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Feb. 10, 2026 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:10
CON INC: Bannon-Epstein Connection EXPLODES
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Modern Nihilism's Fertile Ground 00:07:06
Well, folks, Steve Bannon has now been totally exposed in the Epstein files.
We're going to get into what is actually in the Epstein files and why is it that the people who are like actual conspirators with Jeffrey Epstein, like people who are working closely with Jeffrey Epstein, are being overlooked in favor of a broad, broad conspiracy theory about all of society.
We'll get into all of that.
Plus, a big economic move from the Trump administration first.
The biggest story in the country right now remains the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie's mother, Nancy Guthrie.
Information continues to move unbelievably fast.
If you are trying to keep up, here is the answer.
Finding Nancy Guthrie.
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There is a palpable frustration out there in American politics, pretty clearly.
It's rooted in some ugly and unpleasant realities.
The reality that lots of our major institutions blew up their credibility on COVID-19 and BLM and RussiaGate, for example.
The reality that we don't really have any idea how AI is going to reshape the job market.
The reality that a ton of people in the political class have zero scruples and are totally willing to engage in open corruption.
But that frustration is turning into something else before our eyes in this country, and that thing is nihilism.
And that nihilism is rooted in a gigantic lie, a truly gigantic lie, that all of our problems in the United States are intractable.
That individual problems that you may have or I may have in the United States, that's all the result of an evil system, often led by cohesive groups of conspiratorial elites, that you cannot succeed unless you pierce that supposed matrix.
And that all of those who call for individual responsibility and dutiful decency, those people are actually part of this evil matrix.
Now, this stuff is not solution making.
It is thought preventing.
It is success-preventing.
It's a recipe for personal and national disaster.
And the result is an increasingly incoherent and unhinged politics and an entire generation of young men and women who go looking for meaning in all the wrong places and on the very fringes sometimes turn to violence.
There's a story in the Washington Post from a couple of days ago that highlights this by a guy named Peter Hariski.
He writes, quote, Amid a wave of high-profile killings and political violence in the United States, investigators have been confounded regularly by the absence of a recognizable agenda.
The assailants in several cases, shootings, a bombing, a planned drone attack, resisted familiar labels and categories.
They weren't Democrat or Republican or Islamist militant or Antifa or white supremacist.
There was something new.
In their manifestos, according to the Washington Post, these attackers declared their contempt for humanity and a desire to see the collapse of civilization.
Law enforcement officers and federal prosecutors have begun to describe these attacks as a contemporary strain of nihilism, an online revival of a philosophical stance that arose in the 19th century to deny the existence of moral truths and meaning in the universe.
Well, I mean, as the Washington Post suggests right there, that isn't actually anything new.
Societies that experience major dislocations are often the breeding ground for nihilism and violence.
That's been true going all the way back to Dostoevsky's notes from the underground, which he wrote in 1864.
But actually, if you reread notes from the underground, Dostoevsky goes further.
He says that nihilism doesn't just require social dislocations or economic problems, that nihilism can arise particularly in prosperous periods where everybody seems to be doing pretty well.
So he writes, quote, I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, apropos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity, a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical countenance were to arise and putting his arms akimbo, say to us all, I say, gentlemen, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds simply to send these log rhythms to the devil and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will?
That again, says Dostoevsky, would not matter, but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers, such as the nature of man, and all that for the most foolish reason, which one would think was hardly worth mentioning.
That is, that man everywhere and all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated.
What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.
And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
In other words, convince people that they don't have any choices in life.
And what you are likely to get is a nihilistic retreat into barbarism, specifically because people want to lash out at their supposed lack of choice.
Now, you've heard me rail on this show, a lot of other places, against what I've called the conspiracy theory of society.
That's the idea that everything in life is controlled by systems you can't quite identify and that your problems are solvable only through violence or through some sort of pseudo-revolution.
Philosopher Karl Popper explained this again way back in the mid-20th century.
He said, the conspiracy theory of society is the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon.
Sometimes it's a hidden interest which has first to be revealed and who have planned and conspired to bring it about.
The gods are abandoned, but their place is filled by powerful men or groups, sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from, such as the learned elders of Zion or the monopolists or the capitalists or the imperialists.
And Karl Popper was writing this in the mid-20th century.
So none of this is new.
However, what we are experiencing right now in the United States is dangerous and stupid.
Of course, there are conspiracies out there, but conspiracies generally have specific people involved and evidence of their involvement and a plan effectuated.
The conspiracy theory of society, that everything in your life is out of your control, and that there is a group of manipulative elites who are getting together behind closed doors to figure out how to screw you.
That is something different.
And that conspiracy theory of society is finding unbelievably fertile ground right now.
And there are a lot of people who are promoting it for their own pure grift and greed.
They're doing it because of the con.
It turns out that this modern wave of nihilism is not entirely organic.
It is, as the kids might say, an op.
It is fomented by influencers and politicians who commit ideological arson so then they can pretend to be firefighters, people who manipulate their audiences into believing that their problems are unfixable unless they hand over more power and control to precisely those same influencers and politicians.
After all, influencers can get really, really rich off the nihilism of crowds.
Politicians can foment the change they seek by channeling nihilistic energy, at least temporarily, until they're eaten by the movement that they actually foster.
