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Feb. 16, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show

59:25

What You Talkin’ Bout, Willis?

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	Well, folks, there's something called the Dunning-Kruger effect.
	The Dunning-Kruger effect is a bias in the brain that you tend to think you are better at something than you actually are.
	And the Dunning-Kruger effect is widely held across a wide variety of skill sets in the United States.
	It's also held in general by a lot of people who think they are smarter than they actually are.
	But it's particularly held by people who have been made untouchable by the system.
	If you've been made untouchable by the system and you've just been rising through the ranks for years, Based on, say, your intersectional identity, you're going to think you're much better and more competent at things than you actually are, and they can get away with a lot more.
	This is the story of Fannie Willis.
	Fannie Willis is the Fulton County District Attorney.
	She's the person who's brought charges against President Trump based on supposed violation of RICO law, which, as we've explained on the show, really does not apply in this particular case.
	It's certainly a legal stretch.
	She's attempting to make her name by getting Donald Trump Particularly in a state court, because if you can get Donald Trump on a state charge, well, then he can't pardon himself if he becomes president of the United States.
	Well, things started to fall apart for Fannie Willis over the last couple of months.
	She was a heroine in the media.
	She was a hard-charging prosecutor who was going to finally get Trump.
	And then it turns out that she is, like, key example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but with an intersectional twist, because she thought that apparently she could get away with, like, literally anything.
	So just for background, let me play you a clip of Fannie Willis explaining, before she was elected D.A., why exactly she should be the D.A.
	Here she is.
	Because they deserve a D.A.
	that won't have sex with his employees.
	Because they deserve a D.A.
	that won't put money in their own pocket when it should go to benefit children.
	Because we deserve better.
	Okay.
	Now, as we are about to find out, the Fulton County people did not actually receive that DA, apparently.
	According to Forbes, Willis faces accusations she violated state conflict of interest and public money laws over claims from a group of Trump co-defendants that she engaged in an improper clandestine personal relationship.
	This would be a relationship with a man named Nathaniel Wade, who really had very little prosecutorial background but was appointed the special prosecutor to help her out in the Fulton County case against Donald Trump.
	Wade and Willis apparently traveled together on two vacations, according to court documents, and state records reveal that Wade earned more than $650,000 working with Willis.
	So, yesterday, there was a hearing about all of this.
	It was an evidentiary hearing in court in which the defendant asked that she essentially be Removed from the case for conflict of interest.
	And Fannie Willis, for some odd reason, decided she was going to testify.
	Now this came after she had basically destroyed her own timeline.
	So the question here was whether she had hired this guy because he was super competent and she had paid him and then they fell in love and they started going on cruises and having sex and all the rest.
	Or whether she had known the guy for a while and she decided to bring in her lover to pay him state taxpayer dollars And then go on vacations with him with state taxpayer dollars.
	And did that not based on the interests of the people of Fulton County, but based on her own personal interest in the guy she was shtupping.
	Well, Willis and many of her employees had been subpoenaed to testify at the evidentiary hearing to determine whether she should be disqualified from the case.
	And last week, she tried to stave off her testimony, and that completely failed yesterday.
	So first, they called a bunch of Fannie Willis's employees, her pals.
	So here is one of Fannie Willis's pals explaining that Fannie Willis actually was in a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, As early as, like, 2019.
	Her name is Robin Yerte.
	She was considered, as we will see, a friend of Fannie Willis, but then it got very gossipy and it kind of fell apart for Fannie Willis on the stand.
	Here was the friend, a former staffer at the Fulton County District Attorney's Office, Robin Yerte, talking about the relationship between Willis and Wade.
	You know, without going into all the painstaking details, there is no doubt in your mind that from 2019 until 2022, Ms.
	Willis and Mr. Wade were in a romantic relationship.
	What's the question?
	You have no doubt that their romantic relationship was in effect from 2019 until the last time you spoke with her?
	No doubt.
	And that's based on your personal observations and speaking with them and seeing them together and things like that?
	Yes.
	Okay, so that's what she testified.
	And really, there are two issues in this evidentiary hearing.
	Issue number one is when Fannie Willis started dating Nathan Wade, if it was earlier than the appointment, which suggests, of course, that she appointed him because she was shipping him.
	So that's question number one.
	And question number two is even if she was dating him after they got together on the case, was she then expending taxpayer dollars on him in ways that she wouldn't any other employee?
	That's question number two.
	And Fannie Willis fails on both accounts.
	We'll get to more on this in a second.
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	That's expressvpn.com slash ben. So, they then call Nathan Wade.
	And Wade tries to deny that he was dating Willis in 2020.
	He tries to claim that because he had a form of cancer, it was not possible for him to have a romantic relationship because he was trying to isolate.
	It didn't go over amazingly well in court.
	He was sweating bullets, Nathan Wade, as you would imagine.
	Yes, sir.
	Yes, sir.
	about hate bill.
	Yes, sir.
	Condo. Yes, sir.
	And you indicated that prior to November 1st of 2021, you had spent time at the condo,
	the hate bill condo.
	Yes, sir.
	With Ms. Willis, right?
	Yes, sir.
	And with someone else?
	You said Ms. Yerte?
	Ms. Yerte, yes, sir.
	Okay, so you were not concerned that it was not a sterile environment, was it?
	Are you inferring that Ms.
	Yerde and D.A.
	Willis is not sterile?
	Of course it's a sterile environment.
	It's a condo.
	But don't you remember that I followed up and said, where else might you have been to show your cell phone records from Hakeville?
	And you said, the airport?
	Right?
	Not a sterile environment though, the airport.
	You agree?
	It is not.
	Okay, what about restaurants?
	Not a sterile environment, right?
	They are not.
	And the Porsche, you said something about a Porsche, what?
	The Porsche experience.
	That doesn't sound very sterile to me.
	Is that a sterile environment?
	You're inside your vehicle.
	Yeah, but don't you mingle with others?
	You can.
	Yeah, and you were doing all that in 2021 before November 1st.
	That's what you testified to, correct?
	Yes, sir.
	So there's no reason why you couldn't be dating in 2021, is there?
