Trump TROLLS Legacy Media, Announces WARRIOR DIVIDEND, Venezuela Fake Out
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What is going on, Patriots?
This is Tate Brown here, holding it down.
I am marked safe from a Brian Shapiro debate.
If you saw last night's Timcast IRL, it was a spicy one.
Brian did, you know, he really imposed his will on the panel.
I did my best to hold back the tide of TDS.
It was a really wild show.
You have to remember, like, not too long ago, I was, I had a stay-at-home job where I was just like making spreadsheets all day.
So debating's not my forte yet, but I'm getting there.
But I hope that it was a good show for you guys.
I know it was a lot of, like I said, TDS.
It was a terminal case, I would say.
But we are here.
We are back for the final Timcast News live show of 2025.
I am your host, Tate Brown.
I'm taking you into the afternoon of the Rumble Morning Daily lineup.
Thank you, Stephen Crowder, for the raid.
We have a fantastic show for you today.
Obviously, you probably saw it last night.
If you're watching IRL, you saw a live reaction.
Trump totally did a total fake out.
It was hilarious.
You know, some are saying it was a pointless speech.
You know, there's maybe something to be said about that, but that's why it's funny.
That's why it was a masterful gambit, I would say, from President Trump.
So we'll review his speech.
We'll dive into some of the reactions to it.
Also, Dan Bongino, obviously, this is the story everyone is talking about.
Everyone and their mother is talking about it.
Dan Bongino stepping down from his post as deputy director of the FBI.
So obviously, it's a very wild, wild story.
We had seen, you know, a few days ago that obviously he was considering his future.
He was mulling options.
And he made his decision yesterday.
So again, we'll dive into that, what the implications are, what that means, again, what the broader reaction has been, specifically across the right.
And finally, we have, obviously, this piece.
I don't know if you've seen it.
You've probably seen the reaction.
You've probably seen the commentary.
If you've noticed on your timeline on X, you've probably seen a lot of discussion around DEI.
And you might be wondering, why is this being rehashed?
Why is this being relitigated?
Well, obviously, there was this piece in Compact Magazine from a gentleman, Jacob Savage, and he lamented sort of the how DEI has negatively impacted him.
And this is someone that was coming from the left.
And it was a really interesting article.
There's a lot to unpack in it, and I will try to unpack a little bit of it.
And then we'll see.
We'll dive into the numbers, what this piece means, where did it fall short?
Where were its strong suits?
Again, we'll break it all down, and we will bring in the great Amber Duke to discuss this article and so much more.
She'll be joining us at the half hour mark.
But yes, this is the final.
This is the yearly finale, the grand finale.
I did promise that this is going to be Holly.
It's going to be Jolly.
There is mistletoe, and we have producer Kellen in the house.
What is going on, Kellen?
Holly Jolly, guys.
How are you doing?
Holly Jolly.
He has promised me there is mistletoe.
I can see it, and things might get a little wacky and wild after the show.
Who knows?
Kellen is, you know, he's also in the festive spirit.
He is Holly and Jolly as well.
It's very festivous.
Very festivous.
Yeah, festivus.
Wow, what a holiday that we need to do.
We need to bring that back.
But with that, let's get into the stories.
But first, we have a shout-out, quick shout-out we have to give here.
It is the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.
Look, the entire idea behind this LA regional food bank stream-a-thon, this is obviously going to be for a cause, it's for a good cause.
We're heading into the Christmas season.
People are feeling generous.
People are looking out for each other, which is always great to see around the holidays.
And this is a great, great opportunity here.
Look, the entire idea behind this project is simple: eliminate the NGOs, special interests, foundations, and charities, all the middlemen and whatnot that siphon off the money before it even reaches the people it is supposed to help.
I don't want to name names, but there's a lot of charities out there where their administrative costs are like upwards of 90%.
And this is all that means is that the actual people in need are only getting about 10% of the money.
It's a big issue.
So, the whole point of this stream-a-thon is to ensure that that money goes straight to the people that need it.
So, I wanted to give a quick shout-out, obviously, to the LA Regional Food Bank, Los Angeles.
Look, I know people in the audience have their gripes with Los Angeles, but there's a lot of people there.
There's a lot of people struggling.
And I think as we head into Christmas, we should channel that charitable spirit into some good causes.
So, I wanted to shout out a good cause here.
Obviously, it's going to be featuring Macy Gray.
It's going to be a really interesting show.
So, you tune in, support.
It's going to be streaming on YouTube.
It's going to be a fantastic, fantastic event.
And with that, I want to launch straight into our first story.
Here we go from NBC News.
The TDS-ridden NBC News, I would say.
You can see this just seeping all throughout every aspect of this article.
Trump seeks to defend his economy in primetime speech to the nation.
The president blamed the Biden administration for high prices and insists that his own policies are working, even though many Americans say they are struggling financially.
Again, this is, I've made this point on the show before.
Usually, when it's an opinion piece, they indicate it somewhere in the article.
And this is just not occurring here.
And I know you guys at this point are all on the same page with the sort of the positioning of mainstream media in today's society, how these outlets are just lazy and failing and they're vindictive and whatnot.
And so, this is just another example that I don't need to harp on on that.
But it's just crazy.
It's just crazy the way that they sort of portray stories and they just can't help themselves.
This idea of neutrality, this idea of biasless reporting, I think is just fundamentally dead in the water.
There's very, very few outlets left that are providing, you know, well-balanced news.
And quite frankly, I think people have the appetite for that.
I think people on the right and left are in just such different ecospheres that I think both sort of outlets on both sides have realized there's not really much sense in trying to appeal to just neutral reporting.
Everyone wants their spin.
And ABC, or rather, NBC News in this instance just cannot help themselves.
They just cannot help themselves.
We'll read a little bit of what they have to say and then we'll capture some of the reaction to the speech.
Amid slumping approval ratings, President Donald Trump used a prime time speech Wednesday to deride his predecessor, assert that his economic plan is working, and suggest that Americans need to be patient as his policies start to kick in.
Trump, in an 18-minute address from the White House, rolled out no new proposals apart from what he called a $1,776 warrior dividend, a very based number, that will go to nearly 1.5 million military service members in honor of the nation's founding almost 250 years ago.
