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June 26, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:03:32
It’s Bernie’s Party, You Can Cry If You Want To
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Alrighty, folks, a stacked show today.
Zoran Mamdani is the new face of the Democratic Party.
That means that Bernie Sanders has now fully taken over the Democratic Party.
We'll get into what that means.
Plus, President Trump is a triumphant trip to the NATO summit.
Again, big wins for President Trump and all the fallout from the end of the Iran-Israel war and what comes next.
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All righty, folks.
So New York City is on the verge of electing an actual communist mayor of the city.
And this requires us to ask a question.
Just why?
What is happening with the left that they've decided to opt for Bernie Sanders over anything like a mainstream Democratic Party?
And of course, this has been coming for a long time.
Bernie Sanders ran incredibly strong against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Bernie Sanders then ran incredibly strong against Joe Biden in 2020.
And so there is something happening inside the Democratic Party, and it's growing and it's growing and it's growing.
That doesn't mean the Democratic Party is growing and growing.
In fact, the Democratic Party is shrinking even as this movement is growing.
It's essentially a tumor destroying the health of the Democratic Party from the inside.
But something is happening.
And I think that Zoran Mamdani, this former know-name 33-year-old trust fund kid who has worked all of three combined years, I believe, in his entire adult life, and that includes him rapping.
This person is now on the verge of becoming the mayor of the most important city in the West.
And somehow that is happening because of all of this, because he's a trust fund kid, because he's a socialist, because he's an anti-Semite, because of all of those things.
He's on the verge of becoming New York mayor.
You know, I think reasonable people look at this person who is awful on pretty much every available issue and they say, well, he must be winning in spite of those things.
What is he doing to win in spite of those things?
I think that's missing the point.
He's winning because of those things.
Because there's an omni-cause on the left.
The scavenger cause, I've termed it.
This cause which is to tear down all the systems, just inchoate rage at the system channeled into socialist economics and Howard Zinn foreign policy and destructive hatred of traditional institutions.
And that scavenger philosophy has gained an awful lot of credence on a dissatisfied left, a left that achieved many of its victories and now has plunged itself directly into nihilism.
See, the problem with the left over the course of the last several decades has been that they caught the car.
In the 1960s, the left in the United States began to catch the car on everything from the sexual revolution to the overturning of the constitutional order.
And in doing so, they then had to construct a system.
And the problem is that when you construct a system and then the system fails and fails and fails again, and the backlash happens in the form of a Donald Trump, you start to lose your mind.
You start to become insane.
And so instead of you wanting to capture the commanding heights of the system and change the system from within incrementally, quote unquote, make it better, which used to be the democratic way.
Now you just want to burn everything down.
Now, that in and of itself is not a particularly attractive message to the broader American public that generally does not want to burn everything down.
The dirty secret about President Trump is that when President Trump ran in 2016, pledging that he was going to burn everything down, the reality is that people realistically believed that he was going to burn some things down, but he was certainly not going to burn other things down.
They thought that actually he would be a lot more moderate than he was saying he would be.
And it turns out that in many ways, he was significantly more institutionalist in his approach from 2016 to 2020 than people expected him to be.
And even today, all the people who are yelling about him challenging democracy, democracy is not under threat.
The courts are not under threat.
This idea that Donald Trump is simply running roughshod over our most cherished institutions is a lie.
So Democrats have always used revolutionary language in order to push forward evolutionary ends.
And Donald Trump sort of did the same thing inside the Republican Party.
He used revolutionary language to achieve evolutionary ends.
And all of that is sort of normal politics in the United States.
That is not what's happening to the left now.
Now the left, Bernie Sanders in particular and his entire wing of the party, are using revolutionary language because they want an actual revolution.
This is why you have seen the left nodding at riots over the course of the last decade.
Actual revolution in the streets.
It's why so much of the left was fine with Luigi Mangion shooting the United Healthcare CEO, because revolution requires a few broken eggs.
And it is why Bernie Sanders now has the whip hand in the Democratic Party.
So Zara Mamzani is simply channeling Bernie Sanders at this point.
And he has a few sort of added features.
Obviously, the fact that he's ethnically diverse, the fact that he's not originally born in America, the fact that his father is a post-colonial studies professor at Columbia University of Shia Muslim descent, and his mother is an Indian-American filmmaker of Punjabi Hindu descent.
All these things add a smattering of exoticism to Zoran Mamdani.
The fact that he is a rabid anti-Semite obviously sprinkles a lot of pizzazz atop the sort of Omni-cause stew.
He's basically Greta Thunberg with a beard, with a more ethnically exotic background, and with a lot more charisma.
That's who Zoran Mamdani is.
And that is the international left in a nutshell.
He is the face of the international left in a nutshell.
So I'm going to begin with his victory speech.
Here's a quote from his victory speech.
Let me close with this.
In these dark times, I know that it is harder than ever to keep faith in our democracy.
It has been attacked by billionaires and their big spending, by elected officials who care more about self-enrichment than the public trust, and by authoritarian leaders who rule through fear.
But above all, our democracy has been attacked from within.
For too long, New Yorkers have strained to find a leader who represents us, who puts us first.
And we have been betrayed time and again.
After so many disappointments, the heart hardens.
Belief becomes elusive.
And when we no longer believe in our democracy, it only becomes easier for people like Donald Trump to convince us of his worth.
For billionaires to convince us that they must always lead.
And I pledge to you that we will remake this great city, not in my image, but in the image of every New Yorker who has only known struggle.
Well, I mean, he certainly has not only known struggle.
In fact, Zorn Mamdani has experienced a shocking lack of struggle in his young and non-achievement-oriented life.
In fact, New York State Assembly member Zorn Mamdani, according to Forbes.com, at a panel in Harlem in February, discussed a piece of proposed legislation that would strip Columbia University of various tax breaks and redirect the revenue to fund the city's university system.
Mamdani is no stranger to Columbia.
His father is a Harvard-educated, renowned professor there.
He grew up in university-owned housing.
