The Bulwark Podcast - Will Sommer: Conspiracy Theorists Are Behind the Wheel in the Republican Party

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

The people running the Republican grassroots are nativist populists, and it’s a space where opposition to Israel thrives, along with a heaping serving of antisemitism. Candace’s wild theories about the Charlie Kirk assassination has had a big impact among the young who get their news from TikTok and Instagram. And JD—who is the top-billed speaker at this year’s AmericaFest—is sending signals that he’s absorbing the nativist and anti-Zionist views among right-wing influencers like Tucker. Plus, Susie Wiles dishes on Trump and other top figures, and Stephen Miller’s wife is running a North Korea-style podcast with some of the biggest names in the administration—but with virtually no audience. Will Sommer joins Tim Miller. show notes Will's "False Flag" newsletter The recent Atlantic piece that Tim referenced Vanity Fair's interview with Susie Wiles Exclusive $35 off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/BULWARK.  Promo Code BULWARK

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. If you missed it at the end of yesterday's pod, for Bullwark Plus subscribers, I'm doing a Monday mailbag now. And many people gave me feedback on the amount of chores that I'm doing. So if you want to hear about that And don't want to give me feedback about that as well Or hear my answers to other random questions you all have Become a board plus member

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And I couldn't be more excited about it It is my colleague, author of the False Flag Newsletter one member of the fingering trio it's will summer how you doing me hey happy to be here it's good to have you it is perfect i've been wanting to just sort of do a deep dive on all of like the real housewives of maga infighting with you and we kind of penciled you in for today a while ago and and little did i know that it would be the day after the historic kandis owens erika kirk summit so um i feel very good about that we're going to get to it in a second first it is for people who maybe, you know, aren't, and they should be,

following the false flag newsletters as closely as they should be. Since you've joined the Bullwark, I want to read just a couple of the stories you've done for us this year. You reported on how the Blaze Glenn Beck's outfit identified the wrong pipe bomber from January 6th, and they identified the wrong person based on a gate analysis, GAI-T, like a horse's gate, and it seems like they're about to be sued. You've reported on a MAGA influencer who has healing centers where people sit in front of big-screen televisions, and supposedly that heals them. You went to a center. You have

reported on a right-wing meme account, accounts allegedly taking money from India, including Defiant L's. You put on Laura Lumeric, using Margie Taylor Green of having Arby's in her pants, the aforementioned fingering incident in the lobby of Turning Point USA conference. Mike Lindell, pillow man, texted you from the courtroom. I think the people are probably wondering, like, how do you get all this? What is how does this come to you? How does this come to you? you what is your consumption we see your output what is your input that leads to this yeah i mean i'm consuming this stuff pretty much constantly i obviously very online on places like twitter you know when the family goes to bed i that's when i hit the videos when i'm cooking you know pancakes for the

morning i say okay it's candace owen's time and i fire it up and so you know i i have a true passion for the drama and so when someone says you know here's a video of a guy getting punched out i go oh boy you know and then i then i dive in so you have a joy you bring a Jaude of Eve to the job. I do. It's not a burden for you. You know, you have to. I, you know, I would pay to do it.

You know, it is such a pleasure. There are so many absolute lunatics in this field. And they love betraying each other and talking to reporters. So it's a lot of fun. It's interesting. Like, you know, there's the old phrase that gets brought up a lot during the Trump era about, you know, you have to be careful when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you. That doesn't seem like a problem for you. You seem to have like a detached separation for.

these people in a way that I kind of admire but also wonder how like I also like you enjoy laughing at them from time to time but I find myself consumed with rage at times I find myself you know wanting to use their tactics back against them these temptations don't seem to afflict you why is that talk to us about your inner self you know well you have no idea what kind of dark twisted stuff I'm getting up to privately no I mean you know it's I think often you know it's I think often you And there are certain people, you know, who I cover who have sort of a sense of humor about it. And so, you know, they're personally nice, even if they're, I think, up to awful things for the country and other people. Some of them are not and they're rude and unpleasant people.

And I think, you know, seriously, you know, bad guys. But on the other hand, you know, at least we can take solace in the fact that I think for a lot of these right wing media personalities, you know, karma does catch up to them. I mean, I think about, you know, people who are just really awful people and then they'll get indicted, you know, that we build the wall guys. was running a griff, you know, or they'll turn out in some cases to be a pedophile or, you know, texting underage boys or something. And so, you know, often there is sort of a recompense waiting. You've been doing this now for, God, who knows, like a decade? Maybe more. Yeah, a decade now. Yeah, the Daily Beast. You had the Fever Dreams podcast. We've been blessed to have you with us for the last year or so. I'm just wondering, like, that trajectory, and this was going to take us into

Candace and Erica, but like, how do you assess where we're at now versus? as, you know, 2015, right? Like, do you feel like the fever swamps have gotten hotter? Do you sense any cracking? Just biggest picture. Yeah, I mean, I think the sort of the world of sort of like ring-wing media influencers, social media figures, has gotten a lot bigger. I think they've gotten more influential.

I mean, you know, if you had said to me a decade ago or, you know, whenever seven years ago, Laura Lumer changed herself up to Twitter headquarters. And if you had said, by the way, you know, in a few years, she'll be getting people fired from the presidential administration or, you know, able to block refugees from visiting America, stuff like this. I would have said, no, that lady, she's nuts. And she still is. But now she has all this influence. Or, you know, I think the audiences have gotten bigger. And I think so much of the right now is really being controlled and influenced by these personalities. I look at like Fox News and obviously they have a huge audience. But I don't, I don't

think those people are really deciding what the direction of the party is, what the future is going to look like. What was the Laura Luma refugee story? Oh, yeah. Did she block? This is so crazy. So it was Palestinians who had been injured during the war and had legs blown off, including a lot of children. And they were visiting the U.S. temporarily to get medical aid. And basically she said, oh, my gosh, like, look at all these Muslims coming into the country.

This issue did not exist as a talking point on the right. No one cared. You know, no one knew this was happening. And then within 48 hours, the State Department said, okay, don't worry, we blocked any Palestinians from coming to receive medical aid. That is an interesting transition to Candace because there is this horseshoe that people talk about. And sometimes if I feel like we throw that word around and not all listeners understand what we're talking about. But essentially there's this horseshoe theory that like the far right and the far left end up intersecting at a point and overlapping. And like you see like Tulsi Gabbard is a good example of this.

