Massie's Mess, Trump Victorious & Dr. Oz's War on Fraud

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No, I'm taking some improvement. I think, yeah, no, I think it raises the level of the conversation. Okay, fine. Okay, so what are we going to talk about? We're going to just start talking about pinecombs or what? I hate to admit this. I don't know what the pinecone thing is about. Oh, okay. I'm going to have Baye explain this to you so that I don't get in HR trouble. Baye explain the pinecone thing to Claven because I prefer not to be sued. Well, I don't know. I don't want to get sued, but all right. And also, the reason I bring this up is because are we actually recording already? We're all recording all this, but we'll cut out anything that is unpleasant, which is to say three quarters of the show will be cut out. No, no, no. So I want to give Laura Lumer credit because I feel like she often has great reporting and she never gets credited for it, but she will go into the gutter and get the people and find the people. And like last night was really Laura Lumer's night. And what she did was she found a woman who claims to have had an affair with Thomas Massey two months after his wife died. And the things that she claimed he asked her to do, they're perverse. I will not repeat them. But in part of what she sort of what Laura got out of her was that Massey allegedly also had an affair with Lauren Boebert and in text messages would refer to his genitals, specifically his male member as his pinecone. And I truly want to know. I know, I know, it's horrific. But I truly want to know. Like I'm sure a lot of us feel that like the downfall of Thomas Massey was sort of of a piece with the downfall of the podcast, Stariat and the influencers with no influence. And these people who have turned rapidly anti-Semitic on the right who pretend to have influence. There's that. There's the fact that, you know, he really knows the city right there. But to me, I really do want to know, like, did pinecone gate make a difference to the people of Kentucky? I'm going to go and know that the pinecone gate really didn't make a difference. If it had been a cactus gate, that would have been a completely different thing. I mean, I'm just, honestly, like, what other parts of the natural world would be worse to label your member than a pinecone? Really? You're running into like, see an enemy gate? Like, I don't know. Coral gate. Like, what are we talking here? And apparently, he was texting with women using this name, right? I mean, like, I think that's where the text came from. He's in a text with a woman. He was referring allegedly to his member as a pinecone. And by the way, I know I entered a little bit late here, but I do want to tell the audience, we have the pinecone coming on actually later in the show. So be sure to stay tuned because this is Friendly Five. That's pornographic. Is that, yeah. Well, that's for behind the paywall. Obviously, you know, you got to subscribe for that. You don't get to put the pinecone on YouTube. Only pinecone. Can I ask a question about this, though? Because the only part of this I actually heard, and maybe this is selective deafness on my part, but the only part of this I heard was the part that he had an affair with a woman two months after his wife died, which I didn't think was so bad. I mean, what was she going to do? Come back? I mean, she died. He moved down. Whoa. It is interesting, you know, like on all of the dirt that they were digging up on Massey right before the election, it is interesting that, look, I mean, a lot of it was like raised a lot of eyebrows and probably didn't represent good judgment if it was true. But yeah, right, you're right, Drew. It wasn't, they didn't allege that he cheated on his wife. They didn't allege that kind of impropriety. So, you know, it's kind of typical political stuff. Some of it was kind of weird, like the pinecones and whatever. But it, all of it together, I was confident. I'd be curious to know what you all were thinking yesterday. I predicted Massey was going to go down. I didn't know it was going to be a nine point swing, but I predicted he was going to go down. And the reason why it wasn't just because of the big beautiful bill, it wasn't just because of the pro-Israel donors. It wasn't just because of this, that or the other thing. It was because he was acting like a guy who was about to lose. This is correct. Right. Yeah. All right. Thanks. Yeah. No, this is totally right. Okay. So first of all, like you don't run a campaign in Northern Kentucky in which your chief issue is Israel and the Jews. That's the dumbest thing you can do. Because if you think that the voters in Northern Kentucky are thinking about that, you're out of your mind. His district has 780,000 people and it's less than 500 Jews. And so, if you actually want to know what happened in that election cycle, it's very easy. Watch the local TV ads. The local TV ads were Massey trying to hump Trump's leg. And then the rest of the campaign was Trump saying, get off my leg. That was the entire campaign. The entire campaign was saying, it was Ed Galerine being like, dude, Trump doesn't like you and you're not going to make it happen. You're trying too hard. And Massey being like, no, no, no, no, we're best friends. We're super best friends. And Trump tweeting, I don't even like him. I want him gone. He's the worst. But there is an entire race. We can't paper over the fact. What's kind of funny with Massey is he had a super pro-Israel billionaire donor who was backing him. But there's no doubt. Pro-Israel donors and sort of commentators. Yeah, for sure. But that's because he was vulnerable. Yes, because he was vulnerable. And the other thing is though, because a lot of the Massey supporters are basically trying to peg the whole thing on Jews for the reason he went down. But within the context of Brad Raffensperger going down, Bocassidy going down, the five state legislators in Indiana going down, within that context, I think you got to say, the reason he went down, even if the Israel donors played a role in the race, the reason he went down is the same reason all those other guys went down. And it's because they opposed Trump and Trump owns the party. That's 100 percent right. And then libertarians are just inherently annoying though, because they're constantly saying, I'm standing on principle, I'm not going to play politics. And I keep thinking, you're a politician. It's like Aaron Judd saying, I'm not going to play baseball. It just doesn't make any sense. The guy would not compromise over anything. They're all the same. I mean, Rand Paul, who I kind of like, is like this too, though. They will not play the game, part of which is getting the presidents a gent of them. And so I just think- Michael. Help was like, be gone. