Punch-Graham-4

The Last Amigo

Bob Heckman

DW Opinion

interview

John McCain

Lindsey Graham

Vice President JD Vance&#8217;s decision to spend nearly three hours chatting with Joe Rogan on his podcast is the type of choice that drives consultants to drink more heavily than they do on a normal Wednesday. Devoting that amount of time to open questioning and long-winded theorizing about politics, culture, and conspiracy theories is a minefield for any elected politician, and one where it&#8217;s easy to create clips that will be edited and used to make half-baked arguments or warp what&#8217;s said into an unintended context.
Unfortunately for Vance, despite his well-known and much-admired communication prowess, that&#8217;s exactly what happened. On Iran, Israel, Jeffrey Epstein, and more, the vice president came across as far more interested in defending his own personal opinions than fulfilling the task of representing the Trump administration. Taken as a whole, the interview reads as if he&#8217;s already the 2028 nominee, speaking for the Republican Party he wants to manifest, not the one that currently exists under President Trump.
Time and again, the knock on this VP has been simple: He&#8217;s too online. He pays far too much attention to random social media accounts criticizing his tireless advocacy for a bad deal with Iran than he does to the possibility that the deal is, well, bad. He complained vociferously to Rogan that Israel is apparently funding some of the same people who are criticizing his deal online. But given that polls show the deal is unpopular with a significant portion of Republicans, and that only a small minority of voters think it&#8217;s a better deal for America than it is for Iran, Vance seems to be investing a gargantuan belief in the effectiveness of pro-Israel propaganda to move the needle.
Conservative Fox viewers and Daily Wire readers have never been sold on this deal, and now that it&#8217;s fallen apart, it&#8217;s something he should be eager to put in the rearview mirror — a collapse he should understand is the fault of Iran doing what Iran always does, not something he should blame on foreign manipulators. The sooner voters forget about Vance&#8217;s cheerleading for a doomed plan as his first major foray into foreign policy, the better it is for him.
For a vice president who seems to view the world more through the lens of podcasters than real life, the prescription is clear. The biggest viral trend over the past few months for American parents is in favor of giving kids a &#8220;nineties summer&#8221; — minimal screen time, maximum outdoor time, a throwback to the America where the rare moment of connecting to the internet came with the crackling sound of AOL dial-up and people focused on the real world of their neighbors and friends, long before the word &#8220;podcast&#8221; even existed. Perhaps that&#8217;s the recipe the vice president needs to reset, and get back to being the effective voice for this administration he was in its first year. Let the podcasts roll on. Everybody needs a break sometimes.

US-POLITICS-TRUMP

JD Vance Is In Desperate Need Of A Nineties Summer

Foreign Policy

Iran war

JD Vance

Trump Administration

Jennica Pounds, also known as DataRepublican, is a data analyst and <a href="https://datarepublican.substack.com/">self-described</a> algorithm geek. In the Weekend Punch interview, she speaks with The Daily Wire about debunking wild conspiratorial claims surrounding Charlie Kirk&#8217;s assassination, widespread skepticism about information, and what it means to pursue the truth. The following quote is <a href="https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/2075384791080280453">Pound&#8217;s X response</a> to Candace Owens and her conspiracy theories in light of the evidence presented at Tyler Robinson&#8217;s preliminary hearing, which concluded this week.
<blockquote>
Hello Mrs. Owens,
You told millions of people that Tyler Robinson &#8220;wasn&#8217;t even there.&#8221; That you felt &#8220;confident stating that Tyler Robinson did not kill murder Charlie Kirk.&#8221;
He was on camera. Prone on the Losi rooftop at 12:22. Shot at 12:23:28. DNA on the screwdriver at 30 quintillion to one. DNA on the rifle at 1.7 octillion to one. He told his family what he did. His parents helped him surrender. He texted his roommate: &#8220;I am, I&#8217;m sorry.&#8221; He engraved &#8220;Hey Fascist! Catch!&#8221; on the ammunition a month before he used it.
You said police &#8220;didn&#8217;t even question&#8221; Lance Twiggs. He was interviewed twice. FBI the morning after. Joint state-federal team seven months later. His own attorney. Voluntary phone surrender. You laughed when you said it.
You told Shawn Ryan a shaped charge killed Charlie. That PETN was in his microphone. The medical examiner says gunshot wound. Bullet fragments were recovered from his body. A .30-06 Mauser with Robinson&#8217;s DNA was found in the woods. Neither side — not prosecution, not defense — has mentioned explosives. Not once in four days.
You said the shot came from below. The Losi building is above the amphitheater.
You called Erika Kirk a &#8220;clinical psychopath&#8221; to an audience of millions. You said the assassination was &#8220;an occult ritual.&#8221; You said Charlie was &#8220;sitting in a pentagram.&#8221; You told people Israel killed him because he refused Netanyahu.
You made over a hundred episodes. You built a franchise on a dead man&#8217;s name.
And the hardest fact of all: Tyler Robinson&#8217;s own defense lawyers — the people whose entire career is on the line to get him acquitted — have refused to make a single one of your arguments. Not one. They&#8217;re challenging DNA methodology. They are doing their jobs. You were doing something else entirely.
Charlie Kirk changed my life. He platformed my work when nobody knew who I was. He had my back when I was doxxed. I was the ten-thousandth most important person in his world and I will never be able to repay him.
So I did what I know how to do. I read every transcript. I watched every hour of testimony. I cataloged your claims and I held them up against what was said under oath.
Every single one failed.
I don&#8217;t know why you did this. I&#8217;m not going to speculate on your motives, because that would make me exactly the kind of analyst I&#8217;ve spent my career refusing to be. But I know what you did. You told people confident lies about a dead man&#8217;s murder, and millions of them believed you, and some of them turned that belief into threats against his widow.
The trial continues. And every day of sworn testimony is another day your words get tested against reality&#8230; under oath, on the record, where it counts.
I&#8217;ll be here for all of it&#8230; because just as Charlie defended me, I will do what little I can to defend his legacy and <a href="https://x.com/TPUSA">@TPUSA</a> and <a href="https://x.com/MrsErikaKirk">@MrsErikaKirk</a> from evil.
&nbsp;</blockquote>
Ben Domenech: You’ve done extensive research on the details surrounding the shooting of Charlie Kirk, particularly regarding the conspiracy theories that have spread online like wildfire. What topline details have you found that you think are most important for people to know?
Jennica Pounds: After a week, all of the conspiracy claims have been thoroughly demolished in court. [Tyler] Robinson&#8217;s own defense team isn&#8217;t making any of the claims circulating online.
They&#8217;re making procedural challenges to not show evidence. The people who have the most to gain from a conspiracy being real won&#8217;t even touch any of Candace [Owens]&#8217;s claims.
Data analysis is a skill. The hardest part isn&#8217;t connecting dots; anyone can do that, as Candace and her fans have proven. It&#8217;s knowing when not to connect them. When you find yourself pulling more and more people into your theory as villains to make the story hold together, that&#8217;s when it crosses into fan fiction territory. Except in this case, fan fiction is posing a very real threat to Erika Kirk&#8217;s life.
BD: We live in an era of heightened skepticism after a cascade of media scandals that destroyed public trust. It&#8217;s reiterated constantly – consider Graham Platner the most recent example. How do you go about breaking through that skeptical assumption – that everyone is lying – with the truth? 
JP: The skepticism is earned. People have been lied to by institutions for years, and they&#8217;re right to demand receipts. So I give them receipts. Now, I&#8217;ve made mistakes and been wrong. But I&#8217;ve never gone wrong by letting the receipts talk as much as possible.
Also, most people in this space try to destroy the person they disagree with. I&#8217;m not interested in that. What I do is show people the story they&#8217;ve been told, and then show them what the evidence actually says, and let the distance between those two things do the work.
The trick is that you don&#8217;t have to convince anyone of anything. You just have to make the evidence accessible and let people be honest with themselves.
BD: Candace isn&#8217;t alone. Her conspiracy theories – too many to count – have been echoed and defended by Ian Carroll, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly. What&#8217;s your interpretation of why people would entertain these theories as legitimate, given the evidence?
JP: I&#8217;m not going to speculate on anyone&#8217;s motives; that would make me exactly the kind of analyst I just warned you about.
What I can tell you is what I see in the data. None of these people have gone line by line through three days of sworn testimony. None of them have spent hours cataloging their own claims to track how far the theories have drifted from anything falsifiable. They built a narrative before the evidence was available, and the narrative is more important than anything.
And I&#8217;d be remiss not to mention Joel Finkelstein at The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a good friend, who has done more work than anyone studying the assassination culture that took Charlie&#8217;s life… and that may take more lives if it isn&#8217;t confronted. We need to learn the difference between data and narrative, and fast.
BD: There are clearly a lot of people obsessed with the idea that Candace and her supporters have uncovered some vast political conspiracy. If you were sitting next to someone who thought that way at a local bar, what would you say to them?
JP: I&#8217;d tell them that Charlie Kirk changed my life. He gave me a platform when nobody knew who I was. He stood behind me when I was doxxed by Rolling Stone. I owe him more than I&#8217;ll ever be able to repay.
Then I&#8217;d buy them a drink and tell them I get it. We&#8217;ve all been lied to by people in power, and the instinct to distrust official narratives is earned.
But finding the truth isn&#8217;t making a conscious decision to follow a different narrative to the prevailing one. It&#8217;s about following the data, the actual data, no matter where it goes. The data shows that many institutions are failing us and are taking escalating actions to maintain their legitimacy by coercion. That’s true. But the data also shows that Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk, and that&#8217;s becoming more obvious every day the court proceedings are televised.
BD: The effort that goes into heavy research these days seems harder than in the past, but also more accessible. What approaches and tools do you wish young journalists would use to pursue information and data rather than just chasing after everyone else?
JP: AI is a double-edged sword for sure. Most people use AI to replace their thinking – that’s why those stories of lawyers using AI-hallucinated citations are becoming more common.
For me, agentic AI has been a godsend in analyzing gigabytes of video transcripts, books, documents, website mirrors – and connecting them all together. It’s not unusual to burn 100+ subtasks to compile a 12-post thread. If AI is making your job easier rather than challenging you to meet a 100x productivity increase, you&#8217;re probably using it wrong.
BD: I have bottle 887 of Distilled Data in my bar. It is nearly empty. Can we get a rerelease?
JP: Glad you enjoyed it! I’ll petition my husband.
***

