Entering the MAGA lair

Yesterday, I appeared as a guest on the PBD podcast with Patrick Bet-David and his co-hosts, Vinny Oshana and Adam Sosnick. Patrick was clearly surprised that I’d agreed to do this because he opened the show by saying:

I always respect anybody that is willing to go on any podcast and talk game. I got a lot of respect for people like that.

If you’ve never heard of the PBD podcast, it is the number four podcast on Spotify with millions of subscribers. To give you a sense of what they are about, recent guests have included Kari Lake and Andrew Tate. Need I say more?

I agreed to participate because I’ll say what I have to say, anywhere. That’s how it played out on the show. The truth is that you can’t talk for two hours about any of this without the truth coming to the surface. That’s exactly what you saw. I stood up to it, and I’ll keep doing it.

There were some uncomfortable moments because I confronted conspiracies, lies and delusions directly, unequivocally and bluntly.

I explained why Donald Trump rose to power:

I talked about the Trump voter:

I set the record straight about what is, and isn’t, the establishment. According to a Los Angeles Times investigation, Elon Musk's companies received an estimated $4.9 billion in government support by 2015. He is the establishment. So is Trump — and every single one of his gang of grifters and frauds:

We talked about the peaceful transition of power and the bedrock of American society:

And then we talked about January 6. That’s where things really got off the rails. There’s no question that some of my “native New Jersey” shone through, but accommodation to extremism means confronting their delusions and lies. It got heated, but here was my attempt:

There is no place to compromise on this issue. It happened. Full stop.

If you want to listen to the entire two-hour episode, you can do so here: