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May 10, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:17:30

Tucker's Back!

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Time	Text
	Well, Tucker Carlson has now broken his silence.
	Last week, he put out a video saying that he would be back sometime in the near future.
	And yesterday, he put out about a two-minute video in which he explained that he was, in fact, back.
	He will be launching a version of his show, he says, on Twitter.
	Here was Tucker's announcement yesterday.
	The best you can hope for in the news business at this point is the freedom to tell the fullest truth that you can.
	But there are always limits.
	And you know that if you bump up against those limits often enough, you will be fired for it.
	That's not a guess.
	It's guaranteed.
	Twitter has long served as the place where our national conversation incubates and develops.
	Twitter is not a partisan site.
	Everybody's allowed here.
	And we think that's a good thing.
	And yet for the most part, the news that you see analyzed on Twitter comes from media organizations that are themselves thinly disguised propaganda outlets.
	You see it on cable news, you talk about it on Twitter.
	The result may feel like a debate, but actually the gatekeepers are still in charge.
	We think that's a bad system.
	We know exactly how it works and we're sick of it.
	Starting soon, we'll be bringing a new version of the show we've been doing for the last six and a half years to Twitter.
	We bring some other things too, which we'll tell you about.
	But for now, we're just grateful to be here.
	Free speech is the main right that you have.
	Without it, you have no others.
	See you soon.
	And so it is not perfectly clear at this point exactly what Tucker's show on Twitter will look like.
	What is clear is that there's been no financial arrangement between Tucker and Elon Musk.
	That was the early speculation as soon as this video came out.
	There have been rumors in the air that Tucker was working some sort of deal with Elon in order to take his show to Twitter and that Twitter was going to be launching essentially its own sort of show network, video podcast network.
	And all of the rest, it was unclear exactly how that would monetize.
	Would you pay a subscription fee in order to be able to see a show like Tucker's?
	Would Tucker be directly getting advertising dollars or whatever the deal is?
	None of that has been cleared up, especially because Musk actually put out a statement in which he pretty much openly dissociated from the show that Tucker is doing, at least he didn't say it's bad that he's putting it up or anything, but he did say, I'm not putting money behind it.
	He suggested, he put out a tweet saying that there is no actual deal Between him and Tucker and on this platform, unlike the one-way street of broadcast, people are able to interact, critique, and refute whatever he or anyone else may say.
	He said, I want to be clear.
	We have not signed a deal of any kind whatsoever.
	Tucker is subject to the same rules and rewards as all content creators.
	And then he added those rewards would be subscriptions and advertising revenue shares.
	So apparently there'll be some sort of substack model, I guess, via Twitter, in which you'll be able to directly contribute to people like Tucker if you enjoy their show via Twitter.
	He said, I hope that many others, particularly from the left, also choose to be content creators on this platform.
	So, the early speculation, which is that Musk would have been paying some sort of cash bounty, some sort of salary, to Tucker appears not to be the case at this point.
	What is clear is that Tucker is going to be bringing some version of his show back to Twitter.
	So he's not going to be absent from the public debate for 12 or 18 months, as the length of his contract at Fox News would suggest.
	Now, remember, the early news when Fox News parted with Tucker is that this would have made Tucker free as a bird, but that's not how these contracts work.
	Tucker, presumably, is still bound by contract.
	They can continue to pay him and just take him off the air.
	This is very common in the media industry, is that you are able to pay somebody and then basically pay them to stay home.
	Fox has an interest, presumably, in doing that because they don't want Tucker going somewhere else and bad-mouthing them.
	So how exactly is he able to go on Twitter and do that?
	Because pretty much by implicit association, that's what he's doing there.
	When he says there are a lot of media outlets that'll just fire you for saying the truth, you have to assume he means the people who just fired him for, in his mind, telling the truth.
	So what exactly is he doing?
	So, here is my suspicion.
	My suspicion is that Tucker's contract is very onerous with regard to the other cable networks that he could go to, the other kinds of shows that he could start, any sort of competitive service with, say, Fox Nation.
	Because, again, this is how lawyers draw contracts.
	If you have a big personality like Tucker, and if you let Tucker go, either because you want to or because you have to, what you don't want is Tucker going into direct competition with you until you pay him to stay home.
	However, I'm assuming that there is one area of Tucker's sort of public life that is unbound, and that presumably would be Twitter.
	And that's, again, very, very common, because most personalities wish to keep their Twitter personas separate from their business relationships.
	This is very common.
	Here at Daily Wire, for example, we don't control Matt Walsh's Twitter feed.
	We don't control Candace Owens' Twitter feed.
	Daily Wire does not control my Twitter feed.
	These are all things where we are saying exactly what we think and what we want.
	I assume that Tucker's personal Twitter feed is the same sort of thing, that he retains rights to his personal Twitter feed, and so he felt comfortable putting this out on his personal Twitter feed.
	Now, theoretically, it could violate his contract if the contract extends to virtually all video content, but clearly it doesn't extend to all video content.
	It might be only extending to video content on channels to which Fox News has rights, or its direct competitors.
	And so if Tucker is not considered a direct competitor, then theoretically this could free him from his contract, and this would be why he's launching a show on Twitter.
	Now, I would assume this is the first step in Tucker's comeback.
	I really doubt that this is the last step.
	He's going to be battling out in the courts with Fox to free himself, I would assume, from the other provisions of his contract, which is why he has now issued a letter, according to Axios, an aggressive letter, from his lawyer to Fox.
	That letter essentially argues that Carlson can now breach his contract because he's accusing Fox of having breached its contract.
	Carlson's contract, according to Axios, currently runs until January of 2025.
	Fox wants to keep paying him, which would prevent him from starting a competing show.
	And of course, there are many outlets that have reached out to Tucker.
	No comment, folks.
	And the fact is that Tucker is, you know, presumably, until that legal situation clears up, bound by contract.
	So his lawyer, Brian Friedman, is a very competent lawyer.
	He's a lawyer for a lot of big name personalities, ranging from like Megyn Kelly to you, Charlie.
	Brian Friedman.
	has sent a letter to Fox officials like Via Dinh and Arena Borganti saying that Fox employees
	broke promises to Carlson intentionally and with reckless disregard for the truth. They're going to
	claim that essentially Fox broke the contract, not Tucker, and so now Tucker is going to be able to
	come back and break the contract back. The lawyers are accusing Fox executives, including Dinh and
	Murdoch, of making quote material representations or promises to Carlson that were intentionally
	broken, constituting fraud.
	What exactly would that fraud be?
	The letter alleges that Fox broke an agreement with Carlson not to leak his private communications to the media and not to use Carlson's private messages to take any adverse employment action against him.
	Now, it is certainly possible that Fox executives were leaked.
	This was the original assumption.
	And it was an assumption made by Megyn Kelly, who used to work at Fox News, right?
	She actually mentioned Irina Briganti, who is sort of the head of comms over at Fox, she mentioned her saying that when she left for NBC Daytime, when she did that, she believed that Irina Briganti was the one who was releasing information on her, so she was assuming that that was the same thing that was happening here, that a lot of these leaks about Tucker, you know, the white supremacy leak, or the leak in which she suggested that white people don't fight this way, that that was actually coming from Fox in order to smear Tucker while he was still under contract, and now Tucker is claiming that's exactly what happened.
	This, I assume, is also why Fox sent a letter to Media Matters, which has been the source of many of these leaks in terms of distributing them.
	Fox sent a letter to Media Matters telling them to stop doing that.
	I assume that was a piece of legalese intended to say, it's not us.
	We're not the ones who are doing the leaking.
	So it doesn't look as though they are violating their contract with Tucker.
	Also, the letter alleges that Fox broke promises not to settle with Dominion Voting Systems in a way that would indicate wrongdoing on Tucker's part.
	And now they're claiming that a member of the board said that Tucker had been fired because of the Dominion voting system's settlement.
	Now, that may very well be true.
	It may very well be true that as part of the sort of Dominion settlement, not that Dominion wanted Tucker fired.
	They've actually put out a statement themselves saying, we didn't want Tucker fired.
	We don't care about Tucker.
	But it's possible that Fox looked at that settlement, an $800 million settlement, and they said, we don't want anybody who presents legal risk to us.
	And Tucker is very often walking the line.
	He's very often on razor's edge.
	We don't want that legal risk, and so we're getting rid of Tucker.
	And so, theoretically, it could be sort of tangentially related to the Dominion voting system's fallout.
	They could legally do that, but they can't say it.
	If they say that we did this as part of the Dominion voting system settlement or as fallout from Dominion voting systems, could that theoretically be read as a breach of a promise that they would not harm Carlson's reputation over the Dominion voting system's claim and settlement?
	It's a letter from Tucker's lawyer says, So we'll get to more on this in just one second.
	the covenants of good faith and fair dealing in the agreement.
	They give rise to claims for breach of contract and intentional and negligent misrepresentation.
	A Fox News spokesperson then came out and said it is categorically false that Carlson
	lost his job as part of the $787.5 million settlement.
	So we'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	Okay, so back to this conflict between Tucker Carlson and Fox News.
	And this is going to decide the future of whether Tucker can go to, say, Newsmax or go to, say, Daily Wire or go to any place else and launch a competitive show.
