Transcript
Ben Shapiro (0:00)
Well, folks, Steve Bannon has now been totally exposed in the Epstein files. We're going to get into what is actually in the Epstein files. And why is it that the people who are like actual conspirators with Jeffrey Epstein, like people who are working closely with Jeffrey Epstein, are being overlooked in favor of a broad, broad conspiracy theory about all of society? We'll get into all of that, plus a big economic move from the Trump administration. First, the biggest story in the country right now remains the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie's mother, Nancy Guthrie. Information continues to move unbelievably fast. If you are trying to keep up, here is the answer. Finding Nancy Guthrie. It's the Daily Wire's first ever true crime podcast. It's hosted by investigative journalist Lyndon Blake, and it brings you new episodes every day with the latest on the case tracks, the real leads, the real developments, what changed, what it means, and what is happening in real time. No theories, no fan fiction, just the evidence. This is the case that America is following. Can't stop talking about. Listen to Finding Nancy Guthrie, a Daily Wire true crime investigation streaming right now and dailywire.com and on that Daily Wire+app. There is a palpable frustration out there in American politics. Pretty clearly it's rooted in some ugly and unpleasant realities. The reality that lots of our major institutions blew up their credibility on COVID 19 and BLM and Russiagate, for example. The reality that we don't really have any idea how AI is going to reshape the job market. The reality that a ton of people in the political class have zero scruples and are totally willing to engage in open corruption. But that frustration is turning into something else before our eyes in this country. And that thing is nihilism. And that nihilism is rooted in a gigantic lie, a truly gigantic lie that all of our problems in the United States are intractable. That individual problems that you may have or I may have in the United States, that's all the result of an evil system often led by cohesive groups of conspiratorial elites. That you cannot succeed unless you pierce that supposed matrix. And that all of those who call for individual responsibility and dutiful decency, those people are actually part of this evil matrix. Now, this stuff is not solution making. It is thought preventing it is success preventing. It's a recipe for personal and national disaster. And the result is an increasingly incoherent and unhinged politics and an entire generation of young men and women who go looking for meaning in all the wrong places. And on the very fringes sometimes turn to violence. There's a story in the Washington Post from a couple of days ago that highlights this by a guy named Peter Horiski. He writes, quote, amid a wave of high profile killings and political violence in the United States, investigators have been confounded regularly by the absence of a recognizable agenda. The assailants, in several cases, shootings, a bombing, a planned drone attack, resisted familiar labels and categories. They weren't Democrat or Republican or Islamist militant or antifa or white supremacist. They were something new. In their manifestos, according to the Washington Post, these attackers declared their contempt for for humanity and a desire to see the collapse of civilization. Law enforcement officers and federal prosecutors have begun to describe these attacks as a contemporary strain of nihilism, an online revival of a philosophical stance that arose in the 19th century to deny the existence of moral truths and meaning in the universe. Well, I mean, as the Washington Post suggests right there, that isn't actually anything new. Societies that experience major dislocations are often the breeding ground for nihilism and violence. That's been true, going all the way back to Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, which he wrote in 1864. But actually, if you reread Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky goes further. He says that nihilism doesn't just require social dislocations or economic problems, that nihilism can arise particularly in prosperous periods where everybody seems to be doing pretty well. So he writes, quote, I, for instance, would not be in the least surprise if all of a sudden apropos of nothing in the midst of general prosperity and a gentleman with an ig noble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical countenance, were to arise and putting his arms akimbo, say to us all, I say, gentlemen, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds simply to send these log rhythms to the devil and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet, foolish will. That, again, says Dostoevsky, would not matter. But what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers such as the nature of man and all that for the most foolish reason, which one would think was hardly worth mentioning, that is, that man, everywhere and all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice, in other words, convince people that they don't have any choices in life. And what you are likely to get is a nihilistic retreat into barbarism, specifically because people want to lash out at their supposed lack of choice. Now, you've heard me rail on this show a lot of other places against what I've called the conspiracy theory of society. That's the idea that everything in life is controlled by systems you can't quite identify and that your problems are solvable only through violence or through some sort of pseudo revolution. Philosopher Karl Popper explained this again way back in the mid 20th century. He