Today, Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, proudly rejects the elite circles.
His mother, also Harvard-educated, is an award-winning director where he got his start.
He lives in a rent-stabilized apartment, owns no car, and lists just one major asset in his financial disclosure, several acres of land in his native Uganda that he acquired at least a decade ago.
And his social media savvy outsider campaign to become New York's next mayor has carried him to polling neck and neck with the other frontrunners.
This, of course, before his big win.
All righty, in just a moment, we're going to get into Democrats falling in line behind the radicals like Zoran Mamdani.
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So, Mom Dani is worth a couple hundred grand.
He was born in Kampala, the capital of Uganda in 1991, the same year that his Indian-American filmmaker mother released her second movie starring Denzel Washington.
That was three years after her debut feature, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
His dad had a job teaching at Columbia University.
He attended Bank Street, a prestigious Manhattan private school that now costs as much as $66,000 a year for elementary school students before graduating from Bronx High School of Science, one of the city's best public schools.
Then he studied Africana studies, again, a nonsense study at Bowdoin College, a private liberal arts school in Maine that is also the alma mater of Netflix's Reed Hastings.
After graduating, he worked on his mom's sets.
He tried his hand at a rap career using the monikers Young Cardamom and Mr. Cardamom and took jobs working on several political campaigns and community organizing efforts.
That is legitimately his entire work history.
And this is a person who is campaigning for those who quote unquote have only known struggle.
So what is he actually saying?
What he is saying is that if you are unsuccessful in life, like say Zoran Mamdani, what is required is a revolution, revolution led by someone like Zoran Mamdani.
Zoran Mamdani is a trust fund kid.
That's what he is.
And yet he is treated as though he is a revolutionary.
And by the way, true revolutionaries very often are trust fund kids.
Dirty little secret about revolution.
It is very rarely led by true members of the low income classes.
It is usually led by upper middle income people who feel upset that they didn't get their quote unquote fair worth.
That is what Mom Dani is out to do.
And so he is taking Bernie Sanders economics and he's slapping on top of that all of the spicy pepper that makes so many liberals go absolutely gaga, particularly white, highly educated, rich, elite liberals.
Again, all the things that people see as bugs in Mom Dani are actually draws for Mom Dani.
That is the reality of the situation.
So just to take an example, here is a tweet that he sent out.
This is October 8th, 2023.
It's the day after the October 7th attacks.
Quote, I mourn the hundreds of people killed across Israel and Palestine in the last 36 hours.
Netanyahu's declaration of war, the Israeli government's decision to cut electricity to Gaza, And Knesset members calling for another Nakba will undoubtedly lead to more violence and suffering in the days and weeks to come.
The path toward a just and lasting peace can only begin by ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.
Again, he tweeted that the day after October 7th, before Israel had even responded, and while people were still being shot in Israel by Hamas terrorists, that's the guy who's probably the next mayor of New York.
The guy who is probably the next mayor of New York has been characterized by his mother as non-American, quote, he is a total Desi, completely.
We are not Firangs at all.
He is very much us.
He is not American at all.
He was born in Uganda, raised between India and America.
He is at home in many places.
He thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian.
That is according to the Hindustan Times from 2013.
Okay, so a person whose own mother characterized him as not American in his essence could be the next mayor of New York.
And by the way, his campaign videos drew on all of this.
Because when you are talking again about the scavenger cause and the idea is you have to tear down all the things, it is good to talk about ethnic separatism, like true ethnic separatism, in which you make the appeal to be mayor of New York based solely on your ethnicity.
Here is Zoran Mamdani cutting an ad in Hindi in the middle of the campaign.
Seeing the selection, it has just 20 days left.
And the choice is between me and Andrew Cuomo.
If you're just tuning in, this is all Andrew Cuomo has to offer, and it's a clip from an old movie.
By the movie, property, bank balance, bungalow, car, what do you have?
And he says, you, thanks to you, we've raised $8 million, knocked on more than 800,000 doors, and are on the brink of electing the first South Asian mayor in New York City history.
But it's not who I'll be, but what I will do for our communities and for every New Yorker.
I'm going to make this city affordable.
New Yorkers are struggling to afford food, clothing, and shelter.
I'm fighting to change that.
Rent-freeze, rent-freeze.
Free buses, free childcare, cheaper groceries.
So free stuff for everybody.
And hey, by the way, I'm ethnically divorced.
Cool, cool, cool.
And this is the feature, not the bug.
Now, who is supporting Sarn Mandani?
Because if this is the up-and-coming Democratic Party, a Democratic Party in which upper-class white liberals particularly feel really good because they have non-white faces to tell them things that are essentially luxury beliefs that no one actually wants, who's supporting him?
Just so you'd expect, upper-class white liberals.
So, according to the closing polls, in the New York Democratic mayoral primary, the neighborhoods with the highest non-white percentages, Cambria Heights, Laurelton, Springfield Gardens, Canarsey, voted between 60 and 64% for Andrew Cuomo.
Mom Dani was stuck between 17 and 23%.
In the neighborhoods with the highest Hispanic percentages, Corona, University Heights, Fordham Heights, Longwood, Kingsbridge Heights, Cuomo won somewhere between 48 and 59% of the vote.
Mom Dani was stuck between 31 and 41% of the vote.
In Asian neighborhoods, Mom Dani won, walking away, because again, of the attempted ethnic solidarity there.
And then there are the white neighborhoods.
Then there are the white neighborhoods.
So take a look at the white neighborhoods.
White voters precincts by racial majority.
White voters, Mom Dani plus 5.
Black voters, Cuomo plus 18, 18.
How about by median income?
According to the New York Times, lower income, Cuomo plus 13.
Higher income, Momdani plus 13.
So what is your takeaway?
The takeaway is that upper-class white people predominantly love this crap.
Love it.
College-educated white people love this sort of nonsense.
They enjoy it.
And by the way, if you don't believe me, all you have to do is take a look at this tape of Zorn Mamdani's election evening party when it was announced that Cuomo had conceded the primary.