That is something exciting, by the way, into the new year, something we really have to look forward to.
This is going to be a big summer.
We have obviously the America 250 celebrations.
Also, the World Cup is coming to the United States, which is pretty exciting.
So not just do we have this massive celebration, this super exciting anniversary of our country, we also have the entire world's eyes.
The world's always typically keeping a keen eye on the United States, but it's going to be cool that we're going to be able to sort of showcase a lot of our culture and whatnot to the world for this World Cup.
So I think it's really cool that these two are synthesizing at the same time.
That's kind of my dirty little secret.
That's kind of my main failure, I would say, as an American, is I actually do kind of like soccer.
So I try to keep that a secret, but I'll let that fly just for the show.
Just because it's the end of the year, I figure, you know, going to Christmas, I want to be an open book.
I want to let you guys know of all my shortcomings.
So I'm excited about that.
I digress.
And the checks, sorry, this is a quote from the president.
And the checks are already on the way.
He said, no one understood that one until 30 minutes ago.
We made a lot more money than anyone thought because of tariffs.
This is true.
Obviously, we had the economic report come in.
I covered it on the show about a week ago.
This report was delayed by about 40 days because of the shutdown.
But what we found is that the export-import numbers looked a lot more favorable than economists reported.
It did indicate that the tariffs are indeed working.
It indicated the automotive industry is importing far less goods and that obviously a lot of this is now being generated, created, manufactured in the United States.
So again, there is a lot of people sort of lamenting the tariffs, saying that, well, this is not going to work.
This is just half-baked.
And look, there's some criticism of the tariffs for sure.
I made the point on the show that using them as a political cudgel, it created a lot of instability in the market.
It made it really hard for these companies.
Look, if you're the Trump administration, you're trying to encourage these companies to reshore manufacturing, to make things in America.
You do need to provide them with a bit of stability.
And it was a bit confusing for a while when the tariffs, specifically on China, would shoot up to 120, back down to 20, up to 50.
Created a lot of instability in the market.
So I'm not glazing here, but the tariff regime generally is a very good thing.
Liberation Day was a good thing.
This was something that sort of indicated that the free market economics that the Trump administration obviously inherited, and this was sort of a non-negotiable within the Republican Party, that Trump wanted to break from this.
He wanted to create, sort of reinstate a tariff regime.
There was a lot of government programs early on when they were established that were funded pretty much primarily by tariffs.
And so, again, Trump was really just trying to reassert the United States sovereignty globally.
And in his eyes, a lot of these countries with their trade deficits they ran on us were ripping us off.
So the tariffs obviously were introduced.
And again, like I said, it's instability and whatnot.
You had a lot of economists pulling their hair out, a lot of commentators saying, wow, this seems half-baked.
This seems like it's not going to work out too well.
Numbers came in.
Things are working.
Things are moving in the right direction.
And obviously they sort of slander the president here saying, he just wants people to be patient, wait for his policies to kick in, obviously implying that his policies are just not going to work.
But we're seeing with the tariffs that indeed they are moving in the right direction.
These things do take time.
The president has three years remaining.
So again, yeah, these sort of radical, and this applies to everything across the Trump administration.
These radical reorientation of sort of these status quo's do take time.
It's difficult to pull off in just a year.
I know, and I'm with you guys, that we kind of ran out of time 10, 15 years ago.
So we want things to move quick.
Totally understand that I'm on the same page.
But Trump doesn't have a button, like a fix everything button.
I wish he did, but he doesn't.
And these things will take time.
But generally, everything has been directionally correct on this front, on the tariff front.
I love that term, directionally correct.
I don't even know what it means.
It just sounds like it's directionally correct.
I digress.
Trump marshaled the power of incumbency to command broad television network coverage for a speech that largely reiterated points that he has made in public appearances and interviews since he returned to office in January.
He spoke at a faster clip than usual, and for the most part appeared to stick to the prepared text.
He rattled off about the price of eggs, Thanksgiving turkeys, and airline tickets to amplify his argument that costs are dropping on his watch and to persuade the nation that former President Joe Biden left behind a mess that will take time and effort to fix.
This is true.
Again, the Biden administration, it was kind of this weird, half-baked continuation of Trump won policies, but also sort of introducing, again, some of these more late 20th century free market policies.
And it created this bizarre synthesis that ended up resulting in sky-high inflation.
Obviously, he still had to keep the patronage network going to the Democrat base.
So, you know, everything just went.
It got blown out of the water.
It was absolutely ridiculous.
So it does take time to tamp down these things.
Inflation is going down.
So, again, it takes time.
These things take time.
On that score, voters need some convincing.
A wave of recent polls have shown that Americans are distressed by the cost of living and unhappy with Trump's efforts to steer the country towards prosperity.
A NPR PBS Marist poll conducted this month found that 61% of respondents said the economy was not working well for them personally compared to the 39% who said it was.
Overall, 70% said the cost of living where they live is not very affordable and not affordable at all.
And this is understandable, right?
I mean, this is, again, I'm not going to like just shell here.
The economy, again, it's not great, all right?
Like everyone can look around.
We're not like stupid.
Like things are hard.
I make this point all the time.
The McChicken was like a dollar like five years ago, and now it's like $3.50, depending on where you live.
So again, the Americans are feeling, the American people are feeling the pinch pretty much everywhere.
Rents going through the roof, housing prices, everything, everything is getting crazy.
But the one upside, and this is something that people don't talk about enough, is that as mass deportations do ramp up, you are going to free up resources that are currently being occupied by illegal immigrants.
Housing being one of them.
They have to live somewhere.
When you free up these resources, again, it expands the supply in the country.
It expands the housing supply in the sense that there are more houses freed up as you deport people.
And if it's true, I think JD Vance's estimate was like 30 million illegal immigrants in the country.
That's 30 million bodies that are taking up jobs, that are taking up housing, that are buying food, again, from the limited supply.
So these things will all be freed up, and this will drive prices down.
So, you know, a big part of the economic formula here, the economic calculation, is illegal immigration, mass deportations are going to come into effect.
And Coulter made the point on the show a few months, I think it was like a month and a half ago.
Everything in your life gets easier.