Punch-Pounds

The Data Cruncher Who Debunked The Biggest Charlie Kirk Conspiracies

Charlie Kirk

DataRepublican

Punch

Weekend Punch

&#8220;Death to America.&#8221; These are the only words Tim Sheehy needs to hear to understand what motivates the Iranian regime. The senator from Montana and former Navy SEAL understands this threat and doesn’t hesitate to speak plainly about what is at stake for America and the broader Middle East. In this weekend&#8217;s Punch interview, DW talks with Sheehy about the importance of the fight with Iran to the future of the region and American interests, the rise of radicals within our borders, and his views on the Trump administration’s foreign policy strategy.
***
Ben Domenech: Why do you think that what <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/republican-senator-delivers-blunt-message-on-iran-talks">you had to say</a> about this current situation with Iran hit a nerve with a lot of people?
Tim Sheehy: I don&#8217;t have any problem with us trying to come to an agreement with Iran. That&#8217;s not the issue. My issue&#8217;s not with the administration or the negotiating teams. The issue is with Iran. And as one of the few people on the Hill who actually fought the Iranians directly, and their proxies, who spent years of my life — and my wife&#8217;s a combat veteran and all my friends — fighting against the Iranian influence. I think it gives us a very clear-eyed realization of how insidious the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and their proxy groups really are and how brutal and barbaric they actually are.
Their designs on the world don&#8217;t end with Israel in the Persian Gulf or with Azerbaijan. They want a global caliphate, and they will literally kill everybody to get that caliphate. And they don&#8217;t want to kill them in a lethal injection snap of a finger. They want to brutally wipe us off the face of the earth, like what happened on October 7.
They want us to be in pain. They want us to be burned alive and destroyed. So I think we have to keep that in mind, and trust cannot be a component of our negotiations. We cannot have them say something, and we say something, and we trust that they&#8217;re going to carry it out. And I support President Trump and his team&#8217;s campaign. I think it was way overdue — the first president ever to do this. And I support getting a resolution to the conflict that truly has structural limits around it because we don&#8217;t want to invade Iran.
We don&#8217;t want 500,000 troops there. But I simply feel propelled as someone who fought there and who lost friends to Iran, to remind our side of this negotiation that we need to not forget who we are dealing with. We need to remember what they&#8217;re capable of and what they want because we don&#8217;t have to think or assume what they want; they tell us that every single day, and they act on it every single day. And that is death to America, death to Israel.
BD: Do you think that there is an attitude of naiveté about the Iranians that has perhaps seeped in over the last couple of years, just given the fact that people are so tired of foreign wars, but particularly of Middle East wars, that they perhaps downgrade that threat mentally?
TS: I think that is the wrong answer. I think it&#8217;s just general non-awareness of the threat. I mean, the average American, the average politician, the average person who works in government is not aware of what Iran has done, does every day, and is capable of. They&#8217;re just not. And that&#8217;s a good thing, Ben. That&#8217;s the whole point of these forever wars that everyone hates, and I get it. I fought them, too. I don&#8217;t like forever wars, but we&#8217;ve been able to keep this terrible threat at bay thousands of miles away for the last 50 years. And that&#8217;s a good thing. As a result, the average American, luckily, doesn&#8217;t have a personal experience with radical Muslim psychopaths who want to murder them and their family. And as a result, they&#8217;re like, &#8220;What&#8217;s the big deal? Why do we care about Iran? I don&#8217;t want six-dollar-a-gallon gasoline; this is unpopular. Let&#8217;s get back to bringing inflation down, housing prices down, and immigration under control.&#8221; All very valid points, and they&#8217;re not wrong, but they&#8217;re also just not aware that because we&#8217;ve kept these savages at bay, they actually still exist. And not only do they exist, but they also want to come kill us. And I don&#8217;t want it to be another 9/11. I don&#8217;t want it to be another October 7. And I certainly don&#8217;t want to funnel billions of dollars, as Obama did, into a terrorist regime that wants to kill all of us in any way possible. So I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s naive today. It&#8217;s generally not awareness of the reality of it. And I think the vice president and his team are cheering on the president&#8217;s directive to try to bring an orderly close to this. And I think it&#8217;s very important.
I&#8217;ve expressed skepticism about our ability to get a deal. I have not expressed skepticism about the president and his team at all. I&#8217;m simply reminding everyone that our counterpart here is not trustworthy. And our counterpart will say and do anything to create time and space to rebuild themselves and come at us. They have a very long view on this; they’re not in a hurry. They say, &#8220;You know what? Fine. This guy Trump, he&#8217;s pretty tough on us. Let&#8217;s just play nice. Let&#8217;s get a few hundred billion dollars of revenue. We&#8217;ll act like nice people for a couple of years until he&#8217;s gone, and hopefully we&#8217;ll get another Biden or Kamala or Mamdani for Christ&#8217;s sake. That would be a dream come true.&#8221; And then they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Great, we&#8217;re back, baby.&#8221; And then, with all the money we give them access to, they&#8217;ve rebuilt a whole new infrastructure.
One thing we did learn from this is that a lot of people underestimated how many drones and missiles these dudes really built. They had them buried everywhere, like squirrels with acorns. And on every mountain, they had a goddamn cave full of missiles. And we&#8217;re like, &#8220;Where did those come from? Oh, they came from the American taxpayer when we gave them the money to build them.” And I&#8217;ll be goddamned if we let that happen again.
BD: You talk about radical Muslim psychopaths. I think that you could be talking about them or you could be talking about the latest round of Democrats who ran and won in New York this week. Why do you think the Democratic Party is tolerating this degree of psychopathy on its side? And do you think it&#8217;s actually a more serious problem than perhaps Republicans have been paying attention to? As much as they talk about it, I feel like they didn&#8217;t take it seriously.
TS: I don&#8217;t think they did. And once again, I try not to be a history professor, but sometimes you have to remind people where these issues come from. As you well know, the Red Green Alliance goes back a long way. Radical Islam and Marxist communist ideology have been interwoven for the last 60 years. This is nothing new. The IRGC is really the most virulent example of that. The Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise in 1979 was very much a Red-Green alliance. So this collectivist, Marxist-revolutionary mindset is interwoven with radical Islamic ideology in many ways. And it&#8217;s always been there. Hell, even the Civil Rights movement and the Black Panther Movement were very tied in with that. Muhammad Ali changed his name because of that. So there&#8217;s always been that tie. But I think what&#8217;s happened lately is there&#8217;s been a very targeted investment into our media markets by Muslim influencers who don&#8217;t like us.
They&#8217;re paying off people to say things specifically to incite opinions and events that are obviously, number one, antisemitic and number two, anti-American. It&#8217;s a very engineered attempt to undermine the fabric of our society. And the Democratic Party, of course, traditionally the home base for the American Jewish voter, shockingly became their vessel to do this. I shouldn&#8217;t say shockingly because, actually, it makes perfect logical sense, because the Democratic Party has drifted more and more into the Marxist direction of the past couple of decades, which again, is a natural home for radical Islamic ideology.
So I&#8217;m not surprised by this per se, but I am disappointed that the establishment hasn&#8217;t made a stronger effort to clarify their moral positioning. Because at this point, as you know, the Democrats for the last 30 years, anytime there&#8217;s a policy disagreement with Republicans, we&#8217;re racist, we&#8217;re Nazis, we&#8217;re homophobes, we&#8217;re transphobes, and we&#8217;re sexist. Pick your name, and they call us that. Well, now they&#8217;ve embraced an ideology that literally murders gay people, that stones women to death, that condones the rape and murder of innocent families on October 7, and then condones terrorist attacks that have killed thousands of Americans.
In a terrible way, it&#8217;s politically good for Republicans because they have removed any moral high ground, if they ever had any, to accuse us of being anti-women, anti-minority, or racist. They don&#8217;t have a soapbox anymore because their flagship candidate – the leader of the Democrat Party today – is Zohran Mamdani. That is who leads the Democrat Party. That is their mascot, and that is their messaging platform.
BD: You mentioned that this has been something that&#8217;s been fomented. There&#8217;s an interesting piece that ran in New York magazine recently called “Your Feed Is Fake,” which dug into the number of essentially AstroTurfed campaigns designed to help things go viral. They were looking at it in the context of mostly Hollywood, but also other things. Just to give one example, there were firms that were hired around the Sydney Sweeney Jeans ad that were fomenting and pushing both sides of that argument, meaning the negative and the positive at the same time, to gin up more activity. Do you think there needs to be some kind of transparency requirement, or more government attention, to the number of people out there who are paid influencers advocating for these DSA plans because they are everywhere?
TS: There absolutely should be. And to your point, I do think, though, the podcast-social media influencer world has reached its peak because I think in the 2024 election, we saw that the podcasters were a game changer, the influencers were a game changer, and that&#8217;s because it was legitimate. And I think it&#8217;s been so saturated now. There are so many podcasts, and so many fake influencers with AstroTurf content, that the average person is now starting to just not believe any of it, and they don&#8217;t have the bandwidth to absorb it all. So I think we&#8217;re going to start to see the influence wane. I think it already is waning, but I do believe, just like in TV commercials, there should be a requirement to disclose who&#8217;s paying for this. You can&#8217;t run a political ad without saying who&#8217;s paying for this and this is no different. So that would obviously fall within my purview as a member of the Commerce committee. And I think there&#8217;s already been discussions about that to say, listen, you should be forced to disclose who&#8217;s paying you for this podcast.
If a foreign government gave you $20 million to buy your podcast, well, you need to say that because if you&#8217;re going to pretend like you&#8217;re in your basement in the heartland with your Coors Lite beer and a rifle on the wall and act like you&#8217;re a red-necked hillbilly, but in fact, you&#8217;ve been bought by the Chinese Communist Party, well, we should know that.
BD: The issues related to Iran obviously flow into other foreign conflicts. And one of the big open questions is what does this mean for China – particularly their interest in Taiwan? Do you think that, given the way this played out, it makes China&#8217;s attempt to take Taiwan and absorb it more or less likely?
TS: I think on the whole, this whole campaign makes it less likely. Number one, we had a tremendously successful military campaign, and despite the media just looking for any reason to bash the president, despite the Democrats being abjectly un-American during this process by going after our troops. It was disgusting how the internal backstabbing was happening here against our campaign, against the country that&#8217;s been working after 47 years. So I think we displayed a level of precision and ferocity in those strikes all the way from Midnight Hammer through the latest campaign that China said, &#8220;That&#8217;s oppressive. They can&#8217;t do that.” But let&#8217;s not forget that China has not fought a war since the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953. So they have a big paper-tiger military that should not be underestimated but is not combat-tested, unlike ours. So we showed extreme capability and ferocity in our targeting. That&#8217;s going to give them a good bit of pause.
At the same time, look at Ukraine and say wow, Russia – big, giant, big bear Russia – they&#8217;ve been beaten back and essentially knocked into a stairway now by little old Ukraine with a bunch of off-the-shelf drones and scrappy fighters and trenches.
So China will realize it&#8217;s a lot harder to project military power, especially across a body of water, than you think. It has really only been one time in history where military power has been successfully projected amphibiously over a body of water. That&#8217;s America during World War II with our island-hopping campaign and the Normandy invasion. It&#8217;s really hard to quickly and effectively move thousands of people across a body of water without getting your ass kicked. So I think that will be a tale of caution.
At the same time, though, if China is able to hack this deal in some way on the backend and recognize revenue from a very dependent Iran.
China is always dependent on cheap, sanctioned Iranian oil. That’s been a superpower for their economies. They get oil for cents on the dollar. With Iran being weaker than ever, they&#8217;re going to be more and more desperate to make a deal with China, and they may even give them cheaper oil, and China can take more of it for cheaper. Additionally, sanctions-dodging will continue. No matter what we do, they aren’t going to follow any sort of sanctions regime. So they&#8217;re going to want to try to find a way to continue to use the Chinese yuan as their exchange currency for oil, and that’s, of course, good for China and bad for us. So on the whole, this is going to be worse for China and the designs on Taiwan, but in the end, they might have better access to Iranian oil.
BD: I’m just going to ask a question on behalf of one of our younger staffers. She said, &#8220;Why didn&#8217;t we just keep bombing, and why didn&#8217;t we bomb the IRGC?”
TS: Well, that&#8217;s obviously a question for the executive branch. I&#8217;m not in the chain of command, so I can&#8217;t give you specific reasoning why. The reality is probably that a full collapse of the government would have required the follow-on commitment of ground forces, be they American, allied, Kurdish, or others, which I think would have required a broad alliance to support. And my assumption is that at the time, nobody wanted that. The American people have made it very clear they&#8217;re tired of ground wars in the Middle East. They don&#8217;t want it. And I think that the president said, &#8220;Listen, we&#8217;ll do what we have to do, but I think we can probably get this done without that.&#8221; And I think that&#8217;s where it ended up. However, I&#8217;ll say the president is absolutely locked and loaded and ready to go back in again for another round should they welch on these talks and resume their bad behavior.
***

