Newsom’s Bridge to Nowhere: Fraud Takes Over California, LIVE with Sean Davis | Triggered Ep.326
Sean Davis and guest Sean Davis expose alleged fraud in California, starting with Nick Shirley's $170 million hospice billing scandal involving fake companies in Los Angeles County. They detail James O'Keefe's undercover findings of voter registration bribery on Skid Row, contrasting it with Senator Alex Padilla's refusal to address violations. The discussion highlights the ballooning Wallace-Annenberg Wildlife Crossing cost from $64 million to $114 million, criticizing Governor Gavin Newsom's AI-generated meme response and linking these issues to systemic Democratic corruption that demands structural election reforms and stricter oversight. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey guys, and welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.
It's great to be live with you in studio, and I hope you're all having an incredible Thursday.
Big show for you tonight.
Nick Shirley, the young citizen journalist who blew open that Minnesota daycare scandal, just dropped another bombshell.
This time, it's hospice fraud in California.
We're talking $170 million in fake hospice companies, empty offices, luxuries, cars parked outside that he alone was able to discover.
This is a 20-something-year-old journalist that's able to uncover this.
Imagine how much more there is.
Then we've got James O'Keefe going undercover on Skid Row in Los Angeles.
And what does he find?
Cash, marijuana, cigarettes.
I don't know, just being handed out to homeless people in exchange for signing voter registration forms and election petitions.
And then, because California clearly just can't stop being, I don't know, California, we've got Gavin Newsom's $114 million bridge to nowhere.
A bridge, literally, just goes over a highway, a bridge for cougars and butterflies.
Not entirely sure what a butterfly needs a bridge for because they can fly, but you know, anyway, I wish I was making this stuff up, but I'm not.
And later on the show, Sean Davis from the Federalist is joining us live.
So buckle up.
Guys, make sure you're liking, sharing, subscribing, so you never miss one of these major episodes.
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For all of the top headlines that we cover here on the show, go over to my news app, MXM News, like minute by minute, where you can get the mainstream news without the mainstream bias.
And of course, don't forget about our brave sponsors for having the guts to support this program.
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And before we get to Sean, let's get into some of the top headlines.
Fraudulent Hospice Centers Exposed00:03:41
So if you remember very clearly, Nick Shirley, this is the independent journalist who was on the show a few weeks back, the kid from Utah who blew open the Minnesota daycare fraud scandal back in December.
He testified before Congress.
He sat in a White House roundtable.
He got a seat at the State of the Union, all in under three months.
Well, guys, he did it again.
And this time, it might even be bigger.
Shirley just dropped a 40-minute video on X exposing what he says is over $170 million in hospice and home health care fraud in Los Angeles County alone, just LA County.
And within two days, nearly 9 million people have watched it.
He found basically abandoned buildings turned into offices that are fake companies pretending to be healthcare services.
The way it works is you get a hold of a Medicare beneficiary's number, you enroll people into hospice care, you bill the government for millions, and if anyone starts sniffing around, you pack up and you disappear.
That's it.
That's the business model.
There's nothing else to it.
It's that simple.
Shirley and his crew went building to building in Los Angeles.
And what did they find?
Well, they found shuttered doors, piled up mail, dead phone lines, zero evidence of actual patients, zero evidence of anyone, you know, receiving hospice care, receiving any care.
But these outfits have billed Medicare and California's Medi-Cal program for tens of millions of dollars.
And the real number is probably much, much more.
Los Angeles County has seen a thousand percent, thousand percent surge in hospice care spending in just a few years.
LA County now accounts for 10% of all home health care expenditure in the entire United States.
The entire United States, just LA County, 10% of it.
Let that sink in.
One county, 10% of the whole country.
But don't take my word for it.
Take a look at what Nick found on the ground.
Or grandma.
Yeah, no, no, we're doing anything.
Okay.
Yeah, because we're seeing like we got Guardian of Angels, Blossom Hospice here.
I don't know who they are, but this is okay.
Well, we'll keep looking for Guardian of Angels then.
Yeah, I don't know about that.
So they say they only take it from hospitals, which could be a valid response.
Let's go see if we can find Guardian of Angels.
This place is just filled with hospice centers and home health care centers.
You have one right here, seven-star home healthcare.
And then up here, you have Miracle Healing Hospice.
So this hospice location, Miracle Healing Hospice, in 2023, they charged $1.3 million and per beneficiary was $32,000 for 38 beneficiaries per beneficiary.