	Give me 2020, Mr. Sadow.
	No, say 2021.
	Alright.
	Correct?
	Dating?
	No.
	No reason?
	No reason.
	Got it.
	Thanks.
	Okay, so he's basically blown up on the stand.
	He says, okay, well, I couldn't have been dating her because I had cancer at the time.
	He's like, well, you were pretty non-sterile that entire time, so I'm assuming that you could have been like in a room with her, dating her at the time.
	Wade was then forced to explain about his sex life with Fannie Willis and things got awkward.
	Have you had a personal relationship at all, and you know what I mean by that, after the summer of 2023?
	Are you asking me if I had intercourse with the District Attorney?
	I was trying not to, but I guess if you're going to characterize it as that, the answer would be... The answer would be no.
	So, it's been purely professional since the summer of 2023.
	So that's where we're having issues.
	Okay, you'll have to explain because I don't know what the issue would be.
	No, I will explain to you.
	You say personal.
	We're very good friends.
	Probably closer than ever because of these attacks.
	But if you're asking me about specific intercourse, the answer is no.
	How about if I change it from intercourse to romantic?
	No, okay, so then what the hell is he talking about?
	Okay, so, Wade then admits that he was paid for a bunch of stuff that was really not appropriate.
	He paid for things, apparently, using, you know, the taxpayer dollars he'd been paid for.
	So let's say they went on a cruise.
	He would pay for that using his business credit card.
	And so the question is, well, was the state essentially paying him to then take her on romantic cruises and whatever?
	He says, no, no, no, because she paid me back in cash.
	That's going to be the excuse now, is that whatever state dollars flowed to their relationship inappropriately, it wasn't really inappropriate because she had fat stacks of cash in the safe.
	I'm not kidding.
	That's the actual defense that Nathan Wade and Fannie Willis try to use here.
	You said in the affidavit that you roughly shared travel though, correct?
	Yes, ma'am.
	Okay.
	So this roughly sharing travel, you're saying she reimbursed you?
	She did.
	And where did you deposit the money she reimbursed you?
	It was cash.
	She didn't give me any checks.
	So she paid you cash for her share of all these vacations?
	Mr. Schaffer, you'll step out if you do that again.
	Yes, ma'am.
	Okay.
	And so all of the vacations that she took, she paid you cash for?
	Yes, ma'am.
	And you purchased all of these vacations on your business credit card, correct?
	Yes, ma'am.
	And you included those in deductions on your taxes, correct?
	No, ma'am.
	No, you did not.
	Okay, so, again, his claim, and this goes to claim number two, right?
	Claim number one is that he was dating her before he was actually hired.
	Claim number two is that they were taking business trips That's air quotes for those listening, around the world.
	And that he was paying for them, basically using taxpayer dollars, and then she was reimbursing him for her half in cash, right?
	So that it didn't look as though they were basically scamming the government out of money.
	That's essentially the claim that she's making.
	The countervailing claim would be that she paid him $650,000 to be a prosecutor in an area where he has no qualifications, in order so that they could go on romantic Vacays together.
	So, at this point, Fannie Willis decides she must testify.
	Now, first of all, let me just be clear.
	Anytime you are the subject of any sort of court proceeding, it is almost invariably a horrible idea to say you want to testify.
	This is why every defense counsel ever will tell you, do not get on the stand.
	Very few people are good witnesses in their own defense.
	They're really bad witnesses.
	Fannie Willis happens to suffer from two things.
	One, she's not telling the truth.
	And two, she also happens to be one of the most off-putting witnesses in human history.
	The Dunning-Kruger effect that I discussed at the very top here.
	That effect is so obviously present with Fannie Willis, it is almost beyond comprehension.
	This lady thinks she's good at her job.
	She thinks that she's convincing.
	She thinks that she comes off as honest and forthright and righteous.
	And she comes off as precisely the opposite.
	She comes off as obnoxious and lying.
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	So this begins with her saying that she's going to testify against the Advice of Council.
	And then suddenly, he's changing it. She files her financial declarations, same problems.
	We need her in here to go over all of this and to explain exactly what happened.
	So we would ask the court that the court allow Ms. Willis to be called.
	So she gets up and she's just standing there.
	And I will, too, Your Honor.
	Just a moment, Ms.
	Willis.
	So, Ms.
	Cross, I don't know if you want to speak with Ms.
	Willis now.
	It's sounding like maybe they're withdrawing the objection to the motion.
	I believe the motion to... Or does Ms.
	Miss Wills want to take the lead here.
	I'll draw up a motion to quash Miss Wills.
	Please don't move.
	I'll make that.
	OK, so the position of the district attorney at this point is that she's no longer contesting the subpoena.
	Ms.
	Mershin is called as the next witness.
	So she had tried to not testify, and now she's going to testify.
	And so she strides up aggressively to the witness box, and now is the moment.
	So first, she starts off by suggesting that making her even answer questions is contrary to democracy.
	Which is weird, because it seems like it actually is well within the boundaries of democracy to ask whether the DA who is prosecuting Donald Trump for political reasons is, in fact, A corrupt person who's having sex with the other prosecutor and paying him vast quantities of taxpayer cash while taking vacations with him.
	So here she is getting very, very self-righteous about the whole situation.
	Isn't it true that you met Mr. Wade October 2019 at a judges conference?
	We haven't gotten to the point where Ms.
	Willis should be treated hostilely.
	I think we have Ms.
	Willis.
	I very much want to be here, so I'm not a hostile witness.
	I very much want to be here.
	Not so much that you're hostile, Ms.
	Willis.
	You'd be an adverse witness.
	Your interests are opposed to Ms.
	Merchants.
	Ms.
	Merchants' interests are contrary to democracy, Your Honor.
	Not to mine.
	I mean, okay, so first of all, she's a terrible lawyer.
	That's not what a hostile witness is.
	So the way that it works in a criminal trial, or a civil trial, actually, is a hostile witness, when you've seen it on TV, there's someone saying, permission to treat the witness as hostile.
	And what that means is that when a witness is, say, a witness for the defense, and a prosecutor is prosecuting, then they can cross-examine the witness.
