Ep. 2474 - This Viral Video Is Everything Wrong With America

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Your body's blueprint for rebuilding itself the way it was designed to function. When you invest in your health, invest in your ability to show up fully, think clearly and stay in control no matter what comes your way. We've worked out a special offer from my audience, received 30% off your first subscription order, head on over to armra.com/spirul or answer "spirul" to get 30% off your first subscription order. That's armra.com/spirul. Personal responsibility. That used to be something that most Americans believed in, actually, by the polling day, to most Americans still do, but pretty much nobody in our political class does. Because the most seductive line in American politics is, it's not your fault. In just a second, I'm going to explain why our national debt is out of control. Inflation is rampant and there's no end in sight, and I'm going to do it with one clip. Plus, we'll get to Gavin Newsom's ex-mystress grabbing the spotlight and trying to revive me too. Lindsay Graham's funeral and Rosie O'Donnell singing about President Trump's dangle. Yeah, I know. This is the Ben Shapiro show. Okay, so I'm going to play a clip. This clip says, I think most of the things you need to know about our current politics, actually. Now, this clip isn't really political. It's a clip from Caleb Hammer, who's a financial host, whose main job consists in looking at people making terrible, terrible decisions on both a life and fiscal level and telling them not to do it. But this clip, I think, says a lot about our current political moment. Here is the clip for those who can't see. It is him, as well as his co-host reacting to a woman demonstrating what she bought with her eb-t card. It is a multiple packs of brown. What could you put? Three blocks of monorages. Oh my. Holy shit. Okay, those box of cookies I've never seen. Three of them. That's cool racing. And then she had to get the fruity palette. She had to get that, well, is it tortillas? No, the fruity, Oh, for loops, but blouse, but she got the ones with marshmallows. That sounds so good. Oh my goodness, you heard the fattest woman. Sounds so good. Two blocks of mild cheddar cheese. Two bags of meatballs. Oh. Two, you got five. Oh my. The front onion dip. I got two gallons of meal. No, no, this is too much. I got the front onion dip. Okay. Excuse me, I got three of them. Three. The tubs of that French onion dip. How do you think they're paying for this? This is expensive. This has to be eBT because they're both disabled. This is way. No, no, you've never seen it. You've never seen it every single time. They're waddling. No, every single waddleer is on disability. Are they carts? Are they cart people? Yes. What a hundred percent? And they're all on disability. And they're paying for all this on their disability. Okay. Here is the thing. The reason that Caleb Hammer is going nuts here is because, you know, I think a lot of people have the same reaction. The common sensical reaction. What you eat, well, you get at the supermarket, is your decision, which means that if you choose to buy and eat crap and are therefore more unhealthy, it is your fault. But when I say it that way, it gets really controversial. Now, here's the thing. It really shouldn't be. I didn't say that it's easy to eat healthy. It absolutely is not. We can all drop a few pounds. I am no exception to this rule. It's true for everyone. And eating healthy is hard and it's annoying. Making your kids eat healthy is even harder because your kids constantly want the stuff that tastes good and it's easier to give your kids pizza than it is to insist that they eat the healthy food. But again, these are decisions that are up to free people in a free country. But here is the thing. No politician will ever say that to you. Not a single one. Instead, they will tell you that the reason that you've been eating unhealthy and the reason that you're overweight and the reason that you are, in fact, more unhealthy, it must be because food is expensive. And therefore, when you government run grocery stores, subsidized by the taxpayer. That's really the reason. Here is Zorn Momdani doing this routine a couple of days ago. In the wealthiest city, in the wealthiest country, in the history of the world, no New Yorker should have to worry about being able to afford to feed their family. Now again, New Yorkers do not have to worry about feeding their families. We have SNAP. We have VBT. We have all sorts of government programs. It is true that food is more expensive than it was just a few years ago. But by any historical standard, food in the United States is not expensive. It is not. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the USDA, in the early 1900s, families were spending roughly 40% of their income on food. Today, the average household in the United States will spend under 10% of its disposable income on food. People today spend roughly an equal amount on groceries as they do on restaurants on average. Now again, if you look at just what we are spending, the answer is we are spending less on food, then pretty much any time for any society in human history. Now again, that does not mean that food isn't more expensive than it was just a couple of years ago. It absolutely is. Inflation has a cost and you can spot it every time. You go to the grocery store. The average price paid to domestic producers for food jumped 30% between 2021 and 2023. And since then, grocery prices have continued to climb. I'll be at a slower rate under President Trump. But the solution to that is not government subsidized food. In fact, government subsidies typically make things more expensive. And here is a chart. Maybe the chart that matters most when it comes to government policy, demonstrating the effect on prices when you dump money into items, when you subsidize them using the federal government. And what you see is all the areas where the government does not subsidize, say, TVs, toys, computer software, cell phone services clothing, the price has dropped fairly radically over time. However, in the areas where the government subsidizes the most, say, hospital services or college tuition, or childcare