I'm bringing all of this up to discuss what I think is the biggest news story of the day, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and people we know were involved in it, because it shows the distinction between actual conspiracy and the conspiracy theory of society.
I'm going to get to what the point of all of this is in just a minute because it ties into a really big thing in the news that I think most people are just sort of glossing over for convenient reasons.
First, you know, I was not sleeping in my bed last night.
I got to be honest with you.
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One of the reasons I am so tired is because I did not have my mattress.
Why Not Sleep Well? 00:02:04
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You don't need bad people at your company.
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Steve Bannon's Conspiracy Claims 00:15:21
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So let's begin with what we know.
Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused underage girls.
In fact, he pled guilty in 2009 to state charges of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.
He was arrested again in 2019 on charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors.
And so was Ghelane Maxwell, his longtime partner in crime.
Now, we know that Jeffrey Epstein had longtime relationships with many rich and famous people.
It appears, according to extensive in-depth reporting from the New York Times, that Epstein made his money through Grift.
He scammed rich people into giving him money, and then he used association with those rich people to find other rich people to scam.
Here's what the New York Times writes: quote, in his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar.
Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune.
A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals, and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money.
He started small, testing his tactics, seeing what he could get away with.
His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road.
Again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power.
Wrung by wrung, says the New York Times, Epstein climbed a social and financial ladder, often using young women as a potent form of currency.
His girlfriends, lovers, and even exes helped elevate his status inside a bank, got him hired to track down missing assets, and gained him entree to prestigious organizations.
And says the New York Times, deliberately or not, some of them enabled him as he constructed a sex trafficking operation that would later ensnare hundreds of teenage girls and young women.
Now, here has what has been alleged in the public square: that Epstein had a list of clients, like an actual list, famous and rich people to whom he trafficked underage girls.
It has been alleged in the public square that he blackmailed those clients with pictures and videos of them with said underage girls.
It has been alleged that he was working for foreign intelligence services online.
That's usually said to be mossad.
Sometimes it's the CIA or MI6 or the KGB in order to manipulate the levers of both economic and political power.
Those theories remain unsubstantiated by the evidence.
Evidence is our guide here.
Those theories have yet to be substantiated by the evidence.
That is not for lack of trying.
According to ABC News, prosecution memos, case summaries, and other documents made public in the department's latest release of Epstein-related records show that FBI agents and federal prosecutors diligently pursued potential co-conspirators.
Even seemingly outlandish and incomprehensible claims called into tip lines were examined, according to ABC News.
The only person in this case who truly alleged sex trafficking to men beyond Jeffrey Epstein was Virginia Jufre, who was found by prosecutors to be non-credible.
As ABC News reports, Jufrey acknowledged writing a partly fictionalized memoir of her time with Epstein containing descriptions of things that didn't take place.
She had also offered shifting accounts in interviews with investigators, they wrote, and had engaged in a continuous stream of public interviews about her allegations, many of which have included sensationalized, if not demonstrably inaccurate, characterizations of her experiences.
Those inaccuracies included false accounts of her interactions with the FBI, they said.
Now, listen, maybe more will be uncovered.
And if it is, then we'll cover that.
For example, Glenn Maxwell just yesterday took the fifth in her congressional testimony.
Here's what that sounded like.
Ms. Maxwell, were you a close friend and confidant of Jeffrey Epstein?
I would like to answer your question, but on the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer this question and any related questions.
My habeas petition is pending in the Southern District of New York.
I therefore invoke my right to silence under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
So maybe more will come out.
But given the evidence, here's what we do know.
There was, in fact, a Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy with actual humans.
We know about it.
It involved Jeffrey Epstein working with rich and powerful people to make money for himself, to boost his friends in order to ingratiate himself to them as well.
Some of this involves potentially serious criminal activity, which is why the prime minister of the UK, Kier Starmer, may now lose his job because he selected as his U.S. ambassador a man named Peter Mandelson, who allegedly forwarded classified information to Epstein years before.
Much of it involved untoward emails and likely trafficking of overage women to other men.
But that conspiracy, you know, the one that the evidence shows, ugly and hideous as it is, is not the one that's lighting up the internet and animating the political discourse.
It is the big blown-up conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theory that involves everyone at all times, child trafficking to the most powerful people in the world, blackmail allegations on the basis of foreign intelligence services.
That is the big conspiracy theory that's making the rounds.
That presumably is why Representative Thomas Massey, for example, keeps talking about the men he's going to name who are allegedly involved in this sex trafficking ring.
Here is Thomas Massey with Rokana grandstanding.
But what I saw that bothered me were the names of at least six men that have been redacted that are likely incriminated by their inclusion in these files.
So that's the first thing that I saw.
It took some digging to find them.
We went in there for two hours.
There's millions of files, right?
And in a couple of hours, we found six men whose names have been redacted who are implicated in the way that the files are presented.
Okay, now one thing is very clear.
Thomas Massey has what's called congressional privilege.
If he wishes to name the men, he can simply go on the floor of Congress and announce them.
He could do that today.
He is not doing that for some reason that I cannot discern if he truly believes the allegations that he is making.
Presumably, this is why the deputy AG Todd Blanche is calling out Massey and suggesting that he's participating in grandstanding.
It's not just obviously Thomas Massey.
