Security Threat At Turning Point (Ep. 2495) - 04/15/2026
Dan Bongino and Mark Levin dissect the erosion of institutional trust, linking it to post-Obama deception and the resulting violence seen in attacks on Turning Point host Erica Kirk. They condemn proposed California laws silencing transparency at immigration facilities and mock Zoran Mamdani's socialist grocery store initiative as economically disastrous. The discussion highlights Trump's strategic blockade of the Strait of Hormuz against Iran's nuclear threat, contrasting conservative job growth with blue-state decline. Ultimately, the episode warns that abandoning reason for collective guilt or authoritarianism invites anarchy, urging a return to Americanist principles and free markets to prevent societal collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Protect Your Wallet With Car Shield00:04:41
All America, all the time.
Sit down, buckle up, and get ready for the Dan Bongino Show.
Sorry, folks, I'm never this late, but there were some last minute additions to the show.
I didn't want to leave them out.
So, my sincere apologies.
You guys are here on time.
I try to be here on time.
We've got about, I don't know, a 90% success rate on this, but we're never late because I show up here late.
I get in the studio really early in the morning.
It's just last minute stuff pops, and the guys have to process it, make sure we have a whole input process for video and stuff.
So, Ladies and gentlemen, be a happy warrior.
When you talk about liberty, as Friedman allegedly said to Walter Williams, talk about it with a smile.
I say that because I'm smiling right now.
I love being alive right now with this president in this great country at this time.
There's no better time to be alive.
However, I do see two troubling trends I want to talk about that we have to address.
Number one is the evaporation of trust in institutions.
And you're seeing it now.
You're seeing it like last night, for instance.
We're going to address the threats to Erica Kirk at the Turning Point event in, I believe it was Georgia.
How the evaporation of trust in institutions that either we're going to fix or we're going to have anarchy.
There's no third option.
I need you to understand that.
If you believe in the Republic and you say, I believe in this Republic, Then you have to be willing to defend it and fix it and repair these institutions.
If we're not committed to repairing these institutions and reestablishing faith in institutions, when we get our people in charge, you have nothing but anarchy as a choice.
So I see these two troubling trends.
First, being the evaporation of trust.
And the second thing is, pursuant to this evaporation of trust in institutions, nobody feels like they can trust anything.
So they feel like they're being lied to constantly.
And the natural response to said lies.
Is this pressure valve of violence?
And folks, you're seeing it all over the place now.
You saw it with the Savannah Hernandez attack in Minnesota.
And I'll show you another video right at the beginning of the show about what I mean.
And folks, I don't care.
Listen to me, please.
I don't care who said violence is committed on.
There is zero excuse to use violence as a pressure valve in political arguments.
There's no excuse.
I don't care who it is.
Because again, the only option after that, when we stop talking and start beating the shit out of each other, is anarchy.
That's it.
I don't want that.
I have kids.
Even if I didn't have kids, it doesn't matter.
I don't want that.
I'll show you where all this is coming from in the beginning of the show.
I got a lot to talk about today, so please hang with me here.
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Violence Against Those With No Options00:14:09
All right, fellas, let's go.
We got the great one, Mark Levin, coming up later.
So, again, loaded show on a Wednesday.
Folks, again, be a happy warrior, but be willing to fight the fight when the fight matters.
And I know you are.
I know you are.
I see you there in the chat.
I was in there this morning, and welcome to the person I responded to.
PV Madrone said it was your first time on Rumble, first time in the chat.
Welcome to everyone here for the first time.
We love to see you.
The live show is always the best way to do it because the chat's one big family.
Folks, we got these two problems the evaporation of trust.
The evaporation of trust.
Now, let me put meat on the bone rather than just talking in like flowery language.
I hate that.
When people try to sound smart and they try to be Emily Dickinson writing poetry, I'm not a poet.
The media and the weaponization of government institutions starting way before Obama, but no question, no question exacerbated during the eight years of Obama into the Biden administration.
Has completely destroyed faith in institutions.
What institutions?
Put meat on the bone.
One I was at, the FBI, totally weaponized under Obama, Biden, and frankly, even under Trump 45, where they attacked him from the inside.
Intelligence agencies, the USIC, the Pentagon.
I think everybody still retains faith, thankfully, in the soldiers, the airmen, the Navy on the ground, our Marines.
But the Pentagon leadership, Mark Milley certainly didn't do himself any favors over there.
You've seen evaporation of faith in the education system, in the media.
So the problem you have is obviously, if you have a compass, I use this example a lot, that never points true north.
You don't have a reliable compass.
And the thing is, you don't even have a valid compass either because they're just making stuff up.
I've made this point often that you can have a scale that's reliable but not valid.
If you have a scale that's 20 points off, I weigh 200 pounds.
If the scale says 220, I know if I gain 20 pounds, the scale's gonna say what?
240, because it's always 20 pounds off.
It's reliable, it's just not valid.
It's not measuring my weight.
I'm not 220, I'm 200.
But it is reliable.
The problem with the dissipation of faith in institutions, the media, You know, military leadership and under prior administrations, federal law enforcement, even some local law enforcement during COVID, where we saw police departments being hijacked into these ridiculous COVID restrictions.
Faith in the NIH and CDC and medical institutions totally evaporated under COVID.
You see it all now.
No one, people like vaccines, no one even wants such a vaccine anymore.
The federal government's like, we're going to go so hard on making people take the vaccine that we're going to suppress free.
Any kind of allegiance to scientific thought, vaccines went out the window, no one even wants to touch them anymore.
You guys weaponizing this against us, the Bongino Army, and our listeners out there, lost.
Whatever you thought you were doing didn't work.
Nobody trusts anything out of the media anymore.
So that leads to problem two, which is this pressure valve where people feel and they hate the idea that they're constantly being lied to and deceived about everything.
So the response amongst a growing number of people, not you, thankfully, I'm Please don't take this the wrong way, but you've seen it has been violence because they feel like they have nowhere else to go.
It's not an excuse, it's just an explanation.
You see it last night where Erica Kirk tragically had to cancel an event, a turning point event.
Vice President Vance was there because there was some legitimate threat to her travel.
People had doxxed her travel.
Folks, if you could put up the tweet for me, this is a.
The great Mary Margaret Olihan.
It was fantastic.
Regarding the threats to Erica Kirk that prevented her from attending the rally, people were doxing her travel location, trying to track her arrival and departure.
Multiple direct threats against Erica specifically.
This led to her security team's assessment that they couldn't guarantee her safety.
Noting the event was fine, the Secret Service had it and the VP was there, Vice President Vance, but the travel schedule.
Ladies and gentlemen, if there was a definition of pure unadulterated evil and demonic like behavior, I'm sorry, but this is it.
Doxing this woman's travel.
I mean, at what point, how have we evaporation of trust evaporated so much that this is considered acceptable amongst a small cadre of lunatics?
That a woman who saw her husband, with children, by the way, who saw her husband brutally murdered on television by an assassin's bullet is now the target of her own threats by people claiming to be on, quote, like our side?
This is not our side.
I don't want any part of any freaking club like that.
Do you understand?
I want nothing to do with it.
Count me out, not interested.
No matter what, I'd rather talk to one person on this live stream right now than sit here and say, I'm a part of this bullshit.
Thankfully, we have 12 minutes in, 42.7 thousand filled up a stadium there.
Folks, we see this violence everywhere.
And this is an uncomfortable conversation to have because you can never see violence and threats to Erica Kirk or anyone else as the pressure valve because the only logical conclusion to all of that is anarchy.
Is it not?
If we cannot openly talk to each other and debate these things, and I'm not, this is not some effort to like, Virtue signal, or we should just talk.
That's not me.
I'm a realist.
I understand sometimes, especially when it comes to nation states versus each other, talk time runs out.
It happens all the time.
You've seen it right now in Iran.
But when we're on this individual basis debating people with ideas, and your first response is to punch someone in the freaking or kick them in the balls or punch them in the face, that only goes to one spot.
Sooner or later, somebody tougher than you is going to come along and beat the shit out of you, too.
This is not the animal kingdom.
I only bring this up because, in conjunction with the threats to Erica, I saw this video go viral yesterday.
I don't know if you know who Sneeko is.
Obviously, someone I disagree with vehemently on a number of issues involving geopolitics and things like that.
However, I saw some people thought this funny.
