, I listen to Shapiro.
	Get out of my books.
	So who's really winning?
	People are seeking out information where they know they're not going to be lied to.
	One more, because this is funny too.
	Because like Rachel Maddow, I love this topic.
	How do you watch this show for three years knowing this woman's been lying to you, or if not lying, is so incompetent that she promoted a hoax, the collusion hoax, and you don't wake up one morning and go, Wow.
	I spent an hour every night at 9 o'clock on a show, Eastern Time.
	That was just total BS.
	Like, that doesn't bother you?
	I mean, there was one... I forget what we said.
	There was one thing... One story we had to come back the next day.
	We screwed it up.
	I get out ahead of it.
	Oh, I said that Christine Blasey Ford was not going to show up.
	I was sure of it.
	I knew that I was very suspect about the story.
	We're in the Kavanaugh hearings, of course.
	And I said to my audience, there's no way she's showing up.
	I'll bet my right arm on it.
	You know, of course, she showed up.
	And for the next week, I apologized profusely every day to my audience.
	And for days, they were like, all right, enough.
	You made your point.
	You apologized.
	Move on.
	But I felt like I'd legitimately let them down and made a point every day to almost go over the top and say, I let you down.
	Bad call.
	I predicted it wrong.
	Not the spygate hoaxers and the collusion hoaxers.
	Nothing.
	One of the things that's truly amazing is that it's pretty obvious that social media has allowed avenues for, you know, people like you, people like me to get our message out there.
	And when those messages become popular, the old media immediately jump in to attempt to control social media.
	So you've seen this mostly from people like Kevin Roos at the New York Times.
	Every single day.
	He hates me and you.
	I just know tomorrow.
	Every single day.
	Every single day he posts the Facebook statistics showing that your page is popular, that my page is very popular.
	And then he, the implication of course being that Facebook is putting out this information.
	It never seems to occur to him that maybe the reason people like our information is because the New York Times won't report the kind of stuff that we talk about on a daily basis and instead denies entirely these narratives.
	And this is, I think, the blind spot for the media and it's the reason they've lost so much credibility.
	And now they're stuck.
	I think they've Move themselves into a box canyon where they can't get out, because if they acknowledge that the narratives that you and I pursue on a daily basis and talk about, because we'll talk about all the same stuff they're talking about, but we will also talk about these other narratives that they won't talk about, right?
	I mean, you talked about Spygate and you talked about the Russia hoax and all of that for years on your program.
	I talked about it and I was actually more friendly toward, I tried to give your point of view, but also talked about what the New York Times was saying on a daily basis, and that still wasn't good enough for them.
	But then we would talk about other narratives that were in the news that get completely ignored.
	And instead of the New York Times starting to cover some of those other narratives, or hire a conservative journalist, or hire somebody their op-ed page who might disagree with somebody once in a while.
	Instead of doing that, they've decided that they actually want to hijack the social media networks and try to pressure them into shutting off access to information conservatives provide.
	And that's a truly amazing thing.
	So now they basically just have to double down on what they have.
	Because if they ever acknowledge that maybe we're providing information that is useful, then they have to acknowledge they've been doing it wrong all these years.
	And simultaneously, if they acknowledge that we're successful because people want that information, then they have to acknowledge that social media is not biased.
	It's just that they're not performing their jobs particularly well.
	That's a huge story, and I'm so glad your audience is going to get a kick at this, because there's no two better people to talk about than me and you.
	You and I, on any given day, there's a Twitter account, Facebook's Top Ten, and it monitors via CrowdTangle the most popular posts of the day.
	There's not a day during the week that either you or I aren't on that.
	You usually have three or four posts.
	And on a good day we'll have three or four, usually we have one, one or two.
	So you and I have very popular top ten pages in the United States for posts.
	And you just said it.
	It bothers him so much that a writer, I believe for the New York Times, that guy Roush, who monitors the Facebook top ten, he only does it to pressure Facebook to say, listen, these right-wing provocateurs are posting content that we just don't ideologically like.
	Matter of fact, there was an article in The Week about me and you by this other clown, not Bruce, but suggesting somehow that we're promoting disinformation, which is incredible, because again, Facebook has an army of fact-checkers literally dedicated to destroying the lives of conservatives.
	And I hate literally, because it's literally the most overused word in the English language, but I literally mean that.
	They have an army of fact checkers deployed that just target almost exclusively conservative pages.
	If what we're saying is false, because we get it about once a month, we'll get one of these fake fact checks, which is really an opinion piece.
	Why aren't we getting it every day?
	Why is our page still up?
	And what bothers them more is that there's an interesting thing about your page and my page, that they never tell the story.
	Most of the posts on our... Yeah, we'll put clips, Kayleigh McEnany, Donald Trump, whatever.
	You know, everybody has a few newsy clips.
	You know, you put a little spicy headline, whatever.
	But 50, 60, 70% of the material is material we write, like Daily Wire stuff you guys put together.