I'm paraphrasing.
Everything in your life gets easier with mass deportations.
And it is so true.
So with that, obviously the Trump speech, you guys saw it.
I don't want to play all 15 minutes or whatever, but I liked Michael Knowles' take on this.
I think this was very salient.
This is from Michael Knowles of Daily Wire.
He pulled a war in Venezuela fake out to make the networks broadcast all his first year wins in prime time, all in front of a cozy Christmas decorations at the White House.
Simply the best media manipulator ever to hold the office.
Now we saw, obviously, NPC news.
I like that.
We're going to call them NPC news from now on.
I'm sure someone else has come up with that.
Obviously, we saw them seething here.
Where was it?
This right here.
This is them coping and seething.
Trump marshaled the power of incumbency to command broad television network coverage.
Yeah, because he's the president.
This is how it works.
You got to cover the president when he's talking.
And yeah, they're seething that they covered this.
They were seething that they covered the 15-minute self-glaze.
And it was well earned by the president.
He's had a lot of hard work to do this year.
So I think he's earned a self-glaze session every once in a while.
But I do agree with Michael Knowles' analysis here.
I do agree that this indeed was a fake out.
I do think he was conscious of the fact that people were expecting an address on Venezuela.
Obviously, for a lot of people, they've been keeping a close eye on our operation in Venezuela.
They're expecting sort of some additional communication from the sort of the executive branch regarding our operation in Venezuela.
Are we going to war?
Are we not going to war?
Like, what's going on here?
And I think Tucker Carlson actually has a lot of blame to hold here for why sort of stirred up this frenzy that we were going to get sort of a declaration of war or perhaps some sort of further information regarding our Venezuela operation.
I want to play this clip here.
This was earlier in the day.
He was on Judge Napolitino's Napolitano.
I forget how to pronounce his last name.
Trying.
His show, and he obviously made this statement that he apparently had had a source.
He had members of Congress telling him that the presidential address was going to be a declaration of war.
I'll play the clip here.
Is Trump going to start a war in Venezuela?
I don't know.
I don't know when this program airs, the one that we're on right now.
We're live now, and then it'll be posted immediately.
So my tense is, I don't know the answer.
I've certainly been on the phone a lot about it.
I have no power.
I'm a podcaster, but I'm very interested.
And so here's what I know so far, which is that members of Congress were briefed yesterday that a war is coming and it'll be announced in the address to the nation tonight at 9 o'clock by the president.
Who knows, by the way, if that will actually happen.
I don't know.
And I never want to overstate what I know, which is pretty limited in general.
So obviously he was horribly wrong here.
Look, I like Tucker.
He's built up so much goodwill over the years.
I mean, I've made this point.
It was with John Doyle way back in like June that a large part of why Trump 2 has been so good on policy, why we're seeing such good rhetoric, such good policy, these sorts of things, I think in large part has to do with Tucker Carlson holding the line during the Biden winter.
I mean, if you recall during COVID and then the BLM riots, that really felt like rock bottom, at least from my perspective, it felt like rock bottom in a lot of ways.
It felt a little bit hopeless.
It really felt like everyone was going a bit crazy.
I mean, everyone was posting the black square on Instagram.
I felt like I was one of the only people that didn't post it.
It was like this just bizarre moment that was happening in the United States.
And Tucker Carlson, his evening show on Fox News, it really felt like one of the only bastions of common sense that was sort of one of the strongholds of common sense during that era.
He would get up and it was just fantastic commentary.
It was authentically right-wing in a lot of ways.
He was saying things that you were not hearing from the conservative commentariat.
And it was just really fantastic stuff.
So I think Tucker Carlson deserves his flowers for sort of setting the table for Trump 2 in many ways because of those addresses.
I think, obviously, the show was crushing.
The numbers were through the roof.
I know people have had a lot of criticism of Tucker recently, the way he's conducted his interviews, sort of the guest selection, sort of some of the takes he's had recently.
But it's, yeah, it's really hard for me to completely like flip because I mean, again, he's just bought so much goodwill.
But this is a very embarrassing moment for Tucker Carlson.
This obviously is a hit to the credibility in many ways because if you're telling an audience, a massive audience, I mean, Tucker's reach is probably 10 million people still, that, hey, a war is going to happen and the declaration will be tonight, according to my sources.
And then Trump gets up and doesn't even mention it.
Again, you have to start asking questions of like, okay, what's going on, Tucker?
Maybe we need to reel this in a little bit.
So, really embarrassing moment.
Tucker sold us out.
He sold us out.
I was ready to go.
I had my boat on the coast of Florida.
I had all my contraband.
I was ready to go to war.
I was ready to get involved and mix it up.
And he sold us out.
I was ready, Tucker.
What's going on?
Just kidding.
Obviously, I don't have any of that.
But yeah, again, it was just an embarrassing moment.
And this kind of illustrates this tendency on the right wing because people like to feel like they have information that no one else has.
They feel like they like the idea of having sort of this hidden esoteric knowledge that no one else knows.
And so what you have is you have this rush where people just put out anything because they want to, for posterity, be seen as ahead of the curve.
The problem is it is just far outpaced.
It's far out of step with reality.
And the reality is it doesn't seem like Trump's actually going to go to war.
And even in this operation, it's going to be vastly different from our operations in the Global War on Terror.
Ann Coltser made this point on Twitter yesterday.
She said, look, there's a massive difference between sending our boys out to the desert in the Middle East where they're basically hung out to dry millions, millions of whatever away from the United States versus conducting bombing strikes on drug boats and then the boys can be home by dinner.
Like that's just completely, we're talking about two completely different things here.
It is, in my opinion, a lot easier to see how these sort of operations in Venezuela benefit American interests.
Again, that's up for debate, but I will say that there's a vast difference between even a full-blown war with Venezuela and full-blown war with Afghanistan, Iraq.
Again, these boys could be in Miami for dinner.
So it's a big, big difference.
So with that, we're going to get into our next story.
Dan Bongino.
Dan Bongino is stepping down from his position.
I wanted to play this clip.
This kind of, I think, illustrates sort of the tension in Dan Bongino's head in many ways of how difficult this gig was.
I'll play this clip real quick.