	Again, Tucker's lawyers are trying to argue that Fox breached its agreement with Tucker, and this now frees Tucker to do whatever he wants.
	Carlson is claiming that Irene Briganti, Fox's longtime communications and PR chief, attempted to, quote, undermine, embarrass, and interfere with Carlson's future business prospects, which he maintains would constitute another breach of his employment contract.
	The letter says, make no mistake, we intend to subpoena Ms.
	Briganti's cell phone records and related documents, which evidence communications with her and all media, including, but not limited to, the New York Times.
	Now, again, the cell phone records are not really gonna demonstrate anything, I would assume.
	Briganti is the head of communications at Fox News.
	I assume she speaks with people at the New York Times.
	The real question is gonna be written communications.
	Which, by the way, as a lawyer, I will now be my audience's legal advisor.
	Guys, don't put stuff in writing.
	This is just like a general rule.
	Things in writing, bad idea.
	Text messages, emails, verbal communica- Here's legal advice from me to you.
	It's gonna save you a bunch of money and a bunch of time in the future.
	Say things over the phone.
	Because things that are said orally are then not permanently memorialized.
	Okay, but I assume that Irene Breganti knows this, presumably if she was leaking this stuff
	to the New York Times, there probably won't be any record of it,
	but they're claiming that she wasn't leaking this stuff to the, again, Megyn Kelly, with whom I'm friends,
	she says that it's pretty frequent practice for Irene Breganti to do exactly that.
	I don't know the truth on that, but that is the controversy.
	Carlson's lawyers add that because Carlson is considering litigation against the network
	to resolve these disputes, Fox News must take all immediate steps
	to preserve all existing documents and data relevant to Fox's relationship with Carlson,
	including correspondents between top executives and several media outlets.
	Now, it is quite possible that all of this is designed by Carlson's lawyers, by Tucker's lawyers, in order to pressure Fox to just release him from the contract.
	In other words, all this goes away If you guys just release him from the contract and let him fly like a butterfly wherever he wants to go.
	And Fox, which is a very large company, will have to decide, do they wish to continue to litigate this thing out with Tucker in order to preserve Fox News from competition in which Tucker goes to another network?
	Just on a business level, you see exactly why Fox News would do this.
	Tucker had a huge audience.
	The audience in prime time on Fox has dropped by 50% since Fox left the network, since Tucker left the network,
	because Tucker, again, is very talented at what he does.
	Now, I assume that Fox's long-term plan is you rebuild the audience.
	They also had significant audience drop off, and it took like several years for them to rebuild it,
	even with Tucker, after they got rid of Bill O'Reilly.
	Bill O'Reilly dropped, they lost like half their audience, it took them a couple of years, they rebuilt the audience.
	And one of the things that Fox is saying is that their ad dollars are now coming back
	because there were a lot of advertisers who were afraid of Tucker, which again,
	is part of the problem for a company like Fox News that is a major publicly traded corporation.
	If you're a publicly traded corporation, one of the things you have to do is maximize shareholder value.
	If you're Daily Wire and an advertiser decides that they are going to boycott you, they don't like you because of something one of your hosts says, we launch like Jeremy's chocolates and Jeremy's razors in order to fight people.
	We're perfectly happy to do that.
	Fox isn't doing any of that sort of stuff.
	So the fact that advertisers have dropped off Tucker's program and that now some of those advertisers feel safer coming back in, they're saying, we're not actually losing money on this thing.
	So we're perfectly happy to prevent Tucker from going elsewhere and presumably drawing people away from Fox Nation, shifting their subscriptions over from Fox Nation somewhere else.
	So the real question for Tucker now is whether what he is doing online, just restricted to Twitter, Makes him as prominent in the culture as it otherwise would.
	I mean, he was, again, one of the biggest, if not the biggest voice in sort of conservative media because of that 8 p.m.
	slot on Fox News.
	Without that 8 p.m.
	slot on Fox News, does he have the same sort of impact?
	Now, Tucker, his videos on Twitter are getting extraordinary numbers of views.
	I mean, you're talking about 12, 15, 20, in some cases 40 million views on the last couple of videos.
	Is that something that's going to maintain?
	Is it going to play the same way online that it plays in terrestrial media?
	And the fact is, a lot of the Fox News viewers are not people who are on Twitter.
	Only 2% of the population of the United States is regularly on Twitter.
	When it comes to Fox News, there's not a huge crossover between the Fox News audience, which is disproportionately elderly, and the Twitter audience, which is disproportionately younger.
	This doesn't mean that Tucker isn't going to have outsized impact.
	He definitely will, but that impact is going to change over time.
	That's probably what Fox News is counting on.
	It's all pretty fascinating, but suffice it to say, Tucker is not going to go completely absent in the debate, and he's not going to allow himself to go completely absent in the debate over the course of the next couple of years.
	This was just the first shot, so anybody who thinks this is like the end of Tucker's relaunch, that is incorrect.
	It is not the end of Tucker's relaunch, but also, this is not a cooperative venture between Tucker and Elon Musk.
	Which means, again, that there are going to be other shoes to drop here.
	This is not like the final stage of Tucker's redevelopment deal.
	That's not what this is.
	Meanwhile, CNN is doing exactly what CNN does.
	And they say, of course, that Tucker is a right-wing extremist.
	This is literally how they report now.
	This is the reporting from CNN.
	They say, right-wing extremist Tucker Carlson announced Tuesday he will relaunch his program on Twitter, which he praised as the only remaining large free speech platform in the world after Fox News fired him late last month.
	So again, they call him a right-wing extremist because this is what CNN does.
	This is Oliver Darcy reporting over at CNN.
	This presumably is one of the reasons why Tucker is so popular.
	It's because the media insists on going overboard on literally all the things.
	Worth noting here that CNN, which supposedly hates the right-wing extremists, and they really, really hate Donald, like really hate Donald Trump, they'll be hosting Donald Trump for a town hall style event tonight.
	So, for all these people, we cannot give a voice to the right-wing extremists, particularly Trump and the MAGA-ULTRAMAGA movement.
	Also tonight, on our network, for ratings and money, we present Donald Trump in conversation.
	Yeah, man.
	Your media.
	Corrupt as the day is long.
	Okay, in just one second, we'll get to President Trump, who's now been hit with a $5 million defamation and assault verdict.
	We'll get to that momentarily first.
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	Meanwhile, a jury in New York has now found President Trump in Not guilty, because it is a civil trial, but they have now found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation in the E. Jean Carroll case.
	Now, we've not followed this case particularly closely, because I'll be frank with you, I don't find E. Jean Carroll to be a credible witness.
	I think that she, her testimony, she's a very flighty, strange person.
	She makes Christine Blasey Ford, the lady who testified against Justice Kavanaugh during his judicial hearings, she makes Christine Blasey Ford look as sober as a judge.
	She makes her look incredibly credible.
	E. Jean Carroll made the allegation that sometime, sometime in 1996, sometime, like in the entire year, Donald Trump took her into a room at Bergdorf Goodman, a fitting room, and then raped her.
	This was her allegation.
	Now, the jury has not found that Donald Trump was responsible for rape.
	Instead, they found that he was actually responsible for sexually abusing and defaming her.
	So, how exactly do they find that he was guilty of some sort of sexual abuse but not rape?
	It seems kind of weird, right?
	It does.
	It seems kind of weird.
	And the reason it seems kind of weird is because, again, the thing that she was alleging was rape.
	I mean, if you go back to her original piece in The Cut, which was at thecut.com, this is back in June of 2019, she describes what happened, she says, with Donald Trump.
	She says this, Before I discuss him, I must mention there are two great
	handicaps to telling you what happened to me in Bergdorf's.
	A. The man I will be talking about denies it, as he has denied accusations of sexual misconduct made by at least 15
	credible women, and then she lists off a bunch of names.
	The White House at the time said this is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly
	taking place and was created simply to make the president look bad.
	And B. I run the risk of making him more popular by revealing what he did.
	His admirers can't get enough of hearing that he's rich enough, lusty enough, and powerful enough to be sued by
	and to pay off every splashy porn star or playboy playmate who comes forward.
	And then she continues along these lines, she says, And she says.
	Bye.
	Back at this time in the 1990s, she was a sex advice columnist.
	She says, early one evening, as I'm about to go out Bergdorf's revolving door on 58th
	Street, and one of New York's most famous men comes in the revolving door, or could
	have been a regular door at that time, I can't recall.
	He says, hey, you're that advice lady.
	And I say to number 20 on the most hideous men of my life list, hey, you're that real
	estate tycoon.
	Okay, so first of all, immediate question marks.
	She can't remember what kind of door is being used, so she's already saying that her memory is hazy of this.
	She says, I'm surprised at how good looking he is.
	We've met once before, and perhaps it is the dusky light, but he looks prettier than ever.
	This has to be in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996, because he's garbed in a faultless top coat, and I'm wearing my black wool Donna Karan coat dress and high heels, but not a coat.
	So, point of doubt number two, she can't even name the year.
	Okay, so she's starting in 1995 or 1996.
	Now, If you talk to people who have survived rape, the kind of general presumption that people block out the memories, that may be true in some cases.