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Michael, to your point, the reason you knew he was going to lose is because he started running campaign where it was like, what if I have over podcast Nazis to my house? And I'm not joking. It was literally people wearing sweatshirts that said American Reich on them. Really? I wasn't really trying to. That was real. That was real. And so like that is not the move of a person who thinks he is long for the Congress. That is a person who is trying to steer into the dollars and cents of podcast and and making a future for himself. And by the way, I will point out the strange and respect he is likely to receive for this campaign from MSNBC and from New York Times and from all of these clowns is demonstrative of the fact that if you want to be accepted in left wing world, what you really should do is steer into the anti-Israeli anti-Semitism stuff. It is not about resistance to Trump. You know who is more resistant to Trump than Thomas Massey, a guy named Bill Cassidy, who voted for his actual impeachment in 2021. You think Bill Cassidy is going to be on MSNOW anytime soon as a resistance hero? There's no way in hell. But Massey will and so will MTG and so will Joe Kent and so will the rest of these clowns. And that is because again, the anti-Semitism of left is now baked into the cake. I mean, that is a very real thing from Graham Platner up in Maine to this insane House Democrat down in Texas, who is literally calling for me to go to an internment camp like to be sent to an body and I have to be sent to an attorney. I think you may be there to drew it depends on on her classification of jury or not. I don't know if your conversion was effective. It all depends. But what that says is that Massey, at a certain point here, I think when Trump came out against him, realized that he was going down and he was like, well, I'm going to launch a new movement that is sort of the horseshoe right and the woke left all together and we will be best friends. And I think that that's really what the campaign became as far as the Jewish American money that came in. And it was not Israeli money. That's illegal. It was Jewish American money that came in to that race via APAC and via other super PACs. Well, yeah, the guy's wildly anti-Israel. And it turns out that a lot of donors would like to see him go because he opposed things that they like. That's what happens in every race. But you'll notice that it was not until Trump actually started the process of kicking his ass out of Congress that that happened because he won over 75% of the primary vote in 2020, 2022 and 2024. And it was only when he went up against Trump that things started to get really scurrelly for him. Yeah, no, this is the key, Ben. I think because like, I don't mean to paper over it or gaslight. Like, obviously, there were a lot of pro-Israel donors who didn't like Massey and, you know, Massey kind of earned their iron in many ways in a lot of his comments. But first of all, he's not the only congressman who voted against funding for Israel. And like the hypothetical I think up here is, had Massey voted for the big, beautiful bill, had Massey gone along with the White House and not like Israel voted against funding Israel, even made comments that were anti-Israel. If that were the case, I think he would still have his seat. In other words, it's not that the pro-Israel donors would like him or anything like that, but it's that Trump was this sort of catechon figure. And it was when Trump said, hey, buddy, you're out. That was when all of the other political machinations really started to play out. But didn't Trump send anybody money? Yeah. But didn't Trump back his opponent? Massey has won before against a Trump-backed opponent. I think I see this exactly the opposite as Michael Knowles. I think Americans, especially young people on the right, people on the right, people on the left, are very comfortable criticizing Israel right now. But there is a line in the sand when it becomes obvious that it's not just Israel, you have a problem with, which Rand Paul doesn't want to fund Israel. I don't ever feel like he's being anti-Semitic. There's a line where you cross that it's not just Jews and it's not just pro-Israel people. The American people have very little tolerance for anti-Semitism. And when you start saying that the Republican Jewish coalition, just Republican Jews, are somehow undermining American interests because they're trying to whip up support against you, that reads, I think, to average Americans as really anti-Semitic. And I think it's really off-putting. I think the fact that the Trump piece obviously is a really big deal. But he won before against a Trump-backed candidate. I really think it was the tonal shift, the way that he talked about Israel. It stopped being the same as the way he talked about Ukraine. It stopped sounding like it was a principal opposition to funding and to war and started sounding like he was attacking American Jews. And I feel like average Americans, they're not so into Israel right now, but they are very protective of their Jewish neighbors. And I think that that just came off as so gross. Like his opening to his concession speech where he said, I had to go find my opponent's phone number and he's in Tel Aviv somewhere. I think he had the clip. Can we have the clip? I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede and it took a while to find Ed Galerine in Tel Aviv. I did get the call. I have called and conceded the race. We've been honorable the whole time and we're going to stay that way. He's been honorable the whole time. I wish you were right, but I don't think that's true. I mean, I think that people in America, people tend to be tolerant. They tend to be fairly accepting as long as you leave them alone. But I don't think that that's what brought him down. I agree. Trump stomped on the guy. It was a curb stomping. It was unfair. I don't think Massey has actually been that bad if you just consider him as a series of votes. I don't think he's been that bad. He's just got up Trump's nose. I just think he got up Trump's nose. People are just really sick of a Congress that cannot accomplish anything. And I think that the bigger Trump's way is going to be. I think there's something else there with Massey, too. One is, yes, he is the most obstructionist congressman on the right. I mean, there's no question. He was a consistent no vote for every major agenda item that Trump was pushing, which pissed Trump off. But there's something else that we're ignoring here, which is that Massey decided to make it his chief goal in life to drag Trump through the mud with a bunch of bullshit about Jeffrey Epstein. He and Ro Khanna decided that they were going to run an op going after Trump. He was going to reach across the aisle and suggest that Trump was covering for a child sex trafficking ring. And he was on video naming people in the files who were guilty of nothing, which they then later had to admit. And he decided he was going to ramp this up. So I think that actually the anti-Semitism, as always, is the symptom, not the cause. I think that he started thinking in very conspiratorial ways about American politics in grievance-based ways about American politics. He started attributing that to weird, clickish conspiracies like the quote unquote Epstein class and all this stuff. And Trump read that and he's like, listen, it's one thing for you to vote against me sometimes. It's another thing for you to vote against me always. It's another thing for you to go on MSNOW and talk about how I'm covering up child sex trafficking. The answer here is no. And it just turns out that the crossover between believing all of those former things and also believing that the Jews are deciding on your fate at their Friday night dinners, the crossover there tends to be almost 100%. Yeah, when did you say it? If you're a conspiratorial thinker who does grievance-based politics and also opposes every element of Trump's agenda, the chances that you are going to be wandering around outside in the rain ranting about the Uden is pretty high. Yeah, there was this clip that was going around. It was one of the last real knocks on Massey, 11th hour. And it was him being interviewed by a hostile journalist saying, hey, why do you post Trump and why have you voted against the GOP on these crucial votes, whatever. And he said, hey, I vote with the Republicans 91% of the time, but 9% of the time I don't vote for them because they're covering up for pedophiles. And I thought, okay, hold on. Wait, that doesn't even make a coherent political position. So you agree with the pedos and the pedo protectors 91% of the time? I don't want to agree with them on any percent of the