This was him on Fox and Friends just a few months ago.
Oh, maybe it'll play.
Hang on, let me go back to the start.
Here we go.
I gave up everything for this.
I mean, you know, my wife is struggling.
And I'm not a victim.
I'm not Jim Comey.
It's fine.
I did this and I'm proud I did it.
But if you think we're there for tea and crumpets, well, I mean, Cash is there all day.
We share our offices are linked.
He turns on the faucet.
I hear it.
He's there at, he gets in at like six o'clock in the morning.
He doesn't leave till seven at night.
You know, I'm in there at 7:30 in the morning.
I, you know, he uses the gym.
I work out in my apartment, but I stare at these four walls all day in D.C., you know, by myself, divorced from my wife.
Not divorced, but I mean, separated, divorced.
And it's hard.
I mean, you know, we love each other and it's hard to be apart.
But you're doing some great work yesterday now.
So obviously, like huge, immense personal cost to Dan Bongino jumping into this position.
I want to point this out.
Let's see.
Dan Bongino, obviously, coming into this position, had one of the biggest shows in the United States of America.
We see here, listeners to the Dan Bongino show, this was one of the biggest shows in America.
He was for, let's see, for the month of July, 16 million downloads.
Obviously, June was 11 million downloads.
So he was the second overall on the Apple podcast charts, number one in the news category.
So he had a massive show.
And obviously, we're on Rumble.
So I think, you know, the majority of the audience understands sort of the position that Dan Bongino held within the commentariat and obviously his gravity and whatnot.
And so, again, he walked away from a lot to take this gig.
It was a big lift for him.
Again, here's Politico's reporting.
He's out of the FBI, nine months.
Again, it's tough to really pontificate on what's going on here, where his head is at, because obviously he needs to go on air and sort of clarify what happened.
The main gripe, the main tension was obviously during the Epstein file release, which a lot of people, including myself, would say were botched in many ways.
Again, if we were going to not release them or release them, it would have been nice to commit either way.
Sort of the half-baked sort of deal was just a bit of a train wreck in many ways.
Dan Bongino, there was a lot of reporting at the time.
Axios had this report.
This was back in July, that Dan Bongino had clashes with Bondi over the handling of the Epstein files.
Again, this is a scoop.
But, you know, it indicates that there wasn't total alignment between Dan Bongino and the rest of the crew.
Dan Bongino obviously had to operate in a slightly different way because he was appointed directly by the president, while Bondi and her squad had to go through the Senate, which is a big deal, and they have to conduct themselves slightly differently, where Bongino was kind of coming in as more of a renegade.
Obviously, he had sort of expanded and provided commentary on the Epstein files specifically for years.
And so he kind of came in, you know, as this renegade, and a lot of people had high hopes for what he would be able to do within the FBI.
And from a lot of people's perspective, it was a bit of a letdown in many ways.
My take, it's not a nuclear hot take by any stretch of the imagination, but I do believe that the deep state is very entrenched in the FBI.
I think there's legitimately probably like five or six of our guys in the entire organization.
I mean, again, this is an organization for the last 60 years, which their primary goal has been to punish the right wing.
It's been the orientation of this organization.
It's a big lift to bring in three people and expect, again, a massive reorientation of this department.
The interviews were weird.
I'll concede that it was strange.
I think there's probably a lot more going on behind the scenes.
I think Bongino is a good man.
I think he's a brilliant man.
I really have trust in him.
I have faith in him.
He's a fantastic guy.
He's a hero.
So patriot even.
And so, again, it's really hard for me to believe that he just got into the FBI and like sold out, which is what a lot of people are sort of speculating.
I think there's a lot more going on behind the scenes.
And I hope that as he sort of retakes his mantle as one of the leading conservative voices that he'll be able to expand a bit more on what's going on in the FBI, sort of what is the situation.
Because, like I said, I mean, there's just a lot of questions that are not being answered.
And in some degrees, I think it probably is sort of these clandestine operations that perhaps we're not privy to and we're not supposed to be privy to because they're like active investigations and these sorts of things specifically surrounding the Epstein situation.
But I think a lot of this information, the American people, are entitled to know because, like I said, the American people, specifically conservatives, have been victimized by the Intel apparatus for decades.
And now that we have our people in charge, we would expect some explanation for what's been going on over the last few decades.
So I think it's sad to see Bongino go.
I think he's great and he's clued in.
And so I do think it's sad to see him go.
But again, the pressure that he was under, the personal situation, obviously, it was a big, big lift.
And clearly, he felt like maybe his options were limited as far as what he would be able to do within the FBI.
It appears to me he made some sort of calculation that he would be more valuable to the movement being behind the mic and providing updates and commentary to the American people than his current post as obviously the deputy.
So we'll have to see what the deputy director, former deputy director, has to say in the coming weeks.
It's going to be very interesting.
I would obviously hope for a tell-all.
It's probably going to be a bit more sensitive than that.
But all this to say, I do think Dan Bongino is terrific, and it will be nice to see him back, probably here on the Rumble lineup.
It's going to be great.
So we'll see.
We'll see how this develops.
With that, I have one more piece I can get to, one more news story I can get to before you bring in Amber Duke.
And we are going to have her.
We're going to have a chat regarding this situation.
Like I alluded to at the beginning of the show.
You've probably seen a lot of chatter about DEI on the timeline, especially, and this is really particularly strange as you're seeing condemnation of it from people who previously would lambast you for complaining about it.
You know, I think what was happening here, I don't know if you've had the chance to read the piece yet.
It was probably one of the biggest pieces of all time.
It had like 6 million views on just one tweet regarding it.
Absolutely massive piece.
It was this gentleman, Jacob Savage, who he was scalping tickets in Los Angeles, and he had done this entire write-up doing a deep dive on some of the data regarding these DEI practices in Hollywood and how they've had this sort of oppressive effect on white men specifically.
I won't read through the entire article.
I do recommend it's a good piece.
He wrote here, this is a specific instance of some data that he presented.
In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48% of lower-level TV writers.
By 2024, they accounted for just 11.9%.
Massive drop.
Keep in mind, white men still make up about 35% of the country, 30%, 35% of the country.