	And they can ask more adversarial questions because they're not a friendly witness.
	It doesn't mean, like, your affect is hostile or not hostile.
	Like, she doesn't even know what that means.
	And she's the DA of Fulton County.
	I love that.
	The defendants' interests are contrary to democracy because the claim is that the defendants tried to overturn an election.
	Therefore, she is completely scot-free on the question of whether she is, in fact, a corrupt public servant.
	And then, she goes full out.
	She goes full Al Pacino in And Justice For All.
	You're out of order!
	You're out of order!
	This entire court is out of order!
	Here we go, Fannie Willis.
	Well, no, no, look, I object to you getting records.
	You've been intrusive into people's personal lives.
	You're confused.
	You think I'm on trial.
	These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020.
	I'm not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.
	Well, I mean, it's an evidentiary hearing to determine whether you should be disqualified.
	So technically, in this particular portion of the trial, your actions are on trial.
	But guess what?
	Brazenness is not going to substitute for actually being innocent in this particular case.
	It gets worse and worse for her.
	So she starts yelling about the media.
	She says the media lied about her, which is weird because, again, she's the one who apparently lied a lot.
	And I heard someone yell, this testimony is done.
	It only made sense to me.
	That I would be your next witness.
	And I've been very anxious to have this conversation with you today.
	So I ran to the courtroom.
	So as soon as you heard that Mr. Wade was done testifying, that's when you just assumed you would be the next witness?
	It only makes sense.
	Did you listen to any of the testimony?
	I'm in my office pacing, ma'am.
	Did you listen to any of the arguments?
	I did hear the arguments this morning.
	It's ridiculous to me that you lied on Monday, and yet here we still are.
	And I did listen to that argument.
	Alright, so that was it.
	Just the argument.
	No testimony.
	Right, I listened to the argument this morning where Adam Abadi, I thought, did an excellent job pointing out how dishonest you were with the court on Monday.
	And I'm actually surprised that the hearing continued.
	But since it did, here I am.
	Wow, what a heroine.
	Here she is.
	She throws her friend under the bus.
	Remember Robin Yerte, her former friend, who testified that she and Nathan Wade were romantic in 2019, and here she is throwing her friend under the bus.
	For the last ten years, or five, whatever you'd like to classify it as, have you been friends with her?
	I have not spoken to Robin in over a year.
	I certainly do not consider her a friend now.
	I think that she, you know, There's a saying, no good deed goes unpunished, and I think that she betrayed our friendship.
	Oh, she betrayed the friendship by apparently talking about what this lady was doing outside of school.
	Okay, then she gets to the question of the cash that she gave to Nathan Wade.
	She says, don't worry.
	That cash was never that serious.
	You know, there's no— So what, I gave him cash.
	Well, I mean, it's a little weird, is it not?
	Okay, here we go.
	Same with Aruba.
	You don't know where that cash came from either, right?
	Ma'am, you are mischaracterizing my testimony greatly.
	I'm not going to allow you to mischaracterize my testimony.
	I know that I keep money in my house.
	The amounts of money I gave Mr. Wade, it was never that serious.
	I don't think I've ever handed him more than $2,500 in a reimbursement.
	So we're not talking about $20,000 in cash.
	I don't have $20,000 in cash right now.
	The most I ever gave him, I know I gave him $2,500 when we went to Belize because we went to one hotel Okay, so then she was asked, um, so why did you pay him back in cash?
	Like, there's no record of you actually reimbursing him for your half of the travel.
	Again, that looks like a kickback, right?
	trip, the one that you described with his mom, I think I gave him about $2,000 for that
	trip for like total.
	Okay, so then she was asked, so why did you pay him back in cash?
	Like there's no record of you actually reimbursing him for your half of the travel.
	Again, that looks like a kickback, right?
	If I hire my wife and or anybody else.
	And that person is in a close personal relationship with me and I pay them a lot of money and then we take cruises together that the other person is paying for.
	The idea is that I'm supposed to pay for my half to demonstrate that I'm not actually stealing money from the government.
	But there's no record of her having paid back Nathan Wade.
	Instead, she says, that she paid him back in cash.
	So she was asked, why exactly you paid back Wade in cash all the time?
	And here was her not very convincing answer.
	The money that you paid Mr. Wade, the cash, in October of 2022, you do not know where that money came from.
	I do know where it came from.
	It came from my sweat and tears.
	You know which job it came from.
	Her sweat and tears.
	Did it come from a private job?
	It came from... I don't... I'm not... What are you talking about?
	So it could have come from a private job because before I was VA, I was in private practice.
	So I earned money during that time period that's probably in there.
	You don't know where it came from?
	What do you mean I don't know where it came from?
	I absolutely do.
	I understand the situation.
	We can move on.
	You never wrote him a check?
	Ma'am, I don't have checks.
	Okay.
	Um, so you have no proof of any reimbursement for any of these things because it was all cash, right?
	The testimony of one witness is enough to prove a fact.
	So my question was, do you have any proof?
	Are you telling me that I'm lying to you?
	Is that what you're intimating right here?
	I'm asking if you have any proof that you paid him any of these monies.
	The proof is what I just told you.
	You have no written proof.
	Is that correct?
	So I have some, um, Probably some transactions like in Belize.
	I probably spent $500 on my card.
	So she has no proof that she actually paid Wade back.
	And I love that the lawyer's like, so do you have any proof of that?
	She's like, well, I just gave you the proof.
	I said it.
	That's not proof that there's evidence that you said it.
	But the whole question is whether you're lying or not.
	Like, we can't just take at face value that you claim the thing.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	So, the question is where she got the money, right?
	In the middle of this proceeding, Fannie Willis basically admits to a campaign finance violation, apparently.
	She says that she took money from her campaign and kept that, which I don't believe you can do for personal use, last I checked.
	So my question was, where did that cash originally come from?
	If it didn't come out of the bank?
	Cash is fungible.
	I've had cash for years in my house.
	So for me to tell you the source of where it comes from, when you go to Publix and you buy something,
	you get $50, you throw it in there.
	It's been my whole life.
	When I took out a large amount of money on my first campaign, I kept some of the cash of that.