The sort of big conspiracy theory of society is why Democrats are suggesting that the Epstein scandal is indicative of the way our entire civilization works.
John Ossoff, the embattled senator from Georgia, Democrat, he's out there suggesting that the Epstein class rules the country.
But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich.
It is the wealthiest cabinet ever.
This is the Epstein class ruling our country.
They are the elites they pretend to hate.
Okay, now, I've covered all of this before on the show.
I'm sure we'll cover it all again.
But there's a reason I'm talking about it today because amidst all the hubbub, amid the great conspiracy theory, the big, broad conspiracy theory, there's a person who's escaped scrutiny, which is sort of astonishing because his name is Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon, of course, is chief advisor to President Trump during the very beginning of his first term before he was kicked out on his ass by the president, being called sloppy Steve.
Steve Bannon was deeply in bed with Jeffrey Epstein.
He was.
And that's really important because it is emblematic of this type of op.
It's not just about what Bannon did, it's about what Bannon has been doing.
Bannon is a person who promotes the great conspiracy theory of society while directly benefiting from it and while being directly implicated in specifically the kinds of conspiracy he supposedly decries.
So, for example, here is Steve Bannon, who knew everything at TPUSA talking about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal in the broadest possible way.
Epstein is a key that picks the lock on so many things, not just individuals, but also institutions, intelligence institutions, foreign governments, and who is working with him on our intelligence apparatus and in our government.
This grifty McGriff-faced grifter, my goodness.
Wait until we get into the details of Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein.
He stands up there in front of a crowd at SAS at TPUSA last year and says that this is the skeleton key that picks all of the locks.
Steve Bannon was in the room.
Steve Bannon was working with Jeffrey Epstein, as I suggested in my speech at TPUSA late last year to the chagrin of Steve Bannon.
So let me start off with this.
Who the hell is Steve Bannon?
Steve Bannon is a lifelong grifter.
He grifted his way up the political food chain by making crappy documentaries.
First, he made a crappy documentary about then-Representative Michelle Bachman.
Then he made a similarly crappy documentary about Sarah Palin.
He would use one documentary to then make the next documentary.
And then he used that to make a crappy documentary about Andrew Breitbart, a person with whom I was pretty close personal friends.
And he happened to be giving office space to Andrew Breitbart when Andrew died.
And the leadership at Breitbart decided to hand him outsized influence at Breitbart over my very strong objections at the time.
He then proceeded to use Breitbart as a way to leverage himself into Trump's orbit.
And then he parlayed that into his false Svengali image as chief strategist and putting himself on the cover of magazines and leaking to Maggie Haberman at the New York Times.
And then he was fired by Trump and called Sloppy Steve.
That was his career trajectory.
Steve Bannon is the kind of person who, while he was at Breitbart, Breitbart had an embassy.
The embassy was on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.
It was a fairly large building.
And Steve literally took up residence there so that he could live there rent-free.
Steve is the couch surfer of American politics who has somehow grifted his way up the chain.
He also then spent years subsequently allegedly defrauding people.
He was prosecuted and pled guilty in a case in which he allegedly defrauded people who were supposed to have been donating money to build the wall.
The DOJ prosecuted him in 2020, along with several other defendants in the We Build the Wall scheme that raised more than $25 million.
The DOJ alleged at the time, defendants defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars under the false pretense that all of the money would be spent on construction.
Well, that didn't happen, as it turns out.
In truth, Bannon and his compatriots received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds from We Build the Wall, which they each used in a manner inconsistent with the organization's public representations, according to the DOJ.
But don't worry, there was more there.
Then, of course, he had a very bizarre relationship with a person named Guo Wengai, who was suspected for a very long time of basically being a front for the CCP.
He was found guilty in July 2024 on multiple charges, including fraud and money laundering.
He, of course, had been close friends with Steve Bannon.
They'd appeared on a boat together where they had declared that they were going to create an alternative government of China, who allegedly defrauded many, many people to the tunes of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
Steve was in his orbit, and that's who Steve Bannon is.
And so, is it any surprise that Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein were palling around?
Here are images.
Again, the reason this is important is not just because Steve is a trash human.
The reason that this is important is because Steve is a person, and there are many people in this industry, in the influencer and political industry, who will tell you that things that they themselves are participating in, Steve Bannon, that these are gigantic conspiracies, and that these gigantic conspiracies are why you should give them more power while he is actively working with Jeffrey Epstein.
Hey, that is that's crazy.
I mean, the sad part is that it's not crazy, but this is the op.
The op is Steve Bannon working hand in glove with Jeffrey Epstein and then turning around and telling you that it's an intelligence op that encompasses all the highest levels of government and it's a child sex trafficking ring, and who knows better than Steve Bannon?
What a bunch of demoralization op bullshit.
Seriously, those are pictures of Epstein with Steve Bannon.
You know, I know a lot of people who don't have pictures with Jeffrey Epstein.
In fact, the vast majority of people that I know, even in the political industry, do not have pictures with Jeffrey Epstein.
A search of Steve Bannon in the DOJ's Epstein Files library produces 2,879 unique results.
A search of Epstein's email box populates 526 results for Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon was planning to produce a pro-Epstein documentary literally the day that Epstein was arrested for sex trafficking, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the Epstein-funded doc was to feature interviews with luminaries across media, academia, and politics to reshape the narrative.