I don't think this is funny.
I just don't.
And I told you, I don't give a shit what your ideology is.
As long as you're not committing some crime, and there's no such thing as thought crimes in a free country either.
If you're not committing a crime, you should be free to walk the streets without getting punched in the freaking face.
That goes for Savannah Hernandez, too.
I heard her say on an interview with Laura Ingram, the excellent reporter for Turning Point who got assaulted in Minnesota.
We played the video yesterday that this is the first time where she felt like she didn't live in a free country.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to tell you something.
An incident happened to me about, I don't know, two years ago.
I don't talk about it a lot because I'm not anybody's victim.
I chose to be a public figure.
However, It's not fair to me or anyone else that our civil rights are violated, you know, too.
Something happened a couple years ago, and that's what changed me.
I have never felt like, like Savannah said, that I'm just kind of free to move around like anyone else.
It's, I'm not a victim again.
You public figure things happen, but this happened.
I don't know if you saw this video.
I believe it was in New York.
Check this out.
Put your life force into a sock.
Yeah, you deserve to be publicly executed.
Yes.
What are we talking about?
I know it's.
I saw someone in the chat.
He was talking about executing people.
I just told you this.
I can't think of like a single issue.
I share any alignment with this cat on at all.
The point I'm trying to make is what's how does do you understand what the logical endpoint is to this?
Whether it's a threat against Erica, Savannah Hernandez.
Sneeko or anyone else is what's the solution?
And then another guy comes in and beats the shit out of the guy who beats the shit out of Sneeko.
And then a guy comes in to defend the guy who beat the shit out of the guy who.
And then where does this go?
There's no logical.
When reason and logic go out the window and the ability to talk through these things evaporates, this is the only pressure valve, and I don't want any piece of that.
And I'm going to tell you something the person I blame the most for this.
The most.
It was the reason I left, and that was a hard decision at the time.
I loved being a Secret Service agent.
It was the greatest job in the world.
It was my dream.
When I first walked into Seven World Trade Center in 1999, my first day at work, and looked at, was it three guys and a woman in the lobby all looking at each other, newbies?
First day on the job, it was like 7 30 in the morning, Seven World Trade lobby.
That's where the old Secret Service office was.
I couldn't believe I was there.
I couldn't believe it.
And I walked away 12 years later because I knew Barack Obama was a unique problem.
And I could not, in good faith, continue to collect the government paycheck.
Man, I was in a lot of trouble financially back then.
We did not have a lot of money.
When I told my wife we were walking away, she was like, Are you serious?
Like, it took a few months to talk her into it.
And at a Cinco de Mayo party, she was like, Go ahead, do it.
We were in a lot of trouble, but I did it because I saw Obama as being a unique threat to our institutions.
He didn't seem to care.
Faith in our institutions and the media had been evaporating for a long time.
Obama put jet fuel in it, he hit that nitro button in the car.
And now we're in this system of chaos where you have trials going on.
Who's that, Jeff NNC in the chat?
That's what Charlie warned us about when people stop talking, right?
Bad things happen.
Exactly.
If Charlie lived for one thing, my good friend, a guy I'd known for a long time, it was we have to be able to talk.
So much so he put his life in danger and ultimately taken from him in an effort to speak to people he knew disagreed with him.
You think he was going to UVU to get a bunch of like flowers thrown at him and palm fronds waving on the way in?
This isn't a lecture, man.
You don't need it.
It's a warning.
It's a warning.
Folks, watch any historical documentary of any issue of collective guilt and when talk failed, and you will see what happens.
Mass murder on a scale, on a tragedy, on a tragic level.
Like I would say you've never seen before, but we have seen before a lot.
Had to amaze more.
Here is an Obama video.
This is why this guy bothers me so much.
He does this whole, whereas I'm very candid with you that, hey, I'm not, again, I'm not a poet, not trying to speak in flowery language.
I'm just a guy deeply disturbed by where this ends using reason.
I don't want to fight anyone.
I'm 51 years old.
It's these people challenging me to a fight.
Why do you want to fight?
Well, you want to fight me?
I'm a 51 year old man with decaying joints.
Don't mistake me being 200 pounds.
These are like show muscles, they don't actually do anything.
Justin sees me get up out of the chair.
How bad is it?
Sorry, I didn't mean to inject humor.
I get up out of chair and barely move.
I look like your grandfather.
Even more, your grandfather's probably in better shape than me.
I mean, he wants to fight.
I blame it on Obama.
Watch Obama pretending, pretending to be in the beginning of this clip.
For those listening on Apple and Spotify, it's two separate cuts.
First, he's telling you, oh, my, Donald Trump's the worst institutions.
Oh, this guy's so terrible.
I can't believe it.
And then listen to what he says right after that.
This guy turbocharged.
Turbocharge the two problems I just addressed.
Check this out.
The other side does the mean, angry, demagoguery, you know, divisive politics.
That's their home court.
Yeah.
To all the young people out there, as well as those of you who consider yourselves young at heart, I want you to stay angry.
I want you to stay frustrated.
Folks, I really do blame him.
Biden was just too stupid.
Biden had smart, he was, I'm sorry.
He was just a very ignorant, not intelligent person.
He had people around him who were basically little puppet masters for him, and they were Obama acolytes who took the weaponized system and ran with it.
And a stupid person can be just as dangerous as a smarter person like Obama, who was very clever.
Obama destroyed faith in our military, destroyed faith in our institutions.
Selectively moved out leadership at the Pentagon and moved in their own people, brought in a bunch of clowns in the FBI and elsewhere who had allegiance to politics rather than the Constitution.
Obama Destroyed Faith In Our Institutions00:16:04
And now you're seeing what happens.
Nobody trusts anything.
You have ongoing trials and a number of significant cases going on out there that you have people pretending to be on our side who don't trust the Trump administration.
As if the Trump administration would lie to you about this stuff, what would be their motive?
Folks, I'm going to play for you a short video coming up next of what it looks like when what I just said, when the truth finally kicks you in the teeth and you start to realize you've been lied to the whole time.
Two separate things can happen.
Some people, and it's a small group of people, move down the route of violence, as we saw, which is totally, completely unacceptable.
There is, that's not like we have to, that has to get cut off.
Other people, however, have a moment, they have a road to Damascus moment.
They have this conversion and they become sometimes the greatest prophets of truth out there because they've seen what the lie looks like.
I can't vouch for this person specifically.
I just want to show you what a moment of clarity looks like when you digest it all.
Let me take a quick break and I'll get right back to that.
This is an important video.
Not because necessarily the words in it, but I want you to see what it looks like when you're like, wow, I really have been lied to.
And you've had this kind of.
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Here's what I'm talking about.
I saw this video online.
It reminded me of this how, you know, people who previously had believed in these golden calves and these false gods who one day have this road to Damascus moment.
This is the other option.
You have violence, people who lose their minds and can't believe they've been lied to the whole time.
And then you have people who actually go and do the right thing and become evangelists for a different cause.
This is a climate blogger who realized that the whole world is ending in 12 years.
Greenhouse gas is going to kill us all, the ice age, and it's global warming.
And he kept changing her story.
This is what it looks like when you realize all that was bullshit.
The whole time.
Check this out.
So, when does this small hint of doubt, are you slipping something at like a drink wine night, turn into this complete breakup?
So, the timeline is that I was at now this from 2015 to 2021.
And so, I was there through the COVID stuff too.
And so, and I was visible.
I was an on camera person the whole time I was there.
So, the whole world shut down at the peak of COVID.
It was something like 17%.
We saw a 17% reduction in our carbon emissions, the peak of COVID.
So, that's like just like those two weeks.
Over the year, it ends up being something like 5% reduction.
And I'm thinking to myself, wait a minute, the climate movement wants 100% reduction in our carbon emissions.
What is it going to expect of our society?
Yeah, we're literally locked in our homes, not doing anything.
And we still have carbon emissions.
And so that was the first moment where I go, hold on.
I don't know if I want to live in a world where we have zero carbon emissions because I'm kind of depressed right now at home.
Like, this sucks and we have no freedoms.
And so, what does the climate movement, if you take it to its logical conclusion, it's not going to be no big deal.
Like, it's going to require people to give up their freedoms to lower carbon emissions.
Thank you, CA 1960.
Good morning, Dan.
Finally got you live.
Good morning.
Good to have you here live.
