Mark Simone swings by to fill in for the traveling Sean and touch on the news of the day. Bill O'Reilly stops by as well!The Sean Hannity Show is on weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on iHeartRadio and Hannity.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
He's at the border with Donald Trump, with Governor Abbott of Texas.
He's at the border.
A lot of interesting stuff.
Sean will join us during the program from the border live, so we'll get a report.
And then, of course, you'll see him tonight, 9 o'clock on the Fox News channel with a big special report.
You'll see what's going on down there at the border.
So we've got a lot of big news to get to.
We'll get to Bill Cosby.
He's out of prison as we speak.
He is President Trump is speaking live at the border.
Should we take it?
If you want to.
Well, it's Linda's in charge.
I think we should take it.
Means I don't have to talk.
You're still 25.
Wow.
So he was a young 25 when he got it.
That's something.
Billy Long.
Does everyone know Billy?
Huh?
Does everyone know Billy?
I could have you do your thing.
Do you want to do it?
Do you want to say a couple of words?
Go ahead.
Let's auction off not the governorship, not the presidency.
How about auctioning off the rest of the wall that should have been built?
Go ahead, Billy.
Got to love when they mic those questions, Mark.
Isn't that helpful for a live radio?
It's Billy.
Who Billy is, Billy?
Great job.
We appreciate you being here.
Michael Cloud.
Michael.
Great.
All right, we'll break away from this.
We'll come back after the thank you round.
Come back to it.
This does not seem to be the crucial part of the speech.
You know, whenever you go anywhere as the president or any politician, they give you a card with his 12 local whoever, and you got to introduce them all.
So he's going through that phase.
Hey, it's Mark Simone here for Sean.
This is so strange.
I have, you know, I've been working from home.
I've been doing my show from home for a long time.
It seems like a year and a few months.
So I have not been, I'm actually in the studio.
First time I've been back in a studio.
My building pass didn't quite work.
It's expired.
But it's great to be here.
There's Linda there.
There's Ethan over there.
Everything back to normal.
We've raided Sean's refrigerator, all his food, everything.
He will be with us later in the show.
We'll get to President Trump in a moment.
Keep an eye on it.
Let me know when it gets to something important.
Bill Cosby has been released.
This is a very strange situation.
Cosby, I think we all agree he looks pretty guilty.
Looks like he definitely was guilty and most likely belonged in prison.
But what happened was there was an earlier case where they needed his testimony.
I think it was a civil lawsuit.
So some kind of an agreement was made that the testimony he gave, if honest in the civil lawsuit, would not be used against him.
And he testified honestly in a civil lawsuit.
And then somehow later in this criminal case, that testimony was introduced because it's a civil case, but it was from a deposition.
It's under oath.
And it got introduced into this case, and that got him convicted and sent to prison.
So even though I think he's guilty, he sure seems guilty.
Look at all the evidence.
The argument legally is that that testimony never should have been allowed into the criminal case.
You know, you watch Law and Order, motion to dismiss this testimony.
Well, legally, technically, it shouldn't have been allowed in the case.
But the big question, we'll talk to some experts later.
Why, if that's the case, did it ever happen?
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania did the right thing technically, legally, and let him out.
But what took so long if it's such a simple legal matter that should have been done like in a week?
And again, he looks guilty to me, so I don't think it's bad that he's been in prison all this time.
When you're the biggest star in the world, you know, in his day, Bill Cosby was the biggest star.
Couldn't get bigger than Bill Cosby.
You know how these stars, when they go on tour, they have what's called the rider.
It's in their contract.
It's what they want in their dressing room.
And all these stars have a list of things.
If you're the local arena venue, you've got to make sure this stuff is in the dressing room.
And the link will say Beluga Caviar, Dom Perrion Champagne.
It'll have all these things in there.
Well, I saw Bill Cosby's rider once.
It was a grand piano.
He needs a grand piano to play.
It relaxes him before a show.
A grand piano.
And then it got to the point where he had his own moving van, his own moving company would pull up.
You had to empty all the furniture out of the dressing room.
And then they would bring in his furniture, a Louis XIV chair, a Van Gogh artwork from millions of dollars.
It would be placed all over the dressing room for the one hour he's going to be there.
And then when he was done, his movers, his moving van would take all this stuff out and take it away.
So if you were the next act coming to town, you got there and the dressing room was a card table and a folding chair because they didn't get the other furniture back yet.
So this is Cosby in his heyday to go from that to being in prison.
Obviously, that's very tough.
Although they say he kind of rose to the top in prison, he became like this guru in prison.
He would hold court every day and all the prisoners would listen to him.
So he's out.
They decided to release him immediately, and that was earlier today.
His PR man, his public relations man, came and picked him up at prison.
They drove away, just a car or two with the helicopter, the TV news following it on his way home.
Imagine at some point he'll speak and make a public statement.
He's going to want to consult with lawyers and everything, make sure he doesn't say anything wrong.
So that's the big news of the day.
The other thing is, you know, there's this persecution of Donald Trump from the Russia hoax to the two impeachments to it never ever ends.
You may have heard that here in New York City, we got a district attorney who's a nice guy in real life, Cy Vance.
But like a lot of these politicians, when he gets into that office, crazy liberal Trump derangement syndrome out to get Donald Trump.
It's so ugly to watch this happen.
So the district attorney of New York, you remember about five months ago, he got a hold of all the Trump tax returns.
He won the court ruling that the tax returns of Donald Trump had to be handed over to him.
And you'll remember, I think it was February.
What's that?
Four months ago.
Four or five months ago, these big trucks showed up delivering the tax returns of Donald Trump, each one thousands of pages.
Well, this is the most important point to remember.
This is the crucial point of all this.
The district attorney in New York City, Manhattan, and that's the top district attorney in the country, for four and a half months has been going over Donald Trump's tax returns.
And they have found nothing.
Nothing.
There are no charges being filed.
So obviously the tax returns were totally clean.
No charges.
But this Trump derangement syndrome is a vicious disease.
They got to get it something.
So it looks like the word is, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, a lot of people reporting.
Tomorrow they will indict a Trump executive.
It looked like it was going to be two, although one now looks like he's okay.
But there's a nice guy, Alan Weiselberg.
He's the CFO, chief financial officer of the Trump organization.
He's a good guy.
He's done nothing wrong, but they got to get him on something.
Why go after this guy who has no reason to go after him?
He's a nice guy.
It's, you know, that thing where you squeeze the guy, you indict him, you try to indict his kids, and you hope he'll flip.
You know, they did this with General Flynn, Roger Stone, Manafort.
You indict, indict, indict his kids.
He's going to flip.
Well, that works only if there's something to flip.
If there's nothing to give, nothing to flip, hey, Paul Manafort would have been happy to give you anything.
There's nothing to give.
And that's the case with Alan Weiselberg.
There's nothing to tell.
So you have to manufacture some flimsy charge.
What they've come up with, he was using a company car.
And he may have been using a company apartment.
Now, this is standard practice in all major corporations.
If you're one of the top guys, CFO, CEO, use a company car.
Let me point out: this district attorney has a government car and a driver.
I guess he puts that on his income tax that he has a government car and a driver.
In fact, all these New York City politicians got government cars and drivers day and night.
And not only does he have a car and driver, he's got a security guard.
He's got a couple of, he's got a police detail.
I assume he puts this on his taxes, the district attorney.
But they're going to, this is going to look so silly.
And now, the reason he has a company apartment, the Trump organization, their main business, they have some hotels and restaurants and golf courses, but the main business is building apartments.
Skyscrapers, Trump Tower, Trump Park, Trump International.
They got these apartment buildings all over the city of New York.
And when you have all these apartment buildings, it means you have thousands and thousands and thousands of apartments, which means at any given time, a couple hundred of them are empty.
So is this a great shock that somebody uses these apartments?
You know, if you worked at the Ford Motor Company, executive headquarters, Dearborn, Michigan, they got thousands of Fords sitting there.
If you're an executive, you can use them.
You can take them home.
You can take them for the weekend.
I know guys that do this.
In fact, every weekend they take a different car home.
This goes on everywhere.
I assume if you work at Apple and you're the CEO or the CFO, you can take any piece of hardware.
You know, Maine, Apple headquarters, they got tables filled with this stuff.
So this is perfectly normal, standard practice everywhere.
This is going to be the silliest indictment ever.
Alan Weiselberg, he's a good guy.
I guess the only real point of this is this will seriously hurt Weiselberg's chances for running in 2024.
That's about all this will accomplish.
Outside of that, it's a waste of taxpayer money.
By the way, this is the same district attorney who announced two weeks ago he's dropping all charges against all the rioters, looters all last summer in New York City.
These are looters who smashed, burned, trashed, destroyed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of businesses all over New York and robbed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stuff out of all these stores.
Hundreds of them.
No charges.
They're being dropped.
But Alan Weiselberg took a company car for the weekend.
This is worth millions and millions of dollars.
Hey, we'll take some calls in a minute.
1-800-1-800-941-Sean is the number.
1-800-941-Sean.