She was like a left wing populist who ends up now in Trump's administration. You know, you see and I talked about this in the last couple of weeks with Chris Hayes and Tommy Vitor. You see, you know, sometimes folks who are, you know, on the left and are critical of Biden, maybe legitimately critical of Biden for, you know, the policy of our administration in the Middle East and upset at the Democratic establishment and upset at APEC. And they find themselves online receiving Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson content. And they hear them talking quite passionately about how bad of Israel is. and they start to get like kind of drawn in is interesting you know and that this is one of the fissure lines right like i think that some of those people who you know were drawn to trump because they felt like he was the anti-war candidate or because they may be sensed an anti-semitic streak that

they liked or whatever that he didn't seem like he was part of the military establishment they liked him and now they get him and trump is in there and and what trump is doing is banning injured Palestinian citizens from being able to come to America to seek medical care to seek asylum. I mean, it's insane. But, you know, like that shows you kind of like, you know, the limits of that, that little horseshoe coalition, I think. Yeah.

And I mean, I think that's a lot of the strife that we're seeing right now in MAGA is this disappointment from, you know, what they're really billing themselves is sort of the America first wing. And a lot of these people don't trust one another. and then they're kind of disparate ideologically, but, you know, whether it's Marjorie Taylor Green or Nick Fuentes or or Candice Owens or Tucker Carlson, you have these figures who kind of thought they were getting a new Republican Party out of Trump. And in a lot of ways, it's sort of the same old, at least in terms of foreign policy. Yeah, you're getting the Muslim ban Trump, you know. He wasn't exactly subtle about this, right? Exactly. Well, I guess the one difference is he's willing now to take graft from Qatar. So he's willing to also take bribes from Muslim countries. Yeah, that's a good point. There's some great news this morning. My old boss, Susie Wiles, she wasn't my boss for long, but for people who don't know, she was the campaign manager,

the first campaign manager for John Huntsman's presidential campaign in 2012. That was the campaign I was a spokesman for. He was the most moderate candidate in the race. We hated Trump. We're very nasty to Trump, very nasty to Mitt Romney when he went to get Trump's endorsement. And Susie ended up having kind of like an emotional break during that campaign and left. So I never quite understood how somebody that could not handle the high pressure of the John Huntsman campaign could succeed in Trump world. But here we are. She's in Vanity Fair.

And maybe she won't survive. She has a very lengthy interview, or not one interview, I think 11 interviews with Vanity Fair. The details are out this morning. Among other things, she says that Trump has an alcoholic's personality, J.D. Vance has been a conspiracy theorist for a decade, and his conversion to Trump was, quote, sort of political because he was running for Senate. She said, Elon Musk is an avowed ketamine user. That was the one thing she said she's denied this morning, but it's on tape. Shell said he's an odd, odd duck, whose actions were not always rational and left her aghast. She said, Russell, vote. The budget director is a right-wing, absolute zeal. and that Bondi completely whiffed and handling the Epstein files.

Hmm. I feel like any time a Trump person like kind of speaks honestly about the administration, they sound like me, which makes me feel good, you know? Those quotes could have been

right here on this podcast, but do we have any sense at this point for how it's being received? Yeah, I mean, so right now, looking out at MAGA, as far as I, you know, as you said, it's been a few hours. I think people are kind of trying

to figure out how to react. I mean, there has been this sort of, among the people I cover, there's been this kind of simmer resentment at Susie Wiles, this feeling that, you know, she's this gatekeeper who won't let them truly run amok in the way they want. And so periodically you get these kind of thinly source stories that are saying, you know, Susie's the one who, you know, won't let us do really ramp up deportations or something like that. I don't think that's necessarily true. But I suspect that

they'll be happy, you know, this interview sort of suggests that she's on her way out. Yeah, Susie says in the interview, you know, basically that she hasn't had any big fights with Trump. She said, She's had a lot of little fights over little things. So I, you know, and she essentially says, like, she's not gatekeeping. I mean, she might be gatekeeping, you know, whatever, like, random pet issue that, you know, people in the mega swamp want to push onto Trump, like on all the big ticket items. And she says bluntly that she doesn't, she's not pushing back. One other thing for the story, we're going to go deep on this on the next level pod on Susie.

But one thing that's, I think, particularly relevant for your beat, this one to flag. is she was asked during one of these interviews about going Maxwell's transfer to a less restrictive facility is what was what the Vanity Fair is calling it kindly. Wiles says this at first. She said the president was ticked. It happened. He was ticked off. She adds, the president was mighty unhappy.

I don't know why they moved her. Neither does the president. And then she followed up and said if that's an important point, I can't find out. The reporter followed up several more times and Wiles said she's still not found out. So, magical, a mystery tour. And the course of the interview also talking about Epstein, she basically acknowledges that like there's this new part of the coalition, like the kind of math conspiracy theorists. And she's like, JD's kind of the point person for this.

I just said exactly like, she's kind of implying that. And it's like they care a lot about Epstein and Gaza. And like we got to figure out how to how to message to them. I don't think that's going to assuage any concerns that they just can't figure it out. I don't know. Who knows? It's a mystery how that happened. Well, that's a funny one because it's almost like they're suggesting, you know, this Epstein network goes deeper than we could ever imagine. You know, they're in the Bureau of Prisons.

They got Galane this cozy transfer coincidentally after this interview with Todd Blanche, where she exonerated Trump, which I'm sure had nothing to do with it. The Galane thing, I'm so glad you're focusing on this. Every time we talk about Epstein and there's going to be more Epstein news later this week, when the files are supposed to be released, we'll see if they are. It's just crazy how relatively rarely Galane comes up. because that is such a smoking gun that there was some kind of quid pro quo. She's sent to the nicest possible prison.

There's no explanation for it. And now, you know, obviously Susie Wiles, I think, detects that this is a problem because she's, you know, oh, I don't know. You know, I mean, they'll fire people in this administration in a drop of a hat. And yet the Bureau of Prisons apparently operates autonomously, you know, doesn't have to answer the president for anything. Like, how can you not find out? Like, what is there to, like, how hard could it be?

You know, like, she was in one prison. She's in the other prison. ask the person that transferred there. Why did they do that? Who told them to do it? It doesn't seem like this would be very challenging to figure out. She says, well, if it matters, I guess I could look into it for you. Well, yeah, I would say one of the most notorious criminals in the country.

Yeah, I would say it matters. Yeah, going to the club fed. It sure doesn't leave you feeling comfortable that there's not a cover up a foot if they can't come up with a clear answer to this. So we'll keep monitoring that. There'll be much more Epstein this week. Right, guys, I've got good news if you've been listening closely to my ad reads last couple of weeks. I've purchased some Christmas presents.

