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May 25, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:28
Did DeSantis’ Twitter Gamble Payoff??
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So that's actually what it sounded like last night when Ron DeSantis decided to launch his campaign on Twitter spaces with Elon Musk.
Now yesterday I said this is kind of a cool idea, right?
Because this is edging around the legacy media.
Instead of relying on legacy media to introduce you to the crowd, you just go direct to the crowd.
It's basically an extension of what Trump did in 2016 when he took to Twitter in order to set the narrative pretty much every morning.
Instead, DeSantis decided that he was going to combine with Elon Musk, who is one of the most powerful people and richest person on earth, In order to introduce himself to a very large crowd.
And one of the big questions was going to be how that played.
And the other big question was going to be would it even work?
Well, not so much was the story of yesterday night.
So, about 6 p.m., bunch of people tuned in.
When I say a bunch of people, I mean a lot of people.
I mean 700,000 people simultaneously tuned in to listen to what Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk were willing to say to one another.
And they waited.
And then they waited some more.
And then, at about five, six minutes in, A few voices could be heard.
People whispering into microphones.
People not being clear if the tech was working.
And to a certain extent, it was like, wow, is this really what a campaign launch is going to sound like?
What is going on?
This is really weird.
On the other hand, I was like, wow, look at the authenticity.
This is cool.
Look what's happening.
And then it glitched out.
So you have 700,000 people who are waiting to hear what you have to say for your campaign launch, and it just glitches out.
Now, is that the fault of Ron DeSantis?
Of course not.
He doesn't run Twitter.
That is the fault of Musk's engineers.
That is the fault of Twitter Spaces for glitching out.
And again, when you launch a new technology, it's extremely, extremely risky.
Twitter Space is not a new technology, but carrying that sort of listener burden is a very, very new thing for Twitter Spaces to have to do.
And, you know, as co-founder of a tech company, of a new media company, I can tell you, we've had glitches ourselves.
We've been hacked.
You remember that when we premiered Matt Walsh's huge movie, What Is A Woman?
That day, we were literally hacked.
This sort of stuff does happen on a fairly routine basis, which is why if you're looking for kind of a safe and secure place in order to launch your campaign, Twitter Spaces was not it.
So the thing starts to fritz out.
Here's what it sounded like when Twitter Spaces started glitching.
We've got so many people here that I think we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign.
All right, I'd like to just introduce the folks in the room here.
So it's safe to say we wouldn't be making history without the man sitting next to me, Elon Musk.
His decision to purchase this platform last year to restore it to its original mission as a beacon for free speech and even to expose Twitter's past complicity with a government censorship regime might have surprised many, but not those of us who've known and worked with Elon for nearly a quarter century.
His commitment to freedom and his willingness to put his money where his mouth is upset the narrative imposed on us by our government.
And then it cut out.
And so 700,000 people were kicked out of that Twitter space.
So they had to launch a second Twitter space.
And it took a while for people to be able to log on.
I couldn't even log on, I'll be honest.
I was trying to re-log in so that I could actually listen, and it just kept kicking me out and saying the Twitter space was dead.
So, complete tech failure.
Like, complete tech blowout.
That was a huge problem.
And if you're going to launch, obviously optics matter.
A fair bit.
If you remember the biggest campaign launches in our history, you'll remember that Donald Trump, of course, in 2016 did the famous descent down the escalator at Trump Tower and people mocked it.
Oh my God, what is he doing?
That's so crazy.
And it turns out that became incredibly iconic.
And sure, a lot of the people who were sort of in the rafters were apparently paid.
Who cares?
It doesn't matter.
That was an iconic showmanship thing.
This was supposed to be the introduction to a new wave of politics in which, again, legacy media was cut out of the loop and something new was going to happen.
And people in the media, of course, started painting this immediately as egg on DeSantis' face.
Again, his advance team should have worked with Twitter to make sure this was not going to happen.
The true egg should be on the face of the people over at Twitter Spaces who, again, failed DeSantis and failed Musk in this particular situation.
Musk himself, on the second go-around, he said, yeah, the servers are pretty clearly straining somewhat.
Just a massive number of people online, so it's servers are straining somewhat.
That awkwardness is going to make for a thousand memes.
It's going to make for a lot of mockery, of course.
And that's precisely what happened, as you would imagine.
The substance got left behind in favor of all of the coverage of the kind of craziness of a campaign launch where you can't even hear the person who is launching the campaign and hundreds of thousands of people are trying to get in.
Joe Biden, of course, responded by tweeting out a link to his own campaign, saying, here is a link that works.
I'd like to personally congratulate Rob DeSanctimonious.
Rob DeSanctimonious!
Donald Trump responded in a typically Trumpian fashion.
And again, the people who love this kind of stuff, love this kind of stuff.
The people who think that, you know, maybe this campaign is going to be a fight between
substance and style, maybe see that contrast pretty strongly right here.
So Trump, before this happened, he tweeted out, I personally, I'd like to personally congratulate Rob DeSanctimonious.
Rob DeSanctimonious, they call him Rob.
I'm finally announcing that he will be entering the race for president of the United States.
Hopefully, he will get the full experience of being attacked by the Marxists, the Communists, and the radical left lunatics of our country.
Without which, he will never know the kind of job he is doing.
These lowlifes and misfits are far worse than the leaders of hostile foreign countries.
They must be soundly defeated in order to make America great again!
That was before the launch?
So first of all, I don't understand why he's calling Ron DeSantis Rob.
It's because I think there was a typo in one of his tweets.
And so now he's made this a thing.
He's going to call him Rob.
Again, this is all sixth grade, silly kind of garbage.
I'm sorry.
Like calling people Rob when their name is Ron.
What are we, like 10?
I mean, apparently the answer is yes, because it works.
But like still, like, I guess if you're thrilled with that sort of thing, OK, fair enough.
And then, of course, he then responded to the glitchy failure of the Twitter Space launch.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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Okay, so Trump continued along these lines in attacking DeSantis and the Twitter launch.
So, he also tweeted out, again, calling Ron DeSantis Rob, which is apparently his new thing.
Not sure I get it, but okay.
Rob, my red button is bigger, better, stronger, and is working.
Truth!
I think he's on Truth Social as opposed to Twitter.
So, first of all, I'd like to point out here that Truth Social has never supported 700,000 people simultaneously streaming anything.
Like, so, if we're talking about the back end of Twitter versus the back end of Truth Social, eh.
But, Rob, Rob.
Okay, ma'am.
My red button is bigger, stronger, and is working.
Yours does not, per my conversation with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, soon to become my friend.