The Atlantic's editorial staff went from 53% male and 89% white to in 2013 to 36% male and 66% white.
White men fell from 39% of tenure track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18% in 2023.
In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.
So this is a great piece.
I mean, it went everywhere.
I mean, JD Vance was talking about it.
This was JD Vance's take on it.
A lot of people think DEI is a lame diversity seminars or racial slogans at NFL games.
In reality, it was a deliberate program of discrimination, primarily against white men.
This is an incredible piece that describes the evil of DEI and its consequences.
And Coulter pointed out this data point, obviously, that I just read, that 14.6% of tenure track assistant professors hired at Yale had been white American men.
And the humanities number was just six out of 76.
Sorry, the other way around, it would have been 6.7.
That would have caused a big issue.
7.9%.
Horrific, horrific stuff.
I mean, there's no other calculation to make than just full-blown hatred for white men.
This poster here, Lindy Capital, he posted some graphs showing the dramatic drops among white men in a lot of these institutions.
And he outlines, obviously, I'm running a little bit out of time here, but he outlines, obviously, a lot of the incentive structures that these companies have had to basically root out white men and favor women and non-whites.
And if they reached their goal, they received an interest rate discount on their debt by banks.
So the incentive structures were there.
This wasn't just like a conscious, like philosophical movement.
There was legitimate financial interests at play in conducting this rooting out.
Matt Walsh here, he wrote, the campaign of discrimination and exclusion against white men is insane, not just because it's racist and bigoted, which it is, but also because no demographic has contributed as much to Western civilization as white men.
Make a list of a thousand greatest, most important, most influential figures in the history of our civilization.
And like 975 of them will be white men.
We haven't just been discriminated against any other group, but specifically the group that more than any other built all of this.
And this is the thanks they get.
This is a very, very salient point.
We're being punished for success, suffering for success, if you will.
With that, I will bring in Amber and we're going to see what she has to say on all of these things.
Let me get this fired up here.
Get the mic set up.
All right.
And virtual camera.
Hey, Amber, can you hear me?
Yes, I can.
All righty.
Well, how are you doing today?
Can you give people a quick intro who you are and what you do?
Absolutely.
My name is Amber Duke.
I'm the senior editor for the Daily Caller.
I'm also the Friday co-host of Rising at the Hill and co-host of Free Media at Reason.
I love that.
Well, thank you so much for hopping on.
I wanted to bring you on to discuss, obviously, this piece that everyone is talking about.
I mean, from JD Vance to Milo to Ann Coulter, everyone is jumping on this piece and they're really scandalized by the findings.
Obviously, the author Jacob Savage sort of combed through all of this data regarding the DEI practices, specifically in Hollywood, the implications it's had on the market at large, but also like personal anecdotes from him and his friends on how this is impacting them.
I wanted to get your reaction to that piece, what your takeaway was, and broadly, what you think this means for the movement or really America as a whole, seeing these numbers laid out like that.
Exactly.
I think the numbers is really what was so shocking.
Everyone saw DEI happening in real time.
They saw this really concerted push from left-wing activists to not just have equal representation, but actually overrepresentation by minority groups in various industries, the media, Hollywood, academia.
He focuses on those three mostly in the piece.
But I don't think anyone realized just how bad it really was.
And particularly for young men, people keep asking, why are young men turning right wing?
Why are they seemingly open to radicalization and extremism?
Well, maybe it's because you don't let them have jobs.
And just to walk through some of these numbers, because they really are so stunning in the media, he talks about the Atlantic, which is the sort of, you know, left-wing, long-form profile type outlet.
Since 2020, nearly two-thirds of the hires have been women, along with nearly 50% of people of color.
And now, just as a reminder, white men make up about 30 to 35% of the population, white people overall, about 65 to 70%.
In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69% people of color.
So if you're a boomer white guy, right?
This is the point the piece makes.
You're kind of locked in.
You're grandfathered in pre-DEI.
You're probably not going to get outright fired.
Maybe your advancement will be stunted a little bit in whatever industry you're in.
But if you're a young Gen X to a Zoomer, you are completely being overlooked for these positions.
And it's clearly not the case, which was this is the common left-wing argument about DEI, Tate, is that the problem was not that they didn't want meritocracy.
It's that people who were meritorious, but were people of color were being overlooked simply because of their race or gender.
The fact that they are now over hiring at such a massive, to such a massive extent clearly demonstrates that that's not true.
I mean, are we really supposed to believe that this 69% of people of color, despite being such a minuscule part of the population, are better qualified for those roles than the 35% of white men or the 65% of white people in America?
Nobody believes that.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there's so much to get into in this piece because I think there's also some valid criticism coming from people on the right of some aspects of the piece.
But I think overall, again, it has this effect where sort of like the Atlantic has done for years with their long-form concept.
I think Compact is sort of supplanting them in many ways because they're putting this on people's kitchen tables.
Are laying out the data and people are saying, wow, you know, I've heard people complaining about this, but I didn't realize how bad things were.
And I think that point that you made is very, very salient, which is for kind of layman's terms, you're seeing ladder pulling from a lot of these older guys where, like you said, a lot of these boomers were sort of grandfathered into this.
They knew that they had job security, but they were pulling the ladder up from people that came from the same background as they were because for a variety of reasons, the incentive structures all bended towards hiring minorities, hiring women, various other groups that were not like straight white men.
And so it's that's, I think, the really sinister part of all of this is that you're seeing these, again, these straight white guys, these, you know, conventional hires that were at the in the boomer generation really pulling the ladder up behind them.
That's exactly right.
And this is something that was really endemic to the DEI takeover.
For example, in academia, you would see that these white male university presidents were so terrified of having protests on campus, of having students camp out in the president's office that they would just acquiesce to whatever demands that they had.
I mean, I remember at Georgetown, when it was discovered that the university had sold slaves at one point in its history in order to save the university from bankruptcy, one of the responses from student activist groups, one of the demands that they made was that the university needed to make sure that new professors who were hired were like 50% people of color or something in that vein.
And I went and looked at the actual racial breakdown, the racial demographics of professors at Georgetown at that time.
And it turned out that people of color were actually already overrepresented as a portion of the population in the Georgetown professor roles.