Folks, COVID, I want to add another layer to this.
What evaporated people's trust in institutions, the media, the Pentagon, the FBI, and others?
Obama.
Obama definitely put jet fuel on it.
It's been going on for years.
The Obama era made it worse.
I'm going to double down.
What made that even worse on top of that was COVID.
COVID.
You want to talk about turbocharging a loss of faith in any public voice?
Nothing did that worse than COVID.
And the fact checking, the nonsense opinion making disguised as fact checking, where people like you and I were banned from platforms, was just an abomination.
People have just basically entirely given up.
The problem we have now is we're in charge right now, the people who believe in the Republic.
And if your take on it is like, well, even though we have our people in charge, we don't trust them either, then I guess my answer to you is.
Well, what's your option?
Well, what do you want to do?
Again, do you want anarchy?
You want like the gangs in New York?
Am I right?
I don't understand.
In a complicated world full of trade offs, what is your solution?
You want to go back to this kind of crap, living a life of lies all the time?
Here's another example of what I'm talking about.
Here is Biden.
This is during when he was president elect.
So between 45 and 47, obviously you got 46 here, Biden.
Here's Biden when he's in this president elect period, talking about Trump discussing preemptive pardons for his people.
Now, here's Biden saying, Oh, you can just look this up.
This is what it looks like to be lied to your face by the goon squad in Washington, D.C., and now you understand why people don't trust these people anymore.
Check this out.
President Trump is reportedly considering a wave of preemptive pardons.
Does this concern you?
All these preemptive pardons?
Well, it concerns me in terms of what kind of precedent it sets and how the rest of the world looks at us as a nation of laws and injustice.
You're not going to see in our administration that kind of approach to pardons.
Really?
We're not going to see that?
See, this is really easy because we're in the information here.
I'll address this with Mark Levin later.
Where, you know, I can't say this enough, Josh.
You can go and look this stuff up, you know.
The price for information on the margin has been effectively reduced to near zero.
The kilocals it takes for you on a thumb on your phone to go.
Biden said he was not going to engage in that kind of behavior with preemptive pardons.
Here we go.
I'll use Google Gemini again so you can't accuse me of using some biased LLM.
Biden pardons people preemptively.
This is a screenshot of my phone.
Justin noted this morning.
Wow, using dark mode now.
I think I sent this over at night.
On January 19, 20th, 2025, President Biden issued preemptive, full, and unconditional pardons for his family members Fauci, General Mark Milley, and members of the staff of the January 6th committee.
Fine, that's his right to do that as president.
They have the whole auto pen debacle, of course.
But you understand now why nobody believes in.
Nobody said there's just.
There's no compass that points true north anymore.
There's a scale that's not reliable or valid.
And then what do people do?
They just throw the scale out, they want to burn the whole thing down.
Here's Katie Porter running in that California race.
Katie Porter, former Democrat representative.
She's going after this is what I'm talking about too, like why people just think these people are total goons and clowns.
Katie Porter, the allegations against Swallow are horrifying.
Yeah, they are.
I'm thinking of the courageous women who have come forward to share their stories.
We believe in you and we stand with you.
Maybe this, like Katie Porter, should have sat this one out.
She got community noted into the phantom zone.
Community, no.
Katie Porter is an alleged domestic abuser who poured scalding potatoes on her ex husband's head.
She's also been seen on camera verbally berating staff for minor slights, has been described as abusive herself.
Maybe sit this one out.
This is why I say there's the headlines if you doubt me at all, the severity of these issues.
This is why I've said over and over what bothers people about Donald Trump, especially in the left wing media ecosystem that's not anchored to any kind of true north on a compass or truth at all.
What bothers him about Trump is that Trump is always.
Always true north.
Like he just says what's on his mind to the point where it just like shakes up people's noggins.
Like when we were kids, you'd pull out the parachute and gym and they'd throw all the balls in the middle.
And remember that?
That's like it.
And they'd go everywhere.
That's what he just shakes up everything because they're so not used to hearing from a politician's mouth the actual truth.
They're used to hearing the Joe Biden stuff.
We're not going to do preemptive pardons.
Oh, let's do preemptive pardons.
And I'm really getting exhausted with this entire media BS narrative that everything Trump and his administration does is just luck.
Have some things fallen short?
They always do in public policymaking.
Not everything's Pareto optimized.
However, there have been some unquestionable Donald Trump successes between 45 and 47 that the media will still insist are just luck.
The containment of the border situation, the collapsing crime rate, the rebalancing of global trade, the Maduro operation, the decapitation of Iranian leadership.
Now, Donald Trump's being attacked again on the Iran operation.
Every time something happens that's a positive development, you see people jumping in the argument, either claiming it's luck or pointing out some other externality they claim is negative.
Here's what I mean you think this isn't strategy?
Tom Sauer is a great account to follow.
I had him up on a video clip yesterday, but he's at Thomas B. Sour on X.
He notes this You think this is all luck, folks?
Energy, sea lines of communication, Panama Canal, Venezuela, Straits of Hormuz, Iran, Straits of Malacca, Indonesia, South China Sea, Straits of Taiwan.
He notes Are you guys starting to figure it out yet?
For those who are not figuring it out, he even put up a handy dandy map.
What he's saying here, leave this map up for a second, guys.
You think this is all luck?
Donald Trump's just some dopey real estate developer who just fell into all this and just got lucky that he's just rolling the dice.
Donald Trump has focused strongly on Venezuelan oil, Venezuelan leadership, the Panama Canal, the Straits of Malacca, where they have a new agreement in Indonesia, and Iran.
Oh, look at that.
You have a declared global enemy of the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese Communist Party does not produce enough oil or food to sustain itself.
They need oil from places like Venezuela and Iran.
To get said oil over conveniently to China.
Oh, look at that waterway.
If you're missing out on Apple and Spotify, you can check out the tweet yourself.
But if you're watching our video, you see exactly what I mean.
So look at that.
You see the strait there between Malaysia and Indonesia, the Strait of Malacca?
You see where it comes from, a lot of that oil from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf?
And look where it goes.
Oh, China that needs said oil to power its war machine and needs food and fertilizer to be transported through those routes too, so we can feed their people.
Now, Donald Trump, we have control of a lot of the oil coming out of Venezuela.
We've reestablished control over the Strait of Hormuz.
We have a new agreement with Indonesia over that strait.
And look what happened all of a sudden.
You've got a bunch of his enemies on the left, like, oh my gosh, that was just luck.
I just can't put two and two together.
If this was anyone else, it would be called a stroke of military genius.
They'd be carving out Mount Rushmore right now.
If it was anyone else.
This is not an accident.
Look, the Wall Street Journal covering this again.
The Wall Street Journal, by the way, that's no friend to Donald Trump.
I mean, I really don't want to get into this with the Wall Street Journal.
I read their op ed column every day.
I have since I'm 20 years old.
I rarely miss a column.
However, the Wall Street Journal is all over the place.
You've got editorial writers over there.
One day they love that he took a decisive action in Iran.
The next day they're shitting all over him.
It's incredible.
Here they're back to the beginning.
Donald Trump's blockade is a crisis for Iran.
Now they're supporters again.
To be fair, they're different writers, but they know that they calculate that without exports, surplus production in Iranian oil facilities would fill Iran's oil storage capacity in about 13 days.
Well, what's the problem with that?
Because then Iran would have to shut in wells, which can cause severe damage to said wells and cost it billions of dollars in annual revenue.
Oh, wow.
That's crazy.
I'm sure, Josh, the Trump team didn't know that.
They just kind of winged it.
You don't think they knew this?
You want to blockade the Strait?
Double barrel, middle finger, we're going to blockade the Strait.
Because what happens when we blockade the Strait, in addition to costing you hundreds of millions of dollars at your ports and through trade daily, because you can't get anyone into your ports because we told you no, in addition to doing that, your wells fill up.
How do you start to empty, excuse me, your storage sites for your oil?
You sell it and then refill it.
For the liberals, this is not difficult, even for you.
Well, what happens if you can't sell it?
Because the strait's blockaded and your ports are blockaded and you can't move it out.
They fill up.
Well, what happens to these pipelines and this transport system?
It starts to degrade.
And after 13 days, you're going to have a lot of problems.
Again, combine that with Donald Trump's seemingly random announcement from his Defense Department about a new agreement with Indonesia about that convenient strait, tactical strait over there.
