Tony Awards ratings have dropped for a second year in a row after the 2024 award show on Sunday night averaged just 3.5 million viewers. According to Nielsen’s same-day ratings, the CBS telecast was the least watched awards show so far this year and suffered a drop of 14.6% in viewership over last year’s show — which honors performances on and off Broadway, Playbill.com reported. To put the 3.5 million viewership into context, the 2023 Tony Awards delivered an average audience of 4.12 million viewers, making this year a second year the honors have seen a drop in the audience, the Hollywood Reporter noted. The awards show also saw a drop in the coveted age demographic of 18-49, earning a 0.41 rating (equivalent to about 540,000 people) vs. 0.46 for the telecast last year. While the night might have been disappointing, Sunday night’s telecast is not the lowest audience the Tony Awards have ever had. During the pandemic in 2021, Broadway’s big night failed to reach even 3 million viewers, Playbill noted. Tony Awards Ratings Drop 15% from Last Year After Miserable Opening Turns Off Viewers https://t.co/rqqrhHyoOK via @Showbiz411 — Showbiz 411 (@showbiz411) June 17, 2024 In 2016, the annual awards show experienced its best night ever — the year “Hamilton” took home almost every honor. That year, more than 8 million people watched as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s creation delivered almost a clean sweep, the outlet noted. The awards show was shown not only on CBS but also streamed on Paramount+. However, that “platform isn’t part of Nielsen’s on-air ratings,” THR noted. It also is worth noting that this year’s show was on Father’s Day — and overall television viewing also went down, making it the least watched TV on a Sunday night since 1987, Playbill noted. The “Tony” ratings drop stands alone this year after other major awards shows like the Golden Globes, Oscars, and Grammy’s all experienced a bump in their viewership over the 2023 numbers, THR noted. The 2024 Grammy Awards experienced an increase in viewership for the first time since the COVID pandemic struck four years earlier, as previously reported. CBS scored 17 million viewers in final same-day ratings for the February broadcast of the 66th annual awards show, according to THR. It was an increase of 36% over the number of viewers who tuned in to watch the biggest night in music in 2023 when the show attracted 12.55 million viewers. The 96th Academy Awards also improved after it attracted 19.5 million viewers in March, the largest audience since pre-pandemic highs in 2020, according to Variety. The jump in Oscars and Grammy Awards viewership followed that of the 2024 Golden Globes, which experienced its first spike in the ratings game since 2020, with a 50% increase over last year.

Because of the constant stream of news and information that we’re all subjected to on a daily basis, some of the most revealing moments in politics can be the easiest to overlook. It’s hard to spot a confession when there’s a million other things going on. If you recall, it was just a couple of months ago that a 22-year-old college student named Laken Riley was murdered. Authorities determined an illegal alien from Venezuela attacked her while she was jogging near the University of Georgia, then tried to rape Riley before beating her to death. Riley’s killer had crossed the border illegally, then committed a series of crimes that put him on the radar of local and federal authorities. But even after he was detained for these crimes, the killer was always set free shortly afterward. That continued until the day he came across Laken Riley. Faced with this set of facts, Joe Biden did not apologize for his immigration policy, which makes it all but impossible to deport criminal aliens even when they commit serious crimes, like DUIs. Instead, Biden said during his State of the Union Address that he only regretted calling Riley’s killer “an illegal.” Biden said that, unlike Donald Trump, he won’t call anyone “vermin” — even men who murder college students during attempted rapes. “I’m not going to treat any of these people with disrespect,” Biden said. Because of course you wouldn’t want to disrespect a murdering rapist. That might hurt his feelings. Throughout all of the back-and-forth on immigration that’s happened since Laken Riley’s murder — the fight over the border legislation, Biden’s so-called “parole in place” amnesty program, the lawsuit over Texas’ border fencing — this was by far the single most revealing comment we heard from the Biden administration. It didn’t receive anywhere near the attention it should have. The president of the United States said he regretted using accurate terminology to describe a man who tried to rape an American citizen, then killed her. This is cowardice and incompetence at best. It’s the total abdication of the role of president of the United States, which is to prioritize the safety of American citizens over the feelings of foreign nationals who commit heinous crimes. And it’s the kind of weakness that ultimately invites even more murders. WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show But