time. And so what he represented to me, if you kind of zoom out from these individual issues or the individual donors or whatever, is you had two problems going for him. One, he voted 77, a little over 77% of the time with the GOP in Congress, this term, which is way below the median GOP congressmen who voted 95% of the time. This was also down for Massey last term, who was voting 91% of the time GOP, which itself was down from the previous term when he voted 95% of the time GOP. So you can say, look, I hate the GOP, I'm glad he bucked the party, I like that he's independent, whatever, but that's not going to win you support with the party. And then the other issue was, and this gets to your point, Ben, you know, when you're palling around with Ro Khanna, one of these unctuous left-wing figures who's just constantly taking shots at the right, when you're calling your colleagues and the people who are supposed to be on your team pedophiles essentially, I mean, what you're expressing is not just independence from the party, you're expressing a kind of contempt for the party and a contempt for the leader of the party. And at that point, the vice president put it very well. He said, look, I've gotten along with Thomas in the past, we've agreed on a lot of things, but if you're going to go against the party in such a brutal way, you can't expect the party to back you. So I want to get back to what Ben was saying. I think that backs what Ben was saying. Sorry, go ahead, Ro. Now, I think that backs what Ben was saying, that the Jewish issue is really part and parcel of this horseshoe where the right meets left. I mean, I cannot see the difference between most of the people who are spouting this stuff. I can't see the political difference. They're all seem to be on the same side. And the worst of the kind of hatred than the Jew hatred that comes out is in the New York Times, which has always kind of been in that position. So I do think that there is this way that this guy just drifted out of the mainstream of the right, which actually doesn't adhere to a lot of that stuff. Well, you know what I like to do is drift out of consciousness so that I can go take a nice sleep on my Helix mattress. But I think there's this goes a really quick way to just be a lot. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. I had a great transition. I'm going to do it again. You know what I like to do is drift off to sleep on my Helix mattress. So what you got to do right now is go to helixsleep.com slash friendly fire, which it will feel a lot less clunky than my transition did. We love our sponsors Helix. They let you sleep really, really well. Helix has a sleep quiz that uses your preferred sleep position, firmness and other factors to match you with the right mattress for you, which is a far more rational system than wandering around a showroom laying on random beds. Helix is an award-winning mattress brand reviewed by outlets like Forbes and Wired. Gentlemen, and maybe Batya, you too. I'm not sure. I know you, Drew and Ben, you guys love your Helix mattresses. We do, but I get to stay awake on it. So I know it's comfortable because I never sleeps by just why they're going, wow, what a comfortable mattress. I wish I could sleep sometime. Now they shipped it right in your door in the U.S. with free shipping, 120 night sleep trial, limited lifetime warranty, meaning you can test it risk-free and send it back if it is not right for you. I absolutely love it. I've had my Helix mattress for years and multiple Helix mattresses. In fact, I'm such a good father, I've gotten them for my kids. Go to helixsleep.com slash friendly fire, 27% off site-wide. Helixsleep.com slash friendly fire, 27% off site-wide. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know that we sent you. Helixsleep.com slash friendly fire. Now, before Batya was so rudely interrupted by that advertisement, we can get back to her point. What I was going to say is, yes, on the far right and the left, you see a similar kind of blame the Jews for everything. The Jews are all pedophiles. The Jewish state is undermining American interests, et cetera, et cetera. But I really kind of dispute this horseshoe theory because a horseshoe suggests that they're equal, but they really aren't in terms of the mainstream, which is, I think, what Drew was just pointing to. The right has done, in my view, an admirable job of telling these guys like Massey, this party has no place for you. Trump, Kick Tucker, and Megan Kelly, and Candice Owens out of the party, basically. They have all been excised on my show. You've had congressmen, senators, members of the cabinet saying, what happened to Tucker Carlson? I would be surprised if Tucker Carlson is at the next RNC. And while they're doing a really good job on the right of excising this, the left is just allowing it to metastasize. They're turning the very same people into celebrities and really elevating their profile, campaigning with them, mainstreaming their views. So if I may just do a short plug for my book, The Jews and the Left, they're not the same. These are not the same. You've got one side that is deeply committed to saying we stand against anti-Semitism. You're allowed to criticize Israel, of course, but we are not going to allow Jew hate to infiltrate and become mainstream. And the other side, which is saying, actually, no, this is the price of entry now. The word Zionist is a full-on slur. And I agree with that. I think that's true. I think Republicans are much better about this. They definitely have. Speaking of brutalizing the left, are we about to just take out a 150-year-old communist dictator in Cuba? Could happen. Yeah. They're threatening to prosecute Raul Castro, right? I mean, I think that's the... So presumably, that's the precursor to maybe going and kidnap him and fly him in a tracksuit. And you just hope that whoever sponsors that tracksuit has really paid top dollar for it because Nike made bank off of that Maduro tracksuit. So if we're going to do this in full capitalist fashion, we don't just go and take Raul Castro. We get an endorsement deal, and then we put him in a Reebok tracksuit and really make some money back for the American people on this. Spread it out a little bit. Well, listen, before we get into it, even though Batia, I'm certain would look much better in a tracksuit and really anything else than Ben Dominic would, we unfortunately have to say goodbye to Batia. We have to bring on Ben Dominic. I have no say over it. The producers make me do it. Batia, wonderful to see you as always. Everybody should go watch Batia's show and follow her all over the place. Thank you. Thank you for having me. God bless and protect you all. Take care. Good to see you. So we're talking about Tom Massie's future prospects. I mean, one of the other things here is that if you go out in a blaze of glory shouting about how you've started a movement, maybe you run for president or sponsors over at Calci are estimating 36% odds that Thomas Massie tries a 2028 presidential run. Not totally crazy. Honestly, I think that that's actually, that might be low because somebody is going to have to try and be the avatar of the psycho will great movement. And it's not going to be, I think, Joe Kent or Marjorie Taylor Green, a Massie MTG ticket. Man, that could do serious double digit numbers of voters. But there's also just the- That'd be huge. Look, just on the libertarian point, I mean, put all the other controversy aside, if Massie is going to be Mr. Libertarian, there's always some guy doing that. Ron Paul would run for president. Ron Paul has already signaled he does want to run. And Massie would have some juice to do that. So there is that lane. The other thing that's kind of interesting because Massie is now a Republican, I