and nursery school or medical care services, massive spikes over the course of the last 25 years. Now again, why am I bringing this up? Because this is a matter of whether we consider it your responsibility. And again, those are the words that no one in politics will say in America, your responsibility. The idea is that everything is everybody's responsibility. In fact, everything is nobody's responsibility. Not everybody's responsibility. It's the government's responsibility. But let us be clear. This idea that Zora and Mamdani needs to locate grocery stores within a certain distance because you just can't get to a grocery store in Manhattan is not true. The distance between Mamdani's East Harlem City-owned grocery store and the local Costco is less than a mile. Here is the sad and real truth about life. People make choices. And sometimes those choices are good. And very often those choices are not. There have been studies on whether, in fact, people are eating unhealthy because of so-called food deserts. For a long time, there was this theory that impoverished areas people didn't eat kale because kale was unavailable because there was no local whole foods. And it turns out there's no local whole foods in impoverished areas because people in them impoverished areas don't want to spend money on kale. It's a reverse correlation. According to the University of Chicago, it had studied a couple of years ago. And what they found is that so-called food deserts, areas where you don't have a gigantic supermarket or grocery store with fresh produce, has no meaningful effect on eating habits. Exposing low-income households to the same products and prices, as those in high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only 9%. The remaining 91% of the nutrition gap is driven by difference in what shoppers prefer to buy, according to a national Bureau of Economic Research working paper published recently. Households in food desert zip codes buy almost 90% of their groceries from supermarkets, the same as wealthier households. It's just the wealthier households, according to the study, tend to place a higher value on healthy foods and nutrients. Poor households tend to value unhealthy ones. Low-income households are willing to pay more for sugar and saturated fat, whereas high-income households tend to want to pay more for veggies and fruits, for example. And there's a reason for this, according to the LA Times. In overwhelming majority of the wealthy parents told me they routinely said no to request for junk food. In 96% of high-income families, at least one parent reported, they regularly declined such requests. Parents from poor families, however, almost always said yes to junk food, only 13% of low-income families had a parent that reported regularly declining their kids requests. See, again, here's the thing, junk food tastes good. It tastes great. I love it. Sour miconikes, the best food ever created. Incredible. But then again, it's my decision to destroy my digestive system. It would be my fault. Now, I know the left one wants to make this into a race thing. But in fact, this is a race-neutral thing. White Appalachia has very high rates of obesity, and the same thing is true in inner-city black communities. It doesn't have to be a class thing. It is a class thing in the sense that poor income households tend to eat less healthy food, but the reality is that healthy food remains affordable. In the United States, in fact, it kind of costs the same overall as unhealthy food. So, for example, I checked it out. You could get healthy food for a family of four at Aldi's for a week. You'd have to shop hard, but you could do it for a little over a hundred bucks. That would include things like whole chicken and ground beef and eggs, potatoes, milk, cheese, yogurt, rice, pasta, oats, etc. And that's a pain in the butt. It's a pain in the butt. It's expensive by historical comparison, but it is not prohibitive. And again, if you were to buy a meal plan for that same family of four for a week, things like frozen pizza or frozen chicken nuggets, hot dogs and buns, sugary cereal, mac and cheese, soda, ice cream, the works, it would probably cost you in the same neighborhood. We all have choices, and that's what that Caleb Hammer video is showing. And it's why I think everybody who watches the video reacts in kind of the same way. Why isn't that lady just buying something healthy? She obviously needs to be something healthy. Why is she buying that? But here's the thing, no politician will say this. The left is fully invested in the idea that every bad decision is the result of societal consequence. That is the Marxist theory at work. The reason that lady is making bad decisions about her food is because capitalism has caused her to make bad decisions about her food. And if we had a Marxist redistributionist structure, she would have been brought up to eat only the healthiest foods. Now the reality is that people under Marxism tend to be skinnier than people under capitalism, mainly because they're starving enough. But it is also true that people make decisions. The left suggests that every decision is in fact a societal or governmental decision. Unfortunately, this is also bled over to the right. Take for example the evolution of the vice president. This is a really kind of telling evolution and it says something about the broader right because it's not restricted to the vice president, of course. So back in 2016, the vice president wrote a book called Hilbole Elegy. An in-hilbole Elegy talks about eating habits. He says that when he was in the Marines, he changed his perspective on eating because he was grabbing dessert while at boot camp. And a drill instructor yelled at him, quote, "You really need that cake, don't you fat?" and he says that experience pushed him to reconsider his eating habits. He writes that he began asking questions he never asked before, like, quote, "Is there added sugar? Does this meat have a lot of saturated fat? How much salt?" He says in Hilbole Elegy that the greasy fried food from his mom was stable, that was his grandmother. Everything was fried, lost to peel to him after that shift. He says in that, quote, "Weed Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls for breakfast, Taco Bell for lunch and McDonald's for dinner. We rarely cook even though it's cheaper and better for the body and soul." So that was a fairly typical conservative perspective that you can make choices that better your life. Nutrition, finance, career, like all over your life. But now things have changed because it's become popular in America to suggest that no decision is your own. Well, that was JD Vance's perspective on eating habits, factoring his Hilbole Elegy days, as we will see in a moment, things have radically changed for the vice president. But I'm going to tell you something that has not changed and is not going to change. The reality is the government has been talking about going to keep spending money. And when you inflate the dollar, it's a thing that's just going to keep happening because all the systemic factors aim in this particular direction. 