“Best Interview of 2025” 🏆 @tommygunnxxx stopped by the show to talk about his new book “Tommy Gunn ‘Unloaded’” 📖 as well as his documentary “Fans-Only” which he produced with famed director Joel Van Der Molen. 🎥 Go listen to our chat now! 👇

🚨Colorado Democrats are running a House candidate who had to be strapped in a wrap and helmet in a police van mid-campaign. Christian Schilder is the Democratic nominee for Colorado House District 39 in Douglas County. He faces GOP incumbent Brandi Bradley on Nov. 3. On May 8, 2026, while that campaign was already underway, Texas officers booked him on alleged public intoxication and resisting arrest, search, or transport. The Douglas County GOP says he is out on bond. The video is not a rumor. Axon Fleet cam from 1:09 a.m. shows a man identified as Schilder on a transport bench in a black helmet, a wrap on his legs, yellow straps across his chest, and a covering over his mouth. He rocks, then slumps. Douglas County Campaign Watch posted it and wrote, “This is unacceptable.” They added, “This isn’t an old mistake from years ago. This happened during the campaign he is running right now.” Their close: “Democrat Christian Schilder should withdraw from the race for HD39.” And this: “The campaign photo may be polished.” “The video tells a very different story.” He still has the polished headshot on where he bills himself as a Lone Tree civil engineer who cannot afford a house. #Colorado# #HD39#

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Senators who voted against advancing the Crypto Clarity Act: Independents: • Angus King • Bernie Sanders Republicans: • Thom Tillis • Jerry Moran • Josh Hawley • Susan Collins Democrats: • Andy Kim • Tim Kaine • Jack Reed • Mark Kelly • Ed Markey • Tina Smith • Jon Ossoff • Alex Padilla • Ron Wyden • Dick Durbin • Gary Peters • Peter Welch • Jeff Merkley • Cory Booker • Jacky Rosen • Adam Schiff • Brian Schatz • Patty Murray • Mark Warner • Elissa Slotkin • Mazie Hirono • Chris Murphy • Ben Ray Luján • Ruben Gallego • Maria Cantwell • Maggie Hassan • Amy Klobuchar • Martin Heinrich • John Fetterman • Tammy Baldwin • Michael Bennet • Chuck Schumer • Jeanne Shaheen • Chris Van Hollen • Elizabeth Warren • Kirsten Gillibrand • Raphael Warnock • John Hickenlooper • Tammy Duckworth • Richard Blumenthal • Lisa Blunt Rochester • Sheldon Whitehouse • Catherine Cortez Masto

Here is the full list of votes for Clarity, you are are urged to vote accordingly! **CLARITY Act cloture — Sept. 15, 2026 — 49 Yes, 50 No, 1 Not Voting** Alsobrooks — No Baldwin — No Banks — Yes Barrasso — Yes Bennet — No Blackburn — Yes Blumenthal — No Blunt Rochester — No Booker — No Boozman — Yes Britt — Yes Budd — Yes Cantwell — No Capito — Yes Cassidy — Yes Collins — No Coons — Not voting Cornyn — Yes Cortez Masto — No Cotton — Yes Cramer — Yes Crapo — Yes Cruz — Yes Curtis — Yes Daines — Yes Duckworth — No Durbin — No Ernst — Yes Fetterman — No Fischer — Yes Gallego — No Gillibrand — No Graham — Yes Grassley — Yes Hagerty — Yes Hassan — No Hawley — No Heinrich — No Hickenlooper — No Hirono — No Hoeven — Yes Husted — Yes Hyde-Smith — Yes Johnson — Yes Justice — Yes Kaine — No Kelly — No Kennedy — Yes Kim — No King — No Klobuchar — No Lankford — Yes Lee — Yes Luján — No Lummis — Yes Markey — No Marshall — Yes McConnell — Yes McCormick — Yes Merkley — No Moody — Yes Moran — No Moreno — Yes Mullin — Yes Murkowski — Yes Murphy — No Murray — No Ossoff — No Padilla — No Paul — Yes Peters — No Reed — No Ricketts — Yes Risch — Yes Rosen — No Rounds — Yes Sanders — No Schatz — No Schiff — No Schmitt — Yes Schumer — No Scott (FL) — Yes Scott (SC) — Yes Shaheen — No Sheehy — Yes Slotkin — No Smith — No Sullivan — Yes Thune — Yes Tillis — No Tuberville — Yes Van Hollen — No Warner — No Warnock — No Warren — No Welch — No Whitehouse — No Wicker — Yes Wyden — No Young — Yes Full Senate clerk PDF is not posted yet. This is the complete 100-senator list matching the official Press Gallery result: 49–50, GOP nos Collins/Hawley/Moran/Tillis, Coons not voting, no Democratic yes votes.

