🚨FOX’S $2.7 BILLION MISTAKE?! Why Dumping Maria Bartiromo Just Put ENTIRE NETWORK at Risk | The Fall of Nike| Germany's AdF Wins | Uprising In UK

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I've lost 75 pounds in 20 months with GLP-1s, plus diet and exercise. On Rho, I've gone from struggling to run a mile to running farther every day. You can access FDA-approved GLP-1s online. Get the support you need to reach your weight loss goals. Go to Rho.co slash weight to see if you qualify. I'm a paid Rho partner. 20% average weight loss in one year and non-diabetics with obesity or overweight with a weight-related medical condition versus 3.1% in placebo arm. Rx only. To stay informed about serious side effects, go to Rho.co slash safety. Welcome to the big show. A lot of people asking whether Fox may have made a bigger mistake than it ever had any intention of making. Like a $2.7 billion mistake because they get a big lawsuit coming up. Welcome to the program, everyone. I'm Trisha. You can make sure you subscribe. Maria Bartiromo getting sort of ousted, for lack of a better word. Her lawyer says she's not fired, but, you know, she's no longer on the air. And there have been a series of very, very bad, press leaks about her. And there are now, at this moment, new developments coming forward. I'm guessing likely from the PR team's side of things at Fox. I'm guessing regarding one Maria Bartiromo and the reasons why she was apparently let go. Don't forget, Axios putting it in the news last week that she had indeed been fired. And they quoted somebody from the company saying that she was fired for business reasons. So what? What were those business reasons? I have some theories. I have some thoughts. I think it's really strange that you get rid of one of your biggest stars, like all of a sudden out of the blue. And I question whether or not it had anything to do with Smartmatic and whether they wanted to kind of get rid of the quote-unquote baggage ahead of that or, you know, whether it was really just about her conveying something to the White House that they didn't want her to convey. My sense is it doesn't really matter because any which way you look at it, whether you slice it, this is bad news for Fox. It's bad news, well, obviously, because people like watched Fox because of Maria. So they lose Maria in that sense. And then the other reason it's really bad is because she could actually come back to do them some serious, serious damage. Nothing like a woman scorned, right? Okay, take a look at this. They're putting this one out there that Peter Navarro, you know, he's the guy who's like very anti-China, who's in the administration. He's been anti-China for as long as I've known him, and I've known him like 20, 25 years. Back in the day, we would have, you know, we would have him on CNBC because anytime you wanted anti-China, he was your guy. He's been very, very consistent. And don't forget the president came out with those big findings, remember, in July, and the FBI was involved in that. And it had to do with China maybe possibly having manipulated the election. And Peter was all set to come on Maria's show the next morning and talk about it. Except apparently, the executives didn't want anybody to talk about what the president had said the night before. So Maria, being a good reporter, was like, well, wait. What? And she was somehow forwarded some communication from the producers saying, no, no, this is like no-go territory. And according to this story in The Wrap, she may have forwarded that communication on to Peter Navarro, and Peter Navarro then ran it up the food chain. So this is the article they're saying. The president's senior counselor for trade and manufacturing shares that he received a text message from the now-housted Fox News personality. So what would have happened in this situation? Well, I can tell you how this was managed from the PR side of things. I would only have to assume that someone who was leaking this story to Puck, which is some little trade publication that you have to subscribe to that nobody really cares about except for, I guess, people in the TV industry or in the journalism industry. But anyway, so if you subscribe to Puck, you're getting the inside scoop. But somehow the PR place, the PR folks at Fox or somebody in Fox is leaking like a sieve very deliberately to a couple of sources. Including at Puck and its status. And so they said something to this reporter over at Puck like, hey, you know, go call Peter Navarro. And what did he do? He called Peter Navarro. And Peter Navarro, who's probably thinking about it like this is a censorship thing, was like, heck yeah, you know, I got the text and I ran up the food chain. So that is maybe a little problematic for Maria. Maybe not. We can talk about that. But here's the story. According to Puck, Ralph Giordano. Ralph, a nice guy. He used to work for Neil Cavuto. Really, really, really hard. Working guy. He's a producer over there. Apparently now he's the senior vice president of programming. He sent the guidance to Maria Bartiromo's producers ahead of that July 16th primetime speech because people kind of knew where the president was going to be going. And the guidance basically said not to pursue coverage of Trump's claims involving China in the 2020 election the next morning. And so according to, I'm guessing, again, these are sources within the building that are telling these people that are, you know, now reporting it out into the public in order to try and damage Maria on her way out the door. Navarro told the outlet that Bartiromo sent him the screenshot and indicated that Fox executives did not want her discussing the subject on air. Puck reported that Navarro had been booked on the show to discuss voter fraud before the segment was scrapped. Puck highlighted that Bartiromo may argue that she was simply alerting Navarro, a scheduled guest, to a change in the show's lineup rather than improperly sharing, confidential information. And I'm guessing that's exactly what she's going to say. She's like, look, I had to tell my guest, who's from the White House, why this was going down. And maybe, you know, it's early in the morning. I don't know. She's going to be on air at 6 a.m. So she takes a screen grab and forwards it to him and says, hey, you know, we can't do this. We can't talk about this. And then somehow, some way, that makes its way up the White House. And I don't know, do the president call? Do the president call Suzanne Scott and say, hey, why aren't you talking? Why aren't you talking about China? Now we know. We see the evidence, courtesy of Maria and Peter, and that's how things started to unfold. But did they want her gone? I mean, that's another question, right? That's another question that I think you've got to be looking at right about now. Again, this is, you know, being communicated, I should point out, from most likely the Fox side of things, Peter Navarro coming out and validating some of those things. But we haven't heard Maria say anything about Maria's side of the story. And I think that's an important part of all of this. All that aside, guys, you know what? There's a very important piece in the Maria Bartiromo-Fox story that is not really getting told. It's not getting a lot of attention. And I'll tell you, this may be the most important thing for the company. You know me, I'm a business reporter like Maria. It involves $2.7 billion. That's what Smartmatic, the voting machine company, is seeking in terms of defamation. It is suing Fox for $2.7 billion. is part of that you know unlike dominion which fox had to pay what nearly 800 million dollars for yeah that that was a that was a pretty hefty fee maria is a named defendant in the smartmatic case they're going after her too but here's the thing maria's not on the hook for the money she's indemnified under her fox contract they indemnify their hosts their anchors their reporters so that would mean fox is not only paying for her lawyers they would have to pay for any kind of judgment against her i mean so you know if it's decided that somehow maria owes 100 million bucks that's actually fox that would have to pay that money too so you know i've been trying to figure something out here here's the smartmatic lawsuit why on earth would fox choose now think about why would you choose now with this enormous case still hanging over the company to have this incredibly nasty acrimonious breakup with one of the most central people involved in the case that could potentially cost them billions from fox's standpoint you know there's actually an argument perhaps that they they might want maria gone i i don't agree with this argument i actually think it's a huge legal mistake and i'll explain why but first let's let's try and understand what's really going on with these guys i mean put yourself in the fox legal and pr room you know you're preparing for this smartmatic lawsuit you're dealing with a company that says fox destroyed its reputation by putting allegations about the 2020 election on to tv and smartmatic isn't merely saying you know maria did this or lou dobbs remember lou that lou dobbs did this they're saying that this is bigger than maria or lou or judge janine another one that they called out or hannity they're saying that you know this was institutional mm-hmm And you know, think about it, if you're in a normal defamation case, Look, you can get sued for defamation as a reporter. You're out there covering things in real time. You know, hey, we make mistakes. We're only human. It's a live news cycle. That's certainly a risk. But it wouldn't be as big a case. This is different. This is bigger. The reason $800 billion was at stake in Dominion is because you're talking about an institutional story of an entire network. And in fact, if you go through this complaint, they go very heavily into, and I read the whole thing, they look at Rupert and Loughlin, Murdoch. I mean, here's an excerpt right here saying how that they control so much of the Fox News network. Rupert and Loughlin, they say, play an affirmative role in the procurement composition and publication and the defamation. Published by Fox News Network because they have editorial control over the content and publishing decisions of Fox News. Thus, Fox Corporation, through Rupert and Loughlin, was responsible for the defamation published by Fox News. So they go on to say that basically, you know, Fox News is the cash cow. They needed to ensure that they had viewers and they were hemorrhaging viewers to Newsmax and OAN after the election. And so they're saying that this wasn't just like an off thing. Well, Maria was going down a rabbit hole, but rather this was something that was encouraged by the organization. And so there's going to be a lot of discovery. There's going to be a lot of information that comes out as it applies to that. Now, I should point out Fox is very vigorously disputing it. In fact, their entire legal argument is that this is absolutely wrong. But that's the battlefield. Right. And and everyone stopped watching Fox after the election. I'm sorry. Like Newsmax ratings, they soared. OAN ratings, they were all down. We're all