re's a big drama between Candace Owens and investor Bill Ackman over something that may or may not have happened with Charlie Kirk. So here's the situation. Candace Owens has made the claim that Charlie Kirk was threatened during some meeting that involved Bill Ackman in the Hamptons. And I guess it was a larger event, but Bill Ackman was there. And the claim is that Charlie Kirk was having some kind of change of heart about his opinions about Israel. And I assume that would be opinions about the military stuff, I assume.

And there's some thought that maybe Israel wasn't happy with his point of view. So they have this event and then Candace has claimed that Charlie was offered a ton of money, not sure by who, by Ackman or Israel, I don't know. And that they were trying to pressure him to not only agree with them on whatever they thought about Israel, but also to sort of avoid contact or inviting Tucker Carlson to things.

Bill Ackman has confirmed that he hosted the meeting, but that none of that happened. He just says none of that. Nothing like that happened. And there are some other witnesses who were the people who worked with Charlie who were there for the entire time because he wasn't really alone without them the whole time. And they said, "No, nothing like that happened. It's completely made up."

Now, here's the weird thing. Do you believe that Candace would just make something up? Does that sound like her? Certainly, everybody could be wrong. Certainly, everybody could have a really strong suspicion about something, you know, like the Macron stuff. She might be wrong about that, but that would be based on sort of a statistical, you know, it's my assumption. It's not a lie. I don't believe she's lying about any of it. She just might be wrong.

And on the other hand, Bill Ackman is not a liar as far as I know. I mean, and there were witnesses, so if he did lie, it'd be the dumbest thing in the world. So I don't think he did. So how do you explain this situation where there really aren't liars involved, but they have completely different impressions of what happened? Well, I don't know. Probably since Candace wasn't there, she was hearing reports from somebody who may have exaggerated something and turned something innocent into something it wasn't. I don't know. But there are many suspicions and we don't know.

And as I said, I'll be on Tucker's show tonight sometime after 8:00 p.m., probably 8:40 or so Eastern time if you want to check me out.

All right. There are, according to the FBI, seven social media accounts that appeared to indicate advanced knowledge of the Charlie Kirk assassination. In other words, they joked about something like, well, wouldn't it be interesting if somebody took him out on that date? So it did seem like there were too many people who knew about the upcoming attempt. It didn't look like coincidence to me. And if you're ever planning to assassinate somebody, my advice is don't tell your trans friends because it looks like the trans community might not be the best at keeping secrets. I'm just saying they might not be the best secret keepers.

So anyway, I don't know. We'll find out what that's about.

CNN and as you know also MSNBC, there seems to be a push to blame Trump for not uniting the country enough and that that's what happened to Charlie Kirk. If Trump had taken down the temperature and united the country better, then we wouldn't have this problem. Okay. All right. That's what you think. His extreme rhetoric.

Now, here's my question. Wouldn't you expect Trump's extreme rhetoric to influence conservatives to attack liberals? How in the world does his extreme rhetoric have only one directional cause, which is people attacking conservatives? That's not very good extreme rhetoric if the only thing it does is get you attacked.

And how do you unite people if you're Trump? How do you unite people who are being absolutely brainwashed by their media? Is it really his fault? If the entire media is brainwashing people to say that he's some Hitler character, is it really his fault that he can't get past that? I don't know how you would get past it.

All right, I'm going to give you the frame and the filter that I'm seeing this situation. The way I see it is through my lens as a trained hypnotist. Most of you know that because I say it too often. So I'm a trained hypnotist literally. And so when I look at things, I see it through a persuasion slash mental phenomena kind of a filter.

Here's what I see. There was a whole bunch of Hitler messaging. Ever since 2015, there's been all this Trump is Hitler stuff. And that caused a mass hysteria because enough people took that to be literal that they actually believed they were living in a country in which a Hitlerian character was taking over. And what that did was it formed a bubble. And there were all these people, it wasn't every Democrat, of course, it never works that way, but there was a lot of them, probably tens of millions of people, who got locked in a propaganda-created Hitlerian bubble where they thought they were in this just the worst situation ever and the country's going down the drain and it's all going to be prison camps and all that.

Now, that would be a classic mass hysteria. If you haven't studied mass hysteria, you really should because one of the features of it is that when people see other people acting the same way, it reinforces that they must be right. Wait a minute, I think there's a monster under my bed and you think there's a monster under my bed. And wait a minute, somebody else thinks there's a monster under my bed. My god, there's a monster under my bed. There's no monster under the bed. That's a mass hysteria.