That comes out to $32,935.
Let's see if grandma could check herself into this one.
I'm just trying to be a good grandson.
I mean, we're knocking the door.
No one's coming.
We look inside the window.
Empty building.
In 2023, this place received $1.3 million.
Nothing.
This is insane.
This is insane.
Okay, well, since we can't go to Miracle, let's see if we can get SX Home Health.
It says they're open Monday through Friday from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
It's getting really hard to find grandma the healthcare she needs these days.
Governor Newsom Ignores $170 Million Scandal00:02:59
It really is, isn't it?
We got SX Home Healthcare.
They're not open, so it's all right because you can go to Alpha Omega Bentana Hospice Inc.
Not only are these shell companies, these are shell buildings.
It's like somebody took a motel building and turned it into a hundred fraudulent.
Think about what you just watched, guys.
Empty offices or offices with a couple people who have no clue what they're doing.
Millions and millions of your tax dollars just gone, vanished into thin air.
And when the cameras show up, they run.
This is your money.
This is Medicare.
This is supposed to be for people who are dying, for people who need end-of-life care, for people who have actually paid into these systems.
And these criminals are using it as an ATM machine and committing fraud.
Now, you would think that, I don't know, if you're the governor of California and a journalist just exposed $170 million of fraud happening on your watch, you may want to, I don't know, maybe, just maybe, I don't know, you know, launch an investigation or something, maybe do something.
But this is Gavin Newsom we're talking about.
So what does he do?
His office puts out an AI-generated meme depicting Nick Shirley as a predator, lurking outside a daycare with cameras strapped to his body with a quote bubble that says, hey, I can see your kids.
I mean, really?
You know, I know the left can't meme, but that's kind of next level given what Nick has been able to uncover.
That was the official response from the governor's office of the state of California.
They think Nick Shirley is the problem, not the fraudsters that they seem to be enabling or that they're either perhaps on the payroll of.
And while most Democrats feel the same way, John Fetterman just put Newsom on blast.
Celebrate any journalist or any activist doing that.
And what you know, Governor Newsom put out a disgusting video implying that he's a pedophile or he's that.
Like, why?
You know, like, I mean, like, that's like kind of a smear.
You know, like, you can, you may, you want to disagree, but to imply that someone, someone in one of the most gross kinds of terms like that, well, it's like, hey, shouldn't we agree?
Like, you know, eliminate all the waste.
If it exists under my purfew, let's eliminate it.
Let's call that what it is.
You know, I'm not going to call someone or imply that you're a pedophile or you're going after kids in gross ways.
And this is the guy, Gavin Newsom, who thinks he should be president, who's polling as a frontrunner of the Democrat Party for 2028.
Election Fraud and Fake Signatures00:15:53
This is his answer to $170 million in fraud, 10% of the money spent in America, you know, in this county alone, to attack the messenger.
Pathetic.
It's absolutely pathetic.
Although it's 100% the Democrat playbook.
And staying in California, because apparently this is a state, I guess it's just like a magnet for all things corruption.
James O'Keefe just released part one of what might be his most explosive undercover investigation yet.
He and his team went undercover as homeless people on Skid Row in Los Angeles.
And what they found is a federal crime, literally caught on tape.
O'Keefe's undercover journalists documented dozens and dozens of instances of petitioners offering cash, cigarettes, and weed in exchange for signatures on election petitions and voter registration forms.
Petitioners just told the undercover journalists that they're getting paid $7 to $10 per signature, with some earning up to $1,000 a day doing this.
$1,000 a day to commit election fraud?
Check this out.
Bill pinned to this man's shirt.
This is a signal to all nearby homeless people that he is a source of the money.
Paying citizens to sign petitions is a violation of California Elections Code 18603, which states, quote, every person who offers or gives money or other valuable consideration to another in exchange for his or her signature on a state, county, municipal, or district initiative, referendum, or recall petition is guilty of a misdemeanor.
But it wasn't just cash that we saw exchanged for signatures.
We also saw the homeless being bribed with cigarettes and even drugs, marijuana, and all of that is considered valuable consideration.
And according to the petitioner that we spoke with earlier, it would be a crime just to give out water to anyone who is signing petitions.
Now, you don't give people money to sign it.
That's illegal.
That's illegal.
I can't even hand out water.
Really?
You can't even hand out water?
It's very hot in Los Angeles.
Unfortunately, it's like voter ID.
Or no, not voter ID.
It's voter fraud, they will call it.