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Many other things like this popped up demonstrating the ways in which I had unconsciously absorbed the biases of America's educated class. I was becoming detached from the culture that had made me who I was. Now again, I'm curious, was it somehow less true now than it's bad to continuously feed our kids for loops and frosted flakes? It is not healthy to feed that. Now again, how he chooses to interact with his family is one thing. But it's also not even the real story. According to his first autobiography, his mind shift with regard to eating didn't come at Ohio State. It wasn't a college kid thing. It was a boot camp thing when his instructor said stop being fat and he stopped being fat and realized he should pay attention to his food, trying to turn this into a class warfare issue is scoring cheap political points. But again, I'm not trying to pick on the vice president. This is so much of our politics right and left. It's why the national that is never going to go down ever, ever, ever because no one will ever say the thing in a free society in a country where your vote is about your choice. So is most of your life. And if we have a society where your choices don't matter and we pretend they don't exist and everything is society's fault, nothing is your fault. And then it's society's job and the government's job to fix it. But here's the thing, matter how much government you throw at these problems, you can't fix personal choice this way. You can't fix personal choice this way. When Michelle Obama tried this with school lunches, I don't know if you recall this going back far enough, Michelle Obama, the wife of Barack Obama, if you're back far enough, she tried to fix the school lunches. So she pointed out correctly, by the way, that the school lunches were generally non-nutricious. And so she decided she was going to put together school lunches that were more nutritious. And you know what happened? The kids tossed out everything, all of it. Because it turns out the government can't fix all your problems, it can't fix the problem of decision making. Here's a video from the time of kids reviewing Michelle Obama's approved school lunches. I do bring lunch every day. You do, why? Because I hate the school lunches. Lunchables. Snack pack? I got it from my parents. My parents. I don't really like the old school lunch food that much. I brought chicken nuggets and then, like, cool aid. A couple years ago, back kids were so intrigued by the hot dogs because when they dropped them on the table, they bounced around a little. One of my friends named Abby, she watched a hot dog and you know, they're really rubbery and she saw it wiggle. Again, what actually ended up happening is the kids were basically dumping everything they didn't want. But refuse to accept that again, choice is our choices. This is, by the way, the reason why parents should give their kids food to bring to school. But the result of a sort of attitude, which is that nothing is your fault, that has results. Three results, specifically one, the radical expansion of government because if you don't take responsibility for your life, then somebody has to take responsibility for your life and the government has to expand either by subsidizing your boss and your round or both. Second, we treat the actual normal things that the government should be doing as secondary and the stuff that we personally should be doing as primary functions of the government. This is how you end up with the idiotic take that the government should spend not on defense, but should be spending on whatever the social program of the day is. And you end up with financial illiteracy, of course. So back to Caleb Hammer. Here he was talking with a member of the political left who was saying we spend more money on bombs than social programs in the country, which is absolutely false. But that is your perception if you believe that the government's job is not to do defense, but it is to take care of all the aspects of your life. But every patriotic and we're spending more money on bombs than we are for like social just or like social programs. We spend 50% of the federal spending on social programs. Like what? Social programs, Medicare, Medicaid, mandatory spending, snap benefits, veteran benefits. You mean the snap benefits that people just got taken away from them? You think everyone just got taken off snap? Most people do. The majority just got taken off snap. Our military spending is 10 to 20%. And that's the reason why you're freaking out about 10 to 20%. So Grecius, we spent 50% of social programs. I'm a military kid and I can tell you that she does not need it. Girl, you literally just got the information that you were just wrong and yet you're still doubling down. We don't spend the majority on bombs. Okay, maybe it's not the majority of us. Well, it's not even close to the majority. It's not even a quarter. It's far too much. Okay, you could advocate for that, but that all of a sudden it doesn't mean you just said we don't spend anything on social. That's where more than half of our money goes. What are you talking about? I think it needs to be more. As usual, you're uninformed about everything. And then you just not pay for that. What do you mean? We spend more than anyone. And again, the point that she's making it is indicative and