Among the high-profile participants mentioned was Michael Wolf, an Epstein pal and avid chronicler of the Trump presidency, who was advising Epstein at the time on how to handle dealings with the presidency.
So there is some two hours of the video have been released.
He apparently interviewed Epstein for 15 hours, did Steve Bannon.
Again, this is the guy who is telling you he's the skeleton key that unlocks everything.
What a true grift.
What a true con.
Because, of course, the solution to all of this is that you need Steve Bannon to illuminate the Matrix for you and guide you out of the wilderness as he launches a quixotic presidential run in 2028.
Early 2020 or 2019, Steve Bannon sits with Jeffrey Epstein for 15 hours.
We only have about two hours and 15 minutes of the tape.
Here he was asking Epstein about his fiscal expertise.
When I say no one understands the system better than I do, it doesn't mean I always sound like a doctor.
Your friend is going to get sued for giving a thing.
Yeah, you're not taking on any liability.
There's no contingent liability here for you.
But the word understand is the problem.
Don't understand the system.
So that's, I don't understand the financial system.
Please stop.
You cannot sit here and tell me.
No, what we just went through, I'll go through again.
The hedge fund managers, the money managers, the central bankers, the commercial bankers, the heads of the investment banks, the heads of all the trading desks, the top economists, and I'll throw in the business school lectures of Stanford.
Of all the top 200, 250, you can't name at the top of your head, the guys are at least at your level.
You have to understand it somewhat.
No.
Sorry.
We all don't understand it.
No one understands it.
It's a miracle.
That's part of the problem.
It's impossible to understand.
That word understand simply means if this happens here, that will happen there.
It's predictable.
Understanding means it's predictable.
It's not predictable.
That's the problem.
It's very in complex systems.
That was the fascination.
Is there a way to tease out some level of predictability?
Predictability vs. Conspiracy 00:15:52
The whole purpose of this interview was to rehab Jeffrey Epstein.
Steve Bannon asked Epstein about his ethics.
Here's what that sounded like.
We walked into that clinic where they're giving that money out to these people that are in the most dire straits of poverty and sickness and told them that the money was coming from a, what are you, class three sexual predator?
Tier one.
What's tier one is the highest and worst?
No, the lowest.
I'm the lowest.
You're the lowest.
Okay, tier one, you're the lowest.
But a criminal.
Yes.
That the money came from.
What percentage of people do you estimate?
I understand you don't like probabilities.
Do you estimate would say, I don't care.
I want the money for my children.
I would say, everyone said, I want the money for my children.
Did they know where the money came from?
I think if you told them about the devil himself.
The devil himself said, I'm going to exchange some dollars for you for your child's life.
Do you think you're the devil himself?
No, but I do have a good mirror.
It's a serious question.
Do you think you're the devil himself?
I know.
Why would you say that?
Because you have all the attributes.
You're incredibly smart.
You remember the devil is somebody who's not the devil's brilliant.
You read Milton's Paradise Lost.
No, the devil scares me.
Oh, my God.
This is what Steve Bannon was doing with his time after he was ousted from the Trump administration, was figuring out ways to rehab Jeffrey Epstein.
They had some deep thoughts, by the way, about Bannon and Epstein on Socrates, which is what you need to hear from a guy who is trafficking in minors and a lifelong grifter.
Potentially, one of the bad things to teach children is how to write.
Writing, reading, and arithmetic was supposed to be, everyone's supposed to be taught.
But writing forces you into a very narrow channel of thinking.
You have to write in a certain form in a certain way in a certain linear pattern.
So your thinking becomes somewhat narrow.
The reason I brought up writing is one of the recent discoveries of mine with respect to Socrates, Plato's, and Aristotle is they never wrote anything.
They spoke, and people around who could write wrote.
Socrates could think.
So that was Jesus of Nazareth was the same way, right?
Never wrote anything.
I thought he was a carpenter.
He was a carpenter.
Didn't he need like a little carpenter?
I don't get those.
But at least his written recognition.
Deep thoughts with these geniuses.
Deep thoughts with these with these moral exemplars.
By the way, there are a lot of accompanying texts, all in the Epstein files, showing the deep relationship, the abiding relationship between Bannon and Epstein, including April 2019, Bannon scheduling media trading with Jeffrey Epstein.
Again, April 2019, Bannon laying out the film process, how it would work.
And then again, April 2019, Jeffrey Epstein asking if Woody Allen could join his media training.
And then again, April 2019, Steve Bannon coaching Jeffrey Epstein on how to handle questions from Alan Dershowitz.
And then again, May 2019, Steve Bannon booking plane tickets to the island.
And then again, July 2019, Bannon asking Epstein if they could film on the island.
Remember, this is a person who then went out and retailed that the skeleton key to all politics was there.
He knew what was there because he was part of it.
This is the difference between the giant conspiracy theory that is a demoralization op where you don't have control of your life because there's a group of elite people behind the scenes controlling things and real conspiracies, meaning people combining for a nefarious purpose.
Jeffrey Epstein and Steve Bannon were combining for a nefarious purpose, the rehabbing of Jeffrey Epstein.
And by the way, Epstein was strategizing with Bannon on how to rehab Bannon after Bannon got his ass kicked out of the administration.
