Butler. Now this. A Second Assassination Attempt. Plus, Journalist Chris Rufo Joins TRIGGERED Ep.174
Butler. Now this. A Second Assassination Attempt. Plus, Journalist Chris Rufo Joins TRIGGERED Ep.174
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It's beyond sad that for a second time this year, a second time in basically two months, I have to discuss an assassination attempt at my father's life.
I have to have that conversation for a second time with my five young children in America in 2024.
But guys, that's where we're at.
I'm having to have those conversations far too often, far more often than anyone should ever have them in the civilized world or anywhere else about radical leftists trying to kill their grandfather.
No person should ever have to do this in America, anywhere else, and again, certainly not in the civilized world.
And yet I had to have those conversations again yesterday.
So this is going to be a really important episode.
Guys, make sure, as you're tuning in now, make sure you're liking, sharing, subscribing, so you don't miss these episodes.
And more importantly, so that we can get the news out there.
We all understand that this is a cause of our traditional mainstream media.
They're out there gaslighting.
We'll go through a lot of that later on.
Big tech ain't exactly helping.
In fact, they're all stacked against us.
So we just have to work harder to make sure we break through all of the noise and grow this movement so we can show people what's actually going on.
Not what they're being told, but what's actually happening.
Because those two things are very
Different.
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And guys, let's now get into some of the news.
All of the left-wing madness that is just destroying our country.
One day, one day, guys, I'm hoping, maybe people will get sick of it.
Maybe they'll get fed up of the lies and the gaslighting and then it's, well, you know, it's okay that it happened because it's to Trump.
I mean, he really deserves this.
Yesterday, at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach,
A place where my kids play often, and they often play with their grandfather.
A Ukraine-obsessed left-wing lunatic named Ryan Routh set up a sniper's nest to try to kill my father.
He was reportedly camped in or around the golf course for as long as 12 hours.
Fortunately, the Secret Service spotted this lunatic, engaged him with gunfire, and stopped him.
But how was he able to get as close as he did, just 60 days or so after another left-wing lunatic tried to assassinate my father in Butler, Pennsylvania?
This is the second attempted assassination in just two months!
The assassin, again, is a deranged Democrat.
He has a Biden bumper sticker on his car.
He's donated 19 times to Democrats.
He even tweeted Kamala Harris's slogan that, Right.
Right.
Democracy is on the ballot by the people who've been trying to censor and jail their political opponents for the last few years, the Democrat Party.
I'm not buying it.
Neither should you.
But the media is going to make sure that you think otherwise.
Among other and bizarre disturbing ramblings, you know, democracy is not a ballot, mostly with his obsession with the Ukraine war.
He even apparently traveled to Kiev and was interviewed by the New York Times and spoke about wanting to bring Afghan fighters to Ukraine.
It's all as insane as it sounds, but think about this.
This is a lunatic that the New York Times and others in the mainstream media gave a platform to.
He also said that in 2022, every civilian of every country needed to go to Ukraine to support the war.
Every civilian of every country, folks.
Like, I don't know, like 7 billion people around the world should go do this.
And how did this guy get an AK-47?
What was he actually up to in the Ukraine?
Who funded his Ukraine travels?
Apparently he wasn't legally allowed to purchase a firearm and apparently the serial numbers were scratched off
Who did he communicate with?
There's still a lot of unanswered questions.
The media, of course, has had a disgusting reaction.
Not a shocking reaction, not if you've been watching these scumbags for the last few years.
And I take this one a little bit personally, you know, it's the second time they tried to kill my father in two months because of their rhetoric.
So, you know, forgive me if I come off a little aggressive right now, but there is no other response.
Gladly, many other Americans feel the same way.
Hopefully, they'll say enough is enough and stop listening to the mainstream media.
Some of them are even refusing to call it an assassination attempt.
I mean, even the FBI did that.
Now, I think the FBI is giving us some information.
Apparently, the shooter was also known to the FBI, like all shooters.
Didn't exactly stop him.
I have a feeling we only got that information because thankfully Governor DeSantis of Florida opened up a parallel investigation, is not releasing the suspect to the feds, where he'd probably disappear like, you know, Epstein himself, so to speak.
So I'm glad that's happening.
But NBC News called it a golf club incident.
You know, it's like, you know, it's like he topped his ball and it hit someone in the ankle.
It's a golf club incident.
Clowns.
While the Treasure Coast newspaper just north of Palm Beach County covered it on page 7 with this headline.
Report.
Trump safe after gunfight near Florida Golf Club.
Hmm.
Time Magazine meanwhile said that Ryan Routh had unclear political ideology folks.
It's unclear.
Really?
What's so unclear about being a, what, 17-time Democrat donor with a Biden-Harris bumper sticker?
I don't know.
Doesn't seem so unclear.
It's only unclear if you're a biased propagandist or an imbecile, or perhaps both, like the people in the mainstream media.
And just look at some of these front pages.
The Chicago Sun-Times, the big story of the day is, spotlight on cycling safety.
While USA Today's front page blared, hope in America.
While the assassination attempt was covered in small font with this headline, Trump safe after shots fired in his vicinity.
