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July 10, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:11:21

The SMOKING GUN In The Biden Cover-Up?

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	All righty, tons coming up on today's show.
	A massive update on actually the biggest cover-up and scandal probably of my political lifetime.
	Plus, we will get to the situation in Ukraine.
	Is there somebody who's sort of freelancing foreign policy inside the Trump administration?
	Plus, the Trump administration putting Harvard on blast first.
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	All righty, folks, it's time to talk about the biggest conspiracy and the biggest cover-up in modern American history.
	And no, I'm not talking about Jeffrey Epstein.
	If you want my full take on that, you can listen to yesterday's show.
	But I am talking about the cover-up that was right in front of us and that actually does go all the way to the top.
	And that, of course, involves the fact that the president of the United States was for several years mentally deficient and that someone else, we don't know who, was actually running the country.
	Well, the smoking gun to that effect was essentially presented yesterday in front of Congress.
	So Dr. Kevin O'Connor, who is former President Joe Biden's White House physician, invoked his rights under the Fifth Amendment on Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee, which is insane.
	House Republicans, led by Representative James Comer, had subpoenaed O'Connor in June, according to Newsweek, ordering him to testify as part of the investigation into the cover-up of President Joe Biden's cognitive decline.
	Remember, for years, the entire media, the entire Democratic apparatus claimed that Joe Biden was mentally well, and we could all even see his decline back during that 2020 race.
	It was not nearly as severe as it became in 2021, 22, and certainly by 2024 when he went on stage with Donald Trump and effectively died on the stage.
	But it was clear to anyone with eyeballs who was watching Joe Biden for any amount of time that this was a man who's in serious mental and physical decline.
	And Kevin O'Connor was the former White House physician for Joe Biden.
	And here he was yesterday, pleading the fifth.
	He was asked about what he knew when he knew it about Joe Biden's health condition, and he pled the fifth.
	Were you ever told to lie about the president's health?
	On the advice of counsel, I must respectfully decline to answer based upon the physician-patient privilege and in reliance on my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.
	Did you ever believe the president was unfit to execute his duties as president?
	On the advice of counsel, I must respectfully decline to answer based upon the physician-patient privilege and in reliance on my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.
	On the advice of counsel, I must respectfully decline to answer based upon the physician-patient privilege and in reliance on my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.
	Dr. O'Connor, is it your intention to decline to answer all questions put to you today by the committee on the basis of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination?
	On the advice of counsel, I must respectfully decline to answer based upon the physician-patient privilege and in reliance on my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.
	Okay, this is insane.
	This is insane.
	Okay, so he is claiming based on two things that he is not going to testify.
	One, of course, is physician patient privilege, which is the idea that you are supposed to keep secret the sort of health information that you and your doctor exchange.
	The doctor is not supposed to talk publicly about that.
	However, however, the physician patient privilege should probably not extend to public statements that you make about the health of the president of the United States because you're violating patient privilege by even saying that much.
	If you make a statement that the president is healthy, that the president has the following conditions, that's a violation of physician patient privilege in any other context.
	If your doctor went to a bar today and started talking about your specific health issues, even if he said you're totally healthy and fine, that's a violation of physician patient privilege.
	But that's exactly what Kevin O'Connor did as the White House doctor for Joe Biden.
	He put out public statements about the health of the president of the United States.
	And so asking him about that really should not be an issue.
	As far as the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, that protects against self-incrimination.
	So what he's saying is, if I talk here, then I may find myself in danger of a perjury trap.
	I might find myself in danger of committing a crime, which is absolutely astonishing.
	Again, remember, the original question here was, were you instructed to lie about the president's health at any point?
	That is not, by the way, a question about the president's health.
	Notice that's not a question about the president's health.
	That's a question about the lies surrounding the president's health.
	And if he says yes, then he's relying on the Fifth Amendment, presumably, right?
	He might be committing a crime.
	Then he's saying that he might have told the American people something false or told Congress something false or something like that.
	All of which goes to the fact that it is a dramatically undercovered feature of our national life that for several years, the president of the United States was not Joseph R. Biden, the elected president of the United States, and that there were people who colluded to keep him in power, despite the fact we have an explicit amendment to the Constitution designed to oust people who are mentally incompetent from this office, which means all members of the Biden cabinet were complicit in the cover-up of his health condition.
	All Biden cabinet members were complicit in the reality that the president of the United States was not actually the president of the United States.
	Now, that's a scandal.
	That's a cover-up.
	And that requires a much deeper investigation.
	It was all out in public view.
	There's tremendous evidence for it.
	And now all of the key witnesses are claiming, what, their Fifth Amendment rights?
	A statement was put out on behalf of Dr. O'Connor by his lawyers.
	Quote, as you know, Dr. Kevin O'Connor served as the physician to President Biden during President Biden's term of office from January 2021 to January 2025.
	Dr. O'Connor also had been President Biden's primary care physician for the 12 years before President Biden took office.
	It was Dr. O'Connor's privilege and honor to serve as President Biden's physician as head of the White House medical unit.
	Dr. O'Connor also served in the United States Army for more than 20 years, doing active tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
	This committee has indicated to Dr. O'Connor and his attorneys it does not intend to honor one of the most well-known privileges in our law, the physician-patient privilege.
	Now, again, he was the White House doctor who did, in fact, speak publicly about the health of the President of the United States while he was in the White House.
	So this is not a normal patient-physician relationship.
	Say the lawyers.
	The committee has indicated it will demand that Dr. O'Connell reveal, without any limitations, confidential information regarding his medical examinations, treatment, and care of President Biden.
	Revealing confidential patient information would violate the most fundamental ethical duty of a physician, could result in revocation of Dr. O'Connor's medical license, and would subject Dr. O'Connor to potential civil liability.
	He will not violate his oath of confidentiality to any of his patients, including President Biden.
	Furthermore, through the issuance of a presidential memorandum dated June 4th, 2025, 2025, President Trump has directed the Department of Justice and the White House Counsel to conduct a parallel criminal investigation into the same topics being investigated by this committee.
	In fact, just this past Sunday, Chairman Comer himself confirmed on Fox that Pambondi has announced an investigation at the Department of Justice into the illegal use of the Autopen.
	We believe that the committee should hold its investigation in abeyance until any criminal investigation has concluded.
	The totality of the circumstances surrounding this committee's investigation leave Dr. O'Connor no choice but to decline to answer questions on two overlapping grounds.
	First, the physician patient privilege.
	Second, the pending DOJ criminal investigation leaves Dr. O'Connor no choice but to invoke his constitutional rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to any questions posed by the committee.
	Now, Congress can easily solve this problem.
	All they have to do is just grant him immunity because then the Fifth Amendment concern goes away.
	If they say anything you testify on today cannot be used as the basis for your future prosecution, he can no longer claim the Fifth Amendment because the Fifth Amendment only applies in arenas where you could theoretically be prosecuted for the things that you are saying.
	By the way, there are ways around this.
	According to the Congressional Research Service, under federal statute, when a witness asserts the privilege, the full house or the committee conducting the investigation may seek a court order that one directs the witness to testify and two grants the witness immunity against the use of his or her testimony.
	So that presumably is the next step right here.
	But again, here's the thing.
	O'Connor was speaking publicly about Joe Biden's health while he was president of the United States.
	This is not a normal doctor-patient relationship.
	Here was O'Connor in 2024 publicly saying that Joe Biden's mental health and cognition are totally fine.
	How's the president's health?
	It is.
	Are you going to come to the briefing room to address us?
	Probably not.
	Could that change before the end of his term?
	And how is his mental cognition?
	It's excellent.
	Is there a reason you didn't perform a cognitive test on him?
	He's good every day.