think he's still a Republican, who's in opposition to Trump, is if Trump is doing really, really well, you saw Rubio once again saying he would back JD, Trump reasserting control over the party. If it's like JD Rubio, if that ticket, they keep floating from the White House, if that's the ticket, if Trump's doing really, really well, there you go, you got it. But if the Trump administration does collapse for whatever reason, then the Republicans who are going to have a better shot are the ones who are not tied to the administration. So all of a sudden, then, the Ron DeSantis candidacy starts to look pretty interesting, if he is assuming he doesn't join the admin. Or, I'm not saying Thomas Massie or Rand Paul are going to be president, but all of a sudden, they actually do get a little boost to their prospects. Yeah, but this is the place where AOC comes in. This is my nightmare, the Trump administration really tanks, which I don't think it's going to do actually. I think it's going to come out at something like a rose. But if it does, I think AOC is the most dangerous person in the country. The woman is a pretty and idiot and a fascist. I mean, it's an almost perfect combination to win over the left. Mr. Dominic, you're in, and we turn back to the other Ben. Why are you bringing me on? You could have kept her. I know. I know. She's so much nicer than you are, Ben. She's like, I'm so much nicer. I'm about to go back and have a round. Can I make one more point about the Massie thing before we turn to Cuba? Because, frankly, I'm much more interested in the Massie thing than the Cuba thing, to be honest with you, because nothing's happening in Cuba until it actually happens. So I want to get your guys' take on this. It's very weird that Thomas Massie decides that he's going to steer directly into crazy land. He was hanging with Cenk Wiegher and Anna Kasperian the day before a Republican primary in a bright red district in Northern Kentucky, which is Bro, libertarians are like this. Liberalitarians are like this. Liberalitarians are like this. Liberalitarians are like this. Oh, yes. They just swing less sometimes. Oh, no, no. They're totally psycho. I mean, this is why their convention is the best watching TV. Every four years of their convention is some fat dude with an iron cross dancing around without a shirt, followed by some naked chick talking about how pornography is the most American thing. It's an amazing place, the libertarian convention. But in any case, here's the question. I had three possible theories as to why Massie did this. Theory number one is the most obvious, which is Trump decided that he was going to punch Massie as hard as he could in the face. Massie did not want to blame Trump, so he blamed the Jews, which is a typical thing. You see Tucker Carlson do the same thing where he says, well, it's not Trump that I'm upset with. It's his puppeteers. It's the marionette masters who are really doing it. And those marionettes, the people who are handling all the strings, that's the Jews. So a great way to avoid hitting Trump in a race where Trump is hitting you is to say it's really not Trump. It's people who are being manipulated, manipulative of Trump. So that's theory number one. Theory number two is he knew he was toast, so he was going to steer directly into podcast to stand and try to make himself his next career. And again, we talked about that before. I think that's quite plausible. And then theory number three is that people like Massie spend an awful lot of time online and you just get brainworms. And once you get those brainworms online, it is very difficult to excise them in real life because let's be real. Again, this was a district in Northern Kentucky in which Thomas Massie made his number one issue, a small Middle Eastern state, halfway around the globe, which is, again, only understandable if you have brainworms or if it's on purpose or if it's on purpose in different ways. I kind of want to know which theory of those three you buy. I'll give a more charitable view, which is it, how did it start? It could have started from a real principled opposition to wars in the Middle East or so. I actually think it might have started a little earlier than that, but it could, let's say it started there. There's no doubt that a ton of pro-Israel Jews really wanted to get Massie out. And Trump, again, we were talking about it earlier, but I think Trump was really the factor that made the difference. But nevertheless, it could well be the case that even if Massie didn't start out smacking at the Jews, or he obviously had his Tel Aviv comment last night, it might just be the case that when he saw that his big opposition was going to be coming from pro-Israel Jews, it just accelerated whatever trend was going on there. In other words, he had a problem. So it wasn't strategic, it was emotional. I think it might have been emotional. Can I make a vote here for brainworms? Can I make a vote here for brainworms? Because I know who Thomas Massie used to be. And he basically was this hippie libertarian who was also somebody who would build these chicken coupes and make them controlled by Bluetooth and stuff like this. He was just sort of weird and eccentric, but he really was not leaning into any of the crazy stuff that he leaned in all the way up to this. And that's why it doesn't really, it makes no sense that he would steal the rocket ship directly into the sun, based on prior behavior and the way that he was just kind of this loner who was kind of off on the side. And the fact that he would pair up with Ro Khanna to deal in all of this bullshit going after Trump. Look, there are four things on my Mount Rushmore of hate. It's communist, it's anti-Semites, it's Karens and it's hippies. And by the end of the day, he was hanging out with three or four of those and doing it all the time. So who does that? Someone who was a libertarian who has any kind of rural libertarian principle or something like that, who has the kind of pro-life record that Massie had, the kind of pro-gun record that he had in the past, stuff like that. You just don't anticipate him going in that direction. And so I think the last couple of years of him, he just went crazy and he started hanging around with the worst of the craze. I think my vote is for a combination of the two theories. The one is the brainworms and he went crazy. It was exacerbated by the fact that Jewish money was pouring into the campaign against him. But also, people do tend to look for an exit strategy and it wouldn't surprise me whatsoever as as he started to go nuts, he started to see that little light at the end of the tunnel that ends up in podcast of stand and making it good money and with a big audience. So I think there might be a combination of the passion and the greed because he did seem to really lose his whole personality. You know, if it is the greed, I think that does speak to kind of where the Republican party is. In other words, the anti-Semitism and the conspiratorial muddiness and sort of the Tucker wing of what's going on, that is an excellent exit strategy and it's a very poor entry strategy. And I think people are mistaking an exit strategy for an entry strategy, meaning that we've seen a bunch of candidates who are endorsed by Tucker, who are getting their asses just handed to them in election after election, whether it's Casey Putch against Vivek Rameshwamy up in Ohio. James Fishbeck is about to get crushed by Byron Donalds down here. You have Massey who's now lost his seat. MTG has lost her seat. You're seeing this happen like over and over and over and over. And so you're seeing people exit and presumably make more money and get the strange new respect on the other end. But if you're a politician who is looking to get into sort of a position