Yeah, you're basically enticing somebody.
Hey, if you sign all these, I'll give you a free water.
Our undercover journalist continued to engage with this group in Skid Row and found the majority of homeless people who were being paid to sign, as you might expect, didn't even know what it was they were signing.
What are we doing?
$3 petitions.
What's your signature, date, address, and then after nine, they're going to give you an additional one more sign.
After that, one more, you get $3.
They were also encouraging the homeless to just make up random addresses such as Pinocchio Lane.
Oh, this woman named Brenda Brown acknowledges that if the person signing isn't a registered voter, she won't get paid $7 for the signature.
Brenda Brown also has a stack of voter registration forms so she can get the homeless people to first register to vote.
And guys, it gets worse.
These petitioners were instructing homeless people to use fake addresses.
One employee at Wingart Center told an undercover journalist, you can just put Pinocchio Elaine.
Pinocchio Lane.
I mean, seems very fitting for a liar.
Now, to be very clear about what's happening here, paying citizens to sign petition violates California Elections Code 18603.
Paying people to register to vote is a federal felony under 52 USC 10307.
This isn't a gray area.
This isn't a technicality.
This is a crime caught on camera.
And it's probably happening pretty much every day.
And these are the same groups, guys.
The same people who want to tell you that the Save America Act is a bad idea.
Why?
Because it will ruin their fraud scheme.
And that's it.
We've been saying it forever.
But if you actually had to show, like, I don't know, a birth certificate to register to vote, it's a problem.
They're not going to be able to collect these fraudulent petitions, these fraudulent registrations.
They're not going to be able to get those people to vote for Democrats in the future.
And if they then had to actually show up and actually vote and actually present an ID, rather than whatever mail-in ballot system from Pinocchio Lane that they're scheming for here, it creates a problem.
And here's what makes it even worse.
There are reports that some of these petitions are misrepresenting what people are signing.
They're telling homeless people they're signing a petition to increase the minimum wage.
So they're not just buying votes, they're lying about what's even being signed.
And this is happening in broad daylight in one of the largest cities in America.
Cash and drugs for votes.
And they've been doing this for who knows how long.
O'Keeffe says there will be a new tape dropping every day until someone is arrested or indicted.
So I'd say make sure you send this or the clip, whatever it may be, to your local congressman.
Send it to the DOJ, send it to those who can make a difference.
I'll be doing the same so that they can actually do something about it.
And by the way, you know who won't talk about it?
You guessed it, guys.
California Democrats.
Check this out.
Recent undercover reporting in Los Angeles is showing that there is cash for ballot deals being made.
I'm with the press.
I'm with the press.
I don't think that's a press.
Well, we're bad.
It's right here.
My bad is Cash for ballot measures, cash for ballot deals.
No, Gavin Newsom is now demanding prosecutions for these cash for ballot deals being made in Los Angeles.
This is your state of California where this is happening.
Why are you opposed to the safeguards in the Save America Act?
There's election fraud actively happening in the state of California, and you're opposed to the Save America Act.
Can you explain why?
Two different things.
Two different things.
There is election fraud happening in California.
Why not be a proponent of the Save America Act to protect American elections?
He made his point very clear.
He did not, and the American people so want to answer.
That's your United States Senator from California, to be clear, Alex Padilla, who was California's Secretary of the State before this.
The guy who was in charge of elections.
The guy literally in charge of elections for the state of California.
And he can't even answer a question about election fraud happening in his own state on tape.
He just runs away?
Of course.
He knows exactly what's been going on.
He's fine with it.
It benefits the Democrat machine.
Of course, he's not going to do anything about it.
Again, it's why we have to pass the Save America Act to stop this insanity from happening before Democrats destroy our country.
And just to understand everything we're talking about, this is just in one state.
This is just in one area, within a county, within a state.
That's why we're going through these stories one by one, because this is theft built on lie after lie.
And it doesn't stop there.
Because Christopher Ruffo, another friend of the show over at the City Journal, just dropped a piece that shows how so much of this waste, fraud, and abuse is standing right in plain sight.
Back in 2022, Newsom broke ground on something called the Wallace-Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, a bridge that goes over a few lanes of highway on the 101 freeway in Southern California for animals, specifically cougars and butterflies.
Again, not sure why you need a bridge for butterflies, but it's California.
I'll give them a little bit of leeway because they're insane.
But at the ceremony, Newsom said the state had committed $54 million and promised they'd complete the job with another $10 million.