Can you see a single person of color in this crowd?
I think you are hard pressed.
Oh my god!
So, when I say that Bernie Sanders has taken over the party, that's what I mean.
AOC is Bernie Sanders just wearing AOC's face.
Zorin Mamdani is Bernie Sanders just wearing Zorin Mamdani's face.
And he's pledging all of Bernie Sanders' nihilistic trash solutions to life.
Bernie Sanders, there's a reason he was celebrated by Politico magazine.
Quote, Democratic leadership is way out of touch.
Bernie Sanders on Zorin Mamdani's win.
And he says that Mamdani ran a brilliant campaign, but not just that.
He says that the way forward for the Democratic Party is fairly obvious.
He says we're going to have to support progressive candidates.
Whether they have to primary incumbent Democrats does or does not matter.
Obviously, that's what fighting oligarchy is about.
The Democratic leadership, he says, has got to make a choice.
They're probably not going to make the right choice.
And therefore, we just have to go forward and bring new energy into the party in terms of working class people, young people, people of color, etc.
And again, that sprinkling of anti-Semitism, anti-Israel hatred, hatred for America's foreign policy, hatred for traditional values, the queers for Palestine aspect of the OmniCause, Bernie's all in on that sort of stuff.
I mean, Bernie said to Politico, quote, one thing I want to say also is that if Democrats keep running in fear of APAC, they will continue to do badly.
First of all, the idea that Democrats run in fear of APAC is an absurdity.
It's an absurdity.
APAC doesn't have remotely that kind of power.
And then he goes off on a rant about the right-wing extremist Netanyahu government and all the rest.
That, of course, is the stuff that Just gets all these radical left-wingers absolutely hot and bothered.
Absolutely hot and bothered.
He goes after Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, saying Larry was the guy who helped bail out Wall Street, as I recall.
I'm alarmed there's any Democrat who'd be sympathetic to a Netanyahu government.
And it's all about the OmniCause.
That's all it is.
The reason that all of these people are marching with a queer flag and a Palestinian flag and now an Iran flag and also voting for Zoran Mamdani is because they are about destroying the things that work in the name of nothing.
It is not as though they want to build a better system.
They do not have the capacity to build a better system.
You think that Zoran Mamdani, through rent freezing all the apartments in New York that he can, is going to lower the price of housing in New York City?
They tried this in the 70s and landowners, developers began burning down their own developments for the insurance money.
They stopped actually cleaning up their own apartment complexes because it was too expensive to clean them for the rent that was being received.
No one was developing anything new.
You really think that Zora Mamdani's rewarmed Cuban-style socialism where the government runs grocery stores is going to bring down the price of food?
Of course it won't.
It's not about that.
It was never about that.
It's about a shout and a cry at the quote-unquote establishment screaming at the moon in the name of revolution.
That is Bernie Sanders' party.
Again, Bernie has never been on a major piece of legislation.
Bernie is a lifelong loser.
He's a loser.
That doesn't mean he's not dangerous.
Losers can absolutely be dangerous.
And now what's starting to happen is that the Democratic establishment is starting to come around.
So this race isn't over yet.
Already coming up, President Trump goes hog wild on reporters suggesting that his Iran win was not, in fact, a win.
They're lying.
He goes after them first.
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of the Federal Trade Commission a person so wildly to the left that every major business person in America despises Lena Khan shockingly there are parts of the Republican Party that like Lena Khan because they again horseshoe theory right around this sort of nihilistic economics and foreign policy the horseshoe theory right and the horseshoe theory left they're now just doing the predator meme with the gripped arms at this point there's a picture
of Lena Khan with Zoran Mamdani at his at his party meanwhile Chuck Schumer is now caving as you would expect because Chuck Schumer is a pathetic human being the man who tried to write a book about anti-Semitism after ushering anti-Semitism into his party wholesale he now put out a tweet saying quote I've known Zoran Mamdani since we worked together to provide debt relief for thousands of beleaguered taxi drivers and fought to stop a fracked gas plant in Astoria he ran an impressive campaign that connected with New Yorkers about affordability fairness and
opportunity I spoke with Zoran Mamdani this morning and am looking forward to getting together soon what a disgrace he is what an absolute disgrace he is Chuck Schumer who wrote a book again about anti-Semitism is eager to meet with the guy who says globalize the intifada and chants it meanwhile wall street is of course panicking over all of this but other democrats are similarly jazzed hakeem jeffries the house minority leader he's out there praising mamzani's economic focus along with morning joe
does he have an ideology that you would want your candidates in 2026 to have well from the standpoint of house democrats and what our focus has been clearly uh we have an affordability crisis in the united states of america and our focus will continue to be on driving down the high cost of living in this country well i'm so glad that he's found some common threads with zarin mandani again the democratic party they
always make the mistake of thinking the revolutionaries are on their side the revolutionaries want nancy pelosi's head the same way they want Donald Trump's head.
They're just quieter about it.
So, again, this is who the Democrats are.
This is going to break out into the open in the 2028 primaries because Bernie Sanders is going to pick somebody.
Bernie Sanders at this point is, I believe, 83 years old.
That means that by the time the 2028 elections come around, he'll be 86 years old.
That's too old.
He's not going to be able to run.
He's going to have to tap somebody on the shoulder.
Now, he is out there campaigning day in and day out with AOC.
That means that she, basically a female Zarn Mamdani, is a likely candidate for president.
And if you look at those primaries and you look at the demographic breakdown of the Democratic primaries, she's not in horrible shape.
Democrats may be forced to rely on black voters in South Carolina again to promote, say, a Wes Moore, governor of Maryland, or something like that, just to stop the Democratic Socialists from taking over.
But if there's any sort of economic downturn, the wind in her sails is going to be extreme.
Do you really think that J.B. Pritzker is going to stop AOC or Gavin Newsom is going to stop AOC?
Even Gretchen Whitmer?
Certainly not Pete Buttigieg or Rah Emanuel.