	In many, many cases, women who have been abused, anybody who's been abused, children who have been abused, they remember like exact details, exact details, because it's so unbelievably traumatic.
	People who suffer from PTSD typically remember the exact details of the things that happened to them.
	In this particular case, she remembers what they were wearing, but she can't remember what kind of door was being used.
	She can't remember even the year.
	She can't remember the season, right?
	The fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996, which again is a weird dating because there is a season in between, right?
	I mean, there's winter also that lies in between those.
	So you're talking about like, it's either September of 1995 or like April of 1996.
	So I'll continue with this account in just one second.
	And this is, again, why I haven't paid a lot of attention to the E. Jean Carroll case because, again, I do not find her to be a particularly credible witness.
	We'll get to that momentarily first.
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	Okay, so, back to this E. Jean Carroll account.
	This is the original account that she spilled in 2019.
	She says this is 1995, 1996.
	This is 2019, so this is 23 years later, minimum.
	She says that she met Trump walking into Berg... She was walking out, I guess, of Bergdorf and he was walking in.
	"'Come advise me,' says the man.
	"'I gotta buy a present.' "'Oh,' I say, charmed.
	"'For whom?' "'A girl,' he says.
	"'Don't the assistants of your secretaries buy things like that?' I say.
	"'Not this one,' he says.
	Or perhaps, he says, "'Not this time.'"
	I can't recall.
	It's like the third time in five paragraphs she says, I can't recall.
	He's a big talker.
	From the instant we collide, he yammers about himself like he's Alexander the Great
	ready to loot Babylon.
	As we're standing just inside the door, I point to the handbags.
	How about, no, he says, making the face where he pulls up both lips
	like he's balancing a spoon under his nose and begins talking about how he once thought
	about buying Bergdorf's.
	Or a hat, I say enthusiastically, walking toward the handbags,
	which at the period I'm telling you about, and Bergdorf's has been redone two or three times since
	then, are mixed in with and displayed next to the hats.
	She'll love a hat.
	You can't go wrong with hats.
	Why does she keep hedging this way?
	Presumably because the editors were saying to her.
	I mean, you have to imagine this is what happened.
	The editors of her book.
	They're like, you say that the hats were next to the purses, but I've been to Bergdorf's and the hats aren't next to the purses.
	So what happened?
	So you're adding all of these qualifiers and provisos in the original story, right?
	Maybe the door has been changed since then.
	I don't know what season it was.
	The hats used to be next to the purses, but they're not anymore.
	And I don't really know.
	It's gone over a couple of makeovers, right?
	They're getting rid of every detail that would actually lend credibility or verifiability.
	Forget about credibility, verifiability to her story.
	I don't remember what he says, but he comes striding along, greeting a Bergdorf sales attendant like he owns the joint, permitting a shopper to gape in awe at him and goes right for a fur number.
	Please, I say, no woman would want to wear a dead animal on her head.
	What he replies I don't recall, but I remember he coddles the fur hat like it's a baby otter.
	How old is the lady in question, I ask.
	How old are you, replies the man, fondling the hat and looking at me like Louis Leakey carbon dating a thigh bone he's found in Olduvai Gorge.
	I'm 52, I tell him.
	You're so old, he says, laughing.
	He was around 50 himself.
	And it's at this point he drops the hat, looks in the direction of the escalator, and says, lingerie.
	Or he may have said, underwear.
	So we stroll to the escalator.
	I don't remember anybody else greeting him or galloping up to talk to him, which indicates how very few people are in the store at the time.
	I have no recollection where the lingerie is in that era of Bergdorf's.
	Again, this is like the fourth time in the same story in which she's saying, I don't know where anything is in the store.
	Nothing.
	No verifi- Because, here's the thing.
	Under cross-examination, all of that could easily fall apart.
	If she said, I looked at the hats that were next to the purses and that was five steps away from the lingerie.
	All it would take is somebody coming up with a schematic of a floor plan from Bergdorf in 1996 to say that's not true.
	Right, it turns out lingerie is on the other end of the store on a different floor.
	So she's removing all of the verifiable details so that nobody can doubt the story.
	It seems to me it is on the floor with the evening gowns and bathing suits, and when the man and I arrive, my memory is now vivid.
	Now it's vivid.
	No one is present.
	There are two or three dainty boxes and a lacy see-through bodysuit of lilac gray on the counter.
	The man snatches up the bodysuit and says, go try this on.
	You try it on, I say, laughing.
	It's your color.
	Try it on.
	Come on, he says, throwing it at me.
	It goes with your eyes, I say, laughing and throwing it back.
	You're in good shape, he says, holding the filmy thing up against me.
	I want to see how this looks.
	But it's your size, I say, laughing and trying to slap him back with one of the boxes on the counter.
	Come on, he says, take my arm.
	Let's put this on.
	This is going to be hilarious, I'm saying to myself.
	And as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity.
	Well, I mean... Yes.
	I mean, yes, I... No one is responsible for their own rape.
	Also, going with men that you don't know to a lingerie section and trying on lingerie for those men, that's a little flirtatious.
	And that doesn't mean that he raped... that she wasn't raped.
	Doesn't mean he was justified in raping her.
	But...
	This is not, like, smart behavior, you would say.
	As we head to the dressing rooms, I'm laughing aloud and saying in my mind, I'm gonna make him put this thing on over his pants.
	There are several facts about what happened next that are so odd I want to clear them up before I go any further.
	Did I report it to the police?
	No.
	Did I tell anyone about it?
	Yes.
	I told two close friends.
	The first, a journalist magazine writer, correspondent on TV morning shows, author of many books, begged me to go to the police.
	He raped you, she kept repeating when I called her, he raped you, go to the police, I'll go with you, we'll go together.
	So the fact that, first of all, obviously she didn't think of it as rape at the time.
	She has a friend who keeps saying that he raped her and she didn't go to the cops.
	My second friend is also a journalist, a New York anchorwoman.
	She grew very quiet when I told her, then she grasped both my hands on her own and said, tell no one, forget it, he has 200 lawyers, he'll bury you.
	Do I have photos or any visual evidence?
	Bergdorf's security cameras must have picked us up at the 58th street entrance of the store.
	We also would have been filmed on the ground floor in the bags and hats section.
	Cameras must have captured us going up the escalator and into the lingerie department.
	However, even if it had been captured on tape, depending on the position of the camera, it would be difficult to see the man unzipping his pants because he was wearing a top coat.
	The struggle might simply have read as sexy.
	The speculation is moot anyway.
	The department store has confirmed it no longer has tapes from that time.
	So there are no tapes, even though there are cameras present.
	And even if there were cameras present, it wouldn't have been clear what exactly was going on, according to her.
	So again, this all goes to verifiability.
	Why were there no sales attendants in the lingerie department?
	Bergdorf's perfections are so well known.
	It is a store so noble, so clubby, so posh.
	It is almost easier to accept the fact that I was attacked than the fact that for a very brief moment, there were no sales attendants in the lingerie department.
	Inconceivable is the word.
	All I can... She says, sometimes a person won't find a sales attendant in Saks.
	Sometimes one has to look for a sales associate in Barney's or Bloomingdale's or Tiffany.
	But 99% of the time, you'll have an attendant in Bergdorf's.
	All I can say is that I did not see an attendant.
	And the other odd thing is the dressing room door was open.
	So, what?
	Why haven't I come forward before now?
	Receiving death threats, being driven from my home, being dismissed, being dragged through the mud, joining the 15 women who have come- So she says she was scared.
	That's why she didn't come forward.
	Okay, and then she talks about what happened.
	She suggests that the moment the dressing room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, puts his mouth against my lips.
	I'm so shocked, I shove him back and start laughing again.
	And laughing again.
	He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time.
	And as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.
	She says, I'm astonished by what I'm about to write.
	I keep laughing.
	The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt tie, suit jacket overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway, or completely I'm not certain, inside me.
	It turns into a colossal struggle.
	I'm wearing a pair of sturdy black patent leather 4-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around 6'1".
	I try to stomp his foot.
	I try to push him off with my one free hand.
	For some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other.
	I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off, and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.
	The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes.
	Okay, so that is the...
	She says she's never had sex with anyone else again.
	This is a lifelong trauma.
	Okay.
	So, the reason I don't find her particularly credible is because there are a bunch of lack of verifiable details in this particular story.
	It is now 20-some years later.
	And this is also beyond the statute of limitations for any sort of real rape trial.
	This is well beyond the statute of limitations for rape because the law generally presumes that 25 years on, it's going to be extraordinarily difficult to actually convict somebody of something like this.
	And you could easily see a defense like a he-said-she-said defense.
	She was laughing the whole time.
	She told me to get off, I got off.
	That would not be Unimplausible.
	If you saw this in a criminal case.
	But it's not a criminal case.
	It's 23 years later in a civil case.
	And E. Jean Carroll did not immediately, upon writing the story, file a civil suit.
	It took like several years.
	It's now 2023.
	The story came out in 2019.
	It took her a couple of years to file a civil suit.
	When it was filed, it was funded by Reid Hoffman, who is a big Democrat donor.
	So there's some real credibility issues in all of this.