Okay?
Well, okay?
Alright.
So that was response number two.
Is that he is best friends with Kim Jong-un and has a big, strong red button.
So strong.
Bigger, better, stronger.
Red button.
Rub.
And then, of course, no Trump tweet thread would be complete without his team texting out all of the different headlines from the media outlets who were very, very upset and very shocked and appalled at the failure of the Twitter Spaces launch.
They tweeted out, Ron DeSantis' Twitter disaster.
Then it was headlines from Breitbart News.
No safe spaces.
Twitter launch debacle for DeSantis.
Daily Mail.
Biggest fail in campaign launches in history.
Ron DeSantis' mock for Shambhala Twitter room presidential announcement with Elon Musk that crashes five times and leaves users bamboozled.
Just the News.
DeSantis' announcement met with major tech issues.
Trump reacts with meme.
The Washington Post.
Twitter repeatedly crashes as DeSantis tries to make presidential announcement.
CNN!
Glitches, echoes, and melting the servers crash DeSantis' campaign launch on Twitter.
The New York Times, DeSantis' big moment goes awry with the Twitter meltdown.
So Trump did have one more response.
He put out a truth social, a fake Twitter spaces, including an AI voice of Elon Musk and an AI voice of Ron DeSantis.
And then also his Twitter space, his imagined Twitter space for Ron DeSantis' launch includes, I kid you not, Elon Musk, Ron DeSantis, George Soros, Klaus Schwab, Dick Cheney, Adolf Hitler, the Devil, and the FBI.
This is, I guess, Trump's idea of a funny response to the Twitter space campaign launch, is that DeSantis' backers include Soros, Adolf Hitler, Satan, and the FBI.
Which, um, ooh, boomer meme energy coming in strong here.
Can you hear me?
We can all hear you, George.
Can you just hold on for a second?
KILFA!
I don't think they can hear me.
I can hear you fine, George.
Just speak to the microphone.
I don't think George knows how to use Twitter.
Hello!
Uh, can you hear me now?
Can I please make my big announcement now?
Everyone just- Hello!
Just shut up, George!
Can somebody just mute George?
Dick, could you try not to cough on the phone?
Okay, so how are we going to take out Trump, you guys?
Guys from the FBI, this is not a private call.
This is a public Twitter space.
Everyone can listen in.
Anyway, guys, we invited everyone to this Twitter space, so Governor Ron DeSantis could...
Everyone just shut the hell up so I can make my announcement, okay?
You go, girl.
Wait, the devil is gay?
So what?
Everyone in this call is gay.
Yeah, this is what Trump put out.
So, um, them's your choices for the Republican primary, I guess.
I guess.
Sort of.
Okay, so that is Trump's response.
And of course, the media pick up on this also, as you can imagine, right?
All those headlines are from mainstream media outlets, the vast majority of them.
And meanwhile, you have, you know, overt fans of Trump like David Jolly on MSNBC declaring this just a full-scale disaster, total disaster.
This is the biggest day in the political life of Ron and Casey DeSantis, and it has become absolutely humiliating, rawly embarrassing, emasculating, mortifying.
Who's your word?
This has been a disaster for Ron and Casey DeSantis, because even the decision to do this on Twitter spaces leans into the weirdness of Ron DeSantis.
And it also suggests his greatest vulnerability is this idea that he's governor safe space, that he can only be approached and he can only get in front of people if it's been orchestrated and he's in a bubble.
So he does it on Twitter spaces.
And then we get to the real dangerous part, the ideology he associates tonight.
With someone who has a platform for regressive ideology, Elon Musk, and it brings to the forefront these themes that are the Christian white nationalist themes that bring up his culture war and his marginalizing of already marginalized communities in the state of Florida.
So David Jolly, a former congressperson, now an SMSC, it's a disaster.
And Joy Reid, I mean, Joy Reid is so happy.
If you can't see the clip, Joy Reid looks like she needs to smoke a cigarette after all of that.
And there's a reason that MSNBC is happy.
And listen, is that good for DeSantis?
Of course it's not good for DeSantis.
It's not good for DeSantis because, again, one of DeSantis' basic pitches is, I'm extremely competent.
I'm good at what I do.
All you're gonna get from me is like the meat and the potatoes of politics.
You're gonna get good policy, and it's not gonna be a shambolic bleep show.
And then, of course, you get what you got on Twitter spaces.
So that's a bad look.
That's a bad look.
Now, Does this mean the campaign is over?
So many members of the media are like, the campaign is now over.
Guys, will you calm your asses down for like half a second?
The campaign ain't even 24 hours old at this point.
The campaign has barely begun.
And in fact, there are polls out that are showing that basically Trump and DeSantis in the primaries, in many of these states are head and head.
When it comes to a head-to-head matchup between Trump and DeSantis without any of these other candidates in the race, the latest Marquette poll shows Trump and DeSantis pretty close to even, like Trump at 52, DeSantis at 48.
There are other polls showing him way ahead because you include the other candidates, and they start picking away at DeSantis' support.
In other words, it is very, very early.
And remember, there's no such thing.
I mean, if there's one thing we know from the Trump presidency, there is no such thing as a 72-hour news cycle.
There's only a 48-hour news cycle.
So if you are suggesting that the shambolic nature of the Twitter Space's launch is somehow going to cripple DeSantis' campaign for the long haul, I have a tough time believing you.
That does not mean that it was a good launch.
It was not a good launch.
It was a very, very bad launch.
And it was a bad launch because, again, it undermines the reality of DeSantis' campaign, which is He's an excellent governor.
He's very good at what he does.
He's going to hit all his marks.
And then when your launch is, you don't hit the marks.
And when you're running against the greatest showman in presidential political history, a person who literally made his name on being a showman, that is not what you are looking for.
So DeSantis, for his part, tried to respond to this.
By saying that basically this is a victory.
The reason it's a victory is not because Twitter Space has crashed.
The reason it's a victory is because, I mean, Donald Trump had to stack, like, a room with his supporters in Mar-a-Lago in order to do a launch, and it was pretty disappointing, as you will recall.
At least DeSantis can claim that he had 700,000 people, minimum, who were ready to watch simultaneously him announce this actual thing.
Here was Governor Ron DeSantis announcing that they broke the internet.
We had a huge audience.
It did.
It was the biggest they'd ever had.
It did break the Twitter space.
And so we're really excited with the enthusiasm.
But ultimately, it's about the future of our country.
Trey, I'm running to lead a great American comeback.
We know the country's on the wrong track.
We see it with our eyes.
We feel it in our bones.
We see the border being overrun.