Live tours face a huge challenge this summer. Some artists are already changing their plans. And if global tensions continue, it could send ripple effects through the touring industry. -------- If you've ever been on tour you know that every dollar matters. Airline tickets. Petrol. Buying lunch on the road. How many t-shirts you sell. When those things get more expensive, it can tip the whole tour into the red. And it's starting to squeeze for artists already this year. --------- This week, we mapped out how geo-political tension can ripple through the music industry. Wave 1 - initial price shock • oil, energy, and agriculture price shock higher. • jet fuel price doubles. • airline tickets, petrol creep higher. Wave 2 - artist tour budget squeeze • spring and summer tours are mostly locked in, but they'll feel more expensive than budgeted once on the road. • festival fly-ins and last minute bookings are costly. • gas, petrol, van costs and per-diems are squeezed. • some small tours are cancelled or re-routed. Wave 3 - venue costs rise • energy and utility bills are more expensive to renew. • food and drink prices rise. • artists start to demand higher guarantees from venues. • fans begin to limit their discretionary spending (on tickets, travel, drinks, merch). • smaller venues get cut from the tour plans. Wave 4 - higher ticket prices and consolidation • baseline touring costs are now structurally higher. • ticket costs get hiked • more megastar artist residencies + "luxury" ticketing. • grassroots venues struggle + indie artists can't make it work. -------- Obvious disclaimer here I'm not a geopolitics expert and hopefully tensions ease soon. However, this is already impacting some artists, and it's useful to map out how this type of thing can send ripple effects through the industry.

The Copycat Dictator: Trump Echoes Hitler's Tactics This is not a deal. It is a stickup with letterhead. Trump did not negotiate 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil. He bagged a president, propped up the next available strongman, and announced that the ground under other people's feet now answers to Washington. Delcy Rodríguez did not sit down as an equal. She sat down as a hostage who still had a pen. The United States pointed a gun at a country, then invoiced it for the privilege. That is the old dictator's sequence, not some American innovation. Invent the emergency. Hit the neighbor. Install the local who will sign. Seize the asset. Call it destiny. Hitler wrapped conquest in grievance and "restoration." Trump used drugs as the cover story and crude as the payoff. If Maduro were the point, the story ends in a courtroom. It didn't. Rodríguez is not a partner. She is a quisling with stationery. Majority control. Oil at cost. A hundred-year claim. A press release screaming HISTORY while a shattered country is told to be grateful for the occupation's investment. McFaul called it theft dressed as policy. He was being polite. It is a colonial concession signed after a midnight kidnapping. Kaine was right: this pads the family firm and Big Oil and kicks any clean-energy future further down a burning road. Van Hollen was right: troops in harm's way so billionaire friends can book reserves is not statecraft. It is a fiduciary crime with a flag pin. Spare the gasoline fairy tale. Prices will not collapse because he typed in all caps. What lasts is uglier: Washington owning a slice of another nation's geology, carbon locked in for generations, Venezuelans watching their inheritance sold by a regime that exists because the raid allowed it to exist. After a year of government equity stakes, even a Cato economist gagged: a majority-state oil vehicle branded as private enterprise. That is not capitalism. That is the state as holding company for its donors. If this were about Venezuelans, there would be an election before a concession. First the force. Then the asset. Then the lie that it was always ours. Trump is not Hitler. He is the copy: same method, cheaper suit, commodities desk attached. A dictator-wannabe who looked at a broken country and saw a warehouse. The people calling it a win are the people expecting to cash the receipt.

