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Aug. 1, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:11:07
Woke Bill Burr Attacks Me AGAIN...PLUS A Russiagate SMOKING GUN?!
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Alrighty, a big show coming up for you today.
Bill Burr is attacking me again.
He just can't get over the fact that I called him woke.
We will get into that.
Plus, Kamala Harris is making the rounds about her brand book and an actual real kind of smoking gun on Russia Gate that directly implicates Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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So, Bill Burr, you know, the comedian or maybe now ex-comedian is pretty angry at me still.
Like, he's still angry at me because all the way back in February, if you recall, I said that he had gone woke and he got really sad.
That was after he said that the healthcare CEOs of America might deserve to be murdered.
So, apparently, yesterday he did an interview with Vulture, which is a publication that allegedly still exists.
And here is what Bill Burr had to say: Ben Shapiro talked about going to one of your shows and complaining about you becoming woke, which sort of then crazy.
He doesn't even know what that word means.
Let me tell you.
His definition of woke is white liberals' definition of woke, and they didn't even know what it was.
They just took the word from black people.
That's the worst thing about our people: not only do we take from other cultures, we don't even take the time to understand the definition.
Yeah, he went there to be annoyed so he can then have something to talk about, and then he can make money off of dividing his own country.
Yeah, those people that it's treasonous, but they do.
Yes, but and it, but to be fair, or not to be fair, to uh, the fact is that it worked for what his goal is, which is then he became a thing online where then a certain portion of the right complain about how you're woke racists and were racist.
They're racist.
Yeah, they send pictures of monkeys to me and my wife.
They're horrible people, and they're cowards, and they never say it to your face.
What I'm finding is that people keep trying to categorize what it is that you're doing, like that idiot Ben Shapiro.
No, he's he's woke now.
He's like, I don't, that guy, someone came to me and goes, Hey, man, you should he was trying to bring me into his fold.
At one point, the guy liked me, yeah, yeah, you know, and then when I didn't, then all of a sudden, I'm a guy like he's an adult.
Do you feel misunderstood if people take you words one way or the other?
No, I'm not misunderstood.
I'm deliberately misunderstood.
Got it.
Ah, okay.
A couple quick housekeeping notes there.
First, I don't need to pay to go to your comedy show to be annoyed.
There's a lot of stuff in the world that annoys me.
And typically, I don't shell out hundreds of bucks and then take my wife and my friends to a show in order to be annoyed.
I'm sorry, you did a show and a bunch of people didn't laugh in Florida, and then you fussed like a child, and then you walked off the stage.
It was really ridiculous, and that's on you, my dude.
You probably should give the people refunds because they paid for Bill Burr at Red Rock and they got Joy Behar at the dive bar.
I mean, you used to do jokes like this.
Look at the WNBA, they have been playing in front of three to 400 people a night for a quarter of a century.
Not to mention, it's a male-subsidized league.
We gave you a league!
Where are all the feminists?
That place should be packed with feminists wearing jerseys, slashing their going nuts like the guys do in the upper deck with their big beards.
Am I on the Jumbotron?
Am I doing it?
Women failed the WNBA.
Ladies, ladies, name your top five all-time WNBA players of all time.
Come on.
That's it.
Name five WNBA teams.
Name the WNBTA team in your city.
You can't do it.
You don't give a fight.
They play night in and night out in front of nobody.
It's a tragedy.
Okay, that's what he used to be.
And now your latest material is like this.
They're talking about looting, but CNN and Fox News are not going to bring up the insurance companies that are just going to keep everybody's premiums and still give themselves a bonus.
That's free, Luigi.
For conservative people to act like they're not the biggest babies also is hilarious.
Have you seen this?
My people, Whitey, we're all upset.
There's enough of us to get it going, trending anyway.
We're upset about the new Cinderella movie.
The actress playing Cinderella isn't white.
There's no prince.
They changed the story.
What am I going to tell my kids?
That my people get upset about.
What am I going to tell my kids?
Well, talk around it the way you do.
We talk around the real history of this country.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
I mean, I'm glad he's laughing at himself because nobody else is.
Man, what a fall.
Not liking your show isn't treason.
You do if you're not the president.
You're the guy who came in second in the Billy Corgan look-alike contest because he showed up sloppy drunk and forgot to shave again.
So here's what I mean by wokeness.
I actually do have a definition, and I've done it over and over and over on the show.
And it's not really my definition.
It's the definition that Richard Delgado and Gene Stefanchik, who literally wrote a book on critical race theory, laid out and explaining their basic principles, which match up with wokeness.
One, racism is ordinary, not aberrant.
And second, our system of white over color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material.
So you put those together.
And what that means is that the system of America, in short, is designed to create racially disparate outcomes.
Any proof of racially disparate outcomes is evidence of the malignancy of the system.
Now, there's another element of wokeness that is self-contradictory here: that there is a racial essentialism that Stops you from criticizing as unfactual the viewpoints of others.
You don't understand because you're not black, or you can't understand because you're not gay.
And this ends conversations.
And it contradicts the fundamental basis of wokeness because the basis of wokeness is that everybody is basically the same, which means all group outcomes should be the same, which means any inequality of group outcome is evidence of systemic inequity.
But then also, wokeness will posit that racial groups are so different that you can't even talk to one another.
You can't even criticize the viewpoints of members of another racial group.
It's a bizarre defense mechanism.
So I call Bill Burr woke because he is.
He believes that America is a deeply racist place and that it's embedded in all of our social systems.
And the evidence of that is our economic inequality.
And therefore, it's probably okay to shoot healthcare CEOs.
And also, if you criticize him as woke, it's because you don't really understand the term woke because black people invented that term.
And white people then use the term woke as a descriptor.
And that's cultural appropriation.
Oh, how times have changed.
This is the Bill Burr who used to tell, you know, like this joke.
I'm the black guy who brought up leg shaking.
Saying Elvis took leg shaken from us?
It's like, really?
Leg shaken?
No, nobody thought to do this.
Black people came up with that.
You telling me that?
I'll even give you that.
Let's say you came up with that, but where did that black dude learn how to do it?
Didn't he watch some older black guy do it?
But what?
Because he's the same color.
He's not stealing.
He's just carrying on the tradition.
But if Elvis does it, oh, what the f.
Now he's the biggest thief ever.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
Okay, so now Bill Burr would presumably call that Bill Burr insensitive and unresponsive to the needs and definitions of black people, which all this amazing guys, because Bill Burr is whiter than a painting of a polar bear in snow on a white canvas.
So he's actually the most annoying form of a woke person.
A white lib, the kind he likes to criticize.
The white person who apologizes for being white by pretending that he can speak on behalf of black people about the systemic privileges of being white.
Oh, yeah, while pulling down millions of dollars to be an angry thumb of a human.
So Baldrumpel Stiltskin over here, who gets mad when you call him by his real name, is still pissed off.
