Rubin Report - Dave Rubin - Zohran Mamdani Humiliated as He’s Reduced to Begging for Money
Aired: 2026-05-01
Duration: 51:00


=== First Time Newsman Guest (01:21) ===

[00:00:00]  Thank you.
[00:00:08]  Why, hello there, Internet people.
[00:00:09]  I'm Dave Rubin.
[00:00:10]  This is the Rubin Report.
[00:00:12]  It's May 1st, 2026.
[00:00:15]  Where is the year going?
[00:00:17]  And because it's a Friday, we're doing another Friday roundtable extravaganza.
[00:00:20]  And joining me today is Rubin Report veteran Josh Hammer, host of the Josh Hammer Show.
[00:00:26]  And joining me, first time Rubin Report guest.
[00:00:29]  And Ed, I hate to tell you, it can always be last time too, depending on what happens in the next 40 minutes.
[00:00:33]  I'm not going to tell you about that.
[00:00:34]  It is host of Newsmax's The Briefing, Ed Henry.
[00:00:38]  Gentlemen, welcome to the program.
[00:00:39]  Always excited to see you.
[00:00:40]  First time, long time.
[00:00:42]  Ed, I feel I should give you 30 seconds to talk before we begin because Josh has been on a thousand times.
[00:00:46]  I've been on your show many times, but you're an actual newsman.
[00:00:50]  You know, I feel like, well, but you are.
[00:00:52]  I mean, you've been done the mainstream thing, you've bounced around doing some things, but you're a real sort of DC newsman, which I feel like in some senses almost doesn't exist anymore.
[00:01:03]  Yeah.
[00:01:04]  It's so foreign to look at it sometimes.
[00:01:06]  Like, obviously, the correspondence dinner was overshadowed by this awful shooting, but you know, the whole pomp and circumstance and the preening and stuff, I definitely was part of that.
[00:01:15]  So I can't.
[00:01:16]  I did that for years.
[00:01:17]  I was president of the Correspondence Association.
[00:01:18]  Now I live in South Florida, like both of you.

=== New York Budget Reset (13:39) ===

[00:01:21]  It's like a whole nother world.
[00:01:22]  I'm sure you've talked about it on the show a lot.
[00:01:24]  And it's real America.
[00:01:26]  And it's so much fun here because you feel like you have a real life.
[00:01:30]  You have amazing weather and you're not living literally in the swamp anymore.
[00:01:34]  And so I've got a new show on Newsmax cable, by the way, 5 p.m. Eastern, the big take.
[00:01:38]  You've been on that.
[00:01:39]  You've been on the briefing as well at 6 p.m. on streaming.
[00:01:42]  So at Newsmax, like everybody else, obviously we're doing a little bit of both.
[00:01:44]  We're still doing cable.
[00:01:45]  We're still doing streaming, uh, or, or doing streaming more now, I guess is called Newsmax 2.
[00:01:50]  And you find it wherever, Rumble, um, all of the streaming platforms.
[00:01:54]  But I've only met you, I think once at a recent like first amendment dinner in Florida.
[00:01:59]  And I went to your thing with Donald Trump Jr. when one of your books came out at like a comedy club in West Palm.
[00:02:05]  But there was such a long line to greet you that I didn't even get a chance.
[00:02:08]  All right.
[00:02:09]  All right.
[00:02:09]  Sorry to admit.
[00:02:10]  Noted mega celebrity Dave Rubin.
[00:02:12]  Yeah.
[00:02:13]  Wow.
[00:02:13]  He really wants on a second time here.
[00:02:15]  This is, this is really, this is really something.
[00:02:18]  All right.
[00:02:18]  Well, I didn't know you were in South Florida.
[00:02:19]  So we'll have to do this in, in reality, not just in these little boxes soon enough.
[00:02:23]  But all right.
[00:02:23]  Let's dive in.
[00:02:24]  Ton of stuff happened this week, and it was nice, I think, you know, because the Iran war is on this semi ceasefire pause at the moment.
[00:02:31]  It was nice to get back to some of the domestic stuff, although a lot of it was quite wacky.
[00:02:35]  Let's start in ground zero of wackiness, which is New York City right now.
[00:02:40]  And Zorhan Mamdami, I call him Moron Zamboni, he's very upset because he does not have enough of everyone else's money once again.
[00:02:50]  New York City faces a budget crisis of a historic magnitude.
[00:02:54]  We inherited a deficit larger than any since the Great Recession.
[00:02:58]  Years of mismanagement and chronic underbudgeting, alongside a structural imbalance between what New York City sends to the state and what we receive in return, have taken a toll.
[00:03:08]  We cannot close this deficit with savings alone.
[00:03:11]  We need new revenue.
[00:03:12]  And we need a structural reset in our relationship with the state.
[00:03:16]  That is the only way to meet our legal obligation to pass a balanced budget, and to do so without imposing a financial burden onto the backs of working people.
[00:03:26]  But we cannot do it alone.
[00:03:28]  That is why we are standing together this morning to underscore what is at stake and to call on Albany to deliver additional revenue.
[00:03:35]  Josh, let me start with you.
[00:03:36]  You grew up, much like me, in the New York suburbs.
[00:03:41]  And there's always a tension.
[00:03:43]  Oh, you do.
[00:03:43]  Wow.
[00:03:44]  He's a Westchester guy.
[00:03:45]  I'm Long Islander.
[00:03:46]  You don't know me yet.
[00:03:47]  No, Long Islander.
[00:03:48]  You're a Long Islander too.
[00:03:50]  All right.
[00:03:50]  All right, man.
[00:03:50]  All right.
[00:03:51]  You can come back on the show.
[00:03:52]  Get a room, guys.
[00:03:53]  I'm trying hard.
[00:03:55]  All right.
[00:03:56]  So then the questions for both of you, but Josh, I'll start with you first.
[00:03:58]  You know, there's always been a tension, if you know anything about New York politics, between city and state, meaning that Albany, which runs the state, obviously a huge amount of people, I think about 8 million people live in and around New York City.
[00:04:10]  So there's always this tension and budgets there.
[00:04:12]  But I want to mention two words that he said as he tries to now fight the state on getting more money.
[00:04:19]  He wants a structural reset.
[00:04:23]  This, to me, is the phrase that we better get in our heads because I think his plan is to demolish everything to reset us to something very, very Different, what say you, Hammer?
[00:04:35]  So, this is, Dave, what I like to refer to as the left's euphemism imperative they use all these fancy sounding words that don't actually mean anything, but they are euphemisms.
[00:04:45]  They are anodyne sounding buzzword substitutes for something quite a bit more drastic.
[00:04:51]  And maybe the most infamous instance of this in all of our lifetimes was Barack Obama right on the precipice of the 2008 presidential election when he famously said that we are about to fundamentally transform the United States.
[00:05:02]  That sounds Great, right?
[00:05:04]  I mean, we're going to improve it.
[00:05:05]  We're going to transform that.
[00:05:06]  But no, fundamentally, one does not seek to fundamentally transform that which he cherishes, that which he values, that which he loves.
[00:05:13]  And it's the same thing here in New York City.
[00:05:14]  You're not seeking a structural reset of what is the capital of Western civilization, or at least was the capital of Western civilization, New York City.
[00:05:22]  You wouldn't seek such a thing if you actually value it and what it represents to the people of New York, first and foremost, and those are your actual voters or constituents, but also, frankly, to the country and to the Western world at large.
[00:05:36]  You're totally right, by the way, that New York City Democrats and Albany Democrats have had a somewhat tense relationship, really, for my entire lifetime, I guess.
[00:05:43]  But we saw that actually happen a little bit earlier this year.