	He's good every day.
	What about the speculation about Parkinson's disease or a related condition?
	And he's walking away from the camera.
	Dr. O'Connor, is there anything to that speculation that there might be something related to Parkinson's that he has?
	Yeah, he's good.
	Okay.
	And the specialist's visit to the White House, does that have anything to do with that concern?
	Yeah, he's seen him three times.
	Yeah, the meter is there.
	Okay, just smiling and walking away.
	Everything's fine.
	His mental health, it's great.
	Is there a reason he didn't do the cognitive test?
	Sure.
	He saw him every day.
	He was working with him every day.
	So the Alex Thompson J. Tapper book, Original Sin, which is all about the cover-up of Joe Biden's mental health condition, mentions O'Connor several times.
	Quote, O'Connor told people the 10-minute test was for physicians who saw their patients only occasionally, and he constantly saw the president.
	When others suggested doing the test to make sure, O'Connor would sometimes point to the Oval Office and say, Biden's already being president.
	O'Connor quipped that Biden's staff were trying to kill him while O'Connor was trying to keep him alive.
	He passes a cognitive test every day.
	Again, these were the lines O'Connor was using.
	So now him claiming the Fifth Amendment is a tacit admission that there was something going on, which we already know.
	We already know there was a cover-up.
	The only question is who told O'Connor to cover up the health condition?
	Was it Jill?
	Was it Joe?
	Who did that?
	Also, why was everybody else in the White House complicit in this cover-up?
	And who the hell was the president of the United States for multiple years, for multiple years?
	Now, listen, I understand all of this has consequences for the radical and I think justified distrust of our institutions on a wide level.
	What we've watched over the course of the last few years is the complete destruction of institutional trust at pretty much every major American institution.
	And I think that that destruction of trust is largely, sometimes almost entirely justified from the BLM riots of 2020 to the COVID lies that we were told during 2020 to the lies that were told about inflation in Afghanistan and the president's health.
	I'm not sure more lies have ever been exposed more quickly than right now.
	So I totally get the radical skepticism that many, many people are engaging in right now.
	I do.
	And even in cases where I don't agree with the outcome of that radical skepticism, I totally understand the radical skepticism for sure, for sure.
	This needs to be uncovered to the fullest extent of law, and people do need to be prosecuted for it.
	The American people were lied to.
	Anybody who was involved in the Joe Biden cabinet that refused to make a move to invoke the 25th Amendment to oust him as president of the United States for mental incompetence needs to be effectively barred from politics forever.
	Anyone who is a cabinet secretary who rose to that level, the Pete Buttigieges of the world, for example, needs to be held accountable for not having tried to invoke the 25th Amendment because the American people were robbed of having a president of the United States that they actually elected.
	It's unbelievable.
	And the fact that the doctor is taking the Fifth Amendment right now is just demonstrative of the lengths to which people surrounding the president will go to maintain their hold on proximity to power, even if the person they are supposed to be caring for is the president of the United States, not his administrative power or his family members who may be exercising that power in his absence.
	Again, the widespread speculation, justified by an enormous amount of contemporaneous evidence, is that it was actually Jill and Hunter who were effectively running the country while the president of the United States was mentally incompetent.
	Democrats are going to have to live this one down for a very, very long time.
	Alrighty, coming up, a bunch of strange stuff happening with regards to the Trump administration and Ukraine.
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	politico both top republican congressional leaders said wednesday they are prepared to move forward with new sanctions targeting russia this month after president trump signaled this week he is willing to pressure Moscow to end the war in Ukraine.
	Speaker Johnson said Vladimir Putin has shown an unwillingness to be reasonable and to talk seriously about brokering a peace.
	And I think we have to send him a message.
	That's my view.
	That, of course, is right.
	Meanwhile, Senator Majority Leader Thune cited substantial progress in working with the White House on legislation he said would, quote, enhance President Trump's leverage at the negotiating table and help end the bloodshed in Ukraine.
	He said Senate Republicans are committed to working with the House and White House to get this legislation through Congress and onto the president's desk.
	And this, of course, is the right approach.
	I mean, the fact is that Vladimir Putin is wildly intransigent.
	He does not want an end to this conflict.
	He believes that if he just holds out long enough, eventually resistance is going to collapse and he will be able to take Ukraine.
	And he's also in a situation where he can continue to run this meat grinder on his own people.
	And because he's a dictator who hurls people from third story windows without the questioning media to ask him about it, because every leader kills people, he's able to continue doing this odd infinitum.
	He can just continue doing this forever.
	The United States backing off would mean that Ukraine loses the war.
	In fact, last night in Kyiv was the biggest drone barrage of the war so far.
	Russia's been dramatically upping the ante in Ukraine.
	Joining us on the line is JP Lindsley, American journalist who has reported from Ukraine off and live since 2022, bringing daily uncensored frontline updates to a global audience.
	JP, thanks so much for taking the time.
	Yeah, Ben, hello from Kyiv.
	Great to see you here virtually.
	And I know you were here not long ago.
	And when you were here, it was calm and quiet.
	But what we went through last night, really the past week, but last night was probably the worst and most intense attack I have witnessed during my three years of reporting here every single day.
	So why don't you tell me about what's been going on for the last week?
	Obviously, escalations from Putin.
	What do those look like on the ground in Kyiv?
	When we were there, there was a drone alert, but it never actually materialized.
	Obviously, things have changed pretty radically.
	Yeah, you know, I'd say that there are two types of dualities here in the war that I'm feeling, that we're feeling every day here.
	One is a duality that happens at the front line, which is something we can discuss later.
	But then this is a duality in the cities.
	And so a city like Kyiv today, you know that every single person in this city was awake the entire night during that horrible, intense attack.
	And moments ago, I was just going for a run through the city.
	People went to work on time this morning.
	I was at my coffee shop at 9 o'clock in the morning.
	People are cheerful.
	And yet you know that everyone has gone through this hell.
	And what we had last night from about 1.30 in the morning until almost 4 o'clock, something that I've never witnessed before.
	Every single second, then for those hours, almost every single second, we heard the sound of the Iranian-designed Shahed drones buzzing or exploding.
	Every single second, for two and a half hours, incredibly intense, terrifying.
	Even people that have been through a lot here, military guys and all that, everyone was scared.
	And it felt like one of those nights when you think, this could be the end.
	And then very curiously, in the shelter where I was in my building, at about 4 o'clock in the morning, the intense drone attack stopped.
	And then we got round two, which was the missiles, the ballistic missiles.
	But very interestingly, people started to leave the shelter during the missile attack, in part because you get tired in a way and you accept things.
	But also, if a missile hits your building, a shelter is not really going to protect you.
	So the irony is when the more dangerous weapon showed up, people go upstairs and go back up to their apartments.
	And then just a few hours later, 8 o'clock, I was at my regular coffee shop and everyone is, you can tell everyone is shaking.
	The girl pouring my coffee, she just said Strasno, scary, and she smiles and says, what a beautiful day the weather is today.
	And that's a reality right now.
	I mean, really, it's been like this, I'd say, for more than a week now.
	Every day in Kyiv, you can have a most beautiful summer day.
	But as it gets closer to sunset, everyone gets this sick feeling saying, okay, what are we going to face tonight?
	Because that has been the case every single day.
	So obviously Putin is up the ante.
	On a geopolitical level, the president of the United States is upping the ante as well, because he has now recognized publicly that Vladimir Putin was slowplaying him or lying to him about his supposed desire to achieve a ceasefire.
	President Zelensky of Ukraine, of course, has for at this point months been saying that he is willing to do an immediate ceasefire, just freeze the lines on the ground, and all the rest.
	Putin has been saying nothing of the sort.