	What now?
	I can't.
	Again, first rule of criming, folks, don't admit to the criming.
	So yeah, that was great.
	That was really, really good.
	She concluded with an explanation that she doesn't like wine, she likes very good.
	I mean, again, this went amazingly well for Fannie Willis and for the anti-Trump team in this particular case.
	Here she was.
	I mean, she just blows up on the stand here.
	It's wild.
	Much less cash that time, probably four or five hundred dollars.
	And then I paid for a bunch of stuff.
	I think we did two different wine tours that you do, which are pretty expensive.
	I think I bought him.
	He likes wine.
	I don't really like wine, to be honest with you.
	I like Grey Goose.
	Hmm.
	She likes Grey Goose.
	Well, that's the important thing, as you expend $650,000 taxpayer money on the guy you're snipping.
	Yeah, that's the important thing.
	Even MSNBC was like, oh no.
	So there goes the Georgia case.
	MSNBC had on a former federal prosecutor named Chuck Rosenberg who said, it may be time for Fannie Willis to leave.
	If it's determined that they have apparently misled, even before the judge rules in this case, do you think we should reach a point where, for the interest of protecting the trial, the entire Fulton County trial, that they should voluntarily step aside?
	It's a great question.
	So, this is not going well for the state.
	It could turn out okay, and it might turn out worse, to your point.
	It might be appropriate for Ms.
	Willis to consider removing herself from this case now and turning the reins over to a senior official in the district attorney's office and let him or her handle it.
	It's worse than that, because Donald Trump's attorneys are going to be able to make the very obvious and clear case that Fannie Willis ginned up this entire case so she could hire, in high-profile fashion, the guy she was stripping so she could go on expensive cruises with him.
	That's going to be a very easy case to make.
	And I'm not the only person making that case.
	Over on MSNBC, there's an analyst named Carolyn Polisi.
	She says the same thing.
	She says, this case against Trump is pretty much dead in the water.
	Don't let the legalese fool you.
	This is epic.
	This is monumental.
	If things are going in the direction we think Fannie Willis lied to the court, it's game over for her.
	She will be disqualified if they had a relationship prior to when they represented to the court.
	It's a huge deal.
	I can't overstate it.
	Okay, yep.
	So, um, this is a problem.
	This is a problem.
	So let me just make clear one thing.
	For all those who wish to be associated with or to target Donald Trump, Donald Trump is the monkey's paw.
	The monkey's paw is a short story in which people discover a magical monkey's paw where if you actually make a wish upon it, you get your wish, but in the worst possible way.
	So that is exactly Donald Trump.
	Fannie Wells got her wish.
	Donald Trump made her famous.
	Donald Trump made her prominent.
	Donald Trump may end up putting her in jail, which is just hysterical the way this is working out.
	So we bid a fond farewell to Fannie Willis, whose career is basically over because, once again, the Dunning-Kruger effect undefeated for a lot of people.
	And the reason it exists is specifically because of the intersectionality here.
	I mean, the same day that this is going on, the New York Times ran an entire piece titled, Why the Case Against Fannie Willis Feels Familiar to Black Women.
	And I just have a question.
	Why should that feel familiar to black women?
	Are black women routinely Misappropriating funds in order to pay off the person they're stooping?
	That seems a little racist.
	But according to the New York Times, Tangala Hollis Palmer felt a sense of pride when she learned that Fannie Willis, the DA of Fulton County, Georgia, and one of the nation's few elected black female prosecutors, would lead the election interference case against former President Trump.
	But that pride would be tempered by dismay as news emerged of Ms.
	Willis' personal relationship with a fellow prosecutor, Nathan J. Wade, an outside lawyer she hired to help run the case.
	Ms.
	Hollis Palmer, a black 40-year-old attorney from Mississippi, is mostly upset at critics trying, she said, to discredit Ms.
	Willis.
	At first, she was skeptical of the allegations.
	But when Ms.
	Willis herself conceded the relationship, Ms.
	Hollis reserved some disappointment for the prosecutor, who should have used a little more discretion and a little better judgment, she said.
	So, again, the idea here is that the reason that she's being targeted is not because she is, in fact, corrupt, it's because she is black.
	And that is why, by the way, there's all these questions about DEI surrounding people like Fannie Willis, about affirmative action surrounding people like Fannie Willis, about people like Kamala Harris, incompetence at their jobs, suddenly vice president of the United States, and heir apparent to the White House.
	I mean, there are a lot of people out there who are very incompetent in a wide variety of spheres, and if the entire society tells them they are not subject to the meritocracy, that's how you end up with Fannie Willis as the district attorney in Fulton County blowing up whatever case she was going to bring against Donald Trump in the first place.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
	First...
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	Meanwhile, when it comes to Donald Trump's legal issues, the Hush Money trial is apparently going to start with jury selection in March, late March, March 25th, according to a New York judge.
	That, of course, is the idiotic Alvin Bragg case against Donald Trump.
	Claiming that Donald Trump, for some odd reason, violated state campaign finance laws by violating federal campaign finance laws by paying Stormy Daniels payoff money to be quiet about their affair.
	That is that case.
	It's foolish.
	There's really no basis for it, but that trial is going to move forward in New York City.
	So, that is the latest on that.
	Meanwhile, there is a DOJ case that is currently being brought by Special Counsel David Weiss against a former FBI informant.
	This would be the informant who claimed that President Joe Biden and son Hunter were involved with Burisma Holdings.
	The person who they are now prosecuting is a guy named Alexander Smirnoff.
	He is facing charges in connection with lying to the FBI and creating false records, according to CNN.
	He was arrested Thursday in Las Vegas.
	Apparently, the indictment alleges that Smirnoff's story to the FBI was, quote, a fabrication and amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings and contacts that had actually occurred, but at a later date than he claimed, and for the purpose of pitching Burisma on the defendant's services and products, not for discussing bribes to Joe Biden when he was in office.
	So there are a bunch of FBI memos that contained his talk about how Burisma wanted to pay Joe and Hunter five million bucks apiece and all the rest of it.
	And now the FBI is saying that he lied about it and they are going to prosecute him over this.