So $64 million in total for a bridge for mountain lions.
Here was Newsom announcing the project a few years ago.
Again, personally, this is for me to be here and to be a small part of it, working with our remarkable colleagues in the state Senate, the Assembly, working with local officials and federal officials.
$54 million the state has put up for this program and we'll complete the job within another 10.
Well, guess what?
It's 2026.
The bridge was supposed to be done by now.
And the cost has exploded to $114 million, including $77 million in state funds, more than double its expense.
That's $21 million over budget on a bridge for cougars and butterflies.
Okay?
We're showing it here on the screen.
That's the actual bridge.
$114 million?
You have to be kidding me.
And remember, California is projecting a $2.9 billion budget deficit for this fiscal year.
But sure, let's spend the $114 million on a butterfly bridge that still isn't finished and that has no real purpose.
This is the same state where hospice fraud is running rampant, where people are being paid cash and weed to sign voter registration forms, where homelessness is out of control.
And the priority is a bridge for mountain lions to cross the freeway.
You can't make this stuff up anymore.
This is what happens when there is zero rule other than Democrat rule.
When you have one party rule, you have zero accountability.
When one party has run a state for decades with no real opposition, this is exactly what you get.
And it's why the new fraud task force, headed up by J.P. Vance, is as critical as it's ever been.
All right, guys, we've got a lot more to get into.
And joining me now is Sean Davis, co-founder and CEO of the Federalists.
Sean, great to have you back, man.
Great to be back.
Thank you for having me.
It's my pleasure.
So, you know, I don't know if you're, I think you were listening in.
I saw you there on the screen, but, you know, we just ran through all of the different examples of fraud in California.
I mean, I want to say all of, because I'm sure there's so much more, but, you know, this is what a 20-something-year-old journalist was able to uncover.
And James O'Keefe, between Nick Shirley, hospice fraud, James O'Keefe, you know, cash for ballots, you know, and another bridge to nowhere like the train to nowhere.
They're not trying to hide the fraud.
It's obvious.
It stands out like a sore thumb.
Should this be a line in the sand for us as a movement?
You know, I'm so tired of the word accountability.
This just needs indictments at this point.
Yeah, amen.
So I got my start in politics working for Tom Coburn, senator from Oklahoma, who was a very famous hater of waste, fraud, and abuse and spent all his time and energy going after that.
So I have a special hatred for seeing all this waste and this fraud.
And it should absolutely be a line in the sand for the right.
It should absolutely be a line in the sand for conservatives and for Republicans because you just can't tolerate it.
I don't see how you can possibly look at this stuff and tolerate it and say, you know, it's a good idea that the Somali fraudsters in Minneapolis are getting hundreds of millions or maybe even billions of dollars to do fake autism therapy classes.
It's ridiculous to be spending hundreds of millions on fake hospice.
What these are, these are just bogus political patronage programs for Democrats.
That's purely what they are.
They are payouts to the Democrat client parties to make them stay on the reservation so they'll keep on voting.
It has to be gone.
You have to get rid of all of it.
And I'm with you.
Like, I don't want to hear about, oh, well, you know, we got it on the record that we found the fraud.
I want people prosecuted.
I want people tried.
And I want people convicted.
Because if you allow this type of fraud to exist in the country, you don't actually have democracy.
You don't have a constitutional republic.
What you have is an oligarchy just looting the people for the benefit of its corrupt clients.
Yeah, and I would think with, you know, some, you know, reasonable actuarial practices or accounting practices, they should be able to track the amount of donations from these fake hospices and such that are just being kicked back to Democrat Party politicians to either participate or turn the other way.
But I mean, I would think there's got to be a way to figure out the quid pro quo because we both know it exists.
It's there.
I mean, we know what the awesome power of the FBI and investigators can do because we saw how the Biden FBI went and found grannies who went by the wrong velvet rope on January 6th and tracked down their purchases and tracked their phones and went into their bank accounts.
I mean, I think you were debanked for having wrong views.
So clearly there's the mechanism and the technology to do this.
What is lacking is actually the will to do it in the will to see it done to the end.
And unfortunately, actual oversight, doing this type of investigative work, not just finding the targets like Nick Shirley is doing, and he's doing an amazing job of it, but going in and seeing all the financial records, parsing through them, looking at contribution records, that's really hard work.
It's not particularly sexy and involves sitting around looking at spreadsheets and receipts and stuff like that all day.