	President Trump has said, okay, well, then I'm going to send additional defensive weaponry to Ukraine.
	Do you think it's because President Trump is now recognizing the reality that Vladimir Putin is trying to up the ante and put pressure on Trump?
	I think there's a significant chance of that because we're seeing, you know, every attack these past weeks, every major attack has been the worst ever.
	And it's always coincident with something that Trump has just said.
	And if you look at Trump's comments, you know, saying the other day that Putin is full of BS, you know, we're starting to see that Trump is seeing a different perspective on Ukraine.
	He's seeing that Ukraine needs to win and maybe even that Ukraine can win.
	And so Putin responds by lashing out.
	He's not able to win at the front lines.
	It's very bloody there.
	So instead, we see him lashing out upon these cities.
	And so I think that there's a sense that, I mean, Russia's greatest fear is that America and Ukraine would be best friends.
	And so whenever Trump is sort of opening up to Ukraine, Russia makes these sort of moves, I think, out of a lot of desperation.
	It's also important to remember, not just Kyiv, but the city of Kharkiv, been 30 miles from Russia.
	That city is pounded every day and night.
	And I always talk about it because by day, it is a lovely city.
	There's low crime.
	Kids walk to school on their own.
	If Americans saw that, they would love it.
	And they'd say, we need to protect it.
	But they only really see the negative side of it.
	And I think even within the White House, maybe this is changing now.
	But even the White House has only seen the sad stories and they haven't seen the stories of strength.
	And there's a new chance now with Ukraine finally, they should have done this a while ago, is dismissing the Ukrainian ambassador to the U.S. who really didn't understand the heart of America.
	And I think the key here is that Ukraine doesn't score an own goal, that they picked the right person.
	And so I would hope they would pick someone like someone you met, my friend Gandalf, the warrior from Mazov, who's lost an eye and an arm in battle, who, by the way, listens to your show, or my friend Serhi Stakovsky, who beat Roger Federer at Wimbledon, and now he's a soldier in the front lines.
	If Ukraine can think like that, and they can think of the optics that are needed to persuade the American people, the optics that Trump needs to make the case, I think then Ukraine can actually seize this moment, this awakening from Trump, and the sense that what Russia is doing, as Trump himself said, that Putin is just a bad person.
	And finally, I think thanks to your reporting and thanks to these attacks on cities like Kyiv, finally Trump is starting to realize what Margaret Thatcher realized in 2000, that Putin is a bad guy.
	So let's talk for a second about the situation on the Eastern Front.
	Obviously, Russia continues to pour troops and material into that area.
	The case that the United States has made, and I think this is true for virtually everybody on the right, including people like me, is that the chances right now that Ukraine is going to be able to push Russia out of Donbass or out of Crimea, extremely, extremely low.
	So when Americans look at the possibility of an off-ramp, obviously everybody in Ukraine, in the United States, would love to see an off-ramp.
	That off-ramp can only come when Vladimir Putin realizes that he's not going to be able to go an inch further and that there is, in fact, a wall in his way in the form of material aid and support.
	President Trump seems to be coming to that conclusion right now.
	How dynamic is the battlefield in the East right now?
	Are the lines moving or is this essentially a frozen conflict?
	Well, I would say here's what the other duality is, because, you know, there's incredible things happening at the front, especially with Ukrainian drone innovation.
	But there's also, everything is always, you know, just a few steps away from disaster.
	And it's been that way these three years.
	And Ukrainians have held on.
	And I think a couple points here.
	One, this thing gets missed entirely.
	The first step could simply be getting Patriot missile systems and other air defense to protect Ukrainian cities, to make sure that the fight is only at the front line and stop letting it be in the cities.
	That's the first thing that can happen.
	Secondly, at the front, you know, here's an important perspective.
	So last August, the Russians were on the edge of taking the city of Prokrovsk in Donbas.
	And go back and look at all the headlines from The Economist and the BBC, all the military experts told us that Prokrovsk was going to fall in two weeks.
	Ben, that was last August.
	Prokrovsk now is decimated, but it hasn't fallen.
	And we never see, you know, the absence of a problem doesn't become a headline in our Western media, but it should be.
	I mean, Ukrainians have held Prokrovsk, which means that instead of the fight being in a major city like Dnipro, it's been in a small city.
	And so when we talk about frozen conflict, I think we kind of miss that element of the story, that actually, because Ukrainians have held the line, other places are safer.
	And if Ukrainians had the firepower from the West, so what Ukrainians are doing with their resources is incredible innovation.
	I just posted a thread on Axe yesterday at JP Lindsley about how NATO drones, when they come to Ukraine, including American drones, including from great American companies, they're not ready.
	They don't work.
	And Ukrainians are quickly adapting.
	They could teach so many lessons to the Pentagon.
	But with those drones, they can kind of hold the line.
	But as far as pushing it back, you cannot do that without the heavy firepower that comes from a country like Germany and especially America.
	And so if Trump were to decide to move away from only a defensive posture, that's the first thing, protect the cities.
	But you could really end this if you get American firepower, which we've seen.
	I mean, when the HIMARS arrived, Joe Biden reluctantly sent them, Jake Sullivan, Otto Penn, whatever, reluctantly sent the HIMARS in June of 2022.
	Before the HIMARS arrived, one city in Donbass was falling every week into Russian hands.
	And then what happened?
	High Mars arrived and Bakhmut did not fall for nine months.
	And so if we look at it that way, we see what American weapons can do when they're sent here with permission to use them.
	Well, that's JP Lindsley reporting from On the Ground in Kiev.
	Really appreciate the time, JP, and keep safe out there.
	Ben, thank you, sir.
	Well, President Trump, for his part, was asked by the media about who had authorized the pause and aids Ukraine, particularly Patriot missile defense systems to Ukraine.
	Here was President Trump being grilled about it.
	Yesterday, you said that you were not sure who ordered the munitions halted to Ukraine.
	Have you since been able to figure that out?
	Well, I haven't thought about it because we're looking at Ukraine right now and munitions, but I have not gone into it.
	What does it say that such a big decision could be made inside your government without you knowing?
	I would know.
	If a decision was made, I will know.
	I'll be the first to know.
	In fact, most likely I'd give the order, but I haven't done that yet.
	Okay, so the question is then who did give the order?
	Because there are clearly forces inside the Trump administration who are running their own foreign policy.
	This is a thing that clearly is happening.
	So, according to the scroll, which is a daily news update from Tablet, they think that they've uncovered who this person was.
	It is not a shock to find that it is probably Elbridge Colby, the Undersecretary of Defense, who is allies with the Vice President of the United States and is very much part of the isolationist wing inside the White House.
	Now, again, there can be widespread debate inside the White House about foreign policy.
	We know that that debate happens and that there are very live conversations about a wide variety of topics ranging from Ukraine to the Middle East to the Far East.
	We know that for a fact.
	It is one thing to have that debate.
	It is another thing to effectuate your own decision-making before the president signs in to just go ahead and do the thing.
	And that seems to me a fireable offense, if this is true.
	So Park McDougal reporting, last week, media reported the United States had decided to pause weapons shipments to Ukraine, including missile defense interceptors, 155 millimeter artillery shells, and Stinger surface-to-air missiles amid concern about the U.S.'s military stockpiles.
	The move marked a major shift in U.S. policy, one that could spell doom for Ukraine's war against Russia.
	As it turned out, the policy shift lasted less than a week.
	President Trump said the weapons deliveries to Ukraine would continue because the Ukrainians have to be able to defend themselves.
	The next day, he said he didn't know who had authorized the weapons pause and added a shot at the Russian president Vladimir Putin, saying, quote, we get a lot of BS thrown to us by Putin.