Punch-Sheehy-3

Don’t Trust Iran, They Want Us All Dead

Communist China

IRGC

Taiwan

Tim Sheehy

Stadiums filled to capacity with fans in Collegetown, U.S.A. A marching band with full brass in sync with impeccable, crisp, choreographed movements. A cheer squad of young women wearing bright uniforms and brighter smiles — the Saturday ritual that is college football has taken a turn from the homespun, wholesome, right-of-passage, wistful alum, stuff of Americana to a multi-million dollar enterprise complete with eye-popping dollar bids over television rights, legal battles over players’ compensation, and the darker side of gambling. And that’s just football. College sports in the 21st century have evolved into a chaotic mess. But one senator is hoping to make sense of it all through a bipartisan bill. Will it be the last best hope of reviving the charm and spirit of college sports, or are we at the end of an unraveling American legacy? The Daily Wire sits down with Senator Ted Cruz to briefly talk about Iran, followed by an in-depth conversation to see if he can mark one in the W column and save college sports.
***
Ben Domenech: I want to get your initial thoughts on the MOU, this deal, and what you think about it in terms of pros and cons, risk and reward.
Ted Cruz: To the best of my knowledge, the administration has not yet briefed Congress on what this deal entails. I understand that the administration is doing background calls with reporters with the briefer, whom they identify as a &#8220;senior administration official.&#8221; And I&#8217;m told that the official read the MOU verbatim to the reporter. So I assume that is the text, but no one has confirmed it to me.
BD: Assuming that it is essentially the framework that has been publicly discussed and that has been going back and forth, do you think that it&#8217;s a satisfactory end to achieve the goals that this administration set initially?
TC: I am hoping there are more deep details and better details than what has been released so far. What has been released so far suggests that, unfortunately, the president is getting very poor advice when it comes to this deal. History teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is a bad idea. Under the terms of what&#8217;s been released, somewhere between $10 billion and $30 billion will flow to the Ayatollah immediately before they make even a single nuclear concession. I think that&#8217;s ill-advised. That money, if it goes to the Ayatollah, will go to fund terrorists trying to kill Americans and weapons that will be used to try to kill Americans.
It also appears to formalize a permanent role for the Islamic regime controlling the Strait of Hormuz. It is difficult to see what possible benefit to America could come from that.
BD: When it comes to control of the Strait, the idea that they&#8217;re going to wait 60 days and then start charging tolls or fees — however you want to describe it — for going through, it shocks me that that&#8217;s something that is acceptable to this administration.
TC: I do not believe the Ayatollah should be able to charge one penny for the free navigation of the seas. It has also been discussed that the financial reward could be $300 billion to the Ayatollah. If that is true, that would be three times more than the money Joe Biden and Kamala Harris funneled to the Ayatollah. It is a virtual certainty that if $300 billion went to the Ayatollah, that money would be used to murder Americans.
I&#8217;ll also say the idea that we should want a Marshall Plan for Iran to come in and rebuild Iran like the United States did for Europe after World War II makes no sense whatsoever.
President Trump was exactly right to initiate military action against Iran because, for 47 years, the regime has been waging war against America, has been the world&#8217;s leading funder of terrorism, and has been murdering Americans for 47 years. Nearly 1,000 Americans have been murdered by the Ayatollah and the Mullahs. That is why the president acted as a strong commander in chief to take out their military capacity, and it is not remotely in America&#8217;s interest for us to pay to rebuild that capacity that we just took out.
BD: Let&#8217;s talk about sports. Only a slightly less fractious moment for sports in America, thanks to the college system and the changes that have happened in recent years. And you have a bipartisan bill to save college sports, with proponents and opponents who cut across political lines in interesting ways. What made you feel like you needed to weigh in on this topic and have a federal solution on these matters?
TC: College sports is an incredible institution. At a time when Americans are divided on so many issues, sports is one of the few things that brings us together — students and alumni and fans and communities. Sharing your hometown team. It is uniquely American. No other nation has anything remotely comparable to what we have in college sports in the United States. College sports has also been an avenue for millions of young men and women to go to college and to get an education. Right now, there are more than 500,000 collegiate athletes competing across the country. Many of those are from low-income environments, where they would have few, if any, other viable paths to a college education.
And yet college sports is in crisis right now. Every week, we see another program being canceled, women&#8217;s sports being canceled, track and field being canceled, Olympic sports being canceled, and non-revenue sports being canceled. The transfer portal is chaotic, with student-athletes transferring two, three, four, or five times, which is not good for them. It&#8217;s not good for the college. It&#8217;s not good for the fans. It&#8217;s not good for the sport. And for a student who transfers two, three, or four times, the odds are vanishingly small that the student will get anything resembling a college education. If you&#8217;re moving from school to school to school, the academic environment is one where students are being robbed of the opportunity to get a meaningful college education. You have college sports being governed by endless lawsuits and injunctions. Eligibility standards are all but nonexistent because of the chaos. And you asked why Congress needs to get involved?
Well, that chaos was caused by the application of laws Congress passed, which means only Congress can change those laws. Only Congress can fix this problem. College sports, universities, and conferences have come to Congress, begging it to act. I&#8217;ve spent three years working on this problem, trying to bring Republicans and Democrats together. This is obviously a deeply divided time with real partisan differences on virtually everything, and miraculously, we were able to forge a bipartisan compromise to save college sports. And I&#8217;ve worked hand in hand with [Sen.] Maria Cantwell (D-WA), who is the ranking member on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. I&#8217;m the chairman, obviously. The two of us together have spent hundreds of hours negotiating this bill and reaching common ground. This bill is the only viable path for a bill that can actually pass the Senate and be signed into law. My hope is that we will get a big bipartisan vote behind the bill.
BD: From your perspective, what are the three biggest problems? You mentioned the transfer portal, kids moving around, not getting an education. What are the three biggest problems that your bill is attempting to solve?
TC: There are a number of different pieces in this bill that are really important. Number one is the transfer reform — it guarantees every student-athlete one free transfer, and after that, you can have a second transfer only in narrow, specified circumstances: if your coach leaves, your program is discontinued, or you&#8217;re the victim of sexual assault or sexual harassment. If you transfer a second time for any other reason, then that athlete has to redshirt a year. That provision alone will do a lot to fix the chaos because it ensures that athletes will not constantly enter the transfer portal and simply be acting as free agents, but rather will be student-athletes.