And unfortunately, a lot of politicians, even on the right, they don't really like spending their time doing the nitty-gritty hard investigative work that's required to do things like get convictions.
And so that's one thing that I've always been pushing for: I want to make oversight great again.
I wish legislators and people who have this authority and this obligation to do that would actually dig into it and use these awesome powers and abilities that we've given them to root this stuff out.
We can't just complain about it.
We actually have to have people in office who are willing to go in and do the hard work and root it out and put these people in prison.
Yeah, without question.
And, you know, but by the way, like, Newsom wants to be president.
How do you run on this record?
I mean, are we missing something?
You know, he's one of the leaders of the Democrat Party, a frontrunner for 2028.
I mean, this is going on under his nose.
It's probably been going on for years.
You know, just man, imagine that guy's running the country.
Are we missing something here?
Like, I don't even understand it.
Yeah, I think we're missing how the Democrat brain works.
I mean, remember, they nominated Kamala Harris to run for president.
This is a woman who, yes.
Yeah, so I remember when she was AG, there was this great investigator named David DeLeiden who went and did incredible undercover work to expose the illegal trade in aborted baby body parts.
Democrats Attack the Messenger00:15:02
He had people on camera admitting to it.
And instead of taking action against that, Kamala Harris went and indicted him and tried to put him in prison.
So it's almost like there's this weird thing in Democrat politics, especially if you're from California, that it doesn't matter how incompetent you are or how corrupt you are, as long as you're giving money to Democrat clients and as long as you're trying to put your Republican opponents in prison, by the way, for doing First Amendment journalism work, that's all it takes.
They don't care if you've committed total crimes against nature and humanity in ruining one of the most beautiful and lush and rich states in the country, one of the most beautiful places on earth.
Imagine being given California with all its advantages and resources and its beauty and its weather and doing to it what Democrats have done.
But apparently Democrat voters look at that and they say, yeah, yeah, we actually look at the ruination of one of the greatest states ever as a perfect qualification for running the country.
It's a big problem.
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?
It's nuts.
Now, the O'Keeffe investigation is particularly explosive because this is a federal crime caught on tape.
Cash and drugs and cigarettes for voter registrations.
I mean, the DOJ says they'll aggressively pursue it.
In your opinion, do we need structural changes to how we go after fraud or do we just need to get more aggressive in actually pursuing it?
Yeah, I think we need to do both.
And I think James O'Keefe did a really, really good job of rooting out what I would call kind of the low IQ voter fraud.
It doesn't scale particularly well.
They're going to particular homeless individuals and crazy people and getting them to do things for them.
That's a hard thing to scale.
But I mean, good for him for catching these people.
Everyone involved in that needs to be in prison.
So we should definitely be going after that.
The voter fraud that I worry more about is the kind that we, I think, saw beginning to take shape in 2020 and the kind that can only come about from mass, almost universal mail-in balloting, where you actually have no ability to determine whether somebody turning in the ballot is the one who actually casts the ballot.
You have millions, tens of millions, over 100 million ballots going out.
Who knows where?
They may be going to P.O. boxes that are getting 100 voter ballots each.
They may be going to like UPS stores.
They may be going to office buildings.
And you have no idea if the actual individual voter wanted that to happen, if they even know it's happening.
And I think that's the means by which we see elections rigged on a large scale.
And I think that's what requires more structural reforms.
I think the further you get from somebody casting a ballot and immediately being counted, the greater the possibility you have for fraud in election rigging.
Once you're adding multiple links to the chain with different custody of ballots and all that, the more you have that, the harder it is to have ballot integrity, the harder it is to have election integrity, and the easier it is to have fraud in rigged elections.
And so I think we need to crack down on the fraud, but we also do need structural changes that make it harder for people who actually aren't casting legal ballots to do so.
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, you've been running the Federalists now for over a decade.
The landscape, certainly in media, has changed dramatically.
Nick Shirley is getting, you know, 100, 138 million views on X. O'Keefe is getting DOJ responses within hours of dropping a video.
You know, meanwhile, legacy media is just hemorrhaging viewers.
Is this the way forward, you know, to ultimately get results?
I don't know if it's the exact way forward.
It's definitely a great step forward.
And people like Nick Shirley, I wish we could clone him 10 million times and do this type of independent journalism everywhere.
I think where journalism, especially on the right, works best is when you can have organizations like mine, the Federalists, you can have other groups who have lots and lots of trained seasoned reporters be able to work with people like Nick Shirley to take the ball that he's gotten and then run that down the field.