soaring. And the president, he himself was directing the audience away from Fox and Fox, which Smartmatic points out is, is, you know, the crown jewel, the Murdoch empire responsible for the Murdoch's wealth is basically the be all end all because if Fox goes down, the Murdoch's go down. So this is a big deal. And I'm telling you, this precedent is not great here. The precedent is seven hundred and eighty seven point five billion dollars, which is what it costs to settle that Dominion case back in twenty three. So some of the material that came out in the Dominion discovery, it was brutal. Right. It was absolutely. I mean, Rupert's Rupert's deposition was an absolute train wreck. If you ask me, Dominion's lawyers asking him about Maria Bartiromo and whether she endorsed the stolen election narrative. And Murdoch said yes. And then on Jeanine Pirro, he said, yeah, I think so. And then I think they got to Lou. And he said, oh, yeah, a lot. And they got to Hannity. And he said a little like basically, I think the summation was, you know, some of the commentators were endorsing it. And he also had said something to the effect of, you know, I'd like us to be stronger in in denouncing it. I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight. OK. All right. So, you know, now here you are nearly eight hundred billion million dollars later in the hole. And you've got to think about what's coming next. You got to think about what's coming next, because it could be worse. You know, you were out seven hundred and eighty seven. Now you could be out two point seven billion. I mean, those insurance bills must be skyrocketing. So the lawyers, the Fox lawyers, and these are smart people. Kirkland Ellis, excellent firm. White shoe law firm. They've represented Fox for years. I remember when I first did my deal with them, my deal with Fox, I actually wanted Kirkland and Ellis because I have some friends over there to represent me. And they were like, oops, sorry, we can't. It's a conflict. So I went with another white shoe law firm. But excellent, excellent firm. Their heads have to be imploding, exploding right now, right? Because, you know, you got Rupert under oath saying all that. I guess he was also asked whether or not Suzanne Scott or the host could have stopped putting Giuliani on television or whether he could have. And he said, yeah, you know, I could have, but I didn't. And when asked about executives who knowingly apparently allowed false statements onto the air, Murdoch and I say knowingly because they had all these text messages going back and forth. And that all came out, right? Like the discovery in this stuff is. Fan Duel is now available everywhere in the U.S. Make this your most rewarding season ever with Fan Duel. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here. I'm from Mint Mobile. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12-month plan required. Be slow when network is busy. See terms. Rx only. A doozy. And they apparently didn't buy all this, but they felt like the audience, not Maria, I think actually, in fairness, Maria most likely really felt exactly what she was reporting, and some others felt exactly, Lou probably felt exactly what he was reporting, but I think the executives, there was some nuance there, and they didn't buy it, Murdoch didn't buy it, and yet they put this on the air anyway, right? And so that's why the organization is in trouble. He did say, by the way, that the host should have been reprimanded, that the executives should have been reprimanded, and maybe gotten rid of. Now, this testimony is out there, right? And it's not exactly the kind of material that Fox does, you know, that Fox would necessarily want to put in front of a Smartmatic jury. I'm just saying, like, this is not ideal, right? Smartmatic could say, you knew what happened. Dominion exposed all the internal communications. We've got them. You already paid $780. $7.5 million, and after all of that, you continued to employ Maria Bartiromo. Not for six weeks, not for six months, but for years. I happen to love Maria Bartiromo and have worked with her for many years, both at CNBC and at Fox Business. I think she's an extraordinary anchor, a very hardworking person, and got amazing ratings, okay? So they kept her there for years and years and years, and that's now potentially some of the uncomfortable, I think, issues that we're seeing in politics. You know, Fox is, how do we say, well-known for distancing, personnel distancing, when it needs to. I mean, case in point, yours truly, right? Myself, right before the country shut down, and I had the audacity to say that the Dems will try to create a political circus out of this. Was I not right? Or was I not right? You know, sometimes I'm just a little too right. You know, in my case, the management had actually approved the script, so all was fine, apparently, until there started to be a lot of negative publications about Fox and a lot of negative ink, and, you know, suddenly, next thing I know, we're parting ways, and I became a bit of a distraction, right? Like, the story that they could say, okay, well, we took COVID seriously. Fine. You know what? I'll take it any day of the week, because it's sure it's a heck of a lot better over here. All that said, you know, they did these kinds of things. I think about Lou Dobbs, for example. I mean, Lou continued, continued on there, and then Smartmatic filed its $2.7 billion lawsuit on February 4th, 2021, and what do you know, the next day, February 5th, I mean, talking about timing, Fox canceled Lou Dobbs tonight, and he was, like, the highest-rated show they had at that point. So they said that the programming change had been contemplated before the lawsuit, but, you know, Smartmatic is alleging something very different. They're calling Lou the sacrificial lamb, and Smartmatic alleging that Lou Dobbs is the father of six children. So, you know, they're saying that he's the father of six children. They're saying that Lou Dobbs is the father of six children. So, you know, they're saying that Lou Dobbs is the father of six children. So, you know, they're saying that Lou concentrate on anything else. Like this stuff happens. So why would you treat Maria differently? This is going to be something her lawyer brings up. By the way, she's got herself a big time lawyer, this guy. Brian Friedman is not messing around. He's got a history of actually really aggressive cases. And I think he handled Tucker Carlson. So, you know, hey, he's been down this road before. But let's think about what happened in May just recently. Fox actually got an important procedural victory because a New York appellate court came out and they said, you know what, you can actually conduct additional discovery concerning the allegations against Smartmatic about Smartmatic's business. And why would this matter? It matters because Smartmatic was out there saying, hey, you owe us all this money because our reputation was damaged. Our business was damaged. We lost all this business. And what they've actually found is that apparently Smartmatic had some other problems. Legal problems, including a federal crime criminal case involving some alleged bribery, alleged money laundering. And so this is important for Fox because, in other words, Smartmatic may not be able to blame their entire downfall on Fox. And, you know, the information might be concerning in that it, you know, to Smartmatic and it seems to be relevant in terms of whatever Smartmatic is claiming. And so, you know, I think it's important for Fox to be able to say, well, you know, we're going to, you know, we're going to pay the price. We're going to pay the price. Now, that doesn't mean that Fox has won its defamation case, like hardly. But from a damages perspective, I would say that, you know, in fairness, Fox got something possibly that'd be considered valuable that potentially caps some of those damages. So now, if you're them, you might be thinking from a calculated PR standpoint, OK, OK, our damages defense just improved. So now we need to clean up. Our optics. Let's distance ourselves from Maria Bartiromo. Let's walk into this trial looking like we're a different company. But I got to tell you, you know what? There's a gigantic and I mean a gigantic problem with that theory. And Fox may have helped themselves solve one problem by creating a much bigger problem. You know, Maria is not Lou Dobbs. God rest his soul. She's not Lou from February 21. Here we are, the three of us back covering the invention convention. She's not she's not Lou. Fox kept her. They kept her for 21. They kept her for 22, 23. Then you have the Dominion settlement. They kept her for 24 and 25. Now we have to get all the way to last Thursday when they finally said, OK, we're going to part ways. So Fox goes before the jury and says, hey, look, you know, Maria doesn't work here anymore. I think Smartmatic's lawyers are going to have a pretty obvious response, which is like, well, who cares? So what? You kept her for nearly six years after the broadcasts were suing you over. So I suspect that Fox likes the optics of parting ways again from a PR standpoint, which is very, very important to them and critical to them. But, you know, there's a bigger issue here. There's a bigger issue. And this is the one that I think they may be, dare I say, underestimating. Like, really underestimating. Because there's nothing like a woman scorned, right? Nothing like a woman scorned. And Maria is a fighter. Until a few weeks ago, Maria Bartiromo and Fox were rowing all in the same direction, right? They're all in the same boat. And that's important. Maria's a defendant. Fox is a defendant. They had an enormous common interest in defeating Smartmatic. Maria was also an employee. So she had another reason for Fox to succeed. Her career was there. She's got three shows. For goodness sakes, they were all there. Her colleagues, her friends are there. Her salary was there. Her future was there. Everyone was rowing together in the same boat. As I said, Maria's a fighter. And she's got plenty of reason to fight. She's got plenty of money to fight. And importantly, she's got the mental stamina to go positively bonkers on these people, which is not good for them. I mean, look, we're already seeing it, right? She gets Brian Friedman. I told you, he's a top lawyer. He's the guy that was repping Tucker Carlson, right? He also represented Justin Baldoni in that Blake Lively suit, talking about rabid, right? So he knows how to fight. And he says reports that Maria was fired or isn't employed by Fox are absolutely and unequivocally false. Yeah, he came right out and said, there's no way to fight. There's no way to fight. There's no way to That's true, right? I mean, here's the statement he made. For many years, Maria Bartiromo hosted three number one rated television shows on Fox channels. She's been without question one of the hardest working journalists throughout her award winning career. The irresponsible reports that have been published stating that Maria Bartiromo was fired or is no longer an employee of Fox are absolutely unequivocally false. Make no mistake, we have receipts, he goes