They seriously, they ran this headline, hope in America.
The day after an attempted assassination on a former president of the United States?
The leading candidate?
The nominee for the Republican Party?
These outlets are truly the enemy of the people.
Even when my father said that years ago, and I was in the midst of the Russia, Russia, Russia lies and everything that they perpetrated, I was like, you know what?
That's kind of harsh.
It's not harsh enough, guys.
It's not harsh enough.
You look at their actions each and every day.
They aren't journalists.
They're propagandists at best.
Enemy of the people probably doesn't even begin to start with what they're pushing for our country.
Meanwhile, Democrats will continue to call my father and MAGA a domestic threat.
Here's Jasmine Crockett yesterday on MSDNC shortly before the attempted assassination.
Alright.
Alright, they're having a little bit of a hard time getting this one.
Why don't we just skip it?
I talk about the fact that when we swore in, finally, in January, that we swore to defend against those that are coming against us, whether they are domestic or international.
And right now, I feel like MAGA in general, they are threats to us domestically.
And we see it time and time again.
Sorry about that little glitch.
Took us a little while to get that clip going.
That won't happen again.
But here's another example.
Far-left Democrat Congressman Dan Goldman has gone as far as to say that my dads need to be eliminated.
Eliminated.
Seems like a big one.
It's unquestionable at this point that that man cannot see public office again.
He is not only unfit, he is destructive to our democracy, and he has to be eliminated.
Guys, these people are sick.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries took aim at extreme MAGA Republicans on social media only 30 minutes, 30 minutes after the assassination attempt.
I mean, the gun barrels are still warm and he's telling fellow leftists to quote, we must stop them.
I wonder where it's coming from, folks.
We can't know.
It must be the MAGA rhetoric, not the endless quotes.
If you look at my ex-feed, I posted, you know, the Trump campaign put up very prominent Democrats and all of the things that they've said, and you wonder.
Read it.
Read them all.
The list is long and not distinguished, but it is disgusting.
And it gets even worse, guys.
The Cincinnati Inquirer today published a letter to the editor that blamed my father.
They blamed him!
For the assassination attempt.
The headline is, Trump brings these assassination attempts on himself.
I mean, I honestly, it's like you're reading like something from the Babylon Bee.
These people are insane.
They're deranged.
They're stupid, but they still have power.
People still actually listen to them.
The media and the political left must immediately stop their dangerous rhetoric of blaming President Trump for the assassination attempt on his own life.
That's not what's happening at all.
Every notable Democrat out there is doing this on a daily basis.
They've done it for years.
That's why some of these morons and lowlifes get radicalized.
They think it's their permission slip to go and kill someone who's literally worse than Hitler.
Someone who's the greatest threat to democracy ever.
Someone who's gonna stay in power forever even though he left last time.
I mean, you know, minor details like that.
And the regime media and Democrats, especially Kamala Harris, must cease their inflammatory rhetoric that was directly mimicked by yesterday's would-be assassin.
And these are the same people lecturing us about civility.
Remember?
Civility.
Civility and joy.
That's the Harris campaign.
Everything's joy and civility.
You know, that won't buy you your groceries.
It's not even true.
They're encouraging this kind of violence.
Those kind of language, the things that they say on a daily basis, that's not civility.
But I guess as long as the media says they're being civil in saying that Donald Trump is Hitler, you know, it's fine.
Right?
When they say, when they go low, we go high?
Really?
Really?
Does anyone believe that?
When we have common sense conversation, when we talk about policies that are good for the American people and hard-working blue-collar Americans everywhere, they go low, and they destroy our country, our republic, and our children's future.
There is no place for violence of any kind in politics, and that extends to dangerous commentary from the media and their political left allies as well.
This past week has been a story about how the failing media is destroying this nation.
They never cared to get answers about what's actually happening in, say, Springfield, Ohio.
Didn't stop them from gaslighting us.
But our next guest, Chris Ruffo, he cares.
He actually found evidence of cats being eaten in Ohio.
Watch this video.
What is this they got on the grill?
Man, listen, man.
There go a cat right there.
His ass better get missing, man.
Look like his homie's on the grill, man.
Yo!
What is this they got on the grill?
Man, listen, man.
There go a cat right there.
His ass better get missing, man.
Look like his homie's on the grill, man.
What the fuck?
Hey guys, let's just say that ain't a chicken.
That ain't a chicken.
And I'm sure you've heard endlessly this past week from the media about the awful bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio.
Those threats are reprehensible.
But what is also wrong is that the media and the Democrats have tried to blame my father and JD Vance for them.
Not only did they have nothing to do with these threats, but these threats were from overseas.
The media seems to be helping foreign adversaries who are trying to interfere in our elections.
Listen directly to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine today explain that the threats are hoaxes and are coming from foreign sources.
Thirty-three separate bomb threats, each one of which has been responded to, and each one of whom has been found as a hoax.
So, thirty-three threats, thirty-three hoax.
I want to make that very, very clear.
None of these had any validity at all.
We know that people are very very concerned And we have taken some actions and in a moment.
I'll let Andy Wilson go into more detail But we've moved resources into into Springfield, so I want to say to the parents in Springfield
These hoaxes, these threats have all been hoaxes.