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why don't we just why don't we just start here she meets with charlie kirk's widow erika kirk yesterday for four and a half hours and um after the meeting uh she does not have the usual live stream that she does um instead she puts out this this video let's let's listen Four and a half hours later, I'm alive. I'm alive. I'm totally fine. And I'm sorry. I was going to do a show for you guys this evening, but I am truly exhausted. Very productive conversation. I asked every single question, I mean, from Egyptian planes, the Turning Point USA Faith. And I was very surprised by some of the answers that I got. And I think they were also very surprised when I shared certain intel. This probably should have happened a very long time ago. But I wanted to let you guys know, but I wanted to let you guys know, I am alive. She's alive. Candice is alive. People are worried about that, that she might be killed at the meeting?

Yes, this was a big issue. So, you know, there's been about two weeks of discussions about how exactly Candice would meet with Turning Point. She said, one ground rule, no assassinations, you know, which I'm sure they were happy to agree with. But, you know, she and her fans, I mean, she had claimed there was a hit team from France and Israel out to get her. And so her fans were really like, oh, my gosh, where's our Candace update? posted Instagram videos and TikToks of themselves, you know, pacing the house, where is Candace? And so, yeah, I mean, she had a lot of people convinced that, you know, this was going to be some kind of the French Legion was going to be waiting to sniper or something like that.

So let's just back it all the way up. I want to get into kind of like why this matters. For folks who have been blissfully unaware, like let's just take the lens all the way back. Like, what is the backstory here? Why is Candice afraid she might be assassinated like Charlie Kirk? Like, why did she have to have a beer summit? Well, not beer. I don't think they drink, but, you know, whatever.

You know, why they have to have a sparkling juice summit between Candace and Erica Kirk? Can you just kind of like walk people through the basics? Sure. So, I mean, Candice Owens worked for Turning Point USA. She was very close with Charlie Kirk years ago. She left, and I think roughly 2020, 2019, over some ardently pro-Hitler remarks, I would say. She said Hitler wasn't so bad if he had just stayed in his own. country. And so then there was kind of a distance there. She sort of went off into the right

wing media. Cut to the Charlie Kirk assassination, she has built this huge YouTube profile of her own. And then after the assassination, she basically says, you know, I'm going to get to the bottom what really happened. I don't believe the story that Tyler Robinson did it or the FBI's official narrative. And so for three months now, she's been spinning these conspiracy theories that increasingly we're implicating Turning Point USA, suggesting that specific people on Charlie's staff had betrayed him. And I think we're also suggesting that Erica Kirk was involved. You know, she kind of does a lot of insinuations. But basically that there was this grand plot and that everyone around Charlie Kirk was involved. And it was starting to, I think,

damaged Turning Points brand. Everyone was saying, you know, certainly online, whenever they would post kind of some milk toast turning point thing about how great Trump is, people would say, you know, hey, you murdered Charlie Kirk. So, you know, it was becoming a real problem. problem for them. She does do a lot of the insinuations. I did a video over the weekend on kind of Tucker and Theo Vaughn's interview where they were discussing Candace and where they're like being very just absurdly open to the notion that like she might have some points and that you go back and watch Candace's videos and it's a lot of like, I'm not saying a Jew jumped out of the trap door beneath Charlie, but here's a close up picture of a trap door that was, you know,

behind Charlie. Right? Like she does a lot of. of that, a lot of mentioning of foreign potential influence, you know, the cell phones there a lot of foreign cell phone numbers and the French Legion was on the ground. And she does a lot of this, you know, kind of conspiratorial stuff. And I think that like the main fissure, right, like obviously there's like the interpersonal real housewise part of this. Like Candace is mad and so-and-so, Eric's mad, you know, whatever. But like the main fissure here really is related to Israel, like, Candace, like, since the assassination has done a lot of stuff, like, where she, like, leaked text messages where Charlie would have said to her allegedly.

I don't know. Who knows what these sex messages are even true? Like, said to her that, like, he was starting to get annoyed with the donor class. It was, like, forcing him to do something about Israel or get annoyed with the donors who were complaining that he's having Tucker Carlson speak at his events. And there's a lot of kind of, like, stuff papered over. But it does kind of come down to, I think, that there's, like, a suspicion that Erica Kirk is more on like a traditional Judeo-Christian, we should be aligned with Israel side of the MAGA movement, and Candace is more on the side of this, like America First, conspiratorial nationalists, we've got to separate from Israel, et cetera.

Like, there's a lot of other stuff that's getting thrown out there, but that seems like the main breaking point. Is that fair to you? Yeah, I think that's right on. I mean, Candace Owens is extremely anti-Semitic. She has a history. I mean, you know, I mentioned the Hitler stuff. I mean, she has a history of, you know, she's talked about Jews drinking children's blood, done blood libel stuff. She's very critical of Israel and American support to Israel. But it goes way beyond that as well. I think you're right. That's the kind of the key fault line. This conspiracy theory, I think, really got going a week or two after Charlie Kurt's death when she started saying, well, you know, the donors, the pro-Israel donors to turning point were getting really mad at him. Charlie was about to flip and become more critical of Israel. And I mean, a lot of those text messages were authenticated. by turning point. They said, yes, he was saying, essentially, these Jewish donors are, they're alienating people. I'm getting fed up with them because they're so demanding. They demand

this kind of total fealty to Israel and support. They don't want any criticism. And so I think that really got a lot of it going. And so that is sort of the fault line there. Just kind of like setting the table about like the influence and how important this is. And even this morning, as I was preparing for this on social media, just kind of looking at their reactions to Candice, I see a couple of, like, more like mainstream Fox type Republican influencers, you know, basically saying that Candace has zero real life influence or presence outside of social media. Like, this is not important. One of them says all my IRL friends are Normies.

Most have no idea who she is. And I do think that's just wrong. Like, I think that, like, Candice has six million YouTube subscribers. Like, the word normie, like, is interchangeable. Sometimes people say normie. they mean people who have normal views, like Main Street views, and sometimes they say normie, and they mean average person. And like, if your person is a normie in the sense that they are college educated, they read

the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, depending on which party they're in, they are probably not big Candace consumers, right? But if you are younger, if you're a normie in the sense you're a regular person that doesn't read like news articles, really, but get your news from TikTok or Instagram reels, Candice is huge, like, and has a massive, massive reach in that world. That's always my assessment. How do you, like, judge, like, what matters and the extent of her influence? Yeah, I mean, I think she's really, really popular outside of not just kind of like hardcore online politics people.

