On Sunday, incumbent President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva turned a first-round deficit into a runoff win and became the first Brazilian elected president four times. Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, had finished ahead in early October. Three weeks later he was behind by roughly 4.4 million votes. The numbers themselves are not the part that stands out.
Ben Shapiro’s clip, “Brazil Is a Warning for American Elections,” treats the day as a practical lesson in what happens when the people who write the rules also play in the game. He walks through the first-round split, the runoff swing, and the intervention that arrived as the clocks hit five.
I keep noticing when the stated goal of an investigation is not only the case itself but the calculation the next person is supposed to make before taking the job.
On Monday mornings PBD Podcast the panel discussed this cut of Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin speaking at the University of Chicago on October 13. It was a live recording of Vox’s America, Actually podcast with Astead Herndon.
She was asked how Congress reasserts itself as a check if Democrats regain the majority. She talked about signature cases, not just the president but the people who enabled him. The people around him do not have the same immunity he does.
Then she said she wants young people coming out of school to ask whether working for the Trump administration is buying themselves a ton of problems they do not want, and to avoid participating. She wants that deterrence message sent.
The clip spread. Trump called her a lowlife who is ruining her state. She later said the point was accountability for corruption and lawbreaking, not targeting people for their politics, and that the outrage was manufactured. The full exchange is on the Vox podcast.
What I keep turning over is the part she named out loud: the deterrence. Not only the case, but the signal meant for the graduate still deciding whether to take the job.
I keep hearing Stephen A. Smith outside the sports window.
Stephen A. Smith is the loud voice on ESPN’s First Take. He started as a newspaper writer covering high school and pro sports in New York and Philadelphia, then moved into radio and television. He has two daughters. He calls himself an independent and has spent more of the last couple of years talking about politics, including whether he would run.
He appears on Bill O’Reilly’s We’ll Do It Live podcast. [VIDEO]
Patrick Bet-David put it as an or. Islam, or a West that has gone soft. Raymond Ibrahim would not take the or. He is an American historian, born here to Coptic immigrants from Egypt, fluent in Arabic, a former Arabic specialist at the Library of Congress, and the author of *Sword and Scimitar* and *Defenders of the West*. This is his hour on PBD Podcast #869, posted Thursday. Bet-David opened on the title. The answer was yes to both.
I already posted that the holdout juror finally responded. That was The Clancy Holdout Answered. Fugitive TV had him off camera. Ray Marcel called him Michael. I held the last name there.
This Fugitive TV cut is the follow-up. Michael called Marcel again. He hired a defamation lawyer. [VIDEO]
Over the weekend it became news that the holdout was Black. That was already in the last post. Paula Devlin told Gayle King that on CBS Mornings. King had to sit with it for a second. Some people tried to make the race the story.
Megyn Kelly got to that clip before the NY Post printed the rest.
I just found this Jason Whitlock video. He shares clips from Fugitive TV, where Ray Marcel says he got the Black holdout juror from the Lindsay Clancy case on the phone.
The original call is on Fugitive TV. Marcel says the juror would not sit on camera. Watch that clip itself here: Fugitive TV.
There was another post on this case in the works. It has yet to be published. It may be shared at a later time.
This juror has been taking a beating since the Clancy mistrial. Over the weekend it became news that the holdout was Black.
Whitlock and Marcel both call him Michael. A last name was identified on X/Twitter before either video. The Boston Globe later printed his full name. The jury list remains impounded by order of the trial judge.
We hear things about him lying to the court on his own criminal charges. We hear attacks on his logic. Clancy’s defense attorney tried to kick him off the jury before the mistrial.
Well, this juror has spoken. Whitlock is the analysis. Marcel is the call. He says he checked the box. He says he stayed on the children. A dismissed charge is not a verdict. Neither is the beating.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
I already had the sentence, the day after the anniversary. We still hear people say we deserved it. Treating the dead as a receipt. Changing the subject from the people at their desks to a running argument about everything America has ever done.
The clip is not a pundit discovering that line. It is George Pataki, governor of New York the morning of 9/11/2001, still circling it twenty-five years later with Maya Sulkin of The Free Press. The mayor fight comes with it. The sentence is the same one.