on, and witnesses, and they will come out whether through the courthouse or otherwise. Those reporting her incredulous facts supporting that fiction have exhibited a complete and utter reckless disregard for the truth. So interestingly, he said that, and then the next thing you know, this is the puck guy that was writing on this. I'm guessing that somebody in the building, sorry, I don't have commercials. I have to take big gulps of water. I used to say, I'm pulling a Rubio, but I can't do that anymore. Remember in Rubio, State of the Union, after Obama spoke? Anyway, I digress. Rubio has come a long way. Absolutely unequivocally false. He's saying there's no way that this is true. And I'm going to tell you something. He's right. They can't fire her because she's under contract. And she's disputing them saying you're not supposed to be under contract anymore. I mean, they would have to prove that she did something that was a fireable offense. Kind of funny that within, you know, minutes of this one coming out, what did they do? They went back to this reporter, and I say they because I am pretty sure it's people closely associated and related to Fox. They went back. And they said, Hey, call Peter, call Peter Navarro. And Peter Navarro was like, Yeah, that's what I did. Because Peter Navarro, again, sees this as not fair. And Peter said, I was upset. You know, you ran it up the food chain. And so I would say, though, again, do not mess with a woman scorned. Because one of the important things that he said in all that was, and I'm going to quote him, we have the receipts, and we have the witnesses. And they will come out whether through the courthouse or otherwise. Whoa. All right. So why would I'm just asking? Why would Fox want to turn an aligned co defendant into a very angry former colleague in the middle of a $2.7 billion lawsuit? Right? Why? I mean, I would say, you know, she's required to tell the truth under oath, whether she loves Fox, whether she hates Fox, or whether she's completely indifferent to Fox, and Fox cannot legitimately tell her what to say. And she can't make it up fair. But I spoke to a brilliant lawyer, formerly of another white shoe law firm, who told me this this morning. Anyone who has ever litigated anything understands one thing. There is a world of difference between a witness who feels aligned with an institution and a witness who walks into the room thinking you people just screwed me. Because Smartmatic can ask questions like, and I'm sure they will. What did management know? What conversations did you have with Suzanne Scott, the CEO of the company? What did the executives tell you? What did the producers tell you? What's the guidance that you were given? Who were the approved guests? Did you have the final say? I can tell you, she clearly didn't, right? She clearly didn't have the final say. Because look at that case in point. I mean, I can tell you, I worked there, you don't have the final say. And case in point, they were telling her you can't put Peter Navarro on the air. What did you do? What happened after Dominion? What did Fox tell you about Smartmatic? And Maria can answer all of those questions truthfully, but she no longer has the same incentive to carry Fox's institutional water. And that is a distinction, a very big distinction. And I'm not certain that they were really thinking that one through as they threw these headlines out there, effectively throwing her to the wolves, if you would. Right? Look at this one in the New York Post, Maria Bartiromo out at Fox News after more than a decade at the Giant. And then of course, they're leaking all this other stuff. I would say this, when the lawyer talks about, hey, we got the receipts and those are all going to come out, you think about the Dominion documents and how they really shed a light on internal communications. I mean, there were internal texts, there were emails, there were producer communications, there were management discussions, and they were all things viewers never normally get to see. And that's what litigation does. Litigation opens all kinds of drawers that you maybe just don't want opened if you're Fox. Now, I would say Fox may have another discovery problem. The Maria breakup may have just become especially dangerous in part because Maria's lawyer, Brian, is like talking about a courthouse fight. So if she sues Fox, The next battle potentially isn't merely about what happened in 2020 with Smartmatic. It could actually be about what happened inside Fox in 2026. Why was Maria taken off the air? Who made the decision? Did Suzanne Scott call this one? Did Lachlan call this? Who did it? What did the executives write back and forth to each other? What communications existed concerning Maria? What communications exist concerning Smartmatic? And what discussions occurred around her contract? I mean, all these questions, right? What was management saying privately? We could find out all this information. What was the real reason for her separation? And what did they say internally versus publicly? Like they may think that publicly this looks good. You know, it makes them look like they're really serious. You know, I'm just going to say like clearly a double standard because we learned a lot with the Hannity text that came out. And there was a lot of coziness there between the White House and his show. And so why are you holding her to a different standard? Look, all this is going to come out, right? They're going to be asking all these questions. And if Fox's reasons for removing Maria became disputed facts and litigation, relevant internal communications about the decision can potentially become discoverable. And so that's why when the lawyer Friedman is out there saying receipts and witnesses, that matters. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15,000 is going to be a big deal. And I'm going to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15,000 is going to be a big deal. And I'm going to of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. - Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 month plan required. $15 per month equivalent, taxes and fees extra. May slow when network is busy, see terms. - I'm Hannah. You can access FDA approved GLP-1s online. Go to rho.co/weight to see if you qualify. I'm a paid Rho partner, 20% average weight loss in one year and non-diabetics with obesity or overweight with a weight related medical condition versus 3.1% in placebo arm, Rx only. To stay informed about serious side effects, go to rho.co/safety. - Because those receipts and those witnesses could actually make life difficult, not just because of this ousting, but because of Smartmatic. And it could make things difficult for the existing litigation that's already demonstrated, just how revealing, I should say, Fox's internal communications can be. Now, Smartmatic isn't just, again, targeting talent. They have this broader theory that there's institutional blame. Smartmatic is alleging management knew everything that was going down and encouraged it for businesses reasons, encouraged it for ratings. And as for Maria, I would just say, maybe Fox thinks removing Maria helps Smartmatic Optics. Maybe it thinks, you know, it helped with Lou. I don't think it did, 'cause you guys wound up having to pay nearly $800 million, right? That didn't help much. But, you know, maybe it thinks she's gone, we've changed, we're moving forward. But I'll tell you, you know, after keeping her there for, six years after Dominion, I get it, right? She's very talented. She's super hardworking. I love her. But legally speaking, you know, you had someone there who was in your boat. Maria was rowing right alongside you, and now she's not. And you got her lawyer saying, "We got receipts." And Fox has got to know that those receipts could be dangerous. I mean, after all, they wrote a check because of those receipts to Dominion for $787.5 million. So, maybe Fox thinks Maria's departure protects the company. Maybe it thinks it can tell a cleaner story to a Smartmatic jury. But I would just suggest, you know, if I were a lawyer advising Fox, and I'm not, but if I were, I would just say, you know, in trying to solve your Maria Bartiromo problem, if you consider it that, I think you actually created a much bigger problem for your company. And with a $2.7 billion, you know, it's possible judgment hanging over this case. You know, guys, that is one hell of a gamble. One hell of a gamble, okay? They're taking their chances, big time. You know, I can't say the place was brilliantly managed throughout all of that. I mean, I was not there during Smartmatic. Hmm. I was not there during Dominion, but judging from what I saw in all of the communications that came out, it seemed like it was all that well managed. But you know, what else was not that well managed? Clearly, and Kathy Engelbert is paying the price. The WNBA, Kathy Engelbert is out, out, out, out, out. The WNBA commissioner announcing that she will be retiring at the end of the year. And if you have been watching this show, you knew the handwriting was on the wall. I've been telling you this forever. I've been telling you this since it started, since these problems first emerged. Because you know, Kathy couldn't keep the wheels on the WNBA bus, she just couldn't. Because she didn't have any idea who was driving it. And you know, as well as I know, who was driving that bus. Kaitlyn Clark, not Kathy, not Kathy from Deloitte, Deloitte and Touche, you know, the accounting firm? No, no, no, no, Kaitlyn Clark, the biggest phenomenon women's basketball has ever seen. The young woman who brought millions of new viewers into the sport, who filled the arenas and who sold jerseys and lifted the television ratings. I mean, nobody used to watch this thing before, right? And introduced the WNBA to people who had never watched a single game before, including my own daughters, right? My daughters had never watched it before. My husband, he was actually a D1 ball player in college. Same as my dad, actually. They went to the same school. They were both D1 and they both played ball. And then my husband went on to play professionally in Europe and in New Zealand after college. And I'm just gonna tell you, it goes for both my husband and my dad. Whenever women's basketball came on TV, they could not change. They could not change the channel fast enough. They were like, "Ah!" You know, like, it would hurt my husband to watch that. And now, I catch him watching games. I mean, he was literally offended by the game. And now, when Kaitlyn Clark plays, he watches. And I'm like, what on earth happened? It's Kaitlyn, it's Kaitlyn. And maybe, you know, Sophie Cunningham, because she's so pretty, I get it. But Kaitlyn is amazing. And yeah, she wasn't just another successful rookie. She became the entire business model. Except the CEO, or whatever, the chairman of the league, she didn't get it, Kathy didn't get it. So instead of protecting and promoting the most important player in the history of the league, Kathy Engelberg allowed culture that was openly hostile to her most important player. I mean, you had Clark out there getting shoved and slapped