	And again, the biggest problem here is that E. Jean Carroll is a strange person.
	So here is E. Jean Carroll on CNN talking about the supposed rape.
	You don't feel like a victim?
	I was not thrown on the ground and ravished.
	The word rape carries so many sexual connotations.
	This was not sexual.
	It hurt.
	I think most people think of rape as a violent assault.
	I think most people think of rape as being sexy.
	Let's take a short break.
	Think of the fantasies.
	We've got to take a quick break.
	If you can stick around, we'll talk more on the other side.
	You're fascinating to talk to.
	Most people think of rape as being sexy.
	What in the?
	Even Anderson Cooper is like, I don't know.
	What is the story with this lady?
	Like, this is super duper weird.
	OK, so she's a bad witness.
	So how exactly did this case go against Donald?
	So what the basically what the jury found is that they don't believe her on the rape, right?
	They clearly don't believe her on the rape.
	They believe that he assaulted her.
	So what?
	That he pushed her up against a wall?
	Now why do they believe that?
	Why do they believe not the rape?
	Because she's not a super credible witness.
	But they believe the assault.
	And the answer to why they believe the assault is because basically this trial was a referendum on Donald Trump's p-word tape.
	Right?
	On the grab him by the p-word.
	And that is...
	That's what this trial was.
	This trial was a referendum on Donald Trump having said to Billy Bush, on a hot mic, on Access Hollywood, years ago, that when you're very famous, you get to grab women by the bleep, and they're fine with it.
	Because when you're famous, people let you do anything.
	And then there were a bunch of witnesses, like women, who came forward and said that that's what Donald Trump did, that he assaulted them.
	That he forcibly kissed them, or he forcibly grabbed them, or he forcibly touched them, or whatever.
	And so, even though Eugene Carroll is not a good witness, as evidenced by the fact that even a New York jury would not actually say that Donald Trump raped her, what they're basically saying is we believe Donald Trump.
	When Donald Trump says that he would grab women this way, then we believe that.
	And we believe that many of the women he was grabbing were not super happy with it.
	Donald Trump's original quote is that women will let you do that, which obviously implies consent.
	When people let you do a thing, this implies consent.
	So from Donald Trump's perspective, yeah, I grab women all the time and they're fine with it because I'm famous and rich.
	And from the perspective of the jury, Donald Trump grabs women all the time, and they're not fine with it.
	And here's a list of 15 women who are not fine with it.
	Now, this, again, came back to bite Trump personally, because Trump did do a deposition on tape.
	And so here is Donald Trump on tape talking about the grab-em-by-the-bleep comment.
	In this video, I just start kissing them.
	It's like a magnet.
	Just kiss.
	I don't even wait.
	And when you're a star, they let you do it.
	You can do anything.
	Grab them by the... You can do anything.
	That's what you said, correct?
	Well, historically, that's true with stars.
	It's true with stars that they can grab women by the... Well, that's what... If you look over the last million years, I guess that's been largely true.
	Not always, but largely true.
	Unfortunately or fortunately.
	And you consider yourself to be a star?
	I think you can say that, yeah.
	Okay, so again, not amazing testimony and a lot of lawyers are like, oh no.
	Again, this is why being Donald Trump's lawyer is actually one of the hardest jobs in the
	world.
	Because the main job of a lawyer is shh to your client.
	Shh, don't do it.
	Shh, stop.
	Donald Trump's like, well, yeah, I mean, I guess you could.
	You could say that.
	Now, again, what Donald Trump should have said in that deposition is, when I said that, I mean that people let you do it.
	I literally said that in the tape, that it's consensual.
	And so I deny that these women did not consent to what I was doing.
	And I did not.
	But this is essentially what happened because Trump said that, because Trump said in that testimony, in deposition, that you can, if you are famous, grab women by the bleep.
	Then when a woman claims that you grabbed her by the bleep, then the jury's like, okay, well, that's credible.
	It's credible that he grabbed a woman by the bleep.
	Which is why even the Fox News legal analysts, they were like, yeah, it turns out that
	testifying against yourself is really not a brilliant idea.
	Here's some of the Fox News legal analysts talking about this yesterday.
	So Andy, what do you think the impact was of these pieces of tape on this process?
	Yeah.
	Martha, I think with something like that, I mean, I think the impact was devastating because of the way, not only what he said, but the way that they presented it.
	We've seen the Access Hollywood tape up till this point mainly in the abstract.
	I think one of the most effective things that the Carroll lawyers did was to introduce the tape to the jury In the course of the testimony of Natasha Stoynoff, who was one of the women who claimed that she had been sexually assaulted by former President Trump.
	So it was not a situation where it could just be sort of dismissed as locker room banter in the abstract.
	Right, so basically, this reified Trump's statements before.
	Now, Trump is mad as hell about this, and he has a right to be.
	He wrote on his social media platform, quote, This is why it's not going to harm him electorally.
	The reason it's not going to harm him electorally is because it does look like this was concocted in a laboratory, in this case.
	It looks as though there was a person who almost read his Access Hollywood comments and then was like, What if I just allege that he did that to me because he's already admitted he does that to women and then I say it wasn't consensual and then I sue him and I go to a New York jury and then they fine him.
	Like five million dollars.
	And that's kind of what the jury did here.
	Because if the jury actually believed that Donald Trump had raped E. Jean Carroll, then presumably they would have found that he raped E. Jean Carroll, but they didn't find that.
	Again, what they are basically saying is we don't believe E. Jean Carroll's story.
	We don't believe.
	Like, we believe everything up to what?
	The penetration?
	Like, what exactly did they not believe in her story?
	It sounds like what they're saying is we actually don't believe your whole story, but we believe that all these other women Had experiences verified by Donald Trump on tape talking about grabbing women, and therefore we're going to fine him.
	And so for everybody else looking at this, they're like, well, I mean, he did say that he did that, and there's nothing new here because there have been allegations that he does this to women a lot.
	And now they're going to give Eugene Carroll like a bunch of his money from a New York jury, which is just looking for an excuse to punish Donald Trump because they hate Donald Trump.
	So is this going to affect Donald Trump electorally in any way?
	I have a hard time believing it's going to affect Donald Trump in any way.
	And again, I think it's even I think when he says this feels like a witch hunt, it kind of does.
	I mean, it looks as though they are now litigating.
	In an allegation that Donald Trump made about himself in 2014 or whatever it was with Billy Bush, and they found the world's least credible witness, E. Jean Carroll, to talk about this on tape 23 years later.
	And then the trial wasn't even about E. Jean Carroll.
	The trial was really about Donald Trump.
	So what does it look like?
	It looks like a trial of Donald Trump, about Donald Trump, by a New York jury, and they wanted to find him.
	That's what it looks like.
	And so for his supporters, they're like, OK, come on.
	I'm not going to vote for him based on a New York jury doesn't like him.
	Really?
	And based on the fact that he supported his own statements that he said on a hot mic?
	And which he's already said that he agrees with?
	We'll get to more on this in a second.
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	Okay, meanwhile...
	So does any of this actually affect Donald Trump?
	The media are treating the Trump $5 million defamation verdict as though this is some sort of serious obstacle to him running.
	That's ridiculous.
	It is absolutely not.
	It'll be interesting to see how Trump responds to questions about this, I assume, on Wednesday night, because he is supposed to do a town hall forum on CNN with Caitlyn Collins.
	Presumably she's going to ask him about all of this and he's going to do the exact same thing that he did in his testimony.
	He's probably going to say, it's true when you're famous that you can do whatever you want and also Eugene Carroll is a liar.
	And that's fine.
	He can do that.
	Is that going to have any impact?
	I assume that it will not.
	The only thing that's going to have an impact on Trump legally, it's not going to be this.
	It's not going to be the Alvin Bragg idiot case with regard to campaign finance violations and Stormy Daniels and all of that.
	The only thing that is going to affect Trump legally speaking are just the drip, drip, drip of indictments.
	It may come a point at which voters are like, yeah, this guy's under so many legal cases.
	But it's also true that if it feels like, you know, a cartoon where all guns
	are trained on Bugs Bunny, you start to root for Bugs Bunny a little bit, right?
	That's kind of what it's going to feel like.
	There's an indictment watch in Fulton County from Fannie Willis investigating efforts by Trump
	in Georgia to affect the 2020 election post-election.
	You still have an upcoming trial in a New York civil case against the Trump organization.
	There's still the federal probe from Special Counsel Jack Smith about Trump trying to subvert the 2020 election.
	And there's a federal probe on the handling of classified documents.
	The problem is each one of these cases in isolation looks really weak.
	And so when you have a bunch of weak cases in isolation, it looks like exactly what Donald Trump wants.
	This is actually, all of this can be seen as a giant in-kind contribution to Donald Trump's primary campaign.
	Every time he feels targeted, the Republican base rushes to his defense.
	So it all helps him in the primaries.
	Now, does it help him with the general population?
	I think not.
	I don't think there's anybody out there who was kind of an independent like, well, now that he is being targeted by everyone, I like him more.
	I don't think there are tons of people like that.
	But the idea that it's really going to be like a serious bar to Trump running, I think is ridiculous.
	This is why there's an article in The Washington Post.