We see crime infesting the cities.
We see the federal government making it more difficult for families to make ends meet.
And we have a president Who is a listless vessel, not energetic, and not dealing with the key challenges that are facing our country.
But it does not have to be this way.
Our decline as a country is not inevitable.
It is a choice.
And I think we can choose a better pathway.
Okay, so, Team Stance's response, again, you gotta spin this somehow in the way they're spinning it, and it's not false, but it obviously doesn't overcome the sort of glitchy failure of Twitter spaces, is, there were so many people who wanted to see me that obviously there's a crowd.
And, again, that is not incorrect.
They did, in fact, break the internet, although, obviously, they would be better off if the internet had not been broken.
And so in just one second, we'll see exactly what DeSantis said, because again, so much of this is about the optics and optics matter.
But you know what else matters is kind of what DeSantis would do as president of the United States.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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Okay, so let me get to the actual content.
Okay, so I'm not sure there's ever been a campaign launch in which the optics contrast so strongly with the content.
The optics of this were a mess, obviously.
It launches on a failing Twitter space, It's got, you know, one of the most iconoclastic people on planet Earth, Elon Musk, hosting the thing.
And then you get to the content.
And DeSantis is a bread and butter, meat and potatoes, conservative politician who's able to get things done.
And that's really what his launch was about.
Now, you know, you can say there's no such thing as bad publicity, but again, the contrast here is not particularly great for DeSantis, but if you get to the substance, the substance is really, really good, as always, because DeSantis is really good at this.
That's the thing.
If you had to pick between, forget about, you know, all of the media battles for a second, forget about whose style you prefer, right?
Ron DeSantis, who's very, very direct and linear in his style, or Trump, who, you know, comes swinging out of the trees on a vine, punching people.
Right, like, forget about the style for a second and focus in on who gets things done.
Who won the last election in Florida by 20 points?
Who's taken a state that was really, really purple and turned it bright red?
Who has implemented conservative policies across the board in the state of Florida?
And the answer is, obviously, DeSantis when it comes to policy.
And so when it came to the substance, when he actually sat with Musk and with David Sachs and they took questions from a variety of different people in the chat, This is like what DeSantis is good at.
He's actually good at the business of governing.
So here's what it sounded like when DeSantis announced his run.
I understand that you may have an announcement to make.
We've got, I think, a record audience assembled here.
You know, probably the biggest room that's probably ever been assembled online.
What would you like to tell them?
Well, I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American combat.
Okay, and then he launched into his actual political speech.
The first six, seven minutes of this call were taken up by DeSantis explaining exactly what he was going to do.
He started with a description of our challenges under Joe Biden.
Look, we know our country's going in the wrong direction.
We see it with our eyes.
And we feel it in our bones.
Our southern borders collapse.
Drugs are pouring into the country.
Our cities are being hollowed out by spiking crime.
The federal government's making it harder for the average family to make ends meet and to attain and maintain a middle-class lifestyle.
And our president, well, he lacks vigor, flounders in the face of our nation's challenges, and he takes his cues from the woke mob.
Now, obviously, all of that is true.
And then he suggested that basically what he was looking to do is restore sanity to the nation, which, by the way, is a good campaign.
OK, the best campaign, the best version of the Republican campaign here is not wild, crazy mud fight.
The best version of the Republican campaign is Joe Biden is a very bad president who's not up to the job.
He's wrecked the economy.
He's wrecked our foreign policy.
He's wrecked our border.
He's wrecked us socially.
You know what would be awesome?
Normality.
Here's DeSantis making that case.
We must restore sanity to our nation.
This means embracing fiscal and economic sanity.
Stop pricing hardworking Americans out of a good standard of living through inflationary borrow, print and spending policies.
And please embrace American energy independence.
This also means replacing the woke mind virus with reality, facts and enduring principles.
Merit must trump identity politics.
We must return normalcy to our communities.
America is a sovereign country.
Our borders must be respected.
We cannot have foreigners pouring into our country illegally by the millions.
We cannot allow drug cartels to poison our population with fentanyl.
Public deserves safe communities and law and order must be maintained in American cities.
Okay, again, all that is bread and butter kind of stuff that I think 80% of Americans agree with.
That's the kind of stuff that you're going to get from DeSantis.
And again, that's why the Twitter Space's launch was a negative for him, although the numbers, again, were very, very large.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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Okay, so, DeSantis continued his actual announcement once he got past all of the headlines about the glitchiness.
He got to his actual—his actual announcement was quite good.
Here he was talking about defending law enforcement and restoring honor to the military.
We can't have inmates running the asylum, and we must reject attacks on the men and women of law enforcement.
We also must reestablish integrity in our institutions.
This includes the military.
I'm proud to be a Navy veteran, an Iraq veteran, and I revere our services, but when revered institutions like those in our military are more concerned with matters not central to the mission, whether it's global warming or gender ideology and pronouns, Morale declines and recruiting suffers.
And you need to eliminate these distractions and we need to get focused on the core mission.
Okay.
All of that happens to be correct.
And then he ripped into unelected bureaucrats.
He went through sort of the rest of his campaign spiel.
But the part that really mattered, there are two things he said in this that really matter.
And these are going to be the contrasts going into 2024.
He says, listen, politics is not entertainment.
Governing is not entertainment.
We get results here.
This is going to be the actual pitch for Ron DeSantis, is you want the glitz, you want the glamour, you want the distractions, you want the crazy entertainment of it, I'm probably not your guy.
If you want somebody who's actually going to govern strongly, who's going to get done what you need to get done, if you'd like to win in policy terms, well then I am your guy and I have the receipts to prove it because I'm running a state that has gained hundreds of thousands of citizens since 2020 thanks to conservative governance.
Here he was talking about how governing is not entertainment.
Obviously he's subtweeting Trump here.
But we also understand governing is not entertainment.
It's not about building a brand or virtue signaling.
It is about delivering results.
And our results in Florida have been second to none.
We can and we must deliver big results for America.
You know, DeSantis talked about COVID, he talked about how he did not allow vax mandates in the state, which is true, and how freedom was threatened by COVID-19 authoritarianism.
These are all going to be points of comparison with Donald Trump.
The rest of this campaign is going to be about Ron DeSantis calling out Donald Trump on making Anthony Fauci a world-famous figure, and then allowing him to essentially run his policy in fragmentary fashion, while simultaneously suggesting that Operation Warp Speed is the greatest thing to ever happen in the history of humanity.
And saying that Georgia should lock down and then saying Georgia should not lock down, Michigan should be free.
It was all very right.
DeSantis was very consistent in his policy.