None of them have panned out.
We have people, unfortunately, overseas who are taking these actions.
Some of them are coming from one particular country.
We think that this is, you know, one more opportunity to mess with the United States, and they're continuing to do that.
So we cannot let the bad guys win.
Our schools must remain open.
Remember, guys, CNN's Dana Bash just this weekend tried blaming my father and J.D.
Vance for what she described as terrorism.
And now we find out they're all hoaxes perpetrated from foreign countries.
So the media is basically a willing and complicit
Participant with foreign countries trying to sow discord?
Because of course they don't want Donald Trump back in charge.
They don't want J.D.
Vance in charge.
They want America to be weak and stupid, as we have been under Biden and Harris.
Will Dana Bash get out there and publicly apologize for perpetrating and pushing this lie?
Will it even get a retraction?
Will the retraction be somewhere on CNN.com, page 4,976?
Will she actually acknowledge that she was duped with all of this nonsense and then tried to scapegoat conservatives across the country?
Remember when this stuff wasn't actually happening?
Turns out it is.
So we'll get into all of this and much more with Chris Ruffo in just a few seconds.
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And guys, with that, joining me now, City Journal writer and author of America's Cultural Revolution, Chris Ruffo.
Chris, how's it going, man?
Good to have you here.
Doing very well.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
As well as can be expected.
I'm getting a little too accustomed to, again, having to have conversations with my children about their grandfather getting shot at.
As a son, I don't handle that all that well myself either, though, again, I guess I'm getting used to it.
It's becoming like an average Saturday for me now.
Before we get into talking about your Ohio investigation, what's been your reaction to the media's disgusting coverage of the attempted assassination on Sunday?
I mean, it is totally outrageous.
You've seen it from all quarters of the establishment media.
They're trying to blame your father, President Trump, for the people who are attempting to assassinate him.
They're trying to lay responsibility on him.
Supposedly his rhetoric has caused people to fire shots at him.
Look, this only goes one way, because they're not also saying that the media's rhetoric against President Trump caused the shooting.
And so it is a circular logic that always goes in one direction.
It goes against the political opponents of this establishment media.
They will blame the victim as long as the victim is marked as the enemy.
And at this point, like you've said,
It shouldn't surprise us, but it should still disgust us, because this is just so far beyond the pale, it's hard to imagine.
Yeah, I mean, I'm watching some of the mental gymnastics trying to blame the rhetoric on basically any conservative.
If you're upset that your cat's getting eaten, that makes you a racist and you're terrible and you deserve it.
You had it coming.
They're not really eating cats, but if they are, it's totally fine.
That's usually a week before.
If you don't agree with them eating your pets, you're also a terrible human and a racist.
What's driving
the media's coverage to endlessly demonize literally half of the country.
I mean, the right, even when they want to, you know, constantly lecture you about civility and discourse, you know, it's such a tongue-in-cheek comment.
It's so hypocritical because they're doing the exact opposite.
I mean, you've experienced a lot of this yourself.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, look, I'm interested in the truth.
And how it works is that sometimes the truth is uncomfortable for people in power.
And so we have this media, left-wing media used to be, their identity was they speak truth to power.
But they've totally flipped because their ideas are now in power.
And so what they try to do is suppress the truth.
And what that means is suppress reality.
And so you have every technique in the book from simple denial, obfuscation, selective coverage, word games where they kind of
Kind of take a fine tooth comb and pick through words and try to manipulate specific words to invert their meanings.
Whatever technique it takes, the idea is that they have to suppress it because they know that, for example, on immigration, Donald Trump is strong, Kamala Harris is weak.
That's what the public senses.
There's a debate to be had about immigration that's substantive.
I think so.
to you.
That's what we're seeing very clearly.
And conservatives just have to stay tough.
They have to stand strong.
You have to tell the truth.
And you have to get ready for the blowback because, you know, it's coming.
We know that for a fact.
And now is not a time to hide and to just, you know, bow down.
Yeah, 100%.
I always tell people, you know, we sort of, we have to become unafraid.
I mean, we can be right.
It doesn't matter.
They'll still go after you.
I think, you know, at this point, you know, perhaps no one other than, you know, RFK, you know, understands more than my family about what exactly they'll do to you.
But it doesn't mean we're actually wrong.
All, you know, whether it's the things that we got criticized that were, you know, conspiracy theories that all proved to be 100% right.
You know, how do people do that?
How do we combat that narrative?
Because, I mean, when you're going into an election, you say, hey,
It's not our ideas versus their ideas.
It's our ideas censored, suppressed, smothered, while their ideas, whether right, wrong, or indifferent, are, you know, boosted, artificially put out there, treated as though it's the gospel.
How do you break through that noise?
What is it that regular people can do to help make sure that everyone actually understands what's really going on there?
Or at least see both sides and you can formulate your own opinion.
Yeah, we'll look.
I mean, I think we're at a disadvantage for some of the reasons you lay out.
But I think out there actually is a huge opportunity right now.
Elon Musk has created this platform with X that allows a wide range of opinions.
You don't have to feel like you're going to be censored or banished.