It's Mark Simone.
Sean will be with us a little later.
Hey, follow me on Instagram.
I need more Instagram followers.
Mark Simone NYC at Instagram.
I tell you to follow me on Twitter, but they keep taking my followers away.
Every time I get them, they don't know about Instagram.
If you follow me there, it'll work.
Hey, don't forget the great website with great stories every day, Hannity.com.
Back in a moment.
Hey, it's Mark Simone here for Sean.
Now, Sean Hannity at the border as we speak.
We'll have him on the program.
He'll check in with us live from the border.
And then tonight, he's there with Donald Trump.
He's there with Governor Abbott of Texas.
Tonight, very special edition of Hannity.
You'll see what's going on there down at the border.
Not like this is not one of those Kamala Harris got within 800 miles of the border.
Have you ever seen a map of Texas?
It's the Rio Grande Valley where the problem is.
Look at a map of Texas, where the Rio Grande Valley is.
And then look at where El Paso is.
It's 800 miles.
It's farther than Chicago is from Washington, literally.
So it's amazing how far away she got from the border.
But you'll see the real deal tonight.
Let's take some calls.
Let's go to Herb who's calling from Virginia.
Herb, how are you doing?
Welcome to the Sean Hannity Show.
Taking Sean's place as a 27-year veteran, I'm really concerned about the objective of our senior military.
Our flag officers seem to get lost in this clerical race theory and woke stuff when they forget their primary mission is to defeat the enemy and what they're doing to infect our service members with this cancer just is blowing my mind.
Were you a drill sergeant?
I could have been, but nobody.
Yeah, boy, I would listen to you.
You sound authoritative, boy.
Listen to the way this guy sounds so authoritative.
Didn't he hear that General Milley?
Yeah, well, General Milley said the other day, I want to understand this white rage.
Well, white rage sure wasn't like Black Lives Matter and Antifa who were engaged in burning, pillaging, throwing rocks and stuff at police officers, et cetera.
Our senior military leadership needs to shape up and keep their focus on the real objective because you know the Russian and Chinese military leaders got to be laughing their rear ends off.
Yeah.
All right, Herb, good call.
Thanks for calling.
Let me defend General Milley.
You see, when you're, what is his actual term, Joint Chiefs of Swords, whatever the hell he is, it's a two-year term.
You're there for two years.
So Trump put him in last year, so he's up at the end of the year.
Now, you've seen this General Milley, not the most impressive guy.
And he was with Trump for a year.
So the Biden people, first thing they think is toss out these Trump guys.
And if you look at Milley and you meet with Millie and talk to Millie, again, not that impressive.
And I don't think he's fighting off lucrative job offers as we speak.
So I think he knows he's on the way out.
And that's the reason he's doing all this woke stuff and making these crazy statements about white supremacy or whatever the hell he was talking.
He's trying, he's begging to stay.
He's like yelling to the Obama people, I'm a crazy woke progressive.
Don't fire me.
Because when you look at a guy like that with that uniform and all the fruit salad all over you, you don't think woke.
So he's trying to act as woke as possible.
This is what happens with these swamp people.
They get so desperate to stay in the swamp.
Let's go to Jason, Laguna Beach, California.
How are you doing, Jason?
Good.
Thank you for taking my call, Mark.
I wanted to share something that's stuck with me.
I heard somebody on the radio the other day say, I didn't get to choose what race I was born.
I didn't get to choose that I was born white.
Nobody gets to choose what race they were born.
You're born black, you're born Asian, you're born white.
We don't choose that, but we're putting so much emphasis on the choice rather than the choices we make.
You can choose what choice you decide to make the rest of your life, but you cannot choose.
Nobody chose what color they were to be born.
Yeah.
And that has a resounding effect on my mental status.
It just made me go, wow, we are wasting our time fighting that rather than the choices we make.
Well, hey, what's going on in Laguna Beach?
Everything's open?
Everything's back to normal there?
Yeah, everything's pretty back to normal.
Yeah, all right.
Well, thanks for calling, Jason, because I hear a lot of these progressive governors, they're now talking about the locking down again, restrictions.
Some of these politicians talk about masks, put your mask back on.
Why?
It's over.
If you're vaccinated, it's over.
You're fine.
So, yeah, listen, here's the reason for all this racial strife.
Republicans don't do well with the black vote traditionally in the presidential race.
They're lucky if they get 1% of the black vote.
When Donald Trump ran, something happened because he started talking about these Democrats.
They tell you what they're going to do for you every four years, and then they never do it.
And you never hear from them again until it's election time four years later.
So he really brought that out in the campaign, and he got a surprisingly high percentage of the black vote.
I don't remember what it was, but instead of the usual one, it was like 9% or some very high number.
No Republican ever got that high in African-American votes.
So it terrified Democrats.
And in 2020, still did very well.
And they've got this all calculated, there's algorithms, the math.
They have to reach a certain percentage of African-American vote to win.
And Trump got dangerously close to ending that.
So that's why all of a sudden, white supremacy, systemic racism, all this stuff, white supremacists, there are white supremacists.
I think there's about 12 of them.
There's four somewhere in a mountain in Virginia or someplace.
And remember they used to have a parade, those white supremacists, like six of them in Skokie, Illinois or somewhere.
It was always that.
You know, we had these terrible attacks on Asian Americans all over New York.
So I'm watching this liberal show.
The police commissioner is the guest.
And they said, is this white supremacy?
Are these white supremacists?
And he said, he's a thoughtful guy, Dermot Chase said, you know, I don't know the answer.
Let me get, I'll check into this and get back to you.
The next day, he sent him a letter, made him read it on the air.
He said, our department has never encountered a white supremacist anywhere.
We don't know of any white supremacists.
In fact, with these Asian attacks, the vast majority of the attackers were not even white.
But he did say we've not encountered white supremacy anywhere in New York City, biggest city in America.
But it sounds good.
You remember they used to call Reagan a racist?
He was a racist.
Bush is a racist.
So they just keep elevating it every time.
Racist isn't good enough anywhere.
It's a white supremacist and systemic racism.
It's so systemic in this country that twice we elected a black president.
We just elected a black vice president.
We've had a black chairman of American Express.
Time Warner's had a black chairman.
I could go on and on.
So it's the least racist country in the world.
You know, if you're a black man, go try to get elected president of China.
See how you do.
Go try to get elected president of Russia.
See how that goes.
But they teach this critical race theory, how evil, how awful we are.
You know of any other country where in their schools they teach how bad the country is.
You think in China they're teaching the kids how bad this communism is.
You think in Russia they teach the kids how awful that Soviet Union was.
Anyway, let's take some calls.
Let's go to Joe, Freehold, New Jersey.
Joe, welcome to Sean Hannity Show.
Yes, good afternoon, my friend.
Mark, he can't remember my name.
Mark Simone.
Mark Simone, of course.
I've been listening to you for years.
Oh, okay.
You got a radio now.
That's good.
Go ahead.
I wanted to make a comparison between Emperor Nero and President Biden.
Like Nero was fiddling while Rome was burning.
Yeah.
Well, Mr. Biden is fiddling with our own lives while the United States is burning.
And guess what?
I guess hopefully he'll wake up one day and realize that he is the president of the United States, not of some other country.
Thank you so much for listening.
Thanks.
Biden will wake up one day.
Yeah, good luck with that.
I don't know.
Do you blame Joe Biden?
Listen, clearly, he's not in charge.
He's like a ventriloquist dummy.
He's like just a sock puppet.
He was perfect for what they wanted.
I just get the feeling the committee runs things.
You know, the committee, the Obama people are all there.
Ron Clain, chief of staff.
Susan Rice is like the field coach there, like the defense coach.
Jen Saki, longtime Obama employee.
That's the whole Obama team running things there.
So, hey, there's an old interview with Obama where he actually said once, you know what my dream is?
To have somebody else be the president and I control the whole thing.
Hmm.
Huh.
Well, that would explain why you pick a guy who doesn't seem to be all there.
Just an old guy who does what he's told.
Here, read this index card when you get up there.
And then you'll call on this person and then on this person, and then that's it.
Well, how else do you explain Biden?
Every two seconds, he's taking questions.
I better not take another question.
I'll get in trouble.
I'll get in trouble if I don't get off.
Who's he talking about?
He'll get in trouble with.
Let's go to Kay Kenneth, Big Springs, Texas.
How you doing, Kenneth?
I'm doing good, man.
I appreciate you taking my call.
Well, we always love Texas.
We want to hear from Texas.
What'd you want to say, Kenneth?
Well, I wonder if any of you guys figured out that all y'all are talking about a lot of the time today is Bill Cosby.
You think they didn't release him today to cover up Trump down on the border?
Well, that's all everybody wanted to talk about.
That is a very interesting theory.
You know, I never thought about that.
Hey, wait a minute.
Hey, when I walked in here, Ethan, somebody said, didn't you say, when I walked, somebody said, why'd they release him today?
Remember, somebody said that?
Yep, we said that.
Yeah, somebody, I forget who was saying, why'd they release him now?
How come it happened today?