Patrick Bet-David sat down with Ted Cruz this week for PBD Podcast #851. The title is the tease: what Trump told him behind closed doors. The conversation is longer than that. Cruz walks back through 2016, through working with Trump as president, and through the family story he uses to explain why he does not talk like a country-club Republican. Bet-David keeps circling 2028. Cruz will not announce. He will describe the argument.
Three stretches do the work. How 2016 broke, including the poll Cruz trusted and the nickname that cut. What the relationship looks like in the Oval — including the afternoon Elon Musk tweeted that Trump was on the Epstein list. And the biography: financially independent since seventeen, no trust fund, a standing fight with country-club Republicans. The close is 2028, and JD Vance.
Dave Rubin sat down with Andrew Gold, the former BBC filmmaker who now hosts Heretics. The title of the episode is the claim: if this is not stopped, the UK’s fall is irreversible.
Gold starts with psychology. Political tribes and social-media loops, he says, run on the same machinery as cults: belonging, status, conformity. Intelligent people get trapped because the group rewards the approved answers. People usually leave only after the group mistreats them. October 7 did that for some progressive Jews.
Then the machinery that is supposed to keep the argument open.
We are a little more than two months from the midterms. When the policy argument is thin, some Democrats reach for the older one: America is still that country. The one that hangs people from trees.
Jon Ossoff talks as if the Klan is on the ballot in Georgia. Ayanna Pressley says the Confederacy is alive and well. Jasmine Crockett points to “mysterious deaths” in Mississippi — people “found, hung or otherwise” — and says we can no longer rely on the Justice Department to look. The implication is not subtle. Vote our way, or you are choosing the noose.
Ben Shapiro spent part of a recent show on the cases that keep getting cited as proof. His column on the same argument is here.
Ms. Rachel is Rachel Accurso, the toddler YouTube host behind Songs for Littles. About 20 million subscribers, a Netflix kids show, the pink headband and overalls. Parents of two-year-olds know her as the person who teaches Wheels on the Bus. She started the channel in 2019 after her own son had a speech delay. She has a master’s in music education from NYU. TikTok is one of her platforms. It is not the source of the following.
She has spent the last couple of years putting politics in the same feed as the nursery rhymes. Gaza. ICE detention. In March she told NBC News, “I am political.” This week she put the hanging claim in its cleanest form: please listen to the Black community. Black people don’t hang themselves from trees. There have been at least seven this year.
The history that sentence is pointing at is real. The medical examiner reports and the surveillance footage are also real. Those two things are not required to cancel each other. They just have to be looked at in the same paragraph.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Patrick Bet-David sat down recently with Roman Yampolskiy, the University of Louisville computer scientist who argues that general superintelligence is not a tool we will learn to steer. The claim is blunt: a 99.9999 percent chance it eventually ends humanity.
The number is what travels. The argument is narrower. Yampolskiy is not mainly talking about lost jobs or deepfakes. Those are still human problems. His point is that once you build an agent smarter than every person in every domain, control is not unsolved. It is unsolvable.
A nuke is a tool. Someone still has to use it. Superintelligence, as he describes it, sets its own subgoals. Rational agents converge on the same moves: protect themselves, get more compute, more energy, more matter. If people are in the way, the system does not slow down. You do not count the ants before you pour the foundation.
Guardrails are for tools. Labs already strip them for testing. Models already lie, cheat tests, and route around refusals. If you cannot explain the weights, predict the next move, or contain the system, you are not in charge of it. At that point the race, the surplus, and the job market are secondary. If superintelligence exists anywhere, he says, it takes the rest of the board.
Terry Moran spent nearly three decades at ABC News. Last week he sat down with the hosts of The Fifth Column and said something most people inside the networks still won’t: [VIDEO]
Asked straight out whether ABC News is a liberal institution, Moran answered “Yes.” He didn’t blame individual bias so much as the absence of any real disagreement inside the building. “It’s because of lack of viewpoint diversity,” he said. “That was one of the problems in covering Trump. Nobody had voted for him.”
He described sending internal emails urging colleagues to cover Trump more fairly and getting quiet thank-yous from engineers and the occasional producer—people outside the on-air and senior editorial ranks. The bubble, he insisted, is real. Journalists who never encounter the worldview of the people who actually voted for Trump struggle to understand why those voters see someone like Stephen Miller as a defender of borders rather than a “world-class hater.”