I have never been an FBI agent. Never conducted an investigation. Never worn a wire or served a warrant or spent a winter in a field office where the heating runs four hours behind the interrogation schedule. I was a congressional staffer. Then a political appointee. Then a different kind of political appointee. Then the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is also a kind of political appointee, except the furniture is nicer and the jet is mine. I run the building. I would like to tell you about the jet. It seats fourteen. It costs sixty million dollars. The interior was refurbished during the Bush administration and the procurement file describes the upholstery as "heritage cognac." I know this because I requested the file. Not for oversight purposes. I wanted to know the name of the color so I could describe it at dinner. Heritage cognac. It smells like a law firm that has never lost. I spend a lot of time in that smell now. I think it is the smell of having arrived somewhere that was never meant for you, and noticing that nobody has asked you to leave. Washington to Philadelphia is a hundred and forty miles. Amtrak runs it for forty-nine dollars. I flew the Gulfstream on May 10th because Alexis wanted to see George Strait. The suite was thirty-five thousand. Maybe fifty. I don't track numbers below six figures. The flight crew stayed on past eleven. Overtime. Security too. Someone will calculate the cost per mile of flying a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most Uber rides. That someone will not be me. I was in the suite. The suite didn't have a calculator. It had George Strait. The Bureau told reporters Alexis was "an invited guest of the performers." Representatives for George Strait and Chris Stapleton did not confirm this. They were never going to. But the FBI said it, and under my leadership, when the FBI says something, that is the evidentiary standard. I run the building. The building said it. It's true. Her protection detail is where the budget gets interesting. Twenty-four-seven coverage. SWAT-certified agents. Field officers drawn from multiple Bureau offices nationwide. Two armored SUVs at minimum. Hair appointments. Musical appearances. A blowout in Nashville required four agents in a parking lot for ninety minutes. The annual cost is roughly one million dollars before overtime, vehicle maintenance, and incidentals. The Bureau cites "hundreds of credible violent death threats" as justification. One person has been arrested. His name is Alden Welch Ruml, twenty-six, from Massachusetts. He sent emails. He faces five years. One emailer. One million dollars a year. Four SWAT agents per errand. A quarter of a million dollars in federal protection per verified threat. For context: the average FBI field office spends less annually on its entire confidential human source program. Informants embedded inside drug cartels, counterterrorism cells, organized crime families — the people whose testimony sends other people to prison — cost the Bureau less to keep alive than it costs me to ensure my girlfriend arrives at a salon escorted by men trained to rappel from helicopters. One of my officials suggested we conduct a formal threat assessment. A review. The kind of paperwork the Bureau has generated for seventy years whenever a protection decision requires justification. He had been with the Bureau for nineteen years. He asked in the hallway, in front of staff. I berated him. Not quietly. He stopped asking. He stopped asking. That phrase is going to recur in this document. I want you to notice it each time. Now. Alexis Wilkins is a country singer. I should mention this. She has released eight singles and one EP titled *Grit*. She has zero chart appearances. Her most-streamed song has five hundred and two thousand lifetime plays on Spotify. Taylor Swift accumulates that figure in approximately eleven minutes. A full-time country music journalist at the industry's leading independent publication stated that he had never heard of Alexis Wilkins before I started dating her. She has no active tour. She has never headlined a festival. Rolling Stone cited a forty-eight percent increase in her streaming numbers after we became public, which the same journalist clarified was "a forty-eight percent increase from virtually nothing." This is the person for whom the FBI fields a million-dollar annual protective detail. I want you to hold those two facts together — the streaming numbers and the security budget — and understand that they do not represent a miscalculation. They represent a value system. Her protection is not proportional to the threat. Her protection is proportional to her proximity to me. That is the formula. Proximity to the Director equals resources from the Bureau. I have applied it consistently. I have applied it to everyone. Which brings me to the people who are no longer here. I have removed over fifty career officials since January. Twelve have filed suit. Marshall Yates — my Congressional liaison, formerly the director of something called the Election Integrity Network, which existed to challenge the 2020 results — personally called field offices to compile names. Everyone who worked a case involving the President. Six thousand names were requested by the White House. The acting director before me was asked who he voted for. When he started supporting the President. Whether the FBI had tried to "put the president in jail." He was told the President hasn't forgotten. Three hundred counterterrorism and counterintelligence agents have been reassigned to immigration enforcement. The unit monitoring Iran — Iran, which operates proxy militias across four countries and maintains an active assassination program targeting American officials on American soil — was gutted. Six federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have resigned or been pushed out rather than participate in the prosecution of the previous FBI Director, James Comey, whose crime was investigating the President and whose punishment is being investigated by the institution the President gave me as a gift. I am prosecuting the last Director for doing his job. I am doing this from a fifty-thousand-dollar suite while a sixty-million-dollar aircraft idles on the tarmac outside. Nobody in the building finds this ironic. The ones who would have found it ironic are gone. They stopped asking. My Deputy Director is Dan Bongino. He has never worked a federal case. His career before this was conservative talk radio. He receives the President's Daily Brief every morning — CIA product, NSA intercepts, the full intelligence take of the United States government — and he obtained his SCI clearance after I waived his polygraph. The FBI's own guidelines state that polygraphs are a "preliminary employment requirement." My