The centrist Democratic Party is in retreat.
They're in serious, serious trouble at this point.
So, by the way, is New York.
It seems like the last best hope of the city of New York at this point is, in fact, Mayor Eric Adams.
Here's Mayor Adams slamming Mom Dani as a snake oil salesman.
He's a snake oil salesman.
He will say and do anything to get elected.
Think about this for a moment.
He wants to raise 1%.
He wants to raise tax on 1% of New York's high-income earnest.
As a mayor, you don't have the authority to do that.
You know who has the authority to do that?
An assemblyman, which he is.
Well, will Adams be able to actually achieve a mayoral victory?
Corporate leaders are trying to come together.
It may be too little, too late.
And New York City has been feeding the Democratic Party steadily.
They've been feeding them for years and years and years.
They never stood up.
They never said no.
And now they are being eaten.
That is what's likely to happen next.
Corporate leaders, according to the Wall Street Journal, held a flurry of private phone calls to plot how to fight back against Momdani's primary victory and discussed backing an outside group with the goal of raising around 20 million bucks to oppose him, according to people familiar with the matter.
The calls also discussed efforts to coalesce behind Adams and work to keep Cuomo out of the race.
They're also trying to get Republican candidate Chris Schliwa to drop out by getting the White House to offer him a job in the Trump administration.
So, a lot of people on Wall Street are freaking out, concerned about the future of the city of New York as well they should be.
Wednesday, bankers and traders were trying to figure out the repercussions of a Mamdani mayoralty should he win the general election.
According to the Wall Street Journal, some voiced concern about Mamdani's plan to freeze the rent of millions of New Yorkers who live in rent-stabilized apartments, saying it would deter new investment in housing, reduced supply, and push up prices for everyone else.
Anthony Pompliano, CEO of Professional Capital Management, a Bitcoin-focused financial services company, said, I cannot believe I even need to say this, but socialism doesn't work.
There are renewed questions about whether Wall Street executives would stay in New York at all.
Sandra Gerber, chief executive of investment firm Hudson Bay Capital, said he fielded texts from some of his 170 employees who said they were thinking of leaving.
I'm getting texts from a lot of my friends in New York City saying that this is the last straw, to which I say, why is this the last straw?
You should have picked up and left years ago.
President Trump has responded to Zorin Mamdani's win at this point.
Quote, it's finally happened.
The Democrats have crossed the line.
Zorin Mamdani, a 100% communist lunatic, has just won the Dem primary and is on his way to becoming mayor.
We've had radical lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous.
He looks terrible.
His voice is grating.
He's not very smart.
He's got AOC plus three, dummies all, backing him.
And even our great Palestinian senator, Crian Chuck Schumer, is growling over him.
Yes, this is a big moment in the history of our country.
I'm never going to get over the fact that he just calls Chuck Schumer the senator from Palestine.
I think that's hilarious.
I just do because it's true.
It's so true.
And then he adds, quote, I have an idea for the Democrats to bring them back into play.
After years of being left out in the cold, including suffering one of the greatest losses in history, the 2024 presidential election, the Democrats should nominate low IQ candidate Jasmine Crockett for president.
AOC plus 3 should be respectively vice president and three high-level members of the cabinet, added together with our future communist mayor of New York City, Zar Mamdani, and our country is really screwed.
Well, I mean, listen, in the near term, that looks like a successful campaign for Republicans.
All I keep saying over and over and over is people should be very careful who they hope wins a primary on the other side, because at one point, Democrats wanted Donald Trump to win a primary in the 2016 presidential election.
He has now been president two times.
So be careful what you wish for.
But bottom line is this.
The Democratic Party does not have the capacity to stand up to the radicalism within its own party.
They believe, as always, that the radicals are the future.
And once they say that is so, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy because if you don't stand up to the crazies on your own side, they will eat you eventually.
And the eventually isn't going to be so eventual.
It's just going to happen sooner rather than later.
Okay, meanwhile, President Trump spoke out a lot yesterday about the report that he has labeled false.
Now labeled false by the Israeli government as well from the New York Times and CNN that the strike that President Trump authorized on the Fordo nuclear facility in Iran was somehow unsuccessful.
That was a report the New York Times put out based on essentially a low-confidence intelligence assessment from one of the 18 reports filed for the DNI.
Worth noting at this point that Tulsi Gabbard, the DNI, came out and said that President Trump is right.
Quote, new intelligence confirms what the president has stated numerous times.
Iran's nuclear facilities have been destroyed.
If the Iranians choose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities, Natanza, Fordo, Esfahan, entirely, which would likely take years to do.
The propaganda media has deployed their usual tactic, selectively releasing portions of illegally leaked classified intelligence assessments, intentionally leaving out the fact the assessment was written with low confidence to try to undermine President Trump's decisive leadership and the brave servicemen and women who flawlessly Executed a truly historic mission to keep the American people safe and secure.
And that actually is quite correct.
I mean, it's hilarious to hear it from Tulsi Gabbard, who radically downplayed the Iranian nuclear program until five seconds ago.
But it happens to be completely correct.
Now, President Trump did, in fact, probably expose something he might not, should have.
That would be, he's speaking about this, and he said that it was a total obliteration.
How does he know it's a total obliteration?
Because according to President Trump, Israel told him they had people on the ground literally looking at the site.
It was obliteration.
And you'll see that.
And it's going to come out.
Israel is doing a report on it now, I understand.
And I was told that they said it was total obliteration.
You know, they have guys that go in there after the hit.
And they say it was total obliteration.
Now, again, not a gigantic shock.
President Trump then continued.
He said, listen, these nuclear facilities have been blown to Kingdom Come.
We'll probably end up meeting with Iran, but maybe there's nothing to do there since they have no nuclear facilities to negotiate with.
We destroyed the nuclear.
In other words, let's destroy it.
I said, Iran will not have nuclear.
Well, we blew it up.
It's blown up to Kingdom Come.
And so I don't feel very strongly about it.
If we got a document, it wouldn't be bad.