	So the question the Democrats are making, the one they're bringing, is they're suggesting that because Smirnoff was lying, this discredits everything related to Burisma and Hunter and Joe, which of course it does not.
	That was supplementary material that supported a lot of the allegations that were made about Hunter and Joe.
	And it was very direct, but again, unsupported by sort of further evidence about actual payments of $5 million to Joe Biden.
	But it doesn't end all of the questions about Joe Hunter and trafficking in the Biden business name.
	So that raises questions as to whether the DOJ is actually targeting this guy because he lied to the FBI or whether they're targeting him in an attempt to basically get Biden off the hook for the second time in the last couple of weeks.
	He did violate classified document statutes, but they also said he's senile.
	So that is the way Joe Biden is being let off the hook.
	Okay, meanwhile, in what I think is far more important news than any of these legal developments, the leading critic of Vladimir Putin has now been found dead in prison or has died in prison under unspecified circumstances.
	This is an actual important world event.
	Alexei Navalny was an anti-corruption campaigner who is widely seen as the chief rival to Vladimir Putin in Russia.
	Unclear how he died.
	He was merely 47 years old.
	He had been sentenced on a bunch of trumped-up charges to a penal colony penalty of more than 30 years.
	So he had been behind bars since January of 2021, according to the Wall Street Journal, when he returned to Russia from Germany, where he was recovering after he'd fallen ill during a flight inside of Russia.
	So he got sick while he was on this flight inside of Russia.
	He then flew to Germany to seek treatment.
	And upon reaching Germany, doctors concluded that he had actually been poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent called Novichok, which is, again, one of the things that Vladimir Putin does.
	He tends to poison his critics.
	Navalny, for years, was a large-scale critic of Vladimir Putin up until his arrest.
	He came back from exile.
	He was immediately arrested by Vladimir Putin's team, and then he was sentenced, and then he was moved to an Arctic prison so remote that, at first, nobody knew where the hell he was.
	I mean, for literally weeks, they shuttled him around so that nobody could find out where he was.
	And then finally he released a message saying that he was in a place that was extremely cold, far in the north, where all he could see were some dogs and some snow, basically.
	Here is footage of Navalny from yesterday in a court appearance.
	And as you can see, he looks alive and well.
	Now, he looks skinny, obviously, but this does not look like somebody who is on the verge of death,
	obviously.
	This is him literally yesterday.
	As the Wall Street Journal reports, Navalny's death practically extinguishes the last real
	political opposition that still remained inside Russia following Vladimir Putin's invasion
	of Ukraine, his crackdown on free speech, and the passage of increasingly draconian
	laws aimed at stamping out any dissent.
	.
	Navalny's time in jail reflected the worst excesses of a judicial and prison system that has increasingly been used to punish Putin's political opponents.
	He had suffered alarming health ailments in prison, issues that had worsened in recent months.
	His lawyers were basically cut off from all access on him.
	He was growing increasingly emaciated in video appearances in court.
	So, again, everyone suspects, because people get suicided regularly, and death by natural causes regularly, if they are opponents of Vladimir Putin, that the Putin regime finally had enough of Alexei Navalny, and they felt the threat from the outside, or from Navalny, or from maybe the inside of Russia, and so it was just a convenient time to get rid of Alexei Navalny.
	And Navalny, again, large-scale critic of the Kremlin.
	In 2020, Navalny did an interview on 60 Minutes, and here he was on 60 Minutes talking about his poisoning.
	I said to the flight attendant, and I kind of shocked him with my statement, well, I was poisoned, and I'm going to die, and I immediately lay down under his feet.
	Alexei Navalny was on a flight to Moscow from Siberia, where he'd been campaigning against Putin's party in a local election when he collapsed with no pain, but knowing he was dying.
	Actually, every cell of your body just telling you, that's body, We are done.
	And I gather they suspected poison right away?
	Yes, of course.
	Meanwhile, his team in Siberia searched his hotel room, collecting things Navalny may have touched, like this water bottle, which the doctors in Berlin sent along with a blood sample to a German military lab.
	To see exactly what the poison was.
	And the answer was Novichok.
	They discovered Novichok, this nerve agent, in my blood, inside of body, on my body, and all this bottle from the hotel.
	So that's why we now we know that I was poisoned in the hotel because I Well, again, it's just a pure speculation because no one knows what happened exactly.
	But I think that when I was maybe put some clothes with this poison on me, I touch it with the hand and then I sip from the bottle.
	So this nerve agent was not inside of a bottle but on the bottle.
	Novichok is a highly toxic nerve agent said to be 10 times more potent than sarin gas.
	Labs in France and Sweden corroborated the finding.
	There's no doubt it was military-grade Novichok.
	In just one second, we'll get to more on Alexei Navalny's death, almost certainly killed in prison.
	We'll get to that in a second.
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	Okay, meanwhile... So the question, of course, is why was Navalny poisoned in the first place?
	Navalny was on 60 Minutes, and here he was explaining why Vladimir Putin tried to kill him.
	But why would Putin want to poison Alexei Navalny?
	When we first met Navalny three years ago, he was running against Putin for president.
	He had made a name for himself by getting his hands on incriminating internal financial documents related to high-level officials and posting them on a blog.
	Did these documents that you got prove corruption?
	Absolutely.
	I work as a whistleblower, and I'm not afraid to announce the names.
	He says he found that the Kremlin's inner circle was accumulating vast amounts of wealth and published pictures of multiple homes and yachts.
	He moved on to airing documentaries on YouTube with video of the officials' lavish lifestyle.
	And it's something very special about Mr. Putin, that he's crazy about money, personal money, about his family being rich, his friends, like all his people who served with him in the KGB.
	All of them, they are billionaires.
	That's why fighting corruption means for him that he's fighting me.
	Okay, and now he has fought him to the point where Navalny is dead.
	I mean, the reality is that Vladimir Putin is a vicious dictator who kills his political opponents.
	I mean, the list is as long as your arm of people that Vladimir Putin has killed, ranging from journalists to fellow oligarchs to dissidents who have challenged him in any sort of way, at home and abroad, by the way.