	It's titled right now, Sexual Abuse Verdict Renews Republican Doubts About Trump's Electability.
	Listen, I think if you had doubts about Trump's electability, and I have doubts about Trump's electability considering he already lost to Joe Biden.
	And that he had to pull a rabbit out of a hat to beat Hillary Clinton.
	Like, again, I have doubts about his electability, but not because of this.
	Because Trump is Trump, and people have their opinions on Trump.
	Now, the notion that this is going to be some sort of kill shot with regard to his campaign is obviously incredibly silly.
	It just doesn't make any sense.
	Meanwhile, George Santos, Republican congressperson from New York, he has now been arrested on 13 charges of wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and making materially false statements.
	It's always the ones you least suspect, guys.
	It's, you know, it's like the butler did it.
	George Santos, who lied about literally all the things.
	It turns out that he probably also lied about money and public funds and how he was using the money and all the rest of that sort of stuff.
	This provides a sort of conundrum for the Republican Party because, again, their majority in the House is extraordinarily slim at this point.
	Right now, their majority is like four seats, five seats.
	222 is their majority.
	Now they're down to 221, I would presume.
	And the way that it works is that he would presumably be replaced by the governor of New York.
	The governor of New York, of course, is Kathy Hochul, who's a Democrat.
	So that means that the Democrats will appoint someone to fill that seat.
	That was a swing district that Santos had won.
	And so the large-scale probability here is that the Republican majority will decline by one.
	Which is a problem for McCarthy because, again, he does have this kind of solid core of people who are gadflies and who vote against everything that he brings up.
	That would be Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the like.
	It doesn't always include MTG, by the way.
	MTG very often will vote with McCarthy, actually.
	She seems to be more rational in terms of her legislative priorities than, say, Matt Gaetz.
	It does mean that his majority shrinks a little bit, and that's a problem for the Republicans.
	Meanwhile, I guess that he's being indicted because he is slightly more of a liar than all the other members of Congress.
	But, you know, here's the good news.
	There are plenty of liars left over in Congress.
	That would include the irrepressibly stupid AOC.
	So she's also a pathological liar.
	Yesterday, she pathologically lied about Jordan Neely.
	Jordan Neely is, of course, the mentally ill and career criminal black man who died on a New York subway after a Marine put him in a submission hold in an attempt to stop him from attacking the other passengers.
	She tweeted out, So the real problem is that New York doesn't provide any of the resources necessary for people like Jordan Ely.
	There's only one problem.
	As Thomas Chatterton Williams, a writer for The Atlantic, who is not a conservative, pointed out, she says Jordan Ely was killed because he couldn't access mental health support.
	That's a lie.
	According to the actual New York Times reporting, he was arrested not all that long ago, and he was supposed to go from court to live at a treatment facility in the Bronx and stay clean for 15 months.
	13 days later, he abandoned the facility.
	We talked about this at the Times.
	This idea that this is about underfunding in New York City, it's not about underfunding.
	It's about the fact that there are no consequences for simply going out and living on the street and then abandoning your drug rehab facility.
	But AOC wants you to be able to abandon your drug rehab facilities, an aspect of freedom to live on the streets, according to people like AOC.
	And pathological lies exist all over Congress.
	Only George Santos is really being targeted over his pathological lies.
	Meanwhile, the immigration crisis on our southern border gets worse and worse and worse.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, officials in New York and Chicago have now declared states of emergency after Texas Governor Greg Abbott resumed busing migrants to northern sanctuary cities ahead of the expiration later this week of Title 42.
	Busloads of migrants, mostly from Texas, began arriving in cities hundreds of miles from the border last year.
	Officials have been trying to provide housing and services for those new arrivals in Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C.
	Lori Lightfoot in Chicago, she says, we have hit the breaking point.
	She is still the outgoing mayor of Chicago.
	They've taken in like 8,500, 9,000 illegal immigrants over the course of the last year.
	Meanwhile, you have 10,000 illegal immigrants arriving on the border like every single day.
	And all those people are just being schlepped to the streets of El Paso and left there.
	But Lori Lightfoot is in a state of panic because some busloads of people are entering a city of millions.
	Here is Lori Lightfoot talking about it.
	Last week, I sent a letter to Governor Abbott when we learned that he may be sending more migrants to our city via bus to try to reason and explain to him that yes, of course we are a welcoming city and we will always do what is right by our immigrant and refugee communities.
	But we've reached a breaking point in our response to this humanitarian crisis primarily manufactured by him for cynical political purposes.
	Oh, it's super cynical for Abbott to send people to cities where they want to go.
	You know what's not cynical, though, apparently?
	What Eric Adams is doing.
	So Eric Adams is the mayor of New York.
	He's also claiming that it's very cynical to send people to New York City as a destination.
	So what is he doing?
	It's hilarious how undercover this is.
	What exactly is Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, doing with all these illegal immigrants?
	So Eric Adams' plan is, I'm going to whine about people being sent to New York City, one of the biggest cities on the planet.
	to send migrants to their towns for shelter.
	This is ABC News reporting.
	So Eric Adams' plan is, I'm going to whine about people being sent to New York City,
	one of the biggest cities on the planet.
	And I'm going to take those people and I'm going to send them to Rockland County.
	I'm gonna just schlep them to the suburbs and leave them off next to the school.
	That's my plan.
	So, bad when Greg Abbott sends busloads of illegal immigrants to New York City.
	Good when Eric Adams takes those busloads of immigrants and unloads them in Rockland County.
	Rockland County's top official declared a state of emergency on Saturday in response to Adams' plan to send 340 adult male migrants to live at an Armani Inn and Suites in Orangeburg, New York for four months.
	I mean, honestly, oh darn, it's the consequences of my own actions.
	Oh no, here they come.
	Rockland County had declared itself a sanctuary city in December of 2016, or apparently Rockland County did not.
	So New York City declared itself a sanctuary city, mainly to virtue signal to their left.
	And Rockland County's like, guys, we didn't do that.
	Why are you schlepping them here?
	The county executive Edwin Days of the city declared itself a sanctuary city in December 2016, committing itself to supporting undocumented individuals.
	This county has not.
	We're one-tenth the population of New York City.
	We're not capable of receiving and sustaining the volume of undocumented migrants Eric Adams intends to send over.
	Rockland County is 40 miles northwest of New York City.
	It is close to the Hudson River.
	So, on Friday, Adams announced he was sending migrants to neighboring New York counties in response to the rising numbers of asylum seekers in the city.
	So now, this is good.
	DeSantis sends people to Martha's Vineyard very bad.
	Eric Adams says he's going, we'll take you in.
	We love you guys.
	Come on in, illegal immigrants.
	This is a sanctuary city.
	We're not even going to help the federal officials effectuate immigration policy.
	We're not going to deport any of you.
	You get to stay here.
	Also, you're not staying here.
	You're staying actually in Rockland County.
	Adam said at a press conference, despite calling on the federal government for a national decompression strategy since last year, and for a decompression strategy across the state, New York City has been left without the necessary support to manage the crisis.
	With a vacuum of leadership, we're now forced to undertake our own decompression strategy.
	Man, I love this.
	I love that Eric Adams is going to escape scrutiny for now schlepping people to the middle of nowhere after declaring that he was going to help everybody.
	Meanwhile, immigrants continue to pour over the borders.
	This video from Matamoros, Mexico is absolutely shocking.
	This is just people who are pouring over the border here.
	Look at this.
	It's unbelievable.
	That, of course, is people pouring across the Rio Grande.
	Men and women and children by the hundreds climbing up the banks of this river.
	Things are going great, guys.
	And the good news is Joe Biden has all of it under control.
	In fact, Joe Biden doesn't even have to answer any questions.
	Yesterday, he did a presser and by a presser, I mean he answered no questions and then smirked as reporters were let out of the room.
	We're gonna solve all the world's problems.
	Okay?
	Thank you so much guys. Thank you so much.
	Thank you so much.
	There he is, smiling.
	Oh, this is fun, guys.
	I'll see y'all later.
	Yeah, that's right.
	I made giant jackets.
	Bye, guys.
	I don't answer questions.
	I'm just the president.
	Bye.
	That, of course, was during a session, including Hakeem Jeffries, Kevin McCarthy, and Chuck Schumer to talk about the budget crisis.
	But there'll be no questions to Joe Biden.
	Joe Biden did have a comment, by the way.
	He just keeps smiling like a weirdo.
	He's such a weird old Cesar Romero Joker type.
	So weird.
	Anyway, here was Joe Biden yesterday on the border.
	His comments were less than edifying.
	I spent close to an hour with the Mexican president today.
	We're doing all we can.
	The answer is it remains to be seen.
	We've gotten overwhelming cooperation from Mexico.
	Oh, it'll be chaotic for a while.
	Guys, don't worry about it.
	setting up offices in Columbia and other places where you can,
	or someone seeking asylum can go first.
	So, but it remains to be seen.
	It's going to be chaotic for a while.
	Oh, it'll be chaotic for a while.
	Guys, don't worry about it.
	It'll be chaotic.
	By a while, I mean for the rest of your life.
	That's by a while.
	And by chaotic, I mean like millions of illegal immigrants crossing the border, being caught, and then released.
	She's like, are you kidding?