So they were actually asking to make an overrepresentation problem worse in response to this, you know, hundreds of years old controversy.
And the people at the top, you know, regardless of whether it was white men or otherwise, were so terrified of these people.
They didn't want bad PR.
They didn't want social media campaigns.
They didn't want to have to deal with the annoyance of having student protesters running around campus all day.
So they just completely abdicated leadership and responsibility for their institutions.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, because that seemed to be the main sort of, I don't know if gripe, because I think everyone is acknowledging this is a good piece and this was good for the country at large.
But one thing people pointed out is that pretty much all of the blame was laid at the feet of sort of boomer white men.
And it wasn't addressed enough was the action and the activism of young women and ethnic minorities.
Because in a lot of ways, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say, I'm sure some of them were, but I don't think it's fair to say that all these boomers were just complete ideologues that wanted to ensure that young white guys were completely locked out of the system.
I think a lot of them were, like you alluded to, were reacting out of fear.
They were reacting out of like terror.
And there was a lot of cowardice to not do the right thing because they were feeling threatened.
They felt like their position of standing might be threatened if they didn't acquiesce to this activist insurgency that was occurring at the bottom levels.
And so in a lot of ways, again, a lot of the blame is laid at their feet because ultimately they were the ones that refused to stand up for what was right.
They displayed immense cowardice, but a lot of them were just reacting to this activist base that I think a lot of people are a little too afraid to critique in addition to the larger issue.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
This was not an ideological move by the people at the top.
This was a move of cowardice.
And it definitely speaks to, I think, the just immense abdication of responsibility.
I said that they were willing to completely change institutional cultures for the sake of basically new hires.
And we see this in media outlets too.
I wrote about this in my book.
It's called The Snowflakes Revolt.
I talk about a lot of these issues in the media in terms of the shift towards really basically trying to overempathize with the feelings of young staffers who are making ridiculous demands of their leaders.
And we would see in these media outlets that a lot of the people who were complaining about editorial decisions that were supposedly racist or not sympathetic enough to LGBT rights, that these people were not even in the editorial process.
It was people like cartoonists or people who worked in marketing.
These were not people who were even on editorial staff.
And a lot of them were part-time, but they would get together, they would create these unions.
And so that's another element here that I think needs to be explored in the media and Hollywood space is that a lot of this pressure comes from union leadership as well.
Once these young people are able to coalesce into a union, that obviously gives them greater bargaining rights.
And no boss who's trying to run a profitable company is going to want to get in a long strike or union fight, right?
That's just bad for business.
And so when you actually have an institutionalized way of these people protesting as opposed to just these sort of loosely collected people sitting in the president's office, that actually becomes a danger to your bottom line.
Yeah.
I mean, that's what we saw with the writer's strike.
It was like a year or two ago with SAG AFTA, where obviously they went on strike, basically held all of Hollywood hostage for it was a few months, if I recall.
And that entire sort of movement, that whatever you want to call it, had a distinct leftist flavor to it because pretty much all of the demands that they were making, again, were pretty much indistinguishable from sort of these left-wing activists that you would see across the country.
And the sort of makeup of this union, again, skewed very young, skewed towards groups that you would see among activists.
And all the sort of support they would receive were mainly from like older boomers that, again, didn't really have to worry about losing their jobs because all that was expected of them was to sing along, hand the keys over, and then retire in five years.
And I think we need to take from this piece too, a really fundamental question, which really cuts at the heart of the advocation for DEI, which is the idea that representation matters because if you don't have certain voices in the room or people from certain backgrounds in the room, that there's going to be an inherent bias that is skewed against those voices,
that they have unique insight that is going to actually provide more value to the institution just by nature of them being black or being a woman, et cetera.
Well, let's run through these institutions that the author is writing about, the media.
They have been hiring, as we demonstrated, 50 to 60% of their new hires are people of color or general minorities.
Same thing in Hollywood.
They talks about TV writing.
He talks about academia.
Would anyone argue at this point that all three of those institutions, any of the three, are better off now than they were prior to this big George Floyd push to overrepresent overrepresentatively hire POCs?
Or do people distrust these institutions more than ever?
Is the content bad?
Right.
Like we haven't seen any value add from this diversity shift because as we all know, the real diversity that matters is ideological diversity, intellectual diversity, where you're actually having debates about what TV shows are people actually going to watch.
Are we appealing to the wrong audience?
Is this writing snappy?
Or are we just trying to prove some kind of woke point?
So pretty much everything has gotten demonstrably worse.
Trust in institutions has gone down at the precise time that this DEI push was really ramping up.
Yeah, I mean, the author points out like 2014 is where you start to see the groundwork laid.
But yeah, things really started ramping up during the George Floyd BLM era.
But yeah, something's really interesting.
We had a guest on the on Timcast IRL last night who was of the left.
There was no question about that.
And we kind of got into it in the after show because we got into this sort of debate over immigration and these sorts of things.
And he was making this point that really what he values above all in regards to our immigration system is it further diversifies the country.
He said he was a proponent of diversity.
And when I posited the question, what's specifically about diversity has intrinsic value?
He kind of just kept dancing on the question because he was really just advocating for diversity for diversity's sake.
And then eventually the mask slips and he just admits that I really just don't like when places are very white.
He clearly, and this was a white guy, but he clearly had some bone to pick with white people.
He had some sort of, you know, axe to grind.
And it was really hits at the heart of, I think, what's going on with a lot of these things is that, again, most of the sort of boilerplate lines they're able to give about diversity, like you're saying, like, well, you know, it increases like different ideas in the, in whatever room the decisions are being made.
It's like, again, everyone is this point with how much democratization we've seen of information.
Trust me, everyone has different ideas about a variety of topics.
Like we're not at a shortage of ideologues.
There's no question about that.
It's bizarre to me to advocate for a policy because, again, you just have a prejudice against white people fundamentally.
You're uncomfortable with being around like a very white place.
And I think that's kind of at the core of what's going on here.
Oh, I totally agree.
This stems from just hatred, bitterness, and resentment towards white men.
I mean, that's really what it's all about.
All of these academic intellectual arguments are just after the fact justifications for racism.
That's the reality here.
And I think that definitely needs to be said stronger.