underlying problem. Right? This is a couple that he's having on. It's like $5,000 in debt. When you believe that it's the government's job to take care of all your problems, this is what you end up with. That the government should not take care of our national defense. That we should be sure on interceptors so that we can spend more on snap. Here's the reality, by the way, when you consider all of the government's social programs with all the heavily incentivized private benefits, like for example, employer, funded healthcare and 401k matches and tax credits, the OECD as the organization for economic cooperation and development ranks. the United States, the number one global spender on social programs. Our net total spending, when you combine both the public safety net and private benefits, ranks us at number two behind France per capita. Okay, so the second thing, right, again, there are three things that result from this mindset. Thing number one is that the government radically expands and never stops expanding. Second, we start putting focus on the government not doing its core functions and doing all these other things that are not its core functions. And third and most importantly, we become worse people because nothing is ever our fault. Personal responsibility withers. Governmental control increases. It is a very, very short road from I have no agency to I can take whatever I want from the government because it's not my fault anyway. One more clip from Caleb Hammer that proves the point here he was talking to a couple that earns six figures or close to six figures stealing government assistance and snap and feeling no guilt about it whatsoever. You get food cents on top of that plus Medicaid, so. Yes, super. Oh, I pay everything that is. The way we have set this up, yeah, we're dependent. The entire 200 billion yearly snap budget is the problem, but not the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of subsidies that go to corporations, but yes, the little guys can't understand. Well, subsidies isn't money going to them. Typically, subsidies is usually it's tax benefits. So it's money they're not giving. Food stamps are still money going out. Right. So it is different. You can't compare them one to one. It's not one to one. Well, then you just made the one to one example. No. And you know those subsidies are usually set up in place for them to build like a corporate campus, so they employ more people usually find to a certain degree. It still puts more money in the system because they bring in more employees. They have to pay payroll taxes on that. I'm both that. So what are you talking about? At least what you're going to gas. Let's use oil and gas for an example. How much revenue did they generate and how much of that revenue was profit? You're telling me that they deserve a $700 billion deduction or subsidy or whatever you want to call it to grow their business when you make that much money. You can't fund your own business advancement. I don't know about necessarily deserve, but I would still rather have money go to something that does create jobs, which actually provides a benefit. I mean, the sound program that only buy food. Then people who literally do nothing to them. Can it buy us and just get. Sam can only buy food. She gets Medicaid and she gets the child tax credits. Oh no. Okay. So again, this mentality sells. It does. The most high ROI sale and politics is it's not your fault. I'll take care of it for you. But here's the thing. It's never going to work. They won't take care of it for you. You want to know why people keep moving party to party, swiveling from side to side wildly, crazily because it turns out that if people promise you the world, they will come up short. The government cannot make up for the failures of personal decision making. And by the way, social institutions wither when you get rid of this stuff personal responsibility withers. Now again, the American people don't even support this stuff. The American people don't like it. There's a brand new man had an institute poll that we talked about a little bit yesterday. Talking about support for snap work requirements and it turns out that a broad majority of Americans strongly or somewhat support snap work requirements. They believe that people should actually work if they want some benefits. And when it comes to state responsibility for snap payment errors, for example, it turns out that 55% of all voters believe that states that have waste in the food stamps program should be required to cover part of the cost of that waste that the federal government should have should not have to pick that up. But here's the thing on an individual level, people tend to buy this stuff because it tells us we all want to hear that right. We all want to hear it's not your fault. The government has this. We've got this. That's what politicians will say. And by we, we mean the government. And by it, we mean unending national debt and the withering of our social institutions and of personal virtue. But that is where this is going. Personal responsibility is withering. You want unending national debt? You want unending inflation? You want a failing system? Get rid of the basic idea of human nature that the founding fathers believed in. The founding fathers believed that we all had choices in front of us. Good choices and bad choices. And because we all had the capacity for evil and the capacity for good, they said we needed checks and balances and we needed constitutionally protected freedoms because they believed that that capacity for choice was our highest human calling. That was the thing that mattered more than anything because if you're not exercising your choice in pursuit of the good, then what are you here on this planet for? But that's not actually the direction our culture is moving. And that's particularly true in the online world where again, the online world incentivizes bad behavior and incentivizes attention seeking. And it tells you over and over what you want to hear. Verality is based on what you want to hear. What do people want to hear more than anything? They want to hear their own decisions are not their fault. It's somebody else's fault is why Pope Leo. Again, I have my quibbles with Pope Leo