I didn't enjoy his comedy show last year and he thinks that I and my friends and my wife, we all paid to attend his show just so that I could criticize him.
No, here's the thing.
On a random weekday night, if I'm going to a comedy show, I'm going because I want to laugh.
We paid to attend your show because you used to be funny.
And then you trans yourself and turned into a white, bald, allegedly male version of Sonny Hawson on the view, screeching at me about income inequality and racism.
There is some irony to the fact that as you lost your nuts, you morphed into a shriveled nutsack of a human.
And now you've decided that you're a victim and that everyone you know is a victim and that America is cruel and nasty and such and you're deliberately misunderstood just because you won't put on a great show anymore, which makes me sad because I enjoyed watching Bill Burr.
But now watching you is like watching Robin D'Angelo, but even whiter and even faker and less funny and with a screechy Boston accent to boot.
You turn into Billy, the pissed drunk woke leprechaun.
Good luck with that, my dude.
Listen, I hope you turn it around.
I really do because the world needs better comedians.
And I like a lot of comedians who disagree with me, Luis C.K., Dave Chappelle.
But, you know, we don't need 57-year-old men trying to earn street cred with the fellow kids by turning into a human embodiment of those retarded in this house lawn signs.
That makes me sad.
It does.
And yeah, you're being a woke jackass.
All righty, coming up, a smoking gun in the Hillary Rodham Clinton Russia Gate scandal, perhaps.
Matt Taibbi joins us to discuss.
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Okay, meanwhile, it seems that there is, in fact, a smoking gun in the Russia Gate scandal.
So one of the big allegations of the Russia Gate scandal is that the whole thing basically was cooked up by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
You'll recall there was a firm called Fusion GPS, and it worked with Hillary Clinton's campaign to concoct the steel dossier.
And then somehow, magically, that steel dossier ended up in the hands of the American intelligence agencies, where it became the basis for things like the Carter Page FISA warrant, may have become the basis for the entire RussiaGate scandal in the first place.
And this whole thing was whipped into a frenzy by Barack Obama's FBI, CIA, and DOJ.
But there's never been really kind of a smoking gun that said that Hillary knew that was going to happen.
Like that, that was a thing that Hillary knew.
Well, now we actually kind of have the smoking gun.
According to the New York Post, Hillary Clinton signed off on a plan hatched by a top campaign advisor to smear then-candidate Donald Trump with false claims of Russian collusion and distract from her own mounting email scandal during the 2016 campaign, According to explosive intelligence files declassified on Thursday, the 24-page intelligence annex was compiled from memos and emails obtained by the Obama administration in the lead up to Election Day that laid out confidential conversations between leaders of the DNC and liberal billionaire George Soros' Open Society Foundations.
The plot, the brainchild of Clinton's campaign, then foreign policy advisor Julianne Smith, included raising the theme of Putin's support for Trump and subsequently steering public opinion toward the notion that it needs to equate the Russian leader's political influence campaign with actual hacking of election infrastructure.
Smith then went on to serve as former President Joe Biden's ambassador to NATO.
Open Society Senior Vice President Leonard Bernardo was looped in on the scheme and laid out its intended effect in a series of emails in late July 2016.
Quote, Julie says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump.
There's an email July 25th, 2016, right before the election.
Now it is good for a post-convention bounce.
Later, the FBI will put more oil into the fire.
That's an explicit statement that they're going to start retailing this line.
And then the FBI, he knew, how do you know that?
How do you know the FBI was going to put more flame on the fire?
More oil on the fire.
How do you know that?
That would be the operative question.
And then two days later, Bernardo wrote, quote, HRC, there'd be Hillary Rodham Clinton, approved Julia's idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections.
That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level.
Bernardo also stated: the point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue.
In the absence of direct evidence, CrowdStrike and Threat Connect will supply the media, and GRU will hopefully carry on to give more facts.
What in the actual world?
What in the actual world?
Okay, if that, if those emails are real, then, I mean, that is a smoking gun of smoking guns.
That is a person associated with the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The Open Society Foundation, of course, is a George Soros left-wing group that was working for Hillary, essentially.
And he's explicitly saying all the things out loud.
That's crazy.
That's crazy.
Quote, HRC approved Julia's idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections.
That should distract people from her own missing email.
I mean, like, just saying all of it.
Because remember, one of the big campaign issues in 2016 was that Hillary Clinton had her private servers in a bathroom at her house in which she was storing classified information.
A lot of people were pretty upset about that because it exposed America's classified information to hack.
And then James Comey of the FBI changed the law in order to let her off the hook, you'll recall.
And so now you have people associated with the Hillary Clinton campaign openly saying that Hillary concocted an entire scheme to focus on Trump-Russia as a distraction from email gate.
That's insane.
John Durham consulted the FBI, which assessed the information was likely authentic, but couldn't corroborate exact copies of the Bernardo emails with Open Society Foundations.
The CIA also determined the intelligence was not the product of Russian fabrications.
Durham said Smith was at minimum playing a role in the Clinton campaign's efforts to tie Trump to Russia.
Now, again, what does that mean that they knew the FBI was going to put oil on the fire?
How would they know that if there was no coordination?
Where is that information coming from?
The Trump-Russia investigation, according to the New York Post, was part of what a March 2016 memo included in the annex described as a two-pronged Democratic Party opposition that is focused on discrediting Trump.
Among other things, the Clinton staff, with support from special services, is preparing scandalous revelations of business relations between Trump and the so-called Russian mafia.
This is insane.
The special services cited in one of the memos referred to intelligence activities of Obama's CIA and FBI, which may have included the work of Trump dossi author Christopher Steele.
The memos also claim that then President Barack Obama was putting pressure on FBI Director James Comey through AG Loretta Lynch to wrap up the probe of Clinton's use of a private email server to receive highly classified information while Secretary of State.
The March 2016 memo claimed the 44th president had, quote, sanctioned the use of all administrative levers to remove possibly negative effects from the FBI investigation of cases related to the Clinton Foundation and the email correspondence in the State Department.
Honestly, it's rare that you get like an actual smoking gun in public life.
Most people are smart enough to sort of hide the goods or they don't express it in the first place because they know that everything eventually will be discovered.
Here you just have the smoking gun.
I mean, it's just a smoking gun.
A.G. Pambondi, FBI Director Cash Patel, other members of U.S. intelligence declassified the Durham annex at the request of Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa.
Grassley said, based on the Durham annex, the Obama FBI failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton's political gain, which was ultimately done through the Steele dossier and other means.
These intelligence reports and related records, whether true or false, were buried for years.
History will show that the Obama and Biden administration's law enforcement and intelligence agencies were weaponized against President Trump.
John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA, said that the files showed, quote, a coordinated plan to prevent and destroy Donald Trump's presidency.
A spokesperson for the Open Society Foundation said in a statement, quote, the claim that the Open Society Foundations helped orchestrate an FBI investigation is an outrageous falsehood.