and body checked and taunted, and she took hard fouls that seemed to go well beyond ordinary basketball. And the only one who cared, the only one who was calling it out was Sophie Cunningham, right? Sophie Cunningham was all over it. And she's like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. And she, by the way, she was calling this, as I said, like I was. You're gonna have to have a new person. You do have to have a person in power who is bold, who is confident, who wants the best for the players, and not themselves all the time. So I do feel, as a whole, that, you know, that could be a position that's maybe open at the end of the year, but that's not my call. It's Adam Silver's call, he made the call, and Kathy is gone, gone, gone, gone, gone. But I still, I gotta get back to this. I mean, nobody was calling this out. Except for Sophie. I wanna go to Sophie Cunningham. She's got a little excerpt here on her podcast when she started saying enough is enough is enough. And then listen to what Laura Ingraham at Fox, her reaction is to it, as well as the outkick guest that she has on. And I get it, this may offend some people, but it's worth hearing, it's worth listening to. - This type happens every single game to her, and the league and the refs do absolutely nothing about it. They are, they're definitely targeting her, and the league and the refs do nothing to protect her. - The WNBA wants a pat on the back for what, suspending Alyssa Thomas, who did the big fist to the neck thing, for one game. That's not gonna stop anyone from doing anything against Clark. Now these refs are going, ignoring, literal, these are assaults. She's the best thing that ever happened to that league, and they're letting her get pummeled. What is going on here? Here to weigh in is Dan Douglas. Doc, a host of OutKicks, don't at me. Dan, why is the WNBA doing more to protect its biggest star? People watching think this is about race, and that this ultimately has a racial underpinning to it. I don't watch the WNBA, but I know talent when I see it. - Well, there's no question there's a racial underpinning to it. The reason the WNBA doesn't chime in is because the league is run by angry African-American lesbians. Let's just be honest. That's what the league has been. That's what the power structure has been. and Kaitlyn Clark is not. She is a heterosexual. People ask, well, you know, it can't be race because they accept folks like Paige Beckers and other white lesbians. That's a big deal in the WNBA, and if anybody gets offended by what I'm saying, go sit in the corner. Tough, because that is absolute, and it started the moment Kaitlyn Clark got into the league. And you know what else? You know what, Laura? It's all cowardice. It's all hits from behind, like the first one, Kennedy Carter, a poke in the eye when she shoots a jump shot. Going to the throat when she's already down. You know, it's one thing, you get a hard foul going to the rim, but these women have been cowards to Kaitlyn Clark, and it's ridiculous, but the WNBA doesn't do anything because they are afraid of the angry African-American lesbian woman who has dominated that league for years. Oh! Okay, so, you know, listen. I think there's something to what he's saying. Kathy Engelbert knew that she didn't really have a league without all the players, and she was worried that they were going to, like, rebel against her. So she effectively allowed this violence towards Kaitlyn. She tolerated this violence towards Kaitlyn because she was scared. You had an organization that was rudderless with absolutely no leadership. Kathy should have been saying the whole time, this is our game. These are our athletes. Athletes, competition is welcome, but intimidation will not be tolerated, and you will be thrown out of this. You will be thrown out of this league altogether, but that didn't happen. No, no, no, no, no. And I'm going to tell you, that shouldn't surprise you because this woman was always the wrong woman for the job. She was. She is an accountant. Nothing against accountants, but it's a very different field. She's not a sports manager. She's not a coach. She's not a producer. She's not a marketer. She is an accountant who ran an accountant firm, okay, before the WNBA. Kathy Engelbert spent 33 years at Deloitte and became the. the first female CEO of one of America's big four accounting firms. Whoopee! Whoop-dee-doo! Okay, you know what? Granted, it's a big deal. Don't get me wrong. It's a big deal. She knew how to manage accountants. She knew how to operate inside the very polished, very highly controlled world of corporate America, but I'm telling you, ball is a whole other league and a whole other level. And so, oh, I should point out, she did play a little bit of college basketball, so she knew the game. But listen, managing professional athletes, referees, coaches, owners, television partners, and a growing fan base, that's something else entirely. A sports commissioner, they can't just administer a league as though everybody's a bunch of accountants. No, no, no. You need to lead it. And it's an emerging league at that. So she needed to understand personalities, these rivalries. She needed to understand the culture of a locker room. She had to be able to anticipate conflict. And she needed to be able to make appropriate and unpopular decisions, before that conflict began damaging the product. And she just couldn't do it. Kathy Engelbert could not do it. I mean, think about when Kaitlyn Clark entered the WNBA. The league was handed the greatest opportunity they'd ever seen, for goodness sakes. The biggest marketing opportunity in history. And what did she do? She wouldn't even put her on the poster. It's like they're trying to ignore Kaitlyn. Like, Kaitlyn doesn't exist. I mean, this should have been a total layup, to use the basketball phrase, right? You promote your star, for goodness sakes. You protect the integrity of the game. You welcome millions of new fans. And you make money for everyone by turning attention into long-term growth. But instead, you had the WNBA allowing all this jealousy and resentment and personal agendas to overshadow the game. And you had some players, right, like Sophie, that clearly openly resented what Kathy was doing. They resented that she wasn't willing to stick up for one of them, the most talented person they had. And she made that clear. And she was like, you know, Kathy's going to be gone. I told you, even before her, that Kathy would be gone. And sure enough, Kathy's gone. I would say, you know, Kathy needs to, or whoever comes in, needs to remember, you got to remind these women that Kaitlyn's bringing something to them. Like more viewers. More TV money. Bigger crowds. Better travel. Higher salaries. Better endorsement opportunities. More money, money, money, money, money, right? Kaitlyn Clark single-handedly accepted that. Expanding the pie for every single woman in that league. And somehow, Kathy couldn't get that message across. At all. I mean, she never communicated it. She didn't know which end was up. Heck, this woman didn't even know what a woman was. All right? So you completely had the inmates running the asylum there. Kathy does nothing. I mean, this was really, really bad. The fact that you had to have Sophie come forward and protect her own player, pretty bad. Physically defending Kaitlyn on the court. And, you know, defending her publicly as well. The WNBA, she said it, needed new leadership. And now it's getting it. Of course, we don't know who's coming in. But she said it. You know, they need somebody who's bold and somebody who's confident and somebody who knows what's going on. I mean, that is a remarkable rebuke from an active player. But she was totally right. It needed to happen within a few weeks. Kathy Engelbert announced she was leaving at the end of the year. I don't think this is a coincidence, guys. I think. They knew they needed to solve this. They have a tremendous opportunity here and you need somebody who can manage it. Sophie understood this woman can't manage it. I understand this woman can't manage it. I think you understand this woman can't manage it. But I just want to point out that confidence really eroded. And I mean really eroded when Sophie's out there defending women's sports and Kathy can't tell us what a woman is. If I think about that, she said at the time, I've gotten a lot of negative feedback about hating trans. And I'm like, I never once said that. I think that I'm here to extend love, but I also think that with love is truth, being honest, and I want to protect young girls in a locker room or young girls in a sport that shouldn't have to go up against a biological man. But Kathy can't address the issue of who should be playing in her league there because she doesn't know what a woman is. I mean, there was no answer. They said they were going to work on it and look at it. And you had the WNBAs, own collective bargaining agreement saying that only women are eligible to play. But you had this whole controversy about whether or not a biological man who thinks he's a woman can play. And she had no answer for that. I mean, it just got so absurd because Ennis Cantor Freedom came out and Royce White and they're like, hey, you know what? We're going to play. They declared themselves eligible for the WNBA draft. And I'm laughing, but they were making a really good point. If the commissioner of a woman women's basketball league cannot clearly explain what qualifies someone to participate in that women's league, then what on earth is she commissioning? That is not leadership. That is evasion, okay? You know, maybe that works in an accounting shop, but that's not working in the big leagues, lady. No, no, no, no, no, sirree. Engelbert was handed a once in a generation superstar, superstar. And instead of building on that entire opportunity, instead of building the league around her, she became a case study in dysfunction, all right? So they need somebody new and they need somebody who knows how to manage this. I don't want a PowerPoint deck and Excel spreadsheets and an accountant. No, no, no. We need somebody who's a leader, somebody who has real executive authority and real basketball credibility and comes forward with a vision for what this league could become because I'm telling you, it's got all the ingredients. It could be very competitive and profitable, entertaining, unapologetically female, devoted to women's basketball, but the next commissioner must establish clear standards for officiating and looking after player safety, okay? Whether it's Caitlin Clark or Sophie Cunningham or anyone else, the next commissioner has got to come forward because millions of Americans have discovered women's basketball because of Caitlin. So welcome them in, right? Don't lecture them. Don't insult them, for goodness sakes. Give them a product worth watching. And the next commissioner must be capable of saying plainly, that a women's league exists for women. No evasions, no semantic games, no corporate word salad. Kamala's got enough of that for everybody, okay? WNBA, I'm telling you, it's got enormous potential, enormous potential, but potential