And now you start to see the left wing media, I'm telling you, with anyone else, I'm not telling you, you got to worship the president.
That's bullshit.
Weird.
This is not some fascism or fascism society.
You'll get the joke later.
This is not fascism.
You'll see what I mean later, right?
You don't have to worship the man in genuflect, but can you at least acknowledge, like, hey, man, that's actually pretty clever?
You want to shut the street?
We'll do it.
The Price Of Being Stupid Is High00:04:11
And look at this AP headline, Josh.
Donald Trump got lucky again.
It's like magic, fellas.
China's exports, exports, meaning things they ship out from their ports and others.
I'm sorry, but I've got to be slow for the left wingers out here.
China's exports grew 2.5% in March in a sharp slowdown as the Iran war raises uncertainty.
Wow, look at that.
China's having a problem now selling its goods as the Iran war raises uncertainty.
Kind of crazy.
Our stock market is stabilized.
Recovered most of its losses.
Oil prices are a little bit elevated, but contained.
The economy's doing pretty well.
We've had some good quarters of GDP growth, some that have been flat.
Job growth has been incredible.
Inflation's pretty much under control.
I'll show you that in a minute.
Yet China's having all kinds of problems.
It's almost like Donald Trump took in a bunch of inputs from people, from his advisors, made some executive decisions as the commander in chief, and those decisions are paying dividends.
But the left wing media doesn't want to tell you about any of that.
They don't want to tell you about it.
The war's going terribly.
Horrible.
Gas prices through the roof.
They are, really?
Folks, I'm telling you, they'd be chiseling Mount Rushmore if this was anyone else.
I'd say anyone, regardless of being a Democrat or Republican.
It's just Donald Trump, which elicits this show your ass theory where the media really shows us who they are.
By the way, this is the facts show, not the BS show.
Here's a clip from CNBC yesterday.
Oh, Dan, inflation under control.
You got some data to back that up.
Yeah, this is CNBC, not the Trump Network.
Here, listen to yourself.
Strip out food and energy up one tenth.
We're expecting a number closer to half a percent higher.
So that's nice.
Oh, provisions coming in.
This number moves from 0.5 to 0.3.
0.1 would be the lightest going back to August of last year.
We would be in November equaling one tenth last year.
That's food, energy, and trade.
That comes in up two tenths, half of what we were expecting.
So, what producers are paying for items, you're a consumer, you have producers, businesses, what they're paying for inputs to produce an output you buy.
In other words, they're paying for silicon for computer chips and then selling you a computer.
What they're paying, they have inflated prices too.
That inflation has been relatively tamed and came in lower than expectations.
So, China's struggling, Iran's beyond struggling.
Venezuela, we now control the oil.
We now control strategic waterways into China in case they were decide to randomly attack us or Taiwan.
And yet it's all magic.
It's all luck.
That Donald Trump.
This guy's the luckiest.
You know what he reminds me of?
Josh, you a movie guy?
What was the, it was, was it Deadpool 2 or I don't know if there's three, were there three Deadpool?
I think it was the second Deadpool.
There's that guy who comes in and they're doing interviews for mutants.
And was it the lady?
I think it was the lady who comes in and goes, yeah, I'm just lucky.
And he's like, that's not a thing.
And she's like, oh no, it's a thing.
Like, I'm unusually lucky.
That's my mutant superpower.
That, that, that's who they think.
They want you to believe that's who Donald Trump is.
Who in the chat saw that movie?
You know what I'm talking about, right?
It's not luck.
I have been in the room with him, not a ton, but enough.
When you give him a piece of information, hey, the crime rate's really low, and here's why we're doing it.
The first thing he says is, how do we get it lower?
How can I help?
It's not luck, man.
Doubling down on this, there is the price to be really stupid right now is high because the price of you educating yourself.
On the margin is near zero.
It takes five minutes to do an internet search or an AI search on anything you're curious about.
How is Iran's economy doing since the war?
You can look that up.
Investigating Fraud And Abuse In LA00:15:15
There has never been a more active ecosystem for the freedom of information, ever, than there is now.
Being stupid is a choice.
It's an expensive one because the price of information is so unbelievably low.
Here's Elon Musk talking about exactly this, a guy who's done a lot for, man, X was a mess.
I mean, there's always going to be issues before he got there.
But here's Elon talking about exactly this how you can't have a symmetric society by consent of the governed and leadership from the political class without the free flow of information.
Check this out.
There must also be freedom of speech such that the people know what the truth is.
Otherwise, they cannot make an informed decision.
So if you do not have freedom of speech, you cannot be a democracy because the public cannot make And informed decision about their vote if there is not freedom of information.
Yes.
Amen, brother.
Amen.
Now, why is that an issue?
It's not an issue, it's tautological.
We're having a problem now because, as I said to you in shows, I like to kind of pile the shows onto each other so we tell a long over time kind of longitudinal and within show kind of latitudinal narrative stream.
The explosive growth in the citizen journalist, Savannah Hernandez, O'Keefe's been doing this forever.
Who's the other?
Oh, the Nick Shirley's.
I showed you some Cam Higby pieces.
The explosive growth in citizen journalism and the more than explosive growth in delivery systems for said journalism, social media platforms, the internet, AI, has made the price of you going and finding this information unbelievably small.
It's expensive for Nick Shirley and Savannah Hernandez, who both are under attack.
The left is panicked over this.
I can't say this enough.
The citizen journalist movement has the left crapping their diapers like nothing I've seen in a long time.
So much so.
Did you hear about this new bill making its way around California?
This is a state representative, Carl DeMaio.
He's run for other offices before, but here he is speaking out against it.
He's a Republican speaking out against it.
There is a bill in California right now.
You may find this hard to believe.
I don't because I know the totalitarian, fascist left.
You'll have to joke in a minute.
I know how they are.
They are now trying to basically push through this bill where they can arrest you for engaging in this citizen journalism.
They're not kidding.
This is not a joke.
Here's Carl DeMaio speaking out against it.
Check this out.
Does this apply to a Somali leering center?
In 6218.11, you define a designated immigration support services facility as a facility where immigration support services are provided.
Including but not limited to nonprofit offices, the Somali Leering Centers that were the subject of a national outcry on fraud.
Could they not be defined?
Could they not fall under the definition that you've provided that if a citizen journalist or if CBS News that just showed up at a building looking at fake hospices in LA showed up at some of these so called service providers and was investigating waste, fraud, and abuse and took video of the offices and questioned Mr. DeMaio?
It says a person, business, or association shall not knowingly publicly post or publicly display, disclose, or distribute on the internet websites or social media.
The personal information which relates to the work site, those fake hospices that my colleagues so diligently and effectively helped reveal in Los Angeles, or the Learning Center that Mr. Shirley revealed in Minnesota, posting the video apparently would be punishable under your law.
This is not about protecting people from violence.
This is about threatening and intimidating people who are trying to shine a light on bad behavior.
If you have nothing to hide, why fear the transparency?
But I will tell you this the transparency is coming.
You can threaten people that we're going to fine you for taking video of the misdeeds that some of these groups are doing, but it won't pass the First Amendment rights protections that the Supreme Court affords every citizen.
You can try to bully them, Ms. Ponta, but it will not.
Mr. DeMaio?
This is their response on the left to the explosion of the free flow of information about rampant fraud in the government ecosystem of benefits.
Make it illegal, put these people in jail.
I'm not kidding.
This debate is actually happening right now.
Which side are you on?
You are either for the free exchange of ideas and the freedom of speech and the God given big R right, or you're full of shit.
Folks, I can't say this enough.
Like, I like to practice what I preach here.
My.
Entire financial investment strategy has not really been targeted at financial and economic growth.
Well, why wouldn't you do it?
The whole point of it is no, it's not.
I could have sold assets a long time ago, and I don't because I choose to invest my own capital and time and resources in free speech platforms because I've already shown you what the alternative is when we stop talking to each other.
You saw the Savannah Hernandez video.
You saw the video with Sneeko at the beginning of the show.
This is not where we want to go, man.
You're going to put Nick Shirley in jail now?
You think this is the appropriate response?
How about this?
Just an option.
Folks in the chat, right?
Nick Shirley goes and exposes government fraud and a bunch of other citizen journalists, too.
And your response to Savannah is to beat the shit out of her?