	He has had people killed well outside the borders of Russia.
	And this is why I have to say it is pretty wild that Tucker Carlson didn't just interview Putin, which was fine, as I talked about on the show at length.
	When Tucker interviewed Putin, I thought he did a fine job.
	All he did was let Putin talk, and I thought it was illuminating and interesting.
	And then Tucker went on to essentially act as a propagandist for Vladimir Putin in Russia.
	He went on to act as a as a sort of Walter Durante, Bernie Sanders knockoff.
	So he has spent the days since his interview with Putin gallivanting around Moscow and doing what pretty much appears to be almost identical to Bernie Sanders level propaganda on behalf of the Russian regime.
	I say this because here, for example, is a Bernie Sanders circa 1988 talking about the magic of one of Moscow's train stations.
	Just to give you sort of a background here.
	Here is here is Bernie.
	The stations themselves were absolutely beautiful, including many works of art, chandeliers that were beautiful.
	It was a very, very effective system.
	So, Tucker began his tour of Moscow by going to one of the train stations in Moscow.
	A few things here.
	He said before that Moscow's train stations are clean, they aren't homeless, that you're not worried about being pushed in front of a train.
	And I actually defended that statement to the extent that I think that major American cities have done an awful job with crime.
	I mean, I was just in Camden, New Jersey, which is one of the crime capitals of the United States.
	It is a fact that American cities have done a terrible job in terms of cracking down on crime.
	That happens to be true, but that's not what Tucker is doing here.
	Tucker is doing something a little different, which is suggesting that the entire regime upon which The train station is based.
	He goes to a train station and basically says, because this train station is nice and has chandeliers, people in Russia are living wonderful lives under the tutelage of Vladimir Putin.
	And he keeps saying that sort of thing over and over and over again, which is strange because he doesn't actually need to make that claim.
	If he wants to claim that the Ukrainians should not be supported by American taxpayer dollars, you can make that claim without actually going full Duranty.
	But as Robert Downey Jr.
	might say, never go full Durante.
	In any case, here was Tucker at the Moscow station.
	One of the ways you understand a society is through its infrastructure, the places where people gather, the places where they go to travel.
	You've got a lot of people in one place, it tells you a lot about the people.
	So with that in mind, we're standing in front of the Kyivskaya metro station, and there's a train station next to it.
	Now the metro station was built by Joseph Stalin 70 years ago.
	And the question is, how's it doing now, after 70 years?
	So we went into it to take a look, and what we found shocked us.
	Now, that's not an endorsement of Stalin, who was bad, obviously, nor is it an endorsement of the current president, Vladimir Putin.
	You may not like him either.
	But it doesn't change the reality of what we saw or, more precisely, didn't see.
	There's no graffiti.
	There's no filth.
	There are no foul smells.
	There are no bums or drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you.
	No.
	It's perfectly clean and orderly.
	And how do you explain that?
	We're not even going to guess.
	That's not our job.
	We're only going to ask the question.
	And if your response is to shout at us slogans dumber than the slogans we used to call Soviet and mock, that's not really an answer.
	How does Russia, a country we're told is a gas station with nuclear weapons, have a subway station that normal people use to get to work and home every single day that's nicer than anything in our country?
	We're not going to speculate.
	We're just going to raise the question and wait for someone in charge to give us an answer.
	What is the answer?
	So we'll stop the lecture and let you take a look for yourself at what the Kievskaya metro station in Moscow, Russia looks like today.
	Okay, now pause it for one second.
	So he's not going to speculate on what the answer is here.
	OK, I'll give you the answer.
	The answer is very clear.
	Every dictatorship has certain areas that are extremely clean where they bring a foreign journalist to show them how clean those areas are.
	In fact, that's precisely why this train station was built.
	In 1935, this particular train station was opened.
	It was originally created by a guy named Lazar Kaganovich, who happened to be one of Joseph Stalin's right-hand men.
	The way that the train station was built is they hired a bunch of people who'd actually built the London Underground.
	They had to go to the West to get people to build it for them.
	And then, they basically jailed all those people because they knew how the Moscow train stations were working.
	And also, in order to fund this thing, they had to, you know, bring in a bunch of workers, and they had to pay those workers.
	Well, how exactly did they pay those workers?
	They needed hard currency to buy all of the instruments in order to build this particular train station.
	So, how did they get all that stuff?
	Well, the answer is, they went over to Ukraine, they stole all the grain, and they murdered all the kulaks.
	The Haladzmar is actually one of the reasons why you have a beautiful train station right here, but that doesn't even answer why it's nice now.
	The answer why it's nice now is because dictators have always been able to clean up particular train stations.
	That's not an answer as to whether the country itself is in good shape.
	The country itself is in pretty terrible shape, actually.
	If you go to Pyongyang, there are beautiful pictures of some of the subway stations in Pyongyang.
	That's in North Korea.
	North Korea is a sh**hole.
	This bizarre notion that you can go to one train station and then suggest that something is being done right overall by the regime because the one train station is nice.
	Again, I fully take the critique and agree with the critique that the train stations in the United States are run like garbage in big cities like New York and that they're too dangerous.
	There's been no one more pro-cop than I have been on these issues.
	But that's not the argument that Tucker's making.
	He's making the argument that somehow the regime overall is bizarrely legit.
	And it's all done by implication, right?
	I'm not even going to speculate.
	I'm not even... Well, I mean, you could just say what I say.
	I mean, you don't have to speculate.
	The reason the train station is nice is because Vladimir Putin spends dictatorial resources on keeping that train station nice.
	And the reason the rest of Russia is in really bad shape is because Vladimir Putin spends all of the resources making the train station nice and killing his political opponents like Alexei Navalny.
	This is all happening the same week that he killed Alexei Navalny, in all likelihood, in prison after jailing him on specious charges, by the way.
	And then, just to make sure that it's not commentary, you get the actual full-scale propaganda b-roll from the Moscow railway station.
	Here we go.
	Today, February 2024, in the middle of a war.
	Here it is.
	It's a beautiful train station.
	So is the one in Pyongyang.
	So, in fact, were the highways in Germany in 1936.