at the time, Biden’s defenders told us that actually, Riley’s murder was a rare event. It’s extremely uncommon, they said, for an illegal alien to commit a violent crime against an American citizen. That was the response from the Los Angeles Times, the Cato Institute, NPR, and so on. They all trotted out statistics that, in their minds, demonstrated that American citizens are actually more dangerous than the millions of unknown foreigners who are illegally crossing the border every year. The claim defied common sense, but you were instructed to believe it. The only problem with this logic is that, by definition, we don’t know exactly how many illegal aliens are actually in this country. We also don’t know their identities. Even when these foreign nationals are arrested, the largest cities in this country go to great lengths to conceal their arrests from the federal government. And that gives these people the ability to commit crimes with impunity, all while avoiding detection. Often, when these foreigners commit a crime in this country, no suspects are ever identified. And in the rare cases where suspects are identified, it often takes a very long time to bring them to justice. Case in point: Last August, a 37-year-old Maryland mother of five by the name of Rachel Morin went missing after going for a walk on a trail in Bel Air. Her body was found 24-hours later. Within two weeks, the local sheriff’s office determined that a DNA sample from the crime scene in Maryland matched the DNA from a home invasion that took place earlier in the year, across the country in Los Angeles. That home invasion involved the brutal assault of a 9-year-old girl. But even though authorities had a DNA match, they still didn’t have a suspect, because this suspect was a foreign national who wasn’t in any U.S. databases. So the FBI’s Baltimore field office had to enlist their “investigative genetic genealogy team” to identify potential family members of the killer. The authorities then traveled to El Salvador to interview these potential witnesses and informants. And that exhaustive effort ultimately led to the arrest of a suspect at a bar in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Friday night. Watch: You can see the problem here. When an illegal immigrant commits a violent crime, it’s not enough to gather DNA evidence. That usually works when the suspect is an American citizen, because American citizens who commit violent crimes often have a criminal history — and their DNA Is already in a database in this country. But foreign nationals who come here aren’t in the U.S. databases, even though they often have a violent criminal history in another country. That was the case here, where this suspect apparently committed a murder in El Salvador before coming to the United States. This is a man who committed heinous violent crimes in two states and two separate countries — that we know of.  It’s not hard to see that, if the police didn’t have that surveillance footage from Los Angeles, it’s very likely they never would have been able to identify Rachel Morin’s killer. That appears to have been a major break in the case, along with whatever the feds learned when they traveled to El Salvador.  This is the kind of thing you have to keep in mind when you read reports about how crimes by illegal aliens aren’t that common. This is the problem with all the statistics. The truth is that it’s often impossible to track these crimes, much less investigate them. Unless investigators get extremely lucky and expend an extraordinary amount of effort — which is what happened in Rachel Morin’s case — it’s often impossible to even identify a suspect. It’s also important to consider the fact that the corporate press is extremely selective about which crimes it chooses to cover. Yes, the murder of Laken Riley received wall-to-wall coverage. It was too flagrant and horrific a story to ignore. But there are many similar murders that don’t receive anywhere near the same level of attention. If they did receive a lot of attention, people might realize that the statistics don’t make a whole lot of sense. Consider for example this case from a couple of months ago involving a murder on an interstate in Michigan. This is a story that, as far as I can tell, was only reported by local news stations. It’s also been picked up by the Trump campaign. Watch: Right. It’s a real mystery how he got back inside the United States. It’s “currently unknown.” And in fact we may never know how the killer managed to evade the extensive border security we have. Joe Biden’s DOJ has all these guard towers and laser tripwires and somehow this guy managed to get past all of them. And then when he drove drunk and committed a bunch of other crimes, somehow he still evaded detection. We may never know how he pulled that off. As it happens, there are a lot of similar mysteries unfolding all over the country. According to NBC News, it’s also a mystery as to how a 15-year-old Venezuelan arrived in the United States, only to allegedly open fire on tourists and police officers in a crowded store. Watch:   He’s a “migrant from Venezuela,” we’re told. But they don’t give us any more information. In fact, if you listen to that whole report, you won’t even hear the migrant’s name. You can come to this country illegally and start shooting, and the media and police will still do everything they can to protect you.  