means nothing without leadership. You need real leadership because you've got great players and Caitlin Clark gave them this opportunity. Sophie Cunningham has the courage to say, that the league was squandering it and thank goodness, Kathy Engelberg is now on her way out. The question becomes whether the WNBA owners will finally understand the lesson. This league does not need somebody who's going to merely keep the wheels on the bus. They need somebody who's not just going to keep the bus going, but is going to take the wheel of that bus and take them in a whole new direction. You know, and if the NBA wants to understand where, this road could be going to, because it could be going someplace great or it could be going someplace really bad. I would highly recommend they take a good hard look at Nike. Reminder to subscribe to the show. Nike's hitting the skids here. Another iconic American company. One that increasingly embraced all that woke-ism has just suffered an extraordinary humiliation. Nike's being kicked out of the S&P 100 after 18 years in the index. Nike, Thank you. is going to be removed on September 21st, not from the broader S&P 500, but from the S&P 100. The company has lost a lot of value, a lot of value, and the S&P 100 represents 100 of America's best and most prominent blue-chip companies. Nike no longer makes the cut, and I'll tell you, it's a stunning public marker of just how far this brand has fallen. Think about it. Okay, this is a company that was one of the most powerful companies on earth. I mean, we're talking Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods and Serena Williams and Just Do It, and Nike didn't just sell sneakers. It sold excellence. It sold aspiration. It sold this idea that through talent and determination and hard work, you could do something, that you could be something greater. I mean, it's like the American way, right? The American dream. In late 2021, Nike was trading, check this out, at $177 per share. I marked it there. November 5th, 2021, $177. Last week on Friday, it closed at roughly $38.40. So it's at a 12-year low. It is down nearly 80% from its peak, and its market value has fallen from over $200 billion to approximately $57 billion. Hundreds of billions of dollars in shareholder value goes poof, right? Because of this insane, woke-up. Nike is now in the middle of this long turnaround, okay? So they've brought in a whole new management team, and they're hoping and praying that things will improve. And I don't know. I mean, you look at that. You look at that stock price, for goodness sakes. That is one brutal, ugly thing. It is brutal. That is ugly. If you've been holding that stock, I am sorry, but I could have told you back during the Colin Kaepernick days that it was not going to go well. Investors have been hearing promises of recovery, but the recovery. is taking, and it's probably going to take a whole lot longer than anybody thought. I mean, think about it. Pretty easy to go down, but how do you recover from this train wreck? It did it to itself. And it wasn't just Colin, right? It wasn't just one advertisement or one political controversy or one bad quarter. It was multiple. I mean, every single thing they could have done. I've been everywhere, man. I've been to Georgia, Houston, Cleveland, Minnesota, Buffalo, Lincoln, Chi-Town, Arizona. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Right? They did wrong. There were all kinds of strategic mistakes. There was all kinds of complacency, total lack of innovation, and most important, ladies and gentlemen, most important, a total disconnect from the customers, those of us who helped build that brand. And the cultural warning signs, they began years ago. You can go back to 2018. 2018. Nike chooses Colin Kaepernick to be the face of its 30th anniversary Just Do It campaign. Really? That's the guy you're going to go with? The guy that was out there kneeling during the national anthem to protest? Rachel Lindgren? He wasn't even that good a player, right? He just wanted to take down the NFL, and he took down Nike with it, with these stunts. Nike's message at the time, you see it on the screen, was believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. So the woke marketing people are out there congratulating themselves, applauding Nike, while others began cutting the swooshes off their clothes, burning their Nike shoes because they believed the company was insulting the flag, the anthem, and our country. I was one that was in that camp. And they effectively divided folks and lost half the people that would have ever bought the sneakers to begin with. You know, I'll tell you, you know, maybe they could have done this once and gotten away with it, and everybody would have forgotten and moved on. You know, if the Kaepernick campaign had been the end of this little foray into wokeism, which turned out to be a big foray. I mean, Nike's share price, actually, go back and look at the screen. It was actually still going up, even through that Colin Kaepernick stuff, even though I was warning, you know what, this is not going to be good. This is not going to end well for the company. And yet they had somehow discovered that political controversy could be used as a marketing strategy. Bad idea. Bad, bad idea. Bud Light learned that too. Bad idea. So Nike was suddenly no longer just happy to unite people around athletic greatness and the American dream. Instead, Nike, increasingly wanted to define itself by taking sides in America's most divisive cultural disputes. And let me tell you, sure, that generated enormous attention. And sure, it may have won a lot of praise in those advertising circles from all those elite executives in marketing. And it may have excited some of those activists and all those celebrities in Hollywood and people in the media. But you know what it did? It fundamentally changed the relationship between the two. It changed the relationship between a brand and its customers. Because instead of saying, Nike's for everyone, the company was effectively out there saying, these are our values, and you can decide whether or not you belong. You're either in or you're out. We got a little club going on. You're in or you're out. And then it started getting really weird. Okay, really weird. I mean, the Colin Kaepernick stuff, that was pretty weird. It was so weird that, I mean, the president was even at one point tweeting back in 18 about them. What are they for goodness sakes? I mean, they just had a whole history of really stupid things. But in 2023, when I was first starting this channel, like regularly, and was here every day with you, I noted that that transgender influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, had a good shot at taking this company down. Dylan Mulvaney was the guy that the trans that they hired to promote women's athletic apparel, including a Nike sports bra. Uh-huh. So once again, the company inserting itself into one of America's most contentious cultural debates. And a lot of women, including me, looked at that campaign, and we all asked a very reasonable question, which is, why is one of the world's premier women's athletic brands using a transgender influencer to advertise products specifically designed for and marketed to women? I'm sorry, but like, Dylan, you're the one who's the one who's the one who's the one who's the one Dylan. There's nothing going on up there. So Dylan doesn't need a sports bra. Dylan has no idea what it's like to run and be athletic with breasts. Dylan is a joke. And Nike basically, as women took it, said, actually, the joke's on us. Nike, you're making fun of us. And so what did we do? We didn't buy Nike for years. I haven't bought Nike shoes since. I'm literally wearing new balance right now, okay? Like, that was the end. So Nike was free to make that choice. And I was free to reject Nike. You were free to reject Nike. The whole world was free to reject Nike. And everyone did. Everyone did. Nobody wanted Nike anymore. And on top of it all, there was this corporate mentality that was messed up. Because basically, there was this assumption that Nike's cultural power was so overwhelming that the company could keep adding more and more and more and more and alienating its customer base without suffering any consequences whatsoever. You had this arrogance, this arrogance. That's what I'm going to call it, arrogance, that was carried over from marketing to the business itself. You know, that CEO, John Donahue, he's blamed for a lot of this. He was the consultant guy they brought in from Bain. And you know things are bad when you get the consultants running the business. Nike went all in on direct-to-consumer sales and digital commerce. And their theory at the time was, why share the profit with Foot Locker, or any of these other retail folks? Why not just keep it all for ourselves? You know, consumers can go on websites and apps, and they can buy our shoes. And so Nike pulled back from those wholesalers and helped build those wholesalers, I should say, that helped build the company. And they went straight to the website. Now, let me just say, like, before you drop 150 or a couple hundred bucks on a pair of sneakers, sometimes you kind of want to go into the store and try them on, right? You want to see them. You want to make a decision, because it's such a pain in the neck to things. So if they're not there in the store, and you can't try them on, are you really going to buy them? I mean, not to mention their website's a mess. A mess. Literally a mess. I spoke with a woman at a gym, the gym that I go to this morning. She was like, I hate their website. My husband last night told you he's an athlete, former athlete. He's like, I can't stand their website. I just can't. Nobody can navigate it. So again, this is arrogance. They get a stupid website. They think, oh, we don't need to put our shoes in the store. People are just going to go online and buy They're not. going to plank down hundreds of dollars for your shoes without understanding what they're buying because the fit's kind of important for a sneaker. So they gave up all the shelf space. They helped customers, or they, I should say, they did not help customers understand their products. They wound up giving up that shelf space and what came in, like New Balance, right? And all these other brands. So all those other brands took that real estate at places like Foot Locker, and Hoka's another one, right? Exciting new running brand. You had On, O-N, which became super fashionable, and Premium, and New Balance had a major resurgence. You had Skechers expanding, and Nike, the company that started it all, forget about it. They looked like they were living in the past. They had their Nike direct revenue, which I think at the time felt like six percent, and then digital sales fell even more sharply, and Converse, which was one of their brands, saw a collapse of like 31 percent. I mean, this is not merely a messaging problem with Dylan Mulvaney and Colin Kaepernick. It's bigger. It's a fundamental business problem because you got a bunch of, I'm sorry, woke idiots that think they know better than everyone else. So from the marketing