And to try to lock up Nick Shirley rather than, hey, I got a crazy idea.
How about we go and actually arrest the people committing the fraud like the Vance Task Force and the DOJ have been doing?
How about supporting that?
How about coming out with a bill in California to collaborate with the FBI, HSI, and others and the Vance Task Force on Fraud to geometrically grow the number of arrests and shut down the fraud?
No, no, the response is to arrest the people exposing the fraud.
This is the fascism joke, by the way.
By the way, why can't the left freaking spell?
Sometimes I talk with Josh during the videos.
He opens the door.
And I'm like, what a leering center, fascism.
Why can't the left freaking spell?
All the left likes to do is sing songs.
What's with the singing and the misspelling stuff?
If you're going to put a sign up on your building or carry a sign, you know, the price of information on the margin, as I just said, is very low.
You can go to Grok or ChatGPT and say, can you please spell fascism or learning for me?
It's not hard.
Play this Caitlin Bennett video and you'll see what I mean.
This is what it looks like to be voluntarily stupid.
Check this out.
Your sign says fight fascism.
What is fascism?
Fascism is the breakdown of a society.
There's no society when fascism is present.
Can you give me a definition?
I don't really know if I have to give you a definition because I know I feel violated against my government.
Okay, but what is fascism?
When we want to fight something, it's good to define them, right?
We could phone a friend.
What is fascism?
You could help her.
I don't want to speak to you.
I don't want to speak to you.
I'm fighting for how I feel.
Right.
For others.
Of course.
What specifically do you feel?
Can you not hear it in my voice?
Are you going to cry?
Because I asked you to define a term on your sign?
It's actually not even spelled right.
It actually says fascism.
Why can't they spell?
They don't.
This is what it looks like to be voluntarily stupid.
Thank you, Caitlin Bennett, for some more excellent work.
She could look that up, you know.
And the tragically hilarious part about that whole exchange is the fascism sign holder who can't even spell fascism could have just looked it up.
It's like, well, I'm afraid of my government.
If you would have looked up fascism, you'd understand that it's marked by authoritarianism and a perverted sense of ultra nationalism that empowers government.
i.e. under a dictator.
You could have looked it up!
Can you hear it in my voice?
I'm gonna cry over fascism.
What is fascism?
Objecting to people using like the face app to look good on reels?
Like, what the hell is that?
You don't.
Why are you laughing, Justin?
You don't have to be stupid.
He's a total fascist.
He's the same way, Justin.
He sees a face he doesn't like, he's a total fascist.
You don't have to be stupid.
The price to not be stupid is very low.
Here's what I'm talking about again.
There is no excuse for this kind of stupidity.
Zoran Mamdami, who I really am doing my best not to make every show about this guy's imbecility.
However, Zoran Mamdami is not stupid.
He's a little mini Barack Obama.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
Don't call him stupid.
He's actually very tactical.
Biden was not bright, I'll give you that.
Kamala Harris, definitely not bright.
Obama was a tactician, and so is Mamdami.
They know exactly what they're saying and exactly what they're doing.
But what they're doing is they're preying on an information ecosystem they hope you'll never use.
So, Mom Dami wants to try this experiment again.
And I use the term experiment loosely because it's not an experiment anymore.
We already know the outcome.
If I kick you in the balls and it hurts, that's not an experiment.
I don't think any human being outside of someone who maybe's nervous system cords were cut, if you kick them in the balls, hasn't resulted in pain, okay?
So, it's not an experiment.
Let's try it.
That's not what you do.
Why?
You know the outcome.
Why don't I bash my head off the table?
Because it's going to hurt.
Mom Dami wants to try, you may have seen this, a government run grocery store.
Kind of sounds like the government run grocery stores they run in Cuba where people are starving to death.
So here's Mom Dami.
And by the way, this grocery store is going to take three years to get up and running at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.
Uh, the guy who built my studio, Ronnie, I assure you, if I sent him up there with Mom Dami and let him take it over, Guys, what do you think?
He built the thing in six months?
And I promise you, he'll do it for far less than like $30 million, okay?
Ronnie, go check out Mom Nami.
Here's Mom Nami wants to try this quote, experiment, the experiment in socialism, which has a 100% success rate.
Success rate?
Yeah, it does.
In failing.
It's failed every single time.
That's an incredible record.
Check this out.
New York City, it is time for a grand experiment once again.
Just as LaGuardia used government to respond to the challenges of the Great Depression, We will use government to respond to rising prices and unaffordable groceries.
The city will subsidize a core set of staples.
A private operator will run the store, but they answer to the standards that the city will set.
These standards include requirements that at our stores, bread will be cheaper, eggs will be cheaper, grocery shopping will no longer be an unsolvable equation, and workers will be treated with dignity.
So I was trying to think of an analogy before the show about.
He calls it an experiment.
It is not an experiment.
It is no different of an experiment than you kicking yourself in your own nuts.
It's not an experiment, it is going to hurt.
Andy one is back today, by the way, which is like weird to see him back in the studio.
He's helping us out.
Andy two is out, right?
Andy, the original Andy.
Andy, the sequel, is a little vacated today.
Kicking yourself in the balls is not an experiment.
It will hurt, okay?
So I said to the guys, you know what it reminds me of?
I like football.
You know the prevent defense?
At the end of the game, for those of you who are not football fans, when a team is like, they don't wanna, they wanna prevent like a Hail Mary pass or a long touchdown or even a long pass, they do this thing called the prevent defense.
Folks in the chat, you know what I'm talking about.
What's the joke about the preventive?
It doesn't prevent anything.
The team almost always loses, but they keep trying it because it sounds good in theory.
Let's not pressure the passer too much.
Let's put all our people back there.
It's more people to go and knock down the ball if they throw a Hail Mary.
It almost never works, and people keep doing it.
Why do they keep doing it?
Because it sounds good.
This is Mom Dami.
In theory, it sounds amazing.
Wow, the government's going to run this?
The government model of efficiency, by the way, the government, and they're going to control the prices.
I'm going to ask you a simple question because, again, the price of information on the margin is almost free.
So I'm going to ask you for free and I'll ask you to respond.
When have price controls actually worked?
The answer is never.
Why?
Because price controls result in the same thing every time.
Write this down.
Write this down.
There are two things I need you to learn in the show capitalism is not actually an ism, it's not a belief system at all.
I'll explain in a second.
And price controls never work because of these reasons.
If you suppress a price for food or anything else like Mom Dami wants to do, you suppress it below what the market clearing price is, you are going to get increased demand for that product.
Why?
Because it's cheaper at the government grocery store than it is everywhere else.
So you're probably thinking now, like, well, that sounds great, Dan.
Oh, okay.
Well, let's go to two.
You get increased demand for the product, you get decreased supply at the same time.
Why?
Because nobody's going to sell food in a store at a freaking loss, chuckle heads on the left.
You got Andy One back.
Andy's got a bread company, Andy's bread.
Andy's bread goes for whatever, $5 a loaf.
Who knows after the Biden inflation?
Mom Dami says, no, you're going to sell it for four.
Why Price Controls Never Work00:03:29
What do you think Andy One's going to say?
He's going to flip you off?
I'm not selling my bread in your store, you dipshits.
So you get increased demand for it.
Well, at the same time, you get a decreased supply.
What do you get next?
Well, once Andy stopped selling, who's going to sell bread at $4 a loaf?
I can't believe I got to explain this.
The answer is someone else.
i.e. Josh, who has Josh's bread.
Here's the problem with Josh's bread.
The reason it's three and four dollars rather than five is it's really shitty bread.
So Josh can comply.
Okay.
I'll do it for $4.
My bread's really crappy.
So not only do you get a rush on products that run out, the backfill of products becomes products of lesser quality because they're the only ones that can sell at a price control.
And then you get black markets because people rush in and buy Andy's $5 bread at four bucks for the first few weeks at the government store.
And then they go and sell it on eBay for six bucks because it's hard to find Andy's bread because Andy's bread has been price controlled.
This has only happened every freaking time.
It's like the prevent defense or kicking yourself in the balls.
It results in the same thing every time the team losing the game and you really hurting.
But you can call it an experiment.
We're going to try it again, Mom Dom, he said.
Really?
Justin found this gem this morning.
I know you've heard it before, but I am a huge fan of the great Ronald Reagan.
You have that clip?
Yeah.
Justin, this is a Justin.