We're going to meet with them, actually.
We're going to meet with them.
Okay, so again, President Trump very confident on this.
He also added that he doesn't believe an Iran nuclear deal is actually necessary, given the fact that, again, the strikes on the Iranian nuclear sites were successful.
He also added, by the way, that it is possible that if Iran continues with this nuclear program, then the conflict might be renewed because he is, again, not going to give up on the idea that Iran must remain non-nuclear.
They fought very, very hard and very viciously, very violently, and they were both satisfied to go home and get out.
And can it start again?
I guess someday it can.
It could maybe start soon.
Okay, so again, I think that's a realistic take by President Trump.
He added, by the way, that all of those rumors about Iran moving their nuclear materials, he says, they didn't move their nuclear materials.
They're buried under Fordo.
Is there any indication from U.S. intelligence that Iran was able to move any material, including the USA?
No, we just the opposite.
We think we hit them so hard and so fast they didn't get to move.
And if you knew about that material, it's very hard and very dangerous to move.
So again, President Trump is operating off the best available intel.
That is not true for CNN or the New York Times.
Israeli intel, by the way, assesses the exact same thing.
According to Barack Ravid over at Axios, who usually is being leaked to by the restrainers in the Trump administration, Israeli intelligence services believe U.S. and Israeli strikes caused very significant damage to Iran's nuclear facilities, with some officials perplexed by leaked U.S. intelligence reports suggesting otherwise.
The emerging Israeli assessment presents a far more optimistic view of the operation than that preliminary report from the DIA, which assessed the strikes may have set Iran back only a few months.
Israel, which initiated the war and faces a far more direct threat from Iran than the United States, is largely satisfied with the early results.
So if they're satisfied with the results, we should probably take their word for it since they're the ones who are on the front lines here.
A professional battle damage assessment takes time, said an Israeli official.
However, the official said, the Israeli intelligence services haven't arrived at any bottom lines for now, but we don't think there was any bug in the operation.
We have no indications the bunker buster bombs didn't work.
Nobody here is disappointed.
Now, again, Israeli officials say that the Iranian government has been engaged in its own battle assessment to determine the state of its nuclear program and that intercepted communications suggest that Iranian military officials have been giving false situation reports to the country's political leadership.
A second Israeli official said the Iranians themselves still don't even have a clear idea what happened to some of their nuclear facilities.
Again, they say that these facilities have been either significantly hampered or destroyed entirely.
Natanz is destroyed, the above-ground enrichment facility.
Fordo inflicted major damage on the facility.
Isfahan, the uranium reprocessing facility, was destroyed.
Its underground tunnels were also damaged.
We doubt these facilities can be activated anytime in the near future, said one Israeli official.
And two Israeli officials claim intelligence shows Iran's stockpile of both 60% and 20% enriched uranium is now buried beneath rubble at both Isfahan and Fordo.
And that'll be very difficult for them to recover that anytime in the near future.
Bottom line, this is a serious cumulative effect when you put all that together, said the Israeli official.
All righty, coming up, prosecutors have dropped some charges against Diddy.
Oh my word.
We'll get to that in a moment.
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Meanwhile, President Trump's success in the Middle East means that Iran does not have any major serious outside supporters.
China, Russia, North Korea all have gone basically silent.
According to the Wall Street Journal, as Iran reels from its gravest threat in decades, its alliance with China, Russia, and North Korea is facing a vital test.
Will its partners come to its aid?
Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang could offer Iran crucial assistance to recover from the damage inflicted by U.S. and Israeli strikes on its nuclear program and arsenal of conventional weapons.
That could deepen the alliance, sending a powerful signal for potential conflicts in Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, and Eastern Europe.
Indeed, the three powers helped Iran build the nuclear program the U.S. and Israel have tried to destroy.
But China, Russia, and North Korea don't appear eager to rush to Iran's side.
A big reason.
President Trump's decision to insert the U.S. into Israel's assault on Iran by striking the country's nuclear facilities has made helping Tehran recover far riskier and more geopolitically fraught.
So big win for President Trump.
As I said, America isn't just deterring Iran from building a nuclear weapon because America might just hit him with another bunker buster.
America is deterring China, deterring Russia, making strong moves on the foreign front.
And apparently, by the way, the Trump organization is about to affix its brand to a tower in Tel Aviv.
A well-deserved victory lap for the Trump family, for sure, for sure.
Okay, meanwhile, President Trump is going after the leakers who put out this ridiculous story suggesting the Iran nuclear facilities had not been damaged.
President Trump is rightly beyond angry about this.
So Kelly O'Donnell from NBC News asked him about it, and he smacked her around.
All right, Kelly, go ahead.
Here we go.
There's another one.
Hello, sir.
Thank you very much.
We got them all today.
Okay.
So, Mr. President, you talked about expecting some on-the-ground assessments at Fordo and other sites.
Is that Israeli and U.S.?
It's been obliterated, Kelly.
What is your message then, sir, to the intelligence community when they present reports?
You're not disputing the DIA report.
We're talking about something that took place three days ago.
I understand that took place.
The report was done.
Three days ago.
Wait a minute.
Yes.
They didn't see it.
All they can do is take a guess.
Now, if you take a look at the pictures, if you take a look how it's all blackened, you know, the fire in brimstone is all underground because it's granite and it's all underground.
You don't show it.
But even there, with all of that being said, the whole area for 75 yards around, the hole where it hit is black with fire.
Okay, he is right about that, by the way.
And again, Israeli intelligence says the same thing.
Why would Israel stop the war if they have complete air dominance, if they believed that Fortal were still operational, and if they believed that the nuclear material had already been smuggled out somewhere and they could figure out where it was?
The answer is they would not.
Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, he says that this Iran nuclear obliteration is correct and that these leakers are professional stabbers, professional backstabs.
He's right about this.
He is right.
The question is, who did the leaking?
There should be a full-scale investigation into that leak.
There should be a full-scale investigation into a wide variety of leaks about who was doing what at the White House.