He was always looking at data.
So that's going to be one point of differentiation.
Another point of differentiation, he's going to say, listen, you want to talk law and order?
I literally paid a stipend to cops to come to the state of Florida, 10 grand a piece during the Black Lives Matter riots.
You were tweeting out.
Your campaign was literally tweeting out in support of George Floyd protesters.
That is a thing that did happen in the middle of summer 2020.
Donald Trump did not deploy the National Guard.
You talk about building a wall.
You didn't complete the wall.
You're the president.
You had a Republican Congress.
You didn't get the wall done, right?
These are all going to be points that DeSantis is going to be able to make.
And Trump doesn't have a great rebuttal to a lot of that sort of stuff.
Trump's rebuttal is probably going to be calling him Rob.
It's probably going to be suggesting that he has no personnel.
It's all going to be personal stuff.
So that's going to be the choice, I think.
In this Republican primary, if you think it's really a two-person primary, which I do, it's gonna be, you know, you love the personality of Trump, you think he is wild, then he's eccentric, and that's the only way things get done.
Okay, I hear.
I don't think that it's fully justified by his administration.
And I don't think it's justified by the election of 2020, 2021, or 2020, but I hear, I get the argument and I understand why people love it.
And then the other side of the argument is going to be DeSantis saying, listen, you can speculate on Trump or you can earn a very nice, consistent rate of return by investing in my candidacy.
And that was essentially his pitch.
He said, listen, there's no substitute for victory.
Whining is not a substitute for victory.
Complaining about losing is not a substitute for victory.
Pretending you won when you're not the president is not a substitute for victory.
Here was DeSantis.
There is no substitute for victory.
We must end the culture of losing that has infected the Republican Party in recent years.
The tired dogmas of the past are inadequate for a vibrant future.
We must look forward, not backwards.
We need the courage to lead, and we must have the strength to win.
And to voters who are participating in this primary process, my pledge to you is this.
If you nominate me, You can set your clock to January 20th, 2025 at high noon.
Because on the west side of the U.S.
Capitol, I will be taking the oath of office as the 47th President of the United States.
No excuses.
I will get the job done.
Hey, that's the big pledge, right?
If you nominate me, I will take office, because I will win.
And here's the thing.
DeSantis can answer the question that Trump cannot.
So, Trump has one question that he cannot answer, and I've been asking everyone around him, and I don't... Trump still has not given an answer.
None of his supporters have given an answer.
Let's assume that Trump is right and that the election of 2020 was stolen from him.
Like, full-on stolen.
And I don't mean, like, soft-rigged.
I mean, not in the way that I agree with.
Not in the way that, like, Facebook was suppressing content that was beneficial to Trump and harmful to Biden.
Or, like, the rules changed in the last few months of the campaign because of COVID and allowed for a massive increase in mail-in ballots that obviously benefited Democrats.
I agree with all of that.
In a soft sense, the election of 2020 was rigged, but Trump talks about it in the hard sense.
He thinks that it was like actual voter fraud, fake ballots that were being bused into Fulton County in the middle of the night and then tabulated.
That's the thing that Trump has actually claimed in Arizona, in Georgia.
He hasn't really mentioned it so much in Wisconsin and Michigan, which is weird, because even if he'd won Arizona and Georgia, if he loses Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, he's still not the president.
But put all that aside, let's assume that what Trump says is absolutely correct, that it was full-on stolen from him in 2020.
The question I've asked, and that no one has answered so far, because it's a relevant question, is how do you plan to reverse this?
Truly, how do you plan to reverse this?
What is your actual plan for becoming president of the United States?
Your case is that the system was so out to get you that hundreds of thousands of ballots were literally changed in order to prevent you from becoming the president.
Going on Truth Social and mouthing off about it is not going to change that result.
So what exactly is your plan to change that result?
Now, the thing about DeSantis is that he actually does have a plan.
Okay, DeSantis is in the state of Florida, for example, and this has been true since the 2018 gubernatorial race.
DeSantis is extremely meticulous about how he runs a campaign.
It is not thinly staffed.
He is not going to rely on the vicissitudes of the media in order to buoy his campaign.
He will actually get people out on the ground knocking on doors.
He's going to make sure that there are people who are harvesting ballots in the states where ballot harvesting is legal.
He's going to make sure that he competes on every front, as opposed to Trump, who in 2020, late 2020, early 2021, told the voters of Georgia not to vote in the Georgia Senate race because he was so mad about how Georgia went that he basically handed two seats in the United States Senate to the Democrats, leading to the greatest unprecedented spending binge in American history.
That doesn't happen if Trump doesn't tell people to stay home in Georgia.
Unlike that, DeSantis looked at the state of Florida.
He's like, okay, well, you know, they're doing ballot harvesting.
They're organizing in a particular way.
What if we just out-organize them?
What if we just out-do it?
And then he won by 20 points.
That's the way you actually win.
By the way, you know who else knows this is Brian Kemp.
Won a sweeping victory in Georgia at the same time that Trump was losing Georgia and two Georgia senators were losing their seats because people didn't show up to vote in the runoff.
So, that's the actual plan.
If you believe, if you're a believer that elections get stolen, the only way to defeat that is to actually mobilize on the ground and change how you do the elections.
Not to bitch about it on Truth Social.
So DeSantis can actually make that case because that's actually what he has done in the state of Florida.
That's going to be the final line of attack I think that DeSantis is probably going to use against Trump.
Now, again, Trump's line of attacks are pretty clear at this point.
He's going to call him Rob.
He's going to suggest that he's Meatball Ron.
He's going to do this sort of stuff.
And maybe you're thrilled with that.
Okay.
Maybe you find it entertaining.
Okay.
The question is, who do you think is most likely to beat Biden?
So, when I say that DeSantis is actually pretty good at the game of politicking, let me point out that despite the Twitter Space's debacle, and it was a debacle, the launch, the glitch failure was a debacle, that despite that, in the first hour after that, in the first hour after that, the DeSantis campaign raised $1 million.
To put that in perspective, When Donald Trump declared that the DA in Manhattan was about to prosecute him, it took him three days to raise $1.5 million.
In the first hour, DeSantis raised $1 million.
DeSantis currently has $200 million in the bank.
The New York Times has a full article talking about how DeSantis is preparing an outreach push so big That they plan to knock on the door of every possible DeSantis voter at least four times in New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, and five times in the kickoff Iowa caucuses.
The effort is part of an on-the-ground organizing operation that intends to hire more than 2,600 field organizers by Labor Day, an extraordinary number of people for even the best-funded campaigns.
