Late Wednesday night, a source within the Cruz team informed Daily Wire exclusively that the Trump campaign had sandbagged Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) over his speech at the Republican National Convention. Cruz spoke at the RNC, where he congratulated Trump on his campaign victory, then spoke about the necessity for freedom and finally stated that Americans should &#8220;vote your conscience.&#8221; He was met with resounding boos on the floor of the convention; his wife Heidi had to be rushed from the room; according to reports, one Republican delegate physically accosted Cruz, and Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson refused to meet with Cruz.
According to the source, the entire Cruz speech was cleared by the Trump campaign. Paul Manafort, Trump&#8217;s campaign manager, expressly approved the speech at 4:30 PM ET. The source, who was standing on the convention floor at the time of the speech, said that Trump operatives were present, urging the crowd to boo. &#8220;This was orchestrated by the Trump campaign to make Senator Cruz a pariah within the party,&#8221; said the source.
&#8220;We made this arrangement weeks ago regarding the speech,&#8221; the source continued. &#8220;We said we wouldn&#8217;t cause trouble with the delegates, that Senator Cruz would give a speech, that Senator Cruz would not endorse. They agreed to that. That was always the deal. They saw the speech beforehand and knew what Senator Cruz would be saying. They offered no pushback on the speech whatsoever.&#8221;
In fact, the source added, a few hours before the speech, the Trump campaign had been in negotiations with Cruz for Cruz to play a larger role in the campaign, including advising on Israel policy. Minutes after the speech ended, the source noted, the Trump campaign instantly informed them that the offer had been withdrawn.
&#8220;Senator Cruz was a little surprised by the depth of the boos,&#8221; the source said. &#8220;Donors have been emailing, declaring that he&#8217;s dead, that it&#8217;s the end of his political career.
&#8220;But I don&#8217;t think this is all going to play out the way Donald Trump thinks it will.&#8221;

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EXCLUSIVE: Cruz Camp: Trump Campaign Approved Speech, ‘Orchestrated’ RNC Blowback To ‘Make Cruz a Pariah’

CONTINUE READING

Elon Musk and President Trump are at it again.
A rift has emerged in the Republican caucus between some of the tech bros and populist economists in the Trump coalition.
The Senate passed the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” but you have the economic populists who&#8217;d like lower taxes and big spending, and then you have the tech guys, and what they&#8217;re mostly concerned about is deregulation; they would like some subsidies aimed at things like AI and green energy.
Thus, we are seeing that all break out into the open with regard to Elon Musk.
“Critics say that President Trump&#8217;s mega bill amounts to an abject surrender in the battle for the future of energy,” <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/07/01/trump-clean-energy-tax-credits-renewables">Axios reported</a>. “The consequences for U.S. jobs, electricity prices and the arms race could reverberate for decades.”
Musk <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1939390933205991585">tweeted</a>, “A massive strategic error is being made right now to damage solar/battery. That will leave America extremely vulnerable in the future.”
Jason Bordoff, who leads the Columbia University energy think tank, said the bill could <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/07/01/trump-clean-energy-tax-credits-renewables">hinder the United States</a> in the AI race with China. He said, “Winning that race is going to require we increase electricity generation capacity in the US really fast by a lot. That soaring demand is creating tailwinds for natural gas and nuclear. But even those great sources cannot ramp up fast enough to meet the urgent near-term needs of data centers and AI infrastructure.&#8221;
He&#8217;s saying you need to throw everything at energy, including so-called renewable energy.
So this is a major battle that&#8217;s broken out again inside the tech-centric part of the Republican Party.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2230-member-exclusive?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=The+Ben+Shapiro+Show&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
Beyond that, there was supposed to be an amendment to the &#8220;Big, Beautiful Bill&#8221; in the Senate that was going to protect the development of AI in the United States by creating a federal moratorium to bar state-level experimentation with regulation on AI. Florida couldn&#8217;t have its own AI rules; California its own AI rules.
The idea was that there would be a federal ban on state-level legislation. The federal government could still legislate and regulate with regard to AI, but you don&#8217;t want AI companies having to navigate the thickets of 50 different state regulatory structures in order to develop, because we are in a national competition with China on the development of AI.
But the Senate voted 99-1 to strip a provision that would have blocked states from regulating artificial intelligence for the next ten years.
This is definitely going to hold up the development of AI on a national level.
All of this led to the massive clash now occurring between President Trump and Elon Musk. What exactly happened?
Musk decided that he was going to go to war with the bill again. He threatened to primary senators and congresspeople who voted for the bill. He also vowed to help Thomas Massie — the Republican congressperson who truly gets on President Trump&#8217;s nerves by voting against everything Trump wants — saying he&#8217;s going to help him in a primary.
President Trump then hit back with a long social media post of his own, seeking to frame Musk&#8217;s opposition as a bid to cling to his electric vehicle subsidies. <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114776149269773065">He wrote</a>:
<blockquote>Elon Musk knew, long before he so strongly Endorsed me for President, that I was strongly against the EV Mandate. It is ridiculous, and was always a major part of my campaign. Electric cars are fine, but not everyone should be forced to own one. Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa. No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE. Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this? BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!</blockquote>
He went right at Elon&#8217;s jugular, basically saying, “Listen, you started DOGE. Why don&#8217;t we examine the cost structure on the Tesla EVs? Why don&#8217;t we examine the cost structure on SpaceX and all the rest?”
This followed Musk pledging he would form a new party he calls the America Party. He wrote, “Nearly the entire House and Senate GOP will lose their primary next year if it&#8217;s the last thing I do on this earth.” He went out of his way to call out House Republicans who call themselves budget hawks, such as Andy Harris of Maryland, and Chip Roy of Texas, as well as Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.
Trump is saying, “Listen, buddy, you know, we are friends. We&#8217;re on the same side of this. But if you keep going after this bill and you&#8217;re doing so because you want a subsidy, we could just remove all of those subsidies.”
Musk <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1940025317701148864">responded</a> on X/Twitter, “So tempting to escalate this. So, so tempting. But I will refrain for now.” 
 