	And my clips from my show, So if what I'm saying on my show is false, then where are your army of fact-checkers calling me out?
	So what they're saying is they're bothered by the truth.
	And it's really stunning, and I don't think the audience really gets, behind the scenes, how much pressure... You guys get it more than I do, because The Daily Wire has its own... distinct from Ben Shapiro, has its own distinct... I mean, you guys, you know, you work for The Wire and all, and with them, but you guys have a multiple different, like, layers of success on Facebook.
	Your team is phenomenal.
	Just really good at it.
	It drives them wild and the pressure to get you and me pulled off.
	I mean, I don't know how you feel about it.
	It's your show.
	I'm not interviewing you.
	But I think the guy I work with on Facebook who helps me produce the content.
	He's like, just milk it as long as you can, because you won't be here long.
	You know, I will say that, you know, I think that not all these companies operate the same way.
	I think that Twitter is more of a threat to conservatives, just by statistics, than Facebook is.
	Listen, I've said it before, I think that Zuckerberg seems to have an ideological commitment to the idea, at least, of people being able to get their opinion out there.
	It may be imperfectly applied by his company, but he at least is mouthing those words, and I think he actually does care about that stuff.
	That the precise opposite applies to people like Jack Dorsey, who brutally wants to shut down anybody who disagrees with him.
	I think there are some others.
	I think treating all social media identically is silly.
	Listen, I'd be a hypocrite if I sat here and I think my page may be the most successful Facebook page in the United States.
	It would be really hypocritical for me to talk about being silenced on Facebook.
	But you can certainly see it on Twitter.
	I mean, on Twitter for sure.
	And the pressure is exorbitant.
	I mean, there are people who are out there every day trying to get you demonetized, getting people like Steven Crowder demonetized on YouTube.
	There are people out there every single day who are trying to pressure these companies into literally kicking off the pages, who are trying to get our advertisers to drop us because the advertisers have to be pressured.
	And that's a serious thing that the right has not done.
	And it's put me in the position of basically saying, listen, if you guys continue this, at a certain point, we're going to have to engage in mutually assured destruction.
	I don't want to do it.
	Like, I think that Anybody should be able to advertise on whatever program they damn well please.
	And if Acura wants to advertise with Rachel Maddow, enjoy.
	But if it's going to come to the point where nobody's allowed to advertise on your show or advertise on my show, and if they buy an ad on the Sunday special, then the leftists swarm them, then there will come a point where the right is just going to say, listen, we'll do the exact same thing to your advertisers, and then nobody will have advertising revenue, and then we'll see how you like this.
	Gosh, I could talk to you about this whole topic for hours, but a couple things.
	There's so much in there.
	On the advertising front, without getting too specific, I think, though, we need to stick together, too.
	Guys like you and me and Crowder and people who are into McClavin, Knowles, all of us, we have power.
	I mean, on any given day on iTunes, it's you, me, Michael, Andrew.
	We're doing audiences similar to cable news channels.
	No doubt about it.
	We have power, too.
	People want to sell products.
	They have to sell products to people.
	Well, we have the people, we have the eyeballs, and we have the ears.
	But we've got to stick together.
	And I think in this business, unfortunately, there's too much, you know, dog-eat-dog stuff, which I get it.
	It's a business.
	But I can candidly tell you I've never viewed your show as a competitor.
	No, we don't.
	That's not how we think of the conservative ecosystem.
	No, yeah, and I've never thought of it that way.
	I've always thought, you know... I've promoted your work.
	Yeah, I mean, I had Michael on my show and we were laughing upstairs.
	He had a great weekend after that with subs because I love his show and I think there's There's space in people's lives for between four to six hours of content.
	I mean, Hannity, Rush, and Levin have dominated.
	That's nine hours of content for years.
	You know, I only do an hour show.
	I never viewed you guys as a competitor, but we do have to stick together with the ad stuff.
	There was an incident that happened.
	I'm not going to get into the details, obviously, but it had something to do with your show and someone else.
	And I made sure to make a phone call and, without again getting into specifics, saying, No, we're not doing that.
	And they're in the penalty box.
	And they were like, well, what do you mean?
	We're not doing it.
	I'll tell you later.
	But I think you kind of know.
	And I let them know that that's not true.
	And believe me, they were like, well, what do you mean?
	You sell a lot of our widgets.
	Not for the next few months.
	We didn't sell any of your widgets.
	We'd have to do that.
	Absolutely.
	Again, not to get into specifics, but we've written into contracts that people are not allowed to just willy-nilly be pressured by the leftist ecosystem into pulling their advertising.
	No, I mean, they're asking us to voice their pride, which we're very specific, but we don't just sell anything.
	No, listen, they trust us to talk about their product in an honest way, and we trust them not to undercut our shows.
	I mean, this relationship does go both ways.
	And not only that, I mean, I think that the right needs to stick together when any of us get boycotted, right?
	I mean, when people go after Tucker, when people go after Sean, when people go after Rush.