Why did it happen all of a sudden?
And I said, well, that's when the court decides, but you're right.
That's very smart of you, Kenneth.
That's just exactly what happened.
They said, well, it had to be today.
Immediately.
Not no debate, no nothing.
Yeah, we're letting him out today.
I think they're covering up Trump's trip to the border.
All right.
Thanks for calling.
That's very smart.
Now, Hannity, Sean is at the border.
We're going to talk to him later.
He'll join us from the border, is doing a big special Hannity tonight at 9 o'clock with President Trump, with the governor of Texas.
So if we find out at 9 o'clock, Cosby's appearing on Rachel Maddow to speak for the first time, then we'll know Kenneth was right, that this was all a plot to distract from the border crisis.
Hey, anyway, we've got lots to talk about.
We've got lots of great guests.
Bill O'Reilly coming up after the top of the hour.
Mark Simone here for Sean.
Hey, follow me on Instagram, MarkSimoneNYC at Instagram.
Follow me on Twitter.
Check out my website, marksimone.com.
And of course, for all the best news and great stories every day, Hannity.com.
And we'll take some calls in just a moment.
IRS scandal and the NSA atrocities convince you?
You need a watchdog on Washington with Insider Sources.
Wayne Hannity, every day.
Welcome back.
It's the Sean Hannity Show.
It's Mark Simone here for Sean.
Normally I'm on our big flagship station in New York City, WOR, the number one talk station.
Hey, for, you know, who is it?
Some guy's arguing with me today.
Who listens to talk radio?
Who listens to AM radio?
I checked.
68 million people every day.
That's who listens.
It's pretty simple.
And this is the most listened-to radio program on earth.
Linda, that's correct, isn't it?
She's looking at me like.
I'd like to say something.
What?
I'd like to ask all of the crazy people to stop calling because I don't normally answer the phones.
And I've had my fill today, so thank you.
It's that voice of yours.
You see, she has a cold.
So normally when you hear it, it's right.
Like they can't even hear me like yelling at them.
They're like, what are you saying?
I'm like, I'm just hanging up.
I can't.
No, that's why they keep calling back.
Normally she answers the phone.
What do you want?
No, but today it's hello.
How are you?
Hello.
It's that voice.
She gets sick more often.
It sounds good.
What do you think that is?
It's allergies, I think.
I think it is allergies.
I have terrible allergies.
I need more honey, obviously.
You know, you hear me sniffing?
I never had any allergies all last year because I've been working from home.
I haven't gone.
Now they come in the studio.
It's this stuff on the wall.
Oh, no, I know what it is.
We're allergic to the Blasio.
I have uncovered it.
Hey, those of you around the country, if you think you don't have a good mayor or you don't have a good governor, I don't care who it is.
It's better than what we've got.
We got the world's dumbest mayor.
They have a problem, a little park here called Washington Square Park.
It's about two blocks by one block.
And it's become a crime-ridden drug den.
They're trying to figure out, they're having meetings what to do about it.
Now, you think if you brought Rudy Giuliani back or a great police commissioner like Ray Kelly, and you said, hey, it's a park, it's two blocks long.
You think you could fix this?
How long would that take to clean that up?
About six minutes.
This is going on four months now.
They can't figure out how to fix this up.
Times Square, you know, that's where all the tourists love to go.
Times Square, we've had shooting after shooting after shooting.
This mayor, two days ago, announces he's going to flood the Times Square area with cops because millions of tourists go there.
Wouldn't you think they would have been doing that anyway?
Wouldn't that be the first thing you do if you had a police department?
I want a lot of cops in Times Square.
They just thought to do this.
Danny announces at the press conference, we're also putting undercover cops in there.
I think the idea undercover, you're not supposed to tell everybody.
It's supposed to be secret.
I'm not a police expert, but wouldn't that be part of it?
They got these two gangs in there fighting, and they are telling them we're having undercover cops.
So now it's pretty easy to spot once you know what to look for.
Now we got a governor, Cuomo.
You all know about his decision.
He wrote a memo a year ago ordering nursing homes to take coronavirus patients in.
Now, can you imagine if you're eating in a restaurant and they said, we're bringing in some patients who have active coronavirus.
We're bringing them in.
They'll be at tables near you.
Wouldn't you have a heart attack?
Well, that's it.
Can you imagine a nursing home where everybody's already sick?
And it's not a hospital.
They don't have all kinds of procedures for controlling disease.
It's a nursing home.
And he sends thousands and thousands of coronavirus patients in there, kills 15,000 people.
This is the same governor that signed a bill releasing all prisoners.
No bail.
You're released back onto the street.
Do you see the shootings and all this stuff?
Every one of these guys, they find out he's been arrested 20 times, let out immediately with this no bail.
This is Cuomo in action, not to mention the defund the police and all this other stuff.
But we're going to get somebody new as a mayor.
We're having an election.
And the good news is we had the election last week, and they announced we can't tell you the winner.
Well, three weeks, we'll get back to you.
Three weeks.
So they give us an update yesterday of the numbers.
And everybody looks, wait a minute, this is 150,000 more people voting than you said.
Oh, then they announce a correction.
These are test ballots.
We accidentally counted them.
Test ballots?
Who would have 150,000 tests?
So you talk about election fraud in 2020.
You're immediately thrown off Twitter and arrested.
But every Democrat now is screaming election fraud here in New York City.
So you can't win.
Hey, we got a lot to get to.
Bill O'Reilly will be with us in the next hour.
Top of the hour, Bill O'Reilly coming up.
Sean Hannity will be with us.
He'll be live from the border.
He's at the border with Donald Trump, with the governor of Texas.
So we'll talk to Sean.
He'll give us a full report from the border.
Don't forget, watch Hannity tonight.
Big show, 9 o'clock on the Fox News channel from the border.
Yes, he's a simple man.
Well, not that simple, but a simple man.
Hey, Bill O'Reilly, I don't know if you've read his latest book, Killing the Mob.
This is the best book in the killing series, besides all the famous mob names.
You will not believe the celebrities that turn up in this book.
Killing the Mob, it's the new Bill O'Reilly book.
And of course, he's going to be going on tour with Donald Trump later this year.
Everything's at billo'reilly.com.
Bill O'Reilly, how you doing?
Good, Mark.
Thanks for having me on.
I appreciate it.
Hey, it looks like tomorrow they might indict a Trump executive for using a company car.
They've had the Trump tax returns for five months.
Obviously, they found nothing there.
I mean, this is the biggest waste of time and money for a prosecutor, isn't it?
Well, I think it's a political prosecution that could really come back and hurt Cy Vance, the Manhattan DA.
If this is all it is, the use of an automobile, and you're using taxpayer money, New York State taxpayer money, to chase down an executive for, what, three years now?
I think just going on for three years.
And this is what you got.
That's really going to hurt Mr. Vance and the entire Democratic machine in New York, including the Attorney General, Letitia James, who oversees this.
What it is, is an attempt to, if it happens tomorrow, and I think the Wall Street Journal is a pretty reliable source, so it probably will.
It's an attempt to shake down this guy Weisberg, the executive that worked for Trump, to turn on Trump himself.
That's how this stuff usually goes.
You get, we'll cut a deal with you.
It's tawdry, but I caution everybody, let's wait and look at this stuff, and then your argument becomes stronger and more crystallized when you can see it, what exactly it is.
Yeah.
Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity not here.
He's at the border with Donald Trump, with Governor Abbott of Texas, looking over the border.
What do you think?
Good idea for Donald Trump to go there?
I don't mind the border thing.
As I say on my TV broadcast on the NoSpin news on billoreilly.com, tonight, I think that Donald Trump, who I know wants to run for president again because he told me, something like this gets him a lot of attention, and he's blacked out from social media.
So this is a positive for him because it is a catastrophe.
I mean, I have been searching.
I haven't found any Biden supporters.
Maybe you have seen one, Mark, in your radio experience.
I haven't seen anybody defending Biden's border policies.
Have you?
Anybody?
No, it's more just denial.
They tell you everything is fine and nothing's wrong.
Yeah, it's a blackout denial.
But even on MSNBC, which is the craziest left network, not only in America, but in the world, and that's NBC News.
They should be very proud.
Even there, it's basically, well, he's doing a, he's a humanitarian guy.
Joe Joe's a kind man.
So he's letting millions and millions of people in the United States who really don't have any right to be here, but it's kind, so it's okay.
That's about the strongest argument they can muster over this insane open border policy that's not kind because it hurts almost every American, including law enforcement, which is to deal with all the narcotics coming into the country as well as the migrants.
So Biden has really screwed this up, and Trump is smart to highlight that.
However, I think there's a presidential campaign already underway, and I think that's too early for Donald Trump.
You know, one of the reasons I put together the tour with him, it's a history tour, not a rally.
There's not going to be any rallying going on.
All right.
It's like, okay, you were there for four years.
Here's the problem.
How did you solve it or not solve it?
That's what the show is.
And I told him in trying to convince him to do it, this will be good should you decide to run for president again because you'll have stuff on the record that nobody knows about because it wasn't reported by the corrupt press.