There are a few different factors clashing here, as I’ve said before. On an ideologically and politically pure level, Elon complaining about the “Big Beautiful Bill” is not wrong. It spends far too much money.
But that&#8217;s true for virtually every bill passed at the federal level. That&#8217;s just the reality.
I wish the American people approved of Elon&#8217;s spending plans. I do. I wish we were restructuring our entitlements in a serious way. I wish we weren&#8217;t going to sleepwalk our way like Thelma and Louise right over the cliff, that fiscal cliff that is going to come sometime in the next few years.
I wish we did all these things, but the American public simply is not prepared to do any of those things. And that&#8217;s where you enter the realm of the pragmatic, where President Trump lives.
Is this fight really about EV subsidies? Is this fight truly about political purism, or is it something more personal?
As I&#8217;ve suggested before, the fact that the Trump administration decided they were going to get rid of Elon&#8217;s hand-picked head for NASA — which Sergio Gore was apparently behind — is what ticked Elon off. He hasn&#8217;t let go of it. He&#8217;s still going after the bill. Because of that incident, as well as Elon&#8217;s idealistic view of how politics should work, it should not be a shock that Elon is now attempting to wield his power in a kind of blunderbuss fashion.
It&#8217;s also not a shock that President Trump is slapping back, essentially saying, “Listen, I&#8217;m the president of the United States. Thank you for your help. But I&#8217;m the president. I&#8217;m the one who has to do all this stuff. I&#8217;m the one who has to cut the deals, and I&#8217;m the one who has to live with it if we don’t make the tax cuts permanent.”
This bill indeed has a lot of pork, but so does every single government funding bill of my lifetime. There has yet to be a major government bill that is not a big-spending government bill because the American people lie to themselves all the time. We say we want lower spending, but when asked what we would cut, we start scratching our heads and looking around.
That is the problem if you wish to build a cohesive movement for serious cuts to the government.
That was never the MAGA movement. It wasn&#8217;t. I’ve been speaking publicly about not loving that about MAGA since 2016. President Trump was the one candidate declaring back in 2015 and 2016 that he was not going to touch entitlements. Although I am indeed a big fan of Trump, I’ve criticized him for that position for a decade, because I would love to touch the entitlements.
I think entitlements are a disaster area. They are bankrupting the country. They&#8217;re wildly ineffective as they currently stand. I think there are fixes that could be made to them. I think many of them can be delegated back to the state or local level. And I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s the proper function of the federal government to be involved in three-quarters of this stuff.
But my opinion is not the MAGA opinion. If you&#8217;re going to be politically pragmatic about this, you have to recognize that what this bill effectively is about, more than anything else, is making sure the tax cuts don&#8217;t go away, making sure defense is paid for, and making sure immigration is paid for, among other things.
Is Elon going to force Trump to fight again? I want to know what the endgame is. What is it that Elon is really looking for here?
If he wants to build a popular movement outside the government in favor of slashing and burning large swaths of the federal government, sign me up today. But if we are talking about the idea that someone like Chip Roy is unsuitable for big government, or if we&#8217;re saying the choices here are letting the tax cuts expire and taxes radically increase, and you still don&#8217;t get lower spending, I think most Americans will choose the bill.
That doesn&#8217;t mean that the bill polls particularly well, because the bill&#8217;s been criticized every which way.
But I guarantee you: If Republicans don&#8217;t get this done and the taxes do increase, that&#8217;s going to be even more unpopular.

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Elon Musk, Trump, And The Future Of The GOP