	So someone formulated a major change in U.S. foreign policy and announced it to the press without clearing it with the president of the United States.
	So who was it?
	According to two reports on Wednesday, one in CNN, one in Politico, the authorization for the weapons pause came from the defense secretary, but the idea came from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and restraintist extraordinaire Elbridge Bridge Colby.
	Per the reports, Colby recommended the pause after Trump ordered a review of U.S. munitions stockpiles and then pushed it up the chain at the Pentagon.
	Hegseth signed off on Colby's recommendation, but did so without first notifying Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg, or Congress.
	Upon learning of the pause, White House officials told Hegseth they would provide cover for the decision, but urged the Pentagon to explain it to Congress.
	But here, as always, it's not clear who these White House officials were, whether they were acting with Trump's approval, or whether they had even looped the president in.
	And again, one of the things that I noted yesterday on the program is that in the political article that named Check Colby is the source of this pause, the first person to rush out to defense was the press secretary, the communications director for J.D. Vance, not President Trump, not the Defense Department.
	And again, this all plays a role in the perception of Elbridge Colby as a man who's running his own foreign policy in the administration to the detriment of the administration.
	Right now, the top priority for the administration in the Far East is containment of China.
	This is why we have significant tariffs on China.
	It is why we are pursuing a military buildup largely directed at the South China Sea and protecting Taiwan from the predations of China.
	It's why we are trying to foster a better relationship with Japan.
	That is a hard-fought trade negotiation happening with Japan right now.
	Well, apparently, Bridge Colby has been participating in a process of effectively undermining our relationship with Japan.
	According to that political report, he was responsible for tanking the 2 plus 2 summit with Japan scheduled for July.
	The Japanese had agreed to negotiate on the basis of Kolby's initial request to raise their defense spending to 3.5% of GDP.
	That's doubling the percent of GDP they're currently spending on defense.
	But then Kolby unilaterally escalated the demand to 5%, and Japan was like, what the hell?
	Why are you just throwing this thing in the middle of the table right now when we're late in the negotiations?
	Apparently, Kolby also has surprised officials at the State Department and National Security Council by ordering a review of AUKUS.
	That's the trilateral U.S.-British-Australian security pact, under which the U.S. agreed to supply Australia with nuclear submarines and reportedly alarmed the British by demanding they recall an aircraft carrier from a routine deployment to Asia because the United States does not want you there.
	And again, Japan canceling those negotiations with the United States over Colby.
	That is unique.
	Japan really does not like to do that.
	So, you know, all of this suggests that there is not just a split inside the administration.
	It suggests actually that there are some people inside the administration who are just doing things without the permission of the president of the United States.
	Now, listen, you listen to the show.
	I don't agree with everything President Trump does.
	There are times where I'm very critical of the president of the United States.
	I also don't work in the executive branch.
	The job of the people who work inside the executive branch is to effectuate the policy of the presidents of the United States whom they serve.
	And again, it is one thing to have a widespread, open, honest, hard debate about tough issues in American foreign policy.
	It's another thing to just go do your own foreign policy under the auspices of the president of the United States without his permission.
	That is a very, very different thing.
	That is a breach of duty.
	You are not supposed to be doing that.
	In the first term, we called that the deep state when there were people who were actively pursuing their own policy preferences without reference to the president of the United States, Donald Trump.
	We said that was the deep state thwarting the will of the president.
	If that is what happened here with regard to the arms pause on Ukraine, then the president should make somebody's head roll for that, truly.
	Because again, it is the president of the United States whose policy must prevail in these conversations.
	And that's true whether you like the president's policy or you don't like the president's policy.
	Otherwise, you should quit.
	Get another job.
	Focus on domestic policy.
	There's plenty of stuff that you can do.
	Coming up, the Trump administration going after California for failing to protect girls in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
	We'll get to that.
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	Also, this is just in from the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
	Right now, the situation across Israel remains historically fragile and urgent.
	Israeli neighborhoods have been destroyed.
	Dozens of people are dead.
	Untold more have been injured.
	The threat has not ended.
	Whether in peacetime or at war, Israelis' noballistic missiles could continue to fall at any moment, or a terrorist attack could occur when there are 15 seconds to reach a bomb shelter.
	It's not a lot of time.
	But Israelis don't have enough bomb shelters, actually, especially in Tel Aviv and in Israel's north.
	And that's where the Iranian attacks over the course of the last war were concentrated.
	And that's why the fellowship has been working around the clock to build and place hundreds of concrete reinforced bomb shelters ready when the next rocket strike occurs.
	The fellowship is deploying 60 new bomb shelters, including 10 immediate placements and 50 upgraded models with blast-resistant steel doors to protect vulnerable Israeli communities from future threats.
	The IFCJ is doing all sorts of work for all sorts of people on the ground, all the way up to and including the Druze in southern Syria.
	To learn more about the IFCJ's lifesaving work, visit benforthefellowship.org.
	That's one word, benforthefellowship.org.
	And meanwhile, the president of the United States has authorized more action on the education front.
	So the Trump administration is now suing the state of California because the state of California has decided that they are going to, in fact, ensure that boys can race against girls in athletics.
	According to Los Angeles Times, the Trump administration on Wednesday sued California for allowing transgender athletes to compete on school sports teams that match their gender identity, alleging state officials violated federal civil rights law by discriminating against women, a legal action that threatens billions of dollars in federal education funds.
	The suit filed in the Central District of California alleges that California is in violation of Title IX, a 1972 federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity that receives federal funding.
	Our friend and the U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmie Dillon said, quote, Title IX was enacted over half a century ago to protect women and girls from discrimination.
	The Justice Department will not stand for policies that deprive girls of their hard-earned athletic trophies and ignore the safety on the field and in private spaces.
	Young women should not have to sacrifice their rights to compete for scholarships, opportunities, and awards on the altar of woke gender ideology.
	Of course, this is the correct policy, naturally.
	Linda McMahon, she announced that the Department of Education was finding California in violation of Title IX.
	Here's the Secretary of Education.
	Well, I can announce, you know, today, Ainsley, that the Department of Education has found that the state of California, the Department of Education, and their Interscholastic Sports Federation is in violation of Title IX.
	We are giving them 10 days to remedy that situation.
	We have remedy for them.
	But if they do not comply within 10 days, then we will refer this to the Department of Justice.
	Okay, so, again, that is the right move.
	That follows hard on an announcement by the California Department of Education that they were just going to ignore the federal government.
	Okay, well, if you ignore the federal government, this is precisely what happens.
	By the way, this also shows that Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, is not a particularly honest person on matters of this sort.
	You'll recall that when he did an interview with Charlie Kirk, he suggested that boys should not be racing against the girls.
	It's an issue of fairness, but he did not effectuate any of that in policy.
	But like, would you do something like that?
	Would you say no men in female sports?
	Well, I think it's an issue of fairness.
	I completely agree with you on that.
	So that's easy to call out the unfairness of that.
	There's also humility and grace, you know, that these poor people are more likely to commit suicide, have anxiety and depression.
	And the way that people talk down to vulnerable communities is an issue that I have a hard time with.
	Okay, but that does not mean that boys should race against the girls.
	So Gavin Newsom said all the right things to Charlie Kirk, and then he proceeded to continue to do exactly the same thing that he was doing before.
	Well, meanwhile, the education department is now announcing that their interest accrual for student loan borrowers is going to resume on August 1st, which of course makes sense.
	And there are a lot of people who are student loan borrowers who are very happy with the student loan repayment pause.
	I get it.
	People take out gigantic loans on the false promise made by colleges that they're going to earn more money.
	And that is a gigantic scam.
	I've been discussing this for years.