said, the conspiracy theory of society is the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of. Of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon. Sometimes it's a hidden interest which has first to be revealed and who have planned and conspired to bring it about. The gods are abandoned, but their place is filled by powerful men or groups, sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from, such as the Learned Elders of Zion or the monopolists or the capitalists or the imperialists. And Karl Popper was writing this in the mid 20th century, so none of this is new. However, what we are experiencing right now in the United States is dangerous and stupid. Of course there are conspiracies out there, but conspiracies generally have specific people involved and evidence of their involvement and a plan effectuated. The conspiracy theory of society, that everything in your life is out of your control, and there is a group of manipulative elites who are getting together behind closed doors to figure out how to screw you. That is something different. And that conspiracy theory of society is. Is finding unbelievably fertile ground right now. And there are a lot of people who are promoting it for their own pure grift and greed. They're doing it because of the con. It turns out that this modern wave of nihilism is not entirely organic. It is, as the kids might say, an op. It is fomented by influencers and politicians who commit ideological arson. So then they can pretend to be firefighters, people who manipulate their audiences into believing that their problems are unfixable unless they hand over more power and control to precisely those same influencers and politicians. After all, influencers can get really, really rich off the nihilism of crowds. Politicians can foment the change they seek by channeling nihilistic energy, at least temporarily, until they're eaten by the movement that they actually foster. I'm bringing all of this up to discuss what I think is the biggest news story of the day. The Jeffrey Epstein scandal and people we know were involved in it because it shows the distinction between actual conspiracy and the conspiracy theory of society. I'm gonna get to what the point of all of this is in just a minute. Cause it ties into a really big thing in the news that I think most people are just sort of glossing over for convenient reasons. First, you know, I. I was not sleeping in my bed last night. I gotta be honest with you. I'm extremely tired. One of the reasons I am so tired is because I did not have my mattress. When I'm out of town and I'm not sleeping on my mattress, it is so much worse because my mattress was made just for me, but by Helix. And you can do the same thing. Sleep is really important. I know. Especially when I'm missing it. And so you really should go take that sleep quiz from Helix Sleep right now. And they will personalize a mattress just for you. Finding the right mattress does not have to be complicated. Helix has basically removed all the guesswork. You take that sleep quiz that I talked about. You answer a few questions about how you sleep on your side back. Firm, soft. I'm a stomach sleeper. They match you to the mattress that's actually right for you. Not a one size fits all situation. Isn't just another mattress brand making big promises. Helix is the most awarded mattress company out there. They've got top reviews from places like Forbes and Wired. These people actually test things. I've met the founders. They're the real deal. We've been sleeping on a Helix mattress for years. The difference is amazing because when I sleep, I'm telling you, when I sleep at other places, I just don't sleep as well. So head on over to Helix Sleep right now because you will be sleeping better. Helix ran a study where 82% of participants saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle while sleeping on that Helix mattress. Deep sleep is the stuff that actually helps your brain function, which is pretty important to me. And yes, my wife is banking on as much quality sleep as possible because, you know, lots and lots of kids. Helix makes it really easy. Head over to helixsleep.comBen for 27% off site wide. That's helixsleep.comBen for27% off. Make sure you enter the show name at checkout so they know that we sent you again. Helixsleep.com Ben also. Thank you. Are a lot of bad people out there. I mean, we talk about them on the show all the time. You don't need bad people at your company. You need good people at your company. We are constantly hiring here at Daily Wire and we use Zip Recruiter to help us do that. Because when you post a job on Zip Recruiter, they're not just going to throw it into the void and hope for the best. Their platform actually suggests screening questions to help you quickly identify candidates who are genuinely right for the role. It's efficient, it's practical. It saves you from sorting through a pile of resumes that were never a fit in the first place. ZipRecruiter's matching technology works fast to surface candidates who meet your criteria. You can filter for people who've been active recently, meaning that they're actually looking for a job. That's a big reason why ZipRecruiter is the highest rated hiring site on G2, and we use it. You should use it as well. So if you want the best people you know, not the kind of people at your company who might be trading emails with Jeffrey Epstein as we'll discuss shortly, then head on over to ZipRecruiter and get the best people. Ask the right questions. Hire faster with ZipRecruiter. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/daily wire that ziprecruiter.com/Daily Wire Meet your match on Zip Recruiter. Ask key questions. Hire faster with Zip Recruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter will get a quality candidate within the very first day. Try it for free ziprecruiter.com Daily Wire that's ziprecruiter.com Daily wire meet your match on ZipRecruiter. So let's begin with what we know. Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused underage girls. In fact, he pled guilty in 2009 to state charges of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl. Was arrested again in 2019 on charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors. And so was Ghisan Maxwell, his longtime partner in crime. Now we know that Jeffrey Epstein had longtime relationships with many rich and famous people. It appears, according to extensive in depth reporting from the New York Times, that Epstein made his money through grift. He scammed rich people into giving him money and then he used association with those rich people to find other rich people to scam. Here's what the New York Times writes. Quote, in his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation. But we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune. A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals, and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from from their money. He started small, testing his tactics, seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road. Again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power. Rung by rung, says the New York Times, Epstein climbed a social and financial ladder, often using young women as a potent form of currency. His girlfriends, lovers and even exes helped elevate his status inside a bank, got him hired to track down missing assets and and gained him entree to prestigious organizations. And, says the New York Times, deliberately or not, some of them enabled him as he constructed a sex trafficking operation that would later ensnare hundreds of teenage girls and young women. Now here has what has been alleged in the public square that Epstein had a list of clients, like an actual list famous and rich people to whom he trafficked underage girls. It has been alleged in the public square that he blackmailed those clients with pictures and videos of them with said underage girls. It has been alleged that he was working for foreign intelligence services online. That's usually said to be Mossad. Sometimes it's the CIA or MI6 or the KGB in order to manipulate the levers of both economic and political power. Those theories remain unsubstantiated by the evidence. Evidence is our guide here. Those theories have yet to be substantiated by the evidence. That is not for lack of trying, according to ABC News prosecution memos, case summaries and other documents made public in the department's latest release of of Epstein. Related records show that FBI agents and federal prosecutors diligently pursued potential co conspirators. Even seemingly outlandish and incomprehensible claims called into tip lines were examined. According to ABC News, the only person in this case who truly alleged sex trafficking to men beyond Jeffrey Epstein was Virginia Giuffre, who was found by prosecutors to be non credible. As ABC News reports, Giuffre acknowledged writing a partly fictionalized memoir of her time with Epstein containing descriptions of things that didn't take place. She had also offered shifting accounts in interviews with investigators, they wrote, and had engaged in a continuous stream of public interviews about her allegations, many of which have Included sensationalized, if not demonstrably inaccurate, characterizations of her experiences. Those inaccuracies included false accounts of her interactions with the FBI. They said, now listen, maybe more will be uncovered. And if it is, then we'll cover that. For example, Glenn Maxwell just Yesterday took the fifth in her congressional testimony. Here's what that sounded like. Ms. Maxwell, were you a close friend and confidant of Jeffrey Epstein? I would like to answer your question, but on the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer this question and any related questions. My habeas petition is pending in the Southern District of New York. I therefore invoke my right to silence under the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution. So maybe more will come out. But given the evidence, here's what we do know. There was, in fact a Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy with actual humans. We know about it. It involved Jeffrey Epstein working with rich and powerful people to make money for himself, to boost his friends in order to ingratiate himself to them as well. Some of this involves potentially serious criminal activity, which is why the Prime Minister of the uk, Keir Starmer, may now lose his job because he selected as his US Ambassador a man named Peter Mandelson, who allegedly forwarded classified information to Epstein years before. Much of it involved untoward emails and likely trafficking of overage women to other men. But that conspiracy, you know, the one that the evidence shows, ugly and hideous as it is, is not the one that's lighting up the Internet and. And animating the political discourse. It is the big blown up conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory that involves everyone at all times. Child trafficking to the most powerful people in the world, blackmail allegations on the basis of foreign intelligence services. That is the big conspiracy theory that's making the round. That, presumably, is why Representative Thomas Massie, for example, keeps talking about the men he's going to name who are allegedly involved in this sex trafficking ring. Here is Thomas Massie with Rokhana Grandstanding.