of power in the Republican party, is your best way of doing that? Like as an elected official to steer into crazy land or does it turn out that actually Normie land is the way that you get in and crazy land is the way that you get out with money? No, that's a good observation. There's also one sort of emotional aspect here because my theory is still like a lot of this was exacerbated emotionally and kind of understandably. But the part that we haven't talked about is he started to fall afoul of Trump and get a little bit more eccentric than usual. Right around the time his wife died, I mean, to what degree is this just his wife of decades died and he got kind of emotionally unmoored and it upended his political career. Is that too much psycho babble for political analysis? I don't know him well enough to know that. I just know that he became unrecognizable to a lot of us who interacted with him over the over the years. He again went from being this kind of country libertarian type who was always smiling and kind of happy and knew that he was basically irrelevant to being someone who was aggressively going after the most important person in politics in America, not just in his party and doing so in ways that repeatedly involved him lying blatantly about all these sorts of things related to the Epstein files as Ben was saying earlier. So I think that there is something to that, Michael, but I haven't had him on the psycho analysis couch personally. Right. I just wonder, it's interesting though that the Tucker's lack of influence is the exact opposite of what Tucker himself predicted and that almost everything that Tucker predicts turns out to be the opposite, which I think is proof that God is a gigantic invisible Jewish man with a long white beard. I think he's just screwing with Tucker. It is. Either that or it's just the demon. I actually, like looking at the way these things have shaken out here, one, there are two things that make me feel really good about it. One, even again, it's like I'm not a huge massy hater. I think for a lot of his career, he was great. It just irritated me when he was really turning away and kind of, I don't know, posing the party and the president. But nevertheless, the two great affirmations are one, Twitter's not real life. Sometimes I worry about that. Sometimes I think maybe Twitter is becoming real life or it's obviously, but no, there's a huge distinction between those things. And there's a big chasm between the hardcore politics on the ground and the political media. And so, you know, if the podcast's conducted the election, the results would all be different, but they didn't. You know, it was conducted by voters in districts around the country. And we have so many data points. We have the Indiana data point, which again, that issue was redistricting. We have the Georgia data point. That issue was really the election of 2020. We have Bill Cassidy. We have that data point. We now have the massy. So it just, it seems to me the guardrails hold and politics is actually a little different than the entertainment products. If we had a political media. I have to break in here. I'm sorry. I have to break in here. I have to break in here with a smooth segue into a policy genius commercial. And as soon as I think of one, I'll tell you what it is. But I think the important thing is like, I could go look, I could go at any minute in middle of this conversation. I could just fall off my chair and this gone. And I want to make sure that the people that I care about, but you know, it's only like one or two of them that they are taken care of. And I think all the stuff we remember, we often forget that that's an important thing. 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So I just wanted to add, if you made a comment about political media, I think that if we had a functional political media that wasn't just interested in carrying water for the Democrats, the narrative after last night would be that Republicans are way more unified than Democrats are. Over the course of the past couple of months, we've seen Democrats prevail in multiple primaries. We've seen the situation play out in Maine. We've seen the election of Mamdani. We've seen all of these different situations where the DSA-backed candidate, the AOC-backed candidate, has prevailed over people that the Democrats have actually preferred, or the establishment has even anointed on their side. And nobody's talking about that story in the legacy media because it's an inconvenient story and it's actually true. The fact is that they're only united by the fact that they all loathe Trump. And it's just a contest of how much they loathe him between them. And that's, I think, the real story of what's going on on the left today, which is far more divided than the right after everything that's played out in these primaries. And it's clear that unity really is a political virtue. I think one of the real points of pride for Massey, and it's a point of pride among libertarians, is they love to point out how different they are, how they're willing to stand up to their party or how they, I don't know, how special they are. They love that. Individualist political ideologies do that. But unity really matters. It's one of the four marks of the church per the Nicene Creed, and it's important in your home, it's important in your country. And it's certainly important in political parties. And so it's not just, look, you don't want to blindly follow the leader of a party and the Republicans do a bunch of dumb things that we should try to fight against. But I can't help but going back to this clip that has been going viral of a journalist with an activist outside New York courthouse talking about Luigi Mangione and the killing of Brian Thompson. And this girl said, you know, his kids are better off without him. It's this guy, you know, he deserved to die. And you know, those kids, they can enjoy the blood money. And what I keep coming back to, and we've seen this time and time again, obviously with Charlie's assassination and with the near assassination of Trump, is that the left, mainstream swads of the left have been telling us for every year now, really for much longer, that they would want to kill us and will mock our kids when they have succeeded. They keep telling us that. And in the face of that, we need party unity, not to be lemmings, not to be blind followers, not to be NPCs. But we need, we can duke it out in the primaries, but then we need to get in line, follow the leader and win elections. And to your point, Ben, I think that that really comes out pretty cleanly last night. There is a clear leader of the political party. There is a clear party apparatus, funding, media organizing, and looking ahead to the midterms in 2028, the stakes are very, very high. And I'll take unity as a virtue. I mean, I agree with that. But I think that what happened here and what's been happening is that there are lines drawn, right? Unity has to be around a thing. Right now, the unity in the Republican party is around the thing of the Trump administration. And so you can say, well, you know, Massie was more of a principled conservative when it came to spending, which by the way, I agree with. I was very praiseworthy of Massie's positions for most of his career when it came to the role of the federal government, for example. But the reality is that there were lines that were drawn and then Trump is legitimately excising people from those lines. He's not just saying, I think at unity, come hug me. He's saying, listen, here's where the line is. And if you're on the other side of that line, you're on the other side of that line. The point that you're making about the Democrats is a good one. It also is demonstrative. They have embraced the worst parts of