[00:05:47]  Mamdani basically tried to increase the New York City municipal budget by somewhere between 10 to 20%, give or take.
[00:05:54]  And by the way, it was already really high.
[00:05:56]  The New York City budget is like roughly the same as our state, the entire state of Florida.
[00:06:01]  And by the way, we have a rainy day fund here in Florida.
[00:06:05]  In New York City, they actually are running out of money.
[00:06:07]  And no income tax.
[00:06:08]  Yes, exactly.
[00:06:09]  No income tax.
[00:06:10]  So, Ma'am Donnie went to Kathy Hochul earlier this year, and he got a very chilly reception there.
[00:06:15]  So, he's not making a lot of friends when it comes to New York Democrat circles.
[00:06:19]  He's also going down in the approval ratings.
[00:06:22]  I saw a poll that came out maybe about a week and a half, two weeks ago or so, that showed that he has declining approval ratings among both Hispanic and Black New Yorkers.
[00:06:29]  So, I'm not entirely sure exactly what his end game is here, Dave, to be honest with you.
[00:06:33]  What I do know is that one of my favorite quotations that I cite a lot on my own show was from the early 20th century by H.L. Mencken, who was a social critic, newspaper columnist.
[00:06:42]  And he said, Democracy is a theory that the common man knows what he wants and he deserves to get it good and hard.
[00:06:48]  And we are seeing that playing out in real, real time in New York City.
[00:06:52]  Ed, now that I know you're a Long Island guy, I'm sure you spent many years getting on that Long Island Railroad, going into the city and probably spending money and going out to dinner and doing business and all those things, just like I did.
[00:07:05]  It's interesting.
[00:07:05]  Another two words that he said chronic under budget.
[00:07:09]  There's no amount of money you could give him, right?
[00:07:11]  What would be the number, and they can never come up with the number, that we could say, okay, You know what?
[00:07:17]  Just take it, fix everything.
[00:07:18]  There is no number.
[00:07:19]  Right.
[00:07:19]  Because I agree with Josh said, but I'd add one other thing about the structural reset, right?
[00:07:24]  The other word for that is bailout, right?
[00:07:26]  I think it's just like a fancy way of saying I need a bailout, right?
[00:07:29]  And if you think about the symmetry of those comments from Mdani, the same time that in New York City, where he is obviously in Washington with the president, you had King Charles in town.
[00:07:40]  It was the British prime minister, the late one, Margaret Thatcher, who, of course, famously said the problem with socialism is pretty soon you run out of other people's money.
[00:07:49]  Right, because that's what Momdani's trying to do.
[00:07:51]  He promised the free rent and the supermarkets.
[00:07:54]  The free rent's not coming.
[00:07:55]  The free buses is not, you know, or at least a rent freeze, I should say.
[00:07:58]  The free buses never materialize.
[00:08:00]  The supermarkets, he's going to do one for each borough, but the first one's not coming for like two or three years.
[00:08:06]  And it's so far over budget already.
[00:08:08]  Like, you know, like Aldi, you saw this, the supermarket chain said, we could build a new one for like a million dollars.
[00:08:13]  And he's saying it's like, I don't know, 30 million?
[00:08:15]  30 million.
[00:08:17]  And one in each borough.
[00:08:18]  There are five boroughs, 30 million a pop.
[00:08:21]  And yeah, you should be able.
[00:08:22]  Yes, I can accept that building in New York City, but why do they have to, his whole thing is we have to build it from scratch.
[00:08:26]  Why don't you just take one of those?
[00:08:28]  Gross ass Gristidis and you know, and some bodega and redo it.
[00:08:34]  Yeah, some guy would take a buyout who's got a bodega and make it really nice.
[00:08:38]  Um, the other thing is, um, he had uh Ken Griffin, right?
[00:08:42]  So I think Josh was making an important point.
[00:08:44]  And you mentioned, you know, about the tax base, and you were saying you come in from Long Island on the railroad, spend money in New York City.
[00:08:50]  Who wants to go to New York City and spend money?
[00:08:52]  Ken Griffin's this billionaire who's really decamped mostly to South Florida, right?
[00:08:56]  He's got a big footprint in Miami, where you are, he's also around Palm Beach, where I am.
[00:09:01]  He's building these mon.
[00:09:02]  Big houses by, by the president near Mar-a-Lago.
[00:09:05]  It's, it's famous.
[00:09:06]  All the money he's spending.
[00:09:07]  But he's still saying, I want to do deals in New York.
[00:09:10]  I love New York.
[00:09:11]  He's got this Pita Tear, which is massive.
[00:09:13]  Uh, yeah.
[00:09:14]  Is it excessive?
[00:09:15]  Sure.
[00:09:15]  But this is America.
[00:09:16]  It's capitalism.
[00:09:17]  If the guy's rich and he wants to buy extra apartments, who cares?
[00:09:20]  And now Mimdani stands in front of Griffin's home at a time when, by the way, CEOs and others obviously have been assassinated and targeted when you, when you put him on blast and say, he's a bad guy.
[00:09:32]  And what does Griffin do?
[00:09:33]  He says, you know what?
[00:09:34]  I'm going to pull out of this business.
[00:09:36]  I think it's like a six or eight billion dollar deal.
[00:09:38]  Citadel was building like new headquarters in Manhattan.
[00:09:41]  They don't need to do that.
[00:09:42]  They have a better deal in Miami.
[00:09:44]  But they said, you know, like, like Jamie, Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan, we still want to have a foothold in New York.
[00:09:49]  We still have, now they may just pull the rest of their employees out.
[00:09:52]  So where does that leave New York City?
[00:09:54]  It leaves them screwed.
[00:09:55]  That's the technical term.
[00:09:56]  You know, I'm so glad you brought up the, the, the fact that he stood outside of Ken Griffith's department because it's not that he's against billionaires.
[00:10:05]  No, he didn't go to Outside of George Soros' son, Alex Soros.
[00:10:09]  He didn't go outside his pied de terre, which I'm sure is probably even bigger and he has many more of them.
[00:10:13]  But he went to Ken Griffin's, which in essence was guys, when we get to the end of Gangs of New York or the end of Dark Knight Rises, this is the type of building you'd want to burn down.
[00:10:22]  This is where you're going to find all the fancy women with the fur coats and everything.
[00:10:25]  One of the things I've been thinking about or talking about since the rise of Mom Dami is that it's not just New York, that if he's able to fake it for a while, we're going to see this thing scale across blue cities.
[00:10:35]  Check this video out from Seattle's.
[00:10:37]  Seattle had a crazy leftist mayor.
[00:10:40]  They voted him out, and of course, what happens?
[00:10:42]  You vote in somebody crazier.
[00:10:44]  They've got this woman, her name is Katie Wilson, and she's asked about the millionaires now leaving Seattle.
[00:10:49]  Look at this response.
[00:10:50]  I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are like super overblown, and if you know the ones that leave, like bye.
[00:10:59]  So, Josh, like super overblown, and if you leave, like bye, and like who needs money, and what's math?
[00:11:11]  You know, they're already reaping the consequences a little bit of that in Washington state.
[00:11:14]  I think Howard Schultz, right?
[00:11:16]  The former CEO of Starbucks.
[00:11:18]  And he's no conservative.
[00:11:19]  Howard Schultz is actually a former Democrat mega donor.
[00:11:21]  I'm not sure if he still is after this latest bit of heist, but he's already announced that he's decamping if he hasn't already decamped by now to Florida, to our neck of the woods.
[00:11:30]  These things have real life consequences.
[00:11:33]  California, Dave, your former stomping grounds out in California, just this past Sunday, they announced that they had enough signatures to get this billionaire tax on the ballot.
[00:11:42]  This November.