In December 2018, there are texts between Epstein and Bannon, in which Epstein texts him.
If you Google a picture of the word idiot, a picture of Donald Trump comes up.
And Bannon texted back pop-up picture signed.
Remember, this is the great Trump loyalist, the person who says Trump is going to run for a third term.
Epstein wrote, if you have a moment, you should meet my friend Nicole.
She is great.
And Bannon wrote back, who?
And Epstein wrote back, Nicole Junkman, Countess.
And Bannon wrote back, where does she reside?
And Epstein said, London.
And he says, next time I'm there, certainly.
Love converting Aristos to our righteous cause.
And then later in the same day, Epstein texted, Donald Trump Jr. says his dad is a re-gifter.
I think he should have said re-grifter.
And Bannon wrote back, brilliant, which is one of Bannon's favorite words.
Then in March 2018, texts in which Epstein says, I received a bunch of calls that Donald is losing it.
And now people are worried or usually quite calm, more than worried.
And Bannon wrote back, today was embarrassing.
He had no idea what was in the bill and tried to back out of it.
And then they talk about reinvigorating Davos.
And then you have Epstein trying to advise Bannon on exactly how to get back in.
And then, of course, you have the gross texts between Bannon and Epstein.
Early 2018, Steve Bannon, quote, hell is Paris Fashion Week.
Jeffrey Epstein, quote, there's nothing left in my testicles, but a speck of dust and a puff of air.
Steve Bannon, I'm putting up a poster of you in my apartment.
November 2018, Jeffrey Epstein.
Short notice for Jet Charter, but we can for tomorrow morning to Paris, lunch in Paris, then fly you to wherever.
Steve Bannon, what a life.
You are a pretty good assistant.
Jeffrey Epstein, massage is not included.
Just disgusting.
Just truly disgusting.
December 2018, Jeffrey Epstein, I should start my own reality TV show.
Bannon says, Trump is reality TV.
You are film.
Epstein, it makes Lion King look like a PBS documentary.
Bannon, you and the pride.
Jeffrey Epstein, the pride of Eastern Europe.
Bannon, Mother Russia would argue Ukraine is Russian.
Okay.
And the reality, of course, is that all of this was allowing Bannon to live higher on the hog than he otherwise would have.
It was an attempt to rehab Jeffrey Epstein.
And then he was going out just a couple of years later and pretending like he wasn't in on this and that he knew nothing about it except for the gig, except he knew everything, including the entire gigantic conspiracy theory that has now become the big ball of wax on X.
So what is all of this?
What is all of this?
It is a demoralization op.
That's what all of this is.
It is an op that is designed to make you believe that great conspiracy theory of society, that your life is not in your own control.
It's why people are ignoring the actual conspiracies that are in the Epstein files, the conspiracies between Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein, the conspiracies between Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein.
The conspiracies between other foreign officials like in the French government and Jeffrey Epstein, the stuff that actually there's evidence for.
It's an op designed to make you believe that great conspiracy theory of society.
And it is being run by literally the same people in on the conspiracy with Jeffrey Epstein in the case of Steve Bannon.
It is a con and it is a scam.
Now, that con and scam aren't relegated to Steve Bannon, of course.
The pool right now is really, really warm for tons of influencers and politicians who wish to promote the idea that society is rigged and that if you follow their particularly crappy advice and give them attention and therefore cash, you will somehow break the matrix and your life will become better.
It's a lie.
Again, it's not relegated to Steve Bannon.
We live in a time that is rife with the con, which brings us to one of the sad stories of the day.
A person who calls himself Clavicular has been arrested.
Clavicular is better known, you know, at least in his ID, as Brayden Peters.
He is a 20-year-old.
And Brayden Peters, who seems like a truly sad human being, he has 700,000 followers on TikTok.
And he spends his days punching himself in the face, taking meth, self-sterilizing, and then calling it looks maxing.
And he makes a lot of money off of his kick stream, apparently.
It is all about vanity for him.
And again, it is all about demoralization.
The idea is that women are all horrible people.
You should not aim for getting married and having a family.
That's a sucker play.
That's a loser play.
You should look smacked like this moron.
That way you can mog people, which is to say that you can humiliate them or over.
You're the alpha male if you treat yourself like an extraordinarily effeminate man at a salon 27 hours a day and then go out drinking and look depressed in the corner so that you're not gesture maxing.
I know there are people who actually are doing this sort of stuff and following this sort of stuff.
If you think that i'm exaggerating when I when I discuss Clavicular, who again was arrested and the reason he was arrested is because, as a 20 year old, he was apparently carrying around fake id and prescription drugs, and we'll see how the justice department works for him.
Well, it turns out that the gesture maxing didn't work.
He has now been jail maxed and anyway, here he was explaining looks max.
For those of you who speak English, looks maxing means making yourself look good, but the way that you do that is apparently by hitting yourself in the face with a hammer.
I'm not even kidding you.
We live in a society so stupid and nihilistic that people who are admired by a great many young people hit themselves in the face with hammers.
I wish I could make this up.
It is not possible to make this up.
Here he was explaining looks maxing.
Well, the objective is to get better looking because that's going to allow for more opportunities, allow for better overall treatment.
You know just that subconscious bias in people that you're leveraging by.