They won’t answer questions such as: How could a “migrant from Venezuela” obtain a 45-caliber handgun in New York City, which has some of the strictest gun legislation in the country? How exactly did he enter the country, much less obtain a firearm? And how was his age determined? You’d think those questions would occur to NBC News, but apparently not. But in that report, you did hear NBC mention the rise in crimes involving mopeds. That’s one common denominator they’re willing to talk about. And as it happens, just a couple of weeks ago, there was another “moped crime” in New York, when an illegal alien on a moped shot two police officers investigating a robbery in Queens. Watch: So again, it’s a “migrant” in New York. No word on whether he’s a legal migrant, so you can fill in the blanks. But he’s apparently fond of mopeds, like so many criminals we’ve now imported from Central America. And of course, he happens to have no documented criminal history, even though from that report, it appears very likely he’s committed a lot of other robberies. Again, this is the problem with the statistics you often hear. Especially in Left-wing cities, they simply don’t arrest these “migrants” when they commit crimes. Until they shoot at police officers, they get away with it. Another recent case out of Dallas only proves that point. Watch: So this is yet another preventable series of murders. It’s a case where the Dallas police department didn’t alert federal authorities about this illegal alien’s crimes, including the fact that he beat his girlfriend to a pulp. That just went unreported. I could spend all day showing you cases like this. The Center for Immigration Studies has documented one recent case in which an illegal alien from Guatemala allegedly killed a mother and a toddler in Florida, in a double-murder that’s attracted pretty much no national attention whatsoever. The killer in that case was also apparently wanted for a murder in his home country, just like the alleged killer of Rachel Morin. As the Center for Immigration Studies puts it:  Beating and stabbing another person to death, let alone stabbing a toddler in a tub, is rarely the first crime anyone commits. Most criminals are ‘upward offenders’, that is they start small and work their way up. … All of that raises the question of how many other migrant fugitives from crime abroad were among the almost 1.3 million got-aways at the Southwest border in the past two fiscal years, and how many future victims are thus doomed to meet the alleged fates of this mother and child. That’s a very good question. And in fact this sort of thing is happening so often that I had to make a last minute edit to this monologue, in order to also make sure I mention the very latest “migrant crime.” Fox News reported at 9 AM this morning: An illegal immigrant Ecuadorian is in NYPD custody after a broad daylight sex attack in which police said a machete-wielding man approached two 13-year-olds, one a boy and one a girl, tied them together by the wrists and raped the girl at a popular park in Queens, according to sources. An NYPD spokesperson confirmed a person of interest was in custody but declined to provide additional details. However, law enforcement sources tell Fox News that police arrested an Ecuadorian man Monday evening in connection with the crime. He entered the country illegally in 2021. Perhaps now you can see why a majority of Americans — across the political spectrum — now support mass deportations of illegal immigrants. This is not a partisan issue anymore. Americans are sick to death of this madness. And it’s not just illegal migrants. I began by showing how the statistics on illegal alien crime are extremely unreliable to the point of being useless. That’s true, but the fact remains that there are quite a few American-born criminals who are also being unleashed on the public as well. Remember, for example, that the man who killed jogger Eliza Fletcher in Memphis had served a 20-year prison sentence for kidnapping, and also sexually assaulted another woman. Recall that the recidivism rate for violent offenders in this country overall is somewhere north of 60%. The theme in both types of cases — whether it’s an illegal offender or not — is that innocent American citizens are falling victim to dangerous scumbags who shouldn’t be walking the streets to begin with. We are sacrificing thousands of American lives for the sake of the worst human beings on the planet. If the system cared even slightly about our wellbeing, if it would do the bare minimum to enforce the law, thousands of lives could easily be saved. You don’t need statistics to tell you that. You can just watch the local news. Keep this in mind as Biden advances his various plans for amnesty. This is a man who apologizes for being too harsh to murderers. As long as he remains in office, he will do everything he can to unleash even more of them.