You can actually reach a large audience through the platform.
There are independent journalists that I'm seeing really for the first time in the last stretch, the last coming months, that are really hitting the field.
They're going out into the world.
They're trying to gather the truth.
They're trying to assemble the evidence and the facts.
We have alternative news platforms that are gaining an audience and reaching people directly, bypassing the old legacy outlets.
And then I think we have to just have
More integrity.
We have to have stronger reporting.
And we have to just have the faith that when we report the truth, people can see it for what it is.
And, you know, look, they said critical race theory wasn't in schools.
They said COVID didn't come from a lab.
They said that trans wasn't a social contagion.
They said Hunter Biden's laptop was fake.
And all of the intelligence experts agreed.
And I'm an agent of Russia.
We know now through experience that all of those things were false.
They were deliberate lies.
And I think the American people are starting to get wise to this, and they're starting to see through it.
And I think we just have to have faith.
You have to fight hard.
You have to fight with the facts.
You have to fight honorably and hope that people are smart enough, and I think they are, to see through the lies.
Listen, you've obviously broken some pretty big stories that definitely went against what the narrative would have been.
What was your own personal experience in terms of what's the worst thing you've seen them try to do to you?
Oh, I mean, everything.
They call you names.
That's fine.
It's part of the game.
You get used to it.
They try to undermine your reputation.
I had a Washington Post reporter who was trying to argue in this piece that I had fabricated evidence, that I had made up these stories.
Of course, I had all of the receipts.
I showed them to her editors.
They had to retract, you know, half the piece.
They had to amend it.
They had to issue a major correction basically saying that in fact they were making up all of these allegations from whole cloth.
But the idea is that they have the institutions and the instruments of power.
I think so.
But, you know, even with this story that I broke just this week, we tracked down evidence that migrants from Africa were barbecuing cats in Dayton, Ohio, just down the road from Springfield.
We had an eyewitness account, firsthand testimony, background research, corroborating witness accounts that set the stage.
We found physical evidence.
We did forensic analysis.
We mobilized every possible resource, followed the most meticulous reporting possible.
And then what did CBS News do the next day?
They said, well, we talked to the mayor who said it's not true that they don't have a police report about it.
So it didn't happen.
So we'll wait a minute.
Plenty of things happen that are illegal, that nobody filed a police report.
Just because it doesn't say, there's not a piece of paper sitting in the police station saying something happened, doesn't mean it didn't happen.
That's like basic logic 101.
But it turns out we found the 911 call.
That was from August 26th, like before this became a meme, before it, like, it wasn't like a reactionary lie to something trying to be created.
It happened two weeks before it was out there.
That's right.
We've seen this over and over.
But it's like,
You know, it's very interesting because they'll say, well, we talked to the mayor.
We talked to this person.
It's like, oh, yeah, you talk to a Democratic politician whose interest is to deny the story, has no evidence, conducted no investigation, doesn't offer an argument, in no way refutes the facts of the matter.
And then they run with it.
And they've been used to doing that playbook for so long.
They can do it shamelessly.
They can do it because it's a huge corporation.
And so look, that's where we are.
We can't despair.
We can't give up.
We can't just complain and say, hey, look, the refs are being unfair.
At the end of the day, you still have to put up the points.
You still have to win.
You still have to make the argument.
And so you just slug it out.
You fight.
You present the evidence in the most persuasive way you can.
And then I think the truth, provided that it's given enough heft, it's given enough muscle, it's given enough push, will reach people and persuade them.
Because look, the country is in tough shape.
There's a lot of issues in the country right now.
And they would like to silence people, of course, their speech.
They would like to silence people by actually killing them.
We are hurtling towards a very precarious moment in our country's history, and we have to all stick together.
We have to all, you know, maintain ourselves, have the courage, and I think that the coming months will be decisive.
Yeah, I mean, it sort of reminds me of a small-scale version of what went on in the Ohio.
There's no real evidence.
It was like when Kamala Harris says, crime is down according to FBI statistics.
It's like, no, no, they just stopped reporting crime to the FBI.
So it looks as though crime is down.
It doesn't mean it's actually stopping crime.
They're just not reporting it.
Or they're not going after people or they're not enforcing laws that were always on the books.
So the number of reported crimes are down because they're just not doing anything about it.
Doesn't mean that the violence or theft or whatever it may be isn't happening on a daily basis.
So, you know, that's the problem.
I mean, people do have to dig much deeper than, oh, well, here are the FBI's crime stats put out by, you know, Joe Biden's DOJ, making it look like everything's rosy when in fact things have gotten a lot worse across the country.
Yeah, and look, you asked earlier, what can people do in their daily lives on these issues?
The first thing is to trust your own intuition.
Trust your own experience.
Trust your own observation of life around you.
You know, the left will provide a blizzard of often misleading statistical claims.
They'll cite, you know, very partisan experts as if they're neutral authorities.
And what they try to do is override your own intuition.
They're saying, no, no, we have the truth.
We're going to force it onto you.
You have to submit to it.
And if you don't submit to it, you're a bad person for X, Y, and Z reasons.
But I actually trust most Americans with their own intuition, their own judgments.