	It turns out that pretty much every di- There's places in Beijing that are super nice.
	Every single dictatorship on planet Earth has great places to show foreign journalists.
	Wow, they have chandeliers in the sub- I mean, Alexei Navalny's not gonna see those anytime soon, but they do have chandeliers in the subways, and that's the important thing, isn't it?
	That it's well-lit, and that this one train station is great.
	Okay, this isn't even the best sort of bizarre video from Tucker that he has released in the last three days.
	He also released a video in which he went to a Russian supermarket.
	Now, honestly, what this video shows to me more than anything else, and again, the entire idea here is that you're supposed to be enraged at the United States because you went to a Russian supermarket.
	He actually says that in this video.
	And I will point out many things about this particular video because it's truly kind of an astonishing video.
	So, remember, this is while Russia is in the middle of invading a sovereign country in Ukraine.
	The war in Ukraine has killed a couple hundred thousand people on the Ukrainian side and probably 300,000 people on the Russian side.
	The Russian economy is really, really weak.
	The dissidents in Russia are imprisoned or killed, or both, as in the case of Alexei Navalny.
	But Tucker did go to a grocery store so that he could talk about how bad America is.
	In the weirdest way possible.
	So here is Tucker.
	So a longstanding feature, maybe the longest standing feature of Cold War propaganda in the West, was the Soviet grocery store.
	No products, no choices, shoddily made things.
	And it wasn't actually propaganda, it was real.
	And you can look up the pictures on the internet if you want.
	So we thought it would be interesting to take a look at a contemporary, modern day, 2024 Russian grocery store, two years into sanctions.
	Here we go.
	All right.
	Here we go.
	So I guess you put in 10 rubles here and you get it back when you put the cart back.
	So it's free, but there's an incentive to return it and not just bring it to your homeless encampment.
	Okay.
	This is the, uh...
	Grocery cart escalator.
	This is designed, I'm figuring this out now, where the wheels don't move, they lock on the grocery cart escalator.
	Look, Ma, no hands.
	Retail placement here is a little bit different.
	It's like walking through Macy's to get to Whole Foods.
	Okay, we've gotten through the perfume section to get to the grocery store.
	So we're gonna try and buy what a family of four would buy every week, and we're gonna see what the selection is, and we're gonna see what it costs.
	Now, Russia is famous for its bread, which is one thing I can assess pretty well.
	The low-carb lifestyle has not swept Russia.
	Thank heaven, because, I mean, look at that.
	It's fresh, too.
	Look at that!
	Come on!
	Unicorn and Minnie Mills.
	All right Some kind of Russian wheat cookies
	Ooh, we need coffee.
	Don't we?
	I don't know if this is sugar or flour, to be honest with you, but it looks like a staple, so we should get it.
	It's a very good-looking package.
	It's gotta be flour, right?
	And this is Russian wine.
	It's from Crimea, which not only has the warm-water naval base, but also is the source of most of the grapes in this part of Russia for wine.
	So it's apparently pretty good.
	Cheese puffs?
	You check out of a grocery store and you've got gum, razor blades, and candy.
	Actually, they hide the razor blades because we steal them.
	But these all seem to be Western products.
	Mars, Twix, Snickers, Milky Way, Bounty, Gillette, Paul's Cough Drops, Mentos.
	It's pretty non-sanctioned to me, but what do I know?
	I went from amused to legitimately angry.
	So we were guessing what this would cost.
	Everybody here is from the United States, buys groceries.
	And we didn't pay any attention to cost as we were just putting in the cart where we would actually eat over a week.
	And we all came in around 400 bucks, about 400 bucks.
	It was $104 US here.
	And that's when you start to realize that ideology maybe doesn't matter as much as you thought.
	Corruption.
	If you take people's standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation, and they literally can't buy the groceries they want, at that point, maybe it matters less what you say or whether you're a good person or a bad person.
	You're wrecking people's lives and their country, and that's what our leaders have done to us.
	And coming to a Russian grocery store, the heart of evil, And seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders.
	That's how I feel, anyway.
	Radicalized.
	We're not making any of this up, by the way.
	Two things that are worth noting here.
	One, the idea doesn't matter if you're good or bad or how corrupt it is, so long as, you know, there are no homeless people at the subway station.
	So you can kill Alexei Navalny, but as long as you can still get bananas at the grocery store, like, does anyone really, should you complain, really?
	Number one, there's that, which is absurd on its face on a moral level.
	And then, you just have the basic misunderstanding of how economics works.
	Like a really, really basic misunderstanding of how economics works.
	So, little secret about supply and demand.
	If it turns out that you're in a poor country, if you're a rich American, everything looks super duper cheap.
	I know it's amazing.
	If I go to Venezuela, whatever I have in my wallet will probably buy half the country right now.
	Is that because Venezuela is like an amazing economy?
	Products are so cheap there.
	It's like amazing.
	Or is that because I'm a rich American and the exchange rate means I can get pretty much whatever I want.
	I can do that in any poor country in the world.
	I can walk.
	Why do you think American tourists are upcharged on everything?
	If you go to like the Shuk in Israel or an Arab market anywhere.
	And you're an American and you're negotiating with a guy and they realize you're American, they will up the price.
	Why do you think that is?
	Because they know you have money.
	That is the whole thing.
	That's the whole thing.
	By the way, there's so many things that are wrong with what Tucker is saying here.
	It's going to radicalize you that you go to a poor country and things are cheaper, which is like.
	How does he think that the wage base in the United States has been undercut by foreign competition because wages in other countries are cheaper?
	Is that because things are amazing in, say, China?
	For those wage laborers, after all, they can get their food even though we're paying them nothing.
	In order to radicalize yourself off of the fact that food is cheaper comparatively in Russia than it is in the United States for an American, I say for an American because I'm going to get to how expensive it is if you're Russian in a second.
	You have to want to be radicalized.
	You have to want to do the propaganda work.
	And again, Tucker didn't have to do any of this.
	All Tucker had to do... And if he steps outside of Moscow, by the way, things are way worse.
	He's being led to, like, the nicest areas of Moscow.