Much of my focus was not about the superstars — the Michael Jordans of the world — they&#8217;re going to do fine. They&#8217;re going to make millions of dollars. They&#8217;re going to be on the cover of Wheaties boxes. They&#8217;re going to do great. My focus is very much on the 99% of student-athletes who will never play in the NBA. They&#8217;re never going to play in the NFL. But sports provide them a pathway to get a college degree. It also teaches them life skills — hard work and grit and discipline and teamwork and sportsmanship — all of which set them up for success in the future. So bringing some sanity to the transfer portal is an important element of this bill.
Another important element of this bill is providing clear eligibility rules. Every athlete is entitled to five years of eligibility, a hard age cap of 24, so that you don&#8217;t have what we have right now, which is 27- and 28-year-olds competing against 17-year-olds. That&#8217;s not fair. And what it&#8217;s doing is crowding out high school graduates from the scholarship slots they used to get to go to school.
The bill also makes clear that professional athletes can&#8217;t compete in college sports. If you choose to be a professional athlete, you&#8217;re no longer eligible to be a student-athlete in college. Both of those provisions are very important. The bill addresses the problem from two directions: cost and revenue. On the cost front, the bill provides the authority to enforce the House settlement and slow the constant cost spiral. Right now, virtually every athletic program in the country is losing millions of dollars; many are losing tens of millions. And if Congress doesn&#8217;t act, we&#8217;re on a path that, within five years, there will be 30 to 50 schools playing competitive college football. They&#8217;ll essentially be a mini-NFL, and the rest of the athletic programs will collapse. They will not be able to keep up with the arms race, and when they cancel football, football is what pays for every other sport, so the remainder of their sports will go away as well. That would be a disastrous outcome. That would be bad for student athletes, bad for colleges, bad for academic programs, and bad for fans.
This bill, on the cost side, provides the authority to enforce revenue-sharing limits to keep costs manageable. And then on the revenue side, we provide the legal authority for colleges to join together and negotiate their media rights collectively as pooled media rights. That is designed to substantially increase the revenue that they extract for college sports. Right now, college football has roughly twice as many eyeballs. Roughly twice as many people watch college football as watch the NBA, and yet the NBA&#8217;s media deals are worth billions more than college football’s.
That&#8217;s because right now every conference negotiates separately, and they&#8217;re fractured. By allowing the schools to negotiate jointly, I believe this will substantially grow the available revenue pie, and that revenue is what will enable these programs to survive and thrive. It&#8217;s also what enables us to keep and protect women&#8217;s sports, Olympic sports, and all of the remaining sports that are not college football. And I underscore that media pooling is purely voluntary. The bill does not force them to do that, but it creates an avenue they can pursue if they determine it is in their interest to do so.
BD: How important is transparency in the NIL [Name, Image, and Likeness] world?
TC: I think it&#8217;s very important. The bill has provisions that require reporting of NIL deals and protect the rights of student-athletes to be compensated. The old system, where student-athletes could not be compensated, was unfair.
You had college sports producing millions of dollars of revenue, and everyone got a piece of the pie except for the athletes, and that was not a fair system. As a conservative, I believe you ought to be entitled to earn the fruits of your labor. And so this bill explicitly protects the right of athletes, number one, to participate in genuine NIL contracts. If a quarterback can sell millions of tennis shoes, then that quarterback ought to be able to reap millions of dollars as a result. Now, those NIL deals have to be genuine NIL deals for a valid business purpose. This also protects athletes’ right to share in the school&#8217;s revenue. Both of those are protected, but what it prohibits is phony NIL — essentially a booster with a bag of cash in a back alley simply paying an athlete to be at the school, and that kind of abuse, unfortunately, has been rampant.
By requiring reporting of the NIL deal, the bill is designed to ensure transparency. The bill also puts important restrictions on agents. One problem we&#8217;re seeing across the country is unscrupulous agents taking advantage of often 17- or 18-year-old kids who are not financially sophisticated, extracting huge fees and exploiting these young athletes. And so this bill creates an agent registry, and it caps agent fees at 5%, which is consistent with where they are in the NFL or the NBA, and it provides important protections for student athletes.
BD: Looking at the Brendan Sorsby situation, which obviously applies particularly to those who have issues with gambling, there are different polls that suggest that, given its ubiquity, it&#8217;s going to be a bigger problem going forward with athletes participating. What&#8217;s the solution to avoid this from being resolved just by local judges? There has to be a way to adjudicate this and feel like it has fairness and also understands these situations in ways that don&#8217;t feel like there&#8217;s something corrupt going on.
TC: The Sorsby judicial decision was indefensible, and it is a perfect illustration of why this bill is necessary and of the chaos that currently exists in college sports. I&#8217;m very glad, by the way, that Texas Tech made the right decision to no longer continue down that path, but if the Protect College Sports Act had already been signed into law, you would never have had the judicial decision in Sorsby because this bill makes explicit that eligibility rules can be fully enforced and that gambling is explicitly a basis for denying eligibility. Gambling will only grow as a problem. Gambling goes right to the heart of sports integrity across the board, so this bill provides the authority to enforce those eligibility rules and prevent another situation like what happened with Sorsby.
BD: How optimistic are you that you&#8217;ll be able to get it done?
TC: I’m quite optimistic. Right now, the bill has two Democrat sponsors and two Republican sponsors. So [Sen.] Maria Cantwell and I, but then also [Sens.] Chris Coons (D-DE) and Eric Schmitt (R-MO). On the Democrat side, both Cantwell and Koons are senior Democrats. They have a lot of respect in their conference. My hope is that the markup will produce a meaningful bipartisan vote. I don&#8217;t know if it will, but I hope that it will. We&#8217;re having very productive conversations with members of the Commerce Committee, both Republicans and Democrats, and trying to find consensus and common ground.
We&#8217;ve seen overwhelming support for this bill. Twenty-two conferences have come out and endorsed the bill. It&#8217;s been endorsed by the NFL, the NFL Players Association, and the NBA Players Association. It&#8217;s been endorsed by Coach Nick Saban and upwards of 50 college coaches across the country. Coach John Calipari has been vocal in supporting it. It has been endorsed by Notre Dame&#8217;s athletic director, who testified at the hearing. The breadth of support is significant. There have been a handful of critics, and I would say any critic bears the burden of pointing to the alternative, and I don&#8217;t believe there is a viable alternative. Some have pointed to the SCORE Act in the House. I like a lot of provisions of the SCORE Act. The House has worked hard on the SCORE Act, but Senate Democrats strongly oppose it.
In order to pass into law, we&#8217;ve got to get at least 60 votes, and the SCORE Act would get zero Democrats in the Senate. What made this difficult was negotiating a compromise that could actually pass the Senate. My objective is not just to eke by with barely 60 votes. My hope is to get substantially more than 60 votes — a big bipartisan vote — and to do that, we had to compromise. I made compromises that I don&#8217;t like. I think Senator Cantwell made compromises that she doesn&#8217;t like. And we tried to reach a middle ground designed to solve the problem, and I think this is the only path that can result in legislation that is actually signed into law and able to solve the problem.
***