But, I mean, you know, she got really into, like, celebrity gossip, the Blake lively, Justin Valdoni lawsuit. So I think she's expanded her audience beyond sort of a typical talk radio, Ben Shapiro world. And, you know, look, I mean, you can look at her metrics on YouTube, which I'm not saying are, you know, down to the view count accurate. But each video, she's hitting two, three, four million views. She's all over TikTok, Instagram. And, you know, I mentioned these videos of people saying, you know, is Candace going to make it out alive? These are not seem to be like lunatics. You know, they are people who are living in their homes. They seem like otherwise regular people who might be watching The Bachelor or something like that. And then they're also tuning in like a soap opera to this kind

of Candace Owen versus Erica Kirk thing. So I think she's very influential. I mean, when I talk to, you know, regular people. I mean, people know who Candace Owens is. As you said, she's huge on TikTok, among other things. I was describing her this weekend as like having a psychotic break over this. And I feel less confident about that assessment now. I think maybe I was a little bit, you know, rash with my language. Because it does feel like a very reality TV ification of this, like getting caught up in kind of liking the drama and wanting to create new drama. And so it kind of doesn't really matter, like honestly, like what her motivations are. But Like, she's, she's super skilled at, like, continuing to get attention from people outside of, like, the traditional political news, I think.

And that's, that's important. It's meaningful. That's how Donald Trump got power. Yeah. I mean, I think people keep tuning in because it's, there's this drama. And, I mean, I think it was savvy of her. She's played this thing with Erica Kirk very well, I think. You know, I felt like she was kind of running out of steam in terms of the conspiracy material.

If you actually listen to the show and, you know, I would not recommend people listen to it as intensely as I do. But, you know, you'll kind of tune out. It's like, wait, it's about a Ron Contra now. How did this get involved? And, you know, she doesn't do a great job of explaining it. But Turning Point, I think they made this decision about two weeks ago. Okay, you know, they were kind of like saying some of her stuff was accurate, some of her text messages, and I think trying to mollify her.

And then there was this sense of, okay, enough's enough. We have this big conference coming up, America Fest at the end of this week. Let's close the book here. And so they sort of issued a challenge. They said, meet us in person in Phoenix. And we're going to have a showdown over Charlie Kirk conspiracy theories. And she said, no. And I think, you know, it kind of seemed like she was wimping out.

But somehow she managed to broker this sort of in-person, private meeting with Erica Kirk. So I think ultimately she, at least from this round, has sort of emerged the victor. You wrote your last newsletter was like this title, what to do about the Candace problem. Like, it seems to me, like, just basically that you've got kind of Candace and Tucker and unclear, like, kind of who else, like on one. side of this, you know, and then you have like more traditional type Fox Republicans and, you know, like Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, those types on the other side. And then you've got some folks kind of like, you know, trying to straddle the fence. Is that, is that right? Or like, how would you kind of explain the battle lines? Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think on one hand, you have people

who are really, and again, I think a lot of it comes back to Israel. You have people who are really sort of staunchly pro-Israel, often Jewish themselves. So people like Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, and they are ardent Candace haters. Then you have people who I think are less tied to Israel as an issue and are maybe willing to sort of brook a little, you know, maybe hosted anti-Semite on their show, like in the case of Tucker Carlson with Nick Fuentes. So let's say like we have like kind of like Megan Kelly and Tucker Carlson there. And then you have this sort of insurgent and often, you know, racist or anti-Semitic group, people like Nick Fuentes, although he's clashed a lot with Candice Owens himself, Candace, and these kind of like lesser figures, like Ian Carroll,

who's another conspiracy theorist. And so there's this challenge that I think people like Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly face, where they want to be kind of cool and with it. And, you know, Tucker certainly has his own kind of pet anti-establishment issues, like being critical of Israel, praising Qatar. I would maybe separate Tucker and Megan from this because, I mean, Tucker is, Tucker's brother seems like even crazier than Candace Buckley, who's posting a lot. I think that's accurate. And then if you believe, well, it's in the Olivia Nutsi book in Ryan Liza, like in private, Tucker was telling them that Israel is part of the plot, you know, that is either supporting RFK or trying to stop RFK. It was kind of unclear, but he was very clear that Israel was involved in the Nutsi RFK plot, and that was like in private combo.

So I don't know. It seems like he might be more on the legit side. I think you're accurate. That's right. I think in this case, I'm trying to just say that these are people who, and, I think it's in exact. But Megan Kelly and Tucker, I think both, they want to kind of straddle this world. And she wants, Megan Kelly wants to have ties to this younger crowd like Tucker, but they also want

to maintain ties to this sort of establishment TPSA world. And they're being pulled because TPSA is basically saying, look, you've got to stop saying that Charlie Kirk's staff murder him. Here's the key person that is straddling the line, the vice president of the United States. As chief of staff, as I mentioned, said he's a conspiracy theorist, has been for 10 years in the interview with Vanity Fair. there was an article in the Atlantic yesterday that quoted me and other people talking about just kind of this generational divide on the issue of Israel where there's like some legit

elements to that and there's also generational divide on anti-Semitism right like both things are happening where it's kind of increasing anti-Semitism issues among the youth and J.D. quoted that article saying it was wrong and basically the only issue of anti-Semitism is that we're importing too many people with ethnic grievances. Everything's about immigration for JD. And then this influencer, Sarah Stock, I'm going to ask you to explain to us in a second, replies to JD, right-wing influencer. Actually, white conservative Gen Z don't like Israel anymore either, JD. JD replies, I would say there's a difference between not liking Israel and anti-Semitism. So JD's kind of trudging the anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism path there in a response

to a right-wing influencer, which is kind of creating. as it is that the vice president is engaging with a random right-wing influencer on X. But what you see here is J.D. now, who's the top-billed person at this TPSA conference and who has Tucker Carlson's kid on his staff. Like, JD is very much like trying to straddle this and like trying to be, you know, acceptable to mainstream folks, but also like really send a lot of signals. to people in the Tucker, Candace, Fuentes, world that he is hearing their arguments when it comes to nativism and anti-Zionism at a minimum. Yeah, I mean, I think he's really trying to avoid alienating this kind of young or, you know,

in the case of Tucker, not so young, but this kind of anti-establishment when it comes to to the view on Israel in the Republican Party, this group. And so you can see why he's trying to deflect it, I think, onto what's a safer issue for him, which is immigration, saying, look, why don't we just ban, you know, people from these countries coming in? I mean, clearly, Pierce, he's talking about Muslim immigrants in particular. Yeah. Who is Sarah Stock? She also replied to Judy. He didn't go back to it again, but he said, well, I have your attention. Can you please include India and the third world country ban? So, like, this is, like, she wants to ban people from India from coming to the country.

Like, this is the type of person that the vice president's engaging with online. Like, who is this? Yeah, you know, it is pretty odd when you put it that way that vice president is just sort of getting her thoughts and input there. I mean, Sarah Stock is like a, I would say like a C-tier right-wing influencer. She really shot to fame seven months ago maybe in the, if people remember the Sam Cedar Jubilee video, I know you're a Jubilee veteran, Tim. But basically she was one of the kind of people who pop up. And in her case, she was really sort of an avowed white nationalists. And Sam Cedar said, well, you know, I just don't want to bother debating with you. You know, she had some kind of like light turning point connection. I don't think she does anymore. But

she's definitely on kind of that more harder, right, racist end of it. So that's the person the vice president's taking input from somebody that was kind of doing white nationalist stuff in a Jubilee video with Sam Sater. Well, you can see her sliding that in. Yeah, as long as I have you, you know, here's another brown country. It'll be a real life I don't like. I got to tell you, I think maybe the biggest side of my success in my Jubilee video is that I did not create a single right-wing influencer.