themselves. I mean, legitimately the worst parts of themselves. Hassan Piker talking about social murder with the New York Times, about Brian Thompson. And then Hassan Piker, no shock, endorsing people like Abdul Al-Sayed, the Senate Democrat would be nominee in Michigan, who's probably going to end up with the nomination, who's like a full-scale terrorism supporter. And by the way, Hassan Piker endorsing, wait for it, Thomas Massie. Again, so there is this horseshoe that has taken place. But I think Ba'ay's earlier point is right. The part of the right-wing horseshoe that is horseshoeing is being actively excised from the party by President Trump, which is a pretty amazing thing, actually. Hey, you know, it's always the fury of the guys in the furthest edge of a party, that if they would only allow them to do their thing, they would win everything. The Democrats are going to test that theory. I mean, they've been testing it, and these DSA guys are going to get out there. And it's going to be interesting to see how much leverage they have, because there is a move to the left in a younger cohort of voters who usually don't vote. So we've been safe from them. But they do get excited over a guy like Mamdani. I think he is the only politician that I think of as actually being evil, Mamdani. I think he's an actual bad guy, an actual... Only one. But three big... Well, I mean, there's a lot of corruption, a lot of that stuff, but this guy is an actual destroyer. Platner is legitimately evil. I mean, some of the stuff that Platner was posing... The stuff that Platner is saying again... He's not an office yet. I was talking about office holders. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I know what you mean. But Platner is, again, another guy who's being fully endorsed and legitimized by the entire Democratic Party infrastructure. You have members of the Democratic media who are out there massaging a guy who was saying on Reddit, like a couple of years ago, about how happy he was to watch a video of an American military member literally being killed. I mean, he is... Platner is disgusting, disgusting. And the Democratic Party is hugging him with both arms right now. I mean, legitimately saying... I mean, there are people who are saying that he should run for main Senate and then he should run for president. The only saving grace of Mamdani is he wasn't born in America, so he can't run for the presidency. But grand Platner can. And there are a bunch of people in the Democratic Party who are rising, and the next generation of the Democratic Party is psychotic. I mean, fully damned crazy. Like, they are not remotely anywhere in the neighborhood of the same. And so, I get asked the question a lot. Do we think that there's going to be a reversion to a sort of normal politics after this? I mean, the only way that that happens if the Democrats get absolutely shellacked, and I think that, unfortunately, because of the polarized nature of the political system right now, the chances that they get totally shellacked are pretty low, actually. Yeah, I agree. The demonization... They don't have to get shellacked in the midterms, they just have to do bad. Yeah, the demonization thing that Michael was just talking about, I think we need to really consider and take it seriously. I think people have kind of... They've joked about... It's starting to turn because of Luigi Magioni, because of the number of attempts on Trump's life, and of course, because of Charlie's assassination. But I think, like, I don't know why it hasn't gotten more attention that there have been multiple attempts on Sam Altman's life. That the AI phenomenon is now creating and the demonization of billionaires that Bernie Sanders talks about that is echoed by so many... Not just on the DSA left, but just on the left generally. That's going to create a climate in which these people... They're not going to be able to live and work and have the kind of roles as captains of industry that they've had in the past without having the fear of the kind of backlash that these radical demonizing elements of the left really, I think, believe in truly in their hearts. And that's something that is so evil and so atrocious in terms of American history. We've seen things like this happen in the past, and it led to bombings. It led to assassination attempts. It led to things that were absolutely terrible for our fabric. And to see this happening in the 250th anniversary of America really is depressing to me. Well, one of the things that actually is unique, and Ben, you're pointing it out here, is that in the history of the United States, when there are assassination attempts, typically it is people who are involved directly in the business of politics. It's RFK getting shot, or MLK getting shot, or even even Charlie in the line of MLK, just being a political activist, and not to say they were saying the same thing or anything. But the reality is that it is now extended out to almost Russian revolution style violence, like going after people who are just captains of industry, as you say, people who are running companies, people who are just engaged in the marketplace, like the actual marketplace. If you had said to me 15 years ago that there would be an assassination attempt on the president, I said, okay, that's kind of like, unfortunately, a relative norm in American political life. Even if you had said to me there would be an assassination of a high level political activist like Charlie, I said that's unique and horrifying, but not totally unexpected. If you would say to me, that we would be at a point where people like Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg, or a Sam Altman, these are people who have to walk around with 24 seven security for the crime of creating products and services that people want to buy. And these are the bad guys now that United Healthcare CEO is now considered the bad guy, engaged in quote unquote social murder. You're talking about true Russian revolution style, revolutionary violence directed against an entire class. And that's that scary stuff. I mean, that is a completely different thing. And also, these are all soft targets. We should also point out this has happened before. And we kind of forget about it in American history, but you think about the Palmer raids, you think about the early part of the 20th century, you had anarchists and communists who were setting off bombs on Wall Street, who were setting off bombs and shooting people in the Capitol, yet a Marxist professor from Harvard in 1915, of course, it was Harvard, shooting up or setting off a bomb in the Capitol. You did have these kinds of anarchist bombings about almost exactly 100 years ago. You're seeing them begin to crop up again. The last time that that happened, the federal government came in and curtailed civil rights and put these people in prison, deported these people, got them out of our country. Whether or not we have the ability to actually exert that kind of political authority or the desire to do so right now, I'm not so sure. But we have seen this play out before. And the only way that we were able to survive it right around the time of the Russian Revolution, when Russia did not survive it, is because we wielded federal authority in a very, very strong way. And if we don't do that now, I fear that the problem won't resolve itself on its own. Well, we'll get to more on that in just one second. First, we need to talk about how you talk. And I mean, like actually talk, like on your phone. One of the weirder financial habits people have is you will spend hours, comparison shopping for a plane ticket that saves you like 12 bucks, and then you'll continue paying 80 or 90 bucks a month for wireless service without any question. And at a certain point, you have