	However, the federal taxpayer should not be the one who has to pick up the bill for your decision to take out a gigantic loan to major in sociology at Wellesley.
	That really is not the taxpayer's burden.
	That is your burden.
	Since the ruling, millions of borrowers have remained in forbearance with no interest accrual, with the possibility this forbearance could last until summer 2026 before borrowers were forced to switch out.
	So the Education Department is now urging borrowers to choose a new repayment plan before restarting payments.
	In the One Big Beautiful bill, Congressional Republicans eliminated this program and some other repayment options, leaving borrowers with two possible plans, a standard repayment plan and a new repayment assistance plans.
	And they have until 2028 to figure that out.
	Secretary of Education McMahon said for years the Biden administration used so-called loan forgiveness promises to win votes, but federal courts repeatedly ruled that those actions were unlawful.
	Congress designed these programs to ensure that borrowers repay their loans, yet the Biden administration tried to illegally force taxpayers to foot the bill instead.
	Since day one of the Trump administration, we focused on strengthening the student loan portfolio and simplifying repayment to better serve borrowers.
	And that is the goal of this particular program.
	The administration, by the way, is also going after Harvard on every available front because if Harvard continues to churn out propagandistic violations of the Civil Rights Act, well, then Harvard's going to take it directly on the chin.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration has now attacked Harvard University's accreditation, saying that the school has violated federal discrimination law and may no longer meet accreditation standards.
	The Department's Education, Health, and Human Services notified Harvard's accreditor that a government investigation found the school violated civil rights law for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitic harassment.
	The notification does not actually remove Harvard's accreditation, which would effectively shut down the school.
	It's a shot across the bow telling Harvard to work with the school to, quote, keep the department fully informed of its efforts to ensure that Harvard is in compliance with federal law and accreditor standards.
	Also, DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, has announced it will subpoena Harvard to obtain records relevant to the enforcement of immigration law in connection with the school's international students.
	Again, there's huge numbers of foreign students who are being imported to the United States from enemy countries like China and who are being given all sorts of magical privileges in the United States.
	The Trump administration is seeking to stop all of that.
	Meanwhile, in other action taken By the Trump administration, we now know that the FBI and DOJ are opening investigations into RussiaGate, into the prosecution of John Brennan, the former head of the CIA, as well as James Comey, the former head of the FBI, for their corrupt activities in connection with the Russiagate investigation.
	John Brennan continues to maintain that he's heard nothing from the DOJ so far.
	The people who actually worked this, both in terms of trying to collect intelligence prior to the election, and then the ones who put together the intelligence community assessment, they really, I think, showed the best of what the intelligence community and what CIA is made of.
	So again, I am clueless about what it is exactly that they may be investigating me for.
	Well, I mean, I think that you should know what they're investigating me for.
	The answer is perjury.
	He went in front of Congress and he testified that he had nothing to do with the insertion of the steel dossier into the intelligence community assessment regarding Russia Gate.
	And it turns out that that, according to internal documents and emails, that that wasn't exactly correct, actually.
	John Brennan, one of the most corrupt people in the history of modern American government and now under investigation, that, of course, is the right move.
	President Trump signed into chat on this particular matter.
	Here's what he had to say.
	Well, I know nothing about it other than what I read today, but I will tell you, I think they're very dishonest people.
	I think they're crooked as hell.
	And maybe they have to pay a price for that.
	I believe they are truly bad people and dishonest people.
	So whatever happens, happens.
	Meanwhile, the left continues to look for its point of resistance against the Trump administration, and they are picking the dumbest ones.
	So let's begin with the most obvious stupid point of resistance, and that is resistance to immigration law.
	Democrats continue to claim that ICE are the bad guys, that enforcing immigration law is the problem.
	This continues to be immigration the signal Trump issue.
	It has been since 2015.
	It is the issue on which he is most popular.
	Trump's proposals with regard to immigration are approved by a wide majority of Americans by every available poll.
	And so you're starting to see people try to come up with new angles to thwart immigration law or to make their pitch more sympathetic.
	So for example, the San Bernardino bishop, a man named Alberto Rojas, has now put out a statement dispensing with his parishioners' obligations to attend Sunday Mass, saying that you don't have to come to Mass anymore, because if you come to Mass, you might get arrested.
	The statement says, recognizing that fear of immigration enforcement, such as raids by U.S. ICE, may deter some members of our diocese from fulfilling the obligation to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of obligation, and acknowledging that such fear constitutes a grave inconvenience that may impede the spiritual good of the faithful, I hereby decree that all members of the faithful of the Diocese of San Bernardino who due to genuine fear of immigration enforcement actions are unable to attend Sunday Mass or Masses on Holy Days of obligation are dispensed from this obligation until such time as this decree is revoked or amended.
	Pastors, parochial vicars, other pastoral ministers are to provide compassionate support to those affected by this fear, ensuring they feel welcomed and safe in our communities.
	Parishes are encouraged to explore alternative means of sacramental preparation for those unable to attend regularly.
	So this was then ripped up by Tom Homan, who had a lot of worries about this.
	He said, this is BS.
	He told the Daily Wire.
	He said that the announcement was basically designed to set up a public relations stunt by saying that ICE is raiding churches.
	He said, I don't know of a single incident of church arrest.
	Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told the Daily Wire, we would only go in there if there was a violent criminal who's actively hiding out there or something.
	That is just a fact of the matter, unfortunately.
	The Catholic Church has been a heavy force in facilitating illegal immigration into the United States.
	That is just a reality.
	If you go down to the southern border, there are, in fact, Catholic charities and organizations that out of charitable intentions try to facilitate the movement of illegal immigrants away from the southern border.
	And of course, churches around the country have been complicit in attempting to push sanctuary status and all the rest.
	That is nothing new.
	But it still sort of boggles the mind that some of these churches are willing to flout federal law in this way, as though it is a call of religion to tell people that violation of federal law, particularly basic law like border law, is somehow a positive good or a law that should simply be disregarded.
	Listen, sometimes religious conviction and law conflicts.
	In fact, that happens fairly frequently.
	But this is a strange place to sort of plant your flag at the very, very least.
	And as Tom Holman says, this happens to be a particularly bad example of that because ICE is not, in fact, raiding churches.
	Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who is, of course, the leftmost worst mayor in America until Zorn Mamdani of New York gets elected, he says that the police will never cooperate with ICE.
	You know, again, it's unconscionable at a time in which so many working people and poor people need government to show up for them, that this administration, the Trump administration, has caused so much consternation and division.
	Look, we are welcoming city ordinance.
	Our local police department will not ever cooperate with ICE.
	Whatever their constitutional authority is.
	Okay.
	Well, then I would assume that if you actually facilitate illegal immigration in violation of federal law, you could find yourself on the wrong side of the borders fairly soon.
	You know, Eric Swalwell, who is a man who chases the cameras like a Kardashian.
	I mean, that red light goes on anywhere in a 300-mile radius, and Eric Swalwell is running to it.
	The congressman from California, he says, ICE is terrorizing Americans.
	Are they really sure that this is the angle that they want to take?
	That the real problem in America is ICE, not illegal immigration?
	Okay, it's a strong move.
	We'll see how it works out for them.
	What you see in those pictures, is it making America safer?
	No, it's terrorizing Americans, our friends and neighbors, otherwise known as immigrants, many of them.
	But these are folks who, you know, they go to our churches.
	They work at our grocery stores.
	They work on construction sites.
	They work in childcare.
	They work in many jobs that would not be filled had they not done it.
	And I also just sit back and ask: who asked for this?
	Americans were told that the most violent individuals would be deported.
	And we're now seeing in the numbers that that is a very small percentage of who is being targeted.