Top officials with the pro-DeSantis group, a super PAC called Never Back Down, provided their most detailed account yet of their battle plan to aid DeSantis, who may believe they can sell as the only candidate to take on and win the cultural fights that are definitional for the Republican Party in 2024.
The group said it expected to have an overall budget of at least $200 million, including more than $80 million to be transferred from an old DeSantis state political account for the daunting task of vaulting the Florida governor past former President Donald J. Trump.
Okay, so.
That's how you win elections, by the way.
Right?
It is not.
I understand.
We here on the show, we talk about 30,000 foot politics, right?
What's in the headlines, what people are saying today.
But the truth is the vast majority of the American public does not register politics on that granular level.
They just don't.
That's why the voter turnout rates in this country are like 65%.
The way that people actually consume politics is they have a generalized feeling.
What does that mean?
It means that voter turnout matters.
It means hard on the ground work matters.
It means that staffing up your campaign matters.
So, you get to choose.
Which candidate do you think is most likely to beat Joe Biden?
And the reality is that if you look past the style of the Twitter launch and to the substance of what he was actually saying, if you look past the style, to the substance of what DeSantis has achieved as the governor of Florida, if you look past the style of Trump on Truth Social blasting out weird videos of fake A.I.
voices, of Elon Musk and Adolf Hitler and Satan talking with Ron DeSantis, and you look to, you know, spending money on the ground, getting people to knock on doors, that is actually how you win elections.
Now, that doesn't mean that DeSantis is going to beat Trump in the primaries.
Trump obviously has the upper hand.
He's the most famous person in America.
Republicans generally love the guy.
Understandably, he was a great president for the first three years.
I think the last year was a real problem for him, obviously, which is why he's not the president anymore.
And he had a real problem with being unable to activate the filter between his brain and his mouth, which is why he's not president anymore.
I said all the time during the Trump administration that if you could just take Twitter away from Donald Trump, he would never have stopped being president.
He would have continued to be president.
He'd be president right now.
With all that said, Republican primary voters, anybody who suggests that last night was the end of the campaign, no, no, no, no.
Last night was just the beginning of the campaign, no matter how badly things went on Twitter spaces.
Okay, in just one second, we'll get to something that's going very badly for Joe Biden, and that, of course, is the debt ceiling fight first.
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If you're looking for something interesting to watch, you need to check out what we saw.
It's hosted by storyteller Bill Whittle.
Season 1 focused on Apollo 11.
Season 2 is all about the Cold War.
In episode 11, we continue on as a fearless fighter pilot breathes new life into discouraged American aviators during the Vietnam War as they defy outdated tactics and execute a lightning-fast surprise attack, shaping one of history's most remarkable military operations.
Bill makes you feel like you're there witnessing history.
You'll learn so much about the Cold War in entertaining and fascinating fashion.
New episodes Okay, meanwhile, Joe Biden is having a very rough time of it on this debt ceiling fight.
Again, he is trapped between a rock and a hard place because on the one hand, he doesn't want the debt ceiling to be hit.
If the debt ceiling is hit, a couple of bad things happen for Joe Biden.
One, serious financial turmoil.
So a lot of people are going to wonder whether the U.S.
debt is actually good.
It's going to be a very difficult time actually raising new debt in order to pay for the old debt and all the rest of it.
So that's problem number one.
Problem number two is if we hit the debt ceiling, the truth is we'll continue to pay our debt.
That is mandatory spending.
It's the discretionary spending that is going to get cut.
That discretionary spending is what keeps Democrats afloat.
It ain't Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.
Those things are mandatory spending.
It is going to be all the discretionary spending that is going to get cut.
It's going to be COVID spending.
It's going to be infrastructure bill, Green New Deal garbage that is going to get cut.
And Biden's going to have to go back to his base and explain why all that stuff is being cut if we hit the debt ceiling.
So these are two serious problems for Joe Biden.
And then he's created for himself a third problem, which is that he took the very strong position of, I'm not going to negotiate under any bag of salmon.
And then he has to negotiate because it turns out that he does not run the Congress and there is a co-equal branch of government called the legislature that sometimes you have to negotiate with.
So, he can always rely on the media to do his dirty work for him.
The Washington Post says, This is precisely the opposite of what is actually happening.
The actual thing that is happening is that the Republicans passed a bill raising the debt ceiling and saying, And Joe Biden has summarily dismissed all of that and then claimed that he is negotiating.
This is false.
The Washington Post says, quote, ahead of another round of negotiations
with the White House, McCarthy told Republicans they had the upper hand in the discussions
and encouraged his members to show their support for colleagues facing tough reelect bids next year
as a sign of unity.
McCarthy urged members to make sure vulnerable lawmakers would have plenty of campaign money from GOP coffers.
The overture reflects the GOP's determination to stay unified behind spending cuts,
even as the nation heads toward the brink of default, despite a rapidly approaching deadline,
a White House suddenly eager to compromise and a Democratic-led effort to push a petition
that could force a vote on raising the debt ceiling over McCarthy's objections.
So first of all, no.
That petition is not going to succeed.
You have to have a majority of votes in order to get that petition to succeed.
Number two, the White House is not suddenly eager to compromise.
If they were, they would just sign off on the bill.
And in fact, the same Washington Post is noting that Democrats are very nervous over this whole battle.
battle, quote, Democrats worry grows over White House approach to that talks.
House Democratic leaders are voicing frustration over President Biden's approach to negotiating a debt
ceiling deal with Republicans, worrying that their priorities are
not being championed aggressively enough,
and that Biden hasn't more forcefully pushed back publicly against Republican demands.
So you have the left wing of the Democratic Party, and they're very, very angry at Joe Biden
for not holding the line.
Hakeem Jeffries has acknowledged that Representative Sheila Jackson Lee's team pushing the Democrats to not compromise
are really pushing him.
Jeffries has not yet raised the question with the president, according to a person familiar with the situation who, like others who spoke to the Washington Post, did so on condition of anonymity.
Jeffrey said, Well, he can say whatever he wants, but the reality is that if we hit the debt ceiling here after Republicans have appeared as the moderates who actually want to compromise, Joe Biden is going to feel the full brunt of the American public.
Right now, it is a dead even split in the polling on who gets blamed if the debt ceiling gets breached.
But let's be real about this.
If the economy itself sinks, it ain't gonna be congressional Republicans who pay that price.
It's gonna be the president of the United States.
Janet Yellen, for her part, is trying to bring the pressure.
She says that the U.S.
could become unable to meet all of its financial obligations as soon as June 1st.
This, by the way, is not fully true.