So this is why you should do it.
And eventually he bought into that argument.
That's why the four shows are on the board.
But to just go out and do rallies now, it seems to me a bit early.
Hey, you know, Bill O'Reilly and Donald Trump will be on tour in the fall.
If you go to billoreilly.com, you can buy tickets first couple nights here in Florida.
And these are big venues.
And it'll be quite a night with Bill O'Reilly and Donald Trump.
But that means you had to sit down and negotiate with him about money, about other things.
What is he like at the negotiating table?
Is he even more impressive than you thought he'd be as a negotiator?
I don't know if the word impressive is what I'm going to throw around.
He's a tough guy.
But I'm a tough guy.
Yeah.
So it's two tough guys.
It's my production company.
I have the best production company, I think, in the world.
We are very professional, very precise.
Nothing is left to chance.
Security is dealt with.
Arenas are dealt with.
We're above being honest.
We're generous.
And there are not too many companies that are generous.
We're honest and generous.
So I made Donald Trump an offer he couldn't refuse.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Learned not from killing the mob.
And he didn't refuse it.
He took it.
And now, the idea of this, you'll ask questions.
You'll get to the, you're great at getting to the bottom of something.
You'll get to the bottom of stuff nobody's ever really, like, as you said, finding out how did this vaccine get developed so fast.
It's the most fascinating story ever, and nobody's telling it.
So Joe Biden, over the weekend, the Biden administration is going to send everybody out, including Joe, he's going to Michigan, and Commodore is going to Vegas on the America Together Again tour.
It's kind of like the Turtles Happy Together Again tour, I guess.
It's the same concept.
It's going to be a whole bunch of groups, and they're all going to sing happy together.
Anyway, this is about the COVID vaccine and how successful it's been here in the United States while Canada and Europe and every other country in the world remains locked down because they don't have it.
So Biden's trying to take credit for it, but it came under Trump.
But nobody really knows how that happened.
And that's my headline of this tour.
That's why I'm doing the tour.
And so people will know.
So then in 2024, when you have another presidential election, you'll actually know what happened during the Republican administration.
And nobody knows now.
So to me, this is a good opportunity to write contemporary history in person in front of 15,000, 17,000 people in Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, Houston, and Dallas.
And I'm looking forward to this in December.
You know, if you watch Netflix or anything, the big thing now is documentaries.
There's a documentary about everything on earth.
But the one thing they refuse to do a documentary on is how the vaccine got created so fast, because obviously Trump will be the hero.
So you'll ask him and finally get all of this out of him.
I assume you're going to video all of this stuff, and we'll see it eventually as a special.
Yeah, well, you'll see it on billoreilly.com.
We're the sole media outlet for this.
We are going to obviously videotape everything for archival purposes, and I'll use it in my media operations.
The Trump administration, they're people that have access to the media.
They can use it any way they want as well.
But, you know, look, we're living in an age of deceit, and everybody should know that.
Everybody listening to us right now, Mark, should know we're living in an age where deceit has overridden honesty in almost every area.
And it's really a tragedy for a Judeo-Christian country now to be dominated by deceit.
And the drivers of the deceit are corporations, massive corporations.
Not individual deceit so much.
It's Disney and Comcast and ATT and Viacom.
And I mean, they just traffic in it and make billions of dollars doing it.
And we Americans are caught and we don't even know what's happening to us.
So from my perspective, if I can get stuff on the record that's true, that affects every single American citizen, I'm going to do that.
And the best way I can do it is through my radio and TV broadcast and through an opportunity to interview the 45th president of the United States.
I'd do the same thing to Barack Obama if he wants to step up.
But boy, this deceit that we're dealing with now, this is really, really intense.
You know, also, like two days ago, the crazy Democrats started saying it was the Republicans who started to defund the police movement.
They're the ones defunding.
And all of a sudden, every network is quiet.
Every fact-checking site is quiet.
It's gotten to the point where they can say anything, knowing the media and the fact-checkers will back them up.
What do we do about that problem?
You can't do anything about it.
As long as these big corporations allow this dishonesty, I mean, you used to have two giant newspapers that actually tried to report the news: the New York Times and the Washington Post.
And when I was working at ABC News and CBS News, those news organizations took their cues from the Post and the Times.
And whatever stories they thought were important, then the networks would do those stories.
Well, now the Post and the Times aren't really newspapers anymore.
They're left-wing journals.
They're progressive companies that's promoting that point of view.
So the whole journalistic structure is collapsed.
So what can people do about it?
Nothing.
They can listen to Hannity and to you and to me and try to get some semblance of the truth.
But the companies are free to peddle as much propaganda as they want to peddle.
And there's nothing you can do about it.
One caveat to that.
DeSantis in Florida and the legislature there passed a law that says that individual Floridians can sue the social media companies if those companies hurt them, black them out, censor them, do something untoward to them.
You can bring suit.
Now, that is the beginning of holding these people accountable.
Yeah, you know, the problem, though, the social media, it's a private company, but it's clear now that it's more like a utility and it's got to be regulated.
Imagine if Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone and then said, but you can't talk on it if you're a Republican or if I don't agree with you.
Isn't that really the answer?
Make them utilities and regulate them that way.
Well, Teddy Roosevelt has got to be resurrected from the grave somehow.
Because Teddy went after, you know, the giant corporations that were doing just as you said.
They were choking off competition.
They were censoring people they didn't like, and this was the beginning of the 20th century, and Teddy went in and just blasted them.
That's got to happen in the next Republican administration.
It's not going to happen under the Democrats because the Democrats are benefiting from this.
But the Republicans, if they take the House and the Senate and get a president, they could do heavy damage to not only the social media companies, but the broadcast media companies.
They could pass laws that would punish them if they are dishonest and make money trafficking in dishonest policies.
Hey, I don't know if anybody can answer this.
Maybe you can.
I can see everybody's a liberal in the tech companies.
They're 24 years old.
But in the media, at CBS, at ABC, why is everybody a liberal?
Why has it always been that way?
What causes that?
Oh, I can answer it because I've worked in all of them.
All right.
I've worked at CBS, local and national, ABC National, Fox News National.
So in the beginning, there was no ideology involved.
When I was hired at WCBS Channel 2, nobody asked me anything about my politics at all.
They took my tape, and I was a damn good reporter in places like Dallas and Denver.
And they looked at my tape, and they hired me to come to New York and work for WCBS.
I did good work at WCBS.
The network hired me.
Dan Rather and his crew hired me.
But they didn't ask me anything about politics.
However, I was warned going in from local to national that it was a liberal environment because Mr. Rather was an ardent liberal.
And that proved to be the case.
I left CBS.
All right.
I went back to local in Boston.
Then Rune Arledge, the head of ABC, offered me a job again.
He did not ask me anything about my politics, and neither did Peter Jennings.
I was very successful at ABC, appearing on World News tonight more than 100 times in two years.
All right.
Very little ideology there.
But the climate was liberal.
And then more and more and more, they hired liberals to fill executive positions.
Not reporters so much, but producers, writers, things like that.
And it evolved into now an industry that is dominated by the left, except for Fox, which was set up to counter that.
Yeah.
I hate to say we're out of time, but another place you can go for great reliable stuff, billo'reilly.com.
You can watch the TV show there.
You can get the book.
It's a great book, Killing the Mob.
You can get tickets to see Bill O'Reilly, Donald Trump, a whole series of great events later in the year.
BillO'Reilly.com.
Go there, become a premium member.
Bill O'Reilly, thanks for being with us.
Always fun, Mark.
Thanks for having me on.
All right.
Take care.
It's Mark Simone here for Sean Hannity.
Sean's at the border as we speak.
He'll join us on the program a little later.
Sean Hannity coming up.
Mark Simone here on the Sean Hannity Show.
Hey, welcome back.
It's the Sean Hannity Show.
It's Mark Simone here at Sean Hannity headquarters here for Sean.
He's at the border, but he'll check in with us a little later.
We'll see what he's got to report from down there.
And big show tonight.
Hannity on the Fox News channel at 9 o'clock.
Sean is with Donald Trump with the governor of Texas, Abbott.
And you'll see it all tonight on Hannity.
And we'll hear live from Sean in a few moments.
Also, we'll get to Bill Cosby.
He's out.
He's been let out of prison.
We'll get to that next.
9 p.m.
The president is...
I don't know.
Yep, he's sound asleep in his bed with not a care in the world.
Must be nice, Joe.
The rest of us will keep working.
You're on the Sean Annity Show.
Well, welcome back.
It's Mark Simone here for Sean.
He's at the border.
He's with Donald Trump.
He's with Governor Abbott.
We'll check in with him.
He'll be on with us just a little later, and we'll see what's going on down there at the border.
Bill Cosby was released from prison.
Word is he will speak soon.
I don't know what that means.
He is home.
Ever meet his wife, Camille?
About an hour.
I think he's going to ask to go back to prison.
She's a tough woman.
But anyway, with us is a great legal expert, the great attorney David Schoen, who's always, always great at analyzing this stuff.