We have to just get back in touch with that intuition.
It's available to everyone.
Use the sense of the world that you see all around you.
Is it getting better or is it getting worse?
Are things better or worse for your family, your own private situation?
And I think that if people have a gut check and they ask how they're actually feeling, what are they actually seeing, what are the facts that come through their senses, I think they'll make the right decision.
And that's really all that we can do and what I hope people do moving forward.
So I'd like to, you know, Chris, talk a little bit about, you know, obviously your investigation surrounding the Haitian immigrants eating pets, but like, where do you start?
Where would other people in these communities start?
How do you do good field reporting?
Because, you know, again, I don't think we can rely
You know, on, you know, local, you know, owned by NBC, you know, to actually do this work.
You know, how does, you know, an independent, you know, journalist do this?
How does a independent citizen start going up, you know, backing up the claims so that we can all sort of collectively fight?
When this stuff's going on in your backyard, I imagine people are incentivized to get involved, to try to counter that if there is no, you know, sort of
Thank you.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, you have to just go back to the very basics of reporting and investigative work.
You know, you have to get on the ground, you have to talk to people, you have to develop sources, you have to receive tips, you have to learn how to analyze evidence.
And what you really always want to do is have cross-check the evidence from a number of different points of confirmation.
I think so.
Yeah.
Verify and do the forensic analysis of video footage and photographs.
But really, what I think it comes down to is building those relationships, figuring out who you can trust, and then, of course, always verifying the information before you go to print.
And this is something that I'm doing.
I have a program that I'm running, trying to train journalists in some of these techniques so that when they get in the fight, when they feel the heat,
They can be competent in their reporting.
It's something that we all have to do.
And for a friendly little in-house criticism of those of us on the right, it's something that we have to do better.
We have to be more disciplined.
We have to be more rigorous.
We have to be better in all aspects of our reporting because we're going to be put under more scrutiny than our opponents.
And on one hand, that sometimes is a challenge.
On the other hand, it forces us to be better.
And I think that that's what it's going to take.
Where do people find out about that?
Because I mean, I think that's interesting.
I think you're right.
It's important.
I literally I open up my show, you know, every day saying, hey, with what we're up against, with, you know, the bias that's out there, we have to be, you know, better, smarter, you know, more, do more diligence, you know, each and every day as we do this.
And that's just that applies across the board.
So I'd love for people just to know where they can do that.
If people are interested in it, if they're aspiring journalists and they're concerned about, you know, not being just a left wing shill, I imagine that'd be really helpful to people.
Yeah, actually, thanks for asking.
It's a great time.
You know, I'm running a program called the Manhattan Institute Logos Initiative.
We're actually going to be putting up applications shortly for our next cohort of reporters.
It's going to be focused on investigative work.
It's a year-long program.
There's an honorarium.
There's a retreat.
It's really helping reporters take the next step in their career.
You can find it on my X handle, it's atrealchrisrufo.
I'll be posting about it.
You can just search Manhattan Institute Logos Initiative.
We're going to be selecting 10 reporters.
And look, some of our Logos reporters, we broke the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal.
We broke the Texas Children's Hospital secret transgender program scandal.
We did the Aurora migrant story.
And then now, of course, we're chasing down leads in Springfield, Ohio, and also coming up in Charleroi, Pennsylvania.
Yeah, I imagine there's probably a lot of communities around the country that we haven't even, you know, covered.
And I think, you know, frankly, the media going so hard against it means you probably know you're over the target.
But talk about that a little bit.
I mean, you know, obviously the Claudine Gay was a big thing, you know, taking out the president of Harvard who plagiarized everything throughout the wazoo.
I mean, you know.
Frankly, the reaction to, you know, you're just fact-driven, you know, something that would have gotten anyone else fired in about 0.2 seconds, you know, it was sort of amazing.
I mean, but it shows you how far the other side has gone.
But, you know, you did do the big piece in the City Journal on Aurora, Colorado, which has sort of a lot of parallels to this.
You know, what did you find there?
That's obviously about the migrants that took over, you know, literally housing buildings in the United States.
And it's like, nothing to see here, folks.
It's incredible.
Well, we did a couple things.
First, we dispatched a field reporter to actually go to the apartment complexes, talk to residents, talk to people who are running the complexes, talk to city officials to actually get a sense and a feel for what was happening, conduct interviews, collect information.
We got exclusive video from an insider inside the actually management company of those properties.
And then we also had a researcher working on looking at documents.
Non-profits have to publish their financials every year.
Yeah, absolutely.
And then these people were bringing in and signing rental agreements, lease agreements, for hundreds of Venezuelan migrants in the town of Aurora, Colorado, some of whom had connections with the violent gang members from Tren de Aragua.
And so you had this really kind of interesting story where it's like, it's not just about the Venezuelan takeover of this apartment building.
The story that we uncovered that I think is so important is like, it was all done with Biden-Harris cash.
The federal taxpayers were subsidizing the takeover of these places by migrants, many of whom were illegal and some of whom were connected with violent organized crime.
I mean, that's the situation we're in.
And we also know that the NGO operators
We're dramatically bumping up their salary, bumping up the budgets for their organizations.