It is grounded in malicious disinformation traced to Russian intelligence and now weaponized as part of a politically motivated attack to campaign.
A spokesperson for the Open Society Foundation said in a statement, quote, the claim that the Open Society Foundations helped orchestrate an FBI investigation is an outrageous falsehood.
It is grounded in malicious disinformation traced to Russian intelligence and now weaponized as part of a politically motivated campaign to attack our leadership and our work to promote human rights.
The Durham report found no wrongdoing by our staff.
Now, they're not saying the emails are fake, you noticed.
They're not saying that the emails from this fellow Bernardo are actually fake.
And it is those emails that are particularly damning.
It's those emails that just spell out in full detail what exactly was going on.
That is an insane, insane smoking gun, truly crazy.
Truly and really insane.
So Caroline Levitt, White House press secretary, spoke to this yesterday.
She said, it's pretty obvious that Hillary Clinton approved the Russia hoax, which, again, if those emails are real, she did.
This should be a story every outlet in this room should be covering.
This is further Evidence that Hillary Clinton approved the Russia hoax against President Trump.
Her campaign financed it.
Again, she approved it.
And the FBI and the CIA were both weaponized to, as our director of CIA has said, accelerate this hoax against then candidates and former President Trump.
Senator Chuck Grassley, who is the person who requested the declassification of the Durham Report Annex, he explained why this is a big deal.
I think it's evidence of the great depth that the deep state will go to to cover up weaponization that was going on in the FBI and the executive branch of government generally under the Obama administration.
Again, this is totally crazy stuff.
It is totally crazy.
And it just demonstrates that, again, there are conspiracies in life.
They are backed by evidence.
And here is the evidence.
And my goodness, my goodness, Hillary Clinton should be brought to testify in front of Congress at the very least, knowingly promulgating false information about Trump-Russia to distract from her own email scandal and then coordinating with the FBI.
If that's not some form of obstruction of justice, I'm not sure exactly what is, really.
Astonishing.
Astonishing.
Meanwhile, again, members of the deep state, like John Brennan, he says there was no conspiracy.
We did everything absolutely right.
John Brennan has been accused of perjury for years based on things not related to Russia Gate, but he may have opened himself up to a perjury problem, given new revelations from all these documents.
That's a point that's made by Miranda Devine over at the New York Post.
Apparently, he said to be under renewed scrutiny by authorities over discrepancies between his sworn testimony to federal investigations and his written orders to underlings conducting the intelligence community assessment commissioned by Barack Obama in December of 2016 that found Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump.
That review found that Brennan insisted on the inclusion of the steel dossier over the strong objections of the CIA's two most senior Russia experts who said it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.
And then, of course, he suggested in his testimony that he did not push forward the steel dossier.
Here's John Brennan trying to claim that he did everything right.
Well, if the director of CIA and the director of national intelligence make referrals to the Department of Justice, I think the Department of Justice has to do something to respond to it.
So putting together an internal strike force, whatever, to take a look at this information, is certainly, I think, understandable.
But also, I'd like to think that professionals in the Department of Justice will dismiss any of these referrals because they're baseless.
They really are.
So again, I stand ready to continue to talk about the assessment and what we did during that period of time.
There was absolutely no conspiracy, and we continue to stand behind what it is that we have said publicly.
But do you worry at all that the Trump loyalists who are installed in those key positions could find a way, would find a way to punish you, regardless of what the evidence reveals?
Well, I guess they're going to do what they were going to do, Anna.
I just feel as though what we did was right.
It was legitimate.
It was based on our authorities and responsibilities.
We would have been derelict if we didn't do these things.
In fact, Brennan and James Clapper, they both came forward with an op-ed in the New York Times saying they did every single thing right.
They did an amazing job, as it turns out, with RussiaGate.
And again, that is just not true.
Already coming up, Kamala Harris is back and worse than ever.
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One of the people who's been on top of this the entire time is journalist Matt Taibi.
He joins us on the line now to explain.
He, of course, is an independent journalist and author, best known for his hard-hitting reporting on censorship, corruption, and political polarization over at Racket News on Substack.
He has been an absolute force regarding RussiaGate and covering it.
Matt, really appreciate the time.
Thanks for me on Ben.
So, Matt, let's talk about what the Durham Annex just released shows.
I mean, when I look at that just on a raw level, it does look like the closest thing I've seen to a smoking gun.
You have an email from a member of the Open Society Foundation, allegedly, that openly says Hillary Rodham Clinton agrees with the idea of misdirecting away from her email campaign and toward Trump-Russia collusion.
And oh, by the way, the FBI is going to put oil on the fire.
What do you make of this?
I think it's extremely significant.
It's now very clear what RussiaGate was.
It was a cover-up.
Hillary Clinton had a lot of problems early in 2016.
There obviously is some discussion about whether or not those emails are real.
But what's undeniably real is that the Russians had an enormous amount of material and analysis and that the FBI was aware of this as early as March of 2016.
They knew about these rumors that Hillary Clinton was going to cook up a plan to frame Donald Trump, essentially.
And what did they do?
Instead of investigating Clinton, they investigated Trump.
And to me, that's the smoking gun that this is a setup.
So, Matt, just to be clear about those emails, has anybody actually claimed that they're fake?
What I've seen is that people are upset that they've been released or they've said that it's a hit job or that it's disinformation.
But we've heard that routine about Hunter Biden's laptop before.
Has anybody actually overtly said these emails are just not real?
They have nothing to do with me.
The New York Times had a big article this morning disputing the authenticity of some of those emails.
And some of the principals have used language like, I don't recall saying that, or that doesn't sound like me.
There is a very amusing passage where Jake Sullivan is asked if there was a plan to distract from the campaign's problems by vilifying Donald Trump.
And he says that's ridiculous.
And then later he says, but that he can't completely rule it out either.
So, you know, these all sound like non-denial denials.
And also, we know that the FBI and CIA took this materials very seriously in previous instances.
James Coming was actually motivated to release word of ending the email investigation early because of the existence of this material.
So they clearly put some stock into it, whether they're saying so now or not.
So let's talk now about the intelligence community's internal debates and manipulations with regard to RussiaGate.
So there's an editorial that came out from John Brennan and James Clapper, who, of course, were both in the Obama IC at the time.
And they're claiming that basically they did everything right.
You read their piece, I'm sure, in the New York Times, claiming that everything was right, that all the reports basically exonerate them for any attempt to turn and twist information.
What did you make of their claims?
What did they do wrong?
So first of all, the 2017 intelligence community assessment that was released on January 6th of 2017, which concluded that Russia aspired to help Donald Trump out of a quote-unquote clear preference for him, was based on four pieces of intelligence, one of which was the steel dossier.
Three others were fragments previously discarded and rejected by the CIA, including by his own handpicked team.