David Schoen, how you doing?
Fine, thank you.
How are you?
Very good.
Explain how this guy all of a sudden is out of jail.
This seems to us very unexpected.
Yeah, it's really unexpected.
It's an extraordinary decision, which easily could have gone the other way.
But it's such a strong statement on the sanctity of the right to due process.
I think, you know, people have to get sort of out of their mind how they feel about Bill Cosby or how they feel about Bruce Castor.
It really has little to do with them.
It has to do with upholding the principle of due process.
In a nutshell, what happened here is there are various legal arguments that were used.
But frankly, what the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found is that at the end of the day, when a prosecutor like Bruce Castor did here makes a promise not to prosecute a defendant, and in this case, it was informed by an investigation in which Castor and his whole team found that the prospects of getting a conviction were low.
They didn't feel they could prove the case as to Ms. Cumstand beyond a reasonable doubt.
Based on that, they felt that they should not prosecute.
But Castor decided to very specifically decline to prosecute with the agreement that the civil suits against Cosby would go forward, and Cosby would not be able to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against providing inculpatory testimony against himself.
So once the criminal prosecution was off the table in the civil case, Cosby would be forced to testify, which he did.
He gave four depositions.
He entered into multi-million dollar settlements based on that promise that he wouldn't be prosecuted.
So some of the lower courts in this case had said, listen, Castor didn't have the authority to do that.
He couldn't just give him immunity unilaterally.
And the Supreme Court found that was right.
He couldn't give him immunity.
But they found that due process requires that when the sovereign, here, the district attorney makes a promise that a criminal defendant relies on to his detriment and then gives testimony and so on, that due process requires that we're going to uphold that promise that the district attorney made.
It's really an extraordinary decision and vitally important to the sanctity of the right to due process.
So was there anything wrong with Cosby's lawyers in that way back when they didn't use all this as a defense and prove this?
Well, they did raise it.
I'm not sure they raised it in compelling fashion, but they did raise it.
They filed motions all along that it should be barred.
There are a number of issues that came up.
You know, how is it no issue was made of this in the civil case?
It was never mentioned, disagreement with Castor and so on.
And that's why I say there were a number of ways this case could have gone the other direction.
In fact, there is a dissenting opinion in the case, but most of the justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court joined this decision.
I think at the end of the day, it was such an emphatic promise with the specific purpose by the district attorney to force Cosby to testify in the civil cases that the court decided it had to be upheld as a matter of due process, applying contract law and other principles.
A defendant can't be put in a position like this to his detriment.
We're going to uphold this, whether we like it or not, in the interest of due process.
And the interesting and interesting thing about this case is the remedy is any future prosecution of Cosby for this incident with Miss Constant, the thing he was convicted of, is absolutely barred.
One suggestion was that they not use the deposition testimony like they did in this case.
They said, absolutely not.
He was put in a completely different position once Castor made the agreement.
You may not try him for this crime.
Wow.
But David Chung, somebody made a mistake.
What about the judge of the criminal trial?
Shouldn't he have recognized this problem?
Yeah, well, you know, he went the other direction.
And the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was bound by his fact findings.
What he said was: listen, Castor didn't have the authority to give him immunity, and that's what you're really asking us to give you, Mr. Cosby, immunity from prosecution.
They said that Castor's testimony, Castor testified that he did intend that Cosby should never be prosecuted for this crime, but they found his testimony to be inconsistent.
He had one line in which there was a suggestion that he didn't mean it would be barred forever.
And one point he said he meant transactional immunity.
Another point, use and derivative use immunity.
These are just technical terms on how broad the immunity is.
And so this trial court and even an intermediate appellate court said, you know, under these circumstances, there was no legal immunity.
They had no right to rely on that.
And there wasn't even an agreement here.
Hey, David Chung, you make this sound so simple.
So why didn't a court figure this out one week into his jail sentence and let him out?
Yeah, well, that's a real question.
I mean, he served two years now.
You know, listen, people feel very strongly about this case one way or another.
But I suggest, and I'm sure your shows point this, it's the rule of law that carries the day here.
It should have been recognized.
David, hang on one second.
I think we have Bill Cosby live.
He's actually speaking.
Bill Cosby in front of his house right now.
Along with so many other great names like Dick Gregory.
This is his spokesman talking, and Cosby standing right behind him.
We've been watched by the FBI every day be raping and drugging women in the 60s or 70s, especially a black man.
Today, innocence came to Mr. Cosby with the help of these wonderful attorneys.
Yes, yes.
To his right, you will see Ms. Jennifer Blondjean.
She argued the appeal.
To my left, you see Brian Perry.
To Brian's left, Ashley.
Ashley Cohen.
Ashley Cohen.
And there you have.
These are women and men who, from all walks of life, as I said earlier, James Brown made a song.
It's a man's world.
It would be nothing without a woman and girl.
Mrs. Cosby was that woman for 57 years.
The queen, the matriarch of the Cosby family, who fought for his vindication, who said he would be vindicated.
And today, on this hot day, this is a hot verdict for us that we will forever cherish because we got one of the greatest or the greatest entertainer alive today.
Mr. Bill Cosby, this great American citizen, this American treasure, this high cup with us today.
Ms. Bungine?
Yes.
Obviously, we are thrilled to have Mr. Cosby home.
He served three years of an unjust sentence.
Too long, too long.
He did it with dignity and principle, and he was a mentor to other inmates.
He was really, as I say, doing the time.
The time was not doing him.
He's a classy man.
And I want to say this about the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
They demonstrated that they were impervious to the court of public opinion, which, frankly, the lower courts were not.
Mr. Cosby, we knew all along he never should have been prosecuted for this.
He had every right to rely on the prosecutor's word.
And they pulled the rug out from underneath him because of politics, because of the court of public opinion.
And that is not how our system should operate.
When that happens, there cannot be a just sentence.
And if there had been a just verdict and a just sentence, we wouldn't be here fighting.
But there was not a just sentence and a not a just verdict.
And I think it's really important that we keep our eye on the ball, that our Constitution is sacred and that we need to uphold it at all times.
And I'm glad that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's all about it.
Right here.
I'm very proud of the team that we've put together.
Very proud to be part of this case.
We always thought that eventually this is where it would end up.
Mr. Cosby and I had many, many talks over the last couple of years.
I predicted it, and we're here.
It's a good day for the Cosby family.
Have Ashley said.
Mr. Cosby, how does it feel to be home?
Well, he is extremely happy to be home.
He looks forward to reuniting with his wife and his children.
And obviously, this has been a hard three years for this entire family.
And it's really a blessing for him.
And he says, you know, his heart is just beating really fast, and he's happy to be honest.
And we have Ashley here who worked on the case.
Ashley said a few words.
How's it going?
I'm just honored to be part of such an amazing team.
These lawyers did an incredible, incredible job.
And I'm so thankful to be a part of it and to help Mr. Cosby.
And I'm just proud to be here and watch him get released.
And this wonderful attorney, Haley, you see right here.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Her father was in prison with Mr. Cosby.
And he sent a message to Mr. Cosby before he left today for her.
All right, there have been a couple of questions directed at Bill Cosby.
I don't know why, but to Bill Cosby standing there, these are all spokespeople for Cosby.
He did not speak.
Maybe out of caution, didn't want to say the wrong thing.
He looked a little weather-beaten, a little nervous.
David Schoen is with us, great legal analyst.
Is it just being smart on his part not to speak himself?
Let the lawyers do it.
Listen, I hate to put a damper on their victory party because they're clearly all elated that he's out.
But let's make one thing very clear.
There is nothing in this opinion that's in any way a redemption of Mr. Cosby's conduct or his character.
Listen, I loved him when he was on TV too.
But if you read the opinion, it goes in detail through the very sordid and checkered history that was testified to during the trial.
This is a decision on the law.
It's a tremendously important decision upholding the principle of due process.
It could have gone the other way.
It's a very strong decision on due process, but it in no way suggests Mr. Cosby didn't do what he was accused of.
However, under our system of laws, he is 100% innocent today.
Now, he's totally free and clear on this case, but what about another case coming forward?
They could bring it.
Listen, the other issue in this case that they didn't have to address was the use of other witness testimony.
They brought in witnesses in this case from 15, 20 plus years earlier to try to, under this theory that, you know, the law, under the laws of evidence, we don't allow prior bad act conduct to try to prove guilt in the instant case, but there are exceptions to it.
One of those exceptions is you could prove that it's part of a common scheme or plan.
And they allowed it in, in this case, under that theory and the idea that the absence of any mistake or accident, those are the legal theories under the evidentiary rules.
But it's a real question.
And it's a real question of fundamental fairness to require someone to defend against those kinds of very, very inflammatory accusations 15, 20, or more years after the fact.
That's the trend now.
Many states have changed their laws to eliminate any statute of limitations, and it allows some of the testimony and even charges to be brought many, many, many years afterwards.
There's a debate.
It's a fair debate about whether that's fair.
Yeah.
Cosby is leaving the microphone.
You know, he looks much, much older, skinny, as I said, squinting.