And that was one of the criticisms of the piece too, was that they say, well, we don't really blame the people who took the jobs from us because, you know, if you were offered an opportunity, you would take it.
But I think that kind of ignores that a large amount of the advocacy for these policies came from these groups that benefited, right?
This was self-interest at the expense of another racial group.
And so that needs to be acknowledged and called out for what it is.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, that kind of illustrates the, I think, the biggest kind of gripe people had with it.
Again, I want to reiterate, like, it's a good piece.
It's directionally correct.
I like that term.
I've learned that term recently.
We're still trying to flush out what that even means, but it's directionally correct as far as like it has a benefit to the political zeitgeist in many ways.
But, and this is, I think, an accurate assessment of the piece is in many ways, it's a permission piece because what it does is it allows people specifically to the left of like Ted Cruz that have been lambasting and trying to push down people that are conservatives for years who have been pointing this out, saying, hey, like white men are getting discriminated against in a variety of ways.
And previously where they would try to get you fired or again, try to freeze you out of whatever career pass you would have available to you for making this case.
All of a sudden, this piece drops, and then now all of them are like, Yeah, this is an issue.
This is a big issue, like, duh.
We've all been saying, like, yes, we've been saying this for years.
Like, welcome to the team.
So, I think there's some value in saying, Welcome to the team.
But at the same time, that is a big critique of it: A, again, it's this sort of permission piece, and then B, that it begs the question of like, okay, what now?
I mean, Jeremy Carl, um, he wrote a fantastic response because obviously, Jeremy Carl's been writing about this for like decades.
And he pointed out, like, look, I mean, again, I'm glad you laid out the data.
We've been saying this, but it begs the question, what now?
What action can we make?
Because the piece ends just basically demoralizing.
Like, I don't know what I'm going to tell my kids when they try to follow their dreams.
And it's like, okay, it's useful to point out the issue.
Conservatives are very good at pointing out issues, but what about the solution?
How do we get out of this?
Like, how can we ensure that your kids don't have to run up against that wall?
Yeah, it's a great point.
And I think describing it as a permission piece is pretty perfect.
It kind of reminds me of when there was that exodus from the New York Times with Barry Weiss et al.
And they started writing about how crazy things had gotten on trans issues and how the newspapers were totally captured by ideologues.
And we were all like, hey, welcome to the party.
We've been waiting five years for you to get here.
Yeah.
And it's like the exact same thing happening here, right?
It's for the people who like don't really watch Matt Walsh's show or they think that Charlie Kirk's comments on the DEI pilots were distasteful because they just hear the one sentence said by the people, you know, trashing him after his death.
It's for those people to read an ostensibly, you know, mainstream argument and publication from a guy who doesn't have like a long history of being a conservative activist and say, oh, yeah, actually, I kind of agree with that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is frustrating when people who were like died in the wool leftists until like two years ago come along and then just start like lecturing conservatives on like how we ought to conduct ourselves.
I'm not saying he specifically is doing that, but a lot of people that are like, no, this is great.
It's like, okay, like welcome, but like, you know, wait your turn.
Like we're busy doing things every year.
But yeah, I think Matt Walsh specifically made an excellent point regarding the sort of the implication of DEI, in which he said, if you look through, for example, the history of Western civilization and you were to compile a list of like the thousand most impactful people in the country, I'm paraphrasing his tweet.
If you were to compile a list of the thousand most impactful people throughout civilization, he ballparked like 975 of them would be white men.
Again, this isn't necessarily chest beating.
He's just making the point like this is how you thank them.
I mean, you kind of ride with the hot hand in many ways.
Why punish them?
Because again, if we believe in a meritocracy, you're just going to hire the best people that are, you know, resume-wise.
And if that skews white, it's a white men.
It's skews to white men.
I don't see why that's like such a pernicious thing.
I don't really see white men organizing on the basis of identity.
That's still like very frowned upon all across the political spectrum.
But you see with other groups that they are sort of advocating as a group.
They are advocating for, look, we're not, we don't care about merit.
We want to stare at the table.
And that to me is specifically pernicious thing.
And that line that he used, this is how you thank them, seems very on point.
Absolutely.
And there's two points I want to make here.
And the second, I'll get into what's next because you raised that.
The first one is that when looking at the media, one thing I find really interesting about your point about how groups organize and how white men and I think white people kind of generally have excluded themselves from that paradigm.
One of the really fascinating dichotomies to watch in the media over the past 10 years is that as they've made this concerted effort to start hiring more people of color, what is still really underrepresented in the media are just normal Americans.
And what I mean by that is when the media decided in the early 1900s that you had to go to journalism school to prove that you could meet some amorphous standard of objectivity in order to become a journalist, whereas it used to be a working class trade, what happened was that most of the people who work for these major publications are sort of all cut from the same class.
They all have journalism degrees.
They all went to elite universities.
They mostly grew up in cities.
They tend to have parents who are white collar.
There aren't a lot of journalists who have parents who are blue collar.
I'm one of the few.
And if you look at the pages of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, one thing that's really stunning is that they have the same educational attainment as U.S. senators and Supreme Court justices.
I mean, it's wild.
Like it really, they really are like the elite of the elite.
And as far as I can tell, the effort to hire minorities hasn't changed that.
You're still getting people from relatively the same background.
So it's not really actually experience or background diversity at all in the way that it was sold to us.
Now, on the what's next, there was a really amazing video that came out yesterday, actually, from the EEOC chair, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, telling white men, if you have been discriminated against in your jobs, we are going to go to bat for you.
Please reach out.
We want to make sure that the people who, you know, were racist against you are held accountable, that your workplaces are places of equal opportunity.
So there is movement from the federal government.
Also, last week, the Department of Justice sort of quietly rolled back their disparate impact liability, which means that if a workplace is discriminating, not intentionally so, not because they don't like black people, but because the outcome is different.
So if you have a policy that leads to you hiring more white men and fewer black men, for example, even if the policy itself does not have some different standard applying to white men versus black men, if the outcome is different, that's disparate impact and you can be held liable under civil rights law.
The DOJ said, we're basically not going to prosecute any of those cases anymore.
We're not going to investigate any of those cases.