As I say, we'll continue to pay our debt.
We'll just have to cut discretionary spending.
I will plan to update Congress shortly and try to increase the level of precision.
You know, there's a lot of uncertainty about government payments and receipts even a few weeks out, and it's hard to be precise about exactly which day we will run out of resources.
But early June seems almost certain that we will not be able to get past early June, and I do intend to provide an update pretty soon.
Okay, meanwhile, the Democrats are trying to cram through the idea that Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans are the ones who are extremists on all this.
The problem is that narrative already got away from them.
When the Republicans passed a bill that increased the debt ceiling, Democrats were wrong-footed and they have not adjusted in any way, shape, or form.
Here's Corinne Jean-Pierre, world's worst White House press secretary, explaining that, you know, if we default, there will be a recession.
Yeah, we know, so maybe your boss should sign something.
A default would have catastrophic impacts in every single part of this country, whether you're in a red state or in a blue state.
It doesn't matter.
Every single part of the country.
We're talking about millions of jobs lost, devastated retirement accounts, and a recession.
Okay, so who are you?
I don't understand.
Again, if the American public perceives that you guys are the ones who are not being moderate on making a compromise, you're basically talking the American public into blaming your guy.
It's very bizarre.
The irrepressibly stupid Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the representative from Twitch and also Brooklyn, she says that McCarthy is engaging in quote-unquote extortion.
Extortion!
Here we go.
The reason why anyone is asking anyone on this stage about what we would vote for is because Kevin McCarthy needs our votes.
So if he wants any Democratic support, he has to come to the table.
And we have seen him over and over again say that he will not negotiate, that they are engaged in hostage taking, not negotiation, extortion, not conversation.
And that is not something we can establish.
It is not something we can reinforce in this country.
Um, except for McCarthy already passed the bill.
Like, they just, it's amazing.
Honestly, Joe Biden, it's the biggest political blunder that I've seen a president make just as a pure matter of political gamesmanship.
The president always has the advantage in a debt ceiling standoff because he can say, listen, we need to raise the debt ceiling.
I'm willing to make a few minor compromises, but it's imperative that we not breach the debt ceiling.
Joe Biden started off with, I'm not making any compromise.
I'm not even talking about this.
We're not going to have a conversation.
And Republicans were like, okay, we'll pass a bill that raises the debt ceiling.
Now who looks like the moderate?
The only way that the Democrats can try to buy this back in the face of their own base is presumably to try and blame McCarthy, but it's just not working.
Pramila Jayapal, the progressive leader from Washington, she says that raising the debt ceiling is a sacred principle.
Amazing what the Democrats consider sacred, right?
Abortion, same-sex marriage, transing of the children, and raising the debt ceiling.
These are sacred items to Democratic leadership.
Ranking member of the Budget Committee, Brendan Boyle, has a great bill on this to take care of the debt ceiling, allow the Treasury Secretary to raise the debt ceiling.
Many of us are proud to be on that bill.
I think this is really important because I think there used to be this idea that the debt ceiling was sort of sacred, you know, that you, it was just paying your bills.
This had already been negotiated.
It was already agreed to.
And what we've seen is Republicans increasingly taking on those very sacred principles of Keeping the economy going, of not defaulting, of not throwing people into uncertainty and chaos.
Yeah, that's what progressives are famous for, is paying their bills and not throwing people into uncertainty and chaos.
Meanwhile, again, McCarthy is coming out of this looking pretty good at this point.
Again, it's a pretty astonishing turn of events for the Speaker of the House, who was largely derided for his near inability to gain the speakership.
This is pretty good gamesmanship here from McCarthy.
Listen to how moderate McCarthy sounds when he talks about the debt limit talks.
We need to have a deal this week in order to avoid default.
I still believe that.
I still believe we have time to make an agreement and get it done.
Are you confident about that, Mr. Speaker?
Look, I'm confident at the end of the day that if you watched anything about my life, I never give up at anything.
We will get a deal when we have one worthy of the American public.
So, again, pretty moderate.
And then McCarthy points out we've offered a lot of concessions at this point, so what exactly is the problem?
You're going to need Democratic votes, probably in the House, definitely in the Senate.
You have a Democrat in the White House.
Why not offer a single concession beyond saying we're not going to default?
We've offered a lot of concessions.
The cap on the spending is a Democrat idea.
The work requirement was a Democrat idea.
I can't help it if the Democrats have become so extreme and now it's a party of Bernie Sanders than the party where Joe Biden was elected.
Joe Biden is the President of the United States.
He is the head Democrat.
But if AOC and Bernie Sanders is going to run their party, that's not my fault.
He is right, and it makes Joe Biden look very bad.
And so if the debt ceiling gets breached, Joe Biden is going to pay the price for that.
Again, very, very bad strategy here by the President of the United States.
Okay, meanwhile, we are quickly reaching the point, thank God, in corporate America,
where corporate paymasters, they're starting to realize that the only winning move is not to play a la war games.
That you can't mess around, because if you do, you're gonna find out.
Bud Light found that out when they got absolutely trashed.
I've never seen a brand get trashed harder than Bud Light has now been trashed.
They literally cannot give away beer.
You're seeing pictures from like Walmart of just free stacks of Bud Light
and nobody picking them up.
Because nobody wants to, what dude is interested in purchasing
or even drinking the beer that is associated with a brand that believes that men are women
Like it's just not a thing that a lot of dudes are going to do.
Well now, Target has really stepped in it and they've got a real problem on their hands.
So remember, it wasn't just that Target was pushing the Pride Month stuff.
They've been doing that for years.
And it was annoying and people kind of ignored it.
Then they started pushing not just Pride Month but like giant Pride displays everywhere because during the month of June we get the Holy Month of Pride and during the Holy Month of Pride everything is covered in rainbow vomit.
It's important that every single product be covered in rainbow vomit.
Every single one.
And not just that, now also in Pride Progress.
Vomit.
So trans vomit.
So you have to have some you have to have some bathing suits in which boys can tuck their twig and berries underneath themselves.
They can look more like girls.
You have to make sure that you have baby onesies talking about bisexuality over at Target.
And people don't like this very much.
They also didn't like that Target had started retailing in partnership with a UK based brand called ABAPralen to sell merchandise And a search on Target's website found some of the items.
Those items were designed by a person named Eric Carnell, an outspoken Satanist, whose brand features occult imagery and messages like, Satan respects pronouns on brand apparel.
Which is just delightful.
Abprallen also sells merch with aggressive messaging attacking critics, pins with the phrases, heteronormity is a plague, and burn down the system are featured on the website, along with one that says, homophobe headrest with an image of a guillotine.