But I think he's in very bright sunlight.
I think, you know, if you've been in prison, I don't think he's been in that kind of sunlight in a long time.
And as he turned to walk away, he was very wobbly.
And he's walking so slowly, extremely slow.
He does not look like he's in good physical shape, but it's a fascinating story.
He's out.
He's home.
And so if you were advising, what would you tell him to do?
Stay in, don't talk to anybody, don't do anything.
That's what I was suggesting.
Listen, I'm not in the PR business, and maybe he'll try to reinvent some of his characters.
I don't know.
But I think he ought to thank his lucky stars and stay with his family.
If family stays with him, and apparently they are, and move on.
You don't know.
Maybe they will bring some other prosecution.
I'm sure there's going to be tremendous public pressure from certain circles, Gloria Allred and that crowd.
The best defense against that is keep quiet.
Don't do an interview.
I think so.
I think so.
All right.
Well, David Shoan, great, great analyst.
Thanks for being with us.
Perfect guest for this occasion.
Frankie, I'm so glad you decided to cover this story.
I think it's a very important decision.
Yeah, it's fascinating stuff.
Thanks for being with us.
Thank you very much.
Thanks.
Mark Simone here for Sean Hannity.
Sean's at the border today with Donald Trump, with Governor Abbott of Texas.
And in fact, special edition of Hannity tonight.
You'll see everything at the border tonight.
He'll be with both those great names.
And he'll be with us in the next hour.
Sean Hannity will check in with us from the border.
It's Mark Simone.
Follow me on Instagram, Mark SimoneNYC and Instagram.
I'll tell you to follow me on Twitter.
But every day they just take away hundreds of followers, but try.
You never know.
And of course, check out Hannity.com, great website with great news and stories every day.
We'll take some calls in a minute.
It's Mark Simone here for Sean Hannity.
Well, it's Mark Simone here for Sean Hannity.
Normally I'm heard on our big flagship station here in New York, WOR.
Sean is at the border.
He's going to join us later, probably around the bottom of the hour.
Sean Hannity with Donald Trump, with Governor Abbott of Texas.
In fact, be watching tonight 9 o'clock Fox News Channel, special edition of Hannity.
You'll see what's going on down there at the border.
But we'll check in with Sean in just a little while.
Now, Carol Roth, host of the podcast, The Roth Effect.
She's got a new book out called The War on Small Business: How the Government Used the Pandemic to Crush the Backbone of America.
There's a lot to pick apart here with the lockdown, the reopening, and all of that.
Carol Roth, congratulations on the new book.
Thanks so much, Mark, and I'm glad this show seems to keep uniting us.
It's so fantastic.
I'm so glad to be back with you.
I'm glad to be back with you, too.
I love the book.
And wouldn't you say that way back in the beginning when this all started, this was a Democratic dream come true to be able to lock down every citizen and the Democrats, they'll tell you when you're allowed out, where you're allowed to go, when you're allowed to go to work.
It's what they've always wanted.
But they did abuse it, didn't they?
They did.
I mean, it was the ultimate picking of winners and losers.
They told certain businesses, the big ones, the connected ones, the ones that were in that political club, you're essential.
You're going to thrive.
And the little guys, the ones who didn't have the clout but still make up half the economy, you're not essential.
You're not going to be able to survive.
It's very reminiscent of when we heard the small businesses, you didn't build that many, many years ago.
So this seed had been planted for a long time.
But what it enabled was just the most historic wealth transfer that we have ever seen in history from Main Street to Wall Street.
We saw seven crony tech companies gain $3.4 trillion in value while hundreds of thousands of small businesses closed and many others fought for survival.
I mean, so this is the ultimate exercise, as you mentioned, in force and control, and they're still trying to not let it go.
So the lockdown and the terrorizing, everybody terrified to go to a store, go to a supermarket for all those months, obviously that helped Amazon grow to even greater heights, if that's even possible.
Absolutely.
I mean, you know, the Amazon warehouse was never shut down.
Walmart wasn't shut down.
Pet Smart could groom your dog's hair and nails, but I couldn't get my hair and nails done.
So this really wasn't based on any sort of data or science.
It was completely based on political clout and connections.
And you saw that revenue, the money that would normally go into small businesses, go to Amazon, go to Walmart that had record revenues.
And then you saw the Federal Reserve prop up the stock prices of those companies as well.
So all of those folks who are on the inside, the big government and big business working together, they love this.
They don't want to let this go.
They don't want to let the force and control go.
They want to continue to do it.
And we heard Joe Biden use his outside voice, what he should have been saying in his head when he whispered the other day that, oh, you know, we're going to compete with small businesses for workers.
Hey, last year, when everything was locked down, the restaurants were closed, small businesses were closed.
That was great that they sent people checks to get them through that.
But as we reopened and they announced, even though we're reopen, we'll pay you $800 a week not to go to work.
Sounds like the dumbest idea ever.
But was that really something diabolical there, too?
Oh, I absolutely think that it was.
I mean, we all knew.
We talked to folks in the economic and financial realm talked about this before they even crafted the First CARES Act.
You know, it's one thing we all pay into or employers pay into unemployment on our behalf, depending on what state we're in.
It's one thing to access the money that somebody's paid into on your behalf.
It's another thing to create an additional bonus for staying home.
It's another thing to make sure that the schools are closed so that parents who have kids can't go back to work.
So when you have all of those things going on and then you get the stimulus checks, it sounds like you're trying to condition people to think the government's going to take care of you.
And think about how many of the folks, especially on the left, have been pushing for universal basic income or UBI.
This is conditioning people instead of trying to create wealth by owning a business and saying, oh, no, that's risky.
Come onto the government dole and we'll take care of you.
And I think that's intentional.
They're trying to consolidate power because if you were trying to get people on the government dole and you were trying to kill small business, Mark, I mean, would you have done anything differently than what was done over the last 15 months?
Huh.
Boy, you know, you watch these people, Biden, Kamala Harris, all these, they look so dopey, but they are playing four-dimensional chess with us, aren't they?
Well, I don't think it's actually, you know, Joe Biden, unfortunately, and I feel actually badly for Joe Biden because I don't think he has the mental cognition.
I think that there's somebody, you know, a group of people who are behind the scenes who've been in the government for a long time, working with big business to try to consolidate this power.
And we saw that at historical levels in 2020, they didn't let that crisis go to waste.
So it's not necessarily the people who are the face of the operation who are making all of these decisions.
We saw it at the state government level.
We saw it at the federal level.
We saw it in Congress in terms of the way that they've crafted these packages.
So even though some of the folks don't seem to be very bright, there's at least enough of them that know what needs to be done in order to consolidate power.
And unfortunately, we're just not getting enough pushback against that.
So tell us about the different states.
Obviously, New York, we got a crazy liberal governor.
Florida, you got a great governor who didn't want these payments to not work.
So which states did the best throughout this?
Well, so obviously there was a little bit of a difference depending on how populated and densely populated the states were, what kind of an elderly population they had.
But what I can tell you across the board is that those that had a lighter-handed approach did not have any more deaths per million than the ones that had the heavy-handed approach.
But the ones that had the heavy-handed approach had worse economic outcomes than the ones that took the lighter touch approach.
And you're seeing it in states like your own state of New York, where almost 40 percent of the small businesses that were in operation have been reported permanently closed by Opportunity Insights.
And I question the data slightly.
I think that might be only employer-owned businesses.
But whatever it is, whether it's 2 million or it's more, it's just too many, and it's exponentially more than the number of big businesses in this country.
Hey, so Carol Roth has this great new book, which you should get.
Excellent new book.
It's called The War on Small Business: How the Government Used the Pandemic to Crush the Backbone of America.
Get the book.
One year from now, will this be totally back to normal 2019, or is something permanently changed?
No, it's going to be completely permanently changed because you will see a shift in a consolidation of power.
When you look at the overall data, you may say, okay, well, we have almost as many people back working and we have almost the same level of GDP.
But when you look at where that money is coming from and where that GDP is broken down, before COVID in 2019, around half the GDP and around half the employment was from these decentralized small businesses.
And I think when you look at the data, you're going to see that a lot of those businesses never come back, aren't going to be replaced.
And when people are going back to work eventually to fill these 9.3 Million jobs that the government's been competing and keeping them from.
I think you're going to see a lot more of those going to these big companies that had the appropriate access to capital, who were appropriately compensated, and who got different levels of bailouts and whatnot.
So you're just going to see this continued consolidation of power.
And that's really scary.
That's moving us from more free market capitalism and more decentralization and more wealth creation opportunities to something that looks a lot more like socialism.
And we're seeing that trajectory taking away wealth creation opportunities, whether it's making it harder to own a house, whether it's making it riskier to invest in the stock market by the Fed intervention, whether it's making it riskier to own a small business or killing the small business.
As somebody said to me earlier today, the war on small business is the only war that the government has won recently.
And unfortunately, I think we're going to see that in the numbers going forward.
Hey, Carol Roth, like 100 years ago, you had all these small stores.