[00:11:43]  The numbers out of that are astonishing.
[00:11:46]  this new, this new study from the California Tax Foundation, which said that already, already they estimate that $770-ish billion in wealth has already, has already fled in advance of this thing going into effect.
[00:12:00]  I think Peter Thiel last December announced that he was going to make Florida his more full-time residence to, to avoid this thing.
[00:12:06]  And it kind of raises the obvious question of the Kitty Wilson, ho, ho, ha, ha, you know, Gavin Newsom, ha, ha, ha, ha.
[00:12:11]  I, I, you know, who do you guys think is actually creating jobs?
[00:12:15]  It's a very rudimentary point, very basic point that, that, that I think gets lost there.
[00:12:19]  You know, look, roughly two thirds of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
[00:12:23]  That's a very unfortunate reality, but it actually is economic reality.
[00:12:26]  And I feel for a lot of these people for sure.
[00:12:28]  But these folks are not the ones, by sheer obvious facts of their paycheck situation, they're not creating jobs.
[00:12:35]  They're trying to get by.
[00:12:36]  You actually need wealthy people to start businesses, to invest in capital.
[00:12:40]  And I feel like a lot of this basic economics 101 has gotten so lost.
[00:12:45]  Most of the people on the left, a couple of people on the right, I would add as well there.
[00:12:48]  But it's just common freaking sense that when you lose.
[00:12:51]  People, you're going to lose your tax base.
[00:12:53]  You're going to lose, by the way, the way to pay for infrastructure, bridges, municipalities, public transportation there.
[00:12:58]  Any decent society needs wealthy people.
[00:13:02]  It is natural and is proper and is right to have a full panoply of people all across the income and wealth spectrum.
[00:13:08]  So, obviously, I agree with that.
[00:13:10]  So, Ed, jumping from that point, when she's like, okay, like, bye, and Gavin Newsom celebrates when Elon leaves and everything else, I don't think they're dumb.
[00:13:18]  Well, I don't know her specifically.
[00:13:20]  Maybe she's dumb.
[00:13:20]  But Gavin, I think, is a lot of things.
[00:13:22]  I don't think he's dumb.
[00:13:23]  So, what do you think the play is there because Gavin or when Zorhan does this, he knows he's forcing people out and he knows they need money.
[00:13:32]  So what, what do you, if we were trying to steal man, I suppose what their argument is, what do you think it would be?
[00:13:37]  It would be that what fires up the left wing base right now is let's get the tiki torches and, and get rid of all the capitalists, right?
[00:13:44]  I mean, that's the only way that this knucklehead in, in Seattle, you know, got elected and she knows those are the people.
[00:13:50]  Look at Spanberger.
[00:13:51]  I mean, there's these clips out there of her talking about what fuels us, right?
[00:13:54]  Is what rage is what she says.
[00:13:56]  And she was supposed to be a moderate when she ran.
[00:13:59]  But realize it wasn't going to redistrict, by the way.
[00:14:01]  Let's not forget that.
[00:14:02]  And it flipped on that.
[00:14:03]  By the way, it's not just Howard Schultz moving to Miami this week.
[00:14:06]  What she was reacting to was, I think, a big chunk of Starbucks's headquarters.
[00:14:11]  Some of it is staying in Seattle, but I don't think for long because now they have a big foothold that's going to Nashville, Tennessee, like Florida, another, you know, I think it's no state income tax, right?
[00:14:23]  There's other ones in the South, like in the Carolinas, that are low income tax for the state.
[00:14:29]  So they're drawing all these companies.
[00:14:31]  These jobs and then people who don't want to live in Seattle anymore because you got to step over the needles, the drugs, the homeless, just like Gavin Newsom's California and that billionaire's tax.
[00:14:43]  All of these liberal billionaires, like you were mentioning Soros before, it's not just the Ken Griffins of the world.
[00:14:48]  It's, um, so the Californians are like Zuckerberg, right?
[00:14:52]  Uh, some of the founders of Google and others who have already said they're going to Miami and other places.
[00:14:57]  They're here.
[00:14:57]  I mean, Zuckerberg just bought Sergey Brin.

=== Los Angeles Billionaire Exodus (08:24) ===

[00:15:00]  I drive by his yacht all the time.
[00:15:03]  I mean, they're here.
[00:15:04]  Did you see Chamoth, who's on another podcast, not as good as yours, but another podcast?
[00:15:09]  No, we do.
[00:15:10]  I think I know what you're going to say.
[00:15:11]  And we do reference him often.
[00:15:13]  It's okay.
[00:15:13]  So he posted this thing.
[00:15:14]  I'm sure you probably saw it this week that basically said, when you read the fine print, you know, of this billionaire's tax, there's a provision later in there that says, once this passes at a later date, like if all these knuckleheads in power think they need more money, it becomes like basically a middle class income tax.
[00:15:33]  It's not just for billionaires.
[00:15:34]  So that's the biggest lie.
[00:15:37]  All right, Henry, you can come back on the show because yes, we even played that clip and read that very thing.
[00:15:42]  So you've done your research.
[00:15:43]  He's back on hammer.
[00:15:44]  You're hanging on by a thread at the moment.
[00:15:47]  Let's talk about, well, it's a similar theme, but let's talk about Los Angeles for a second because this guy, Spencer Pratt, who's not a reality TV guy, but I guess he was in Malibu.
[00:15:56]  What was it?
[00:15:57]  Malibu, guys of Malibu did something in Malibu, something.
[00:16:01]  Reality TV, what was it?
[00:16:02]  The Hills.
[00:16:03]  The Hills.
[00:16:03]  Okay, he was in the Hills.
[00:16:04]  He's been a reality TV guy, not somebody that wanted to get in politics, but everyone knows the trajectory of LA, particularly post COVID and what a disaster it's been.
[00:16:13]  And then he really got involved because of the Palisades fire.
[00:16:16]  The mismanagement beforehand and then really subsequently after because his house burned down.
[00:16:21]  Check out his campaign ad.
[00:16:22]  He's running for LA mayor right now.
[00:16:24]  This is where Mayor Bass lives.
[00:16:25]  You notice something?
[00:16:26]  Or here, where Nithya Rahman's $3 million mansion sits.
[00:16:30]  They don't have to live in the mess they've created where you live.
[00:16:36]  This is where I live.
[00:16:37]  They let my home burn down.
[00:16:39]  I know what the consequences of failed leadership are.
[00:16:42]  That's why I'm running for mayor.
[00:16:44]  For my sons and the rest of us, Angelenos.
[00:16:46]  That would have stopped these corrupt politicians from destroying our city.
[00:16:50]  We are going to get the golden age of Los Angeles back.
[00:16:54]  Hammer, a moment ago, we all rightly, I think, pointed out that having Mom Dami stand in front of Ken Griffin's place was, let's say, classless at the least, if not directly dangerous.
[00:17:05]  Here, I think it's a different thing.
[00:17:07]  He's going to the elected leaders' homes and saying, look how they lived while not only did my house burn down because of them, but also look at the urban chaos that they've created in the other places.
[00:17:18]  I don't see these things as equal.
[00:17:21]  So, first of all, let me say that the Palisades fire is a horrific tragedy that we still don't have all the answers for.
[00:17:28]  Dave, I actually, my wife and I, who you know, we were out in Santa Barbara for a wedding last Memorial Day for a couple whose house burned down just a few months prior, actually, in the Palisades fire.
[00:17:38]  So, I have friends whose house burned down, and I don't really know Spencer Pratt's exact situation.
[00:17:44]  If he's actually a reality star, which is news to me, because like you, I don't really follow, then I presume that he has enough money.
[00:17:50]  He's not literally living in.
[00:17:51]  What we saw there, but I guess I might be surprised.