So, um, I mean, no argument.
No argument from me.
They think that that's not literal.
I think it's a little literal.
I'm not a believer in the Christian version of Satan.
LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign people.
So, um, I mean, no argument.
No argument for me.
They think that that's not literal.
I think it's a little literal.
I'm not a believer in the Christian version of Satan.
Like Satan is almost a Gnostic.
But anyway, I'm out.
Gnostic opponent of God, you know, the fallen angel who now opposes God's King Shepard.
That's not a Jewish concept of Satan.
But the idea that the Yetzir Hara, right, the evil inclination is very into pride, passion,
liberty and sexual license.
Yeah, I mean, yes.
So Target just got they're getting ripped up by a lot of their customer base.
And so now they've decided they're going to try to walk off it.
The problem is once you engage, you cannot disengage.
The Pride Progress team will not allow you to disengage.
You will be forced to re-engage.
And so now you're forced to play this two-step.
You got to take one side or another.
You need to be neutral and just provide products to people to buy them.
Or you can take a clear demarcation line on issues of the day.
Now what's amazing about this Is that you have people like Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who has done an absolutely horrific job in the state of California to the extent that 500,000 people left the state of California net between 2020 and 2022.
And Gavin Newsom is out there tweeting about Target and suggesting this is just so terrible.
We can't allow this sort of thing ever, ever again.
And in fact, Gavin Newsom then started to do the The old holocaust poem, right?
First they came for the, and then they came for the, by the time they came for the Jews, there was no one left to defend me.
Okay, so Gavin Newsom tweeted, CEO of Target, Brian Cornell, selling out the LGBTQ plus community to extremists is a real profile in courage.
Well, why is he saying that?
Well, because Target decided to move some of their pride progress nonsense to the back of the store in states where it ain't that popular.
He said, this isn't just a couple of stores in the South.
There's a systemic attack on the gay community happening across the country.
Yes.
Gays across the country are under systemic threat in a country where gay marriage is not only legal, but now they are attempting to force your children to learn about it in kindergarten.
Wake up, America, says Gavin Newsom.
This doesn't stop here.
You're black.
You're Asian.
You're Jewish.
You're a woman.
You're next.
Yeah, you're right.
Probably Target's going to stop selling women's clothing.
Probably now.
And also, as a Jew, I'm feeling real threatened by people who are not into the transing of the children.
Like, as an Orthodox Jew, I feel super threatened.
You'll notice that Target has been selling Hanukkah gear for literally years.
Like, every Hanukkah season, a lot of Hanukkah gear.
Has there ever been a boycott of Target on that basis?
Nope.
Ain't nobody care.
You all have noticed that Target, for Black History Month, sells all sorts of black product.
Some of that stuff is pretty divisive.
Has anyone ever boycotted Target over that?
Not really.
Has there ever been an anti-Asian move against Target?
Nope.
It is only when you start trying to trans the kids that people start to get a little uptight, for good reason.
But again, now Target is stuck between a rock and a hard place of its own making, as all corporate brands will be.
So all you corporate brand leaders out there who are preparing for Pride Month, just remember, this could be you.
If you decide to step into this minefield, and then you get blown up, ain't no sympathy for you over here.
And in fact, some of us are quite happy to make an example of you.
If you decide to become the bleeding edge of the Pride Progress team attempting to foster a societal viewpoint that damages children and wrecks traditional morality.
You've seen the two-step here from the L.A.
Dodgers, right?
The L.A.
Dodgers are the most clear example.
They decide they're gonna have a pride night.
They've been having a pride night for years.
Nobody much cared.
Like, if you didn't like it, you just didn't go to the ballpark.
And then they decided, you know, we're gonna honor the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, which is an anti-Catholic group in which gay men and gay women dress and trans people dress up as Jesus and Mary in blasphemous... in blasphemous... sort of... displays.
And then the Dodgers had to walk that back because it turns out like a huge percentage of their fan base is Hispanic Catholic.
And then the LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign community was so mad that they reinstated the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
So here's what you guys can do.
Don't play the game.
Just sell the products and stop trying to proselytize on behalf of left-wing crap.
Not that tough.
Don't vomit rainbows everywhere during Pride Month.
Just sell pants.
I know this is real tough stuff here.
I know this is really bad.
By the way, this would make for a... You wanna know how you know I'm sincere about this?
It makes for a less lucrative America if we do this.
It makes for a less lucrative...
Daily Wiring.
We literally launched Jeremy's Razors on the back of woke brands.
We launched Jeremy's Chocolate on the back of woke brands.
If you guys want to keep polarizing this thing, we are happy to take money from people who feel scorned and upset because there are brands who hate their guts.
But you know what?
I'd prefer an America where you just go back to selling your product and stop trying to promote the idea that Rachel Levine is a moral exemplar to us all.
It's very simple.
Go back to neutral and all weapons go away.
But if you're going to play this game, play stupid games, win stupid prizes, F around and find out.
I've said it multiple times, there's a Harvard Business School study.
The Harvard Business School study shows that the left has basically been leveraging brands for the last couple of decades.
That left-wingers will use their ire against conservative corporations in order to rip on them, whether it's Chick-fil-A or whether it's Hobby Lobby.
They will go after them full-scale if they even perceive any whiff of conservatism.
Meanwhile, conservatives for literally decades have just been like, okay, it's a left-wing corporation, whatever, I'll still go there.
Not anymore.
Those days are over because you have pushed too far.
You have decided that it is imperative that you become the loudspeaker for a system of morality that disdains traditional institutions like the nuclear family, that disdains the Natural necessity of heterosexual relationships and pretends that all sexual activity is morally equivalent and equally fulfilling and entirely... And there should be moral apathy about all this stuff.
That's you.
You did it.
So now you have a choice.
You can go back to neutral and stop with this garbage, or you can continue to walk down this primrose path.
And I am more than happy to take my business elsewhere.
And more than that, we here at Dailyware, we're happy to start our own businesses that don't scorn our audience.
Target is, uh, if you think it's over for Target, it ain't over for Target, not by, uh, not by a damned long shot.
Okay, meanwhile, speaking of local news stories that became national news stories and then went back to being local news stories, this one's hilarious.
So, you'll remember that a couple of days ago, there was a man who crashed a U-Haul truck into a security barrier outside the White House.
Now, this sort of thing has happened before.
In fact, back in April of 2021, there was a police officer in Washington, D.C.
who was actually killed by a person who ran him over near the Capitol building.
We don't talk about that situation because it wasn't connected with January 6th.