Then the malls came along and wiped out the small stores.
And then Walmart came along and wiped out the malls.
Now you've got Amazon wiped out everybody.
But isn't that it?
After Amazon, which is everything now, what else could you invent?
There's nothing that could take over from them.
Well, creative destruction is a real thing.
And it's okay when it happens naturally.
It's just not okay when the government builds the playing field in their direction.
But I do think that this is historic in terms of the scope of how much capital a lot of these big guys have.
And certainly Amazon is one that has gotten just a tremendous boost.
And so I always believe in innovation.
And I'm sure there will be other companies that we haven't heard of today 20 years from now that end up being very dominant.
But unfortunately, I think it's just going to be a smaller number of them.
And as I said, 99.9% of all business entities pre-COVID were small businesses.
And I think we want to preserve that as that economic freedom.
But I do think we'll have more things that are invented.
I just think that consolidation of power is going to become more and more real.
All right.
Well, everybody get the book.
It's a great book, and it just came out, and you will love it.
It's called The War on Small Business: How Government Used the Pandemic to Crush the Backbone of America.
And check out the Roth Effect.
That's the great podcast.
Carol Roth does, The Roth Effect.
Carol, thanks for being with us.
Yeah, it's always a pleasure.
Thanks, Mark.
All right, take care.
Hey, it's Mark Simone here for Sean Hannity.
Now, he's going to join us in just a few minutes.
Sean is at the border with Donald Trump, with Governor Abbott of Texas.
In fact, he'll be on Hannity tonight, special edition at 9 o'clock.
So make sure you watch it.
We'll take some calls in a minute.
Mark Simone here for Sean Hannity.
Hey, welcome back.
It's the Sean Hannity Show.
Mark Simone here.
I got the easy part.
I just sit in the studio.
Now, Sean does all the work.
He's at the border.
How many hosts will do this for you?
Oh, they'll all talk about the border.
He's at the border with Donald Trump.
He's there with Governor Abbott.
If you watch Hannity tonight at 9 o'clock, you're going to see quite a show, very special town hall from the border with Donald Trump, with Governor Abbott of Texas.
In fact, we'll check in with Sean.
We'll interrupt him down there and talk to him in just a few minutes, so he'll report to us live from the border.
We'll take some calls.
800-941-Sean is the number.
Tomorrow could be the day we have a district attorney here in New York.
He's a nice guy, but in goes to work.
He's a crazy left-wing liberal Trump derangement syndrome.
They got the Trump tax returns.
They were delivered in a big truck four and a half months ago.
Thousands and thousands of pages.
They've been going over these tax returns for four and a half months.
No charges.
They didn't find anything in those tax returns.
So when prosecutors get desperate, they'll grab somebody, they'll come up with something to indict them, they'll threaten to indict their son.
You saw that with Michael Flynn.
You've seen all these, they do this to flip the guy, only there's nothing to flip.
He's got nothing to give you.
They've done this with a nice man.
He's the CFO at the Trump organization, Alan Weiselberg.
They've threatened to indict his son.
They've investigated everything about this guy.
Guess what they found?
He used a company car.
So I'm not kidding.
It looks like they may charge him with this tomorrow.
He used a company car.
And he stayed in a company apartment.
You ever heard of such a thing?
This is a prosecutor, by the way, with a government car and a government driver, a government police detail.
It's the silliest thing.
Anyway, just watch for that tomorrow.
Don't go away.
Sean Hannity joins us from the border coming up next on the Sean Hannity show.
Oh, wait.
I see 28-12.
This is so confusing.
I know.
You were just testing us.
You want to make sure we were paying attention.
So confusing.
We are watching and listening.
Oh, my God.
This is so confusing.
Yeah, it's 28-15, 37, 14.
There's clocks counting every.
It's like everywhere.
It's crazy.
Don't blame me.
I've been working at home for the last year doing my show there, and I'm not used to.
This is the first time I've been in the studio for the whole year.
I actually came into the studio today.
You should have seen the guard.
Who the hell are you?
You're a host here?
I have a card.
I got a building pass.
They stick it in.
Did it work?
It hasn't been used in 14 months.
Expired.
Anyway, let's take some calls.
Let's go to Dave in Chicago.
Dave, how you doing?
Yes, good morning, Mark.
Good afternoon, Mark.
I'm doing very well.
Thank you.
Mark, to touch on your Carol Roth interview, there's a real downward spiral for businesses, especially those that were victims of the looters and the arsonists.
I have a couple of quick questions, if you please.
First of all, will the insurance companies offer coverage knowing that the thugs that did this will not be jailed?
And lastly, Mark, what about the businesses that are currently in operation but can't get enough workers due to excessive unemployment and even with huge incentives such as $50 an hour, free iPhones?
Thank you.
All right.
Yeah, it's the craziest situation we've ever seen.
This same prosecutor going after Alan Weiselberg, he used a company car.
This same prosecutor announced he's not going to prosecute the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of looters from last summer in New York that destroyed, smashed, burned businesses, took hundreds of thousands of dollars with not being prosecuted.
And absolutely ridiculous.
It's a good question.
I don't know.
You're the insurance company and you see that they're not even going to prosecute these guys.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
And the idea, you know, if you go around Manhattan right now, everything is slow.
I mean, the restaurants are packed, but the service is slow.
They can't get anybody in the kitchen.
They can't get any waiters.
Joe Biden paying everybody to stay home, $800 every week to stay home.
Even if you've got a good job in a restaurant, you're making $1,000 a week.
You know what?
Work your tail off for $1,000 a week or stay home for $800?
Everybody's staying home.
So it's absolutely crazy.
Anyway, don't go anywhere because Sean is going to join us next.
He's been at the border all day with Donald Trump, with Governor Abbott of Texas.
Very special edition of Hannity.
Coming up tonight, 9 o'clock.
Don't miss it on the Fox News channel.
But stay right here.
And Sean will join us live from the border coming up next on the Hannity Show.
See, I did it again.
Well, where can we find out about you, Mark?
What's your handle?
Oh, Mark Simone, NYC at Instagram.
Follow me there.
I would tell you to follow me on Twitter, but they keep taking my followers away every day.
But back in a moment on the Sean Hannity show.
Hey, it's Mark Simone here for Sean, although he'll be here in one second.
It's a big news day.
Big edition of Hannity tonight, special town hall on the Fox News channel.
It's going to be big at the border with Donald Trump, with Governor Abbott of Texas.
Here's President Trump about the real border.
We're going over to the border right now, but we're going to the real part of the border where there's real problems, not a part where you look around and you don't see anybody.
And we're going to admire the wall and how it works because wherever we have the wall, that's what made the big difference.
It made tremendous difference.
And a lot of people like to say to the media, well, we could immediately, I saw it today, we should immediately go back to the Trump policy.
It's not that easy now.
It's not that easy.
But we have a sick country in many ways.
It's sick in elections and it's sick in the border.
And if you don't have good elections and if you don't have a strong border, you don't have a country.
And I'd like to see Biden ace it.
He won't ace it.
He'll get the first two.
There's 35 questions and the first two or three are pretty easy.
They're the animals.
Is this a lion, a giraffe?
When he gets to around 20, he's going to have a little hard time.
I think he's going to have a hard time with the first few, actually.
They're trying to say this is a disaster for them.
Let's blame the people that have really done something about it and can do something about it.
But when your hands get tied because you no longer control the White House or Congress, it's a disgrace.
Dan, we worked on it hard and we worked on it long and we discuss it every week.
And we had it down to a point that we'd never seen anything like it.
I'm so glad that you mentioned the fentanyl because the fentanyl was almost a non-factor.
And now I hear it's just pouring into our country.
And it's the most dangerous of all, but just pouring into our country.
Big day at the border here.
Donald Trump is there.
Governor Abbott, of course, is there.
And Sean Hannity is there.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, the man who needs no introduction, because his name is on the wall.
It's on the building, the most listened to radio host on earth.
Sean Hannity, welcome to your own show.
How are you doing down there?
Mr. Simone, thank you, sir.
You're doing a great job as always.
And, you know, part of that is really funny.
When you think about Kamala Harris, it's 93, four days, whatever she's the borders are, and she doesn't show up at the border, and she makes a big deal.
We have to find out what is the cause.
Why are people coming?
So she goes to Guatemala and Mexico.
We already know why they're coming.
When she was running for office, she was promising free health care.
Joe promised asylum for anybody that wanted it.
And we now see the consequences of elections and shifting and changing policies.
There's going to be a lot to talk about today.
The issue that the president was just talking about was fentanyl.
And, you know, fentanyl, we now have the two biggest, largest bus ever in the history of fentanyl now entering this country.
And fentanyl is killing hundreds of people every single month in this country.
It's also where 90% of the U.S. heroin supply is coming across that border also.
You got human trafficking, you know, young kids into prostitution trafficking.
We've chronicled all of this.
I thought the president was pretty funny with his remarks about Joe Biden.
Joe's not been down here.
Kamala really came for a photo op.
You know, we're in a place called Edinburgh, which is right near McCallum, Texas.