The Scavengers are on the move. 
Scavengers are people who wish to tear down the society in which they live. They have very little in common with one another other than that simple fact. They simply want to tear down everything. That explains the bizarre agglomeration of radicals from across the political spectrum, who seem to gather together to rally against our civilization.
We saw a lot of that this past weekend. There was a march that took place to end Pride Month in Ireland, including a drag queen with a Palestinian flag. 
How do you put all that together? There are no openly gay people among Palestinians.
At the Toronto Pride parade, they flew Iranian flags. Remember, Iran is a place that hangs gay people from cranes. And yet there were people running around with flags reading “Freedom for Iran.”
And now there is the Omnicause flag. You remember the “rainbow pride” flag? Then we got the “pride progress flag” which had side arrows coming in and added white, pink, and blue. Then they added black and brown, because, of course, there are trans people who are black and brown. And then you had intersex people who were added as a yellow.
And now they&#8217;ve added on top of that a heart containing the Palestinian flag, because all the causes are one.
The Omnicause has finally come together. And that Omnicause is the Scavenger mentality. It&#8217;s all the people from the Jean-Paul-Sartre-Hatred-Of-Western-Civilization Left to the Queer Pride Left, who have decided that they are going to band together to destroy the civilization that we all share.
You could see that in action a little bit earlier over the weekend during the so-called Glastonbury Festival, when a member of the British rap punk duo Bob Vylan got up and started chanting “Death to the IDF” and suggesting that if you were a white Briton and you wanted your country back, “F***  off. You don&#8217;t get to get your country back.”
All of which brings us to Zohran Mamdani. 
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2229-member-exclusive?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=The+Ben+Shapiro+Show&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
So for all of those who keep pretending that Mamdani is a normal Democrat who just has some progressive leanings, the hell he is.
He&#8217;s the Apex Predator of the Intersectional Scavenger Coalition. He is a person who&#8217;s perfectly comfortable talking about spending $65 million in New York City to trans the kids and also talking about “Free, free Palestine” and “Globalize the Intifada” and also how it is deeply important and deeply necessary to seize the means of production.
He&#8217;s not hiding the ball at all. He is a representative of a Left that has lost touch with reality and is now running specifically and solely in order to denigrate and destroy the civilization in which it lives. That is their goal. 
None of these pieces fit together unless you understand that they are all directed toward destroying everything, not building anything.
Over the weekend, Mamdani joined NBC’s Kristen Welker. He was asked about the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which he continues to seize upon and use.
<div id="attachment_941993" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-941993" class="size-large wp-image-941993" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222185391-864x576.jpg" alt="MEET THE PRESS -- Pictured: (l-r) Kristen Welker, Moderator; Zohran Mamdani, New York City Mayoral Candidate appear on &quot;Meet The Press&quot; in New York, NY, Sunday, June 29, 2025 -- (Photo by: Peter Kramer/NBC via Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222185391-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222185391-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222185391-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222185391.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Peter Kramer/NBC via Getty Images</div>
Understand that the term “intifada” means a violent uprising. That is how the term was coined. It is a term for a violent uprising, particularly against Israel. “Globalizing the intifada” means that you want an extension of a violent uprising all across the West.
The retconning that you&#8217;re seeing now, where people say “intifada” just means a nice, gentle struggle, is the same con pulled in the early 2000s, when some Westerners said “jihad” only meant internal struggle.
Mamdani was asked why he won’t stop saying “globalize the intifada.” He then cited free speech.
He can do whatever he wants. It&#8217;s a free country. But the question is not whether he ought to be allowed to say “globalize the intifada” as an American citizen. He is. The question really is: Is it a good or moral thing to say? 
One of the last refuges of cowards these days is to pretend that your free speech is being violated when you are criticized for saying something bad.
Mamdani’s father, a professor at Columbia University, said in 2021, “The resistance this time began in Jerusalem and spread to Gaza, now the West Bank and Palestinian communities beyond. This is not a conflict between Israel and Hamas. We are witnessing something far more meaningful, the birth of the third Intifada against settler colonialism.” 
You can see exactly where Zohran Mamdani came from. He is a merger of pro-jihadi leftism, a sort of cultural Maoism, a communist vision of economics, and an anti-traditional-virtue version of social politics. All of those things are combined together in a witch&#8217;s brew of nastiness, designed against the civilization that has made him now a famous person and made his parents very wealthy, famous left-wingers.
He&#8217;s embracing Islam, socialism, “free, free Palestine,” and marching in Pride parades in the same way that Ilhan Omar has. You think that Ilhan Omar is very fond of Pride parades or Mamdani — if he really is a religious Muslim in any serious way— is?
What it really is about in the end, as always, is Scavengers who seek to tear things down.
That is what they want to do. 
In the most colloquial sense, the highly-educated, intelligent Democrats are being cuckolded by Mamdani because they&#8217;re watching their party being stolen from them by Zoran Mamdani and cheering it.
They&#8217;re sitting there and they&#8217;re watching and cheering it because, God forbid, they should have to stand up against Zoran Mamdani and his vicious agenda for even a smidgen of a moment and lose the support of the hard Left.
It’s all disgusting and repellent.

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The Scavengers Are On The Move