None of them went viral at my expense. So far. So far. we might look back and say, this is where we got a future Republican president. You know, he made a big splash. I don't think so. I think that I neutralize them well enough for that. So anyway, I just, it's more meta in the JD thing because then I want to get to the M-Fest

because he is obviously trying to like shore up any potential vulnerabilities he might have, assuming Donald Trump steps aside and he wants to be, you know, the next in line to carry the banner for the MAGA movement. And you could imagine a vice president in a different world thinking, well, okay, I need to focus on, you know, appealing to the more kind of non-political manosphere types, like, or a little bit less ideological. Or I need to kind of shore up our issues with the Christian base. You know, like there are all kinds of different factions.

The faction that JD seems the most concerned about shoring up is, like the most conspiratorial, like, mega nationalist element of the party. Like, he's got Tucker's kid on his staff. He will not disavow Guantas or disavow anyone that is making anti-Indian comments despite his family. Who he chooses to engage with online is, like, generally usually going after, you know, more whatever establishment types and, like, being more defensive of, you know, kind of the fringe right. And I think that tells us, like, where he assesses the juices

in the party. And I think that is, like, more important than where we assess. I think that it seems to me like the juices with the, you know, whatever, Candace Tucker wing of the party. But I think it's pretty telling that the vice president agrees with that. I think that's right. I mean, this is a world he's very familiar with. I mean, he's obviously a big fan of Menchus Moldbug, Curtis Jarvin, the would-be monarchist guy. I think he's saying, you know, I have to court this group. You know, I think it's also a group that he potentially could lose control of. I mean, you look at someone like Nick Fuentes, who's been very critical of J.D. Vance's

ties to be to like Peter Thiel. You know, there's this, even within this group we're describing, there's a lot of different factions. And I think one of those groups is very concerned about things like Palantir, this kind of techno surveillance authoritarian state that Peter Thiel represents. And so I think you're right to assess that J.D. Vance sees that he has to kind of keep the regular Republicans that he inherits as the vice president, while also not really angering the Groyper's and people like them. Let's go to the folks who are trying to straddle this divide and can keep it together at

America Fest. This is the end of the year turning point USA Fest. I've been to several times. The lineup is out. They do a Cochella style lineup, you know, where they put the, you know, the top-build people in the first row, and then you get all the way down. I want to read through the first couple rows of. who's speaking there.

Because I think it's pretty telling about where things are going with the party. And just again, to set the scene like, this is the biggest event of the year now. And like it's way over shadowed CPAC. There isn't really even equivalent of it on the left. I mean, you have tens of thousands of people coming from around the country to gather in Arizona at the end of the year for this. Like, it's just hard to judge this as not being like the most significant gathering on the right. And here are the headliners. J.D. Vance is in slot one, then Erica Kirk.

Slot three is Tucker. Four is Bannon. Five is Don Jr., then Tulsi, then Megan Kelly. That's the first row. Okay, Megan Kelly is the only person there that's like at all, like at any point could have been considered like a traditional type conservative. Then you get the next row, you get some Fox people and Ben Shapiro on there. Then you get Glenn Beck, who is just fresh off his. effort speaking to the AI George Washington that he created. And then you get the first

actual candidate, like on the ballot candidate besides J.D. is Vivek running in Ohio. And then you get Benny Johnson, Pizza Gate, Jack Posobiac. Then you get the first cabinet number, Sean Duffy. You get Tom Holman after that. Then Ken Paxton, not John Cornyn. He's in a primary in the Senate. You get crazy Ken Paxton, not Cornyn. And then you get a bunch of weirdos after that. Doesn't that list tell you everything you need to know? Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, you can see how big the kind of the right-wing media of it all is. And as you said, I mean, people like, these are not typical kind of Fox News Republican media figures either. I mean, Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, Amfest is very much, I think, who's invited and who's not, is really says a lot about the direction of the Republican Party, at least as TPUSA wants to control it to be.

It was a huge deal, even before Charlie Kirk's assassination, whether or not Tucker Carlson would be involved. divided to speak because he's become increasingly anti-Israel. And that's a lot of what the drama with Charlie Kirk and his donors was about, whether he would take Tucker off the speaker's list this year. So I think it's something that people on the right watch really closely in terms of who's in and who's out. Yeah. Like, who's not on this list?

Let's just go through. Mike Johnson. John Thune. You know, Mickey Haley. Is Ted Cruz on here? I don't see Ted Cruz. Let me get to Ted Cruz in a second. Those types of people, I mean, I don't know.

Spencer Cox was the more mainstream governor of Utah, who was a governor in the state where Charlie was killed. You might imagine a different world where he gets invited to speak about that. Nobody in that vein is speaking at all. You do have Russell Brandt, if you go down the list a little bit, and a bunch of other characters that you'd be familiar with that I don't know that our listeners will, so we won't waste their time. But I think that if you look at this, it's a very easy to see what the trajectory of this thing is. Like, you know, there's kind of this discussion of the crack up. It's kind of like there's still this fight over Israel that is happening and like Ben Shapiro is still there, like holding the ground on that side of the fight. But like the rest of it is over.

The people that are that are running the grassroots movements of the right are nationalist populace and the vein of Tucker and Steve Bannon. And like that's where things are going. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it is striking that someone like Ted Cruz isn't on the list. I would say turning point is also, I mean, you mentioned that it's kind of Amfest has surpassed C. Deepak. I mean, this is where the energy is, particularly after the Charlie Kirk assassination. I mean, the question is sort of, is it going to be turning point or is Candace going to get a slice of the action, something like that? Rather than, is it going to be, you know,

the National Review or Ben Shapiro? I mean, those people are more or less out in the cold. They have kind of their legacy audiences. They're not really driving anything. Just on Ted really quick. I was joking with Bill Crystal about this, I think was last week, about how like Ted seems to be now positioning himself to kind of carry the banner for, you know, non-conspiratorial, more traditionalist, you know, Republican values and strong military and strong role for America and the world. He went and had the fight with Tucker where he was supportive of the Iran strikes and Tucker was opposed.