The only thing that I can get out of that editorial by Brennan and Clapper is that they're throwing the FBI under the bus because there's a key line in there which says we only included the steel dossier at the behest of the FBI, which isn't true.
They pushed it as well.
So it's just more excuse making.
Every time these guys say anything, it takes us a little while.
We knock it down and they come up with something else.
So obviously the Trump administration has really been pushing a lot of these revelations with regard to RussiaGate.
The DNI Tulsi Gabbard had her sort of revelation of that House Intel report that uncovered what you're talking about, all the details suggesting that essentially the conclusion that Russia definitely wanted Trump was gamed and it wasn't true and that it was fostered by an intelligence community and perhaps Barack Obama directly that wanted that conclusion.
How significant is all of this?
Because we've known a lot of this for a long time.
You've been on this for a very long time.
RussiaGate is, of course, nothing new.
Some people like you were on it very early, but I think it's been pretty well accepted over the course of the last several years that there was an attempt to undermine the Trump presidency and the Trump campaign by pushing this sort of information.
The recent stuff, is it big?
Is it small?
Do you think it's being overblown or is it being underplayed?
No, it's big.
And as somebody who worked for a long time, I spent a month and a half last year on, for instance, that House intelligence report that just came out last week.
What's new about all this is that the shift in public attention is going to go from a flawed investigation into Donald Trump into a manipulated investigation.
And now it's abundantly clear from all these details that it wasn't even really an investigation of Donald Trump.
It was a setup designed to distract from an internal scandal involving Hillary Clinton.
The whole thing was fraudulent from the very beginning.
It wasn't just thin or badly sourced or incompetent.
It was a setup.
And if you go back and look, you will find countless examples of essentially an effort to set up members of the Trump campaign, offering them dirt on Hillary Clinton through FBI informants, that sort of thing.
This was a hit job by the intelligence services on behalf of the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton.
So what do you think the next steps are?
Obviously, it's great that the American people are seeing more of this stuff.
There's been talk by Daniel Gabber that there might be prosecutions, that the FBI ought to look into it.
It's unclear to me what sort of statutes could be called in in terms of a criminal investigation.
Certainly Congress has the ability to subpoena and put under penalty of perjury people who are going to come and testify.
What do you think needs to be done next?
Well, I think you're correct to identify that this is the big unknown at the moment.
I've been told from the start that they're looking at various forms of conspiracy charges.
I don't think they're aiming for perjury.
I think they're aiming for something higher than that.
But what exactly that is is not clear.
I've been told pretty conclusively that they're looking at conduct that isn't just rooted in 2016 and 2017 that extends all the way through the Biden administration And things that happened at the very least early in the Biden term.
They're looking at patterns of conduct.
So they're talking a big game about making court cases.
And I think at this point, it's not a hearts and minds thing anymore.
The media is obviously not going to cover it in the way that we would have hoped years ago.
This has to end in prosecutions for it to be effective.
And I think they know that.
So the fact that they're even doing this suggests to me that that's the plan all along.
Well, that is Matt Taibi.
He's been on top of this since the beginning.
You can follow his coverage of all of this over at Racket News on Substack.
Matt, really appreciate the time and the insight.
Thanks so much, Ben.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration, you know, it is their job to ensure that people who are complicit in the Russia hoax, who are working on the Russia hoax, don't actually work for the administration.
And thankfully, that is now happening.
It took a little while and a little investigative reporting by our own Luke Roziak over at the Daily Wire.
There's a woman named April Doss, who is working as the top NSA lawyer.
And it turns out that her background was that she had worked for Senator Mark Warner of Virginia when he was serving as the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel.
And she was basically serving in order to tie Trump to Russia.
Well, the Trump administration found out about it.
They fired her.
So yesterday, I spoke with Luke Roziak, the reporter who originally broke the story on April DOS.
Here's what it sounded like.
Luke, thanks so much for joining the show.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Ben.
So let's talk about the story of April Doss.
Who was she?
And when I say who was she, it's because she's now been fired.
What was the story surrounding April Doss?
She worked for Mark Warner on the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Donald Trump, trying to tie him to Russia.
And then she went on to become the general counsel of the National Security Agency, which is in charge of cybersecurity, very much along the lines of investigating the DNC hack and everything that precipitated Russia Gate.
And so after she worked for the Democrats, she went to become general counsel of the NSA in the Biden administration in 2022.
Now, the Democrats concealed her hire at that time because they had actually blocked a Republican with a very similar background from having that position during the Trump administration.
They said it would be inappropriate to have somebody who had previously worked for Republicans being in this position.
But somehow, when the shoe's on the other foot, it's all well and good.
You can hire a former Democrat operative into this position.
So she's now been fired, not just because she worked for Democrats, but because, you know, the Russiagate investigation was profoundly unethical.
It wasn't like they were just trying to get Trump and Trump doesn't like that.
They were trying to get him through extremely Machiavellian and dishonest maneuvers that were totally in violation of what we would expect from unbiased investigators.
And on top of that, she's done a lot of writing talking about how Trump is an insurrectionist, which, by the way, nobody was ever charged with insurrection in January 6th, but somehow Trump is an insurrectionist.
She's talked about, she's really advocated for the weight of the intelligence state to clamp down on people for wrongthink, even though now with a couple of years of hindsight, when we look back at her writing, we can see that she was very much the one who was wrong.
Talking about COVID vaccines, talking about the garm censorship stuff that you've been involved in, you know, corporations need to be censoring people because of all these reasons that turn out to be fake.
The Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping, she said, we got to crack down on QAnon because of that.
Well, it turns out her buddies in the FBI probably entrapped those people.
So this is a lady that not just is a Democrat operative, although she is that, she's also a lady who's been wrong again and again, who's invoked a vicious clampdown on free speech because she doesn't like what people are saying.
And, you know, it's totally out of step with the Trump policies.
And so unsurprisingly, she's now fired.
So, Luke, obviously, the media have now jumped into action, claiming that she was fired wrongly.
The media have suggested that the real reason that she was fired is because Laura Loomer put out a post in which she quoted your original Daily Wire story.
And then the media completely ignored the actual allegations in the Daily Wire story, basically suggesting that Laura Loomer did a loyalty test for Trump.
She didn't fulfill the loyalty test and thus she has been fired while noting any of the actual details in your story.
Yeah, that's a great point.
The Times adopted this idea that Laura Loom, and it's funny because they're writing about a retweet.
Like I did this story, and I think they were already working on firing her when I initially contacted this agency, brought her to their attention.
After the story comes out, Laura Loomer retweets it, which is great.
But the New York Times decides to focus the whole story on the fact that Laura Loomer retweeted something.
She had this prestigious paper of record writing about literally somebody clicking the retweet button on their phone, but they can't say it that way.
So they call it like a far-right conspiracist echoed calls.
But what they mean when they say echoed calls, because it sounds like such dramatic language, is literally just clicking a retweet button.