Right now, the West is in its ascendancy, not in its decline.
Over the weekend, President Trump championed a peace deal that is now cut between Congo and Rwanda, brokered by the White House to stop the bloodshed in Congo, where a militia allegedly backed by Rwanda occupies huge areas of land.
President Trump explained that he is brokering peace throughout the world, saying, “This is a tremendous breakthrough. In a few short months, we&#8217;ve now achieved peace between India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, and the DRC and Rwanda. And a couple of others also, Serbia was getting ready to go to war with a group I won&#8217;t even mention because it didn&#8217;t happen. We were able to stop it.”
He&#8217;s right about that. He also continues to maintain his strength in the face of an Iran that has pledged further nuclear development. He said to Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, listen, you keep lying and saying that you won? You didn&#8217;t. You got your ass kicked.
“I&#8217;m putting out a little statement,” <a href="https://x.com/breeadail/status/1938650917127233987">he stated</a>. “I&#8217;m going to respond to the Ayatollah’s statement yesterday that ‘We won the war.’ Won the war? And I said, ‘Look, you&#8217;re a man of great faith, a man who&#8217;s highly respected in his country. You have to tell the truth, you got beat to hell … It would be great if they (Iran) didn&#8217;t have that hate. But the last thing they&#8217;re thinking about is nuclear weapons right now.”
“Would you consider bombing the country again?” <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgenq599kwo">he was asked</a>. “Sure. Without question. Absolutely. That would be unbelievable,” he answered. “But, you know, our incredible fliers; I call them the shots. These guys are unbelievable. Think. From 52,000 feet, they hit the equivalent of a refrigerator door. They actually hit it right in the center, so it&#8217;s much smaller than that.”
But at a time when the West should be resurgent and on the upswing, instead you have America&#8217;s major cities: New York City, L.A., and Chicago, being run by full-scale left-wing nutcases who are deeply ensconced with hatred for their own civilization. The same thing has happened in London in the UK. It&#8217;s been happening in France as well.
It&#8217;s a serious threat to the West. And the biggest threat to the West is not external at this point.
The biggest threat to the West is internal: the Red-Green Alliance, the communists/socialists, and the Hamasniks coming together in hatred of their own civilization.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2228?elementPosition=5&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
All of this ties into July 4. It&#8217;s going to be great. I hope you&#8217;re going to have a wonderful Independence Day, celebrating the foundation of the greatest country in the history of the world, but we should talk about a myth that has been purveyed about July 4 and about the United States in general.
This, of course, is the 1619 myth that “America was founded on slavery and that the Revolutionary War was fought for the preservation of slavery.”
There are many lies that are told about our civilization, particularly about the foundation of our civilization, in order to somehow claim that our civilization should be torn down.
If you were to poll the morons of Glastonbury in the UK who chanted “Death to the IDF” and mocked white Britons by chanting “I hear you want your country back. Well, shut the f*** up,” or the Democratic primary voters for Zohran Mamdani in New York about what they think of the United States, they would surely agree with the myth that America was founded on slavery.
It&#8217;s not true.
A huge number of the Founders overtly opposed slavery in principle. Even those who held slaves themselves did not provide significant defenses of slavery. That included George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Washington said, “There&#8217;s not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for its abolition.” Thomas Jefferson&#8217;s original draft of the Declaration of Independence called the slave trade an “execrable commerce” and “an affront against human nature itself.” John Jay said, “It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished, to contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others involves an inconsistency not to be excused.” Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton spoke against slavery as well.
Why was slavery included in the Constitution of the United States originally? Because there were still slave-holding states in the United States. Many of the northern states were not slave holding states, but the southern states were. And the question was, could you get together a coalition to defeat the British, or could you not?
This was not a fight on behalf of promoting slavery. Slavery remained legal in the British Empire until 1833. So this was not a fight in which one side was pro-slavery and one side was anti-slavery. Far from it. The leaders in America ideologically were not in favor of slavery. There was a practical on-the-ground consideration, which was that many of the southern states were reliant on slave labor. 
Again, that&#8217;s an evil not to be excused, but to claim that the Revolutionary War was about slavery is to be ignorant of history. In fact, as soon as the Revolution began, there were eight states that immediately came out and started abolishing slavery: Vermont, 1777. Pennsylvania, 1780. Massachusetts and New Hampshire, 1783. Rhode Island and Connecticut, 1784. New York, 1799. New Jersey 1804.
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As the Claremont Institute&#8217;s Arthur Milikh once <a href="https://www.heritage.org/american-history/commentary/1776-not-1619">pointed out</a>:
<blockquote>The Founders laid the constitutional ground for abolishing slavery. One example is <a href="https://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/1/essays/60/slave-trade">Article I, Section 9, Clause 1</a>, which states that Congress could prohibit importation of slaves starting in 1808. On the first day that this clause became operative, Congress passed, and President Thomas Jefferson signed, this prohibition into law. Congress took additional steps to restrict slavery. It passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territories. Seven years later, Congress made it illegal to build ships for the purpose of the slave trade.</blockquote>
It&#8217;s important to debunk some of these myths, because those myths become the basis for claiming that the West is uniquely evil. Slavery has indeed been an evil institution, but it has also been virtually universal. 
The question isn&#8217;t whether the Founding Fathers were hypocrites about slavery. Some were; some weren&#8217;t. The question truly is: Why did it take the West to end slavery?
In fact, slavery is still practiced in many of the areas that are favorites of the Glastonbury crowd. Many of the places that they are claiming are “havens of freedom,” that require “less of a heavy Western hand,” are places that are still practicing slavery.
A huge part of the Middle East still engages in slavery. Not Israel, but many of its opponents. That is the point.
July 4 spells a clarion call for human freedom, and it has been seen that way by right-minded people ever since.
This is why the very famous Frederick Douglass speech about what July 4 meant to the slave doesn&#8217;t say that July 4 is bad. It says that the problem with the 4th of July is that the principles that the Founding Fathers sought to instill had not yet been realized.
That is the right approach, a historically accurate and mature approach, instead of the leftist scumbag wing that simply suggests the West is uniquely evil when in reality the West is uniquely good.