[00:17:55]  I mean, I guess my big takeaway from that video, Dave, is just the sheer level of venom and, and, and anger.
[00:18:02]  And some of that is undoubtedly justified.
[00:18:04]  I mean, Los Angeles has been run into the ground for decades.
[00:18:07]  You famously fled there.
[00:18:08]  The last time I was there, we encountered countless homeless people and needles and feces and all the, all the garbage on the street there.
[00:18:15]  It's an absolute, absolute, absolute cesspool.
[00:18:18]  But I mean, maybe I'm naive, but I would prefer to live in a country where it's not just this level of anger.
[00:18:25]  That is going to make a city like Los Angeles great again.
[00:18:28]  Offer something positive.
[00:18:30]  I, I, I, Ronald Reagan was the governor of California.
[00:18:33]  I, I, admittedly, that was a lifetime ago.
[00:18:34]  It was literally a lifetime ago.
[00:18:35]  But try to, try to paint a positive vision there instead of saying throw the bums out.
[00:18:40]  Maybe you take throw the bums out.
[00:18:41]  Maybe you mix it with, oh, I don't know, like one policy idea to actually tangibly improve the day to day lives of Angelenos there when it comes to crime, when it comes to homelessness, when it comes to drugs.
[00:18:51]  That's probably frankly asking too much, to be honest with you.
[00:18:54]  I probably sound a little naive just for saying that there, but in theory, I think that's what I think a lot of voters would like to see, probably.
[00:19:00]  Interesting, because as someone that lived there and fled very publicly, and I didn't want to move, I had just bought a new house a year before I moved that I thought we were going to live in for the rest of my life.
[00:19:09]  I get the anger.
[00:19:10]  I get the anger.
[00:19:10]  I don't know the rest of his policies.
[00:19:12]  But, Ed, what do you think about that?
[00:19:13]  Just sort of conceptually, if people on the right, and I don't even know that this guy's really a conservative or a Republican, I mean, he's a Pacific Palisades guy.
[00:19:21]  He's probably like an old school mugged liberal, basically.
[00:19:25]  That would be my guess.
[00:19:27]  What do you think the best tack is there to push back against these guys?
[00:19:31]  I think the best is to go with the competence argument, I think, because that's what he's doing.
[00:19:36]  Uh, two things.
[00:19:37]  One, he's saying that Karen Bass, because I think he's running in a Democrat primary and there's a lot of people running against her, is incompetent, right?
[00:19:46]  And she was in Ghana, right, at the inauguration of a new president when Pacific Palisades and part of Malibu were burning down.
[00:19:55]  These are just facts.
[00:19:56]  News of the day.
[00:19:56]  And they had warned her.
[00:19:57]  And they had warned her.
[00:19:58]  They warned her.
[00:19:58]  And phone calls keep coming out, like people taped calls and different things, text messages suggesting she was warned.
[00:20:05]  She was downplaying.
[00:20:07]  They couldn't get the water out of the fire hydrants.
[00:20:09]  Like all that stuff that's been well documented.
[00:20:11]  And I think the theme in that ad too is they're not like us, that they really don't get where real people live and how they live.
[00:20:22]  It was my point earlier about Florida versus New York.
[00:20:24]  And frankly, I think to bring it back to President Trump briefly, and then I'll get back to Steve Hilton, who I spent some time with in Pacific Palisades, because you mentioned Schwarzenegger and, and, you know, Reagan as governor.
[00:20:35]  Um, can a Republican win is I think the president has to get back to the common sense agenda, like, I remember listening to the inaugural address just to, to, to go 30,000 feet for a second.
[00:20:47]  And I'd been to a lot of his rallies in 2024 and earlier and, and never heard the phrase common sense agenda, but that like crystallized it in the inaugural.
[00:20:57]  Like, yeah, these 80 20 issues, right?
[00:20:59]  And now with the war and other things, he's kind of gotten away from it.
[00:21:03]  I wonder in, you know, the closing months going into the midterms, if, if the Republican party can get back to the common sense agenda and competence, like we can get these things done.
[00:21:16]  I mean, they can't even protect you in Los Angeles from fires.
[00:21:19]  They can't get the water out of the hydrants.
[00:21:21]  The fire chief got fired because she was ridiculous.
[00:21:24]  She was a DEI hire, right?
[00:21:26]  There's, there's a million examples of this.
[00:21:28]  And so I was out, um, in Pacific Palisades on a personal trip last July.
[00:21:33]  It happened to be the six month anniversary of the, of the tragic fires.
[00:21:37]  And Steve, I called Steve Hilton.
[00:21:38]  He said, well, come on out in the trail.
[00:21:39]  I'm doing a six month thing.
[00:21:41]  And do you know what Gavin Newsom said?
[00:21:42]  And I hope people hold this, uh, hold him on this one.
[00:21:45]  He said, we're going to have a Marshall plan.
[00:21:48]  That's his phrase to deal with rebuilding.
[00:21:50]  And how many homes have they rebuilt?
[00:21:51]  I haven't checked them up, but recently it was like one home, maybe two homes, right?
[00:21:55]  And all of them are responsible.
[00:21:57]  And they're all Democrats, just like Seattle and Washington State.
[00:22:00]  All of these states are Democrat run and they're not competent.
[00:22:05]  And they take all your tax money, promise all these government insurance, and they're not even getting the water to you when there's a fire.
[00:22:11]  They're not giving you the bait.
[00:22:12]  Instead, they're spending money on leering centers.
[00:22:15]  And I know I sound like I'm talking, but this is what's going on.
[00:22:18]  They steal your tax money.
[00:22:20]  Keeps going up, billionaires, taxes that become middle class income.
[00:22:24]  And then they waste money, steal money, and the people in the middle get screwed.
[00:22:28]  That's what happens.
[00:22:29]  Spencer Pratt, he's living in a trailer.
[00:22:32]  Well, you know, it's so interesting because on real time on Friday night, Bill, who, you know, he's still a Democrat despite all of this, he finally was like, guys, you're taking all of my money and it's getting worse.
[00:22:43]  He finally made the connection between, oh, I keep giving them my money and things keep getting worse.
[00:22:48]  So maybe that's a bellwether for something.
[00:22:51]  I like your point, though, that the Republicans will have to, before the midterms, get back to just Common sense stuff.
[00:22:58]  That will work because we know the Democrats, all they have is fear.
[00:23:02]  Here is T.M. Obama.
[00:23:03]  Because they are doing everything they can, it appears, to artificially give Donald Trump a Republican majority in the Congress and in the Senate, which of course he's at risk of losing because his presidency has been a disaster and the Republicans have been nothing but sycophants and rubber stamps for Donald Trump's extreme agenda.

=== Republicans Sue States (12:35) ===

[00:23:24]  We're going to make sure that there's a free and fair election in November.
[00:23:28]  And this voting rights decision by the Supreme Court has come late enough in the process that I agree entirely with Mark Elias that at the end of the day, at best, it may give the Republicans an additional seat or two in advance of November of 2026.
[00:23:44]  And then we got to battle it out in connection with 2028.
[00:23:49]  Josh, I'm going to have you put on your lawyer hat.
[00:23:50]  Do you have an actual hat there?
[00:23:52]  Do they give lawyers a hat?
[00:23:53]  I don't know.
[00:23:54]  You got to give us.
[00:23:55]  Let me grab it off the shelf and grab it.
[00:23:56]  You probably have a MAGA hat there.
[00:23:57]  Well, first off, he says artificially give the Republicans a majority.
[00:24:01]  It's the Democrats who in Virginia, although it's hung up by the courts right now, went from being the fairest state in the nation, a 51-49 state voting percentage, to 6-5 Democrat advantage.