	And that is a routine thing.
	That's a routine thing, is to try and knock advertisers out and, you know, There will come a point where the right decides that they've had enough of this, and the eventual answer is going to be launching of right-wing companies in exactly the same areas that don't actually care anymore.
	I mean, you've seen this with Black Rifle Coffee, one of our sponsors, right?
	Black Rifle looked at Starbucks, and they said, okay, well, if you guys are going to market to the left, then we're going to market to the right.
	We'll put a gun on our cover, and people will buy our coffee, and they do an awful big business.
	You know, Roger Ailes, who, whatever you think his problems were or not, when I was an instructor in the Secret Service Academy, a guy who was graduating in the class knew him.
	So he came down to give a speech.
	This is years ago.
	Gosh, I don't know, 2002, whatever it was.
	But he comes down and he was taking questions afterwards in front of a small group of parents, proudly watching their kids graduate.
	And someone asked him, you know, how'd you come up with the idea of Fox News?
	And I never forgot this.
	He said, I was sitting there in my house one day and I thought, gosh, there's this underserved market in America called 51% of America, that like, he was joking, I was like, why isn't there a conservative news station?
	So what you're saying about a whole conservative ecosystem of social media, products, advertising companies, ad reps, everything, it's emerging now, we're seeing it now on Aaron.
	Just kind of doubling down on this.
	You're seeing it now, though, too.
	Even companies like YouTube, who've decided it's a good idea to demonetize anything I say, and they don't demonetize almost any leftist channels.
	We figured out ways around it.
	I read the ads in the show.
	You want to take my show off?
	YouTube makes probably millions of dollars a year off my show.
	Look, I'll find another outlet.
	I really, at this point, I don't care.
	I talk about YouTube on my show all the time.
	You want to host my show?
	Fine.
	We can be business partners in this.
	You don't?
	I will happily move on to another outlet.
	I'm really okay with that.
	I don't have any problem with YouTube.
	I don't boycott YouTube because they host leftist shows.
	I don't care.
	And like you said about the advertisers, I have never once mistakenly watched CNN in an airport because that's the only place you see it.
	And seeing an advertiser be like, oh my gosh, I gotta boycott this company.
	Because again, it goes back to that conversation we had about, you know, law and order and big R God-given rights.
	It's a company.
	They're not advertising CNN.
	They're advertising their product to CNN's audience.
	These whiner infants on the left.
	Oh my gosh, Ben Shapiro was talking about abortion.
	We can't talk about abortion.
	Boycott the show.
	They're not, nobody's endorsing anything.
	I don't even care what your views are.
	You're selling a product, man.
	Get over it.
	And then one final thought on Twitter.
	I agree.
	It would be hypocritical for me to bash Facebook.
	Our page is, you know, doing not as well as yours, but pretty darn good.
	We do get fact-checked a lot.
	We get a lot of stupid stuff.
	But Twitter's a train wreck.
	I think Jack's moneymaker has always been square.
	I think Twitter's his plaything.
	I don't think he cares what you think.
	I think he'd kick you off tomorrow if he felt like it.
	And I think he'd flip you two middle fingers and say, have a nice day.
	And matter of fact, I would not be stunned.
	Again, I'm not in the predictions game.
	I'm just saying I would not be shocked at all if there's some adverse action against the president close to or after election day, depending on who wins.
	I wouldn't, where he's just suspended, and then I think people are going to start to really wake up.
	I would never get rid of my Twitter account.
	Full disclosure, I have an ownership stake in Parler, so your audience is not in any way confused.
	I do.
	It's recent.
	I did that because I say to people all the time, I don't want you to cancel your Twitter.
	There is a fight there to be had.
	I just want to make sure you have a home base somewhere else where you can go to Twitter and play with the liberals all you want, but understand that your time is limited there.
	And I believe again on Facebook, I think my time is limited too.
	I wish it weren't the case.
	I mean, I really, there are billions of people there that could use our information.
	And I think my days are numbered there.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about your Secret Service service.
	Like, what was that like?
	Because I think people have misperceptions of what exactly that constitutes.
	I want to ask that question.
	I want to ask you that question.
	So we're going to talk about what it was like to be in the Secret Service.
	Because you actually were in the Secret Service when Obama was President of the United States.
	We'll get to that in a second.
	But first, if you want to hear Dan Bongino's answers, you have to be a DailyWire member.
	So head on over to DailyWire.com.
	Click subscribe.
	You can hear the rest of our conversation over there.
	Well, Dan Bongino, check out his new book, Follow the Money, The Shocking Deep State Connections of the Anti-Trump Cabal.
	Dan, thanks so much for stopping by.
	Really, really appreciate it.
	This was one of the best interviews we've done.
	I feel really good, so thanks.
	Thanks. Great talking to you, buddy.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Mathis Glover.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
	And our assistant director is Pavel Lydowsky.
	Associate producer, Nick Sheehan.
	Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
	Editing is by Jim Nickel.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
	Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
	Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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