I've been down here almost 15 times, and I could tell you, everywhere from the Rio Grande through San Diego, you're not going to learn a whole lot about what's going on at the border when you're that many miles away from the border where Kamala Harris was.
And I think the real reason was she didn't want to go into the cages that she and Joe have been building for children that are overcrowded in the middle of a pandemic.
So anyway, there's going to be a lot to talk about tonight.
We're really looking forward to the event.
You have no idea.
So we're flying in today, and the lines of people that won't get into this event tonight were massive.
And we only have so much space because of where we're doing the show tonight.
But I'm excited.
It's an important issue, one where we look, either we're going to be a nation of laws, follow our Constitution, protect our borders, protect our sovereignty, or we're not.
And right now we have a president and vice president that are facilitating, aiding, and abetting in lawbreaking.
And it's somewhat unprecedented that there's not even an attempt to turn people away from the border.
They just process them.
And then in the dark of night, they're transporting people to all 48 states around the country in the hopes that the states will then have to have the requirements to take care of food and water and shelter and education and health care.
And states really can't afford to do that.
That's unfortunate.
Now, Sean Hannity spending the day with the president.
You'll see it all tonight on Hannity at 9 p.m. Eastern.
A lot of policies get reversed by this new administration.
But this one, the border, this has got to be the most heartbreaking for him because it's so simple, a wall, guard the border.
He must be just so upset about this.
You know, I was reading that the Congress just appropriated nearly $200 million for walls in the Middle East.
You know, Congress didn't have that much of a problem building up a quick fencing to protect themselves after what should never happen in this country on January 6th.
And they did that in fairly short order.
500 miles of wall were working.
We were at the lowest levels of illegal immigration in many, many years.
So the policies were working.
I don't think it's good for the people that are coming.
I don't think we're able to absorb the population growth.
We're talking about a few million people.
It's a 25, 30-year record by the end of the year if we stay on track or stay on the pacing that they're on now.
And so there's, you know, this is our national security priority.
Number one, the United States has been warned by numerous countries that other groups, those with nefarious intentions, radical associations, that they're blending in with the migrant population as a means of getting into the U.S., what they are coming here for, it's not going to be any good.
And from a national security standpoint, it's a bad idea.
You know, to me, I'm a big believer in merit-based immigration.
But whatever it is, it's got to be legal immigration.
Certainly, I think people should have background checks so we know they don't have radical associations.
In an era where we just went through the worst pandemic since 1917 and 18, I think we ought to have some type of health checks of people that come across the border.
And the third thing, if you get one of these highly coveted slots to come and be a part of our family, our American family, you ought to be able to show that you're not going to be a burden on the American people financially, and you'll have the means and ability to take care of yourself.
So between that and Bill Cosby today, it's been a slow news day for you.
Well, that's a strange situation because I understand legally they didn't have the right to throw him in jail.
They had promised him they wouldn't use that testimony in this case, and they did.
But what took Pennsylvania?
What took that court so long to figure that out?
I sat in jail for it.
Listen, do I think he's guilty of all of this in my gut, in my heart, in my mind?
Yeah, I really do.
There's just too many people that the testimony was too compelling.
Now, a deal was struck with the prior DA, and that deal that he made that he would testify in a civil case, they promised him in return that they wouldn't prosecute him.
They made that deal.
And that's what the court pointed out today as they vacated this guilty verdict in the case that took place.
It's a, you know, are we a nation of laws if you make a deal with a DA, which is something that goes on every single day of the week?
You know, do you abide by the deal or not?
I think from the legal vantage point, they probably did the right thing.
You know, I haven't had a chance to read the entire 78 pages, but I will.
And from what I could see is that that agreement was violated.
The court recognized such, and that was the reason for their overturning the conviction or vacating it.
Things get very strange with these prosecutors.
We got a VA here in New York who announced he's not going to prosecute any of the looters, smashers, trashers of all the businesses.
But it looks like tomorrow he may try to indict a Trump executive for using a company car.
This is a district attorney who has a government car and a driver.
By the way, how funny.
Isn't that ironic?
Look, this is so common.
Probably almost every company in New York is guilty in some way, shape, matter, or form.
Do they pay for their employees' Ubers?
Do they give them money for taxi cabs?
Do they pay for car services for them?
It sounds like it was a company car, maybe a company hotel, and maybe as a gesture of goodwill, college tuition paid for children or grandchildren.
That is something that is never prosecuted.
Even liberal lawyers on liberal networks are rolling their eyes and saying, that's it.
That's all you've got.
Because if that standard is now applied to every company, especially in a city as large as New York, probably somebody, some CFO at some company would be guilty as charged.
It's the kind of thing that usually, if you didn't put it down on your tax form, they would say, you missed it.
You need to put it, you need to add it.
You're going to pay the tax, and you usually pay a pretty hefty penalty.
It's not the kind of thing you say, oh, you got a company car and you didn't declare it.
You're going to jail.
Yeah.
Well, Sean Hannity's at the border.
We're here eating everything out of his refrigerator.
We're eating all your food.
Do we have to declare this?
You know, Sean, Sean, I got to tell you something.
So, Sean, we miss you, of course, here in New York, but I got to tell you something.
So, all day today, we're getting phone calls from our listeners that are just loving that you're there and that you and President Trump and Governor Abbott actually went to where the crisis is.
But I thought it would behoove us to play Biden actually telling these migrants to come to the border.
You know, this guy's acting like Trump gave him this problem, and we have him on tape telling them to come.
Ethan, can you play that?
What I would do as president is several more things because things have changed.
I would, in fact, make sure that there is, we immediately surge to the border.
All those people are seeking asylum.
They deserve to be heard.
That's who we are.
We're a nation that says, if you want to flee and you're freeing oppression, you should come.
Linda, by the way, if you get your local honey, that'll probably help with your bad allergies.
Oh, thank you.
You know, I have heard that.
A great witch doctor that I know actually taught me that.
I heard she's fabulous.
She's all booked up, though.
I can't get an appointment with her.
Wait, Mark, I'm talking about Linda.
Oh, no.
Hannity, you'll get your voice back if you just take local honey.
And didn't you?
And what did I do?
I sent you a whole kit of allergy honey.
I will buy you local honey in Pennsylvania, wherever you're hidden in whatever bunker you're living in.
That's right.
My underground bunker with my underground honey.
She sounds much sultrier with that doctor.
I know.
I got my Demi Moore voice.
You're right.
Easy, Mark.
Calm down.
All right.
Sleep with the windows open.
I like that voice.
But think of what Biden just said there.
Immediately surge.
Come and get the asylum that we're offering.
Kamala Harris herself is saying, yeah, and we provide health care benefits, too.
And what's so nefarious about this, and this is why I think you've got states like South Dakota and Florida and so many others, they're sending law enforcement to states like Texas, where I am, and in Arizona, because they know that Biden and Harris, usually late at night, are transporting illegal immigrants, dropping them off in these states.
And then it becomes the state's responsibility to provide food, water, shelter, healthcare, and education.
And that is an enormous cost to them.
And meanwhile, states and state governors, they're not allowed to enforce federal immigration laws.
Governor Abbott is not allowed to tell people you must turn back.
And if you remember, there was that case with Jan Brewer back not that long ago, really, Mark, in which there was a lawsuit, and they did not have the right to enforce on the state level these federal immigration laws, which is beyond me.
And now you find, for example, Governor Abbott is now forced to build his own wall.
He's allocated $250 million and he's even asking for monies and donations from people to help build the wall to protect the people of Texas.
Well, it just gets crazier and crazier.
And this new Democratic thing of blaming Trump for the border, blaming Republicans for defunding the police, knowing the media will cover for them, the fact-checkers will keep quiet.
Where is that going to go, that new technique?
You know, I don't think it goes very far.
We all know who supports defunding the police, dismantling the police.
We know where all the violence took place in deep blue cities run by Democrats for decades, states that have been run by Democrats for decades.
You know, this is a fallacy.
I often say this.
Everybody that wants to believe in the new Green Deal and free child care and free guaranteed government pay and government jobs and government healthy food and government health care.
How have they done with basic law and order and safety and security?
They failed.
How have they done with education?
They failed there too.
How did those Obamacare promises work out?
Well, we didn't keep our doctors' plans and we're all paying about 250% more.
You know what, Sean?
I hate to interrupt you, but due to the constraints of time and the show, I got to let Mark go to a break.
By the way, you love.
This is an amazing moment for me.
Just let me have it.
It's amazing.
Thank you for appearing on the Linda show.
I'm gone one day and she's like jumping right all over the show.
Tell them what you told me, how you're fed up.
You want your own.
That's it.
I need my weird voice to get on the air.
Watch Hannity.
Linda, honey, you got to get local honey.
If you get local honey, you don't need real medicine.
Just tell us about your town hall and how you're going to save America.
Tonight, 9 o'clock.
Big show, right?
All right, big show.
We're going to be rolling tape at nine, and we'll see you then.
All right.
Thanks, Spark.
Sean Hannity at the border on the Sean Hannity Show.