It's a really difficult thing.
And I think we're actually in this weird spot in media now where we're kind of stuck between these two new paradigms, where we have lots of independent journalism, but we also still have a lot of the legacy infrastructure.
And then we're still dealing with a totally corrupt big tech.
You know, the kind of the golden age, I think, of journalism on the internet was right when the internet was getting started, 2000s, maybe 2010.
You could find anything.
Google was amazing.
No one was being censored.
And then they realized after Hillary lost in 2016, because she was a terrible candidate, oh crap, we got a problem here because if people have free access to information, they might make decisions that we, their left-wing tech overlords, don't really want them to make.
So we're going to start doing the censorship.
So I think the story for the last 10 years is this war between big tech and its own users happening in parallel with this war between corrupt legacy media and everyone really on our side that they don't like.
And so I actually think the best thing going forward, it's not just having great independent journalists like Nick Shirley.
It's in having control of your own platforms like Rumble, for example.
You know, without Elon going and buying going and buying Twitter, making it X, I think we would have been cooked.
There would have just been a total information monopoly by the left.
So I think you have to have great independent journalists, but you also need to have control of your own distribution platforms.
Because if we continue to allow a Facebook or an Apple or a Google to control 80 or 90% of distribution, we're never actually going to have a free and independent media that can hold people accountable.
Well, and I think to your point, yes, it has always started with tech in terms of the big censorship complex.
I see perhaps even worse than Google now would be what's going on in AI.
You saw the stuff a couple of weeks ago with Anthropic saying, hey, well, we're going to be the AI for the, we want to be the AI for the Department of Defense, but like, you know, we, the rulers of Anthropic, actually get to decide what's the appropriate response.
You know, if they're sending missiles at us and, you know, maybe the enemy could be harmed more than the disparate cause of a weapon hitting the United States.
We get to overrule that.
And they're like, wait, wait, what?
Like, you don't get to make decisions for the DOD.
Like, you don't get to overrule or program these systems to be able to make those decisions in, let's call it with a woke mindset than what the Department of Defense would want to do.
And so that tech threat didn't just sort of get mitigated a little bit by Elon.
It's gotten worse now with the advent of AI.
I think, you know, Grok has done a great job of that, but I'm worried that whether it's Gemini, Google's platform in AI, obviously you saw the fallout with Anthropic.
I mean, they actually want to control and be the decision makers of all of these things going forward.
So we can't just win the tech battle as it relates to information.
If we lose to woke AI, that's probably even worse because on Google, you can see the search of, you search a subject and only CNN pops up.
You probably realize you're getting biased information.
I would think with AI, you could be fed information that just slowly changes the way you think.
And it does so very, you know, very subtly and very over time to literally change someone's entire mindset by the information that they're giving them.
Yeah, and it gets especially scary when you see what's happening with all the different agents and being able to have agents do things on your behalf.
So let's take X, for example.
They have this community notes feature, which is kind of cool, community-driven that allows people to do fact-checking and vote on it and whatnot.
Well, what happens in the midst of the propaganda wars that are constantly happening when it comes to foreign policy, where suddenly you can deploy your own AI bots to go and game community notes thing?
You can claim you're just fact-checking.
You're not censoring.
And then suddenly, even the stuff that's supposed to be fairly democratic, suddenly that can be gamed.
So, I mean, I find the AI future, I'm not a technologist.
I find the AI future to be fairly terrifying in terms of what they're going to be able to do to us with surveillance, with kind of this brainwashing that you see through subtle changing of facts.
It's a brave new world out there.
And I just, I don't know how we're going to handle it.
And I think the only way we can is by doing total decentralization.
So you don't have these one or two or three evil tech oligarchs suddenly being the sole deciders of what you're told and what information you get access to.
Yeah, I think without question, I mean, you and I seem to get it, but Washington Republicans, well, you know, that seems to be a very different story.
As I've said, my father is making decisions for the long term, not just for the next election cycle.
So, you know, what is the right call to action right now for voters?
What is the right pressure point for Republicans, especially in the Senate who seem to be so inactive on things that are wildly popular with the American public, like the Save America Act or whatever it may be?
What do you think needs to be done right now?
Yeah, one of the best lessons I learned about power and politics, I learned from Dick Armey, I think almost 20 years ago, former majority leader for Republicans in the House.
And he made this observation that Washington ends up being controlled by a group he calls the bedwetters.
You've got the Republicans, they're going to do what they want.