[00:24:12]  They then changed it to 10-1.
[00:24:14]  So that seems a bit artificial.
[00:24:15]  Again, it's hung up in the courts.
[00:24:17]  But to the SCOTUS decision, related to getting race out of the redistricting process, as it pertains to Louisiana specifically, I don't know, getting race out of our system seems pretty good to me.
[00:24:32]  I thought they don't like systemic racism.
[00:24:35]  So, the only surprising thing, Dave, about what the Supreme Court did when it came to the Congressional Mathis Week is how long it took for a very common sense ruling like this to come down.
[00:24:45]  So, the Voting Rights Act famously passed in 1965, one year after the Civil Rights Act, as part of the great civil rights movement legislation.
[00:24:52]  And it's been litigated in court numerous times.
[00:24:54]  So, actually, in 2013, there was a similar case called Shelby County out of Alabama involving the Section 5 coverage formula.
[00:25:01]  This litigation involves a separate section, Section 2, which essentially says it's actually a very convoluted, overly lawyered phrasing.
[00:25:08]  Surprise, surprise.
[00:25:09]  But the dumb and down, what it basically says, Section 2 of the statute, is that states and localities can, cannot abridge the right to vote on the basis of race.
[00:25:19]  It's phrased in kind of a very vague, kind of anodyne, sign, sound new way.
[00:25:23]  Here's the catch.
[00:25:24]  The catch is that for decades, for decades, politicians have interpreted that as essentially carte blanche, as license to create What is commonly referred to as majority minority districts in certain states.
[00:25:37]  So they essentially carve out these black majority districts in what are largely white conservative states, states oftentimes the South, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:25:49]  And the problem is that when you interpret Section 2 that way, it runs blatantly afoul of the 14th Amendment, with the court just interpreted in the big affirmative action case, the Harvard litigation three years ago.
[00:26:01]  They just had a sweeping ruling. that we finally said that when we say you can't just discriminate on the base of race, that actually means you can't discriminate on the base of race.
[00:26:11]  So finally, the court says here at the court this week that no, you actually cannot intentionally draw your maps to take into account race.
[00:26:19]  It is an utterly commonsensical ruling.
[00:26:20]  All the usual suspects are freaking out about it.
[00:26:23]  It's a brilliant ruling.
[00:26:24]  It also is going to have some interesting further litigation repercussions because they could have just gotten rid of section two.
[00:26:29]  That's actually what Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch would have done.
[00:26:32]  But the opinion leaves section two in place, but says you can't do it this way.
[00:26:36]  So it's a very, very enticing opportunity here for America first legal, a lot of these conservative legal outfits now to go on the offense and to basically start suing states like, like Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama.
[00:26:48]  If they don't take the, the prophylactic action of getting rid of these majority minority districts there, there's going to have big repercussions there in net though, Dave.
[00:26:55]  If I can sum up there, Florida, obviously big action this week.
[00:26:58]  Virginia hung up in the courts.
[00:27:00]  As you said, it looks to me like on net, Republicans are probably going to come out ahead in this great mid-decade redistricting battle.
[00:27:08]  And as you correctly alluded to, Democrats only have themselves to blame because you can look at some of these iconic blue states, states like Illinois and Maryland, and just utterly cartoonishly gerrymandered districts.
[00:27:19]  I mean, these things that are just like going like this and that and that.
[00:27:21]  I can't believe them.
[00:27:22]  It's unbelievable stuff.
[00:27:23]  So they've been hoist on their own petard, and frankly, I think it's glorious.
[00:27:26]  Excellent use of the lawyer hat.
[00:27:28]  Ed, could you put on common sense hat and explain to me how what we've had actually made sense in these people's minds?
[00:27:37]  I mean, partly what's going on here is that we checked the numbers on the show yesterday 83% of black Americans voted for Kamala Harris.
[00:27:45]  So they've got a lock, and Trump has increased that both times, meaning the Republican chair.
[00:27:50]  But they have such a crazy lock on the black vote that, in essence, they have No need to do anything for black people.
[00:27:57]  So, to separate race from all of this, I think actually will end up helping black people.
[00:28:02]  I think you're right.
[00:28:03]  And by the way, great use of the word prophylactic as well.
[00:28:06]  If you picked up on that, I think that Josh is really pouring it on now to make sure he's back on the show because he put on the.
[00:28:12]  I'm trying it.
[00:28:13]  I'm trying.
[00:28:13]  He just ran with it.
[00:28:15]  Common sense, I was listening closely to what he was saying because he broke it down really well about how ridiculous these districts have been set up.
[00:28:22]  So, common sense, I mean, I listened to Temu Obama, as you said, Jeffries, who's ridiculous.
[00:28:29]  You know, the cheap version of Obama and all he kept saying was that this was an illegitimate ruling and the court's illegitimate.
[00:28:36]  It's the Trump court, not the Roberts court.
[00:28:38]  And I think about the basic hypocrisy of how every time the Supreme Court or a lower court takes down, strikes down some big Trump action, it's the greatest decision in the world, according to Higgins Jeffries.
[00:28:52]  And when President Trump says, this is nonsense, Boesberg, like the same guy who tears down everything I do with no real legal backing behind it, any, you know, middle of the road lawyer would say, ah, this is a liberal ruling.
[00:29:07]  This is ridiculous.
[00:29:07]  It's not really following the law.
[00:29:09]  It's political, right?
[00:29:11]  Trump rips it apart because he's a counterpuncher, as we know, and he goes on shoots.
[00:29:15]  And then what did Jeffries always say?
[00:29:17]  Donald, there's no guardrails.
[00:29:18]  Donald Trump's a dictator.
[00:29:20]  He's a Nazi.
[00:29:21]  All of these ridiculous things when he legitimately uses his First Amendment rights to say the court is illegitimate.
[00:29:27]  Now Jeffries says it's illegitimate.
[00:29:29]  When you, if you just play back what Josh just said, he broke it down in like two minutes, how And by the way, they're accusing the Republicans of doing everything they're doing.
[00:29:50]  You know, Clay Travis pointed out earlier in the week that Indiana, which is a red state, they could have done redistricting this entire time and they've chosen not to because generally conservatives conserve things rather than break things.
[00:30:03]  DeSantis operates a little bit differently, which is if you guys are going to mess around, we're going to mess back.
[00:30:08]  You know, we're going to mess around 10 times harder.
[00:30:10]  Let me show you this.
[00:30:10]  This is Alabama Representative Terry Sewell, a Democrat, and she would like to wipe out Republicans.
[00:30:18]  What this decision says is that it values partisan politics over discrimination.
[00:30:25]  It's really, really, really, I mean, it takes us back.
[00:30:28]  And so to the extent that it's urging, it's inviting red states to totally take away all the Democratic seats and be totally red, it also encourages blue states to do exactly the same.
[00:30:42]  So, I can't speak for my chairwoman, but I take 52 seats from California.
[00:30:47]  I sure would.
[00:30:48]  And 17 seats from Illinois.
[00:30:50]  Josh, grab that prophylactic again and help me here.
[00:30:53]  My understanding of this correctly, what she's saying basically is not looking at race is actually racism.
[00:31:03]  Yeah, that's exactly what she's saying.
[00:31:04]  And by the way, there are two other things to note.
[00:31:06]  One is she's saying blue states, why don't you do the exact same thing?
[00:31:10]  Newsflash, they literally are.
[00:31:12]  So, Massachusetts, for instance, does not have a sitting Republican member of Congress.
[00:31:16]  They've essentially eliminated the Republican party from the New England congressional delegation across the entirety of New England.
[00:31:22]  So, uh, many blue states have actually been doing this for a very, very long time and news as that may be, uh, to Congresswoman Sewell.