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The Resurgent West: Why Today’s Triumphs Outweigh Our Critics

The legacy media have stonewalled letting President Trump have the win he deserves for his strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities. What President Trump did in Iran is one of the most historic wins of my lifetime.
Just to recap, Israel launched an overwhelming aerial assault on the Iranian facilities, nuclear and missile-based. They were going after ballistic missile development factories in Iran — their ballistic missile stockpiles, their missile launchers — as well as their nuclear facilities.
For nearly two weeks, Israel hammered the Iranians. But there was one facility in particular, Fordo, which was some 250-300 meters underground. And Israel did not have the ordnance capable of penetrating that facility. So President Trump authorized a B-2 strike using 30,000 pound bombs on Fordow, and in his words, “obliterated” the site.
The media won&#8217;t let that be the case, that President Trump used force to end the Iranian nuclear program and then declared the war over — and it was over.
It was, in fact, a historic win, and a win that we haven&#8217;t seen in American foreign policy in my lifetime: One strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities, a complete reshuffling of the deck in the Middle East with Israel as a regional powerhouse and Iran a supplicant, and no continuous war between Israel and Iran, no hot war continuing.
With no American casualties, by the way.
An amazing accomplishment.
But the media just won&#8217;t let President Trump have it. They won&#8217;t. They keep claiming over and over and over that, actually, maybe Fordo wasn&#8217;t destroyed. In fact, Fordo is fine. Maybe the Israeli-American effort was completely for naught, they claim.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2227-member-exclusive?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=The+Ben+Shapiro+Show&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
They have no basis upon which to say this, other than the word of Ayatollah Khamenei, who has been tweeting that everything is hunky dory from his bunker, presumably in Tehran, <a href="https://x.com/khamenei_ir/status/1938180907887698222">claiming</a> with astonishing chutzpah: 
<blockquote>With all that commotion and all those claims, the Zionist regime was practically knocked out and crushed under the blows of the Islamic Republic.</blockquote>
You have to be high on drugs to believe this. He was literally hiding in a bunker for the entirety of the war. His regime was so weak that the Israeli Air Force was flying continuous sorties unhindered over Iranian airspace, with zero casualties on the IAF side, zero, for two weeks.
And yet <a href="https://x.com/khamenei_ir/status/1938184845873844536">he says</a> that, in reality, the “Zionist regime,” Israel, was practically knocked out and crushed:
<blockquote>My congratulations on our dear Iran’s victory over the US regime. The US regime entered the war directly because it felt that if it didn’t, the Zionist regime would be completely destroyed. It entered the war in an effort to save that regime but achieved nothing.</blockquote>
The Baghdad Bob aspect in the Middle East is always absurd to Westerners. Ayatollah Khomeini trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, at least in terms of public perception, does not mean that he was not, in fact, hammered or that the nuclear program is intact.
But Khamenei <a href="https://x.com/khamenei_ir/status/1938185956793761808">tweeted out:</a>
<blockquote>The Islamic Republic delivered a heavy slap to the US’s face. It attacked and inflicted damage on the Al-Udeid Air Base, which is one of the key US bases in the region.</blockquote>
Nope. Actually, he called and he whined and begged the Qataris and the Americans to allow him to send a few missiles at the base, none of which actually hit.
Why am I telling you what Khamenei is saying? Because you&#8217;re hearing it echoed by the media. The New York Times and CNN reported that there was a Defense Intelligence Agency estimate that Fordo had not been knocked out, not been obliterated, not even been severely damaged.
It turned out that that was a low-confidence assessment by one of 18 intelligence agencies under the DIA. It didn’t matter. The media ran with it anyway. This became the top story in the media.