Punch 5-5 – Fly Me to the Moon-1-1 (2)

Can College Sports Survive The Chaos?

College sports

College Transfer Portal

Protect College Sports Act

Ted Cruz

These are unprecedented times in politics, and they include unprecedented decisions on the part of political leaders – none more so than what J.D. Vance decided to do this week, in the midst of a book tour where no one talked about his book.
The vice president of the United States, the odds-on favorite to be the next presidential nominee of the Republican Party, decided to unequivocally bet his reputation and his future electoral prospects on an extremely vague and uncertain deal with Iran — one which if it comes to fruition (a doubtful matter itself) would result in tens and potentially hundreds of billions of dollars flowing to the regime of the new Ayatollah.
From the perspective of Washington Republicans, this is a move by a vice president who wants a political win. Having felt his skeptical views about the Iran conflict and other foreign policy actions largely ignored by President Trump, here was an opportunity for narrative success: a potential “forever war”, unpopular particularly with working-class Independent and younger Republican voters, brought to an end in a sweeping act of diplomatic acumen by the young veteran of past conflict.
The story is a compelling one. Instead of his potential presidential competitor, Marco Rubio, solving this problem, it would be Vance who stepped in to lower energy prices, relieve the pain on American working families, and also bail out nervous Republicans on Capitol Hill fighting to keep their jobs and their majority. And if you disagree, you favor — as he put it to Megyn Kelly — &#8220;[E]ndless conflict. They want this to go on until every bomb has been dropped or until every Iranian is dead.&#8221;
There is not enough straw in the world to build a man this size. But as for the deal, the devil is in the details, and they are not minor details: Immediate ability for the Iranians to move oil and profit from it; a vaporware rebuilding fund, sure to be filled with corrupt interests and repurposed for the usual items on the Ayatollah’s grocery list; unenforceable demands that rely on a pinkie swear — sorry, “gentleman’s agreement” — from the religious zealots who rule the country.
On Thursday, the vice president answered a question from The Daily Wire in the White House briefing room with a casual list of things that could bring resumed military action against Iran for violations of the memorandum of understanding:
<blockquote>
It&#8217;s just going to be a holistic approach where we look at their behavior. Are they funding terrorism? Are they leading attacks on other people? Are they trying to get centrifuges to redevelop their nuclear weapons program? There are all these questions that we&#8217;re going to ask about whether they&#8217;ve actually changed their behavior. Do they allow the inspectors in, as they have said they would do, or do they refuse to allow those inspectors in? A whole host of things we&#8217;re going to see, working towards a very successful resolution of this process. But again, it takes two to tango. And what the President is just saying is that we maintain economic, diplomatic, and military leverage that nobody else in the world has. So if the Iranians want to change, great — we&#8217;re going to help them. If they don&#8217;t change, we still got all the cards.
</blockquote>
The problems with this answer are obvious and numerous. If you have all the cards, why the capitulation? The Iranian regime has never, including during the latest operations, stopped funding terrorism through its proxies. Leading attacks on other people is part of their daily routine. The situation in Lebanon is impossible to guarantee. And as for future commitments to inspectors and changed behavior, the Ayatollah has no term limit — he can just wait a year or two and return to the regime’s behavior — and what then? Would a future President Gavin Newsom resume military action? Would a President J.D. Vance?
As an advocate for this new Iran deal, the vice president deployed his usual Yale Law skill: turn the situation into a false choice between boots on the ground, American casualties, and forever war, or this deal. What is the alternative? You may recognize the same rhetorical tics from an equally eloquent and unlikely Oval Office decisionmaker. At least this one has the virtue of coming after a near-decimation of the Iranian ballistic missile arsenal — but if that’s all this was about, why do they stand to reap all the financial benefits?
Vance clearly believes in this deal. His former Senate colleagues who supported Operation Epic Fury don’t understand the nature of it and resent the lack of any read-in on the details. Behind the scenes, several admit they view the deal and the follow-on negotiation as laughable, a punt that is unlikely to actually come to fruition, scoffing at the idea of a $300 billion fund and assuming that bombs will be falling again in months.
One Senator confided that they believed Vance was nuking his future political prospects by tying himself so closely to a major foreign policy endeavor that looks, for all appearances, like a doomed effort at “trust, but only verify if we have to.” It is a perspective echoed by others — but of course, they are making assumptions based on facts not yet in evidence, and for some, it’s a silver lining to a bad resolution.
Most vice presidents don’t have to stake their future political prospects on a major decision. But Vance’s political career was so brief prior to joining the 2024 ticket that this essentially amounts to the biggest thing he’s ever owned. How this deal turns out could end up being one of the biggest questions for him on the debate stage in two years’ time. That places an enormous amount of faith in the Iranians.
The vice president is clear about where he’s placed his trust. We’ll see how much that’s worth.