	I mean, so, yeah, again, I'm just confused as to why they have declared ICE the problem.
	Again, it's a very, very strange move.
	Tom Homan, meanwhile, is saying, listen, you guys keep using violent language, like the ICE are terrorists or they're Nazis or Gestapo.
	And that is going to create problems for our ICE agents.
	I mean, these things have consequences.
	Unless the Democratic leadership stops the rhetoric.
	I mean, we're hearing from senators and from congress people like Japa connecting us to terrorist group.
	You got AOC out there saying we're violating people's civil rights and constitutional rights.
	Now they're comparing us to the Nazis.
	That tells the left, lunatics out there, that emboldens them.
	Okay, well, if a member of Congress can compare him to Nazis, then I can take some action.
	So it's a rhetoric that needs to be tapped down.
	You're going to see more bloodshed.
	I called it two months ago, and unfortunately, I was right.
	All righty, coming up.
	Katanji Brown Jackson is now clearly the worst justice on the Supreme Court, maybe in the history of the Supreme Court.
	I'll explain in a moment.
	First, the administration is trying to do a lot of good work.
	They're trying to cut regulations.
	They're trying to get government out of your way.
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	Meanwhile, President Trump won a major 8-to-1 victory at the Supreme Court.
	So first of all, we should point out an 8-to-1 victory is an overwhelming victory at the Supreme Court.
	It means that all of the Republican appointees voted in a particular way, but so did Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
	Even 7-2 is not as big a victory, obviously, not just statistically, but philosophically as an 8-to-1.
	An 8-to-1 basically means unanimous except for this one crazy person, usually when it comes to a court that is as divided as this one.
	Okay, so in this particular case, the Supreme Court lifted a halt on President Trump's plan to shrink the federal workforce, which cleared the way for potential mass layoffs.
	In February, Trump had issued an executive order, according to the Wall Street Journal, aimed at drastically reducing the government's workforce by eliminating waste, bloat, and insularity.
	The order directed heads of agencies to work with Doge on hiring decisions and to develop plans for layoffs.
	And then in May, a federal judge in San Francisco blocked it from taking effect.
	So the high court put out an unsigned order on Tuesday and said that it had based its decision on the legality of Trump's executive order and didn't rule on whether any reorg plans broke the law.
	The court said, quote, the government is likely to succeed on its argument that the executive order and memorandum are lawful.
	The only dissenter was Justice Katanji Brown Jackson, who has proved herself to now be the worst justice on the Supreme Court.
	It's not actually all that close, which is shocking.
	I did not think that the low bar presented by Sonia Sotomayor could ever be underdone.
	But somehow, somehow, the underwhelming Katanji Brown Jackson has achieved this.
	Not just with her asinine opinions of late, including one in which she just included memes in her opinion and claimed that district court judges should have the ability to shut down the entire federal government whenever they please.
	Not just that.
	But now in this ruling, where she suggests that the court is greenlighting illegally dubious actions, quote, this was the wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this court knows about what is actually happening on the ground.
	Again, that is a bizarre statement by her.
	I mean, if you are in doubt, generally speaking, you're the court as to the legality of an executive action, you usually wait for ripeness.
	You usually wait to see what the executive branch does and then you rule on it.
	Justice Sotomayor wrote to concur with the court's decision to lift the halt.
	She said the plans themselves weren't even the thing before the high court.
	She said the district court is still going to consider the legality of the layoff plans.
	It is amazing stuff.
	But Katanji Brown Jackson, again, has proved herself to be absolutely an open tool of the left at this point.
	She did an interview recently with ABC's Lindsey Davis in which she said that it was her job to express her feelings in her opinions, which by the way is just, I'm sorry, that's insane.
	It is not your job to, this is not poetry.
	Okay.
	This is not creative writing class.
	These are Supreme Court opinions.
	You are not supposed to express your feelings in your opinions.
	You are supposed to express interpretation of the law, hopefully interpretation of the law that hews to the text.
	This is not feelings time down at the local drag queen story hour at the library.
	But here we are with an actual Supreme Court Justice, Katanji Brown Jackson, now talking about how her feelings have to be infused into her opinions.
	Are you concerned about the state of democracy today?
	You know, my feelings about the state of democracy have been expressed in the context of my opinions when issues come up related to democracy.
	So it's hard to say, you know, am I concerned in a general way?
	The concerns that I have, I have articulated in my opinion.
	I think the nice part about being on the court is that you have the opportunity, whether you're in the majority or in the dissent, to express your opinions.
	You mentioned Justice Breyer.
	One of the things he used to say, sometimes people say, well, the court is so secretive.
	Nobody knows what goes on in the court.
	And he used to always say, I don't understand that.
	We are the only institution where people actually write their opinions when they vote.
	They tell you exactly what it is.
	And I just feel that I have a wonderful opportunity to tell people in my opinions how I feel about the issues.
	And that's what I try to do.
	wow.
	She gets to show her feelings and her opinions.
	And that's the important thing.
	By the way, in this opinion, again, she's outvoted eight to one.
	Quote: For some reason, this court sees fit to step in now and release the president's wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation.
	In my view, this decision is not only truly unfortunate, but also hubristic and senseless.
	What in the world?
	What in the world?
	Again, this sort of language from KBJ is, and again, she's another one of these people who's going to end up with her own acronym.
	She's incredibly purple in her language.
	So it is not exactly a shock to find that she now has a fan club because performative outrage is the mode of the day, for sure, on both left and right.
	However, it is demonstrative of what a terrible justice she is.
	Also, whenever you have Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the senator from Rhode Island, who is a complete and utter dunderhead, defending you, that is a good indicator that you are a bad justice.
	He put out an entire tweet thread defending Katanji Brown Jackson.
	Quote, what's up with Justice Jackson?
	She started making her mark and speaking out early.
	And some of her dissents are so pointed, Kagan and Sotomayor don't even join them.
	The far right is out for her.
	And even Republican justices are getting snarky.
	So what's up?
	Here's my take, which, by the way, is the way that we now do acts.
	Here's my take with a thread for traffic purposes.
	Quote, one of the internal traditions of the court is collegiality.
	First, you're there for life, so you may as well get along.
	Second, issues come and issues go.
	And an ally in one case is an opponent into another.
	Third, the court thinks of itself as a stately institution, hence decorum matters, all of which is well and good in ordinary times.
	It's akin to members of Congress calling each other the distinguished gentleman or the distinguished gentlelady to maintain decorum and avoid events like the caning of Senator Sumner.
	But what if we're not in ordinary times, as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse?
	Well, that's, of course, when you need a hero without a cape, a hero in perhaps a judicial robe.
	We are in a time when a billionaire-funded scheme has spent decades trying to pack the court with billionaire agreeable justices so as to capture the court in the sense of regulatory capture or agency capture.
	And what if the billionaires have finally succeeded?
	What if we're in a time when a billionaire's gifts program has given certain justices lifestyles of the rich and famous and they have reciprocated with favorable rulings and sheltered behind the weakest ethics review of any court in the land whenever the gifts program is challenged?
	And he goes on in this vein.
	And then he says, Justice Jackson has begun looking at patterns and noticing what types of parties tend to win and which tend to lose.
	She has noticed procedural discrepancies.
	What if a colleague uses your collegiality as a strategic tactic, like a pick on a basketball court deliberately for advantage?
	Surely the coin of collegiality has a flip side.
	Obligation to behave in a way that your colleague's collegiality is never abused.
	And so basically the idea is that she is awful and writes truly horrifyingly bad opinions because she's standing up, man.
	She's standing up to the man.
	That's her thing.
	It's not an ordinary time, and yet she persisted.
	Are we really going to do this girl boss stuff when she's just a bad justice?