politically, but when it comes to central values here, he happens to be correct. Here he is saying, you know, you might want to engage in some virtue again. Is it really possible to have joy in such difficult circumstances we might ask? It is only possible if our life is founded upon our relationship with God as a loving father. The joy St. Francis was speaking of cannot be found through electronic devices, spending hours in front of a screen, endlessly scrolling on social media every day. These activities often waste precious time. They could be used for moments of silent prayer, of cultivating authentic friendships, spending quality time with family, learning more about our faith, studying, or playing sports. So again, he's not wrong about this. Getting re-involved in your life making decisions is good for you. It's good for family. It's good for community and it's good for the government. Well, you end up with this unending government. If the alternative to freedom is tyranny, and a freedom is built on the idea that your decisions are your own, then when you give up your decision-making power and say the government ought to take care of everything, tyranny is usually what follows. We will get to a story of lack of personal responsibility. It also concerns Gavin Newsom in a moment. But as we have been talking about eating healthy is really, really hard to do. It's really important and it's your choice. But when we're talking about choices, that doesn't mean that every choice makes it easy. Okay, when it comes to packing lunches or trying to figure out what to eat or cram in those fruits and veggies in your diet, that's actually hard. Well, this is the reason I like balance of nature. You got to do what you got to do to stay healthy. I'm pretty skeptical of products that promise to solve all your health problems with a magical ingredient. Bounce of nature doesn't do that. It's simply real fruits and veggies, whole foods that are carefully dehydrated and put into capsules. That's it. No gimmicks, no mystery ingredients, and no trendy buzzwords. I take those fruits and veggies capsules as part of my morning routine. They're an easy way to stay more consistent even on the days when my schedule gets away from me. Those freeze-dried snacks, they become a favorite around our national office, which is saying something because there are a lot of snack options available around there. Back to school season is a good time to reset your routine. If getting more fruits and veggies part of that plan, balance of nature makes it a whole lot easier. Head on over to balanceofnature.com. Use promo code Shapiro for an additional 10% off any subscription. That's balanceofnature.com promo code Shapiro for an additional 10% off your subscription. When we talk about the social consequences of a consequence-free and choice-free society, this brings us to a bizarre, strange story from Vanity Fair, written by a woman named Ruby Rippy. This woman had an affair with Gavin Newsom way back when this exploded outward a couple of decades ago, 20 years ago. This woman was originally married to a Newsom staffer while he was the mayor, and then he started knocking boots with her. And now she has a long story in Vanity Fair, in which again, the attempts to escape responsibility for her own bad decision-making, it's pretty wild, the entire structures of thought that we've built on top of all of this. So she writes in Vanity Fair about how she faced her demons but lost her voice, and now she's ready to share her story. So here's how it all went down, according to the person with whom Gavin Newsom had this affair. 2004, quote, remember she's married and she has a newborn child. One night we all made a Mexican restaurant on Lombard Street, warm tortilla chips, lines, margarita sweating in glasses. As the waiter takes orders, I feel the mayor looking at me. I glance up across the table back at him. As if caught off guard, he reacts pointing at me, "Hey, you look really good." He says, "You've lost all your pregnancy weight." There's an awkward laugh. I reach for another chip and stare at my husband's margarita, the salt rim catching the light. I want it, but I'm in another self-inforced stretch of sobriety, so I sit on my hands and wait it out. After that, I start paying closer attention," she says to what I wear, "Shinnell makeup." A yellow silk dress fitted at the waist, ping-patton leather heels. At senior staff meetings, we sit in a semicircle, facing his enormous oak desk, 12 foot high velvet curtain strontite, casting the room in a private glow. I feel important." So the story is not about how Gavin Newsom is a good guy. He really, really, is not. There is a punchline here that is kind of astonishing. So basically, she decides that she doesn't like her life, she has an alcohol problem, and she ends up in an affair with Gavin Newsom. And she admits in this article that it was totally consensual, quote, "The boundaries begin to disintegrate. I linger in doorways, position myself within his sightline. At events, he holds the doors, waiting for me to pass first. The texts shift from work to something else. My manufacture reasons, to be near him. The choreography becomes obvious, people notice. As the performance unfolds in plain sight, I start measuring my days by how close it is to five when I can start drinking." And then she says, "We meet, we drink, there's sex, but it isn't the point. The point is proximity, to power, to being chosen to feel, feeling newly visible, no longer muted by pregnancy, by new motherhood, by the strain of white nuckling, long stretches of sobriety. It isn't love, it isn't romance, it's intoxication. And then, of course, they break up. And she uses cocaine and all the rest. Okay, now she ends up telling her husband. But she says this, here's her conclusion. Well, me too is still more than a decade away. But the arguments are already forming. I hear every explanation. None absolves me. That's the drinking matter. It's how did my arrogance, the belief that consequences were for other people. I was not confused or naive. I was a grown woman who made choices that hurt someone I loved. I am the culprit. Still, the me too reckoning exposed what I had messed. And here's the punch line. Power does not