Vice President  Vance Holds News Conference At White House

JD Vance’s Big Iran Gamble

2026 midterm

Iran Nuclear Deal

Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)

I spoke to Texas Senator Ted Cruz today for this Saturday’s Daily Wire Weekend Punch interview, but he provided his immediate reaction to the widely publicized release of the memorandum of understanding with Iran. Here were his thoughts:
***
Ted Cruz: To the best of my knowledge, the administration has not yet briefed Congress on what this deal entails. I understand that the administration is doing background calls with reporters, with the briefer whom they identify as a quote, senior administration official. And I&#8217;m told that the official ran the MOU verbatim to the reporters. So I assume that is the text, but no one has confirmed it to me.
Ben Domenech: Assuming that it is essentially the framework that has been publicly discussed and that has been going back and forth, do you think it&#8217;s a satisfactory end to achieve the goals that this administration set out to initially?
TC: I am hoping there are more deep details and better details than what has been released. What has been released so far suggests that, unfortunately, the president is getting, I think, very poor advice when it comes to this deal. History teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is a bad idea. Under the terms of what&#8217;s been released, somewhere between $10 billion and $30 billion will flow to the Ayatollah immediately before they make even a single nuclear concession.
I think that&#8217;s ill-advised. That money, if it goes to the Ayatollah, will go to fund terrorists trying to kill Americans and weapons that will be used to try to kill Americans. And it also appears to formalize a permanent role for the Islamic regime controlling the Strait of Hormuz. It is difficult to see what possible benefit to America could come from that.
BD: When it comes to control of the Strait of Hormuz, the idea that they&#8217;re just going to wait 60 days and then start charging tolls or fees, however you want to describe it, for going through, it shocks me that this is something acceptable to this administration.
TC: I do not believe the Ayatollah should be able to charge one penny for the free navigation of the seas.
It has also been discussed that the financial reward could be $300 billion to the Ayatollah. If that is true, that would be three times more than the money Joe Biden and Kamala Harris funneled to the Ayatollah. It is a virtual certainty that if $300 billion went to the Ayatollah, that money would be used to murder Americans.
I&#8217;ll also say the idea that we should want a Marshall Plan for Iran to come in and rebuild Iran like the United States did for Europe after World War II makes no sense whatsoever.
President Trump was exactly right to initiate military action against Iran because for 47 years the regime has been waging war against America, has been the world&#8217;s leading funder of terrorism, and has been murdering Americans for 47 years. Nearly one thousand Americans have been murdered by the Ayatollah and the mullahs. That is why the president acted as a strong commander-in-chief to take out their military capacity. It is not remotely in America&#8217;s interest for us to pay to rebuild that capacity that we just took out.

US-ISRAEL-IRAN-WAR-POLITICS-TRUMP

Instant Reaction: Ted Cruz Blasts Plan To Send Billions To Ayatollah

Strait of Hormuz

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
Today is the birthday of one of my favorite British writers, Dorothy L. Sayers. The Oxford educated author, translator, and literary critic insisted on the L., as she was nothing if not a stickler for detail.
You may be generally aware of Sayers’ existence — more likely so if you have a library card, a Britbox subscription, or enjoy the sort of detective fiction that Rian Johnson has been ripping off for his &#8220;Knives Out&#8221; movies. These stories tend to have a much smaller number of deaths (and less grotesque ones) than the American “true crime” genre. The investigators, such as Sayers’ iconic creation Lord Peter Wimsey, are marked more for their wit, banter, and understanding of human nature than their devotion to forensics.
If you are a Christian, you may know Sayers as someone who, while not a member of the infamous men-only Inklings, was a close friend of some of its members, including C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. But that friendship did not include her Oxford graduating classmate J.R.R. Tolkien, who <a href="https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss2/53/">confessed</a> that he “loathed” her books, finding her depictions of sexuality hedonistic. In &#8220;Strong Poison,&#8221; when she introduces her own stand-in romantic interest of Harriet Vane, Wimsey is weighing the pros and cons of pursuing the woman: “She has a sense of humor &#8230; and brains &#8230; life wouldn&#8217;t be dull. One would wake up, and there would be a whole day full of jolly things to do. And then we would come home and go to bed &#8230; and that would be jolly too.” That was a bit too much for Tolkien in 1930, but then no one (at least no one normal) reads Tolkien for his takes on sex.
If you’re a true nerd, you may even know Sayers as a founding member of the renowned Detection Club, whose first members included Agatha Christie and whose first president was G.K. Chesterton. She famously authored the oath to be sworn over a skull by its invite-only members: “Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God?” She would go on to curate great collections of detective fiction published by some of the top writers in the field.
What you may not know is that Sayers&#8217; life outside of the world of British mystery writing was often stacked with personal drama. Prior to the publication of her first novel, she gave birth to a son out of wedlock, having discovered belatedly the father in question was married. She gave the baby up for fostering and never acknowledged him as her own. The daughter of a vicar, she behaved like nothing of the sort, despite her Christian faith. She loved to smoke and drink and ride her motorcycle, and as an advertising writer in the 1930s, she created the famed <a href="https://www.guinness-storehouse.com/en/discover/guinness-galleries/gilroy-advertising">Guinness toucan</a>, the ads for which you’ll still find hanging around your Irish local pub.
What certainly deserves to be known and appreciated more about her is that Sayers’ unique life and experience gave her an understanding of human nature that proved prescient for our day and age, and particularly for the fractious relationship between modern men and women. You can find this throughout her work, but its best distillation is a speech given nearly a century ago to a women’s society in 1938, which you can find published in full in the collection “Are Women Human?”
She opens her remarks by saying that she is unsure about the very word &#8220;feminism,&#8221; and that “under present conditions, an aggressive feminism might do more harm than good.” As she explained in the context of her university experience:
<blockquote>
Take, for example, the very usual reproach that women nowadays always want to “copy what men do.” In that reproach there is a great deal of truth and a great deal of sheer, unmitigated and indeed quite wicked nonsense … That battle was won, and rightly won, for women. But there is a sillier side to the university education of women. I have noticed lately, and with regret, a tendency on the part of the women’s colleges to “copy the men” on the side of their failings and absurdities, and this is not so good &#8230; The women students, too, have a foolish trick of imitating and outdoing the absurdities of male undergraduates. To climb in drunk after hours and get gated is silly and harmless if done out of pure high spirits; if it is done “because the men do it,” it is worse than silly, because it is not spontaneous and not even amusing.
</blockquote>
You can read the entire speech <a href="https://matiane.wordpress.com/2024/06/26/dorothy-l-sayers-are-women-human/">here</a>. The conclusion of Sayers&#8217; argument has always struck me as stunning for how much it reflects the tensions between the sexes that endures today:
<blockquote>
Indeed, it is my experience that both men and women are fundamentally human, and that there is very little mystery about either sex, except the exasperating mysteriousness of human beings in general. And though for certain purposes it may still be necessary, as it undoubtedly was in the immediate past, for women to band themselves together, as women, to secure recognition of their requirements as a sex, I am sure that the time has now come to insist more strongly on each woman’s — and indeed each man’s — requirements as an individual person.
It used to be said that women had no esprit de corps; we have proved that we have — do not let us run into the opposite error of insisting that there is an aggressively feminist “point of view” about everything. To oppose one class perpetually to another — young against old, manual labour against brain-worker, rich against poor, woman against man — is to split the foundations of the State; and if the cleavage runs too deep, there remains no remedy but force and dictatorship.
If you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it — not on classes and categories, for this will land you in the totalitarian State, where no one may act or think except as the member of a category. You must base it upon the individual Tom, Dick, and Harry, on the individual Jack and Jill — in fact, upon you and me.
</blockquote>
This is the warning we in the West should heed today. The anti-relational musings of the chattering class, the grinding down or caricaturization of masculinity, the runaway scared memes of whether a man or a bear in the woods is more dangerous to a woman — all represent in their deepest level a collectivist vision of sex.
This inhuman vision, advocated for by voices on the Right and Left today, is not just a danger to our pursuit of happiness. They are a danger to individual freedom itself. This is not idle talk. Recognize it for what it is: the seeds of Western suicide. Dorothy L. Sayers did. So should you.