You've kind of got the base of Democrats are going to do what they want.
But the balance of power is always this squishy 10 or 20% of House members or senators.
And they're controlled entirely by their fear because they're constantly going to be wetting the bed.
And the insight he had was they're going to be afraid of someone.
They might as well be afraid of your side.
So you should control their fear.
You should make sure that you're the one they're worried about ending their political career and making sure they lose their next election.
And so I think that constant pressure, especially on stuff like the Save America Act, these guys have to constantly be terrified that they're about to lose their next election.
And a great example of this, I think, is John Cornyn.
This guy who is doing nothing for MAGA, nothing for American First for years and years and years.
Suddenly, he's in a really, really tough reelection in Texas.
And now, magically overnight, he's the best friend of base conservative voters.
And suddenly, he wants to do election integrity.
They turn into a creature that I call the leapier conservative.
You know, every four or six years in the case of senators, they magically discover that they're conservative again.
And it's because they have an election coming up.
So I think the best thing that the voters on the right can do right now is make these people understand you will never have this job in Washington that you covet again if you don't do exactly what we tell you to do.
And when we tell you to do it, and I think the main topic right now is the Save America Act.
I don't care what excuses they have, how hard it is, how much they're going to have to work.
They might have to work, I don't know, a couple of five-day work weeks in a row.
Do what it takes to get the Save America Act passed because we're not going to have a republic for much longer if we don't have secure, safe elections with integrity.
So I think that's what we need to focus on is getting the Save America Act passed.
Yeah.
And again, the same folks all in on the fraud are the most outspoken against the Save America Act.
I mean, it's sort of wild, but it tells you everything you need to know.
And yet, we still have to battle in the Senate to get it done.
It's just mind-blowing to me.
You know, an issue that's 84% popular across the board, everyone in America, not just conservatives, this is truly 80-plus% issue.
You'd think that'd be a no-brainer, and it's not.
Yeah, it's the constant battle we have on the right that's so frustrating.
You know, we could complain for, I think, weeks on end about it.
The Democrats, they have 51% of the power and they get 100% of their agenda through.
We end up with control of the Supreme Court and the Congress and the White House.
And for some reason, there's always a couple Republicans in the Senate who make sure that we don't even get 51% of our agenda.
But the solution here is in primaries, make sure that the person you're voting for in primaries is the person who's going to do what they said they were going to do when they ran for election.
That's the most important thing.
And I think Republicans have probably taken for granted a little too much how important their own primary is.
It's not enough just to beat the Democrats, although you have to do that.
You have to make sure that the person you have going to battle against the Democrats is battle-tested, is trustworthy, and isn't going to run for the Hills or play possum or stick their head in the sand whenever the time to fight comes.
We actually need fighters in the Senate and in the House and in the Supreme Court.
So when the battle comes, we know that the outcome is assured instead of constantly hoping that, oh, maybe they'll actually do the right thing this time.
I guess on that topic, what's your view of the talking filibuster?
If Democrats want to block the Save America Act, shouldn't we make them stand up there all day and night explaining to the American people why requiring citizenship to vote is a bad idea?
I mean, I think that would be very useful to anyone running against them in a general election on an 84% issue.
Why won't Republicans even do that?
Yeah, I think the talking filibuster is fantastic because it actually switches the burden of maintaining the floor and maintaining opposition.
The recent practice, and I'd say probably over the last, definitely the 10 or years or so, is that once Democrats say, hey, we're going to filibuster this, Republicans kind of just throw up their hands and say, well, guys, I guess we don't have 60.
We should just move on to the next thing.
And Democrats never have to work for it.
They never have to make a sacrifice for it.
They just get to say, hey, we oppose it and move on.
And what the talking filibuster does is it switches that work calculus.
So now instead of just granting them what I call the zombie filibuster, where they don't have to do anything, they don't even have to show up.
They could just effectively not vote by not showing up for work.
I mean, it's a pretty big deal.
Yeah.
So instead of putting the burden on us to hit 60, we should put the burden on them to maintain the floor 24-7 for days or weeks or months.
If something is as important as whether you can trust your election, I don't really care how long it takes, whether it takes a month or a week or three months.
And I've looked at their workload this year.
I think they're voting on average once a day.
Maybe.
They've passed a handful of bills.
They generally work three, maybe four days a week.
You guys are in the greatest deliberative body in the world in history.
Congress Must Do Their Job00:03:04
You have an incredibly important job.
You've been given terms of six years.