Of course.
And so everyone is profiting except for the actual citizens and taxpayers that this kind of arrangement affects.
Yeah, I mean, I always sort of say there's no money in peace, but it seems for a lot of these NGOs, there's also no money in a secure border.
You know, talk about how much of these, like, so-called non-profits, you know, talk about the numbers, because they are making profits like you wouldn't believe on the border invasion, again, paid for by the U.S.
taxpayer to the detriment of the American citizen in many cases.
That doesn't mean there's not some nice people that come across the border, but when we're letting, you know,
Well-known gang members come across, drug traffickers, human sex traffickers.
I mean, it's just totally indiscriminate and they don't care.
I guess it's just another dollar, you know, or whatever dollars may be per person that comes across.
Yeah, I mean, you look at the budgets for some of these organizations.
They'll go from, you know, a $500,000 budget to a $20 million budget in one year, totally subsidized by the taxpayer.
And so they're pulling in big money to manage the flow of the migrant crisis.
They get actually paid more.
And we've seen this.
One of our Logos reporters did a great story showing that the worse the migrant crisis gets,
The more money that these NGOs get, and then the higher the salaries that the executives give themselves.
And so they have this perverse incentive.
When the migrant crisis gets worse, it's very, very good for their business.
That lesson holds across many different domains.
But there's another important component about this.
Why doesn't the government just do these programs itself?
Why doesn't the government just directly manage it?
Because the government is accountable to the people through things like FOIA requests.
Department of Homeland Security, I can request almost any document they're required by law to give it to me.
So I can see what the government is doing, and journalists can monitor the government's actions, the government's communications, but not with non-profit organizations and NGOs.
They can be fully funded by the government.
They could be fulfilling the requirements of a government contract.
They could be moving thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens across the country.
But I, as a journalist and as an American citizen, don't have the right to actually inspect their books in a comprehensive way, don't have the right to inspect their communications, and don't have a right to really request any information at all.
And so we've seen them through all of these various NGOs, shell companies, and real estate schemes.
The federal government is just pumping this entire ecosystem full of money.
It's totally unaccountable, and the incentives are totally at odds with the best interests of the American people.
I mean, tell the people watching a little bit exactly what an NGO is.
It does seem like it's clearly the vehicle designed to circumvent those laws so that you can spend billions of your taxpayer dollars without any accountability to the people.
But they are getting an endless flow of tax dollars every fiscal year.
Can we stop that in a second Trump administration?
Just how entrenched is all of this?
It seems like it's designed to be a workaround.
How do you stop it?
I mean, you know, yes, the short answer is absolutely you could stop it.
I mean, you stop it really through two methods.
First is you stop the flow of illegal migrants over the southern border.
And guess what?
We know how to do it because we saw it between 2016 and 2020.
You know, it was the reality.
It was the status quo.
And so the first thing is stopping the flow of new entrants.
That's a prerequisite.
Absolutely.
You know, a second Trump administration would know how to do that.
The second thing is, is to work with Congress to say, you know what, we have to cut off the flow of funds to these NGOs.
A lot of these NGOs were spun up or significantly expanded only in the last few years.
They could be cut off from funds tomorrow.
We're good to go.
You should be subject to federal FOIA laws.
And so if, let's say, Catholic Charities is getting hundreds of millions of dollars, for example, throughout its various components to facilitate the flow of migrants over the southern border, Americans should say, well, we now have a right, because we're paying for this operation, to request information from you.
You have to provide it.
And so I think those, you know,
Three methods.
Stop the flow of new migrants over the border.
Stop the flow of funds to these corrupt NGOs.
And then any NGO that is running large-scale government contracts require that they be subjected to FOIA.
I love all of those things, and if we have, I'm going to make sure, to the best of my ability, that something like that happens.
But why doesn't the legacy media want to tell these stories?
I would think that if you're an investigative journalist in legacy media and you could show hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer waste going against the will of the people,
Dissolving, uh, you know, so many, uh, creating so many problems.
Uh, why are they so scared of this?
Why are they so okay with hiding it, not reporting about it, talking about it, and or pretending that these people are doing yeoman's work as opposed to exactly the opposite?
Yeah, we could talk for hours on just this topic.
It's a really important topic.
I'll give you two answers, though, that I think are most pertinent.
First is kind of a personal dynamic.
If you were working at, you know,
One of the kind of left-wing magazines, newspapers, TV shows, and you proposed a story on this.
You know, your colleagues would raise their eyebrows, and I think your career chances would be hampered.
You know, I've talked with reporters from a lot of these left-wing newspapers.
I have good, friendly personal relations with them.
And it's very clear, you know, there is an ideological line at these publications.
And if you cross it, you're basically, you know, kind of marginalizing your own chance of rising through the organization and getting its rewards.
But the second, the bigger picture reason for this is that these are partisan entities.
And in fact, that's okay.
This is actually pretty normal in American politics.
Newspapers were almost always partisan in nature, from
Before the American founding, up through, let's say, the World War II period, it changed as it consolidated into the big three television networks that had to have kind of wide range of general advertising.
And now it's fragmenting again into partisan orientation.