[00:31:28]  But the real reason that she is so upset is because she's about to lose her congressional seat.
[00:31:33]  I mean, she is from one of these majority minority districts right there in the state of Alabama.
[00:31:37]  So self-interest is the only reason that she is kind of giving this, this death stare out there into the audience.
[00:31:42]  And it's true that the court does essentially give its, its, its imprimatur of legitimacy to partisan redistricting here.
[00:31:50]  Here's the thing, Dave.
[00:31:51]  That's been happening for 200 plus years.
[00:31:53]  Gerrymandering takes its, its name from Elbridge Gerry, who goes, who was, it was a statesman, a congressman in the very early 19th century, just, just a couple of decades after the constitution was ratified.
[00:32:03]  This stuff goes back a very, very long time.
[00:32:06]  And if you don't particularly like it, if you're not happy with how your state, whether it's a blue state or a red state, if you are a liberal in a red state or a conservative in a blue state and you're not happy with how your people are, are doing the maps there, you have multiple remedies.
[00:32:19]  First and foremost, go to the ballot box, try to vote them out.
[00:32:22]  Second, failing that, if all else fails, You can do what you did, Dave, and you can leave.
[00:32:26]  That's the beauty of federalism.
[00:32:27]  That's the beauty of our system of laboratories of democracy.
[00:32:30]  But the notion that every single time that politicians do something that you don't like, it's unfair or it must be illegal.
[00:32:38]  That, that's not actually how the Constitution works.
[00:32:40]  In fact, Anthony Scalia, the great justice, if I'm paraphrasing here, he once said, it's paraphrased, but he basically said this.
[00:32:46]  He said that if you are of the opinion that everything that you like is constitutionally required and all that you hate is constitutionally forbidden, you're probably not reading the Constitution very well.
[00:32:56]  And I think that's exactly what's happening here to the congresswoman from Alabama, who probably will be out of a seat rather soon.
[00:33:02]  Wow, Josh really wants back on the show.
[00:33:04]  Yeah, I mean, man, Ed, I've never seen anyone work on this.
[00:33:07]  Can I get in here?
[00:33:08]  Well, let me throw in one number for you because I think this is interesting and then take it away.
[00:33:12]  In California right now, which is obviously a huge state, they have 52 representatives.
[00:33:16]  Only seven are Republican.
[00:33:18]  But if you think about how they vote, Cali, obviously it's a blue state, but about 40 something percent of the electorate does vote Republican, but it's broken down 50.
[00:33:28]  Two to seven.
[00:33:29]  So again, Virginia had what was the fairest situation.
[00:33:32]  Right.
[00:33:32]  And in California, on that point, if you look at the numbers, I believe Donald Trump got the most amount of votes of any state in the union from California.
[00:33:42]  Because you think, oh, nobody voted for Trump in California.
[00:33:44]  It's all Democrat.
[00:33:45]  No, as you say, Orange County, all kinds of places, you get outside these LA, San Francisco, blue cities.
[00:33:51]  There's a lot of Republicans, a lot of MAGA voters.
[00:33:54]  So it should be a delegation of, you know, like 30, 24, or whatever the numbers might be.
[00:33:59]  But instead, yeah, was it seven Republicans?
[00:34:02]  Ridiculous.
[00:34:02]  That alone would probably, if that was done fairly, allow the Republicans to potentially keep power in the U.S. House, regardless of how much of the rest of the country goes.
[00:34:12]  One other thing, and Josh would have read the entire Supreme Court, the briefs and the decision, but has anyone made the point as well that when you make these majority minority districts, don't you dilute the power of, say, black voters or Hispanic voters if you concentrate?
[00:34:29]  I just want to quickly make for people who maybe were being too South Florida centric.
[00:34:34]  But when I moved out of the New York, D.C. media bubble to South Florida, and Newsmax has a big operation in Boca Raton in between Palm Beach and Miami, I grew up always knowing that there were a lot of Cuban Americans who might be conservative, fled communism, all of that.
[00:34:49]  And Miami was very Hispanic, right?
[00:34:52]  You get around Florida, you see it's not just Miami, folks.
[00:34:56]  It's all around.
[00:34:56]  My newsroom is probably at least half Hispanic of my colleagues who are great men, women, worked at Miami TV stations, worked in the Tampa market, you name it.
[00:35:07]  My point is, if you just concentrated all the Hispanic voters in Miami and said, we're just going to create one district, you'd have Carlos Gutierrez or someone and have one Hispanic Republican in the U.S. House from Florida.
[00:35:21]  Instead, voters of this background, it's not just Cuban anymore, it's Venezuelan, all kinds, they have more power because it's more diffuse.
[00:35:33]  They're in more districts.
[00:35:34]  They're voting not just in Miami, in Boca Raton, in Tampa.
[00:35:39]  I just, it's sort of basic common sense to me, right?
[00:35:41]  That if you just put all of the black voters in one district and say, we're going to grab power.
[00:35:45]  Actually, black voters might have more power if they were spread out around different states.
[00:35:50]  Matt, are you telling me black people, wait, Are you telling me black people are individuals and they might think differently than you think?
[00:35:56]  They might make up their own mind, Dave.
[00:35:58]  You have to, you have to look at this differently.

=== ABC Kimmel Disney Pressure (13:47) ===

[00:36:00]  Well, this, I'm shocked and appalled.
[00:36:03]  Uh, guys, let's go, let's go do one other thing before we wrap up, uh, this week.
[00:36:07]  You know, it's, it really is nuts how the news cycle moves because Donald Trump, They had the third assassination attempt on his life.
[00:36:13]  Today's Friday.
[00:36:14]  It happened on Saturday.
[00:36:16]  And we, you know, after 24 hours, it basically disappears.
[00:36:20]  And that's how normalized this stuff has become.
[00:36:22]  But I want to talk, I'm always more interested in the narrative stuff and how the media deals with things, usually than the incidents themselves.
[00:36:29]  So a few days before the White House correspondence dinner, everyone's heard this already.
[00:36:33]  But here is the joke that Jimmy Kimmel did.
[00:36:35]  Again, I think it was two or three days before that has now caused the major kerfuffle post assassination attempt.
[00:36:42]  Our first lady, Melania, is here.
[00:36:44]  Look at more.
[00:36:45]  So beautiful.
[00:36:46]  Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.
[00:36:51]  Josh Kimmel claims that, well, first off, hilarious.
[00:36:54]  Ha, ha, ha.
[00:36:55]  Do we have a laugh track?
[00:36:56]  Okay, fine.
[00:36:58]  Kimmel claims that it was an age joke that Trump is just older than her.
[00:37:01]  Now, I don't care.
[00:37:03]  I asked all my guys.
[00:37:03]  We all watch it together.
[00:37:04]  Nobody thought that.
[00:37:06]  Nobody.
[00:37:06]  Okay.
[00:37:08]  It's fairly obvious what he was doing there.
[00:37:10]  I actually don't think that him being fired would be the best outcome here.
[00:37:15]  There's a million reasons ABC should have fired him over the years.
[00:37:18]  The amount.
[00:37:18]  That he gets paid to do a terrible show and how partisan he's become, and he's like the reverse Johnny Carson and all of that.
[00:37:24]  I don't think we get a huge win here if it appears that the administration put pressure on the FCC or something to go after ABC to then fire him.
[00:37:35]  So I love your commentary on that, but also just the general state of how these things just keep happening and it'll probably happen again in three weeks and we just keep going.
[00:37:44]  Yeah.
[00:37:44]  So, first of all, I obviously share your team's assessment when it comes to the fact that no one, I mean, this is slightly more plausible than Jim Comey saying that he mysteriously just, oh my God, saw 8647 magically in seashells there in North Carolina, Outer Banks Beach.