You know becoming better and better looking is really worth all the effort that you put in.
Yeah, the effort apparently includes taking crystal meth so that you are very skinny and also steroiding yourself to the tune of auto sterilizing uh, which is, which is apparently a thing that he did.
He's self-sterilized because he took so many, so many of these uh drugs.
He also has a very deep philosophy.
His philosophy is nihilistic idiocy.
He explained that, that political philosophy, to Michael Mows.
This next election cycle, who's gonna win?
It's gonna be Gavin Newsom against Jd Vance, because Jd Vance is subhuman and Gavin Newsom Mugs is.
Jd Vance is subhuman.
Yeah, what makes you say that?
Uh, he's got a very short total facial width to height ratio.
He's obese uh, very recessed side profile, whereas Newsom is like 6'3 Chad.
So you're, Jd is very tall.
Jd's got to be well still on 363.
Gavin Newsome obviously mogs him to death.
So you're a Newsome head.
You prefer Newsom to the vice president.
I'm just telling you who's going to win.
Do you prefer him, though?
Honestly, it's hard to say, but Newsom being that much more of a mugger and like having a president who's like fat and especially that young.
I don't think he's fat.
I would say he's a bigger guy for sure.
It's just like, it's just embarrassing.
Like, how are you?
You fat and you expect to like lead a country.
You can't even be in shape, you know?
So you like you got, let's say you got a vote.
It's 2028.
I'm voting for Gavin Newsome.
You're voting for Gavin Newsome.
You can't be that.
You can't be that subhuman.
Yeah, Clavicular, a great moral linchpin of our society.
Here he was talking about how Charlie Kirk wouldn't have been murdered if he were better looking.
Would Charlie Kirk have gotten assassinated if he were Chad?
Well, probably not.
And here's why.
Good looking people experience something called the halo effect.
So it's quite possible that if Charlie were to be better looking, someone wouldn't have hated him enough to assassinate him.
What happened to him is quite terrible.
And this might be an insensitive video to make, but I'm really trying to bring awareness to how brutal the black pill is.
Looks really are going to determine the quality of your life to a high degree.
So if you're not doing everything you can to maximize them, you're missing out.
Yeah, notice the black pill.
The black pill is the big thing these days.
The black pill, whether it's Steve Bannon or whether it's Andrew Tate or whether it's Clavicular or whether it is a myriad of influencers and politicians.
The idea that you are not in control of your own life and the only way to get out of that is to give these people your money and watch their crappy content and join their crappy scams and give them more power.
And then they will go out there and tell you how now you have escaped the matrix while you are legitimately giving them money to do so.
I mean, it is a con from beginning to end.
And again, this is very big in the world of the internet, which is why you should definitely keep your teenagers off the internet and off of social media.
Andrew Tate spent this week explaining why he doesn't read books because, you know, in the real, because the real world is a big conspiracy.
It's just, there's a gigantic conspiracy out there, and no one can succeed unless you give him money at his real world scam factory.
If you do that, then maybe you can succeed and you can be just like Andrew Tate, a miserable man who wanders the globe trying to evade criminal charges while renting cars that he pretends that he owns and occasionally gets hit with yet another charge.
Exciting stuff.
Exciting stuff.
Here was Andrew Tate explaining just yesterday, I believe, why he doesn't read books and why books are for losers.
Basically, I'm too smart for books.
Let's hit the road.
Yeah, I'm too smart for books.
So Twitter's upset about that.
There's always some broke dude who reads books, who's really upset by the fact that I have a $110 million car collection and $400 million of property around the world.
I'm one of the most well-known, relevant people.
I'm one of the most famous people on the planet.
I get asked to do politics.
This is the shtick.
Right.
This is the shtick.
First of all, the inflation of the wealth is insane.
There have been full investigations into how much money he actually has, but I have no doubt that he can find an enormous number of disaffected young men who believe the world is stacked against them and therefore wants to buy into what he calls the real world, which I believe is his new name for Tate University or Hustler University.
He keeps retitling it.
You are running out of time.
You are going to wake up one day at some point in the future and you're going to hate yourself because by the time you realize how important that was, it is going to be too late.
We tell you how to get rich now.
Earn money the same day you join.
You will have money in your bank within 24 hours.
This is your chance.
Time is running out.
Join the real world now and start making money today.
Wow.
What a pitch.
What an amazing pitch.
By the way, his past efforts, for example, Hustler University, it turns out they're gigantic alleged scams.
Here's the thing.
If you follow these people and they've created little media empires for themselves and they've created little echo chambers for themselves and in some cases, large echo chambers for themselves based on their scam.
If you listen to what these people say and you do what they recommend, you are likely to be miserable in your life.
I'm not directing this at Steve Bannon or Clavicular or at Andrew Take because I don't give a shit about those people, but there are a lot of young men, particularly young people generally, who are buying into this miserable thought process.
Truly miserable, because the people you're watching are miserable losers, truly.
Miserable losers.
Steve Bannon is a thrice-divorced couch surfing con artist who cannot properly wear a non-wrinkled shirt.
Clavicular is a misguided 20-year-old high on drugs and apparently self-sterilized who punches himself in the face in order to look smacks while spending his evenings hanging out with low IQ, racist dullards, the very definition of hell.