Now, the word we use for it is TDS. But I would argue that TDS would be the right word for one person. You know, if you're dealing with one person, they have Trump derangement syndrome. If you're talking about a body of people who have all been propagandized and hypnotized, that's closer to a mass hysteria if the false thing they've come to believe is also dangerous. So that's what the hysteria part is. You don't get a hysteria unless the false belief is also scary. So their false belief is very scary. Hitler's coming and the people living in that Hitlerian fantasy.

There's not really any quick way to fix that. That's not really fixable in the short run. And because if he were to point out that they were wrong, they would be triggered into cognitive dissonance. Now, cognitive dissonance is where your brain basically misfires because you saw something that was incompatible with who you believe you are. For example, if you believe you're smart, but there's strong evidence that you did something really stupid, will you say, "Oh, I guess I'm actually stupid"? Almost never. If you believe you're smart, you'll say, "Huh, well, it didn't work out, but it was really smart anyway."

And for these reasons, and people listening to your reasons will say, "Are you drunk?" I mean those don't even sound like reasons but like the things you say are just word salad and that's the tell for cognitive dissonance. That when they explain their position, people who are not in cognitive dissonance listen to it and go, I don't think that made sense. That didn't even make logical sense. So that's how you tell.

So let's take the Charlie Kirk situation. So Charlie Kirk, because he was associated with Trump, was demonized as stupid because that's what the left thinks of the right, right? They think they're stupid, uninformed, ignorant, and that they're just plain evil. Just evil. Like they're killers.

Now, what would happen if that was your belief about Trump and therefore by definition about Charlie? And then you see a clip in which he is being friendly and open and listening to other people's opinions and then giving very well-informed answers. And you realize he's not dumb. You thought he was. He's actually like really smart. Like really smart. And then you realize that he's not evil. He's actually a really nice person. And 100% of the people who know him, knew him, all say the same thing. It's not like there's somebody who came out and said, "You know, I keep hearing these good things about Charlie, but it wasn't my experience. I had a bad experience." Nobody. None. Not a single person. Every single person who knew him, left and right, left and right, say he was a nice guy. He was genuinely generous. He's generous, smart, and nice to a fault.

Now, what happens to you if you think he was a stupid Hitler, but then you observe through all the clips of him interacting with the other side in his debates on campus, you observe that he's very clearly the opposite of everything you held to be true. What would be your mental experience? Would you say, "Oh, I changed my mind. It looks like the evidence is opposite of what I've been told, so I'm going to go with the evidence"? Some people will, but not many. Far more people will be triggered into cognitive dissonance, and they'll have to find something terrible about him, and they will simply imagine things that didn't happen. That's what happened.

If you ask people, well, what is it you didn't like about Charlie Kirk? They will tell you that they know somebody who knows something that was really terrible and they're just sort of going after what their friends say. Or they'll say, "Well, he said," and then what follows is something he didn't say ever anywhere. Or they'll say, "He said X." And maybe the quote is correct, but the context is completely incorrect and it changes the meaning of what he said. You know, sometimes he's talking about what other people said, not even agreeing with it, and it gets quoted as what he said, the thing he's disagreed with.

So that's how I understand this. It's a mass hysteria because it's a collection of people. Each of them individually has TDS because that's the one person having a problem but collectively it's a mass hysteria and then on top of that there was so much counter evidence that it absolutely triggered people into cognitive dissonance. Not everybody, right? Remember none of this is ever everybody. It's always just too many people.

All right, so that's my take.

Melania Trump just lawyer-whipped the *Daily Beast*. Apparently they'd said some things that she made them retract. They tried to link her to Jeffrey Epstein. What? The *Daily Beast*. And none of it was true. And so her lawyers made them delete those lies. They would have had to dish out millions if they had kept with their story, but they immediately said, "No, no, we made that up." I guess I don't know what they said, but in effect, they admitted it wasn't true.

And at the same time, Trump is suing the *New York Times* for $15 billion, calling it a virtual mouthpiece for the Democrats and said it's defaming him over and over over the Epstein coverage. Do you think he'll win that? I doubt it. But you might make the *New York Times* change how they treat him because they don't want another lawsuit.

Here's the potential bad news. So Harry Enten of CNN points out that there's a very strong correlation for midterm elections where the team that has the fewest number of retirements within their ranks usually wins the midterm. So in other words, there are planned 17 Republican retirements in Congress, but only 10 Democrats are planning to retire. If things are razor close, the difference in just people who retired probably would put Democrat