I would love to know, for one, who leaked to Tucker Carlson, that Mark Levin was at the White House and what he was saying at the White House.
That would be interesting to me.
I want to know where all these leakers are, because it seems to me a leaky ship is going to sink.
Here's Marco Rubio.
But all this leaker stuff, these leakers are professional stabbers.
That's what they are.
They go out and they read this stuff and then they tell you what it says against the law, but they characterize it for you in a way that's absolutely false.
I mean, he is right about that.
He is right.
Pete Hagset, the Secretary of Defense, said the same thing.
The instinct of CNN, the instinct of the New York Times, is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country.
They don't care what the troops think.
They don't care what the world thinks.
They want to spin it to try to make him look bad based on a leak.
Of course, we've all seen plenty of leakers.
And what do leakers do?
They have agendas.
And what do they do?
Do they share the whole information or just the part that they want to introduce?
And when they introduce that preliminary report that's deemed to be a low assessment, you know what a low assessment means?
Low confidence in the data in that report.
And why is there low confidence?
Because all of the evidence of what was just bombed by 12 30,000 pound bombs is buried under a mountain, devastated and obliterated.
So if you want to make an assessment of what happened at Ford, you better get a big shovel.
He is exactly right about that.
He's exactly right.
And the big question remains, who were the leakers?
And I hope that the Defense Department and the DNI, they deserve to do a full investigation into who is leaking this sort of material to the New York Times that puts American national security at risk.
That's a big, key question.
Meanwhile, the horseshoe theory right and the horseshoe theory left continue to join hands.
So on the left, Joy Reed is making arguments that sound very much akin to members of the Tucker Carlson crowd.
She was appearing on CNN.
She's no longer on MSNBC.
And it hasn't really made MSNBC's programming much better, but it was hard to make it worse.
So she's now moved over to CNN to make the programming there worse.
She's essentially the Ebola virus of cable programming.
Wherever she goes, the ratings die.
Here she was talking about how the West is arrogant to drop bombs on Iran.
What does that make Iran, which was shooting missiles into Israeli civilian areas for the entirety of this 12-day war?
And why is it that there is this arrogance in the West and in the United States to say that we get to decide who can have nuclear energy?
We get to decide that and not just decide It.
We get to act on it and drop bombs on a country that didn't attack us.
We had no business dropping bombs on Iran.
And so the question of whether the tactic worked or not to me ignores the fundamental moral question at hand.
And I think that I'm not alone, probably, among Americans who are saying that this was something that we had absolutely no right to do.
No right to do, because why should we judge?
Why should we judge if Iran has a nuclear weapon?
You know, an Islamic theocracy that has vowed to wipe Israel off the map and then to turn its sights to the rest of the West, including Europe and the United States, that has spread its terror tentacles throughout the world.
Who are we to judge?
Who are we to judge?
I mean, after all, we're the country that dropped the nuclear bomb.
That's something that Cornell West has said.
Again, very much akin to some on the horseshoe theory, right?
Here is Coronel West, again, on CNN, suggesting that the United States shouldn't be able to make any judgments.
After all, we killed 250 million people with the World War II A bombs.
We did not kill 250 million people with the A bombs.
Just going to point that out on a factual level.
It is not true.
When you attack a nation like Iran, the quickest lesson one learns is to make sure you now have a nuclear weapon so you're never attacked again.
That's the only reason why Israel got its weapon in 1966.
That's why North Korea got its weapon.
That's why France got its weapon.
That's why the United States and Russia got their weapon.
And for those of us who go all the way back to the United States to kill 250 million people in two days in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that's not a high moral moment for the Americans.
What now?
Again, this sort of desire by that horseshoe theory right and horseshoe theory left to denigrate the United States in order to prevent us from taking action against seriously nefarious players on the world stage.
It is quite disturbing and it is quite disgusting.
And many of those same people are trying to now downplay the size and scope of the United States' win.
Because if it is clear to everyone that the United States did the right thing here by ending the Iranian nuclear program, if it is clear to everyone that it did not start World War III, if it is clear that President Trump made the right move, well, then their entire philosophy is on the ropes.
Maybe America is actually, in foreign policy terms, generally good, not bad.
Maybe the United States is actually not acting like a bull in a China shop, but is acting in targeted fashion.
Maybe not every aspect of evil countries doing evil things is blowback designed at American overreach.
But this is why you have Senator Rand Paul out there trying to laugh off President Trump's big win.
Do you think that now the president's at the NATO meeting in Europe?
He's gotten a very warm reception.
Can you call this a win for the president?
Well, you know, the Bushes are happy.
Mike Pence is happy.
Bill Crystal is happy.
All of his critics that think he's not bellicose enough are just loving it and clapping, and they're very excited.
Many of them, I think, secretly hope that we will send troops into the Middle East and be more mired in another prolonged war.
It's just a lie.
It's just a lie, and it's a stupid lie, and it's a nefarious lie.
No one wants hundreds of thousands of American troops in Iran.
No one has made that argument.
No one.
Even people who have talked about regime change are talking about the possibility of essentially knocking off the Ayatollah and then letting the Iranian people have at it.
No one is talking about a mass ground invasion.
But that horseshoe theory right and horseshoe theory left have a perverse view of America in the world.
Again, back to Joy Reed.
Here she was on the Breakfast Club pod saying that Iran with nukes would actually make the Middle East calmer, which is in those are the remarks of an ambulatory psychotic.
I mean, I don't know how else to put it.
And the reason you won't see nuclear war in our lifetime is that everyone who would deem to threaten global annihilation has nukes.
Mutually assured.
And I think what would, in a weird way, make the Middle East...
Because everybody's packing.
Everybody got guns.
That's right.
You know, maybe the Middle East would be calmer.
Now, again, a realistic assessment of the world suggests that nefariously unstable countries that pursue terrorism across the region and the world should not have nuclear weapons.
But I guess that's too much for people who don't like the United States very much in the first place.