need to coerce. It only needs to exist. The responsibility to hold the line belongs to the one who holds it. That didn't happen. But I didn't stumble into the space left open. I saw possibility and went for it. Both things are true. I am responsible for what I did. Because it's not to distribute consequences evenly. Here's the key. The key is the idea that this is a form of coercion. It's a shadow of fully consensual affair with Gavin Newsom. Again, gross. Gross by her. She's marrying Hattaked. Gross by him. She was marrying Hattaked. Also this notion that because he was a powerful person, which is what drew her to him in the first place as she admits that somehow this relieves her of some level of responsibility or that Gavin Newsom is uniquely guilty for this in because he was powerful, which was the draw to him. How about you just say I acted horribly. How about that? How about that? But again, there is something that undergirds this. And that is this perspective on life that everything, value systems, everything is the outgrowth of power. Everything is a reflection of power. The postmodernist author, Michelle Foucault, he argued that basically all structures are structures of power. And therefore, racism is not racism. It's racism plus power. Terrorism isn't terrorism. Terrorists are powerless. That's why they're terrorists. So the only true terrorism has to be driven by Western powers. And apparently your responsibility for banging your boss while you're married is mitigated because he was powerful. We need a society in which blame and shame are things again. We do where your decisions are your own and you take full responsibility for those decisions that we don't treat you as a victim. We don't treat you as though there's some sort of get out of jail moral free card here. That doesn't exist until we go back to that. We're going to have a country that has some serious values problems and that's going to bleed over into our politics. All right. The other big news of the day yesterday, the actual news was the Lindsey Graham funeral program yesterday. The Lindsey Graham funeral program did feature the Jerusalem cross. Now we are told that the Jerusalem cross was some sort of Nazi image because Pete Hegg Seth has a tattoo of it. And of course, does not. Sort of all the luminaries showed up for it. Senator John Featherman put on a suit for Graham's funeral as you would imagine. Here he was walking in. How is it to be in a suit for once? I mean, normal. You know, what do you think? I think it looks good. I like you in the hoodie though. Yeah. Well, I mean, now I see people now are wearing shorts now with suits too. So maybe that's enough to really bring me over to the side full time. Well, good. Meanwhile, President Trump spoke at the funeral and he talks about running against Lindsey Graham in 2016 and then how they became friendly. As you remember, Lindsey and I did not exactly get off to the best of starts running against each other. Back in 2016, Lindsey said something rather nasty on his flight to becoming the next president of the United States. So naturally, I did something that I shouldn't have done. I shared his personal cell phone number with the millions of people that happened to be watching that particular day as I made a speech, a very important speech. I remember the number 202-228-0292 if anybody wants to give it a shot. His phone exploded. He said, "I had that number for 20 years. His phone totally, I don't know what he did with it, but it exploded." That was the beginning of a friendship in a way. But it was Lindsey who had the last laugh because while I blew up his phone for one day, we became great friends and Lindsey did not stop calling me for the next 10 years. It was not easy. Yeah, the president, honestly, his, his eulogy for Graham was one of his better moments. I thought that the president was obviously very warm towards Senator Graham. Here he was talking about Graham. It was very funny because obviously somebody else worked on his speech and he would kind of add lib in the middle. But no matter how heated things got in Washington virtually, everyone, Republican or Democrat, liked Lindsey. Well, not everybody, but it sounds good, not everybody. He was a tough cookie. Okay, I have to be, I have to veer from this verse. He was a tough cookie, darling, but he was beautiful. He obviously had a lot of warm with four Lindsey Graham, the president, Sean Hannity, who is also close friends with Lindsey Graham for years. He made a great point. So there are a lot of people who have tried to characterize Graham as, you know, he loved war. Even the president made a joke along these lines. Okay, nobody loves war unless you're a complete sicko. You don't love war. Lindsey Graham believed in a muscular American presence in the world and believed in some ways that I disagreed with and America's ability to shape conflict to its advantage. I disagreed sometimes on the manifestation of that. But Sean Hannity is right. Lindsey Graham wanted peace. He wanted lasting peace and he understood that confronting America's enemies was very often the only way to achieve peace. Lindsey, he was often unfairly characterized as a warm monger. I've heard that false criticism a lot. It's not true. The truth was the opposite. Lindsey desperately wanted and talked to the president about a lasting peace in the Middle East. He wanted every region, every country in the region on that path to peace. That was Lindsey's dream. If people would only listen to what he had been saying. Members of the left decided that now is a great time because when is it not a good time? To rip into Lindsey Graham, Stephanie Ruhl over at MSNBC, MS now. She kind of implied that Graham may be in hell, presumably for his support of president Trump. Yeah, I'm guessing Han John McCain are having very complicated conversations right now. Absolutely. If they are in the state of the country. If they are in the same place, tire some chunk, weger who hated Lindsey Graham nearly as much as he hates America. He put out a tweet quote, here's my eulogy to Lindsey Graham. You were a murderous pig. Even among the warmongers in DC, you stood out for the glue you took in the depths of so many you orchestrated. You'll be missed by no one outside