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How do we know that it&#8217;s stupid? According to the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/world/middleeast/centrifuges-fordo-damage-iran.html">UN nuclear watchdog</a> head, the director general of the IAEA, there was “no escaping significant physical damage after the U.S. strike on the Iranian facility.” Barak Ravid of Axios, a front man for Left-wing and isolationist agitprop coming out from various leak-driven parts of various administrations, <a href="https://x.com/BarakRavid/status/1938229914244682140">tweeted</a>, “I told Jake Tapper that a senior Israeli intelligence official told me that other than the word ‘obliterated’ the reality regarding the results of the attack on Iran is much closer to where Trump says it is than to where the initial DIA report said it was.”
All of this came to a head yesterday when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did a press conference. He crushed the fake news that&#8217;s been targeting President Trump, declaring:
<blockquote>Because you cheer against Trump so hard — it&#8217;s like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump because you want him not to be successful so bad — you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes. You have to hope maybe they weren&#8217;t effective. Maybe the way the Trump administration represented them isn&#8217;t true. So let&#8217;s take half-truths, spun information, leaked information, and then spin it. Spin it in every way we can to try to cause doubt and manipulate the public mind over whether or not our brave pilots were successful.
This was an historically successful attack. We should celebrate it as Americans, and it gives us a chance to have peace, a chance to have a deal and an opportunity to prevent a nuclear Iran, which is something President Trump talked about for 20 years.</blockquote>
He was correct.
Hegseth wasn’t done. He called on Jennifer Griffin of Fox News, who&#8217;d been one of the people who reported this particular DIA assessment.
<blockquote>Griffin: Do you have certainty that all the highly enriched uranium was inside the Fordo mountain, or some of it, because there were satellite photos that showed more than a dozen trucks there two days in advance. Are you certain none of that highly enriched uranium was moved?</blockquote>
<blockquote>Hegseth: Of course, we&#8217;re watching every single aspect. But, Jennifer, you&#8217;ve been about the worst, the one who misrepresents the most intentionally what the president says.
Griffin: I was reporting about the ventilation shafts on Saturday night. And in fact, I was the first to describe the B-2 bombers, the refueling, the entire mission with great accuracy. So I take issue with that.
Hegseth: I appreciate you acknowledging that this was the most successful mission, based on operational security, that this department has done since you&#8217;ve been here. I appreciate that. So, we&#8217;re looking at all aspects of intelligence and making sure we have a sense of what was what.</blockquote>
Hegseth got feisty with the media, and a lot of it was deserved. Some of the questions he was asked were absolutely ridiculous. He was asked by a reporter about the fact that he had suggested that it was “brave boys” who flew the plane when one of the people in the plane was a woman, and here was his response:
<blockquote>So when I say something like our boys and bombers, see, this is the kind of thing the press does, right? Of course. The chairman mentioned a female bomber pilot. That&#8217;s fantastic. She&#8217;s fantastic. She&#8217;s a hero. I want more female bomber pilots. I hope the men and women of our country sign up to do such brave and audacious things.
But when you spin it as, because I say “our boys,” — and bombers is a common phrase — I&#8217;ll keep saying things like that, whether they&#8217;re men or women. Very proud of that female pilot. Just like I&#8217;m very proud of those male pilots. And I don&#8217;t care if it&#8217;s a male or a female in that cockpit, and the American people don&#8217;t care. But it&#8217;s the obsession with race and gender in this department that&#8217;s changed priorities. And we don&#8217;t do that anymore. We don&#8217;t play your little games.</blockquote>
You could see how deeply, deeply annoyed Hegseth was along with the entire administration, having to explain that when you drop 12 bunker-busters on an Iranian nuclear site and destroy their nuclear facilities — or at the very least render them completely inoperable — and then the media lie about it and seek any speck of information to discredit that — it is deeply annoying.
And it should be deeply annoying. The media refuse to give President Trump the win he deeply deserves.
Simply put, they are trash.