	We can't even get this guy to string two sentences together.
	address Americans on the border.
	Christ, like, are you kidding?
	We can't even get this guy to string two sentences together.
	No way.
	About Title 42 share message that New York is given or, you know, you know, something
	to that effect.
	Well, we hear from the president on.
	Well, I would say you heard from the president just this past Friday.
	He did an interview, a sit-down interview, with one of the networks and talked about Title 42, talked about immigration, so the American people did hear directly from the President on this issue.
	I don't have anything else to share in the next couple of days about the President's schedule, so I'll just leave it there.
	He did talk to MSNBC, guys.
	But there is good news.
	Corrina Jean-Pierre says we have top men on this.
	Just like the Ark of the Covenant.
	Top men.
	And by top men, she means Kamala Harris.
	I don't know how anybody finds this satisfying.
	She says, yeah, we got a border crisis, but you know, Joe Biden is talking to Kamala Harris, who will presumably be supplying electric school buses and Venn diagrams to all of the illegal immigrants.
	Will the Vice President be involved in today's meeting since she'll be here in the country while the President is away?
	So the President has been closely consulting with the Vice President on this.
	They have had several conversations on this issue.
	And so again, when it comes to issues that matter to the American people, they're very much partners.
	Yeah, mmm.
	And probably Kamala Harris is like, mmm, yeah.
	I mean, uh-huh, yeah.
	Good stuff from Kyle.
	I'm sure she's fixing all the problems.
	She's done an amazing job on the border so far.
	Remember, he deployed her to solve the border crisis two years ago, and it's been going swimmingly.
	And by swimmingly, I mean literally thousands of people swimming across the Rio Grande to enter the United States.
	That's exciting stuff.
	Meanwhile, the Biden administration doing yeoman's work on blowing up the budget as well.
	So there's been no breakthrough on the debt ceiling.
	There was a all for show meeting yesterday between President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
	But according to the Wall Street Journal, they remain at loggerheads after a meeting at the White House on Tuesday.
	They have made little progress in averting the first ever default by the federal government.
	Again, You know, I am not one for conspiratorial thinking.
	However, it occurs to me that Joe Biden, knowing that the economy is not in amazing shape right now and that there will probably be a recession, him finding an excuse to blame Republicans who are not really in charge of the government might actually be in his wheelhouse.
	He might be looking for a way to blame Republicans for an economic downturn.
	And maybe that's why he's not negotiating, because there's no other reason not to negotiate at this point, considering avoiding the debt ceiling is not all that tough.
	Kevin McCarthy's proposal, which is to, again, not lower spending, but to stop the trajectory of spending from rising in the same way, has been outright rejected by the White House.
	He just wants to go back to 2022 levels of spending.
	And yet there is no movement, none whatsoever.
	Here's Kevin McCarthy yesterday announcing, yeah, we sat in a room and Joe Biden stared at the walls and ate oatmeal, and it was real weird.
	We can lift the debt ceiling.
	And find a way that we can curve this increasing debt that is affecting every American family with inflation.
	And now three banks of our fourth largest banks are closed, are in a debt problem.
	Nothing has changed since then.
	The only thing that has changed is the House has raised the debt ceiling and passed the bill.
	That's why we had a meeting today.
	Everybody in this meeting reiterated the positions they were at.
	I didn't see any new movement.
	The president said the staff should get back together, but I was very clear with the president.
	We have now just two weeks to go.
	OK, meanwhile, the Democratic playbook here is we just can't default under no circumstances can we default.
	We're not cutting anything, but we definitely it's so important.
	We cannot default.
	We must pay our we must pay our debts.
	Also, we're not negotiating under any circumstances.
	Here's Hakeem Jeffries doing that dance.
	Under no circumstances should the United States default on our debt.
	America must always pay our bills.
	A default would be catastrophic for everyday Americans, for small businesses, for people all across the land.
	He refused.
	President Biden said he would.
	Leader Jeffrey said he would.
	Of course I said I would.
	about the small businesses all across the land that you shut down for two years.
	And well, well done on that.
	You know, Chuck Schumer, he's doing the same routine.
	Look at these terrible Republicans.
	Chuck Schumer has all these terrible.
	It's just amazing.
	They won't they won't do what we want them to do.
	And it's just awful. It's awful.
	He refused.
	President Biden said he would.
	Leader Jeffrey said he would.
	Of course, I said I would.
	But he wouldn't take it off the table.
	And instead of him giving us a plan to remove default, he gave us a plan to take default
	hostage.
	Thank you.
	you.
	Take default hostage?
	He passed a bill that raises the debt ceiling.
	It's you guys who refuse to even negotiate so much so that Joe Biden now says he's thinking of just violating the Constitution and he's going to, you know, consider the 14th Amendment a basically blank slate to spend whatever he wants to spend.
	You said you're certain there won't be a fall.
	Are you willing to take unilateral action, like a vote in the 14th Amendment, to make sure that doesn't happen?
	Well, I have been considering the 14th Amendment.
	And a man I have enormous respect for, Larry Tribe, who advised me for a long time, thinks that it would be legitimate.
	But the problem is it would have to be litigated.
	And in the meantime, without an extension, it would still end up in the same place.
	You see how much fun that is?
	It's really fun that Larry Tribe can plant an op-ed in the New York Times talking about how he's now in favor of reinterpreting the 14th Amendment, and then Joe Biden can go out and cite that and pretend that he has legal precedent for this, which he doesn't.
	Joe Biden was asked about the fact that he's not negotiating, and then Biden got real chippy with the reporters.
	He started getting real mad at the reporters.
	Why are you even asking me this stuff, man?
	Why?
	Don't you know that I'm going to get sabotaged and the gamut is going to go to shab?
	We've got a specific answer.
	We've got a specific answer again today.
	You didn't listen either, so why should I even answer the question?
	So is there a specific answer?
	We got a specific answer again today.
	Which is what?
	The first, you didn't listen either, so why should I even answer the question?
	We cut the deficit by $160 billion.
	B-I-L-L-I-O-N dollars on the Medicare bill.
	No, you didn't.
	What's he proposing?
	Did he tell you?
	I'm not being facetious.
	Did he tell you what he's proposing?
	He was talking about the bill.
	Yeah, but what does it propose?
	Do you know?
	I'm not being a wise guy.
	You are, though.
	It's in English on the web.
	You can read the bill.
	It talks precisely about the cuts that he wishes to implement.
	What are you talking about?
	What in the world are you talking about?
	It doesn't matter.
	This is why, again, I think the Democrats, Joe Biden and company, they may want to run the economy directly into the ground.
	And they may want to do so just so they can blame Republicans.
	I mean, it really is an incredible thing.
	I mean, that's what Karine Jean-Pierre tried yesterday.
	She was like, Republicans are threatening recession and 8 million jobs.
	Are they or are you?
	You won't even negotiate.
	Like, if you guys would negotiate and you'd say, here's our position, and then the Republicans are like, here's our position, then maybe you could find a middle position.
	But when your position is, we will not negotiate ever at all, who looks more unwilling to raise the debt ceiling?
	Kevin McCarthy, who passed a bill to raise the debt ceiling, or you, who are doing nothing?
	It's not about the President.
	It's about the American economy.
	It's about the American people.
	That's what the President views as success.
	That's the way that it should be done.
	Regular order.
	This is regular order.
	What House Republicans are saying is that they want to potentially, if they get their way, threaten the country's first default.
	Something that has never happened before.
	That's what they're threatening.
	Again, could lead to trigger a recession.
	Eight million jobs potentially lost.
	That is what they are threatening.
	That's what they're threatening?
	That's what you're threatening?
	Joe Manchin, Senator from West Virginia, he's like, you know, it's unreasonable that Biden isn't even negotiating.
	Yeah, Joe, that's correct.
	Senator Joe Manchin, who has been calling on the White House to sit down and have these discussions with Republicans, indicating that they need to agree to some spending cuts.
	Otherwise, the consequences, he warned, could be drastic.
	It's just, it's not rational, it's not reasonable, and it's not practical.
	And it's something that, it's hypocritical to say that we're not going to do it now when we've done it every time that there has been a split in the party.
	The only time that I know there hasn't been big discussion is when one party, whether it be Republicans, have the President, the House, and the Senate.
	Or the Democrats have all three.
	Plain.
	Well they're saying no, no cuts, nothing, tighter.
	That's not, that's not, I think that's not reasonable.
	Yes, it is not reasonable.
	By the way, that's a member of Joe Biden's own party, and with Dianne Feinstein absent, it means they don't actually have a majority in support of Joe Biden, even in the Democrat Senate.
	That's what that means.
	But Joe Biden doesn't care, because that's the way this works.
	He's hoping the media will cover for all of his foibles, and It's probably not wrong.
	And meanwhile, on the international front, there are a couple of major stories brewing.
	One, of course, is actually in Pakistan, which we don't pay attention to a lot.
	We really should.
	It's a country of 230 million people with nuclear weapons.
	And nobody ever pays any attention to Pakistan, despite the fact that Pakistan is generally in a widespread, decades-long battle between radical Islamists and people who are slightly more moderate, between military dictatorship and a democracy that may go radical.