But you're right, they needed that because they had to redirect the focus from the facts, which are this woman's long record of things that are really objectionable, not just the fact that she's a Democrat to a far-right conspiracy.
So then you have Mark Warner, the Democrat who hired her to begin with, lashing out and saying, how dare you fire her, which only affirms the fact that she's very close to these Democrats.
But yeah, it's funny, once the New York Times adopted this, you know, basically they just kind of made up out of thin air that Laura Loomer was responsible for all this.
Then all the other media adopted the exact same framing.
So it is fascinating how they just kind of invent these narratives.
And again, no disrespect to Laura Loomer.
It's just the New York Times kind of was like, they wanted to give her the credit because it helped them paint a certain narrative.
Well, that's Luke Roziak, investigative reporter over at the Daily Wire, doing solid work.
Luke, really appreciate the time.
Thank you, Ben.
Meanwhile, Democrats continue to struggle for a wave forward.
Kamala Harris is back.
Now, not that back.
She said just yesterday that she didn't want to run for governor of California, which of course is a wise move because if she were to run for governor Calvin, I'm not sure she wins a primary.
She's just not very popular among Democrats, But she has announced that she has a brand new book coming out, and it is exciting, exciting stuff.
I mean, just Stellar.
She says that she has a book called 107 Days about the shortest presidential campaign in modern history.
It comes out in September.
So I trust, my listeners, that when her book comes out, we will elevate lines and scavengers above her book on the bestseller charts just to dunk on her once more.
But here was her announcement.
Just over a year ago, I launched my campaign for president of the United States.
107 Days, traveling the country, fighting for our future.
The shortest presidential campaign in modern history.
It was intense, high stakes, and deeply personal for me and for so many of you.
Since leaving office, I've spent a lot of time reflecting on those days, talking with my team, my family, my friends, and pulling my thoughts together.
In essence, writing a journal that is this book, 107 Days.
Sure to be a bestseller, but if she can't make it a bestseller by telling you about it, perhaps she can make it a bestseller by doing a TikTok trend about it, because there is nothing that more says you're in touch with the kids than being, you know, a 60-year-old person who is doing TikTok trends.
Everyone thinks you've been kicking back, drinking margaritas on the beach, but really you've been hard at work writing a book, meeting with leaders, thinking about the future of our country.
Who said that?
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
You mean a self-aggrandizing TikTok trend?
Where she's been hard at work, guys.
She's been so hard at work.
We thought that she was just day drinking, like she appeared to be doing during the campaign.
And it turns out that she's both been day drinking and also writing this book for what she for sure had no ghostwriter.
Yeah.
Okay, then.
Well, if you're trying to sell your book, obviously the place to go is Stephen Colbert, who is another comedian who is no longer a comedian.
He is just a lawn sign in human form.
And by the way, he doesn't have that many viewers.
So I asked our sponsors over a comment that is Perplexity's brand new web browser what Stephen Colbert's ratings look like versus, say, Greg Gutfeld.
Greg Gutfeld's show, Gutfeld, currently averages more viewers than Stephen Colbert's late show, with Guttfeld drawing about 3.29 million viewers versus Colbert's recent average of 3.06 million at his own ratings peak, but typically more around 2.42 million in recent months.
Guttfeld's average in the second quarter of 2025 was 3.289 million total viewers, making it the biggest late night ratings winner, even though it also airs at 10 p.m. with less direct competition from the other network late night shows.
By comparison, the late show with Stephen Colbert averaged 2.417 million total viewers for the first run episodes during the same period.
So he's gotten like a brief surge because it's basically a dead cat bounce.
But suffice it to say, he is an unsuccessful host and he's unsuccessful because he's not very good at his job, because he brings you humor like this.
Here he was with Kamala Harris last night.
You know, when I was young in my career, I had to defend my decision to become a prosecutor with my family.
And one of the points that I made is: why is it then when we think we want to improve the system or change it, that we're always on the outside on bended knee or trying to break down the door?
Shouldn't we also be inside the system?
And that has been my career.
And recently, I made the decision that I just, for now, I don't want to go back in the system.
I think it's broken.
Now, the system is so broken, she doesn't want to go back into it because she didn't win.
It must be because of the broken systems.
So she's decided the systems are all unfixable because people don't like her.
But why wouldn't people like her?
She's so delightful.
I mean, do you see that charming, winning, joyous brat personality?
How could she possibly have lost to Donald Trump and gotten whomped by him actually in election?
It's a mystery wrapped in an enigma.
Well, she didn't stop there.
She was asked about Joe Biden's health by Stephen Colbert, and it got awkward.
It did not go well.
Spoiler.
It did not go well in that debate.
Therefore, you became the candidate.
At what point in the say month that followed that did people start saying you might need to be prepared for this?
Let me say something about Joe Biden.
I have an incredible amount of respect for him.
And I think that the way that we should be thinking about where we are right now is to remember that we had a president of the United States who believed in the rule of law, who believed in the importance of aspiring to have integrity and to do the work on behalf of the people.
And that's where I'll leave that.
Vogelgrind and also Joe Biden was dead.
No follow-ups there from Colbert, by the way.
She's just completely misdirects to Joe Biden.
It was a wonderful, wonderful man who was so wonderful for the country.
And yeah, she was asked who the Democratic leader is.
And of course, she has no answer to that because the answer to that is they don't really have a leader other than the kind of wild insanity of Bernie Sanders' arm on Donnie and AOC.
Who's leading the Democratic Party?
I'm just curious.
There are lots of leaders.
There's generally a leader of the Democratic Party.
You know, like, oh, that's the leader of the party.
Who comes to mind?
I think there are a lot of, I'm not going to go through names because then I'm going to leave somebody out and then I'm going to hear about it.
But let me just, let me say this.
I think it is a mistake for us who want to figure out how to get out and through this and get out of it to put it on the shoulders of any one person.
It's really on all of our shoulders.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
This is her comeback.
It is not going amazing.
And if that wasn't enough to sell you on Kamala Harris, she also cackles.
Can I add a cackle in for a 25% discount?
Here we go.
I mean, There's a lot of personal stuff in the book.
I mean, poor Dougie.
You're blowing the lid off of Doug?
For example, my birthday's in October.
The election's in November.
You see where I'm going.
And Dougie kind of dropped the ball on my big birthday.
He didn't get you anything.
Oh, you have to read the book.
All right.
Tell me the page.
Tell me the page.
Even Stephen Colbert is like, that's the big secret you're going to drop in 107 days is that Dougie didn't do an amazing job for your birthday.
I mean, like, a really amazing spoiler would be like a secret would be like, where Dougie's living now, which is kind of far away from Kamala Harris, if the rumors are true.
But yes, she's back.
The Democratic Party is in serious trouble.
They really, really are.
And they are in even more serious trouble, given the fact that the Republicans in Texas are likely going to gerrymander the map.
Now, gerrymandering is a normal part of politics.