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Hegseth Wrecks Trump-Hating Media

New York City is on the verge of electing an actual communist mayor of the city, and this requires us to ask a question.
Why?
What is happening with the Left that they&#8217;ve decided to opt for Bernie Sanders over anything like a mainstream Democratic Party candidate?
Of course, this has been coming for a long time. Bernie Sanders ran an incredibly strong race against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Bernie Sanders then ran an incredibly strong race against Joe Biden in 2020.
Thus, there is something happening inside the Democratic Party — and it&#8217;s growing —and it&#8217;s growing — and it&#8217;s growing. That doesn&#8217;t mean the Democratic Party is growing and growing. In fact, the Democratic Party is shrinking even as this movement is growing.
It&#8217;s essentially a tumor destroying the health of the Democratic Party from the inside. But something is happening.
Zohran Mamdani, the former no-name, 33-year-old trust fund kid who’s a socialist and anti-Semite, who has worked for all of three combined years, I believe, in his entire adult life (and that includes him rapping), is now on the verge of becoming the mayor of the most important city in the West.
I think reasonable people look at this and think he is winning in spite of those things. I think that&#8217;s missing the point. He&#8217;s winning because of those things.
That’s because there&#8217;s an Omnicause on the Left; the Scavenger cause, which is to tear down all the systems. Inchoate rage at the system channeled into socialist economics, Howard Zinn-inspired foreign policy, and destructive hatred of traditional institutions.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2226-member-exclusive?elementPosition=6&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
That Scavenger philosophy has gained tremendous credence with the dissatisfied Left, a Left that achieved many of its victories and now has plunged itself directly into nihilism.
The problem with the Left over the course of the last several decades has been that they caught the car. In the 1960s, the Left in the United States began to catch the car with everything from the sexual revolution to the overturning of the constitutional order. In doing so, they then had to construct a system.
The problem is that when you construct a system and then the system fails and fails and fails again, and then the backlash happens in the form of a Donald Trump, you start to lose your mind, you start to become insane.
Thus, instead of them wanting to capture the commanding heights of the system and change the system from within incrementally, “make it better,” which used to be the Democratic way, now they just want to burn everything down.
That is not a particularly attractive message to a broader American public that does not want to burn everything down. The secret about President Trump is that when President Trump ran in 2016, pledging that he was going to burn everything down, the reality is that people realistically believed that he was going to burn some things down, but he was certainly not going to burn everything down.
They actually thought he would be a lot more moderate than he said he would be. It turned out in many ways that he was significantly more institutionalist in his approach from 2016 to 2020 than people expected him to be. Even today, all the crazy people who are yelling about him challenging democracy, won’t recognize that democracy is not under threat, that the courts are not under threat. This idea that Donald Trump is simply running roughshod over our most cherished institutions is a lie.
But Democrats have always used revolutionary language in order to push forward evolutionary ends. Interestingly, Donald Trump did the same thing inside the Republican Party. He used revolutionary language to achieve evolutionary ends. All of that is normal politics in the United States.
That’s what&#8217;s currently happening to the Left. Bernie Sanders and his entire wing of the party are using revolutionary language because they want an actual revolution. This is why you have seen the Left nodding at riots over the course of the last decade, at actual attempts at revolution in the streets.
It&#8217;s why so much of the Left was fine with Luigi Mangione shooting the United Healthcare CEO, because revolution requires a few broken eggs, and it is why Bernie Sanders now has the whip hand in the Democratic Party.
Zohran Mamdani is simply channeling Bernie Sanders at this point, with a few added features. He&#8217;s ethnically diverse, he&#8217;s not originally born in America, his father is a postcolonial studies professor at Columbia University of Shia Muslim descent, and his mother is an Indian-American filmmaker of Punjabi Hindu descent.
All these things add a smattering of exoticism to Zohran Mamdani. The fact that he is a rabid anti-Semite obviously sprinkles a lot of pizazz atop the Omnicause stew. He&#8217;s Greta Thunberg with a beard, with a more ethnically exotic background, and with a lot more charisma.
He is the face of the international Left in a nutshell. In his victory speech, he said:
<blockquote>Let me close with this. In these dark times, I know that it is harder than ever to keep faith in our democracy. It has been attacked by billionaires and their big spending by elected officials who care more about self-enrichment than the public trust, and by authoritarian leaders who rule through fear. But above all, our democracy has been attacked from within. For too long, New Yorkers have strained to find a leader who represents us, who puts us first, and we have been betrayed time and again after so many disappointments. 
The heart hardens, belief becomes elusive, and when we no longer believe in our democracy, it only becomes easier for people like Donald Trump to convince us of his worth, for billionaires to convince us that they must always lead. And I pledge to you that we will remake this great city not in my image, but in the image of every New Yorker who has only known struggle.</blockquote>
“Known struggle?” Are you kidding me? Mamdani has experienced a shocking lack of struggle in his young and non-achievement-oriented life. 
According to <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2025/06/24/heres-how-much-new-york-city-mayoral-candidate-zohran-mamdani-is-worth/">Forbes</a>:
<blockquote>At a panel in Harlem in February, New York state assembly member Zohran Mamdani discussed a piece of proposed legislation that would strip Columbia University of various tax breaks and redirect the revenue to fund the City’s university system. Mamdani’s no stranger to Columbia—his father is a Harvard-educated, renowned professor there, and he grew up in university-owned housing. “Columbia was our first landlord,” he told the crowd, according to an account in the student newspaper. &#8230; Forbes estimates Mamdani to be worth around $200,000. &#8230; Mamdani attended Bank Street, a prestigious Manhattan private school that now costs as much as $66,000 a year for elementary school students, before graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, one of the city’s best public schools. &#8230; he studied Africana Studies at Bowdoin College, a private liberal arts school in Maine.
After graduating, he worked on his mom&#8217;s sets. He tried his hand at a rap career using the monikers Young Cardamom and Mr. Cardamom, and “took jobs working on several political campaigns and community organizing efforts.”</blockquote>
That is legitimately his entire work history. This is a person who is campaigning for those who “have only known struggle.”
What is he actually saying?
What he is saying is that if you are unsuccessful in life, what is required is a revolution: a revolution led by someone like Zohran Mamdani, a trust-fund kid.
That&#8217;s what he is. And yet he is treated as though he is a revolutionary.
By the way, a dirty little secret about revolutions: They are very rarely led by true members of the low-income classes. They are usually led by upper-middle-income people who feel upset that they didn&#8217;t get their “fair worth.”
That’s Mamdani. And so he is taking Bernie Sanders’ economics and slapping on top of that all of the spicy peppers that makes so many liberals go absolutely gaga, particularly white, highly-educated, rich, elite liberals.
All the things that normal people see in Mamdani as problems are nectar to the Left.
When I say that Bernie Sanders is taking over the Democratic party, this is what I mean. AOC is Bernie Sanders wearing AOC’s face. Mamdani is Bernie Sanders wearing Mamdani’s face.
There’s a reason that leftists are marching with a queer flag and a Palestinian flag and an Iran flag and also voting for Zohran Mamdani: because they are about destroying the things that work — in the name of nothing.
It is not as though they want to build a better system. They do not have the capacity to build a better system.
This is about a shout and a cry at the “establishment,” screaming at the moon in the name of revolution.
That is Bernie Sanders.
Bernie has never been on a major piece of legislation. Bernie is a lifelong loser. He&#8217;s a loser.
But that doesn&#8217;t mean he’s not dangerous.
Losers can absolutely be dangerous.