This is his favorite video today because this is his input into the show.
Just a couple seconds, but worth hearing again.
Check this out.
I think you all know that I've always felt the.
Nine most terrifying words in the English language are It is time for a grand experiment once again.
I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
You guys get the joke.
But yes, very well done, Justin.
Good addition to the show.
This will not work because it can't work.
It is very easy for you to go and look this stuff up.
This just popped in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
Folks, human beings engage in pattern recognition, it's a survival mechanism that keeps us alive.
You hear a sound at night.
The sound at night could be innocent.
However, that sound at night might not be innocent and maybe some mountain lion in the woods or in the mountains getting ready to eat you alive.
So human beings take information and they create patterns out of it.
You know, if you're a smart person, which you listening to the show are, you'll see the pattern here.
If you're a liberal who's a moron, you'll miss this whole thing.
Wall Street Journal just put this graph out about private sector job growth in states.
You'll notice a pattern about the states that are exploding in job growth Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee.
Alabama, New Jersey, and New Hampshire.
You'll notice that most of those states are strongly Republican.
There's a couple Democrat states in there, but they're either purple or strongly red.
And the ones that are strongly red, Texas and Florida, are leading the country in job growth.
Folks, again, this is called a pattern Minnesota, California, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Oregon, Hawaii.
This is called a pattern.
Those states just happen to be, yes, not only blue states, but deep blue states.
Fix Your Sleep Quality Tonight00:04:49
You could do this homework, Libs, on your own.
Maybe put down the I hate racism signs.
Maybe put the sign down and go, like, log on to your computer and do this thing called research.
I did it for you.
This whole purpose of the show, I even made it easy for you.
The Dan Bongino show is a delivery vehicle for truth.
That's it.
It's right here.
It's right here.
You can just look it up.
You can just tune into the show.
You can even go in the chat and say nasty stuff and vent your liberal, violent rage in the chat.
It's okay as long as you leave the show smarter than when you got in, which is not difficult.
Folks, it's really, really cheap to educate yourself these days.
You've got the Khan Academy, you've got AI, it takes but a few minutes.
I'm going to tell you something.
I can't say this enough.
Go, if you've got a couple of hours to kill, go to any streaming site.
I don't really care Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, there's tons of them.
Fox has some great stuff with Fox One.
Just watch a couple of documentaries on pre World War II.
Pre World War II.
We know what happened in World War II, obviously.
You know the endgame, the horror that, I mean, an unimaginable horror.
But I want you to watch what happened in the lead up.
Folks, if people would have just done their homework, we could have saved millions of lives.
The price for ignorance as it metastasizes is death and destruction every single time.
I'm going to take a quick break and I'm going to get to my guest, the great one, Mark Levin, who's been a friend to me for a really, really long time.
Always happy to have him.
So thank you in advance, Mark, for joining the show.
Ladies and gentlemen, today's show brought to you by our good friends at Helix Sleep.
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Always a pleasure to welcome to the show my mentor in the space, the godfather of the Tea Party, a multi time best selling author.
Oh, gosh, you have TV shows, podcasts, radio.
You get it.
They call him the great one for a reason.
Also, check out Liberty's Voice's new podcast on Rumble, Mark Levin.
Mark, welcome back to the show.
Dan, you're very gracious, man.
You're just a superstar out there.
You're one of the great podcasters out there.
And I want to thank you for everything you've done for the country.
Everything you're doing for the country.
God bless you, my friend.
Thank you, buddy.
You've always been there for me, and I never forget who my friends were in this business, who gave me a start, and that was you.
Mark Levin Welcomed Back To The Show00:15:31
So, first, this blockade, President Trump's blockade, I think was a stroke of strategic genius.
And I'll tell you for two specific reasons, so we're not talking hyperbolically.
Number one, economically, yes, it will cost the United States some money to sustain a military presence in the area, but it also reduced over time the risk premium on oil.
So, in the end, I think it's net present value, it's a push.
The Iranians don't have that luxury.
Their economy is crashing.
They're in triple digit inflation.
They're losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day.
Every day their ports are blockaded.
So it's a loser.
On the military front, the Iranians had no ability over time to sustain a full time blockade of the strait when they were holding it hostage.
And if they were to attack American ships now, they break the ceasefire.
So there's really no option for the Iranians where this thing is a winner.
I think that's right on.
I think a couple more points too.
I believe that that regime needs to be eliminated.
And I'm not afraid to say it because if the regime hangs around, it's like cockroaches.
They still have the ability to rise up, get another strong man and so forth and so on down the road when there's no Donald Trump to actually deal with it.
You see the opposition to him.
The Democrat party doesn't mind a regime that has nuclear weapons.
They just figure they'll pay them off or they'll figure they'll appease them.
And of course, it doesn't work, but they don't care.
And I would also add as a footnote if this works and it's going to work, what the president will manage to do is the Gulf Arab states and the Israelis, maybe not overtly, somewhat overtly, are going to be allied for a long time on the same issues and about the same causes.
So you really will have peace spreading in the Middle East.
You see now Israel's negotiating with Lebanon, the government there that's very, very weak and needs the Israelis to help them with Hezbollah.
Which the Iranians used to send into Lebanon to destroy their democracy, to assassinate their Christian president, and to try and take over that country.
That government wants the Israelis to do what they're doing, even though some people don't quite understand that.
The other thing is China.
By controlling the Straits the way the president is, China has a problem.
The two main exterior or external forces for China when it comes to oil are Venezuela and Iran, as well as Russia.
But we will control the oil out of Venezuela, and we will control the oil effectively that comes out of the Gulf.
And so this is important strategically when we're dealing with a China that's on the move, that's building up massively.
And by the way, that's essentially taken over the South China Sea without firing a shot with their phony islands.
They hope to do the same thing there, what the Iranians have done in the Straits.
So my understanding is, late word today is the president's going to open the Straits in exchange, in part, for China agreeing.
That they will not give weapons to Iran.
That's a big deal.
And I assume, in exchange for also ensuring that that waterway will stay open for everybody, all countries and so forth.
That's all I know right now.
But I think your point's a very good one.
And it is brilliant what the president has done.
You know, I know you know the president well.
He is one thing he's very good at is aggregating information from people and synthesizing an output from that.
I really get kind of exhausted with the, oh, Donald Trump was just lucky kind of talk.
You know, the economy will get like a spike in GDP.
Oh, it was just luck.
The border gets shut down.
Oh, it was just luck.
The homicide rate collapses.
The crime rate collapses.
Oh, he's just lucky.
Or, you know, we should thank Joe Biden for that or something.
But when it comes to strategic, you know, geopolitical reordering, the president, through his recent actions in the Malacca Strait with Indonesia, the Panama Canal, he's looking at a larger vision here.
This Don Roe doctrine, although it was said jokingly, is very real for him.
And I think finally we got a president who gets the larger picture that we can't continue with China, with Venezuela and others to just do this Charlie Brown football routine.
Sooner or later, we're going to have to use force.
It doesn't mean forever wars, as we saw with Maduro, but it does mean the use of the most powerful military in the world to secure a more secure future for the future U.S. citizens, our kids, your kids, all of them.
You're 100% right.
That's why the isolationists are really nuts in so many ways.
You have enemies that are on the move.
You have enemies that are strategically, economically, geographically trying to find choke points, whether it's the Strait of Hormuz, whether it's the South China Sea, whether it's our Panama Canal, whether it is the Arctic and so forth.
And the president sees this.
He's not president of a nation that's on a suicide watch.
He's president of the greatest superpower on the face of the earth.
He's not interested in sharing power with other countries.
He's interested in sharing interests with other countries and not abandoning our superpower status.
And so, in order to be a superpower, we have to build up our navy, which is under 300 ships, under Regina, with 600 ships.
We have to build up the rest of our military as well to compete with evil forces out there that push ideologies.
And those ideologies are not pacifistic, those ideologies are aggressive, those ideologies are destructive.
It's communism.
And it's Islamism.
And these are two grave threats to the Western world and to the United States of America.
The Democrats, you know, they put their head in the sand.
And worse than that, they try to sabotage Trump when he's doing this, as they tried to sabotage Reagan and the Strategic Defense Initiative now that every country uses and needs in order to protect themselves from missiles.
The Democrats, if they could, the defense budget would be cut by 50% and they'd be redistributing wealth and running our grocery stores and everything else.