to the business itself to international, they screwed up. They screwed up in China. I mean, that was perhaps one of the biggest problems in them all because for years, you know, China was actually a really big market for them, a huge engine of growth, and Western companies, they looked at China's enormous population and said, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, and Nike was one of them. So Nike invested heavily. It opened all these stores. It built these digital operations. It sponsored athletes, and it treated greater China as one of its most important global markets, but they got that wrong too. I actually have a source that ran, or was connected with running a lot of the Nike company in Asia, and this person told me, you know, after George Floyd, basically all white men over the age of 35 at Nike worldwide, including the ones in Asia, they were all gone. They just got rid of them all, and the business fell apart. So Chinese customers, because you don't have anybody that like knows how to run the company, right? Like they're, they're all gone now. You've got DEI on steroids, it was a big part of what they were doing. Here's an article, federal government, Nike discriminated against white workers with DEI programs. It's absolutely true. Absolutely true. Chinese customers started buying Chinese brands, and so Nike suddenly was no longer a status symbol, and you had China sales falling by double digits. So Nike lost its relevance, right, as the most important consumer, in one of the most important consumer markets in the world, and I think it's really interesting, because think about the contradiction. In America, Nike got woke and really ticked off its customers, but being woke, that didn't help them in China. Nike wanted to be the cultural authority in America, and simultaneously, they became less and less culturally relevant in China. So this is a real-on corporate disaster. Now they get a new guy in, Elliot Hill, he's like a Nike veteran, he was a lifer, he was brought back in in 24 to try and repair some of the damage from John Donahue, the consulting guy, but I'm, I'm sorry. I don't know if he can do it, right? I mean, how do you salvage a company like this? It's not going to be easy. He had spent 30 years at Nike before retirement. Maybe he was one of the guys that was forced out. Maybe. He's been pretty candid about the challenge he faces, and his message has been effectively, you know, look, we know we're not living up to our full potential, and clearly the market agrees. Yeah, the market just wants nothing to do with this company, so he's got to do something. So he's got to do something. So he's got this win-now strategy. Sounds good. He's trying to repair Nike's wholesale relationships. He's trying to restore innovation. He's trying to put athletes and sports back at the center of the company, and they're, you know, I don't know, like, can he do it? They've had some signs of progress. I guess their North American revenue increased a little bit, like 3%. They saw some demand for apparel during the World Cup, and those are good things, but I'm still going to tell you that, you know, you look at the fiscal 2026 revenue, and it was a lot of money, and it was essentially flat at 46.4 billion, down 2% when currency changes are excluded, and fourth quarter revenue fell 4% on a currency-neutral basis. Nike Direct dropped 9%. The digital business dropped 12%. Nike-owned stores dropped 7%. China keeps deteriorating. I'm sorry, this is not good, right? Nike did beat Wall Street's expectations for the fourth quarter, but even that result actually required an enormous asterisk, because it was actually related to recovery of tariffs under the International Emergencies Economics Power Act, so this company is not doing well. It is not doing well, and I would just say, you know what? So be it. You know, I hope this serves as a lesson to these woke idiots that think they know everything. By the way, I should point out, if you haven't gone to my 76 Research, please do. We have three portfolios there. Go check them out, 76research.com. I'll tell you, Nike's still cutting jobs, 1,400 rolls, that they cut earlier this year. They got a new CFO who came in, David Denton from Pfizer, and they hired Jane Ewing. She's a longtime Walmart person as the chief commercial officer. I actually think she starts today. This is her first day. They've pushed their investor day out to November as management tries to restore growth, but it shows you, you know, like, go woke, go broke is actually a very real thing, and it comes from just not understanding your customers. I would say this. It is still a very recognizable brand, one of the most recognizable in the world. It still has extraordinary athletes and valuable products, but rebuilding trust is so much harder than destroying it. Winning back shelf space is much harder than surrendering it, and recapturing cultural relevance is a whole lot harder than losing it, and convincing customers that we matter again, much harder after behaving as you have. You know, if you think about it, there's kind of a connection here between Fox, the WNBA, and Nike, right? Fox is risking, by getting rid of key people like Maria, why the viewers came there to begin with. The WNBA allowed ideology, internal politics, player intimidation to basically overshadow its greatest star and alienate potential fans, and now Nike has become so convinced of its own frickin' BS, right, and cultural dominance that it's lost sight of the customer and lost control. to virtually every major competitor. So I'm just going to tell you, those consultants and the corporate executives, you know, they can dismiss us customers as old-fashioned. They can say that, you know, our objections to Dylan Mulvaney are ridiculous, and they can tell themselves that the backlash exists only on social media, but no, no, no, no, no. Customers, we don't have to win an argument with a corporation. We just, we stop watching. We stop subscribing. We stop buying. And when enough of us collectively, together, quietly walk away, eventually Wall Street notices. Nike's downfall should be studied in every business school in every boardroom in America, because when an institution turns against or stops listening to the very people who made it successful, those people, all of us, we get the final word, don't we? And we've had it. Good luck to Nike. Oh, big, big, big election news overseas. Did you guys see what's going on in Germany? It's really kind of incredible. I mean, a huge win, huge win for the Nationalist Conservative Party in Germany over the weekend. Wow, here they are celebrating. They can't quite believe it. You got AFD, the party in Germany, winning the day there, winning the day, crushing the opposition in state election, 44% of the vote, ADF, locked down first place. This is the first time in post-war history that you've had a conservative group like this come forward. They fell three seats short of a majority, but I'll tell you, they are gaining traction. Look at that. I mean, they're in brown. If you're looking at the graphic there on the screen, they are just soaring. And this is just the beginning. This is just the beginning. Alice Weidel, Elise, I should say, Weidel, she is, she's a big deal. She's the head of the organization, the political movement. She very well may be the next chancellor of Germany. She really might be if this momentum keeps up. And it's just an incredible, incredible history here that she's facing. So I wanted to show you a little video of her. Here she is talking about the economy. And this is a party that was founded in 1934. And she's saying, we're basically about to go bankrupt. We are basically about to go bankrupt. We've got no sustainable policy for our country. We have no sustainable policy for Germany. And there she is saying, we're going to go bankrupt. Germany is bankrupt. And they are not, the people are not being told. So they're trying to deceive you. And, you know, part of the reason it's going bankrupt is because it's done stupid things when it comes to migration, etc. Now, just to back up, you know, we're going to go bankrupt. We're going to go bankrupt. You've got to understand the history here. The history is actually really important because for more than 80 years, Germany has lived with basically one overriding political commandment, and that's nationalism must never be allowed to take control of the country, right? Nationalism is dangerous because it was nationalism that led to Nazism. And so they've always wrestled with this question of national pride. I would disagree with that because I think you can have nationalism without leading to, you know, an Adolf Hitler. But think back to the days after World War I. If you go back in time, you had the Treaty of Versailles, right, which is pretty legendary because they stripped Germany of about 13% of its territory, and they took away its colonies, they limited its army to 100,000 men, they put all these enormous reparations, which were a huge economic burden onto the country. It crippled it financially. So that was a disaster. They also had this war guilt clause, which forced Germany to accept responsibility for the war. And so millions of Germans were looking at that Versailles Treaty as a kind of national humiliation with the reparations and the war debt and the government money printing that ensued, the occupation of the rural region producing devastating hyperinflation in 1923. 1923, I mean, you think about the 20s, we were soaring, right? Our economy was doing great. Not so in Germany. And just to give you a little economic history here, middle-class savings totally wiped out. And then you had the Great Depression, right? So it got worse. You had mass unemployment and a total collapse of public confidence in Germany's what was then young democratic governors. And so, you know, Hitler comes along and he exploits it all and exploits the grievances and he weaponizes them. And he promised to tear up the Treaty of Versailles and restore German strength, et cetera, et cetera. You know, the upshot of all of that, which was horrific genocide and horrible, like Nazism was what, you know, they wound up with. And it's that ideology that was responsible for the Holocaust and the murder of 6 million Jews. And it was a catastrophic time for tens of millions of people dying. But, you know, I would say, keep in mind that, you know, history teaches us something else. And that is that you cannot extinguish a person's desire for national identity by shaming it out of them. And so I understand and I recognize, I think we all do, that Germany is unique in that they have this horrific history. But you can't then say, well, nationalism forever is going to lead to something awful. Because nationalism is like kind of just part of being a human being, right? You take pride in your family and where you're from. But if political leaders try and treat that expression of national pride as something dangerous, as they have since done, right, in post-World War II Germany, then you're going to have problems. And that's what they're dealing with right now. I mean, it's not going to lead to Nazi. I mean, that was the first time I heard that. That was extreme, right? What happened after Versailles, that was extreme. But the answer is not to say, OK, we can't be proud of who we are because, you know, of our past. We do. It's an instinct to want to be connected to something, to a culture, to a home. And so, yes, Nazism was bad. But they blame nationalism for it. And then they said, we can't have nationalism anymore. That was total perversion, if you ask me, of nationalism. But it left the country so terrified. And they took this disastrous, woke turn. But what do you know? Because it's part of being a human being. Nationalism is back. Healthy nationalism is back. And that's what we're seeing on display right now with the ADF. I mean, if you think about it, really. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. May slow when network is busy. See terms. I'm Hannah. I've lost 75 pounds in 20 months with GLP-1s. Plus diet and exercise. Rx only. German political parties kind of capitalized on this nationalism being bad thing, right? Because they had had this horrific history, all the German politicians that came forward after that were able to say, nope, we don't want nationalism because that means, you know, you're basically, you know, part of the super-duper right-wing Nazism party. And so they used that. They used it to basically squash everybody else. National pride was not tolerated. Sovereignty was transferred to Brussels, for goodness sakes. And if you questioned mass migration, it would bring all these accusations of not you being wrong, but you may be being associated with Germany's darkest chapter in its history. If you demanded tighter borders, you were called xenophobic, for goodness sakes. If you challenged the EU, you were accused of endangering Europe. If you supported the alternative for Germany, the ADF, you risked being branded an extremist. And for years, that strategy worked until now. It doesn't work anymore because take a look. Again, the ADF did a wonderful, wonderful victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. Not by one point, not by two points. They won 43.8% of the vote, okay? More than doubling the support and crushing Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Fred Merz, as I like to call him, and his Christian Democratic Union. It collapsed to just, what, 17% that he got there? The AFD now holds 39 of the state's parliament's 83 seats. They're just three seats short of an outright majority. So this is not a fringe movement, anymore, guys. This is not a handful of radicals, like they want to call it. This is not a political extremist group. This is becoming more mainstream. And I'm telling you, it's a political earthquake, if I ever saw one, because what's very clear is AFD won, and it's going to continue winning. Germany is a federal republic. Saxony-Anhalt is one of the 16 states. Its government has some meaningful authority over schools and policing, culture, regional policy, all that kind of thing. But the election itself does not make the AFD, the government of Germany. To control the national government, the AFD is going to have to win enough seats in parliament, known as the Bundestag, and find enough partners, really, to form this big coalition. But I'm telling you, it's got the momentum, all kinds of momentum. I mean, think about February 25. You had the AFD winning, like, almost 21% of the vote, finishing second. And now this. And now this. Amazing. So a current average of national polls actually puts AFD at about 28%, CDU and its Bavarian partner, they're down to, like, 21%. Nobody likes Mertz, by the way. Fred Mertz is like persona non grata. He's one of the most unpopular chancellors in Germany's history. Meanwhile, Alice Weidel, she says her party's goal is to get to 40% in the next federal election, unless Mertz just collapses earlier. So they are on an upswing. This is a very clear signal, okay? AFD is going to keep winning. It's going to keep winning. And there's a reason. Like, how did this happen? So first of all, just a little history on AFD. It was founded in 2013 by economists and academics who were opposed to the Eurozone bailouts. Why? Well, do you remember the European debt crisis? I do. I was reporting at Bloomberg Television. I can't believe this. I mean, it was crazy. It was actually, we were worried about contagion, and it's spreading to markets and having another subprime crisis of 2008. But we didn't, thank goodness. Anyway, the European debt crisis was a big deal. Germany basically had to bail out Greece. Well, I don't think the Germans appreciated having to bail out Greece. And so some of the economists wanted to challenge this idea that Brussels was in charge and this idea that German taxpayers should just continually underwrite the failures of all these other governments. That didn't seem very fair. And so we started to see some momentum. But then, then along came Angela Merkel. And Angela, in 2015, basically changed everything. Because Angela opened Germany's doors during the European migrant crisis. Remember all the Syrians that needed to come in, and she assured the country we can do this. Famous last words, Germany's migration agency. Gosh, look at this. They recorded 1.1 million asylum registrations in 2015 alone. And then there were like 745,000 applications in 2016. And things just kept going and going and going and going. 2023, you had another 329,000, I mean, it just kept accumulating. And so you kept getting more and more migrants in. And then, of course, with Ukraine and stuff, they've had more migrants coming in. They're under a separate program. But, you know, all in, you think about this population of 83.5 million people. So 83.5 million people, 12.4 million of them, that's nearly 15 percent, guys, are foreigners. They have 15 percent of their population as foreigners in Germany. And that's not it. I mean, it's actually even more because they have this term, they talk about a broader migration background population. So I guess, like, if you're a child born to migrants, maybe they consider you that broader migration background population. That is somewhere around 25.2. I mean, wow. OK, so 25.2 million, that's more than 30 percent of the country. So think about this for a second. Nearly one of every three people among children and young people. It's even more. It's more than four out of 10 people is not German. So that's an extraordinary demographic transformation, right? It's extraordinary. And it has produced a lot of real consequences. We should start with crime because crime has been just increasing massively, 181,000 violent crimes in 2015. And by 2025, the number had increased 212,000. There's an increase of roughly 17 percent a year. You can see it on the graphic. And according to Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office, non-German nationals accounted for 42.9 percent of those suspects in 2025. Wow. I mean, that's concerning. So those are suspects. Those aren't convictions, I should say, but the category includes some temporary visitors. The disparity is kind of undeniable. So foreign citizens are approximately 15 percent of Germany's population, right? 15 percent of Germany's population. And yet they're accounting for 43 percent of violent crime suspects. I mean, that's that's almost three times their share of the population. So for years, when when Germans expressed concerns about all of this and they did, expressed concerns about attacks and radical Islam and the safety of their communities and sexual violence, et cetera, the establishment would not listen. Instead, it lectured people. It lectured people for noticing the problem, right? Because you might be you might be taking us back towards that direction that we don't want to go back to in the 1930s. That's what you I mean, that's that's kind of where they went every time. I mean, I should also point out welfare, right? Welfare has been a big part of that. and sending, they're saying you may vote, But if you vote the wrong way, the political establishment will combine together and we will nullify your decision, which is exactly what Freddie was just telling us when he was referring to these people as though they are the deplorables. And they wonder, they wonder why the AFD keeps growing. It's going to keep growing and growing. They get a big test coming up September 30th. Mark your calendar, Berlin in the eastern state of Mecklenburg, Western Pomerania, that's going to be voting. And so, you know, the AFD has been leading again, wide margin, wide margin. And so if they win that one, combined with Saxony-Anhalt, I'll tell you, there's no reason to look like this is an isolated eastern rebellion thing. It is beginning to look like a real national realignment. And I wouldn't be surprised if Elise Weidel makes it to chancellor because the people are finally speaking up and they have had it. This is not a system that's working for them. It's not a system that works for anyone. I mean, look, we experienced it in our own country, for goodness sakes. It's not working for us. And finally, you got the border being shot. I mean, look. The AFD is not the Nazi party and modern Germany is not the Weimar Republic. But history has warned us, you know what? When legitimate public grievances are shamed, when they are suppressed, when they are pushed outside the accepted political system, people rise up. You cannot suppress national pride. You cannot make it disappear. You cannot silence their concerns about the borders and about their own economic situations and about crime. You can't do that. You can't tell them that it's. Morally unacceptable because of what went down in the 30s. All right. A sovereign nation has the right to control its borders and it has the right to decide who enters and it has the right to remove people who have no legal right to remain. So this is what's happening. Taxpayers, they're coming forward and saying, why am I as a taxpayer who's working my tail off? Why am I being asked to pay when foreign citizens who now represent? Fifteen percent of our population and account for 46 percent of working age welfare recipients don't have to. How is that fair? Germany's political establishment, they tried to contain the AFD and instead they have created a big old pressure cooker and the voters have had enough, enough, enough. And it reminds me of the movie I saw actually last weekend. You guys got to go and see this. OK, this is an amazing movie. I really it reminds me so much of this because it's called The Uprising. Andrew Garfield is. He's starring in it. It was from all. It's a little I wouldn't take the kids. It's it's, you know, rated R anyway. So I wouldn't take the kids because there's actually a lot of violence. Takes you right back to those times in the late 1300s. But in the late 1300s, basically, you know, the serfs in Great Britain, they rose up against the monarchy. It's just a phenomenal story. Acclaimed director, the guy who directed Captain Phillips and Jason Bourne. It's called The Uprising, which is funny because we were just talking. It came out in Uprising and it's just it's really fun. It's out September 11th and I got the privilege of seeing it last weekend. I