	I mean, I guess we are, is what the left is fond of doing.
	As far as those government cuts, by the way, some of the cuts are absolutely excellent.
	Right now, the FTC is targeting gender-affirming care as consumer fraud.
	There's a lot that the federal government is doing on the regulatory side that is going largely unnoticed, but that is excellent.
	According to the Daily Wire, in a major move against the transgender medical industry, the Federal Trade Commission hosted a workshop on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., examining the dangers of so-called gender-affirming care.
	That FTC workshop, first reported by the Daily Wire, has sparked the ire of leftist activists.
	At the beginning of the panel, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson addressed the objection that trans issues are outside his agency's purview.
	In fact, Ted Ferguson, the FTC targets industries and entities that lie or deceive the public.
	And then he said that the trans medicine industry is a lie and it is deceiving the public, which of course is absolutely true.
	Meanwhile, the TSA has finally decided to get rid of the shoe removal rule.
	So the thing that's been annoying you for legitimately 20 years, where you go to the airport and they make you take off your shoes and stand in line with the other smelly-feeded people, and then you have to kind of shuffle through and put your shoes back on, all because there was an attempted shoe bomber way back when.
	That's gone now, which makes perfect sense, actually.
	Christy Noam said, our security technology has changed.
	It's evolved.
	TSA has changed.
	Airport wait times average about 27 minutes, and some of the time is going to come off the process.
	A spokesperson told Axios on Tuesday that TSA and DHS are always exploring new and innovative ways to enhance passenger experience and our strong security posture.
	And it was three months after the 9-11 attacks that a terrorist named Richard Reed tried to detonate explosives hidden in his sneakers on an American airlines flight.
	But it took five years for the TSA to implement that choose-off policy, citing a continuing threat.
	So, you know, again, this is how government typically works.
	So yeah, could cuts be done?
	Yeah, cuts could be done.
	Now, those cuts are being used in some cases or attempted cuts as a sort of way to blame the Trump administration for things going wrong.
	So we have yet to hear that FEMA has somehow mishandled the Texas flood circumstance, but CNN is doing its very, very best.
	They're saying that if it had not been for the federal government and its projected attempts to cut costs, then FEMA would have been even faster with regards to these Texas floods.
	According to CNN, FEMA ran into bureaucratic obstacles, four officials inside the agency said.
	Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam recently enacted a sweeping rule aimed at cutting spending.
	Every contract and grants over $100,000 now requires her personal sign-off before any funds can be released.
	For FEMA, where disaster response costs routinely soar into the billions as the agency contracts with on-the-ground crews, officials say the threshold is essentially pennies requiring sign-off of relatively small expenditures.
	And they're complaining that that means that there is too much bureaucracy.
	So FEMA officials said that they couldn't pre-position urban search and rescue crews from a network of teams stationed regionally across the country without Christy Noam's approval.
	In the past, says CNN, FEMA would have swiftly staged these teams, which are specifically trained for situations including catastrophic floods, closer to a disaster zone in anticipation of urgent requests.
	But FEMA officials realized they needed Noam's approval before sending those additional assets.
	Noam didn't authorize that deployment of urban search and rescue teams until Monday, that's 72 hours after the flooding began.
	Now, Trisha McLaughlin told CNN GNOME did not need to authorize those additional resources initially because the department used other DHS search and rescue assets.
	And then over time, as a need for FEMA resources arose, those requests received Noam's approval.
	So basically, CNN is trying to spin up the idea that FEMA did not act with any level of timeliness because of this ridiculous bureaucratic nonsense.
	but DHS is saying, no, that's not how it worked.
	We actually had other resources on the ground and then it got approved and we shifted resources.
	So, in order for this to be a major problem, what you'd have to do is make the case that FEMA somehow was not on the ground doing its job.
	So far, it is not clear that that is the case.
	But the media are doing their very best.
	First, they tried to claim that cuts to the National Weather Service had allowed this sort of damage, and it turned out that wasn't true.
	Now they're trying their next strategy, which is that explicit approval for mid-range to large-scale costs from Christy Noam at DHS caused a delay, but they haven't actually shown evidence of a delay that affected how things were dealt with with regards to this Texas flood.
	They're going to keep trying and keep trying and keep trying because this is the way the media work.
	All cuts are bad.
	All cuts will kill people.
	And now they're just looking for an excuse.
	Now, one of the weird oddities of the Democratic approach to the Trump administration is they want to suggest that the government is both attempting to radically cut itself and also is an autocracy.
	One of the foremost people making this claim is, of course, former Georgia governor Stacey Abrams.
	I'm joking.
	She was never the governor, but she claims she was the governor.
	And then she thought about running for president.
	And then she didn't run for president.
	So maybe she's the former president as well.
	In any case, she has a new viral video called 10 Steps to Autocracy that she did with Jimmy Kimmel.
	And we're going to go through that right now in the takedown.
	All righty, so let's begin with her, with her steps to autocracy.
	Well, let's hear it, Stacey.
	Okay, so this happens in every nation that has become an autocracy having been a democracy.
	So whether we're talking about Brazil with Bolsonaro or India or Putin and Russia, the Philippines with Duetorte.
	So start with winning an election.
	Can you pause it there for one second?
	Okay, I just want to say at the very outset that Brazil did not become an autocracy under Bolsonaro.
	And India is not an autocracy now under Modi.
	So at least two of the examples she's currently citing are not, in fact, autocracies.
	In fact, Bolsonaro is no longer in charge of Brazil.
	And actually, it's more of an autocracy thanks to the leadership of left-winger Lula Da Silva, which is why President Trump just hit them with a 50% tariff.
	In any case, here is Stacey Abrams continuing.
	Usually the last one you're going to get to have for real.
	Number two, you have an expansion of executive power.
	The president decides he wants more than he's supposed to have.
	Number three, you start to make the Congress complicit.
	So you weaken them and you neutralize or neuter the judiciary.
	Like, oh, I don't know, the Supreme Court giving you unfettered power and saying we don't have the ability to stop things.
	Well, actually, that's not neutralizing the judiciary.
	Okay, so there are a bunch of things to say here.
	One, expansion of executive power.
	Remember that time that Barack Obama was president and he said that because Congress wouldn't give him what he wanted, he would use his pen and his phone to do things?
	Was that an expansion of executive power?
	Like a little bit?
	Like just a little?
	How about that time that Joe Biden decided he could just make 80 million people vaccinate using OSHA regulations and that he could just alleviate the student loan debt of tens of millions of people just for no reason?
	Was that, in fact, an expansion of executive power or attempted expansion of executive power?
	I feel like, yes.
	As far as the idea that you're running roughshod over the judiciary, when the judiciary rules in a way you don't like, that does not mean the judiciary has now been ignored.
	In fact, it was Joe Biden who was routinely saying that if the judiciary did not do the thing he wanted to do, he would simply find another way to do it.
	He said that with regard to the student loan process.
	So so far, this is a really bad diagnosis by Stacey.
	I still can't get over the fact that she says when things are transforming into autocracies, you're having the last election you will ever have.
	And she cites Bolsonaro as a reason, but Bolsonaro is not the leader of Brazil and right now may end up in jail for a significant period of time.
	They had another election and the left won.
	This is just so stupid.
	Everyone is such an idiot.
	My goodness.
	Then you move on to firing all the people who know how to make government work.
	So you gut the civil service.
	And you do that because you want to break democracy so people forget the stuff that used to get done.
	So you can't get your social security check.
	So the CDC doesn't know what diseases are anymore.
	Then you put in place these loyalists, people who are only responsive to you.
	You put them in charge of the FBI so they go after your enemies.
	You put them in charge of the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, so they can signal to their friends and tell them all about the evil plans that you have.