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She Loved God, Booze, And Cigarettes — And She Thought Feminists Got Everything Wrong

Gender

History

Mystery

Upstream

The internet and streaming platforms haven’t just left a mark on Hollywood-style entertainment; the sports industry has felt the waves: a rushing tide that swept up cable behemoths like ESPN and publications like Sports Illustrated — even newspapers such as The Washington Post no longer carry separate sports sections. In just a few years, the industry that cultivated and created stars turned to the internet to recruit them. This is one of many changes to an ecosystem that dominates an increasing share of Americans’ time and attention each year, judging by NFL viewership numbers alone. Gambling, fantasy leagues, college transfer portals, and media startups have contributed to an evolution in sports and are the topics of discussion for DW’s Weekend Punch interview with Outkick founder, Fox News contributor, and Tennessee die-hard fan Clay Travis.
***
Ben Domenech: Obviously, you have just achieved something pretty significant when it comes to the world of sports media with OutKick. You were one of the OG people to recognize the space that existed that wasn&#8217;t being filled. How do you think about that sports media landscape now, and what do you think is different when you started OutKick?
Clay Travis: Good question. When we started OutKick, there was much more of a written marketplace for original content. If you remember back in those days, you might go to Deadspin, you might go to Grantland, or Kissing Suzy Kolber. It was the heyday of interesting written content that was being produced on a regular basis. That doesn&#8217;t really exist now.
The blogosphere was still a thing. Video hadn&#8217;t completely taken over, and everybody didn&#8217;t have one-minute social media clips that they were being inundated with on TikTok, Instagram, or even Twitter, where the virality has all gone video. I still think much of the news cycle was dictated by what people wrote rather than what people said. That&#8217;s the biggest thing I see as different in the marketplace right now compared to when we started.
BD: When you see the landscape now, what are you surprised by in terms of either the success or the failure of the worldwide leader to adapt to the changing cultural moment and priorities of fans?
CT: It used to be the case that ESPN made stars. And I actually think ESPN is now reflective of the larger marketplace. Other than maybe Fox News and maybe Netflix, I&#8217;m not sure anyone makes stars anymore, other than the internet and maybe YouTube, but you don&#8217;t have big media companies that deputize you and say, &#8220;You are now a star.&#8221;
One of my favorite stories back in the day was right before the show “Friends” made its debut. The entire cast went out together in Las Vegas, and one of the show&#8217;s creators was there with them and said, &#8220;This will be the last time that you guys can go out to dinner for the rest of your lives.&#8221; And you are going to be on after “Seinfeld,” you&#8217;re going on NBC, it’s a sitcom that everyone is going to see, and you are going to go from normal people to luminescent stars overnight.
That kind of world doesn&#8217;t exist. You can see it in the rise of Pat McAfee, where ESPN had to go hire people who were already famous. You can see it in the success that the Barstool guys have had. I still think of myself as a guy who came out of the internet, and you have to compete against everybody when you come out of the internet. You don&#8217;t get deputized, and someone doesn&#8217;t say, &#8220;Oh, this guy&#8217;s going to matter because we&#8217;re putting him on a show and there are very limited numbers of shows.&#8221; In fact, it&#8217;s kind of a fun question. Who is the last person in sports media to become famous from television? It used to be that you would find a Stephen A. Smith or a Michael Wilbon or a Tony Kornheiser columnist —  people who had had an opportunity to write, did radio, and then you put them on television.
That pathway doesn&#8217;t seem to exist for ESPN other than maybe, again, Fox News and Netflix.
BD: We&#8217;ve just seen the takeover of Hollywood and the box office by two creators in the horror space who came out of YouTube. Do you think at some point there will be a similar crossover effect from these YouTube personalities to a greater degree than it&#8217;s already happened, or are they their own animals and will stay within that lane just because of the nature of what they do?
CT: I think if you can make money, Hollywood and every other media company is going to find ways to make money more than they otherwise would. For example, I’m utterly fascinated that Star Wars, which has been popular since 1977, was dominated by two YouTube guys, even though Star Wars obviously had a 50-year head start on them in terms of recognizing the marketplace. And so I think what it represents is every generation wants to find its new people, and I think YouTube is more experimental, and when you&#8217;re more experimental, you can find out what works quicker than a lot of big companies can. If they&#8217;re totally wrong, they lose hundreds of millions of dollars. If a YouTuber is totally wrong, they might lose a few hundred thousand dollars. And so the scale of success is massive for them, but the risk that&#8217;s put on the table is tiny, and most big companies have the reverse.
BD: Let’s talk about those big companies. They&#8217;ve made huge bets on sports rights across the board, rights that are continually getting more expensive. Those costs are being passed on to consumers. You testified about this on Capitol Hill. What is the actual solution that doesn&#8217;t require some kind of breakup or major disruption that would be difficult for the marketplace to handle? Or is that something that&#8217;s going to have to happen if we&#8217;re ever going to get back to a point where people can afford to watch as many games as they want?
CT: What surprised me is the degree to which Republicans and Democrats across the political spectrum were furious with what NFL games cost now. The NFL is very popular and powerful, but there definitely seems to be the sense that fans are being gouged and that anger over affordability and access is also declining. I think this is a bad combination for the NFL.
It&#8217;s funny, I have said for some time — and I think it&#8217;s probably going to end up being the reality of where we end up — that somebody&#8217;s going to try to put together a bundle of streaming services, which just recreates what we had when we had the bundle of cable channels, and it was a great deal. Everybody with one remote control could sit and watch every game. You could jump from one to another. I have argued for a long time that fans really didn&#8217;t understand how good we had it back then. If you compare the fan experience watching games to 2012, for instance, back when we started OutKick, I think it was way better.
It was way easier to find your favorite teams. It was way more affordable. The analogy I used in my testimony earlier this week on Capitol Hill was this: I&#8217;m sure you remember the first flat-screen television that you bought, which was crazy expensive. It had HD. It revolutionized the sports viewing experience. I was at Costco the other day. You can buy a massive flat-screen television for $700. So we have higher-quality television at a much more affordable price. Meanwhile, you&#8217;re paying way, way more for the sporting rights, and you&#8217;re getting much less. And again, that&#8217;s a bad combination.
BD: In terms of the decision that the NFL has made to go in all these different directions, particularly to require setting up their own coverage, their own teams, and their own announcers. And then of course, you add the overseas product and their hopes for extending the game around the world, which is getting bigger and bigger. Do you think that they&#8217;re risking diluting a product, or is the NFL just so big that they can do whatever the hell they want?
CT: They do risk diluting a product in some sense. In September, I&#8217;m very excited. I&#8217;ve got Thursday football, Friday football, Saturday football, Sunday football, and Monday football. And then after a few weeks, I&#8217;m thinking, &#8220;Man, I don&#8217;t really care that much about Monday Night Football.&#8221;
It used to be that when you just had Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, Monday Night Football was really a big deal. Now it&#8217;s not to that same extent. That&#8217;s a challenge for the NFL going forward in maximizing revenue without oversaturating the marketplace.
BD: The NFL has decided to embrace gambling — I&#8217;ve heard the first radio ads for betting on prediction markets this week, and they&#8217;re essentially described that way, which surprised me a little bit. Do you think there&#8217;s any risk of going too far in that direction of making the game seem more disposable because fans are less devoted to their teams in a way that echoes what happened to the NBA? Or where people just don&#8217;t care about their teams anymore — they just care about stars?
CT: It’s what the fantasy football world has created. For instance, my kids want to watch every game, and they have an incentive to do so. I do think the game itself can be threatened when you&#8217;re allowing prop bets to become too much of a storyline because players certainly can be corrupted, as we&#8217;ve seen, and the overall game itself can risk being bogged down by not whether someone performs at the absolute highest level or even whether a team wins, but whether someone scores a touchdown or makes a reception. And I do think the gamification of the game itself does lead to monetization, but I think you have to remain aware that the game is still the primary story, not how individual players perform.
BD: Senator Ted Cruz has a bipartisan bill that is advancing, which is pretty rare for him. On the question of reform for college sports, they describe it as saving college sports. It does many different things that have generated controversy, not necessarily among the people who you would think would be politically on one side or the other. What is your particular take, and do you think that this would be a step forward or would create so much complexity that it would be very difficult for the different schools, the different institutions, and teams to adapt?
CT: The number one thing they have to have is an antitrust exemption. You can just look at what happened with Brendan Sorsby versus Texas Tech. You can&#8217;t have individual federal district court judges making default policy rules for different teams in Texas compared to Florida, California, or Michigan. Everybody has to play by a uniform rule. Right now, every time you try to put a uniform rule in place, a player who is disadvantaged by that rule sues.
It used to be that college athletes like Maurice Clarett sued to get to the NFL faster. Now guys sue to be able to stay in college longer. The second-highest paid basketball league in the world, after the NBA, is college basketball. So all the best European players actually want to play college basketball. Illinois effectively had an Eastern European All-Star squad and nearly won the national championship with it. So you do have to figure out basic rules. How many years can somebody play? How many years can they transfer and give an organization or entity the ability to put those rules in place?
What Ted Cruz presents with the SCORE Act — figuring out how to get something that can pass both the House and the Senate that just has a very basic framework to allow rules to be put in place — is going to be necessary. The absence of any rules themselves at some point is leading to such a chaotic situation that college sports are on a sort of runaway train.
Do you remember “The Polar Express”? There’s a scene in that movie where the train track runs out, and the train hits the ice and starts to spin in every different direction, and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;What in the world&#8217;s going to happen here?&#8221; I think we&#8217;ve reached the point where the train track has run out, and we&#8217;ve got a train on ice, and we really don&#8217;t have any idea how to control it or where it&#8217;s headed.
BD: When it comes to your recommendations for our European friends who are navigating the country right now during the World Cup, what&#8217;s something that those folks who are trying to go viral haven&#8217;t checked out yet?
CT: That they saw Buc-ee’s is pretty crazy. Somebody tweeted that Lionel Messi played in College Station before the University of Georgia did. I&#8217;m sure you saw that they brought out the War Eagle at Auburn for the Iceland versus Argentina game, if I remember correctly. It’s wild. I think the sheer immensity of America, when it comes to places, just walking into a Publix and looking at how many different types of peanut butter we have. I just think that the European mind doesn&#8217;t comprehend how much incredible excess we have. There&#8217;s that great stat where the British were actually told how poor they were compared to the poorest American states, and they just really had no understanding or comprehension of that.
BD: What’s the most underrated storyline in sports media today?
CT: The degree to which there aren&#8217;t very many successful sports media companies, period. right? There was a time when ESPN employed a lot of people who worked on ESPN.com. Hunter S. Thompson used to write at ESPN.com. — Bill Simmons. I started talking with you about the lack of writers. It used to be that writers drove content conversation and discussion in a significant way. There&#8217;s almost no one writing interesting opinion pieces now, and I think sports media suffers as a result.
BD: Should we feel happy for Timothée Chalamet, or has he led a life that is so charmed that we are allowed to hate him for being so happy?
CT: It reminds me of how today’s young Boston sports fans have won so many championships, creating an embarrassment of riches, which is such a dichotomy between everyone else. If you grew up from 1950 to 2000, Boston won almost nothing. If you were born after 1990 or 2000, all you&#8217;ve seen is Boston win. The guy&#8217;s got everything going for him and doesn&#8217;t seem to be wearing too many stresses on his shoulders.