You know the names of people like Brian Sicknick, who may have died as a result of January 6th, but did not die on January 6th, and it's still unclear.
You know his name.
You don't know the name of the officer who was killed in an actual quasi-terror attack by the U.S.
Capitol because the person who killed him was not actually, like, a MAGA member.
Okay, well, this is a perfect example of that sort of flip.
So, there's a man who crashed a U-Haul truck into a security barrier outside the White House.
And this was top of the news.
It was the biggest story in the country.
Why?
Because he had a Nazi flag.
He had a Nazi flag.
And he said that he was gonna kill President Biden.
And so, for a brief hot second, the media were like, ah!
Our dream scenario has emerged!
Here it is.
A white supremacist, MAGA-hatted, Jussie Smollett attacker who's about to ram into the White House with a U-Haul truck and a Nazi flag.
Oh!
All of our fancies are about to come true.
Members of the media were Jeffrey-tubing it.
They broke out the stores of KY.
They were really getting ready for just a party.
And then it turned out that the person who did it is a person named Sai Varshith Kandula.
And he is an illegal immigrant.
Ooh.
Uno.
A fuller picture of Kandula also began to emerge from an acquaintance who attended high school with him in suburban St.
Louis.
Apparently, the friends were shocked by allegations against him.
They portrayed him as quiet and kind.
They did not say what country he was originally from or when he arrived in the United States.
Assistant Federal Public Defender Diane Shrewsbury, who was appointed to represent Kandula, did not offer defense of Kandula in court.
Apparently, they say that it appears this guy is a crazy person.
In fact, Kandula liked to wear a surgical mask with Biden's name on it during the pandemic because he got a reaction from the people at Marquette University where he was going to school.
Kandula apparently, you know, has kind of lost his mind, and again, not here legally.
He told authorities he bought the flag because Nazis have a great history, and he admired their authoritarian nature, eugenics, and their one-world order, according to charging documents, and he called Adolf Hitler a strong leader.
But he wasn't a Trump supporter, so not a national news story.
We can't have a conversation about illegal immigration or who's in the country legally and who's not.
That would be a conversation media doesn't want to have.
So instead, we just won't have the conversation at all.
And so the story, poof, it disappeared.
It no longer exists.
Just like many local news stories, it popped into the news for a brief hot second, and then, like that, it was gone.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
Candace Owens, she made a documentary about Black Lives Matter.
It's called The Greatest Lie Ever Sold.
And it was all about how Black Lives Matter was a giant scam.
The entire organization was designed to make money for its founders.
It paid Patrisse Cullors a lot of money.
Hey, Patrisse Cullors' brother, a lot of money, like $1.6 million for security services in 2022.
Another sister of a board member earned $1.1 million for consulting.
They cleared tens of millions of dollars from ridiculous left-wing progressives in places like California who decided that they wanted to put a lawn sign on their lawn reading, in this house, black lives matter, water is delicious.
You know, that kind of garbage.
So all those idiots signed checks to Black Lives Matter and it was used by a black person, Patrisse Cullors, to purchase herself a very, very nice house.
Well now, according to the Daily Mail, BLM's national organization is at risk of going bankrupt after its finances plunged $8.5 million into the red last year while simultaneously handing multiple staff seven-figure salaries.
Oh, you mean it was a giant scam?
No, you shock me.
Financial disclosures obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show the perilous state of BLM Global Network Foundation, which officially emerged in November 2020 as a more formal way of structuring the civil rights movement.
Despite the financial controversy, BLM continued to hire relatives of Patrice Cullors and several board members.
Paul Cullors was one of BLM's only two paid employees during the year.
He collected $126,000 salary as head of security on top of consulting fees.
He is best known as a graffiti artist with no background in security.
For the previous year, 2021, tax filings revealed that BLM paid a company owned by Damon Turner, the father of Color's Child, nearly $970,000 to help produce live events and provide other creative services.
The sister of a former Black Lives Matter board member, Raymond Howard, was employed as a consultant.
That would be Daniel Edwards.
Her new impact partners was paid $1.1 million for consulting services in 2022.
So donations have plunged because everybody stopped feeling bad about the George Floyd of it all and decided to start sending their checks to their global warming scam pack.
So they just moved it from one scam pack to another scam pack.
But it is delicious to imagine how much money went to Black Lives Matter and their founders, and then all that money went directly
into somebody's pocket.
So just slow clap for the racial scam that paid off until they went bankrupt.
Yep, yep, yep.
Okay, meanwhile, some things that I hate.
So Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, he is a vicious, horrible anti-Semite.
He has been for years.
He pretends that his anti-Semitism is actually just anti-Zionism, but nope, it's actually just full-scale anti-Semitism.
So, apparently, over the last couple of days, he did a concert at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Berlin.
Now, Berlin, you'll recall, when it comes to, you know, anti-Semitism and Nazism, it has a history.
There's some things that happened in Germany.
A few things.
In fact, the brand Mercedes-Benz may have been involved in some of those things, actually.
Roger Waters decided it would be an excellent idea to dress up as an SS officer and then compare Anne Frank, the murdered 14-year-old Jewish girl, to Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu-Akhla, who was accidentally shot, probably, by IDF forces.
When I say probably, I don't mean that she was accidentally shot... Probably, like, accidentally.
I mean that probably IDF forces accidentally shot her.
It's still not clear whether that is the case or not, but let's assume it's the case after investigations.
Clearly, the IDF was not targeting a prominent journalist to kill her.
That would be a very stupid thing to do, and obviously, it is not what happened.
But that didn't stop Roger Waters.
That dude is now comparing a journalist who was accidentally killed in the middle of a shootout with terrorists to a 14-year-old girl In Denmark, who was taken out of an attic and shipped to Auschwitz, where she was gassed to death.
Because Roger Waters is a piece of human debris.
He is a garbage human being.
At the beginning of the show, an announcement was displayed on a screen reading, quote, Nope!
He is a vile piece of crap, and he hates the Jews.
ruled that I am NOT an anti-Semite. Just to be clear, I condemn anti-Semitism
unreservedly. Nope! He is a vile piece of crap and he hates the Jews. The Jews.
And then he compared, of course, a bunch of victims of the Nazis to various people
who've been killed in conflict with the Israelis.
He is... What a vile piece of garbage.
Guys, here's what it looked like.
♪♪ Uh, gross.
And terrible.
Yuck.
Alrighty, we've reached the end of this part of the show, but you don't want to miss what's coming up next.
We'll be speaking with Bishop Robert Barron.
We'll be talking about the Judaization of Catholicism.
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