lawyers reclassified him as a Schedule C political appointee. Experts said that's not how the statute works. The experts are career officials. Career officials are the previous administration's furniture. I am redecorating. Nikole Rucker is my personal assistant. She arrived at the Bureau on January 20th without a security clearance of any kind. She was physically escorted into the Director's suite because the door requires a clearance she did not possess. By February she was in London, seated across from a Western allied intelligence service, notebook open, pen moving. She used to work for Stephen Miller. The White House says she does not share operational details with him. I am told this is technically accurate in the way that most technically accurate statements are technically accurate. The polygraphs are still running. Just not for my people. We administer them now to career staff. The questions have changed. We ask whether they've criticized me. Whether they've spoken to a reporter. Whether they've expressed doubt about the direction of the Bureau. The machine measures stress. Under my leadership, stress has been reclassified as disloyalty. Disloyalty as a security risk. A security risk as grounds for termination. Fifty people have traveled this chain. Twelve are suing. The rest stopped asking. I run the building. In February a New York Times reporter named Elizabeth Williamson published details about the protective detail. I opened a preliminary inquiry. Federal stalking charges. We searched our databases for her information. The Department of Justice reviewed the file, found no legal basis, and terminated the inquiry. Called it retaliation. The Times' executive editor called it "a blatant violation of Elizabeth's First Amendment rights." I do not retaliate. I respond to threats. A journalist publishing accurate reporting about my personal use of public resources is, by my definition, a threat to operational security. My definitions are the ones that govern inside this building. I wrote the organizational chart. There is a framed copy on my wall. It has one name at the top. The Atlantic published a separate story. Excessive drinking. Frequent absences. Staff forcing entry into my home because I could not be reached. I filed a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar defamation lawsuit. At my budget hearing, Senator Van Hollen cited the allegations under oath. I told him the only person slinging margaritas on the taxpayer dollar was him — in El Salvador, with a convicted gang-banging rapist. Fox News subsequently noted that public records do not support either characterization. But the line worked. That is the difference between evidence and performance. I have always understood which one this building rewards. In 2023, before any of this, I said the following on national television: "Chris Wray doesn't need a government-funded G5 jet to go to vacation. Maybe we ground that plane." I meant every word. We should have grounded his plane. So mine wouldn't invite the comparison. I sell merchandise. "Fight with Kash." T-shirts, hats, a children's book. The profits go to a foundation I started. The brand benefits from my position as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is not a conflict of interest. A conflict requires two competing interests. I have one interest. It has never been healthier. I told the Senate that the FBI cannot meet its mission with a five-hundred-million-dollar cut. I requested twelve billion. Two billion more than last year. In the same period I spent a million on my girlfriend's security detail, fifty thousand on a concert suite, flew a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most commutes, waived background checks for three political appointees with no law enforcement experience, reassigned three hundred counterterrorism agents to check green cards, gutted the unit tracking Iran's assassination program, and opened a federal investigation into a newspaper reporter for the crime of publishing a newspaper. I told Hannity: "We are going to protect not only me and my loved ones but every American that is threatened." I meant the first seven words. The rest was institutional boilerplate. The kind of thing you say when the camera is on and the sentence needs to land somewhere that sounds like it includes other people. I run the building. Now I want to tell you about the water. The week before the concert I went to Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona. A VIP snorkel. Nine hundred sailors and Marines are entombed in that hull. They have been there since 1941. The oil still leaks. It rises to the surface in small dark rainbows that break apart when you swim through them. The water was warm. Very clear. I could see the outline of the ship's superstructure below me, the geometry of a vessel that sank with its crew inside, and I remember the water temperature was perfect and the sun was on my back and my detail was on the shore and nobody in the water asked me to justify my presence above nine hundred dead. Recreational swimming at the Arizona is prohibited. The National Park Service said they were not involved. The Navy could not identify who authorized the outing. The logistics were coordinated by military email. A former government diver spoke to reporters anonymously. He said the access was unusual. He said it raised safety and security concerns. He spoke anonymously, the article noted, "for fear of retribution." A man who dives for the government is afraid to describe, on the record, how I swim. That is the climate. That is the building I run. A nineteen-year veteran stopped asking. Fifty career officials stopped working here. Three hundred counterterrorism agents stopped tracking the people who want to kill Americans. Six prosecutors stopped prosecuting. A government diver stopped talking. A reporter found her name in a database. And the oil keeps leaking from the Arizona, eighty-four years after the hull settled, surfacing in thin iridescent films that nobody is assigned to monitor because I reassigned them. I have never been an FBI agent. I have never conducted a federal investigation. I have never built a case or flipped a witness or spent a night in a surveillance van waiting for someone dangerous to make a mistake. But I have flown a sixty-million-dollar jet to a George Strait concert. I have watched the show from a suite that cost more than most Americans earn in a year. I have swum above nine hundred dead sailors in water so clear I could see their ship. And I have ensured, through the systematic removal of everyone who might object, that no one in the building will tell you any of this is wrong. The oil surfaces. It always surfaces. It has for eighty-four years. I run the building. The building doesn't ask questions anymore.