And so I'm not optimistic that we're going to be able to change that.
And I'm not frankly convinced that it would be better if we went back to, let's say, the model of the big three networks in, say, 1961.
But what I think it requires is those of us on the right to really do an analysis and then to get smart about how we use the funds that we do have in the most effective way possible.
What kind of news organizations do we need to build?
What kind of reporting techniques do we need to master?
And then what kind of story should we really be telling to drive counter narratives to the establishment narrative?
Look, we've done it.
We're good.
In the kind of narrative flow of the country.
And so while we're at a disadvantage on size, we're not in a disadvantage on what's right, and we're not in a disadvantage if we can be very tactically sound in how we approach these issues.
And so this is the moment where we have to rise to the occasion and we have to build something that can counter what is, of course, a hostile and partisan establishment.
Yeah, I mean, can you talk about that a little bit more?
I mean, even going back to the sort of the concept of like open society after the Cold War.
I mean, the regime's media behavior today, we can actually trace back decades.
You know, can you sort of give us some historical context to how we got where we are?
Yeah, of course.
What you really have, and just take the New York Times.
The New York Times is still the most important newspaper in the country.
It's the agenda setter for the left, but really it's the agenda setter for the median, say, you know, kind of newspaper reader.
It's the most important paper.
Whether we would like that to be or not, that's the fact on the ground.
Part of it is just the composition of who actually works at the New York Times, who are the reporters for the New York Times.
If you go back to, say, 1970, a lot of the people in the New York Times newsroom would be, you know, blue collar, you know, come from the middle class, you know, maybe a state school education, maybe a high school education even, and they'd be going doing the, you know, you know,
Going to drink after work and be like the ink-stained wretches of the New York Times.
And you said this at newspapers all over the place.
That was the model.
Now if you go to something like the New York Times, it's kind of a predominantly Ivy League, kind of populated by products of, let's say, the Ivy League.
It's people with elite family backgrounds, people that come from money, people that are kind of highly educated in these institutions.
But what it brings with it is a totally different cultural sense.
And so you see a totally different cultural sense over time.
I've talked with reporters, you know, at the New York Times about this, especially older reporters.
And then the ideologies that emerged first in those institutions become the default ideologies of the paper.
You actually saw this play out between 2020 and 2024 at the New York Times.
You had young reporters that were going all in on George Floyd, all in on trans, all in on every fashionable
kind of cause from, you know, Barnard College.
And then you had the older reporters thinking, oh man, I'm going to get canceled.
I'm going to get destroyed.
I'm going to get taken into a struggle session.
We have to figure out how to manage the ideology at the paper.
And so you have an ideological conquest that is also synonymous with a kind of class conquest.
A new class of people populates these institutions.
That's bad for obvious reasons, but it's also bad for a reason related to immigration, let's say, surprisingly.
Look, people who go to work at the New York Times, go to work at NPR, go to work at related publications, they don't come from places like a kind of tough, rundown town in the Rust Belt or in Ohio.
They don't live next to, you know, Haitian migrants that have, you know, caused these kind of cultural conflicts in these outer suburbs, exurbs, or, you know, flyover countries, they would say.
And so they're insulated from the consequences.
They're insulated from the reality.
I mean, if it's not happening, you know, in Manhattan or Brooklyn, it might as well not be happening.
Because for them, it's just an ideological symbol.
Haitian migrants are a symbol of diversity, a symbol of tolerance, a symbol of multiculturalism.
Anyone who opposes it is just a racist.
But they don't actually have to deal with the more complex reality on the ground because they're insulated from it.
I think it's a tremendous disservice and I think that the media's blind spots is really because of those reasons.
Yeah, I think that's also why they hate someone like a JD Vance, who actually came from those things, who understands those people, who can talk to them, and they can't even fathom, you know, those are the basket of deplorables.
Why would we even talk to them?
So, I mean, it's pretty bad.
Yeah, it is.
And I mean, I think, you know, and again, you know better than I do.
I don't know your father.
But I mean, I think it's part of the reason why they don't like him, too.
Because look, blue collar, middle class, hardworking people love Trump.
They just love him.
I mean, you see it everywhere.
And for them, you know, for the people, like, for them, it's just a kind of aesthetic question that they hate it.
They hate what it represents.
They hate the symbols of it.
And they hate, too, that they have lost the connection with working people.
Look, the left for 150 years, since Marx, the idea was that they would have the working class, the union household, the factory worker, the agricultural worker, they would rise up and overthrow the elites.
What happened with the left is now it's inverted.
The left controls all of the elite institutions and they're declaring a revolution against the working class people.
That's precisely who Donald Trump and JD Vance are representing in this election.
They're trying to actually stop a revolution of the elites against the American middle class.
And so they are not only, you know, seen as kind of class traitors or kind of gauche, arriviste, you know, outsiders.
You know, your father from Queens, J.D.
Vance, you know, from a rough and tumble background in Ohio.
But they actually threaten to beat those people at their own game.
I think that's what they hate the most.
And that's what I like most about the Trump Vance ticket.
It's like, you know, a true kind of counter-revolutionary movement to say, you know what, we actually love this country.