Matt Walsh’s new episode is less a recap of the Jason Arday scandal than a look at what the scandal produced. After the Cambridge professor’s death, a crowd gathered in Trafalgar Square to treat a man whose record was already collapsing under plagiarism claims and an implausible life story as a hunted racial martyr. Walsh plays the footage, the speeches, and the demands for media control. The point is not simply that Arday’s career does not survive scrutiny. It is that a certain politics would rather canonize the wreckage than admit the hiring, the standards, and the story were the problem.
Konstantin Kisin, the Russian-born comedian, Triggernometry co-host, and author of An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, sat down with John Anderson and said something most British politicians still won’t: the country is poorer than its people think, and the people in charge keep telling them otherwise.
The interview is called “The Politics Of Gaslighting.” Kisin walks through the numbers without the usual hedging. Most Britons, according to polling he cites, still believe their country is in the same wealth league as Switzerland, Singapore or Australia. On a per-capita basis it isn’t. Britain sits much further down the table and is close to being overtaken by Poland. The pie is shrinking. The argument is over who gets the next slice.
That’s the part that travels. GDP can be juiced by importing more people. Per-person living standards are a different story. Kisin’s point is that the political class has every incentive to keep measuring the first number and ignore the second. Anderson, who has seen the same productivity stall in Australia, keeps asking the obvious follow-up: how do you tell people the truth when they have been trained to treat it as an attack?
In this clip from his recent appearance on the PBD Podcast, Ben Shapiro addresses the broad drop in views and engagement across much of conservative media since the intense political year of 2024. He breaks down the different audiences that various right-leaning personalities actually reach and draws a clear line: he would rather have lower ratings than abandon his principles. Shapiro says he prefers Democrats not running the country over chasing clicks that depend on perpetual conflict, and he notes that he has held positions (on 2020, January 6, and other issues) that cost him audience rather than reverse course for numbers.
Former Minneapolis police officer Tou Thao gave a long-form interview on the Yada Yada Gold podcast and spoke with unusual directness about four things that still get little sustained attention: the plea deal he rejected, what he was doing and thinking on May 25, 2020, the reality of federal prison, and the incentives that reward those who adopt the preferred narrative.
Minneapolis Police Officer Tou Thao in 2020 via ABCNews
The Storming of the Bastille (painting) - Wikipedia
People often compare our era to the Gilded Age—rapid growth, massive fortunes, and wealth gaps that eventually led to Progressive Era reforms inside America’s democratic system. Others point to the French Revolution and its mix of elite detachment, crisis, and radical spiral.
Both analogies speak to today’s tensions, but they point in different directions. The Gilded Age suggests we can fix disparities through adaptation and targeted policy. The French Revolution warns what happens when disconnected elites help unleash forces that spin out of control.
Watch the clip that sparked this post right here: [VIDEO]
Danny Burmawi is a Jordanian-born author, analyst, and founder of the Ideological Defense Institute. Raised in a Muslim family, he converted to Christianity in 2007, which led him to leave Jordan. He spent about 15 years in Lebanon leading Christian organizations before moving to the United States in 2023 for advanced theological studies. His books, including Islam, Israel and the West, draw on personal experience and deep study of comparative religion and Middle East affairs.
In a recent video from Jeremy Boreing (formerly of The Daily Wire), Burmawi breaks down the tactical partnership often called the Red-Green Alliance — the cooperation between Marxists/communists and Islamists. The discussion is direct and revealing.
Burmawi explains that the alliance is not based on shared long-term goals but on a shared desire to dismantle the current Western system. Marxists seek to tear it down to build their utopia. Islamists aim to replace it with a caliphate under Allah’s rule. For now, they work together and “kick the can down the road” on who will dominate afterward — much like temporary wartime alliances in history.
He applies this to New York politician Zohran Mamdani, noting Mamdani’s Shia roots and family background, including his father’s writings that framed America critically. While Mamdani publicly supports progressive causes like LGBTQ issues and abortion, Burmawi argues these serve as “bones thrown to useful idiots.” The real priority remains advancing Islamic influence, using leftist coalitions as a vehicle for greater political power.