There's a lot of videos went out about that. I noticed yesterday, Ted Cruz on his podcast, he's a competitor in the podcast space, did a kind of a tribute to Rob Reiner that was very much in contrast with the, you know, rhetoric we saw from Trump and his biggest allies online trashing Rob Reiner after he was murdered. It does seem like Cruz is going to try to kind of carry the banner of, I don't know what it would be, the type of person that would like put bumpers on like the most extreme elements of this and position himself as a counter to Vance and probably get a decent amount of, you know, more traditional Republican 70, 80 year old donors to fund that effort.

Yeah, it seems like he's trying to set himself up as sort of like, you know, a little mix of Trumpism and a little mix of the old Republican Party and we're going to combine it, whereas J.D. Vance seems sort of like this, we're going to go really mega on the sort of the least, I would say, appetizing aspects of Trump to the non sort of mega base with a little like kind of this techno authoritarianism, this new right aspect of, you know, we got to do it to our enemies before they do it to us. And, you know, certainly I think J.D. Vance's people see Ted Cruz as potentially their biggest rival amid the previous controversy over Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes, the Heritage Foundation got caught up and all this stuff. The Vance partisans were saying,

this is really kind of like a proxy war between basically Ted Cruz's people, people like Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, they're only heightening this issue because they know that J.D. Vance has to Ties to Tucker, and they're trying to damage J.D. Vance over it. Yeah, it's interesting. I think that effort is going to fail. My assessment is that the MAGA base and Republican voters in the Trump coalition is not interested in foreign wars or entanglements at all. I think that there's a, obviously, a vein of anti-Semitism. There's also just a vein of, like, just a rejection of the neocon orthodoxy on foreign policy that is the majority view in the right.

And I, you know, Ted Cruz, whatever, fighting a good fight against Tucker Carlton's bigotry is fine. Like, there's room for kamikaze soldiers out there in the world. But I don't know that JD has any of all. vulnerability there. You mentioned another thing, though, that I think might be a vulnerability of J.D. dance. And that is the, I believe the word he used was the techno authoritarianism. J.D. has, like, combined part of his coalition within the smaga infighting is basically, you know, the nativists, the magna nativists, and, you know, kind of a dip in his toe into the right-wing conspiracy world. But he also has combined that with very close ties to

Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen and David Sachs and that like the tech MAGA world and you've seen him take criticism on that from Bannon and others who say that JD is in the pocket of these big tech oligarchs and I think that

to me as I project out to 2028 that could be a more interesting fault line than the Israel and foreign policy stuff because I think that the MAGA base is probably more sympathetic to anti- big tech arguments and to the argument that JD is their puppet, then they would be to what

Ted Cruz is putting forth. What do you make of that claim and what are you seeing in that kind of fissure? Yeah, I mean, I think there are a couple issues there. I mean, I think the anti-big tech stuff, you know, operates on a couple angles, you know, potentially the surveillance aspect, the sort of, you know, C. Bannon talks a lot about his fears of like the singularity when we all become robots. But sort of on the less extreme aspect, the sort of more practically, I think there's a growing anger over like AI data centers in these communities and people's fear that, you know, you'll get taken over by a server farm. There's a lot of anger on the populist and I think really young white men over H-1B visas and the idea that, and this

dovetails with the kind of the anti-Indian hatred we've been seeing rising, and the idea that these tech companies are really like, you know, just importing all these workers. So I think there's a lot there. And then, you know, the other thing is what's another like big movement within the right right now is maha. And these are people who are like crunchy, you know, they often want like, you know, go away for less technology in their lives. So I think there's a couple little vectors here that I think J.D. Vance's ties to big tech companies could be an issue. I do think that there is like an anti-elite sentiment in both parties, like on the right, where a lot of these big tech guys are, you know, kind of representative of what they thought

that Trump was going in there to, you know, dismantle, right? Like the power of folks like that. And I think that potentially there's just an issue there, just like coziness. Like, these guys are globalists. Like, sorry, like Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, like, Mark Andrews. They might try to, like, pretend like they're not, but, like, they are. I think that's right. I feel like the tech oligarchs have been so successful at aligning themselves with the Trump administration that in some ways it's become a problem for J.D. Vance and how is he going to separate

himself, leaving aside his own personal ties. I want to go through a couple of other things, but just kind of to close, like thinking with the Amfest and the right, you know, the feud between Candace and Erica. and, like, where the energy is. Are you seeing any movement of the right or any excitement around, I don't know, like a three-legged stool of cutting taxes, cutting regulations, family values, and a strong military? Seeing any interest in that? No, I'm really not.

I thought you were going to say, Ann, punishing the French foreign legion for their misdeeds to Charlie Carter. No, I'm really not. I feel like so much, I mean, it's so divorced from policy in a lot of ways. I mean, besides maybe some big ones like immigration restriction. I think that's why someone like Candace Owens has been able to be so successful because she's so entertaining. The one thing I'd add here as we close on Erica and Candace says, you know, I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about this meeting. But I think it's already clear that there's a real difference of opinion in what happened there. I mean, Erica Kirk said, it's time to get back to work.

You know, so she's like, it's over. We're done. We're moving on from the conspiracy theories. Candace Owen says, you know, they were really interested in the intel I offered. So clearly, you know, she's trying to subsume them into the Candace Intelligence Agency. Did you have a favorite Candace take on the Kirk killing? I mean, the French Legionnaires being on the ground has got to be it. But the bee cults and the men in Maroon were also intriguing.

The guy with the hoodie was also intriguing to me. Did you have one to cut your eye? You know, I feel like the bee cult and the trapdoor, and you got into this in your bulwark takes. You unearthed a lot of classics that I had forgotten. I mean, for me, the craziest has been that she still says she's being hunted by a multinational team of assassin. yet she's willing to go hang out with Theo Vaughn at, of all things, Tucker Carlson's nicotine pouch party. You would think that would be an area where the French Legion

and the Israeli assassins would want to look. And if they're on a hunt for Candace, I feel like Tucker Carlson's nicotine pouch party in Nashville would be like something you'd want to stake out. Well, those French guys, they're probably smoking cigarettes. They're sticking out like sore thumbs. They're not packing the lip. that's can't kandis is safe yeah the tucker pouch kind of say has also penetrated the

marketplace somewhere over the last couple weeks where a friend was telling me that they had switched from zin to tucker's pouch because they like i don't know whatever the wetness or something the way it feels it's like Tucker Tucker has like i just i think it's important i got to know what people realize it's like Tucker has like now is like a is a nicotine pouch magnet like it's not you know it's one of these things where some of these right wing you know products are like it's just for like the freaks that that that consume right wing media and they're like I'm gonna eat the alternative Cheerios for Patriots or whatever and it's like not really a business Tucker's nicotine pouch business feels like a real business yeah I mean he was obviously an early adopter of the sort of the

Zin style nicotine pouch. I remember the Nelk boys on YouTube gave him a Zin pouch the size of a car. They airlifted it. And he was so excited. And I think he clearly decided to, you know, get his beak wet on this business himself. Beakwet's kind of a gross thing to say because he also says that the pouches help him, you know, engorge. That's what he says. Oh.