[00:37:59]  I mean, neither of these passes the laugh test, obviously.
[00:38:03]  So no one really believes Jimmy Kimmel.
[00:38:05]  I guess I will say this to begin, which is I'm a little surprised that he was suspended after his post Charlie Kirk assassination comments, which were bad, but frankly, I didn't think they were actually as bad as this.
[00:38:15]  I think that this was actually considerably worse, given actually all that is happening out there.
[00:38:20]  So if you're going to suspend him, For either, I'm a little surprised that it happened with the Charlie Kirk comments and not with these latest comments.
[00:38:28]  On the latter point, look, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, I've known Brendan for a long time.
[00:38:33]  He's a buy the book guy.
[00:38:35]  I think very, very highly of him.
[00:38:37]  I think that this is part of a broader phenomenon that is happening in our culture right now.
[00:38:42]  And I think it's easy, Dave, to kind of get bogged down in oh, should the FCC try to go after ABC and Kimmel?
[00:38:50]  Should we be indicting people like Jim Comey or Tish James or this new Anthony Fauci guy for?
[00:38:56]  For not complying with FOIA and this and that, there.
[00:38:58]  But, you know, putting back on my, my, my lawyer hat, so to speak there, I, I have long been of the opinion that in America's roiling cold civil war, that the only way out is through.
[00:39:09]  And what I mean by that is that I, I'm sorry to just kind of put this bluntly, but we didn't start this.
[00:39:15]  We, we genuinely, honest to God, did not start this.
[00:39:18]  And sometimes, sometimes when you have a bully, it actually really is important from a basic game theory perspective to just punch the bully in the face.
[00:39:26]  Obviously not literally.
[00:39:27]  Don't say hammers.
[00:39:28]  Oh, here we go.
[00:39:29]  Oh my God.
[00:39:30]  Yeah.
[00:39:30]  But I mean, I mean, think about it.
[00:39:34]  If the other side, if the other side is coming at you, you have to punch back at some point.
[00:39:38]  Again, it's just basic game theory.
[00:39:40]  And that plays out a little more directly in the lawfare context for sure.
[00:39:44]  But I would just kind of ask whether or not it comes from the media ginning up of this assassination porn.
[00:39:51]  And that's basically what MS Now is.
[00:39:52]  That's basically what CNN is.
[00:39:54]  It's assassination porn.
[00:39:55]  Blue Sky is just pure, pure assassination porn.
[00:39:58]  So at some point there, you do have to kind of punch back a little bit.
[00:40:02]  Is this the best way to do it?
[00:40:03]  I think your mileage may vary, to be honest with you.
[00:40:05]  On those grounds, I think it's probably defensible.
[00:40:07]  I also think to the backdrop of what was really the biggest media story for a couple of days, which was that insane interview that Hassan Piker, who's a huge lefty influencer, had with the New York Times, where he basically was excusing violence and, uh, you know, against your political opponents.
[00:40:21]  And, and in this case, he was talking about Brian Thompson, the healthcare CEO who got assassinated.
[00:40:24]  It's like these things are somewhat connected.
[00:40:27]  Uh, Ed, let me have you comment on this.
[00:40:29]  My, my good friend Sage Steele, who formerly worked for Disney at ESPN, uh, here she is commenting on a bit of the hypocrisy around the Kimmel joke.
[00:40:38]  Well, you used to work for ABC, Disney.
[00:40:42]  Do you think they're going to do anything?
[00:40:48]  I would say it would shock me if they did based on history.
[00:40:52]  I will say this yes, almost 17 years, Jesse, working for the Walt Disney Company at ESPN.
[00:40:57]  And they have a history of punishing free speech, but it depends on what the narrative is.
[00:41:01]  For me, it was as simple as saying that I'm against the company mandating you to take a vaccine in order to keep your job while complying.
[00:41:10]  Pulled me off the air, suspended me, took assignments, punishing me for just saying that while complying.
[00:41:14]  Then you have Jimmy Kimmel, who not only mocks the death of Charlie Kirk, but continuously with the hateful rhetoric and now crossing the line, I believe, with what he said about Melania and Donald Trump the other day.
[00:41:26]  If you're Josh tomorrow, this is your chance, not just to send a message to Jimmy Kimmel, but to all the other talent, to the executives, and most importantly, to the American people to say we are better than this.
[00:41:37]  Ed, let me show you two headlines here because Sage makes an interesting point.
[00:41:41]  She complied.
[00:41:42]  She complied.
[00:41:43]  She just talked about it and got fired.
[00:41:45]  But look at this from Variety in 2018.
[00:41:48]  Roseanne gets canceled after stars racist tweets.
[00:41:52]  She had one tweet about Valerie Jarrett that they said was racist.
[00:41:56]  She at the time had the number one comedy show in America.
[00:41:59]  She got fired.
[00:42:00]  Same company.
[00:42:01]  And this 2021 BBC, everyone remembers this.
[00:42:03]  Gina Carano dropped from Mandalorian after abhorrent posts.
[00:42:08]  Um, there's a bit of, this is not a two-way street.
[00:42:13]  How about are you saying Democrats are hypocritical?
[00:42:16]  Is that what you want to suggest?
[00:42:17]  Um, I think you're right.
[00:42:19]  And I think Sage still, I mean, what happens to the screaming about Donald Trump shutting down the first amendment when obviously the social media companies didn't care about the first amendment rights of Donald Trump or his campaign and took, took him off all these platforms, uh, and all the rest of it, especially after, you know, beyond the campaign and covering up the Hunter laptop, then deplatforming him and so many others after January 6th.
[00:42:41]  We, we could go on.
[00:42:42]  So she complies with the ridiculous vaccine policy, but just exercises a first amendment right.
[00:42:49]  And she's shoved aside.
[00:42:50]  Let me put on my reporter's hat for a moment because I want to try to make sure I get that second invite.
[00:42:55]  Should I have a ghost hat?
[00:42:57]  Maybe I'd be better at this.
[00:42:59]  So Brendan Carr, a little bit of insight.
[00:43:02]  When the Charlie Kirk thing happened, um, Kimmel was on the ropes because he was already ratings challenged.
[00:43:10]  They really couldn't defend it at ABC.
[00:43:12]  They pulled him off for a while, right?
[00:43:14]  Stations were abandoning him and then ABC.
[00:43:17]  Um, and what did Brendan Carr do?
[00:43:20]  He stepped in it.
[00:43:21]  He decided to do an interview or something with Benny Johnson, maybe, and say, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.
[00:43:29]  And then it became.
[00:43:30]  He's a mob boss.
[00:43:31]  He's overdoing this.
[00:43:32]  Look at the, you know, the craziness inside the administration.
[00:43:36]  That created sympathy and a rallying cry for Kimmel.
[00:43:40]  So what, why I bring that up now is I think Brendan Carr, having spoken to him and others in that orbit in recent months, learned from that, that you stick to the facts.
[00:43:51]  You don't pour gasoline on the fire.
[00:43:53]  Like Kimmel's going to self-immolate, right?
[00:43:56]  And so what did Carr do this week?
[00:43:57]  He just said, we're doing a review of some broadcast licenses and people screamed and yelled or whatever, but related to ABC.
[00:44:04]  And I think he's going to do, he's a lawyer by training as well.
[00:44:07]  And, uh, I think Brendan Carr is going to do a buy the book look at, at these licenses.
[00:44:11]  Are they complying?
[00:44:13]  Um, rather than, you know, more rhetoric that makes Kimmel look sympathetic, which is hard to do, obviously, because he's not a very sympathetic figure.