of Israel and defense contractors. I hope Israel releases the tapes anyway. Of course, his idea is that Israel must have had tapes blackmailing Lindsey Graham, just a vile human being, truly a vile person. The United States Senate is going to vote on a Russia sanctions bill, attribute to Graham. It is well deserved. The president did meet with Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine yesterday. Apparently went very well. He also met with the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Tanya, who apparently that went well as well. The president, you know, the reality is that the thing that Lindsey Graham understood better than pretty much anyone in American politics is the nature of our enemies. Lindsey Graham understood that Russia is America's enemy. Lindsey Graham understood that Iran, which by the way, fired missiles at America's bases in Jordan last night, that Iran is our enemy and that it turns out you might not be able to have nice talks with our enemies that result in things. You might need to actually try to box them in and fight them economically, diplomatically, as the last resort militarily. That was the good thing about Lindsey Graham. And if Republicans forget it, along with the Democrats, this country is in serious, serious trouble. Meanwhile, by the way, speaking of the Democrats, John Fetterman, who again, Warisouk, he has been what a breath of fresh air he has been with regard to the DSA crazies, the nut jobs inside the Democratic Party. He was on CNBC yesterday and he was calling out the Democratic Socialist of America, by the way, the new candidate for governor in Wisconsin is very, very likely to be a Democratic Socialist of America, act like and part-time bartender, which I mean, you could have guessed from the from the earlier description. Here is Senator Fetterman. For every Democrat, both here in our caucus or anyone nationally, if we were successful to eliminate the filibuster, imagine what the last 18 months would have been in terms of the policies enacted because, you know, Democrats, we haven't stopped any kinds of thing, really. The only thing that has was the filibuster. And now on our side, now, we have more and more crazies. You know, the DSA abolished the border, abolished the prison, abolished the Senate, you know, crazies. Now they're at the gate here in my party and I would warn people of the kind of extremism. Now that's, you know, incredibly dangerous. Well, Fetterman went on to point out that if elected to the Senate, Abdul Al-Sahiad, the Michigan Senate candidate who really kind of likes terrorism, that he would end up heading the program as party. emerging pro-Hamas wing here in the party. Mom again, right? It's a Senator Featherman for calling all of that out in a way that other Democrats will not Kathy Hocal. I mean, God, it's just got to be incredible to be a Democrat who must be eager to be tasked. Kathy Hocal, her press office released a meme of LeBron James. LeBron James just signed with Philadelphia 76ers, but he's going to be living in New York City and then commuting to play for the sixers because who the hell wants to live in Philadelphia, I guess. He's going to commute daily from New York City to Philadelphia via helicopter. Kathy Hocal's office then put out a tweet that said, "Lepietta terror." Like instead of LeBron, "Lepietta terror because it's the second house." They can't wait to tax him. Man, what a great place New York must be where they can't wait to tax you. Welcome to the state we cannot wait to grab your money. What a party you Democrats have constructed truly, truly awe-inspiring in its vision. Meanwhile, Rosie O'Donnell, she was in Ireland speaking of Pietta terror lady. She was in Ireland and then she came back, which is unfortunate. Well now she has decided that we all need to hear her rewriting of the lyrics to the wizard of Oz so that she can talk about the president's penis. Yeah, I had to hear it, so that means you also had to hear it. His approval rate is 30. His diaper's always 30. I think the guy insane. The reflecting pool is green, his reasons were obscene. It's him we all do blame. Da da da da da da da da da. He grew a magic ear stole billions in a year 'cause he doesn't have a brain. Oh, I can't tell you why some people think he's smart. All he does is lie and cheat and steal and and he's asleep when meeting starts. He still dreams that he is Putin while our country he is lute on humanity. A stain. Da da da da da da da da da da da. All he does is cause a strama, cause he'll never be Obama. Cause he doesn't have a brain. Hope you enjoy that Donald. That's for you. A tick-tock you don't sh*t. I can't believe the Michael Moore made that video. That was that was terrifying. I mean, tone deaf. She is not Yip Harberg. Yip Harberg is the original lyric author of the Wizard of Us. That was not good. That was not good. It was poorly sung. The lyrics were bad. She did get to talk about the president's genitalia, which is great. She is it a light. I can't imagine why the president going all the way back. I think that you know what? We need a throwback president Trump response to Rosie O'Donnell. You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slabs and disgusting animals. Your Twitter account only Rosie O'Donnell. I will meanwhile in a much darker cultural news. Pretty horrifying tick-tock. She was on tick-tock and that's horrifying. But there's a much more horrifying tick-tock story joining us online is Lyndon Blake. She's host of that so criminal here at The Daily Wire and she's the person who covers sort of all things cultural and criminal that maybe I've been missing here on the show. There is a story that is going to completely viral that is an extraordinary and horrifying story about a tick-tock influencer named Sarah Gilson, who's also known apparently as Sarah Duffy. And Lyndon's going to fill me in on that one. Lyndon explain to me what's going on here. Okay, you remember that Netflix documentary trend that you actually did a couple of weeks ago. It has been such a viral trend mainly because they've been funny. They have been poking fun in a certain situation or some type of mundane situation in your life. And Sarah Gilson, a day after she got an emergency protective order