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Greta Thunberg With A Beard

You finally did it, you maniacs! You blew it up.
We are now living at the very end of “Planet of the Apes,” when stunned Americans wander the beaches of New York City and find the Statue of Liberty half-buried in the sand. That’s because Zohran Mamdani, a communist pro-Jihadi insane person who seems to have been bred in the laboratory at Columbia University just to be a leftist pastiche, is now the mayoral frontrunner in New York City because he won the Democratic primary last night in stunning fashion over the disgraced former governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo.
According to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/nyregion/cuomo-mamdani-mayor-primary-nyc.html">The New York Times</a>:
<blockquote>Zohran Mamdani, a little-known state lawmaker whose progressive platform and campaign trail charisma electrified younger voters, stunned former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York on Tuesday night, building leads so commanding that Cuomo actually conceded.</blockquote>
Cuomo said, 
<blockquote>I&#8217;m very proud of the campaign that we ran, and I&#8217;m proud of the effort that we put forth, and I&#8217;m proud of the issues that we discussed. But tonight was not our night. Tonight was Assemblyman Mondani’s night, and he put together a great campaign, and he touched young people and inspired them and moved them and got them to come out and vote. And he really ran a highly impactful campaign. I called him; I congratulated him. I applaud him sincerely for his effort and let&#8217;s give him a round of applause.</blockquote>
So, Sad Sack Cuomo now wants to run as an Independent. We will find out whether that is real or whether that is not real, because after he registers as an independent — and now the mayoral race becomes Eric Adams, who’s running as an independent, and Cuomo running as independent, against Mamdani, who will be the Democratic nominee — Mamdani is pretty clearly the front-runner.
The Times continued: “Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist from Queens, tapped into a current and current of anxiety around New York City&#8217;s growing affordability crisis and his joyful campaign” — it&#8217;s always joyful for The New York Times. When you are a socialist nutjob, that means that you are filled with “joy,” so much “joy,” and anybody who accurately characterizes the state of New York City as not particularly good, that person is filled with rage.
They did the same routine about Kamala Harris. You remember she was so “filled with joy” and Donald Trump was so “filled with rage.”
It turns out that Trump&#8217;s perspective on reality was significantly more linked to reality than Kamala’s perspective.
Apparently, Cuomo was filled with “rage” and “despair,” but Mamdani was filled with joy.
There&#8217;ll be so much “joy” at these state-run supermarkets. I&#8217;m not kidding when I say that. That was one of the Mamdani proposals: he wants the city to run supermarkets because he believes that the profit motive is creating bad grocery choices in New York City, which is psychotic. Socialists have never been good at the distribution of food. That&#8217;s why they have bread lines in socialist countries. And Mamdani is not just a left-leaning Norwegian type. Mamdani is someone who believes in full-scale nationalization, the government running the means of production.
When we say he&#8217;s a communist, he&#8217;s an actual, honest-to-God communist.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2225?contentProgram=The%20Ben%20Shapiro%20Show&amp;contentType=ShowEpisode&amp;elementPosition=2&amp;location=Home%20Tab&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Home%20Featured%20Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
I think the most important thing here to remember is that young Democrats are basically sixth-grade voters in your middle-school election.
If you ever ran for student body president in middle school, you will remember that if you ran a normal campaign pledging, for example, that you were going to clean up the gym better, and then some kid came in and said, “I pledge free ice cream and no homework for everyone,” all the kids voted for that idiot.
That&#8217;s New York City when it comes to all of the Gen X, millennial, and Gen Z voters, particularly white people.
If you look at the voting map of New York City from Tuesday night, you will notice something very funny. Everyone who actually has to live in the parts of the city that are not the richest parts of the city voted against him. 
Mamdani is simply an essential boiling down of every luxury belief that upper-class, college-educated white people hold, and those beliefs are insane.
You wonder why I&#8217;m very much in favor of President Trump effectively wrecking the universities?
This is why. They have become indoctrination centers for Zohran Mamdani and his voters.
Blame this on the upper-class, college-educated white people. That&#8217;s who did this. It shows you that college makes people stupid.
As a resident of Florida since 2020, let me say this to all the high-net-worth individuals in New York City, all the people who pay taxes, all the productive people in New York City with investment firms and financial investments: We&#8217;re here for you, down here in Florida. We&#8217;re here.
But leave your values at the border because your stupid values bought you this. So don&#8217;t come down to my state and wreck my state. We&#8217;ll be checking ID as you come down into my state. We&#8217;ll be deporting all the New York illegal immigrants who come into the state of Florida if you come down here and you bring your Democratic crap politics to my state.
But if you&#8217;re coming down here as an act of contrition and repentance, noticing that your city has completely destroyed itself, noticing that your city is now trending toward full-scale socialism, wrecking all of the things that made New York City great, all of the investment, all of the creativity, all of the innovation, in favor of redistributionist nonsense — if you&#8217;re coming down here and you are simply bringing your productivity and your innovation and yes, your wealth, down to Florida from New York, come on down. We&#8217;re here for you. We&#8217;ll be here for you in your time of need.
And yes, the real estate prices may be a little bit higher since that&#8217;s your penalty for not having seen what was coming in the city that you helped to wreck over a period of time.

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You Finally Did It, You Maniacs

Opinion

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Lucy was once a rising star in the climate movement — she even helped get AOC elected. But after becoming a mom and living through 2020, everything changed. Now, she’s sharing her transformation on TikTok. Let’s talk about it.

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The Comments Section with Reagan Conrad

She Left the Cult of Climate Hysteria [Member Exclusive]

She Left the Cult of Climate Hysteria

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Proof For Your Liberal Friend: Public Schools Are Radically Left-Wing [Member Exclusive]

Public schools can be truly vile places. Show this video to your liberal friend as proof.


Proof For Your Liberal Friend: Public Schools Are Radically Left-Wing

Robert Spencer, author of "Antisemitism: History and Myth," joins me for a powerful discussion about the forces contributing to the rise of antisemitism across the western world.

The Andrew Klavan Show

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Can Michael Knowles get 1 kill in Fortnite?

Michael Knowles drops into the world of Fortnite with just one goal: get ONE kill in 15 minutes. Can he pull it off—or will he get eliminated before he even lands?

Watch as Michael navigates the madness of Gen Z gaming, dodges storm circles, and learns that cultural commentary doesn’t help much in a Battle Royale.

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