One of the big ones that just drove me absolutely insane was during the Biden administration, the same day that President Joe Biden went to Sheets to do a campaign stop and basically show how much of a working class guy that he is.
He's Scranton Joe.
He went to get his schmuffin or whatever it was at Sheets.
This is a great family-owned American institution.
It's based in the Mid-Atlantic for people who aren't familiar.
The same day, his EEOC announced a lawsuit against Sheets under the Disparate Impact Clause.
What did Sheets do?
They said that they weren't going to hire certain criminals.
That's literally it.
They have a policy that they review every applicant, job applicant's criminal record.
And there are certain things, we don't know exactly what they are because their hiring standards are not fully public, but there are certain things where whatever's on your criminal background check could cause you to not get hired.
Now, I assume it's probably things like violent crimes, felonies, right?
If you meet some certain threshold of a criminal history, then you don't get hired at Sheets.
Great.
I don't want the person working in the cash register at Sheets to be a hardened criminal, right?
Seems pretty common sense.
But because black people have higher crime rates and tend to have lengthier criminal backgrounds or are more likely to commit violent crime, that had a disparate impact on Sheets' ability to hire black people.
And so the Biden administration sued them.
The Trump administration dropped the lawsuit and is now getting rid of all similar investigations related to disparate impact, which is huge.
Yeah.
Well, and that's that's kind of the tricky thing about sort of undoing a lot of this because like from the EOC's perspective and other related government organizations, if they were to subpoena sort of these leaders that have sort of built out this discrimination apparatus, it's really difficult to pin them down because I mean, in the piece and also broader commentary, they've outlined how discreet a lot of these things are.
Because, you know, you look at the movies when you would see like discrimination against like black people and they'd be like walking into a help wanted sign and they'd be like, no, get out of here, whatever.
Like it was very on the nose.
But like when white guys are applying to these places, there's like an entire incentive structure all across the United States that is pointing away from them.
And so these companies, they just have these really discrete things like, we want to hire someone that comes from like a unique perspective, like a diverse background.
And then they can like, you know, ask a few pointed questions in the interviews to have like a justification to say, ah, he just wouldn't be like a great fit for our company culture.
They have all these like really like gay terms that they use to justify this discrimination.
And that's what's going to make it so difficult if the government, for example, is to take action on these sorts of things.
Because outside of the data, they have a lot of plausible deniability with a lot of these things.
And that's what makes it so difficult to, again, put together a case here because it's going to have to be case by case in a lot of situations.
But yeah, so much of it is just calculated, prudent.
And that's what makes it also so sinister.
That's how you can tell it legitimately is a full-throated effort to ensure that you can crowd these people out and freeze them out forever.
That's right.
I think you have to start with the really obvious cases because especially from 2020 to 2023, people were admitting it out loud, right?
I mean, they were not, they were, a lot of them weren't discreet.
So you start with those.
The ones that were more discreet and subtle, I think you have to have whistleblowers who are brave enough to come forward, which is why the cowardice demonstrated in the piece by certain people is so infuriating because it perpetuated this system.
And I mean, I also think getting to the point about just like moving forward and what the EEOC is doing,
having this come from the federal government and really open up that permission structure as we're talking about from the government is really important just to show people that they have someone who's on their side and that there is an actual force with teeth that can back them up.
Yeah.
Well, I guess we can start with Joe Biden because he literally said, I'm only going to hire a POC woman to be my vice president.
That's right.
So, I mean, it's like at the highest level.
But yeah, Amber, we're starting to run out of time here.
I wanted to ask for maybe your closing thoughts on all this that we've discussed and also where people can find you to get more of your work.
Absolutely.
I want to tell one more quick story on this point of the subtlety.
When I was working at WMAL, which is a conservative radio station in DC, they were owned by a corporate conglomerate called Cumulus Media, which owns a lot of the conservative media stations around the country.
And on their workplace database, I was shocked one day when I logged on and I found out that they were offering bonuses to people who recommended diverse candidates to be hired.
If the candidate ultimately got hired, you would get like a $2,000 bonus in your check.
So it's exactly what you said, Tate.
It's the diverse backgrounds, right?
We're going to actually give you money if you recommend some black woman and she ends up getting hired at the radio station.
So it really is unbelievably pervasive.
I think this piece is a good start, I guess, in at least illuminating the problem and just how bad it got.
But we're going to need serious action to correct this.
So I'm Amber Duke, everybody.
You can find my work at dailycaller.com.
I'm also on Substack under State of the Day.
And every Friday, I'm on Rising, every Tuesday and Wednesday on Reason on YouTube.
So thanks, everybody.
Awesome.
Thank you so much, Amber.
I'll see you around.
And Merry Christmas.
All right.
Merry Christmas.
We can say that now.
It's so true.
All right.
See you later.
Bye.
All right.
Well, that was the great Amber Duke.
Man, yeah, it's so pernicious.
The oppression against swag, swagged up white boys with a little bit of motion.
They hate to see that.
The left really hates to see.
The left really hates to see a swagged out boy with motion open in the corner because we will knock that down every single time.
I'm talking Kyle Corver.
That is sort of the level that I'm talking about.
They hate to see it, and they've built an entire apparatus around destroying that.
They hate to see that dub.
With that, guys, this is the last live show of the year.
It's very sad.
I have to say goodbye to you guys.
And I don't know what this sort of show is going to look like in the new year.
I hope I'm here again to chat with you guys, but there's a lot of things moving behind the scenes.
So we'll have to see how this show evolves and whatnot.
We are going to raid you guys.
We're going to send you guys over to the great Devori Darkens and you'll go hang out with him for the next hour.
It's going to be fantastic.
And yeah, I just want to say thank you guys very much for hanging out as the show develops.
Obviously, I had to develop.
We had to a lot of different wrenches thrown in and we sort of made it work.
And I think this week it went well.
I'm very happy with sort of how this presentation went, but I hope I will see you guys in the new year.
You'll definitely see me on Timcast IRL and some of our other shows.
But with that, you can follow me on X and Instagram at RealTape Brown.
Come give me a follow there just in case I don't see you after the new year, just in case.
We will be back tonight at 8 p.m. for Timcast IRL.
I want to wish everyone a merry, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.