State legislators typically draw the congressional lines for various elections.
And the Supreme Court does have the capacity under one man, one vote to say that those lines are absurd, that they are leaving people out, that they are doing a bad job representing the public.
You can't draw kind of snake-like districts that encompass certain populations in order to minimize their impact.
The Supreme Court will step in under that doctrine.
But typically speaking, it has been the long-standing policy in the United States that the various state legislatures draw the congressional district.
That is particularly true right now when, as it turns out, the last census, I've talked about this extensively on the show, the last census was just wrong.
The Census Bureau admitted this in 2021.
The 2020 census was wrong.
It undercounted people living in places like Texas and Florida and Arizona, and it overcounted people living in California and New York.
So that meant that actual congressional allocation, as well as electoral college allocation, was just wrong.
If the census had been done right and actually reflected the population of the various states, Donald Trump could have won the last presidential election without winning any of Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania.
That's how badly the census got it wrong.
And so Ron DeSantis, he's been calling for a redo of the census.
Here's the governor of Florida.
They should do it and count people that are legally allowed to be here.
How many seats would California lose if you only counted lawful people, us citizens?
They would lose a lot of seats because they're a sanctuary state.
For us, you know, we would stand to gain because we did not spend money to try to try to count illegals because I don't think that that's constitutionally proper.
The analysis that even Biden's people had to put out showed without question that we should have a different count.
Okay, well, the Democrats are now complaining about the congressional gerrymandering in the state of Texas.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, who could theoretically be deprived of the House majority, he's pissed about it, obviously.
Donald Trump has ordered Greg Abbott and compliant Texas Republicans to race back to Austin, have a special session in order to rig the congressional map and undermine the ability of Texans to have a free and fair midterm election.
That is wrong.
Okay, but at the same exact time that Hakeem Jeffries is complaining about that, J.D. Vance is quite properly complaining about the fact that California Governor Gavin Newsom is also attempting to radically gerrymander California.
He points out of their 52 congressional districts, nine are Republican.
That means 17% of their delegation is Republican when Republicans regularly win 40% of the vote in that state.
So in other words, this is the way the system works.
The system is frequently used by the party in power in order to increase their vote share in terms of Congress.
Harry Enton over at CNN, he points out this could make actually a relatively large difference in the Congress.
He says that if Texas redistricts the way that they're talking about right now, Texas could actually increase its seat difference by five.
Yeah, it could make a huge difference.
This, in fact, could win or maintain control for the Republicans in the House of Representatives.
What are you talking about?
Well, Texas has 38 congressional districts.
Look at those that Trump won last year by at least 10 percentage points.
Under the current lines, it's 25.
Under the proposed lines, it's 30.
That's one, two, three, four, five, five potential pickup opportunities for the Republican Party.
They are playing hardball at this particular point.
And right now, it seems to me that Democrats are actually playing close to the Little League peewee.
Okay, well, California, they're going to try the same thing.
The problem is they've so radically redistricted over and over and over in California, there aren't that many more seats that they can gain through redistricting in California.
So again, the way that this tends to work is Democrats redistrict like mad, and then they complain when Republicans do the same thing.
Well, it's good for the goose is good for the gander.
One of the people hardest hit here is Jasmine Crockett, the new hot, fresh face, so fresh, so face, even more fresh in face than AOC.
She's very upset.
She says they're trying to dilute the voices of the majority in Texas, by which she means that she could theoretically lose her congressional seat or have to run inside a district where she doesn't actually live.
They want you to say, oh, it's all about partisan politics.
Texas is a majority minority state and they are trying to dilute the voices of the majority in this state.
Well, hard to say that they're trying to dilute the voice of the majority in the state when Trump won it by 10 and has a Republican legislature and a Republican governor and two Republican senators.
So you're actually in the minority politically in your state representative.
Meanwhile, Democratic hopes seem to be fading, but they have one hope, and I've been saying this for a long time.
Their only hope is that the economy weakens under President Trump.
That is their big hope.
This is why I've been critical of the tariff war.
I think that economically speaking, it is not a good idea.
Now, is it going to lead to long-lasting inflation?
The answer is probably not.
So Milton Friedman, as I've said before on the show, says that inflation is anywhere and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
What does he mean by that?
What he means is that if you increase taxes, for example, that might increase pricing temporarily, but then demand goes down and then the pricing goes back down.
So you can do things that temporarily increase prices, like, for example, tariffs.
But what happens is that as the prices go up, then demand goes down and the prices come down.
That is a normal working of the economy.
Bad policy can kill demand because it's basically an interference in the economy, but it's not going to lead to long-lasting inflation.
Well, at least a long-lasting inflation is what Joe Biden did, which is just hose money, fire hose money all over the American public.
If you do that, if you treat it as though it's a game show and everybody's stuck inside the phone booth and we're just going to drop money on them, then the prices go up because you just have a higher supply of money and a higher supply of money with the same amount of goods means higher prices for everybody.
So that is why Donald Trump is calling for Jerome Powell to lower those interest rates.
But lowering the interest rates isn't going to solve the problem of what actually pushes an economy forward.
What pushes an economy forward is not continued consumption.
What pushes an economy forward is, in fact, innovation, investment, smart investment.
And what you're seeing right now is that the economy is, in fact, slowing in certain ways.
So we talked about that GDP report that came out yesterday.
That GDP report that came out was a 3% GDP growth.
But a large chunk of that GDP growth was in exports over imports.
So exports minus imports is one way of measuring your gross domestic product, the stuff you produce inside the United States.
So if you just cut off the imports and you leave the exports the same, you're going to get GDP growth.
That's just a weird thing about the stats.
It's something pointed out by the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
Well, if you start to kill demand, if you start to create bumps in the economy, what you're going to get is lower investment and lower job growth.
And you're starting to see that materialize.
According to the U.S. Labor Department, the U.S. added just 73,000 jobs in July.
Not only that, there was also a major downward revision in May and June.
So there were some reports that came out in May and June that suggested that there was fairly substantial job growth.
Apparently, employers added 258,000 fewer jobs in those months than previously estimated, which is not exactly great.
Again, one of the things that's happening here is that the fundamentals of the economy could be fine if you just remove the shackles.
And in some areas, Trump is removing the shackles, deregulation, particularly with energy.
We talked about that just earlier this week with the Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright.
In other areas, he is revising the rules of the road to make it easier to invest.
He just did this with the Genius Act with regard to stablecoin, for example.
AI companies are booming under President Trump.
The problem is that, on the other hand, you have things like, for example, a gigantic tariff war with the rest of the world, which is in fact going to limit supply coming into the country, sending prices up temporarily.
That is going to crush demand.
Demand will go down and then the prices will come down.
And you can say, okay, well, we'll artificially stimulate demand by essentially firehosing money into the economy.
But that leads again to more of an inflationary bubble.
That is the game that's being played right now.