Andrew Tate is a career con artist who artificially inflates his own wealth in order to sucker demoralized young men into giving him more of their money and attention, and who to date has made approximately zero lives markedly better and who has to pretend that he's experiencing a true sense of life fulfillment by renting expensive cars and walking around shirtless with a cigar in a made-over Bucharest industrial warehouse.
Texas Senate Race Drama 00:10:02
Here is what is going to make you happier.
And this is why all of this matters.
Here's what's going to make you happier.
Stop listening to these chaos and demoralization agents.
Instead, we all need to understand that we are privileged to live in the greatest country in the history of the world.
Take the white pill.
Your choices are in front of you.
Yes, life has obstacles.
And in politics, it's our job to overcome them collectively.
We can do that.
But most of the obstacles in your own life are things that you can overcome.
The biggest decisions in your life, getting married, it's a thing you can do.
Having kids, it's a thing you can do.
Taking care of your own kids, that's a thing you can do.
Joining a church, that's a thing you can do.
Bettering your skill set to get a job.
Starting your own business, being a useful part of society and a fulfilled human being.
The vast majority of those decisions are decisions that you can make, which makes you one of the more fortunate human beings on planet Earth in its history.
Do not get taken in by this conspiracy industrial complex, much of which is being promoted specifically by people who are conning you over it.
Steve Bannon just being exhibit 1A in the pantheon of con artists who are attempting to blackpill you for their own specific benefit.
All righty, meanwhile, in other news, the president of the United States has now repealed landmark climate findings from the EPA.
This is a very, very good thing.
The Trump administration, according to the Wall Street Journal, is planning to repeal the Obama-era scientific finding that serves as the legal basis for federal greenhouse gas regulation, according to U.S. officials in the most far-reaching rollback of U.S. climate policy to date.
The reversal targets a 2009 endangerment finding, which concluded that six greenhouse gases posed a threat to public health and welfare, which was a way for the EPA to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions.
They said that clean air, the Clean Air Act, somehow was connected with carbon, that carbon was endangering people, which is really, really stupid.
EPA Minister Lee Zeldon quite properly said this is the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.
So this removes the regulatory requirements to measure, report, certify, and comply with federal greenhouse gas emissions standards for motor vehicles and repeals associated compliance programs, credit provisions, and reporting obligations for industries, according to administration officials.
Now, this won't apply to rules governing emissions from power plants or oil and gas facilities.
The reason this is good is because those regulations are costing the American taxpayer and industries legitimately tens of billions of dollars every single year.
Now, that doesn't mean every company is going to take advantage of the new set of freer regulations because many of them are worried that the minute a Democrat gets elected, these things go right back in place.
But for the moment, it does relieve pressure on a lot of the companies that are attempting to operate efficiently in a modern economy.
So President Trump had already moved toward that.
Officials say the rollback equates to more than $1 trillion in regulatory cuts.
They said that rescinding the finding would result in an average per vehicle cost savings of more than $2,400.
You want to lower costs?
You want to make things more affordable?
Get rid of useless regulations that do not actually achieve that which they seek to achieve.
So that is a big move by President Trump and the administration.
A welcome move.
President Trump, I think he's throwing out outsized numbers, but I'd rather that we shoot for the stars.
And if we miss, then we still end up with a moonshot economically.
Here was the president with Larry Kudlaw on Fox Business talking about the growth rates that he is pursuing.
We should be at 15%.
I'll tell you, if our new head of the Fed, who I think is going to be great, and he's a really high-quality person, but if he does the job that he's capable, we can grow at 15%.
I think more than that.
Now, again, that is highly unlikely.
The United States has not grown at 15% any year that I can remember.
I think historically, it's just not really possible since we're such a gigantic economy.
With that said, obviously, deregulation is a huge part of what President Trump is trying to do, and that is a very, very good thing.
Now, it'll be interesting to see what the newly selected Fed Chief Kevin Warsh will do if he is in fact confirmed as the new head of the Federal Reserve.
According to the Washington Post, President Trump's choice to lead the Federal Reserve has spent years criticizing the central bank's enormous bond portfolio.
Any push to significantly shrink the Fed's $6.6 trillion balance sheet of bonds and mortgage-backed securities could actually push mortgage rates higher, working against the president's goal.
That would amount to him taking assets that the Fed currently owns and pushing them back out to the broker middlemen, which essentially leads to a sort of deflation in the dollar and higher interest rates.
So the question is whether that can be solved for by generally lowering the overnight interest rates.
He's sort of push-pulling with regard to the economy, and it'll be interesting to see whether that works or not.
That is Warsh's entire strategy is to shrink the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve while simultaneously lowering the interest rates at which banks are lending out the money.
That is the goal that he is attempting to solve for.
And what that really is, is a bet that more liquidity in the economy while simultaneously divesting the Federal Reserve of a bunch of government subsidies.
That what that's going to do is cause more investment in the private sphere.
Again, all of this policy is having an incredibly salutary effect on, for example, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which closed at over 50,000 for the first time over the weekend and is now trending up toward 51,000, which is pretty unbelievable.
And whether that's reflected in the labor markets is going to be the big question for President Trump.
And this is something that, honestly, all the people who are big AI advocates, they really should start talking pretty openly about what happens to the job markets.