	He's being taken to the Bolshoi Ballet, and he's being taken to the Moscow train station, and to, like, the really nice upscale supermarket.
	If he took, like, a three-mile ride outside of Moscow, things would look very, very different.
	But that's the kind of amazing thing about all of this.
	Let me just tell you something about how it works.
	If you are a Russian, if you're a Russian, Russia has a per capita GDP of $13,000.
	A per capita GDP of $13,000.
	The per capita GDP of the United States Today is $70,000, 7-0 compared to 13.
	It's worse than that, by the way, because per capita GDP does not tell you even remotely the entire story of who has all the wealth in Russia.
	About 500 oligarchs have pretty much all the wealth in Russia, like legitimately all of it.
	In fact, the median salary, which is a good representation of sort of the average person in Russia, ranges anywhere from about 590 bucks per month in July of 2023, according to Spanner Index, to about 750 bucks a month.
	Now do the quick math.
	You're talking about like less than $8,000 a year would be the median salary.
	In fact, according to studies, 60 plus percent of Russians spend half their salary on food.
	Half of it.
	That is not remotely what Americans spend on food.
	Because you know why?
	We're real rich over here.
	And that means that we can support higher prices.
	That they can't support in Russia.
	So in other words, Tucker's over there being like, oh my God, look how cheap this is.
	And every Russian is looking at that bill and they're thinking to themselves, that is like a lot of, that's a lot of money.
	And he says this would support, that what he had in his cart would support a family for a week, right?
	That's what he suggests.
	And that costs like a hundred bucks.
	And to him, that's really cheap.
	But as I just said, the average monthly salary of a Russian, the median monthly salary is like 600 bucks a month.
	So it's a hundred bucks to feed a family for a week.
	There are four weeks in a month last I checked.
	That means you're spending well in excess of two thirds of what you earn in any given month just on food in Russia.
	And in fact, when he suggested, well, they don't have inflation over here because I mean, look how cheap things are.
	It's the opposite.
	It's the opposite.
	The exchange rate to the ruble has skyrocketed.
	In other words, an American dollar goes way farther in Russia than it would in the United States, specifically because everybody in Russia is so much poorer.
	In fact, you can even see it in the video.
	Tucker shows footage.
	From the supermarket cash register of how much that cost.
	And it was something like 9,481 rubles.
	And he says that comes out to like $104.
	81 rubles and he says that comes out like a hundred and four dollars.
	In other words, the exchange rate right now is one one dollar is 92 rubles.
	In 2010, one dollar was.
	So if you're talking about inflation and bad economies, Russia has inflation and a bad economy.
	In fact, just over the course of 2023, consumer price inflation was 8%.
	In 2022, it was 13.8%.
	And for particular products like cabbage or oranges, the increase in prices was in excess of 70%.
	Life in Russia is not good under Vladimir Putin.
	Don't be fooled by like the train station with the chandeliers.
	Full-on 23% of the Russian population does not have indoor plumbing.
	If you head out to the rural areas, not to the center of Moscow, the richest area, what you'll find is that 48% of Russians in those areas still use outhouses.
	18% additionally, so like two-thirds of Russians who are living in rural areas do not have indoor plumbing.
	18% have zero sewage system, not even an outhouse.
	They only have like a pit.
	That is how things are working in Russia today.
	And as for the supposed joys of living in Russia, they have a 21% alcoholism rate in Russia for men and women, about 500,000 abortions per year in Russia.
	Russia's population right now is approximately 143 million.
	The United States population right now is approximately 331 million.
	So we have about a million abortions a year in the United States, which is awful and horrifying and terrible, and everybody, including Tucker, hates that.
	Russia's abortion rate is far higher than that of the United States.
	Well under 10% of Russians actually attend church on a monthly basis.
	Forget about a weekly basis, a monthly basis.
	In other words, propagandizing for this regime is a lie.
	It is bad.
	It is wrong.
	And Tucker also went to a McDonald's over in Russia.
	It's a McDonald's that had been transferred over to Russian control because McDonald's decided that they couldn't actually make money in Russia.
	He does the same thing.
	He's amazed by the quality of the food.
	It's amazing.
	It's just the same as McDonald's.
	Well, yeah, because, I mean, it was a McDonald's.
	And then they just turned over this particular chain to the Russian CEO of McDonald's.
	They sold it to him.
	What Tucker neglects to tell you is that for several months in, say, 2022, they didn't have French fries because the potato harvest was not good enough, as reported by the Associated Press at the time.
	Now, why is any of this important?
	Because the juxtaposition of what Tucker is doing to prop up Russia as some sort of wonderful model to emulate for the United States, which is what a lot of these videos are about.
	Again, specific critiques of the United States when it comes to our positions on crime, for example.
	I agree with that.
	That's not what Tucker is doing here.
	It's clearly not what Tucker is doing here.
	He continues to say he's being radicalized by things like low prices in Russia because it's a poor country.
	Or that he's amazed by the fact that they have things that are commonplace in the United States.
	Well, one thing I noticed is that when it comes to population migration, not a hell of a lot of people from America migrating to Russia, a lot of people from Russia migrating to the United States, and that is for a reason.
	The question of what is indicative of how Vladimir Putin rules, the death of Alexei Navalny, or the fact that they still have chandeliers in the Moscow train station, it's pretty clearly the death of Alexei Navalny.
	And that's without any political reference to what's going on in Ukraine.
	There's this strain that's grown on both the right and the left that suggests that America is somehow not the greatest place in the world, that America is actually quite terrible, and that if you go to other countries, these other countries are better.
	There are certain things about other countries that you could say are superior to the United States.
	You could.
	You can say that there are certain educational systems that are run better than those of the United States.
	You can say that a train station in Moscow is cleaner than a train station in New York City.
	But the broad-based political critique that somehow it doesn't matter how you run the government so long as the trains run on time, or it doesn't even matter if the trains run on time.
	America is just kind of inherently bad.
	That's incredibly problematic.
	It's incredibly dangerous.
	And it's hard to see how it's super America first.
	All right, you guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
	We're going to be getting into Joe Biden's senility.
	The media are covering it up.
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