Meanwhile, President Trump went to the NATO summit yesterday, and he got an immediate big victory, a commitment to a NATO spending boost.
According to Breitbart, President Trump hailed a historic monumental win for the United States, Europe, and Western civilization as the NATO alliance agreed to his demand to equalize the burden of common defense with a 5% of GDP floor on military spending for its members.
Speaking at a press conference before he departed The Hague in the Netherlands, President Trump saluted a highly productive NATO summit and particularly noted he came away with a changed perspective on European defense.
The centerpiece for that Hague summit, the first major NATO meeting in years, is the adoption of a new floor for spending by member states on their own and collective defense.
While members had been expected to spend 2% or more of their own GDP on defense, that figure has now more than doubled to 5%, even if that does include infrastructure spending not previously considered to count as defense spending.
So NATO Secretary General Mark Rudy, who of course is very much in favor of countries spending more money on NATO, praised President Trump to the skies, as well he should.
Here is Rudy.
For too long, one ally, the United States, carried too much of the burden of that commitment.
And that changes today.
President Trump, dear Donald, you made this change possible.
Your leadership on this has already produced $1 trillion in extra spending from European allies since 2016.
And the decisions today will produce trillions more for our common defense to make us stronger and fairer by equalizing spending between America and America's allies.
So, I'd just like to point out that that's the NATO Secretary General talking about Donald Trump.
Remember that time Donald Trump was supposed to be a Russian tool who hated NATO and is going to destroy it?
Remember that time?
And now it just turns out that Donald Trump has gotten NATO countries to increase the amount they are spending on common defense in a commitment to NATO.
Remember that time?
I remember that because I'm older in about five minutes.
President Trump said that when NATO allies meet the Hague defense commitment, it will add more than $1 trillion per year to our common defense.
He said, I came because it's something I'm supposed to do, but I leave here a little bit different.
I watched the heads of these countries get up, and the love and passion they showed for their countries is unbelievable.
I've never seen anything quite like it.
They want to protect their countries.
They need the United States.
Without the U.S., it's not going to be the same.
It was really moving to see it.
They love their countries.
They are really respectful to me.
I left here saying these people really love their countries.
It's not a ripoff.
We're here to help them protect their country.
And earlier in the day, President Trump also affirmed his commitment to Article 5.
That, of course, is the article that allows a NATO country under attack by an outside force to call on all the other members of NATO to come to its defense.
Now, President Trump, again, endorsed that.
Quote, I stand with Article 5.
That's why I'm here.
If I didn't stand with it, I wouldn't be here.
Responding to a journalist cutting in tasks so you would defend countries, even if they don't pay their fair share, Trump said, well, what did I just say?
Yes, of course.
Why would I be here?
So in other words, President Trump used leverage.
He used leverage.
Another point that was made by Secretary General Mark Rudy, who said, you know, sometimes daddy has to use some harsh language.
I mean, we may do papers on it, Marco.
Maybe we're going to do papers.
I don't even know if you need them.
They're not going to be fighting each other.
They've had it.
They've had a big fight, like two kids in a schoolyard.
You know, they fight like hell.
You can't stop them.
Let them fight for about two, three minutes.
Then it's easier to stop them.
Daddy has to sometimes use strong language.
You have to use strong language.
Every once in a while, you have to use a certain word.
I think you have to join the house.
Okay, that is amazing stuff.
Truly amazing.
So Marco Rubio was laughing in the background.
President Trump was asked about that particular remark by the Secretary General.
And Marco Rubio broke into laughter.
He called you Daddy earlier.
Do you regard your NATO allies as kind of children?
No, he likes me.
I think he likes me.
If he doesn't, I'll let you know.
I'll come back and I'll hit him hard, okay?
He did.
He did it very affectionately.
Daddy, you're my daddy.
Do you regard your NATO allies, though, as kind of like children?
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
Good for Trump.
Okay, so remember, President Trump was supposed to be the guy who undermined American security, according to the left.
He was supposed to be the guy who handed over the country to Russia.
He was supposed to be the guy who was going to turn around and sell out NATO, allow Russia to simply walk through Eastern Europe.
And as I've said a thousand times, President Trump is not that guy.
He lives in the world of reality.
He's not looking at a dissolution of NATO.
He wants other countries to pay their fair share.
By the way, he did go out his way to slap the Spaniards because the Spaniards said they would not increase their spending.
And he is right about that.
He is correct.
So again, President Trump getting things done.
And for all those who believe that the president of the United States is fully turned against Ukraine, again, I see this sentiment a lot, again, on some of that horseshoe theory, right?
I'm still waiting for the evidence that President Trump has fully turned against Ukraine.
President Trump had a rather fascinating exchange with a Ukrainian reporter.
Here's what he had to say.
BBC News, Ukrainian.
Where are you from?
I'm from Ukraine.
So my question to you is whether or not the U.S. is ready to sell anti-air missile systems Patriot to Ukraine.
We know that Russia has been pounding Ukraine really heavily right now.
Are you living yourself now in Ukraine?
My husband is there.
Wow.
I can see you're very, you know, it's amazing.
And me with the kids, I'm in Warsaw, actually, because he wanted me to be.
Is your husband a soldier?
No?
He's.
He's there now?
Yeah.
Wow.
That's rough stuff, right?
That's tough.
And you're living here?
In Warsaw.
And you're a reporter?
I am.
Good.
And President Trump then said that he would be providing Patriot missiles to the Ukrainians.
He said, according to ABC News, that he might be sending those Patriot missiles to Ukraine, that he's going to see if he can find systems for Ukraine.
That was after he met with Zelensky, who again, Vladimir Zelensky has now done everything Trump wanted him to do, up to and including putting on a suit.
Remember that time he went to the White House and he was wearing that jumpsuit that he wears because it's wartime in Ukraine still?
And everybody went nuts because he should be wearing a suit, including the president and the vice president?
And now he showed up to NATO wearing a suit because he knew that President Trump likes when he wears a suit.
That's just a smart thing to do.
It's just the thing he should do, politically speaking.