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Somewhere today in America, erstwhile CBS anchorman Scott Pelley is chewing the living hell out of the arm of his glasses in a bout of uncontained fury at the way his bosses are fixing 60 Minutes.
Pelley, infamously the most anti-Trump anchor in television history (quite the accomplishment, considering George Stephanopoulos exists), went on a loud, unprofessional rant during a <a href="https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/scott-pelleys-embarrassing-tantrum-proves-bari-weisss-point/">meeting</a>. This memorable moment, sure to be enshrined with a shiny plaque, was reported with glee by reporters at The New York Times, The Guardian, and Puck – who had to work hard to get audio Pelley clearly wanted leaked. Pelley’s spittle-flecked invective against CBS boss Bari Weiss and new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton included referring to a list of recent firings as “Black Thursday,” as if letting go a list of hacks on a show that survives only based on the fact that it follows the National Football League was a date to be noted in the annals of history.
&#8220;She’s murdering 60 Minutes! … She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that,” Pelley reportedly said, telling his new boss he “would never be welcomed” at the show. “[Weiss] has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?&#8221;
As a former CBS employee for several years, Pelley was infamous for asking the stupidest questions in production meetings, and now he clearly wants the award for “big loud speech that establishes exactly why you’re not a newsman and hopefully gets you a severance package that can help stand up your new Substack.”
What inquiring minds want to know is: Did Pelley walk in already twirling his glasses, or did he wait til he got rolling?
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Scott Pelley rolling into that Bari meeting so hyped he drops his glasses <a href="https://t.co/jjkjLQHtBC">pic.twitter.com/jjkjLQHtBC</a>
— Benjamin Domenech (@bdomenech) <a href="https://x.com/bdomenech/status/2061510920531025923?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 1, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Here’s the real thing that bothers Scott Pelley: the era of the pompous Democrat television anchor is over. That role is filled by John Oliver and Jimmy Kimmel, and was formerly filled in his own house by Stephen Colbert. People don’t want a newsreader who lectures them simply by virtue of their ability to read a prompter. And they certainly don’t want that type of lecture from people who clearly hate half the country they’re reporting on every night.
I don’t know if what Bari Weiss is doing to CBS is going to work. Television is hard – I’ve been in it just as a commentator and contributor for a decade and a half, and I’m still learning. But CBS is a network institution with a wealth of internal value if it can be brought out of the dusty corners of decrepit leftism into the present day, and not just because of Jane Pauley’s CBS Sunday Morning segments on the history of the Erie Canal. The people that won’t be part of it are the Scott Pelleys of the world – people who don’t report, research, or find the news for themselves, but read it on a camera and feel like that gives them <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/curtis-houck/2025/05/23/cbss-pelley-gives-hateful-pompous-commencement-speech-smearing">oracular authority</a> over the direction of the world behind the little red light.
Chew on that, Scott.

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Somewhere CBS Newsman Scott Pelley Is Chewing The Hell Out Of His Innocent Glasses

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Ben Domenech