to ask yourself, why am I doing that? Especially now that companies like Pure Talk exist. Pure Talk is veteran led. It's backed by 100% US based customer service and now offers unlimited high speed data for just $34.99 a month. It's a pretty major shift because unlimited high speed data at Pure Talk used to start around $55 a month, but Pure Talk has continued pushing to offer more value at lower prices. So if you looked at Pure Talk before and you didn't make the switch, well, that was dumb of you. You should have done that. And now you should probably take another look. One thing people always ask is whether the service holds up compared to the massively overpriced major carriers. The answer is, I mean, it's yes, but you should try it yourself. Pure Talk lets you test the service for 30 days with no contract and no cancellation fees. There's really pretty much no downside to seeing whether it works for you. Knowles, I know that you have been using Pure Talk. How has your service been? I absolutely love it. I've had my Pure Talk phone for about six years now. The customer service is great because they speak English and they speak it in a normal American way, but two, it is actually the best service in the country. A lot of people hear that and they think, oh, you use similar towers, similar coverage. You know, it is the same towers. It's the same coverage as the best places in the country. And you can even take it overseas if you're going on vacation this summer. So it's just phenomenal. I could not possibly recommend it highly enough. Well, take it from Knowles. It's the one issue I trust him on. The switch itself can happen in as little as 10 minutes. And again, if you need help, that US based customer service team is standing by. Head on over to puretalk.com slash your Piro. Claim unlimited high speed data for just $34.99. Again, that's puretalk.com slash your Piro to switch to my wireless company. And Knowles is wireless company and America's wireless company, Pure Talk. We're saying goodbye to you, Mr. Dominic, because you don't have a doctoral degree. And we are replacing you with Dr. Oz. Good to see you, sir. Good to see you, man. I'm an honorary doctor. So if anyone ever, you know, has a heart attack on an airplane, I'll say, hey, hey, hey, who needs a commencement speech? I'm here. I got you. I'm totally recovered. Do we have Dr. Oz with us? There he is. Dr. Oz, good to see you, sir. Good afternoon, everybody. How are you? Doing very, very well. I know we're all here just babbling and cackling and giggling, whereas you are not only helping to lead health in the country, but also rooting out all of that terrible fraud, which we have not talked enough about. Well, maybe I can put it in the context of affordability, because I think for a lot of Americans, it's what they're most concerned about. And if you just took the fraud out of Medicare and Medicaid, and we estimate there's probably $100 billion of fraud on the programs that the government pays for you to get better health, that would allow us to double the life expectancy of the Medicare trust fund. So put that in context. If you're working your tail off right now and watching the show and you're worried Medicare was not going to be there for you when you reach the ripe old age of 65, it's the parachute that's going to catch you and deal with your health issues that's costing you an arm and a leg so you can keep your arms and legs, then you should be pretty much with us on this fraud issue, because by doubling the life expectancy of the program, we'll make sure it's there for you and for your grandkids. And that's the kind of discussion we need to be having in earnest with each other, because the fraud is so large, is so weaponized that we have to start asking ourselves, is this really a flaw for state leadership, for governors, or maybe there's a feature here we had not noticed before, which is why they've allowed it to go unimpeded for so many years. Can you explain what kind of fraud is taking place exactly? I'll give you three examples. So South Florida, where you guys have some affinity, is a state that has generally done okay on fraud, waste, and abuse, but in the area of durable medical equipment, where the wheelchairs and canes, these companies have now grown so quickly that we have twice as many of these durable medical equipment suppliers as McDonald's in South Florida. It's impossible that that many people want to sell you wheelchairs, but that's the norm we think the Cuban government's involved, because many of the perpetrators actually flee back to Cuba. Even worse, one-third of all hospices in the entire country are in Los Angeles, not California, and actually specifically the city of Los Angeles. Now, that would imply a very high death rate in LA, and no matter what we might say about Los Angeles, that's not the truth. And so if you have one-third of all of the hospices taking care of people at the end of their life with dignity in one city, then we would have to assume most of those folks are fraudulent. In fact, half of the people in Los Angeles, the hospice centers, we do think are fraudulent, and we have stopped paying almost half of them already. And here's the craziness of all state, 800 of these hospices we've stopped paying, we've had maybe two dozen complain. So most of these guys say, all right, the gig's up, they can't look in for a man, we know one day we'd be out of business, we're going to go defraud somebody else. But the fact that that could have occurred under the watch of Gavin Newsom, even though he was warned four years ago by the state auditor general that there was widespread fraud and really just did performative things to pretend he was dealing with the crisis, why should the federal government have to come in and clean up the mess? Well, unfortunately, it's federal dollars they're spending. So literally New Mexico, another blue state, and Mississippi, a red state, their tax bills are higher because those folks who don't have the income of people in California are paying extra federal taxes so we can transfer it right to Los Angeles where the unmitigated disaster of fraud, not just at hospice but in other programs exist. Let me give you a third example and then we can come to the why question, which is always the most important one. New York City, New York State, these are big prosperous areas. The number one job growth, in fact, the number one job of all in New York State is a personal care service attendant. Now, what does that mean? That means we're paying someone to carry your groceries up the stairs to your kitchen. That person is often your child or the neighbor's kid and your neighbor's kid's driving you to the doctor's office. So all these services that historically your family would do for you, we're not paying someone to do for you, it's become a jobs program. Let's take it to the why question. Why would it be that you would allow that much growth? Why is California have twice the amount of money being spent on these same personal care services than the national average? It's because if you're not making jobs yourself and you want to pretend like you're creating jobs and you want to be able to get federal tax dollars to pay for those jobs and then tax those that income so you have more state revenue, well, you create personal care services. It's literally exactly what they have done in New York and in California and here's the part that's really getting me. They're unionizing those workers, which means we're going to help the union that's the big service workers union in New York double in size. All that union dues and all the taxes on that, that all flows back potentially for political patronage purposes to support the single dominant party in New York state and California. Dr. Oz, other than the