This country is not fundamentally evil.
We love the people of this country.
And we're going to make sure that the people have their voice heard in these institutions.
Yeah, I mean, I think with, you know, also, you know, newspaper subscriptions are way down.
There's less of that traditional, you know, Sunday paper that everyone kind of used to read.
So instead of trying to sell you an entire paper, they're trying to sell you on every link, every click, every little headline, every piece of clickbait.
You know, it's a fundamental structural flaw.
To the news business, probably, these days, because everything sort of has to be sensationalized, and everything has to be done in 140 characters or less, with no nuance and no nothing, and it's just, you know, sort of outrage cycle after outrage cycle.
Yeah, that's right.
And so look, I like polemics.
I appreciate the history.
Look, American journalism has always been polemical.
It's always based on outrage.
It's always based on scandal.
That's just the history of newspapers.
But what I think that we need to learn, the real lesson for the right, is we can't simply get in these outrage cycles.
We can't get stuck in the cycle.
It has to be used to direct energy towards a concrete goal that is making the country better.
And so what I think is really important about some of these stories, for example, in Springfield, in Ohio, or Aurora, Colorado.
Yes, these are shocking stories.
Yes, these should be setting off alarm bells for Americans.
But we have to orient them always towards then solving the problem and making things better.
And so if we can connect these stories that have real resonance in the country,
With a positive vision for actually solving the underlying problems and then using them to put forth some good policies.
I think that's good journalism.
I think that's a responsible use of even outrage, even scandal.
And I think that, look, that's the name of the game.
That's how we're going to fight.
That's how we're going to wake people up to what's happening.
And that's how we're going to improve the fortunes of this country for everyone.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
I mean, so I guess given all that, Chris, you know, what are the biggest stories right now that aren't being covered?
Do you see any of these things sort of popping up?
Obviously, it's going to be a crazy, what is it, you know, 50 days to the election, 49 days till the election or, you know, are some big investigations that you can preview right now that you're already working on?
Yeah, of course.
We're working, of course, on this series of migration stories.
We want to expose this corrupt migrant NGO scam to show exactly how the Biden-Harris administration is essentially laundering money through these NGOs to facilitate this huge flow of migration.
But look, I think there's and this is a horrible thing, and I hope to be wrong.
But I think that there's a chance of civil conflict.
I know that the groups on the left, for example, are ratcheting up the pressure.
We saw that last time, of course, in 2020, horrifically.
And so I think that we all have to be ready.
And of course, you know, we have to be very careful.
We have to obviously, you know, we're committed to civil discourse.
We're committed to resolving problems through dialogue, through voting, through normal processes.
But we should also be prepared to show exactly, in my case, how the left is organizing its kind of street protest movements.
I have some analysts that are working on this.
They're already seeing movement from some of these violent left-wing networks.
I think we want to expose them before there is any violence to prevent violence.
None of it was organic.
It is all planned.
We shouldn't even be having to talk about these things.
But given the assassination attempts, given what happened with the last election, rather the last cycle from 2020 with George Floyd onward, you know, we have to do the best we can to prevent and disrupt any kind of civil conflict.
Yeah, no, I think that's so important.
Anything you can do on that.
And guys, if you see it, if you see Chris posting about it, make sure you get it out there.
None of it is organic.
None of it is real.
It's all pre-planned.
It's premeditated.
Yeah, and there's no doubt in my mind that they're going to be doing a lot of the same.
And it's disgusting.
It needs to be stopped.
So Chris, thank you very much, guys.
Make sure to check out Chris on X.
You know, as well as some of the other programs that he's doing.
Really important stuff.
One of the few guys out there, you know, not just going with the narrative of the mainstream and has the guts to actually cover it all.
So, Chris Ruffo, thank you so much for joining us.
Really important stuff.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, everyone.
Keep your heads level, keep calm, keep confident, and keep cool.
We'll see you soon, man.
Thanks.
All right.
Guys, I think that was a really important conversation.
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Guys, for those of you who are still tuned in, also, 8 o'clock tonight, we're doing a Twitter Spaces with my father, talking about the Trump crypto platform and all of the things that we'll be doing there, DeFi platform.
You can get all your information there.
Just go to my Twitter page.
Don't look at some of the stuff that's out there from random people.
There's obviously, you know, in that world, you know, there's some great stuff, and there's some people that'll definitely try to scam you.
So, like, you know, look at either, you know, my Twitter page.
Just go to those links.
If it's not on, like, my verified account, it could not be real, perhaps.
So, make sure you're checking it out that way.
But that's gonna be live, 8 o'clock tonight.
We'll give you a lot of information about what's going on in there.
I think that's going to be really important, so don't forget to go check that out.
8 o'clock live on Twitter Spaces.
Go to my Twitter profile or my ex-profile.
Sorry, I still can't get used to that one.
You know, check it out.
I put up the link or retweeted the link for the Spaces earlier tonight.
So again, just be very careful where you're getting your information from.
Make sure it's coming from our verified sources.
You know, a lot of great guys in that world and a lot of, you know,
Some people that will play those games, so make sure you're careful with that.
Check it out there and I will see you guys again on Thursday.