We'd all starve to death and so forth and so on.
Strategically, what the president is doing is what must be done.
So, this idea where they throw around slogans on the left in the woke Reich, R E I C H, about what about forever wars?
Well, who's fighting a forever war?
The enemy's fighting a forever war.
We're not fighting a forever war.
We're playing defensive wars or preventative wars, which are quite different.
We're not imperialists.
We're not colonialists.
We are who we are.
We have a great history of who we are, and the enemy has a great history of what they are, and they're very evil.
So, you can't close your eyes to this, you know.
The president, in many ways, is Churchillian.
He's Reagan esque.
You talk about the Don Roe Doctrine, which is a real thing.
And because of that, there will be more peace for a longer period of time in our country and with our allies.
You know, Mark, one of the things that really changed me, you know, that old adage, you know, a man never steps in the same river twice.
He's not the same man.
It's not the same water.
It's never the same river, right?
I go into the FBI, spend this year there taking these briefings every day, and you start to see the real picture about how grave the Iranian threat is.
Is, not was, but still is with this nuclear material.
The problem we have now that I've tried to explain to people who are making this ridiculous point oh, there was an Iranian fatwa against nuclear weapons.
That's nonsense.
That's total garbage.
They spoke openly about their desire to get a nuclear weapon.
I play the clip all the time from their deputy speaker over there.
I played it just the other day.
The problem is the delivery systems with modern technology have evolved with hypersonic missiles, with ballistic missile technology, with the ease of sharing it between China, Russia, and others, North Korea.
As we saw with AQ Khan and Pakistan back in the day, the delivery systems are immediate.
We cannot, it's a zero fail environment.
We cannot have them launch a nuclear weapon they built underneath our noses and then just be like, oh, my bad, like we missed that.
It doesn't work that way.
And that fatwa talking point I hear is just garbage.
The Iranians spoke openly about their desire to use nuclear weapons and attain nuclear weapons.
These are terrorists and we're supposed to sit here and say, oh, the head terrorist put out a fatwa.
Oh, well, then of course they're not terrorists anymore.
What are they building?
What are they enriching?
What are they doing?
What do they refuse to give up?
Fatwa or no fatwa?
Nuclear weapons, enriched uranium to nuclear levels, weapon level.
So what are you talking?
There's a fatwa out there.
Well, who cares if there's a fatwa out there or whatever is out there?
The fact of the matter is they're slaughtering their own people.
They're slaughtering other people.
They tried to take out our president.
They attacked our embassies.
They blew up a barracks with 241 of our soldiers in it.
They promised to do more.
You know what these are?
These are suicide bombers.
They want to be with nuclear weapons.
That's their mentality.
They live to die.
They live to die.
And the West has problems getting their head around this.
The left will never get their head around this.
And so the rest of us don't have to sign a suicide pact with these left wing nuts.
Or these woke right isolationist goons.
The fact of the matter is, this is all common sense.
It's all experience.
It's not theoretical.
They tell us what they are.
He puts out a fatwa, but he talks about destroying the United States and the West.
Well, how does the fatwa and destroying the United States and the West fuse?
They don't fuse.
How do they mesh?
They don't mesh.
If you're going to destroy the West, why would you hold back on your nuclear weapons?
You wouldn't.
And they could blackmail us, they could try and destroy our economy.
People who talk this way are stupid people.
I would stop talking to them.
Mark, switching gears a little bit, you know, you and I have been dealing with left wing media goons for you a lot longer than me, but you know, between Mediaite and the New York Times and the Washington Post, and you know the whole kind of cavalry of zeros there, they've really, over the years, there's been a poll tested regression line downward from the public's trust in the media.
It's now at, I think, near historic lows.
I mean, I'll be generous.
Roughly say 20, 25%, one in four people trust that the media is giving them accurate information.
It's literally their only job to get people information to form an output, a proper decision.
They can't get that right.
The problem with that is that distrust in institutions is now filtered down even onto our own side.
And I use air quotes because I debate that these people were ever on our side.
However, you see it now.
You've been battling these people.
You saw this latest scandal at Mediaite.
Fabricating quotes.
I mean, this really shouldn't surprise anyone.
You've been dealing with these knuckleheads for years.
You're quite right, and it's gotten worse.
You know, I thought with new media, we would have new ideas on these new platforms to press the cause of Americanism, to have the debate with the other side without the left wing impact that the big networks had and the big newspapers had, these big corporations.
And I was wrong.
What's happened is, in addition to those people becoming podcasters, with exceptions like you, and there are real exceptions, but the industry generally, in addition to them, You've got cockroaches coming out of the woodwork.
People who have failed in other media, people who have been disgraced, people who have been fired, people who are in support of terrorism, people who front for criminals.
Because it doesn't take much to get a microphone and do a podcast and something like that.
So there are no controls.
And I don't even know what controls you would put in place in the first place.
I would just say to our audiences be discerning.
About what you listen to and who you listen to.
If somebody is there and they're just rambling stupidly, or somebody's there, excuse me, and somebody's there and they're telling you, abandon Christianity, that the Jews are behind everything, that Donald Trump is controlled by this group or that group or whatever, these people are nuts.
You know, we have a lot of people, Dan, who are in this business who 40 years ago they'd be wearing white sheets.
With the Klan, or they'd be marching and saluting with the Nazis who are telling us that we were on the wrong side of World War II, that Hitler's misunderstood and Churchill is the devil.
We have people telling us that Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel, that Netanyahu is the modern Hitler.
We have people telling us all these things that we know to be false, but the problem is you have a lot of young people.
This is where they get their information and their news, and they're listening to these people.
And I fear that's one of the reasons why there's so much negativity out there and so much of a significant divide.
You brought up this site Mediaite that was started by Dan Abrams.
Dan Abrams is an odd guy.
On the one hand, he wants to be viewed as some kind of a legal intellect over there at ABC News, where he's a legal analyst.
And then on the other hand, he's kind of the Jerry Springer of law and crime on cable.
Then he creates this site Mediaite.
And what is the site intended to do?
To observe the media and comment on the media.
And who does he hire?
95% of them are left wing thugs.
The headlines are hysterical.
They're intended to be sensational.
And then he brings in this editor from day one by the name of Kobe Hall.
You should be suspect immediately.
Anybody that calls their kid Colby, that's an issue as far as I'm concerned.
You don't name kids after cheese, and you don't.
But this guy's, he's weird.
And now he's suspended because he's been caught fabricating quotes.
Now I've been going at it with these guys, and it seems like every week it's somebody else.
And I feel like I'm back in junior high school or something like that.
You don't hear anything intelligent, anything profound, anything that moves the ball.
So my view is you got to be very discerning.
Just like with TV or radio or anything else, but especially when it comes to podcasting, you know, you, Shapiro, Hammer, several others who are very, very good.
But then there's the lowlifes, the thugs, the punks, the guys undermining our country, grifters who really don't care about the mission, who really don't believe in our principles.
You can get wealthy promoting our principles and so forth, but the goal shouldn't be to get wealthy.
The goal should be to do the right thing, good versus evil.
That should be the goal of these platforms.
And conservative talk radio came to be in order to challenge these people with the great Rush Limbaugh, who really was our Babe Ruth, and same in podcasting to challenge these people.
But instead, a lot of this poison has seeped into the system.
So we get the woke Reich.
Republican Party Founded On Moral Causes00:04:03
I spell it R E I C H. Sort of these neo fascists, these isolationists.
You get truly dumb people like Bannon or Marjorie Trader Gangreen.
And I use.
These humiliating phrases because that's all they understand.
You get the lowest common denominator.
That's what you get.
And I'm hoping you and some of the rest of us can help through our own broadcasting, through our own substantive discussions.
I mean, we got to reach into the toxic pool from time to time, but I hope we can change this whole business and really for the better.
Well, what worries me, Mark, is our conservative movement and the Republican Party in general back into the civil rights era was the house built on a bedrock of fighting against this idea of collective guilt.
You know, that we should stigmatize people based on characteristics that have nothing to do with their actual character being Jewish, being Muslim, being Christian, being black, being from Indonesia.
It doesn't really matter.
The whole essence of conservatism was to conserve all that's good.
And this idea of an egalitarianism based on God given, you know, capital G, capital R rights.