rooting out of the fraud that's happening, what systemic changes do you think need to be made to how the federal government deals with Medicaid at the state level? I know there have been a lot of critiques of the block grant program because it basically removes a lot of the incentive for states to actually police their own fraud because if you're just getting a chunk of change, it doesn't really matter to you whether or not you identify the fraud or not, the chunk is the same. What sort of systemic changes do you think need to happen? This is very addressable. First of all, you need a federal government that wants to do their job. The prior administration gutted the Medicaid program integrity. I'm going to be clear about this. There were six people left that we're aware of that were working in Medicaid program integrity for the country at CMS, the agency that I run for the president. And that basically means we're not serious about this. We just want you to enroll as many people as possible into the Medicaid program. We don't want to hear about fraud. And that's what I was told by people who are here because they were told this and just go do something else. Just don't focus on the fraud issue because you're going to create a narrative, a micro narrative that doesn't agree with our administration policy. But you also have to have states that want to work with us. We need an all government approach. So what the president did by appointing JD Vance to be the head of this White House anti-fraud task force, and we've been doing announcements as you've been witnessing frequently highlighting these realities, is if I've got a problem at CMS and I'm the insurance company and I see that there's some aberency in payments, we've doubled or tripled the payments in an area, it doesn't make any sense. I can go to DOJ, FBI, the office of inspector general, and they're going to actually work for me with me rather and take charge of this issue to actually investigate crime. Or I can go to Scott Best in a treasury and he's going to actually use forensic accountants to find out where's the money getting laundered to? Like who are the big players involved? Because it turns out we have foreign groups that are involved in organized criminal activities and foreign governments, we believe, that may also be involved in these endeavors. These are not mom and pop setups. We need an all of government effort. And finally, governors have to feel the pressure. Governor Waltz stepped down in Minnesota because of pressure over the massive amount of fraud that he was unwilling to take charge of when he was governor. We had the governor, Maine has now stepped down, others may as well. If your governor's not willing to do their job, you the people should be upset because you're compromising your people and your state programs by not taking charge of the fraud. Medicaid has to be run by the states. Medicaid therefore should be matured and nurtured and for good reason protected by state leadership against this kind of fraud. And if the federal government has a stepping because our tax dollars are being abused, it's not going to be a happy day. To what degree is all of this fraud organized? To me, with my political cap on, that's what's most interesting. Not just that some scam artists are trying to build the system, but that there is a system of patronage that has politicians not just looking the other way, but really in some ways cooperating with it. You mentioned Governor Waltz. There are plenty of accusations there. So how organized is this? And who can we bring to account? Not just for stealing some taxpayer dollars, but for setting up a system that's fundamentally unjust? Well, I just interviewed a whistleblower yesterday from Minnesota. She worked in state agencies. She's a Democrat, by the way, who's raised a Democrat, was a Democrat. And as soon as she began raising concerns about the fact that there was a disproportionate amount of money being taken by the Somalians in Minnesota, she was quickly ostracized and blocked off. And she said the big problem there was they did not want to be perceived as racist. They want to be Minnesota nice. And that doesn't mean that you literally blind yourself to the reality of criminal activities. But because she was willing to call that out, she was ostracized. And I think that's part of the puzzle, that people aren't willing to just do the right thing. Part of it is they recognize that by doing the right thing, they might actually look worse in the eyes of their voters. Some people may not like the fact that you're going after criminal entities. And these are dangerous groups that intimidate witnesses. If you go to Flushing Queens in New York, you're not going to get any of the Chinese folks who live there to talk to you about the fraud that they're witnessing. But we know there's tremendous amounts of fraud, human trafficking by the way, lots of other bad things. Because once you tolerate corruption, it spreads widely. But there has to be a change in expectations. Many states have normalized fraud. Now think about this. If it's okay for a doctor to lie about a patient needing hospice by claiming that they're going to die when in fact they don't have any problems whatsoever that are there are mortal or even near the mortal, they're selling their soul. And what we have allowed to happen is got worse during COVID. When there was a general belief you could just throw money at the problem and hope it worked out. And then a lack of policing of program integrity over the last administration's tenure, you're left with a system where fraud is normalized, where corruption is what's always out there. So you're looking for your little handout. Like many countries that have fraud, it's systemic. Everyone gets a little piece of the action. Everyone dips their beak into the equation. But I was told this by a friend of mine, and this is a profound statement that he made. They said, when Republicans win the White House, everybody wants to be a secretary treasury. Everybody wants to be the ambassador to England. That's what Republicans seek. When a Democrat wins the White House, they want to get control of health and human services. Because that's where the big money is. Our budget's almost $2 trillion. And that money flows through many systems where all you need is a beneficiaries identification number to serve as a credit card. You can take advantage of the system. So we have got to create a world where taking advantage of our most vulnerable Americans is no longer acceptable. Yes, we need to do that. Two things I really desire. I would desire to totally clean up HHS with all of this fraud. I would also desire to be the ambassador to England. That sounds like a great job. Dr. Oz, we've taken up enough of your time. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you for everything you're doing and Godspeed on this very important task. Now we turn to a man who every day goes by will more likely need health care coverage. And that is of course Andrew Plavin. This Memorial Day, and I remember the first Memorial Day, this Memorial Day weekend, get 45% off an annual Daily Wire plus membership. That's too nice for these people. God, here's what you get. Exclusive member-only content like Real History with Matt Walsh, which has new episodes every single month. And frankly, we've got a lot more coming. Shows you haven't seen content you haven't heard about yet. All exclusive to members. This is the time to join 45% off dailywire.com, do it today or else. Do it. Do it right now. That's what I'm going to leave you on. Just go do it. I don't want to put any distraction in your head before then. No. And I hope everyone has a good Memorial Day. Good to see you gentlemen. See you next time. You too, Michael. Good talking to you.