	So Imran Khan, who is currently the most popular leader in Pakistan and tends to be on the more extreme side of Pakistani politics, has now been arrested, which could lead to mass unrest by his supporters.
	According to the New York Times, Imran Khan, who is Pakistan's ousted prime minister, was arrested on corruption charges on Tuesday in a major escalation of a political crisis that has engulfed the country over the past year and that raises the prospect of mass unrest by his supporters.
	The arrest intensified a showdown between the powerful Pakistani military and Khan and brought the country into uncharted political territory.
	Pakistani leaders have faced arrest before, but never has anyone like Khan so directly and with mass popular support challenged the military, which for decades has been the invisible hand wielding power behind the government.
	And this is what should scare people.
	And again, it demonstrates pretty full scale that sometimes there's a conflict between democracy and, you know, the interests of the West.
	One of the great lies about American foreign policy is that American foreign policy in all circumstances must cut in favor of sort of formalistic democratic arrangements as opposed to American interests.
	And it's a fool's game.
	Because the reality is that if the military in Pakistan were no longer in charge of the nukes, but Imran Khan were, this would be a significantly Less stable region.
	It's already an unstable region.
	Political tensions have been building for months as Khan, a former cricket star who is extremely populist, has accused the military and the current government of conspiring against him.
	Both the military and government officials deny those claims.
	His supporters are ransacking the official residences of army commanders.
	Hundreds of protesters have gathered outside army headquarters just outside Islamabad.
	In the port city of Karachi, the police are firing tear gas to disperse crowds.
	Again, the fact that Pakistan has nuclear weapons is one of the least covered, most dangerous parts of world politics.
	Pakistan is in an unbreachable conflict.
	I mean, it's just an intransigent conflict since 1948.
	Nobody pays any attention to that.
	Really, no one pays any attention to the fact that Pakistan has been in a series of conflict with India for seven decades.
	And that Pakistan is constantly in danger of falling directly under the sway of radical Islamists.
	Nobody pays any attention to that.
	Instead, they pay attention to Israel killing terrorists.
	So this is the other story that's on the table today, is that Israel launched something called Operation Shield and Arrow, killing three high-level Islamic Jihad leaders.
	Islamic Jihad is a terrorist group by every available metric.
	It is backed by Iran.
	Islamic Jihad, just last week, launched 102 rockets, 104 rockets, into Israel.
	And Israel retaliated by killing three Islamic Jihad leaders.
	They did so in extremely targeted strikes.
	And the international community, they always treat a targeted strike as though it's an act of egregious war crime violation.
	It's insane.
	Israel will literally take out, not apartment buildings, apartments, like single apartments in terror-occupied areas with the intent of killing as few human beings as possible.
	You can see the pictures of it.
	They'll take out like a room in an apartment.
	And it'll turn out that the terrorists have been trotting their kids around with them, specifically in order to deter Israel from killing them.
	And Israel will call off strikes.
	I mean, I've seen footage of them doing this.
	They literally call off strikes if there are too many civilians in the area, but they have to make a call sometimes.
	Do I kill the Islamic Jihad leader, even though he's hiding behind his kids?
	And it's on him.
	Because you know what people of any level of decency don't do?
	Hide behind their children.
	I have three children of my own.
	You think I would trail them around with me to deter someone from killing me?
	That's insane.
	That's insane.
	So Israel kills these three Islamic Jihad leaders and this has led to mass rocket attacks that across Israel, including in Tel Aviv, the videos are
	very easy to find.
	You can see people being evacuated on the roads.
	They're literally driving to Tel Aviv on a main highway, and the sirens will go off,
	and suddenly Israelis have to run off out of their cars onto the side of the road,
	where there's no bomb shelter whatsoever.
	And then you will see rockets being shot down by the Iron Dome.
	An Iron Dome, which by the way, is opposed by people like Rashida Tlaib,
	who's a terror supporter.
	the the It's total madness.
	I mean, there were pictures that were emerging of El Al flights, like, these are civilian airliners, flying into Ben Gurion Airport, and rockets being shot down not all that far from the jets.
	No country worth its salt can tolerate this.
	If this were America, let's say that Mexican drug cartels started using Matamoros, Mexico as a launching point, a staging point for hundreds of rocket attacks into Brownsville, Texas.
	Let's say that started happening.
	American Marines would be sitting in Mexico City tomorrow morning.
	Tomorrow morning.
	Entire areas of the Mexican border would be free of humans.
	Because you know what the American military does not do?
	Play around.
	And you know what else they don't do?
	They don't worry so much about what the UN Security Council is going to do.
	The fact that Israel is criticized when it has to kill terrorists and those terrorists hide behind their families, but that terrorists can shoot hundreds of rockets into a sovereign state and Israel is expected to absorb it, is totally insane.
	The Israeli government should do whatever it has to do to stop the terrorism.
	Yes, up to and including taking controversial military actions to kill as many terrorists as possible and stop these sorts of attacks.
	You can't have a country that's living half underground.
	Total madness.
	Absolute madness.
	Okay, let's get to some things I like and then some things that I hate.
	So, things that I like today.
	So, MrBeast has put out a new video.
	He's the most popular YouTuber.
	He's put out a new video.
	In this video, he helps 1,000 deaf people hear again.
	He pays for cochlear implants and stuff, helping deaf people to actually hear again, or hear for the first time.
	That's pretty awesome, right?
	I mean, here's some of the video.
	This is the first out of a thousand deaf people that we're going to help hear again.
	And she hasn't heard her mother's voice in four years.
	Can you hear?
	I love you.
	Next, we helped Kaylee, Sudie, and even entire families hear their loved ones again.
	But they are only a few of the 1,000 people that we are going to help hear again today.
	We got our hands on over $3 million of cutting-edge hearing technology that, unlike old hearing aids, analyzes people's specific hearing needs, allowing them to hear again without causing any damage.
	Can you hear me talking now?
	Yes.
	Oh, my God.
	Wait.
	He can hear it.
	I'm going to cry.
	Okay, like, that's great, right?
	Nothing bad about that.
	Oh, don't worry.
	In the world of the internet, everything is bad.
	Everything is terrible.
	So, a bunch of people have now come out ripping on Mr. Beast.
	Okay, so, the Redditors, they have decided there are many reasons why they are very, very upset at Mr. Beast.
	So, some people will say, well, you know, when he gives charity, when he gives charity, he's just covering for the failures of the systems.
	This is sort of the Bernie Sanders attitude toward charity.
	Which is that if you help your neighbor, this is bad.
	Because really, the government should be helping your neighbor.
	And you should pay taxes to the government, you jerk!
	Stop helping people, it's bad!
	The problems caused by capitalism are the real- Okay, so let's be real about this.
	Those hearing implements do not exist without capitalism.
	End of story.
	So one of the people on Reddit was like, this came to a head with the recent stunt of paying for a
	thousand blind people's medical treatment to help them gain sight. Looking at that, it's a
	very nice thing for somebody to do, but at the same time, it highlights there are many people
	going without things like available medical treatment only because they lack the resources to
	pay themselves, and there is no broader societal mechanism to help them. Wait, so me doing
	a nice thing for my neighbor is bad because there's no broader societal mechanism for those
	people to be helped by the government?
	So unless you're a full-scale socialist, you shouldn't give charity.
	And also, even when you're a full-scale socialist, you shouldn't give charity because your money should go to the government.
	These people are morons.
	Also, apparently they say he's a for-profit charity because he presents himself as a philanthropist when in reality he's a CEO whose business model is turning people in bad situations into a profit.
	So first of all, let's say that that were true.
	Let's say that he put ads on this.
	So?
	So?
	So you mean advertisers want to be associated with a good thing?
	And then they want to pay him and then he's going to use some of that money to do more good things?
	Oh no!
	He's going to use his money to do nice things for people?
	Whoa!
	That's terrible!
	I, on a personal level, thank God, have very good cash flow.
	And I spend a lot of my money on charity.
	But according to these morons, if I make a lot of money and give a lot of my money to charity, that's bad because I shouldn't be making a lot of money.
	And Mr. Beast, if he's making money off of people getting the warms and fuzzies from this sort of stuff, that means he's a bad person.
	That means you're a bad person if you object to this.
	Gotta be honest with you.
	Also, he has specifically said that on these videos he does not monetize them.
	He does not try to make money off of these videos.
	Now listen, I would have no problem if he did try to make money off of these videos because some of that money is going to go to more videos like this where he's helping a thousand people here!
	But apparently, he doesn't want that sort of controversy, so he's not even monetizing these videos.
	So then they go to the indirect route.
	Oh, well, you know, this is making him more famous.
	And when you click on his videos, it makes him more money.
	And then, he's using that money to help people, and that's making him richer.
	Okay, let me ask you a question.
	Here are the alternatives.
	The alternatives is, a rich person helps people, or you make him poorer and he doesn't help people.
	Those are the choices.
	There's no choice where you randomly make him poorer, and then he spends all that money helping people.
	Because that's not how the world works.
	That's ridiculous.
	And then finally, the last criticism is, are selfless acts truly altruistic if you film it and want people to know that you perform the selfless act?
	And this would be sort of the Kantian argument is, oh my god, what's his intent?