You haven't seen that? No. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Yeah. What can they do? claims that Zinn is the product for people that want to put the nicotine, insert the nicotine pouch anally, and that his product is for people that want to want to put them in their

gums and want to get extra. Anyway, we'll leave it with there. It's a family podcast. What else do we got here? Oh, our friend Katie Miller, another competitor in the podcast phase, Stephen Miller's wife, is interviewing today Cash and his girlfriend I want to play a little bit

of the teaser from that interview We are so excited to be joined by Cash and his beautiful girlfriend Alexis So I just want to clarify You're not Jewish I'm not You are not from Israel No

So how did we get to Are you a Mossade agent? You know, that's a great question Where's her ring? Just to clarify How often has he traveled to see you since January 20th? Um, that's, um, it's a sizzle reel. That's Katie sort of doing a highlight reel of her questions to them, teasing us about the answers. I can feel the how did we get to are you a Mossad agent about Cash's wife, just the aforementioned 53 minutes of this podcast, which is there's a lot of obsession on the right with, into with Israel conspiracy theories would be the answer to that question. And her husband and bosses, former bosses are, uh, are encouraging it and playing along with it. The other question she mentioned is something that you did a lot of reporting on, which was,

the fact that the bureau chief of the FBI has been using the FBI plane to go visit the girlfriend and Nashville a lot. And I guess they had to address that on the podcast. Talk about what you're seeing out there from Cash and the girlfriend. If you have any updates since your last newsletter on that front. Well, you know, I think they've been laying low since the big kind of the private jet incident. Obviously, if he famously took it to go see her sing at a, took to the jet to see her sing at a wrestling match in Pennsylvania and then took her home to Nashville. And then after that, you know, I started looking at the jet stuff. And, I mean, there were like a lot of jet trips.

Now, the FBI director has to travel by jet. That's the rule by a private jet. But, you know, it was a lot of trips. And real quick ones, too, to Nashville. It makes you wonder what was he picking her up, what was going on there. The New York Times did some reporting on this as well. There's been a lot on her use of bodyguards. I guess that's the latest is that, you know, not only does she have an FBI security detail, which is very unusual.

But then, you know, I believe the Times reported that she was at one point demanded that the security detail takes one of her drunk friends home, drive her home a couple times. The FBI has denied that because, you know, I was about to say they've been kind of keeping themselves out of controversy, but I guess not. I mean, they're really still in the mix. I guess they're trying to, you know, here we see Katie Miller ask, when are you going to get married? So maybe that's the next step. Yeah, the girlfriend's drunk friend getting the security detail. I'm not sure why a girlfriend should be getting security detail. Cash, though, this feels a little risky to do this like kind of soft Oprah couch interview about, you know, where the

FBI director is with his girlfriend, much younger girlfriend, who he's been traveling to see amidst a lot of controversy about the fact that they, they identified the wrong shooter at the Brown University campus shooting. That shooter at the time of this taping is still at large. Doing this kind of interview when you have that high stakes of a job seems like poor judgment. I noticed on Twitter this morning, Sagar and Genti posted that you have to have a sub 60 IQ to take this interview. I saw a lot of right wing accounts retweeting that. You've been reporting with Kyle Serafin, who's a former character, a former FBI agent who's been ginning up a lot of people upset at Cash. It does seem like Cash is really playing the fire here. Yeah, I agree.

I think his move here should have been to really lay low and to focus on being the FBI director. You know, in the past, we didn't see, I don't think, Robert Mueller or James Comey, sitting for these kind of Oprah-type interviews with their wives. But, you know, Cash is, he's a different, he's a different breed. Timu, Oprah. Yes, exactly. Well, yeah, very much so. I mean, whatever Tee-Moo is, I mean, this is, it's very strange. And I feel like it was just a few weeks ago that it was reported that Trump was getting fed up with Cash's kind of publicity.

hound ways. But I guess, you know, Cash thinks things have blown over. I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about Katie Miller for a second, who has the T-Mu's T-Mu's Oprah. It's kind of like the old Bill Simmons was like, you know, there's a phrase where this player is a poor man's version of someone else. And he's like, we had to upgrade that for like really bad players. This is a homeless man's version of someone else. Like, we need whatever's below T-Moo for this. Timu Oprah has 25,000 YouTube subscribers. I've got some friends with kids who have Roblox YouTube accounts that have more subscribers than that. Katie's had Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth, Cash Patel, Cheryl Hines, Pam Bondi, Mike Tyson, and J.D. Vance on this podcast.

I mean, that's quite the booking, I guess, of people doing favors for her husband. And yet, like, literally nobody is watching it. Yeah, these numbers are brutal. I mean, for some of these, like, that's a question. Yeah. You know, she's trying to crack. You know, she had Cheryl Hines on. you know, who's like a relatively prominent figure, you know, she couldn't crack 10,000 on views on that, which is, I mean, these are really poor numbers. And, you know, Katie Miller, I feel like she didn't really intend to become an influencer. She had this thing where she was working in the White House, then she left to work for Elon when he left the administration. I guess that didn't work out. And so she said, well, I guess I'll become kind of like this, this mom, MAGA figure. But, you know, there's a lot of competition that feel already among it, you know, Candice Owens. And so I think she's sort of stuck, even though she's

getting these big these big guests it's pretty sad i mean it's a sad state of affairs you'd think you there'd be a little bit of shame i guess you just know that your like gollum husband is like essentially running the white house right now so like the secretary of defense just has to do what he says and like what other rationale is there for it like you have to go and say to to haggseth and vance and bondi like the three most powerful people of the administration that yeah you spent two hours with me on my team of Oprah podcast and you got 12,000 views. Like what? She has a funny thing going where I feel like she's always

having these people on when they're in the midst of some scandal. Maybe it's because they're always kind of embroiled in some scandal. But she had Pete Hagseth on right around the time that he had ordered the sort of no survivor strike. I don't think she asked about that. She had Cheryl Hines on and had like a bit, you asked about Olivia Nuzzi, I think to her credit. And Cheryl Hines said,

you know, I'm not really going to talk about it. She goes, okay. You know, and now she has cash who's sort of embroiled in I don't know, several scandals at once. So she's getting these, I think, what would be interesting guests, but they're sort of using her to launder to have, you know, a nice sit down about when are they going to get engaged? It must be nice to have the in-house North Korean podcast at the White House.