	Then you make certain that you break how we communicate.
	So you criticize the media and you create your own echo chamber of propaganda.
	You call it truth, even though you know you're lying.
	Oh, good lord.
	Good lord.
	Okay, so let's just get back to this.
	She says that you break the bureaucracy by making it not work in order to achieve an autocracy.
	Well, no, usually an autocracy is heavily reliant on a vastly effective bureaucracy that oversees every aspect of people's lives.
	So actually the efficacy of the bureaucracy is a prerequisite to full autocracy.
	The problem in the Soviet Union or in Nazi Germany was not an incompetent bureaucracy.
	It was a highly, highly competent bureaucracy, particularly, for example, in CCP China right now.
	Very competent, very large, even not competent, very large and overweening bureaucracy.
	And then it says, well, you staff it with loyalists because like the FBI and have them go after your enemies.
	They literally prosecuted Donald Trump multiple times in the last administration.
	What is she even doing?
	And then she says, and then you attack the media.
	You attack the sources of truth.
	You create your own propaganda outlet.
	What happens if the entire media have become a propaganda outlet for the Democratic Party?
	What happens then?
	Okay, we'll let her conclude this idiotic, foolish rant on Jimmy Kimmel.
	Then you go to the next step, and I call that step seven.
	Because at step seven, you have to blame someone.
	You have to blame people for the broken government, for the broken promises.
	So you go after DEI.
	You go after the vulnerable, the dispossessed.
	You go after any community that doesn't look like what you think power should be.
	While you're doing that, you make certain that you, in step eight, you eliminate anybody who can help them.
	So you sue law firms that do pro bono cases.
	You go after philanthropies and accuse them of giving money to the wrong people.
	You go after colleges and universities that can teach people possibly what else they should know.
	You get to step nine and you start to encourage and incentivize private violence.
	You send the U.S. Marines into spaces they should not be.
	You send the National Guard in.
	You kidnap people off of the streets and pretend that's normal because that's how you quiet dissent.
	Because you make everyone afraid that if they don't do what you want, they might be next.
	And once you've done those nine steps, steps 10 is easy.
	That's when you decide there won't be new elections because everyone's either afraid, poor, broken, or complicit.
	Okay, so this is so insane because you accuse another group of the unworkability of government.
	Okay, the entire Democratic Party has been claiming for decades at this point, the unworkability of the federal government is due to a white supremacist power structure that lies at the root of America, which means you have to have $2 billion riots in 2020.
	And then she says you have to attack the institutions.
	Oh, do you mean like the church and the family?
	Is that what you're talking about?
	You know, those institutions, like the fundamental institutions of civil society?
	And then she says you incentivize private violence and proceeds to give examples of actual law enforcement, the U.S. Marines and National Guard.
	That's not incentivizing private violence.
	Incentivizing private violence, that would be like when you make excuses for gigantic riots that do $2 billion in damage or like when you make excuses for people who murder healthcare CEOs, allegedly.
	And then she says, final step, no new elections.
	So her paranoia is there will be no new elections in 2028.
	I would love to see one iota of evidence of this, like one.
	But again, the paranoia justifies anything.
	It really does.
	The conspiratorial paranoia on the left justifies violence.
	It will get more violent from here, guys.
	It will.
	The permission structure has been set up.
	Because if you really believe that Nazi Germany is a coming, then you are justified in joining the French resistance, like preemptively.
	You are justified in doing that.
	That is the permission structure that's being set up.
	Okay.
	In later and stupider news, the WNBA has now named Angel Reese to their 2K26 video game cover, which is really, really exciting.
	I will say that Angel Reese apparently has been on a tear as of late, according to ESPN, averaging 18 points, 17 rebounds, five assists, and two steals during her six-game double-double scoring streak, which is truly an impressive stat.
	I mean, I know we are all very, very impressed by her shockingly amazing basketball skills.
	And first of all, I always feel bad showing clips of the WNBA because watching the WNBA in action is mostly like watching a pretty bad junior high boys basketball team.
	Here is all-star, absolute superstar Angel Reese coming down the floor, isolation situation.
	This is some pretty stunning basketball you're about to watch right now.
	Four-second differential between shot clock and game clock here.
	I like this matchup right here, Kiki Erie Finn and Angel Reese, two all-stars.
	Check out the handle on this one.
	Reese lost the handle.
	Melvin in transition.
	My goodness.
	I haven't seen a handle like that since me in fifth grade.
	That is really some extraordinary basketball playing.
	By the way, her 2025 stats, again, not that I have them memorized because I clearly don't.
	I looked it up.
	She's played 19 games.
	She's averaging 13 points a game.
	Now, I would just like to, for contrast, put forward, I know, I know we have to do it.
	We do.
	Caitlin Clark.
	Okay, so Caitlin Clark, her current stats right now, according to basketballreference.com, she's played in 10 games this season, okay, because she's been injured.
	She averages 17 points a game.
	Okay, so more points a game.
	On the career, she averages 19 points per game, as opposed to 13 points per game for Angel Reese.
	Now, let's be clear what's happening right now.
	The WNBA is bending over backward, not to just say that Caitlin Clark is their star.
	They're bending over backward because Angel Reese has become the bet noir of Caitlin Clark.
	And there are a lot of players in the league who keep complaining that Caitlin Clark is too white to be featured by the WNBA, even though Caitlin Clark is making them all significantly more rich and significantly more famous.
	You have not heard of any of the players in the WNBA until Caitlin Clark made them famous when they started bullying Caitlin Clark or, as in the case of one of her teammates, came to Caitlin Clark's defense.
	So, I mean, WNBA can do this, I suppose, but it is, in fact, a pretty obvious form of DEI.
	I know.
	I'm going to get myself in trouble.
	How do I accept that?
	No one is watching the WNBA if Angel Reese is in the game.
	Okay, the attendance statistics prove this.
	Whenever Caitlin Clark and her team travel to a place, the attendance statistics go up.
	Is there any market uptick in attendance when Angel Reese and her team visit a city that Caitlin Clark is not in?
	The answer, of course, is no.
	And so it just speaks to the reality of the WNBA, which is that as a league that has existed off the subsidies from the NBA for decades at this point, the entire reason for being for the league is to reinforce these DEI perceptions.
	And at the very moment when they could shed that in favor of actual popularity, they are unable to do it.
	That's the only takeaway I can make right here.
	So I asked my sponsors at Perplexity because I was definitely not going to know this off the top of my head.
	Who are the top 10 scorers for the last season, top 10 rebounders, and top 10 assist makers for the WNBA in the 2024 season?
	Top 10 scorers, Asia Wilson, Arique Agunbawale.
	Again, I'm going to scroll up all these names because I've never heard of these people because it's the WNBA and I don't follow this any more than I follow your local curling competition.
	Kalia Copper, Breonna Stewart, Nafiza Collier, Jewel Lloyd, and then Caitlin Clark at 19 points a game.
	And I will note here that there is no mention here of Angel Reese.
	Angel Reese is the number one rebounder in the game mainly by rebounding her own misses.
	That is basically how she stacks those up, right?
	She gets in the paint.
	She blows a layup.
	She rebounds it.
	She blows another layup.
	She rebounds it.
	She blows another layup.
	She rebounds it.
	It's a great way to pack your rebounding stats, actually.
	And the top 10 assist makers, Caitlin Clark is number one.
	She had eight and a half assists per game.
	Again, the only rankings in which Angel Reese lists is rebounding.
	That's the whole thing.
	So congrats to the WNBA for, again, making wise marketing decisions.
	All righty, coming up, we're going to get to the Middle East, where President Trump is trying to negotiate a final ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
	The show continues right now, but remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.
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