There's an enormous amount of dyspepsia and concern about the transition of the jobs markets.
People in white-collar jobs, particularly, are feeling very worried that they're not going to be able to have a job because AI is getting so good.
It's going to replace their jobs.
Now, listen, this has happened before, giant technological changes.
New jobs that we have never even heard of will be created and other jobs will go away because the cost of production will drop to zero.
If you see some of the new video technology that's being made right now, the cost of producing a movie is going to drop so radically, it's going to shred entire industries in Hollywood, just to take a quick example.
And you're seeing this with regard to the legal industry as well.
Maybe it's too early for the AI experts to sort of predict what's going to happen, but if they want less dyspepsia and less risk of over-regulation, then they probably should start retailing right now what the future economy looks like in terms of jobs.
I mean, on the negative side of the ledger, the president did threaten on Monday not to allow the opening of a new bridge connecting Canada with Detroit, which that I don't get.
Seems like if you build a bridge, it should probably be open.
The Gordie Howe International Bridge is close to completion after nearly eight years of construction paid for by Canada.
That cable state bridge, according to the Wall Street Journal, running 1.5 miles, marks a new piece of trade infrastructure to alleviate congestion at the Detroit-Windsor-Ontario Gateway, which is the busiest commercial land crossing in the United States.
And President Trump says that he's basically going to keep that bridge closed until he's able to leverage some concessions out of the Canadians.
And this seems counterproductive to me.
It is cutting off your economic nose to spite your face.
And at a time when you're seeking economic growth, cutting off our chief trade partner, because Canada is our number one trade partner, that still seems like an own goal for no apparent reason.
And meanwhile, it seems that, as I've been saying for years at this point, any party that wishes to win, all they have to do is just be normal.
And yet, that seems like a very difficult thing for every party.
I don't know why it's so tough, but apparently it's very tough for any of these parties to program into Normie Land.
Texas right now looks to be shaping up as a real doozy, the Texas Senate race.
So that one could theoretically tip the position of the Senate in 2026.
Right now, if you were to sort of give odds, you would suggest that Democrats are the favorites in North Carolina.
They are the favorites in Maine, and they are the favorites likely in Ohio.
That one's pretty close.
And then they need to pick one more off.
And so is that going to come from Texas?
Will it come from Iowa where Joni Ernst is stepping down?
Is it going to come from Alaska where Dan Sullivan is seen as somewhat vulnerable?
Texas, the Democrats seem to be on the verge of nominating possibly Jasmine Crockett as their Senate nominee, which Republicans can only pray for.
She would be an awful, awful Senate nominee.
It's pretty astonishing that she is even competitive.
According to a new poll from the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs, she has 47% support ahead of state rep James Tallarico, who's sort of the latest hot thing for the donor class.
He's like the beta ork of this election cycle.
Crockett has strong favorability among likely Democratic primary voters.
The chances, by the way, that she wins a general election pretty low, but could only be boosted by Republicans then embracing a candidate with a lot of dirt to him.
That candidate would presumably be Ken Paxton, the attorney general of the state, over John Cornyn, the multi-term senator.
There's a three-way primary that is occurring right now in Texas between John Cornyn, Representative Wesley Hunt, and Ken Paxton.
It's a very narrow race.
That same hobby school poll showed Paxton holding a seven-point lead over Cornyn, 38% for Paxton, Cornyn at 31, Hunt at 17%.
Now, the reality is that the polls seem to consistently show that if it were Tallarico versus Paxton, for example, that is a much closer race than Tallarico versus Cornyn.
Again, it is possible that this just ends up being another bear trap for Democrats, and they pour billions of dollars into a race that they can't win.
At the same time, why Republicans would seek the less electable candidate for the Texas Senate seat?
That is a move that I do not fully understand.
Then again, again, the Democrats are doing the same thing.
The Democrats refuse to divide off from their more insane positions.
Kentucky Governor Andy Bashir, who wants to run for president in 2028, no one understands why.
He continues to be radical on the trans issue.
It is amazing to me that Democrats cannot divide off from the single most toxic issue in their portfolio.
Why Democrats Can't Move On 00:01:41
But we rarely talk about the why.
People want to know what drives us, especially in a world with social media where everyone's looking for the next authentic thing.
For me, that's my faith.
Most of the decisions I make are based on that golden rule that says we love our neighbor as ourself.
And that parable of the Good Samaritan that says everyone is our neighbor.
And so when I've taken actions like vetoing the nastiest piece of anti-LGBTQ legislation that ever came through my state, I described it in those terms.
I said, my faith teaches me that all children are children of God.
And I didn't want people picking on those kids.
Now, again, what he is talking there is about the transing of the children.
Good luck to Democrats if they decide to embrace this position.
All Americans want is some semblance of normalcy.
They are begging for it, and no one will give it to them.
And that is why, among many other reasons, there is so much political dyspepsia at the moment.
All righty, folks.
Coming up, we'll get into a little bit of foreign policy.
The Chinese were handed control of Hong Kong by the British.
It turned out that was a really bad decision.
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Okay, no not even close Two.
Great.
Whatever.
You know what?
Two, four, three, six, four.
And now.
I cannot believe we're back here again, Ben.
If the Ben Shapiro shows a mom, then Ben After Dark is a cool mom.
Jay.
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