And that's why I say all the time like, this isn't to me infighting because this is not, the Republican Party is like a treehouse, it's like a club, you know, and we have a set of rules and there's not a ton of them.
There are different opinions on tax rates, different opinions on, you know, abortion, different opinions even on, you know, the Second Amendment.
There's little issues on the margin.
There are no issues on the margin when it comes to collective guilt.
We do not do that.
And seeing it kind of fester, like you said, amongst this younger crowd seeking out voices engaging in this, Mark, is really, really disturbing.
We all know where this ends.
And I'm never going to participate in that kind of shit ever.
Ever.
You can count me out.
You're great.
And here's the thing the Democrat Party has always been like this, whether it's slavery, segregation, eugenics, Jim Crow.
And on and on.
And today, whether it's Marxism and Islamism, they all find a home in the Democrat Party.
The Republican Party was founded in the 1850s for one reason to abolish slavery.
The Republican Party was founded out of moral, just, principled American causes.
The Republican Party is the only thing left in terms of political parties that represents Americanism, not Marxism, Islamism, other isms, socialism.
Americanism.
And we have to fight within the Republican Party to hold the establishment's feet to the fire all the time.
I grew up this way in the conservative movement.
Whether it's the Reagan movement, whether it's the Tea Party movement, whether it's the Convention of States movement, I've been involved in all of it, all of it.
So, to watch these people come in and claim that they're MAGA, even when the president says, No, you're not, you're excommunicated, you're crazy, you're kooks, get out.
But the idea that they're MAGA, they're not MAGA, they've never been MAGA.
What is MAGA?
Make America Great Again.
1984, that was the campaign line from Ronald Reagan.
What else is MAGA?
It's my argument.
I've told the president that the MAGA is the Tea Party.
It is the second generation of the Tea Party.
That's what it is in many, many respects 80, 90% of it or so.
Mark, we know where that.
Collective guilt ends.
It ends in Holocaust, is what it ends in.
It ends in mass murder on a scale humanity, unfortunately, has seen repeatedly.
We have examples of this.
All we have to do is crack a history book, not even a good one.
We know where this ends.
But we also know where collectivism in general ends socialism, communism, all euphemisms for the same thing the government control of the means of production.
Capitalism Requires Human Freedom00:07:15
Me and anyone else listening can just go to their phone or tablet and just go to AI, Grok, Gemini, it doesn't really matter.
Give me evidence socialism works.
In this info era, it's stunning that we continue to try this quote experiment.
I say quote because it's not an experiment.
We already know the outcome.
Like Mom Dami up in New York, he wants, I addressed earlier in the show, he wants to do this government run supermarket idea, which is, again, I would say dumb, but it's not dumb.
It's evil because it's already been tried.
Price controls don't work.
You cannot control a price without limiting human freedom.
A price is what two human beings agree on as a market clearing value of a product.
When a third party, the government, tells one of those sides that's not the price or both of them, that's taking away people's freedom.
It's just stunning, again, in the information era, how people just can't do basic homework on clowns like Mom Dami and AOC and Bernie Sanders.
And we keep seeing the socialism pop up again.
Socialism doesn't create wealth, it redistributes wealth.
Capitalism, I don't like the word because Marx invented it, but still, capitalism is commerce.
Nobody invented it.
It's not an ideology, it's a reality.
It's spontaneous.
It's how people get along, it's how they work with each other.
They don't care what race you are, what religion you are.
If you go to a diner in the morning and have eggs, you don't care where those eggs came from.
You don't care which farmer was involved in making it, their politics, their race, their.
It doesn't matter.
Socialism, you do.
Now, we're setting up one store so far.
What are they going to have?
Well, I don't know.
But he says they're only going to subsidize a basket of basics.
That's what they do in prison.
You get a basket of basics.
You go into a big supermarket in America today, you're talking about a football field of shelves of food from all over the country, all over the world, all kinds of wines, 50 types of bread, seven grains, eight grains, no grains, potato bread, Hawaiian bread.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
How about butter and margarine?
And cream cheese.
Oh, look at that whole section yogurt, whole section.
You want 90% fat, ground beef, 85%, 95%?
Well, I want that one.
That's fine.
How about shrimp?
Jumbo shrimp, small shrimp, popcorn shrimp.
What do you want?
You want food that's made?
You go to the deli.
10 types of bologna, 10 types of bologna.
Yeah, bologna.
Ham from everywhere else.
Now, Mandami's supermarket is not a supermarket, it's a basket of eggs and bread.
Now that's the problem, isn't it?
First of all, where do the eggs and bread come from?
They don't come from the government.
They don't come from social.
Everything that he's going to sell in this store, all five products come from capitalism.
He even is going to have a private person run the store.
So all he's going to do is sell eggs and bread or whatever that basket is at a subsidized rate, meaning the taxpayer pays for it anyway.
So you're not going to have more food, better food, cheaper food.
You're going to have shortages.
If he were in charge, we'd all starve to death, wouldn't we?
Profit is what?
They hate profit.
But what is profit?
Profit is the net difference between the cost for somebody to make something, hire something, pay for materials, all the taxes and the overhead, the price that they sell it for.
You have to make a profit.
Why?
So you can do it all over again and maybe expand it and create it.
Let me ask it this way Is the assembly line worker in America better off than the assembly line worker in Russia?
The answer is of course.
And just one other point, a little theoretical, because you and I enjoy this stuff.
Yes.
You see, Marx said that the proletariat, the working people, broadly defined, would rise up and overthrow the bourgeoisie, the managers, the executives, and whatever.
But it didn't happen because the capitalism created this massive middle class that had access to water.
Electricity, cars, food, homes, clothing.
So you got capitalism all wrong.
Marxism is a defective, destructive ideology.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't understand human nature.
It doesn't understand human society.
So then comes in this guy, Grimsky, who's an Italian philosopher.
He spends a lot of time in prison because he's thrown in there by the fascists.
He has a different idea.
And now all these Western leftists have embraced it.
What is it?
Not the bottom up, the top down.
That's how we have a revolution control the culture, control the bureaucracy, control the government, and impose it on people.
There's not a great calling for socialism in this country.
There's a great calling for a lot of things cheap and a lot of choices.
And so socialists do a better job at propaganda.
Why?
Because socialism is about emotion.
Shouldn't you have a right to health care?
Shouldn't you have a right to a home?
Shouldn't you have a right to clothing and food?
Nobody should be able to take that away from you.
And so the whole argument is emotional.
It's not rational, it's emotional.
And when we discuss capitalism or commerce, we open our white papers and talk about supply and demand and these other things, which are important to talk about.
But we got to get better at explaining what you just explained and what I'm trying to explain is you want to go hungry?
Socialism.
You want plentiful food at an affordable rate?
Supermarkets.
Those are capitalism.
These government run a basket of stables.
That's socialism.
We just don't seem to have the people who are able to make the points.
Yeah, I got to run, Mark.
But that point you made about the inversion from a bottom up, a faux revolution, because it never did happen, to a top down hierarchical collectivist management system by quote experts is the key distinction.
Because you're led to believe by these neo communists these days that this is some kind of enhancement of personal freedom.
Like, look, we're going to take away all your needs and wants, when in fact, they're going to take away everything from you.
Everything and give it to this hierarchy on top.
It is the ultimate system of elitism, which is the great irony.
Fred Siegel has a great book on this Revolt Against the Masses, which describes how liberalism, progressivism has always been a top down system that worships the elites, always trying to simulate the old costumed European aristocracy.
It's always been this way.
And I'm sorry you got suckered if you really believe this is a movement of the masses.
That was a great point.
Your point about pistachios, like I love pistachios.
Honey roasted, salt and vinegar, regular, regular loaf.
Rocketing Up The Charts With Subscribers00:01:46
It's like, it's incredible how freedom, economic freedom, does that stuff.
Folks, Mark has a podcast.
You know about his radio show, 6 to 9 Eastern, every single day on like every conservative station across the country.
Liberty's Voice on Rumble with Mark Levin.
Check that out.
And all of his books are just incredible.
Hey, Mark, thanks a lot for your time.
We really appreciate it.
First of all, you're terrific.
This is why you're one of the kings in this movement.
Hey, thanks a lot, Mark.
We appreciate it.
All right, folks, thanks again for tuning in.
I really appreciate it.
You got Haley coming up at noon, rumble.com slash Haley.
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Hey there, I'm Vince.
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