	The intent is really the thing.
	Did he intend to be charitable?
	So first of all, you can intend to be charitable and do it publicly.
	It's actually kind of an important thing.
	Maimonides has a hierarchy of the best types of charity to do.
	Number one type of charity you can do is give somebody a job.
	If you give somebody a job, according to Maimonides, this is the best type of charity.
	Number two is giving anonymously.
	And the reason that giving anonymously is the second best type of charity is because then you know you're not doing it for the credit.
	And then you get into giving charity but having your name attached to it.
	But there is a proviso.
	If you putting your name on a charitable endeavor causes others to give more charity, that's a good thing.
	So when we give charity, my wife and I, we like to give anonymous charity.
	Because frankly, we don't care if our name is associated with it.
	We're not doing it for the claps and the giggles.
	We're doing it specifically because we want to give the money and we feel duty bound to do so.
	Okay, but there have been situations where we specifically will give public charity because it encourages other people to give the charity.
	If you've ever been to a charity fundraiser, this sort of stuff happens all the time.
	I've emceed many charity fundraisers.
	When you emcee a charity fundraiser, very often what you do is you'll do a fundraise at the end.
	You'll get up and you'll say, listen, it's time to give to X organization.
	It's for school scholarships.
	It's gonna be a great organization.
	And I, as a famous person, I pledged that I'm giving $10,000 to this organization.
	How much is Bob giving?
	And then it turns out the people in the room are like, oh man, Well, I mean, if he's giving 10, then maybe I'll give 10.
	If he's giving 10, maybe I should give 15.
	So if Mr. Beast goes out there and does a charitable thing, maybe it will cause other rich people to do charitable things.
	That would be very bad.
	Can't do that.
	Now, the reality is the reason so many people are hating on Mr. Beast on this particular score is because when people are very rich and very successful, there are a lot of people who hate them.
	That's number one.
	But number two, there is now ingrained in a lot of young people this weird idea that helping your neighbor on a personal level is a betrayal of the need for systemic change.
	The reason they think this is because so much of our philosophy now is driven by the idea that if you say that people can individually change their situation or change the issues of others, then this means that you will be redirecting energy from the system itself.
	This is the Bernie Sanders take.
	You give charity, well you should be spending all the time and money that you're giving to the charity.
	You should be spending that on political activism to change the entire system.
	Well, maybe I don't think that the system is bad, number one.
	And maybe, number two, even if I were an activist, I could do both.
	But I've noticed that there's a weird sort of reversal, which is that Bernie Sanders gives virtually no charity, that Democrats overall give very, very little charity.
	By every possible study in the United States, Red state people who vote red give way more charity as a percentage of their income than people who vote blue.
	Why?
	Because people who vote blue are like, well, I gave it the office.
	And people who vote red are like, well, no, actually, my money doesn't even belong to me.
	It belongs to God.
	And that means a certain percentage of my money needs to go to people who can't take care of themselves.
	So which are the better people?
	The people who are like, I gave it the office because I made Bob give the money, and that was really the big thing.
	So I forced Bob to give the money.
	Or the guy who's like, you know what?
	I'm giving of my own accord.
	Much of that, you want to get to the Kantian?
	You know, the sort of Kantian intent of it?
	Who is the better person?
	By Kant's standards, the person who says, I'm giving money of my own accord because I think it is good to give money, or the person who forces the other guy to give money, or says, I'm giving money because I'm forced to by the federal government and this makes me superior.
	Again, this is all insane.
	I fail to understand anything remotely like why Mr. Beast should be criticized over this sort of stuff.
	He tweeted out, So first of all, I don't pledge to give away all my money before I die because I want my kids to have my money.
	I promise to give away all my money before I die, every single penny.
	Twitter, MrBeastBad.
	So first of all, I don't pledge to give away all my money before I die,
	because I want my kids to have my money.
	I am not pledging, I pledge to give away a large chunk of my money.
	Before I die.
	Which I will, because I give away a significant chunk of my money every year.
	I give away a lot of my money.
	Not all of it.
	Not 50%.
	I give a lot of money.
	And you know what?
	Good.
	Doesn't make me a saint.
	Makes me like a normal charitable person.
	And that's a good thing.
	If Mr. Beast wants to give away more than that, good for him.
	But the fact that this is even controversial.
	What a gross society looks like is this.
	I mean, truly.
	A gross society looks like, here's a guy who's curing a thousand people of their deafness.
	What a jerk!
	What a jerk.
	Well done, guys.
	Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	So this is actually two separate things that I hate.
	So, first of all, Disney and their deep and abiding desire to apparently trans the kids is very weird.
	So apparently, Melissa McCarthy, who is the voice of Ursula in the new live action, or she plays Ursula in the new live action Little Mermaid, she showed up and had a heartwarming run-in with iconic drag queen Nina West.
	Oh, so iconic.
	Like Einstein iconic.
	Like Moses iconic.
	The two met on the red carpet and began bowing to each other and chanting, it's everything I ever wanted.
	McCarthy graft West hands told her her dress was perfection and invited her to breakfast.
	Oh, look at that.
	Look at the beauty of a woman bowing to a man dressed as a woman at the Disney premiere.
	It's so nice.
	I'm so glad that Disney invited this very giant male drag queen to a premiere of a children's movie.
	It's so nice.
	According to Yahoo News, the pair seemed to have an instant connection, even broke into song with an impromptu version of Rosemary Clooney's Sisters while they wrapped their arms around each other's shoulders.
	So nice.
	Sisters forever.
	Here's a little bit of the video of Melissa McCarthy talking about her heartwarming moment with a dude dressed as a lady.
	I had no idea that the original Ursa was based off the late great divine.
	No idea.
	I know, that's incredible.
	And you have your own personal history with Drag Queens.
	I have loved Drag Queens since I was in high school.
	I think it's one of the most joyful, irreverent, funny, fantastic sources of entertainment.
	We've been doing it since we've been telling stories.
	It's since the beginning of time.
	And I have such a love of John Waters films.
	It's like we just watched them on a loop all through college.
	And so when Little Mermaid came out, and there was no...
	It was before the internet, guys.
	I'm that old.
	But there was no way to kind of... I didn't know how to find out, but I was like, I am positive whoever created her look and created this character was a fan of Divine.
	I was like, I know it with my whole heart, and now I know it to be true, and I was like, of course!
	Of course!
	So the idea is that the original Ursula in the animated film was based on Divine, who's a drag queen.
	Okay, that's true.
	Also, nobody knew that at the time and no one cared.
	And the reason no one cared is because Disney wasn't actually attempting to trans the kids back in 1989, when The Little Mermaid came out in 1990, whatever year it was.
	But it is amazing.
	So Disney, this is what Disney wishes to try it out.
	Like, slow clap for these geniuses.
	So you morons have undercut your own value by pushing all of the social leftism in movies for kids.
	And the way you're trotting out Little Mermaid, which is gonna be one of your big live action remakes
	of the animated film, is not only by pushing the woke notion
	of racially neutral casting, except if there's a black character,
	which never ever can be cast as white.
	Not only are you gonna do that, you are also going to now promote
	and continue to facilitate drag queen story hour amongst the children at the Little Mermaid.
	By the way, gotta love the fact that it's Rachel, what's her face, Rachel Lindsay, the bachelorette, everybody is racist lady, who's interviewing.
	That is like a singularity of woke idiocy right there.
	Genius.
	By the way, I will note that The Little Mermaid looks absolutely terrible, just on an aesthetic level.
	I've never been a fan of Disney remaking all of its animated films as live action films.
	In fact, the entire purpose of animation is to not be live action.
	But now they are remaking it and it looks hideous.
	And just on an aesthetic level, this movie looks terrible.
	It looks... Again, forget about all the wokeness for a second.
	Look how bad this looks.
	Like, it looks as if... I don't know why they're going for some sort of realism as though you're actually at an aquarium.
	As opposed to, you know, it being colorful and bright.
	I don't know why they are going for, you know, 1940s film noir look in color live-action The Little Mermaid, but here we go.
	No, this looks so terrible.
	Okay, so it's an empty sea, and her floating around in creepy uncanny valley territory.
	Sebastian looks awful.
	Okay, so it's an empty sea and her floating around creepy uncanny valley territory.
	Sebastian looks awful.
	It's creepy and weird.
	So instead of him being a cute and interesting crab, he now looks like an actual crab that's
	singing to you in extremely creepy fashion.
	Also, the ocean is completely empty.
	This looks terrible.
	My goodness.
	Finding Nemo looks way better.
	That's not even a question.
	Producer Zack says Finding Nemo... Yes!
	I mean, this is not even remotely the same.
	Finding Nemo looks like it would be fun to live under the sea.
	This looks like you're basically living in a mausoleum underwater.
	Look at, like, where is it?
	This is a fun song, by the way.
	Where is the fun?
	She's in an empty sea and he's singing to no one.
	Like, that's... If you... Honestly, I'd wish to go back and juxtapose that to the original Little Mermaid animated scene.
	Not even remotely close.
	So, I don't know what Disney's doing, but it is certainly stupid.
	Alrighty folks, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We'll be getting into Chris Pratt being ripped up and down for, you know, being a Christian.
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