against her husband, Sean Duffy, she decided to do this Netflix trend except she didn't go for a funny angle. She went for a pretty dark angle and was very vulnerable and said, prepping for my Netflix documentary where I expose my soon to be ex-husband of being a pedophile basically. So you see that on your tick-tock feed. Obviously, you're like, what? You start following it. It goes viral. Well, shortly after that, she wound up dead. At the hands of her husband, Sean Duffy, there is horrible dispatch calls out there where you can hear a woman screaming. Then there's a gunshot her on dispatch. You can hear the shot that killed. And it's so disturbing because investigators say that Sean Duffy killed Sarah, then turned the gun on himself. And it just, it just makes you so mad because this was not just a random coincidence where Sarah is just trying to start like drama on tick-tock with her husband. No, she was getting a protective order from him because a girl and her parents on this little girl's basketball team a couple weeks earlier went to the police station in Oklahoma where this all happened and said that Sean Duffy inappropriately touched the girl and kissed her at this basketball tournament. Now Sean Duffy was a basketball coach coach, little girls and it just makes you sick because there were signs there where this could have been prevented. But it ended in a horrible tragedy. We're digging really deep into their past on that. So criminal and we'll have a full episode out later this week. But basically, you have this 43 year old woman, a tick-tock influencer. She likes to sell jewelry and sell bags. She had two teenage kids, a son and a daughter from her first marriage, now dead and now her kids have to grow up without their mother. Now, her first husband, Lyle Landers, he has done interviews on multiple platforms this week, talking about how he is trying to warn Sarah for the last five years to get away from Sean Duffy. And he said that he had some type of control over her. Just a really sad situation. And obviously, right now, the story is blowing up all over the internet because even before this tragedy happened, that Netflix documentary trend video was blowing up because it was so shocking and people were actually googling the court cases and following up with their court appearances. It's just a horrible, horrible situation. So Lyndon, were there criminal charges that were in the offing for her husband before this happened? How far had that investigation gone into the accusations of inappropriate touching of minors of pedophilia and all the rest when she actually sat down and did this? So this is interesting. I said this is in Oklahoma. And Sean Duffy was a member of the O Sage tribe. This is an Indian country area. And because of that, his case left the jurisdiction of where the initial complaint was filed and it went to the US Attorney's Office. And this was all a very, basically just to lay the situation. And that's why you had some time there before Sarah necessarily found out that this has gone on with her husband. But even before that, there's reports that they've had issues that he filed for bankruptcy two years before. And I will say this. And a lot of times in these murder suicide cases that you follow, it's like the husband is always going through something and then just takes it out on the wife. Two years earlier, you had Sean Duffy allegedly filed for bankruptcy. So money troubles were happening. He was accused of inappropriately touching little girl. Another coach is a person that actually told that little girl's parents at the basketball tournament that it happened. And then when his wife who already had a platform is trying to take ownership of her story is what you want to say. I mean, she wasn't trying to make light of it, but she was like, oh, this is I'm an influencer. This is a popular trend. I'm going to put my spin on it. And then it goes viral. And what does Sean Duffy do instead of taking ownership for his mistakes? He kills her. And then kills himself because he's a coward. Obviously, tremendous act of people and it intersects with the social media sphere because obviously the reality of social media means that he knew that she was posting this. This already went viral and presumably that was the trigger that spurred him to do all of this. Just a reminder that what happens on social media is not, in fact, private. It has a large audience and spillover effects that are that are pretty scary. Yeah. And to add to that, they were known online as kind of the duffs as this happy couple. And it's like, oh, of course, you can guess it. This happy couple online that seems like they have it all together actually doesn't have it together. And it's just we've talked about this before, Ben. How social media is a wonderful thing, but also a horrible thing. And this case right now is showcasing the worst parts of social media where a woman online seemed to be fine, but in reality, even years prior, she had filed restraining orders trying to get away from Duffy, but then she never showed up for that hearing. So then that case was dismissed. And it's one of those situations where you need to really, really listen to the person. And And they may be under some type of control, but just know if you think something's off about a certain situation, follow your gut and follow up on that. Because I know that her first husband, my old lander, that she had a wonderful relationship with, he is reeling from this right now. And now he's going to raise their kids alone. And I just know he feels this weight of this as someone that tried and tried and tried to get her to walk away. But in the end, he couldn't. Let's Lyndon Blakey can check out that. So criminal over at DailyWire. She covers all of these breaking criminal stories. Lyndon, thanks so much for the time. Thanks for the coverage. Thanks, Ben. Alrighty, folks, you think the show is over wrong. You are. If you're a daily wire member, you get even more analysis, more news coverage and access to the mailbag right now. We are going to be answering your questions. If you're not a member, become a member, use Coach Shapiro. Check out for two months free and all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us. [MUSIC PLAYING]