Katie Miller, don't have to do any numbers. Okay, two other things. I'll let you go. You've been covering this guy that is a little bit below the radar, I think, Nash at this point. And as same is James Fishback. He's running for governor of Florida. As a Republican, talk to us about that campaign.

Yeah, so James Fishback is a guy I bought in on early as a character to watch. So this is a guy who he was a hedge fund analyst, sort of seemingly very low level. And then he kind of fashioned himself as a, he's also very active in the anti-woke high school debate scene. And so I'm sorry, the anti-woke high school debate scene? Yeah. So is there like a rival debate organization out there? So he felt that high school debate had become too woke.

And so he launched his own nonprofit of anti-woke high school debate. And if you believe a lawsuit filed earlier this year, he met his new girlfriend. Now, when he was 26 and she was 16. And so that has been litigated. You know, she ultimately didn't get a restraining order. 16. 16, yes. He denies kind of broadly that anything untoward took place.

Epstein is jealous. Think about that idea. Like, I'm going to create an anti-woke. You'd think that would draw mostly boys, though. You'd think a gay predator would do that, create an antips. too woke debate club. But anyway. And so now he's running for governor of Florida. And a lot of his critics have been making that Epstein comparison. I think there's a lot still unresolved there. And again, he denies it. But he also had this whole thing where he kind of got in an obrolio with this hedge fund he worked for. They said he was inflating his title. Then he got into a lot of sort of schemes around getting revenge at the hedge fund. And now he owes them. I believe once the legal fees are calculated, it's going to be like $2 million. So they repossessed his Tesla. He's just getting. in a lot of scrapes. I've written about it in false flag. And now he's really kind of positioning himself as like the Groyper candidate. He's being really racist about Byron Donald's, who's

the Trump candidate, who's black in the race. And he's saying, I'm going to make the trains run on time like Mussolini. So he's really leaning into the kind of Nick Fuentes of it all. Do we know how he's polling? You know, he's been putting out his own polls that show him very favorably. I think, you know, on the prediction markets, he's at about 20% in the primary. I think weirdly, because Byron Donald's doesn't really have another competitor. I think it looks like he might, you know, be kind of the other, the sort of the DeSantis pick. Christina Poushaw, the DeSantis aide, has reportedly been working with him, according to NBC this week. So, you know, it's so bizarre.

I mean, this guy, to be frank, like, shouldn't be, you know, running for dog catcher. I mean, he, I can't imagine what his credit score is going to be over this $2 million debt. And yet he's, you know, he's getting some traction. He got endorsed by a member of the State Board of Education. DeSantis's spokesperson is working for the Groyper candidate. So NBC reported that Fishback's uncle was saying that Poochaw was working for him. And there were some other ties there. People can look it up.

Poushaw denies that she's really linked to him. But there appears to be at least some elements of DeSantis' world backing Fishback. And they don't like Donald's. Why didn't Mrs. DeSantis run? I thought that was going to be the whole thing. I thought Casey was going to run against him. Yeah, I remember that. And people like Laura Luma were really gearing up to attack her.

And there was all this sense of like a Desantis, you know, Casey DeSantis show. down against Byron Donald's, but I guess not. But, you know, so far, you know, Fishback's been doing kind of like Fuentesi tactics. He has young people stand up at Byron Donald's events and say, you know, when will you debate James Fishback? And Donald seems kind of flummoxed by it. So I think you might get some traction out of that. Well, I guess if Byron Donald becomes governor of Florida, the good news for me here in

Louisiana is that we might not have the worst and stupidest governor in the country anymore. And we can kind of look askance at Florida again. And final topic, when you came aboard the bulwarks, something I did not realize is like there are some like Will Summer hipsters out there, okay, that are like people that are deep in your oove, you know, that read like the last little item of the newsletter or go back to archival versions of fever dreams podcast to see what, what is happening with old characters from the MAGA world.

And just, you know, just I want you to give one to the real ones. Is there somebody you're following right now that's a little bit off the radar that's catching your eye. Yeah, this is a figure who really excites me. I'm glad to bring one for the real heads, the ones who know, like, the real lunatics who could never lead a newsletter because they're too niche. But I got on to this guy recently named Gary the Numbers guy. And this guy, he's kind of like, he looks like a kind of like a Midwest uncle.

He's got a big beard. He's kind of hunched over. And he wears a hat with a series of numbers on it. And he is like the Manosphere. 6-7? Well, no, that would be good. I haven't seen him weigh in on, you know, whether that's a favorable number. But basically, he does numerology for, like, these right-wing mannosphere guys that people are

familiar with fresh and fit. So he's kind of like one of their minions. And so they'll say, hey, Gary, like, you know, here's my birthday. He'll say, that's very auspicious. And so he was on Tim Poole. Tim Poole's raging against Candace Owens. And he says, you know, and now my guess, why is Candice Owens being so awful to everyone on the right?

And he goes to Gary and he goes, well, I'm afraid she's a year of the, year of the, the dragon and this is the year of the dragon or whatever you and that's why she's so powerful right now you know what what what can we do about it and i mean it it's this whole other university existed but i think he just consistently says like your horoscope is going to be fabulous and they go wow you know you're a genius gary gary the mega numerologist um well i would have i would have mocked this more if it wasn't for the fact that it was just yesterday that i was scrolling through the youtube comments yeah i i look at your comments from time from time to time i want to see i want to hear your feedback people um we care particularly if you're a subscriber look at those comments

and someone replied to me and sam stein in the potperee video we did over the weekend and said that both sam and i have have really favorable birth year date numerology that's huge very good and i felt really good about that because i feel like i probably have good numerology and so i don't know what gary thinks i don't know if there's competing numerology but I'm open to hearing about it. Will Summer, thank you so much. It's the False Flag Newsletter. Go sign up for that.

There will be a bunch in the False Flag Newsletter this week as we hear more about the Eric and Candice meeting, the Epstein files coming out later this week. So it will make good reading for you and your family over the holidays. Will, I'll talk to you again soon. Hey, thanks for having me. Everybody else will be back tomorrow. We're going to get a little more serious tomorrow.

Okay. We're going to get a little more serious. So it'll be good though. It'll be good. Important and serious. You know, we've got balance in all things in this world. So make sure to come back for tomorrow's show. Check out the mailbag from yesterday. We'll see you all soon. Peace. Round like a circle and a spiral.

Like a wheel within a wheel. Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel. Like a snowball down a mile. mountain or a carnival balloon, like a carousel that's turning, running rings around the moon, like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face, and the world is like an apple whirling silently in space, like the circles that you find, and the world is like an apple, whirling silently in space, like the circles that you find, in the windmills of your mind Like a circle in a spiral,

Like a wheel within a wheel Never-ending or beginning On an ever-spinning reel As the images unwinded Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind. The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brough.