[00:44:22]  I, to me, at this point, especially because we don't want it thrown in our face that we're, we're now screaming about someone being fired, right?
[00:44:30]  Whether it's, whether it's just or not.
[00:44:31]  To me, if ABC wants to give that guy, I think it's 20 mil a year to do that show.
[00:44:36]  Crazy.
[00:44:37]  And have it insult half the country.
[00:44:39]  We've already been through it for 20 years.
[00:44:40]  So if he wants it for another year or two while everyone gets their videos and comedy and everything else elsewhere, to me, it's like, let's just keep mocking the guy.
[00:44:49]  I don't know that him being fired is the right thing, but ABC should make that decision.
[00:44:54]  I want to do one other thing because you both mentioned Brendan Carr, who is the FCC chairman.
[00:44:58]  Ironically, and this kind of ties everything we've talked about on the show together, Disney, which that little blue blip that you saw on the Florida map we showed before, it's right outside Orlando because that's where I think all the furries who work there live.
[00:45:11]  They are in some trouble with the FCC because it appears they had been hiring people based on skin color for many years.
[00:45:18]  Surprise, surprise.
[00:45:19]  The FCC has been investigating Disney's ABC stations for possible violations of the Communications Act of 1934 and the FCC's rules, including the agency's prohibition on unlawful discrimination.
[00:45:30]  The FCC determines that calling in Disney's ABC licenses for early renewal at this time under the Communication Act's public interest standard is essential within the meaning of agency regulations.
[00:45:42]  FCC Chairman Brendan Carr discussed it on a podcast with Katie Miller, who is married to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
[00:45:50]  There's evidence suggesting that Disney literally was dividing and categorizing employees based on race and gender, and potentially, we'll see what the evidence establishes ultimately, giving different opportunities to people based on their race or gender or other protected class.
[00:46:04]  And we're going to get some more discovery from Disney on that, but that could raise character questions about the company long term.
[00:46:10]  Josh, it's interesting because I just said that ABC should be left to their own devices, whether they want to.
[00:46:30]  Well, that's also exactly among other reasons why our, our governor, Oliver, Ron Sanders got into this extended years long fight with the Walt Disney Company, which is one of, if not the single largest employer here in the Southern United States.
[00:46:45]  It's not a, it's not a fight that a governor picks.
[00:46:47]  Picks haphazardly, but he did so because they were peddling woke filth and apparently they were employing woke practices inside the company itself.
[00:46:55]  But this broader notion of Brendan Carr looking at this simultaneously with the backdrop of this back and forth with Kimmel kind of takes me back to my earlier point, which is I'm obviously not calling, God forbid, for the infamous kind of Stalin esque notion of show me the man and I will find you the crime.
[00:47:10]  Rather, what I'm saying is that for decades now, when it comes to lawfare of the left, prosecuting Trump and this and that, the grannies outside the pro life abortion clinics, et cetera, et cetera, at some point, sometimes you do use prosecutorial discretion and you operate in good faith to find a law.
[00:47:28]  that you think that someone has actually violated.
[00:47:31]  And in this case, it seems like ABC actually has violated the law.
[00:47:35]  Now, so people can connect that in their mind or they cannot connect that in their mind there.
[00:47:38]  But at some point, I think they will get the message.
[00:47:41]  You know, Dave, I think a lot about this Substack post that our mutual friend Abigail Schreier wrote a few years ago on this very topic, where she famously said that short-term escalation is probably necessary in the interest of a mid to long-term stasis of some sort of stabilization or equilibrium.
[00:47:57]  And, you know, putting on my lawyer hat again for the third time on the show, That's not my preferred way of doing this, by the way.
[00:48:02]  I prefer that, like, eagle protection is, like, actually a thing and that we're all free and fair.
[00:48:06]  And, but the point is it's so warped and it's so distorted at this point there that some sort of short, short-term escalation, again, operating in good faith, assuming that they've actually violated this law there.
[00:48:17]  I think that actually is the path forward for now.
[00:48:19]  Yeah.
[00:48:19]  And I mean, it seems to me it's pretty obvious they did this.
[00:48:21]  And there were, if you may remember at the height of COVID and all that, all the Zoom meetings that got leaked from the Disney people, I think Chris Rufo leaked them where they were talking about hiring, you know, black and trans writers.
[00:48:32]  And, you know, they were then Employees who were saying, I'm white, and I was told I'm not going to get a job.
[00:48:37]  So it's obvious it was happening there.
[00:48:39]  It seems to me, however, if they go for Disney on this, you're going to have to go for basically, you're going to have to go for everybody.
[00:48:44]  I was, I just mentioned on the show yesterday, I was on a Delta flight yesterday, and they still have their 2024 DEI award on the plane, on the plane when you get on.
[00:48:53]  Yeah.
[00:48:53]  So you'd have to go for absolutely everybody.
[00:48:56]  Did the pilot get a DEI award or was it a stewardess or?
[00:48:59]  I was like, whoa, I got a white pilot.
[00:49:01]  This is going to go well.
[00:49:02]  Oh boy.
[00:49:03]  You're going to get in trouble.
[00:49:05]  I'm sorry.
[00:49:06]  I was just looking up the word stasis because I just want to make sure I can hear you.
[00:49:10]  He's using all his empty words today.
[00:49:11]  Yeah, he's just chopping all these big words.
[00:49:14]  Doesn't this bring it back to the conversation where we started, right, with the Voting Rights Act, which is about race has to be injected?
[00:49:21]  And now you're bringing us to DEI.
[00:49:23]  And whether it's a pilot, whether it's somebody writing a comedy show or something at Disney, it's like I grew up in Long Island, right?
[00:49:32]  Very, you know, mixed group of people, you know, Irish, Italians, Catholic, Jewish, white, black.
[00:49:39]  And it was a melting pot, literally.
[00:49:40]  Nobody cared.
[00:49:41]  And my parents just brought us up as, like, you know, you're supposed to like everyone, get along, but it's like the battle of the fittest.

=== Trans Writer Shaniqua Black (01:12) ===

[00:49:47]  Like, you've got to work hard.
[00:49:49]  You've got to make your own way.
[00:49:50]  That's the way it is in New York, writ large, pre Mamdani or whatever.
[00:49:54]  But my point is, I don't care about the pilot's race or whatever.
[00:49:58]  I want the best pilot, right?
[00:49:59]  White, black, male, female.
[00:50:01]  If somebody's writing jokes or whatever, why does it have to be a black trans writer?
[00:50:06]  Because they are checking boxes.
[00:50:08]  If that's the best writer, the person is hysterical.
[00:50:11]  Awesome.
[00:50:12]  You know, just do that.
[00:50:14]  And it's like, you know, we're going to pick a congressperson based on, you know, majority, minority race, or we're going to pick it based on this is a good, decent person who's got America's interests at heart.
[00:50:26]  How about that?
[00:50:28]  Well, I'm sorry.
[00:50:29]  I have to fire you, Shaniqua, my black trans writer.
[00:50:33]  It's been fun.
[00:50:33]  Thank you for your time here.
[00:50:36]  Gentlemen, Henry, you're coming back for sure.
[00:50:39]  Oh, yeah.
[00:50:39]  Hammer, hammer.
[00:50:41]  As I always tell you, you were hanging on by a thread, but you used so many words, big words, the prophylactic.
[00:50:48]  You're back.
[00:50:49]  You can come back.
[00:50:50]  In one answer, he went from prophylactic to porn.
[00:50:53]  He kept using porn, I noticed as well.
[00:50:55]  He's got a diverse vocabulary.
[00:50:57]  What hat was that, Josh?
[00:50:58]  I'm trying to keep you on your toes, Henry.
[00:51:00]  That's what I'm trying to do.