really enjoyed it. So, you know, as we talk about all these things and how people can only be pushed so far, it's the story of one man who who's like had it right. He was a serf and they had no freedom and they had no economic freedom. And what did the crown keep doing? Taxing, taxing him, taxing him, taxing him and taxing him to pay for the the hundred year war with France. And finally, they're like enough is enough is enough. Right. And so it's all about. It's all about that story and just a really interesting piece of economic history. So go see it. It's out September 11th. It's called The Uprising. And speaking of Great Britain and uprisings, we saw one over the weekend. Did we not? This this group of Brits just rising up, rising up there in Portsmouth. Wow. Very, very interesting story. Let's go to the video here again. This is just happening there last night. My goodness. I mean, Britain is really at a at a breaking point. When you think about the breaking point that Germany has just hit, I'll tell you, you take a look here across the English Channel and Britain is quite close itself. Yes, indeed. So we're looking at some video coming into us from Portsmouth in the UK because on Sunday evening you had a small boat carrying approximately 140 miles. Yes. And it was a boat carrying approximately 140 miles. I'M NOT GOING TO SAY ANYTHING cars on the way to the M-20 to get on holiday, and they see all this happening around them. Disgusting. Disgusting. Alright, well, all that said, you know, look, Britain's government is not exactly allowing the people to speak up. I mean, I'll tell you, they're making an enormous mistake. If they think that they're going to be able to just be able to dismiss this as a group of thugs, right? Because there's more to this. It's very similar to what we've been talking about with Germany. There's more to this story. The real story is that enormous numbers of ordinary British citizens believe their government has completely lost control of the border, and that the government completely refuses to listen to them. This was the second major protest in one weekend, because on Saturday you had another. Demonstrators blocked roads around Dover, and by Sunday night you had this happening in Portsmouth, and Portsmouth's council officer is blaming the home office, saying the location was completely unsuitable, the council had not been consulted, the disruption was entirely avoidable. Think about that. I mean, I would just say, you know, Nigel's criticizing them for wearing the masks. Danny Thomas, who was one of the one of the I guess instigators, or one of the organizers, I should say, behind this protest, he confronted one of the guys from Nigel's party, from Reform UK, and this was his point, which isn't a bad one. In other words, the people have had it. They've reached a breaking point, but if the government knows that they're doing this, they're going to be penalized. The reason I've come down here today and the public is talking is watching you and watching all the cameras. You have to understand, Yusuf, that what we're trying to do and the reason the Patriot platform has been created is not because of violence. We're not looking to intimidate anyone. Let me start by firstly explaining to you why the men are wearing masks. As you know, and as Nigel knows, the left in this country target us massively. We have working class men who are bricklayers, who are roofers, who are carpenters, who build the houses that you live in. They build the roads that you drive on. They do all of that stuff. The reason they're covering their faces is because we know they're going to be targeted. What happened in Dover on Saturday, there was no violence. There was no arrests. The women and children, the children were allowed through. The police were very straight and very clear to the police. We had lawyers on the phones. All the lawyers were on the phones and we made sure they spoke to the senior police officers. What Nigel Farage has done is not good. When you call people disgusting, you have to understand the reasons of why this is happening. Yusuf, you have three years until you are able to put yourself in a position to change any of this. This has gone on for too long. The men of this country, they're standing up for their women and children. What happened here last night was controlled. The men of this country were here to send a message that something more needs to happen than words. You smashed up some police vehicles. That was nothing to do with us. That was probably done by the lefties to try and make us look bad. Please let me speak. Please let me. Do you accept that having masks is intimidating? Yusuf, please. Can I speak to Yusuf? Yusuf, Yusuf, listen to me, please. Okay? I don't want any violence. And I have done everything I can in my power to maintain a level of calmness. I did that last night. If you speak to any police officer here last night, you can see all the videos around the country that went around. We told the police very clearly there'll be no violence. Hold on, let me finish. There'll be no violence. No police officers will be attacked. No police officers will be touched. No vehicles will be touched. And that was the basis of you, as your party, say you represent the people. The working class do not vote. We are building a voting block. What we're doing right now is creating an infrastructure of men, not for violence, not to commit crimes, but to create a voting block. So in 12, in 18 months time, we convert into a voting block. And that voting block will go to the most suitable candidate and to the most suitable party that is able to bring this country back into order. Okay? Bottom line, this is a real problem. All right, the real problem is that the government has fully lost control of its border in the UK. It was totally unprepared when that boat arrived. But this is like par for the course, right? Look at what has happened. I told you, I was just in London. I was like the only person every time I got in an elevator that didn't have a, you know, a thing on my head, for goodness sakes, you know, it was a different country than it's been that many years ago. So government officials are out there insisting that these small boat crossings are down this year, but fewer illegal crossings are really not the same thing as control. I mean, think about it, if somebody breaks into your home, right, you don't feel secure because fewer people broke in. In the last month, right, you feel like I was just broken into. And this is what is going on in Britain, people feel like they have been broken into. You have 41,000 people that cross the channel in small boats in 2025. I don't even know how many people have been broken into. You get the average number of people crammed into that boat, somewhere around 62 last year, up from 41 in 2022. The boat reportedly carried about 140 people here, more than twice last year's average. So Britain is receiving approximately 101,000 asylum applications in 25. That's close to a record set the previous year. By the end of the year, they had more than 107,000 people that were receiving asylum support. You get 30,000 being housed in roughly 200 hotels. And guess who pays? The British taxpayers. 4 billion pounds in one year. You get housing, one asylum seeker in a hotel now costing the government, the taxpayer about 144 pounds every night. So what is that? Maybe $170? I'm doing the math in my head. I mean, 52,000 pounds per year. So that's what, $62,000, $64,000 a year that you got to pay to cover these people? Just put them in a hotel? We've been there, done that, right? Remember in the United States, they were in the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, where they were paying to house all of those people and then giving them maid service and then giving them special cards for their ethnically appropriate food? I mean, for goodness sakes, this is not working. It's just not working. Okay, not working. It didn't work here. It's not working in Germany. It's not working in Great Britain. It's not working in Italy. It's not working. It's not working in Spain. You've seen the pictures from Ceuta, Spain. Pedro Sanchez is going to be out over this. British taxpayers are sitting there going, hang on. And their economies are in tough shape, tough, tough shape. They got rampant inflation. They got no growth. And so when you go out and you then label these people as thugs, again, violence is wrong. Don't get me wrong. You should never attack a police officer, for goodness sakes. But you've got to understand what these people are up against. You've got to understand that they feel like their country is just poof, gone, and nobody's listening to them, and they're not even allowed to talk about it. And heck, you're not allowed to talk about it. And heck, you're not allowed to talk about it in the U.K. Because the minute you start filming stuff, right, you're in all kinds of trouble. So that is the connection, you guys, between what is happening right now in Britain, what just happened in Germany, just this weekend, okay? Because we've talked about Italy, and we've talked about Spain, and we've talked about all of these countries. But for years, Europe's political establishment treated public anxiety over mass migration as something shameful. Same thing that happened here, for goodness sakes. Same exact thing. You know, we're not imagining this. Voters see the boats, and they see the hotels that they're paying for, and they see the billions of dollars going to all of this, and they see political leaders who appear a lot more comfortable condemning their anger than controlling those boats. Germany's voters are delivering their warning through the ballot box. Britain's warning arrived this weekend at the edge of a marina with riot shields, blocked roads, hundreds of people shouting, stop the boats. Governments, they're can condemn disorder. And you know what? They should. They should. But unless they confront what's actually driving it, this may just be the beginning of something pretty darn enormous. Oh, I had a lot to say. It's good to see you guys. Cat Crazy Sam, Don Baca, good welcoming you back. I have been watching sort of out of the corner of my eye, all of your comments on Andy. Great to see you here. Peace of my mind back in the room on this Labor Day. You know, I didn't think I was going to work today, but gosh darn it, there was so much going on. And with everything happening in Europe, I had to be here with all of you. This is extraordinary. We really are on the front lines of history. If you have not subscribed to this show, please do me that favor. It's important that you do. I will be back here live tomorrow. We have so much more to talk about. I'm hoping some good things come out of Moscow and Kiev, right? You saw Kushner and Witkoff over there. What's going on? Visiting Moscow and Kiev all within like two days. They had dinner with Putin and then they went off to talk to Zelensky. So maybe, maybe, fingers crossed, peace. Could it be? Thank you for being here. Thank you for all you do to make this a success. I will see you right back here live on the show tomorrow. Happy Labor Day. Thank you.