It is why I'm not a big fan of artificially induced bumps and hiccups in the economy.
Now, as I've said before, President Trump does stick and move with the economic news.
So yesterday, for example, President Trump on Truth Social announced that he had extended his deadline for Mexico and the United States to reach some sort of trade deal for 90 days.
And he's doing that because he understands that if there were to be a radical increase in the tariff on Mexico, that would, in fact, have a negative downward impact on demand in the United States.
It could create economic stagnation or the conditions therefore.
Again, one of the things that's happening here, globally speaking, is that America still remains the best bet on the block, but you don't want people to invest in America just because it's better than the other countries.
You want them to invest in America because it's actually an amazing place to invest.
Because if they're just doing it because right now we're the best, some other country could come in and drink our milkshake.
That is one of the problems here.
President Trump put out a statement: quote, I've just concluded a telephone conversation with the president of Mexico, Claudia Scheinbaum, which was very successful in that more and more we are getting to know and understand each other.
The complexities of a deal with Mexico are somewhat different than other nations because of both problems and assets of the border.
We've agreed to extend for a 90-day period the exact same deal we had as for the last short period of time.
Namely, Mexico will continue to pay a 25% fentanyl tariff, 25% tariff on cars, and 50% tariff on steel, aluminum, and copper.
Additionally, Mexico has agreed to immediately terminate its non-tariff trade barriers, of which there were many.
We'll be talking to Mexico over the next 90 days with the goal of signing a trade deal somewhere within the 90-day period of time or longer.
Present at the meeting with Vice President J.D. Van, Secretary of Treasury Scott Besant, Rubio, Lutnick, the whole team.
There will be continued cooperation on the border as it relates to all aspects of security, including drugs, drug distribution, and illegal immigration into the United States.
Thank you for this attention to this matter.
So, again, that is President Trump pushing the can down the road to try and reach an off-ramp with Mexico.
However, to pretend that there is going to be no economic impact by multiplying the tariffs that American citizens effectively have to pay for in temporarily increased pricing and domestic manufacture, to pretend that's going to have no impact if you quadruple or quintuple those things, it's going to have some impact, obviously.
Now, I think that many of the economically sophisticated players are hoping that President Trump, again, finds more off-ramps, that as we move forward, as it becomes clear that the economy is stagnating more than it otherwise would, he's going to look for an off-ramp, presumably provided by the Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant.
Jamie Dimon, who's recently in good standing with President Trump, he's been praising President Trump for the thoughtful tariff policy.
We started tariffs.
We didn't know what they're going to be.
And now we kind of know, and they're more moderate and thoughtful and more carefully done.
And hopefully they'll help some companies export.
Maybe some people move manufacturing back here.
So, you know, so far, so good.
Okay, but fewer burdens on the American economy would be good.
And this goes to the question of the White House threatening prescription drug makers with price controls.
Okay, you cannot just dictate to people what the price of goods and services are.
It doesn't work that way.
Price control is a left-wing policy.
Suggesting that the federal government has the unique capacity to simply dictate what things cost is not a good policy.
It's just a bad policy.
And in fact, what it leads to is a crimp in the supply, which artificially ends up boosting the price.
Again, the notion that the government can sort of willy-nilly interfere in free trade and private property and pricing, centralized government power here does not achieve its sought-after goal.
And yet there is the White House trying to promote the notion that it could unilaterally lower prescription drug prices by diktot.
There's Caroline Levitt at the White House saying so.
The president is determined to solve this problem and took further action today.
He has signed 17 letters to pharmaceutical companies' CEOs.
And I would like to read you one of these letters to the CEO of Eli Lilly.
On May 12th, 2025, I signed an executive order delivering most favored nation prescription drug pricing to American patients to stop global fleet freeloading and guarantee that Americans pay the same prices enjoyed by other developed nations.
I'm calling on Eli Lilly and company and every manufacturer doing business in our great country to take the following actions within the next 60 days.
Extend the most favored nation pricing to Medicaid, guarantee most favored nation pricing for newly launched drugs, return increased revenues abroad to American patients and taxpayers, provide for direct purchasing at most favored nation pricing.
But if you refuse to step up, we will deploy every tool in our arsenal to protect American families from continued abusive drug pricing practices.
Now, again, I wouldn't like this from Barack Obama or Joe Biden.
I don't like it from the Trump administration.
You cannot tell companies what they can price their product at because you do not have that information.
Not only do you not have that information, if you try to dictate prices, what you end up doing is crimping RD.
There's a reason the vast majority of pharmaceutical patents happen right here in the United States, and that is because the United States is absorbing the cost from all the other countries in terms of its pricing mechanism.
The actual solution here would be for President Trump to make pharmaceutical pricing a piece of his tariff war.
He should be using the tariff wars in order to force other countries to open their markets to American drugs at free market prices.
That's what he should be doing.
It shouldn't be most favored nation status, meaning like Americans pay what Canadians pay.
It should be Canadians pay what Americans pay.
Because if you have a broader group of consumers who are now having to pay fair market prices, like free market prices, as opposed to using government cramdowns in these various countries and then essentially pushing all of the pricing into the American bubble, if you do that, you will get lower prices for Americans.
The price distribution mechanism on drugs is totally unfair because other countries actually are screwing Americans.
And this is where President Trump should actually be using tariff policy and trade policy to force other countries to pay their fair share when it comes to prescription drug pricing, for example.
But just telling these companies they have to lower their prices arbitrarily, that is not going to work.
Now, there are some things, again, there are many things that the Trump administration is doing well when it comes to the economy.
One of those is something called the Trump accounts.
This is the $1,000 accounts that have been created by the one big beautiful bill.
Those accounts essentially are a basic form of a health savings account or a social security account, but tied to the market, which means people will actually be invested in the market.
Now, you can make the case as on a very free market approach.
It is a more free market approach than just giving people welfare.
It is a way of getting people to understand that as the markets go, very often so goes their quality of life.
So, Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerzner, who's been a big moving force behind the so-called Trump accounts, he explained on June 9th exactly what these are supposed to be.
And the Trump accounts, right, that everybody in this room are here and we've been working so hard on, but would never come to fruition without your leadership.
Those will change the game forever.
It makes America an ownership society again.
You are giving the shot for every American to feel like they're in the game again.
Part of America with that economic mobility, that dream that led Michael Dell to start Dell Computer in his dorm room, Dara to feel like he had a shot after coming here from Iran, and a couple poor kids from Missouri and Indiana to make it to where we are today.
So thank you.
And again, this seems to me like a, if you're going to have the federal government involved in this sort of policy at all, it seems like a pretty salutary piece of policy.
Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, got himself into a little bit of hot water the other day because he said this is basically almost like a replacement for Social Security, meaning you put money in right now, it garners a return on the SP 500.
And then 50 years later, it's worth a lot more money than it originally was.
He wasn't saying Social Security is going away.