And he did it.
Vladimir Zelensky has said he would agree to a 30-day ceasefire immediately.
Vladimir Putin has agreed to nothing, zero things, zero.
President Trump does not like being treated that way by Vladimir Putin.
He doesn't.
Once again, President Trump, got to say, on foreign policy, the guy is absolutely slaying it.
He just is.
When you're getting praise from NATO, when you are ending wars in the Middle East with a single military strike, when you are throwing China off their game, deterring them possibly from going after Taiwan, these are all good moves.
He said to that Ukrainian reporter, quote, we're going to see if we can make some available.
They're very hard to get.
We need them too.
We were supplying them to Israel.
He said, they do want to have those anti-missile missiles, the Patriots.
We're going to see if we can make some available.
And again, he treated that woman with sympathy, which is usually an indicator.
For President Trump, he treats politics very personally.
He does.
It's all relationships with him.
It was one of the major problems that Vladimir Zelensky had.
One of the major problems that Zelensky had is that he and Trump got off on the wrong foot for a long time.
And that put him behind the eight ball.
Well, that seems to be passing now, particularly because President Trump, his relationship with Putin has been fractured because Putin is acting against President Trump's interests and frankly dunking on President Trump whenever he gets the chance.
I think President Trump is tiring of that really, really quickly.
Now, meanwhile, we do have an update from Diddy Land.
I know, I know.
I'm not super into this case, but I know lots of you are into the Sean Diddy Combs case.
Apparently, the Diddy prosecutors are now about to drop some of the charges.
And this makes some sense, frankly, because as I've suggested, him being a complete walking piece of human debris does Not necessarily mean that he's guilty of some of the crimes with which he is charged.
That's the problem with the criminal law.
You actually have to fulfill the elements of the criminal law in order to be charged.
Now, not all the charges are going away.
Federal prosecutors, according to thefader.com, in the Diddy racketeering trial, are no longer planning to proceed with theories of attempted kidnapping, attempted arson, and aiding and abetting.
The racketeering case is still going to proceed against the rap mogul.
He faces charges and transportation to engage in related to both an anonymous accuser and Cassie Ventura, his former girlfriend of 10 years.
He's pled not guilty.
In a letter filed on Tuesday, June 24th, prosecutors told Judge Aaron Subromanian that they had removed instructions from the charge pertaining to the theories.
Quote, the government is no longer planning to proceed on these theories of liability, so instructions are no longer necessary.
So there are meetings that happened yesterday between prosecution and defense to discuss jury instructions.
Closing arguments for the trial begin June 26th.
Some of these charges are being taken off the table in order to simplify what is being presented for the jury.
But it's kind of interesting to see what got taken off the table.
So, for example, the attempted kidnapping charge got taken off the table.
The fact pattern in that particular case, I'll be honest with you, I had to ask my friend Perplexity, our sponsors at Perplexity, to fill me in on this because Perplexity has been watching this more closely than I have.
On attempted kidnapping, Combs' former assistant, Capricorn Clark, testified that in 2011, upon discovering Combs' former partner, Cassie Ventura, was dating musician Kid Cuddy, Combs forcibly took Clark, well-armed, to Kid Cuddy's residence.
Clark claimed Combs threatened to kill her, Kid Cuddy, and Ventura if Kid Cuddy informed police about Combs' presence in the home.
This incident was presented as an attempted kidnapping tied to Combs' efforts to control and intimidate those involved.
So that charge has now been dropped.
Attempted arson.
Kid Cuddy, again, I guess that is another rapper.
I know, I know, testified that after ending his relationship with Ventura, his home was broken into and his Porsche 9-11 was set on fire using a Molotov cocktail, which an arson investigator confirmed was a makeshift firebomb containing gasoline.
The prosecution suggested that Combs was behind this targeted arson attack, setting a Cadillac escalade registered to Combs' label parked outside during the break-in.
Apparently, that's supposed to be retaliation because of Kid Cuddy's relationship with Cassie Ventura.
And then there's the aiding and abetting.
So he was accused of using his businesses to facilitate transporting women across state lines for distributing drugs, using violence and intimidation to control victims, recording those events for personal gratification.
So some of those charges were dropped, but not with regard to Cassie Ventura and also one other anonymous accuser, apparently.
So as for the remaining charges, he could still go to jail for life really, really easily.
The maximum penalty is life imprisonment.
The mandatory minimum is 15 years per count.
On racketeering conspiracy, RICO case, 20 years imprisonment is the maximum penalty.
So while prosecutors have dropped the specific Predicate Act, in order to have a conspiracy, you have to have an underlying crime.
It's a RICO prosecution.
It's about a conspiracy organized to commit a type of crime.
But the crimes they're alleging for purposes of RICO are bribery, witness tampering, forced labor, and narcotics distribution, transportation for 10 years imprisonment per count.
There could also be aggravating factors, consecutive sentences, and all the like.
So why did they drop all these charges?
Apparently, to simplify jury instructions, to focus on the stronger charges, and to prevent defense about overreach in the racketeering and conspiracy charges.
So the likelihood that Diddy is still going to jail for the rest of his life, that likelihood is still quite high.
Don't be misled by some of the sort of coverage that is coming out of the mainstream media today that the case is collapsing or something like that.
It pretty clearly is not.
Okay, meanwhile, speaking of criminal charges, you remember Representative LaMonica McIver?
That was that New Jersey Democrat who tried to break into an ICE facility and assaulted federal agents in the process.
She pled not guilty on Wednesday during a brief court appearance, according to the New York Times.
The Justice Department charged McIver after a clash between lawmakers and immigration officers during the arrest of the city's mayor outside the privately run detention center, which has become a flashpoint in President Trump's deportation crackdown.
McIver is one of a handful of politicians across the United States who's been arrested in recent weeks.
So she, as we say, is again pleading not guilty.
She pretty clearly is guilty, but it's quite possible that there will be jury nullification or that some arrangement will be reached with the prosecutors in this particular case.
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