Go and do your job.
Deliberate.
Make them debate.
Make the Democrats vote it down and make them exhaust all their options so that when they're out of their speeches and when they're out of their amendments, you can just vote on the bill.
So I wish the Senate would do that.
Unfortunately, and you've probably noticed this in some of your time in Washington.
A lot of these guys really don't like working hard.
They love the trappings of office and they loved being called the honorable so-and-so.
They love getting to avoid TSA when they go to the airport and getting walked through.
What they don't love is that really, really difficult work of the long days and the long hours and the poring through spreadsheets and research reports.
A lot of them don't like that.
And my message to them is tough.
You are elected to do the job and we expect you to do the job.
So go and do the job.
No more excuses.
Pass the Save America Act.
Get it done.
Yeah, I mean, I think more than anything, the American people just want clarity on what's happening and why it's happening.
You know, for example, right now, TSA agents aren't getting paid because Democrats want to punish TSA agents for no other reason other than, I guess, the left is totally consumed with TDS, Trump derangement syndrome.
But do we need to communicate that better?
I see on the mainstream media, well, it's to defund ICE and that's why we're standing up for it.
But that's not true because ICE has been funded.
It has nothing to do with the rest of TSA.
So it's the Democrats' way of inflicting pain on the public.
But again, the mainstream media is going to run around and say, oh, it's because of Republicans doing this.
It's like, no, that's actually been done.
It's taken care of.
It has nothing to do with it whatsoever.
But they don't know that.
I mean, how do we communicate that better?
Because I don't think the question is, should we communicate it better?
I mean, I think that's pretty clear.
How do we communicate that better?
Yeah, repetition is the key to persuasion.
And I'll talk with our staff a lot.
We'll go on television.
We'll do radio hits.
And one thing I'll hear sometimes is, oh, well, I already said that thing.
I need to come up with something new.
And I tell them, no, no, no, say the same thing over and over and over again.
You have to repeat the same message.
You have to assume that before it sinks in, someone has to hear the same thing probably 20 or 30 times.
It's so easy to tune out things that are happening in politics that you can't just go and say, oh, well, I wrote this one article or I had this great tweet or I had this one great media appearance.
You need like 50 of those each.
So I think persistence is probably more important than having the exact perfect message yourself.
Because look at the lines at the airport.
That's a pretty great message.
You know, you get some person losing a flight, not being able to go see a loved one because a flight got canceled because they couldn't get through security.
That's its own message.
And so we just need to make clear, look, this is Democrats mad that they lost the election, mad that the border secure is secured now.
And they're trying to do a backdoor renegotiation of our border laws.
And they're trying to use people's travel plans and people's livelihoods as leverage.
And it's just wrong.
And they should probably stop doing it.
Polls Show Public Support00:02:56
Yeah.
You know, when you talk to voters, you know, some days they'll say, you know, it feels like they're winning on every front.
And other days, you know, probably not so much.
Again, beyond a lot of the noise, you know, what are the key signals and indicators you're paying attention to right now?
Yeah, so I look at polls, not in this micro sense where I'm parsing all the crosstabs.
You can get a general sense of kind of like the trend of things by looking at polls.
I try to gauge the vibes.
You know, people may laugh at that.
Like, how do you do that?
Like, I don't know.
I've been doing this for 20 years.
You generally get a sense of kind of where the mood of people is, which is different than just looking at a poll.
You know, the vibes in 2024 for Republicans were incredible.
They had all the energy.
They were having all the fun.
I didn't need to look at a single poll to know how that election was going to go.
And then I think the third thing I look at is: you know, if you think of polls as being from the bottom up and the vibes being kind of what's happening in the middle, the top-down kind of version is what's happening in the country right now.
Is the economy good?
What's the market look like?
What are prices?
Are we at war?
What does that look like?
So, those are the kind of three big things.
The polls, the vibes, and kind of the overall macro trends in the country are what I look at.
All right.
Well, Sean, I really appreciate it.
Thanks for everything that you're doing.
Everyone, go out there and check out the Federalist.
Sean, I'm sure we'll be talking again in the not too distant future because I'm sure there'll be more fraud out of California discovered.
I'm really psyched that now we're going to have a fraud czar JD Vance out there looking at all of this because I think the American people deserve to know what's actually happening with their taxpayer dollars.
So, really appreciate what you as always.
Again, guys, go check out the Federalist.
Sean, I'll talk to you soon.
Thank you, sir.
Take care.
Thank you.
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