He's saying that if you were to have a privatized version of Social Security, it would outperform, which obviously is true.
Also, at the end of the day, that I'm not sure when the distribution level date should be, whether should it be 30 and you can buy a house, should it be 60.
But in a way, it is a back door for privatizing Social Security.
Like Social Security is a defined benefit plan paid out that to the extent that if all of a sudden these accounts grow and you have in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for your retirement, then that's a game changer, too.
He got all sorts of flack for this comment.
And then yesterday he walked it back.
He said, I'm not talking about getting rid of Social Security, you doofs.
I'm talking about as a compliment to Social Security, duh.
The Democrats hate this program because it brings capitalism and markets to every American, not just their constituents at the upper end.
And over time, the compounding is going to be an incredible supplement to Social Security, not a replacement.
It is a compliment.
And what I said was Social Security will continue as it is.
It is intact.
Everyone will get their check every month.
But it's very exciting to me that there could be a big payout at the end of when people turn 59 or 60.
Of course, he's totally right about all of that.
And it does underscore.
Let's be real about this.
I wish they were talking about privatizing Social Security.
They are not.
If people would actually talk about that, that would be a much better solution to our systemic debt problems than what we are currently talking about.
And again, the third rail of American politics remains extremely electrified.
But also at some point, Americans are going to have to grab that third rail because otherwise you're going to hit by the train.
That really is, those are the only two choices.
Well, meanwhile, it is a Friday, and that means it's time to do a little bit of lighter cultural news.
Joining us on the line to discuss is Emily Austin.
She's a journalist, TV host, and political commentator who, of course, began her career in sports media, hosting for MTV, Sports Illustrated, DAZN.
She's contributed to Newsweek and all the rest.
Well, she's here to inform me what is going on in the world of culture, because as you know, I tend to cover the serious news.
So, Emily, thanks for taking the time.
Appreciate it.
Of course, good to be here.
So, let's start with the Sydney Sweeney controversy.
I cannot believe that we are fully a week into a controversy over whether a good-looking young blonde woman is somehow a Nazi symbol.
But give me the latest.
I know.
So, the latest is people are still mad, Ben, and people are going to stay mad.
But I can assure you, I've did some deep digging into this.
Everyone who's mad is fat or ugly.
So, rest assured, they have serious jealousy problems.
On a serious note, though, I think not to make everything political, but they are.
Look, Sidney Sweeney being hot is now Nazism.
Everything under Biden's administration rewarded victimhood, rewarded being always a minority, always, you know, if you're trans, you're better than straight people.
And if you're a minority, feel bad for yourself instead of promoting winning and being successful and getting out of that, you know, woes-me mentality.
So, with that, people really have to make everything about themselves.
It's like they look at they looked at Sydney's picture, they squinted a little bit too hard and they said, How do I make this about me?
Well, I'm a person of color and she's white, so that's racist now.
And it really comes from a point of narcissism.
How do you make everything about putting yourself in the victim seat?
But that's where we are.
But what they don't understand is everyone's rolling their eyes.
American Eagle sold out of their denim collection.
We want to make America hot again, America winning again.
Nobody likes fat and unattractive, neglected people.
So, I'm glad we're returning to a sense of normalcy.
And American Eagle is sold out.
So, this victimhood mentality is starting to evolve into a winning mentality.
By the way, it is kind of fascinating because American Eagle, like virtually all of the clothing manufacturers, is going to have to deal with higher tariffs.
And so, they've been facing that.
They've also been facing the possibility that Amazon, I believe, is starting its own jeans production line.
And so, they're concerned about having to compete with that.
This is the most successful remarketing brand that I've seen.
It's sort of the opposite of what happened with Dylan Mulvaney.
Bud Light decided to treat a man as a woman and totally tanked their brand.
American Eagle decided to treat a woman as an attractive woman.
And it turns out that a bunch of people like to buy products associated with attractive people.
Who knew?
I mean, great, great shots in the advertising world.
Now, meanwhile, apparently, Shannon Sharp has now departed ESPN.
What's the story with this?
Because we've seen a lot of these sorts of cases.
Obviously, there was a very controversial video of Shannon Sharp where he was on his phone went live while he was engaged in some untoward activity at one point, I believe.
But what is the actual story surrounding Shannon Sharp here?
So, Shannon was with a much younger woman who, you know, towards the end or after the relationship decided to come out with a sexual allegation charge against him.
They settled for many, many millions.
She settled the case.
She retired from her very prestigious OnlyFans career and is carrying on with her now wealthy life from squeezing the money out of this man.
Now, I won't comment on whether or not the man's innocent.
I don't care about him enough to try to speculate, but I just find it ironic that after Shannon Sharp was with the woke mob, the mob that was quick to cancel people, now he's on the other side of it.
And it just shows you that no matter how much you preach social justice and, like I said, go into that victim mentality and paint the I'm a black man picture, you are still not safe from that woke mob of cancellation.
And what's the reality is that this is a hit for ESPN.
You love the guy, you hate the guy, you believe it, you don't.
He was ESPN's biggest personality.
Like him or not, he's on the internet.
He keeps things spicy.
And now they're going to have to fill that void.
So good luck to ESPN on that.
But as a sports broadcaster, I can attest you walk a very thin line balancing between this is my work.
This is sports and entertainment.
This is my personal life.
This is my advocacy.
And now the business has to make an analysis.
Well, at what point does this TV personality's advocacy or personal life overshadow their talent on air?
Now, as a sports fan, I could tell you, I don't think anyone cares.
They love seeing Shannon Sharp.
He's one of the most entertaining people on air.
But it's interesting to see now him on the other side of this cancel culture.
And one of the things that's always fascinating about these sorts of issues is that Shannon Sharp was not convicted of anything in court.
There was no conviction.
He didn't even lose a lawsuit.
He settled the lawsuit.
When it comes to a lot of these cases, if you're a very rich and famous person, you will settle these things out of court without an admission of guilt, specifically in order so that you can move on with your life.
And so if the new system is basically that an allegation and settlement is tantamount to guilt, such the network is going to fire you, a lot of people are going to get fired over to ESPN in the future.
Right.
No, of course.
I think it sets a really bad precedent.
And what likely will happen is Shannon's going to go and start his own show that might get more viewers than it did on ESPN because anyway, traditional television is starting to die down and digital media is picking up.
So if he wants to get his dream revenge plan, he should definitely go start a podcast.
Like Stephen A. Smith has a podcast and he's an on-air personality, but Shannon would crush it because again, personal business aside, when I'm watching TV, I really do very little care about what that person does at home, what he does with women, if he's gay, if he's straight.
It's not really my issue.
If I'm turning you on to watch sports and you're talking about sports, an OnlyFans model who accuse you of something isn't my priority.
Well, that's Emily Austin.
You can go check out all of her work over at X.com among other sources.
Emily, appreciate the time and thanks for the information as always.
You got it.
All righty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.
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