Democrats are now talking about “saving democracy.” “Democracy” technically means that if we’re all in a room together and we want to make a decision, we all vote on that specific decision. A republic means you have representatives, which means you don’t vote directly on many of the decisions that are being made. Instead, you delegate the power to vote on those decisions to a representative government. Typically, that representative government has a series of checks and balances. The United States is a republic. It is not a direct democracy. It’s a democracy in the broader sense, which is that we vote. But it’s not a democracy in the technical sense in which you vote on every issue or in which a pure majoritarian popular will decides every single issue. In fact, the founders decried exactly such a system. They saw that as what they would call a mobocracy. They didn’t want just a series of referenda on every single issue to go to the popular vote, which is why intervening institutions in the government exist. It’s why Congress is represented on a popular level, but the Senate was originally supposed to be represented at the state level by the state legislatures. Originally, state legislatures were supposed to pick their senators. It’s why the Senate itself is not proportional; Montana and California have the same number of senators. It is why a series of checks and balances between the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judiciary exist. It is why an electoral college exists. There are all sorts of institutions in our republic that are designed to check excesses of the mob. That was very much at the forefront of the founders’ concerns, as is evidenced by the Federalist Papers. WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show Why is that important? Because a shift in the way people thought of democracy in the United States took place, which started in the late 19th century as a take-away from German progressivism. Much of modern American government, our structures, particularly the administrative state, are drawn from it. Woodrow Wilson, who was the dean of Princeton University before he became the President of the United States, greatly admired that system. He wrote extensively about German progressivism and his vision for what democracy should look like. He believed that the Constitution of the United States had outlived its sell-by date, that the Constitution’s checks and balances were useless. Wilson, a Democrat, wanted something that was both more democratic and less democratic: He wanted a popular vote for one man who would make all the decisions with the help of administrative bureaucrats who were experts on the issues. In other words, he wanted a government of expertise. He believed all the checks and balances thwarted that government. In 1908, he famously wrote, “The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution, it will be from no lack of constitutional powers on its part, but only because the President has the nation behind him, and Congress has not.” In other words, the president is elected by the public, effectively speaking, which means he should have as much power as humanly possible. That was important to Woodrow Wilson because he believed in the setup of the administrative state, an entire branch of the government that was effectively independent of the popular will. When Democrats say democracy, this is what they mean. They do not mean that they respect the institutions of the Republic. They don’t respect the Supreme Court of the United States except when it is giving them precisely what they want. The Democrats like to say the word “democracy” because they want to portray Donald Trump as an incipient fascist. But it is actually Joe Biden who is hell-bent on undermining the actual democratic republic. CNN, which is hosting the first presidential debate, interviewed several Trump supporters and asked about him undermining democracy. The Trump supporters correctly responded that we don’t live in a democracy; we live in a republic, which is true. We live in a representative democracy with a series of checks and balances that thwart the popular will on a regular basis. CNN tried to say it’s very bad to say that we live in a republic, not a democracy. They interviewed author Anne Applebaum, who said: These words were used in different ways in the 18th century. And it’s true, the Founders didn’t want direct democracy, by which they meant people gathering on the town square. They wanted representative democracy. But I think the reason why this conversation about language has risen now is because there is a part of the Republican Party that would like to rule as a minority, and they need an excuse for why that’s okay. And so they have begun to say, we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic. It’s not 100% clear what that means, but I think they mean, we want Donald Trump to be able to do whatever he wants. This is truly Orwellian because it’s total projection. The people who want the president of the United States to do whatever he wants without any checks and balances are typically Democrats. So with the polls indicating Trump is winning, Democrats are already preparing to do what they want to do: subvert the institutions of the Republic. They are looking to subvert the democratic institutions of the Republic. They are looking to subvert the legislature. They’re looking to subvert the presidency. They’re looking to subvert the courts. In an article titled, “The Resistance to a New Trump Administration Has Already Started,” the New York Times stated: Opponents of Donald J. Trump are drafting potential lawsuits in case he is elected in November and carries out mass deportations, as he has vowed. One group has hired a new auditor to withstand any attempt by a second Trump administration to unleash the Internal Revenue Service against them. Democratic-run state governments are even stockpiling abortion medication. A sprawling network of Democratic officials, progressive activists, watchdog groups and ex-Republicans has been taking extraordinary steps to prepare for a potential second Trump presidency, drawn together by the fear that Mr. Trump’s return to power would pose a grave threat not just to their agenda but to American democracy itself. Understand how Orwellian that is. They are saying they need to do non-democratic things to save democracy. They need to burn down the village in order to save the village. One of the actions they are going to take is to stack the administrative state. The Times continued, writing: Interviews with more than 30 officials and leaders of organizations about their plans revealed a combination of acute exhaustion and acute anxiety. Activist groups that spent the four years of Mr. Trump’s presidency organizing mass protests and pursuing legal challenges, ultimately helping channel that energy into persuading voters to oust him from power in 2020, are now realizing with great dread they may have to resist him all over again. … The Biden administration pushed through a flurry of regulations in the spring, meeting a deadline to ensure that those rules could not be summarily overturned next year under a 1996 law if Mr. Trump wins the election and Republicans take total control of Congress. This is a thwarting of democracy. It is hilarious to watch all the same people who are shouting to the rafters about the evils of Trump and his attacks on democracy now attempting all the same measures that they say Republicans should never attempt. This is how the Left thinks of our institutions, that they own these institutions. Any outside threat to these institutions, including the future boss of the institution, must be destroyed. This is stealing democracy: actively setting up structures that prevent the fundamental working order of the government, so long as the Republican is the person who is running the government.

He can be seen grabbing money out of the register while the other alleged robber pistol whips the worker

'Drug traffickers increasingly have partnered with Chinese underground money exchanges'

Dickie V. is coming back

'They were subjected to the 65-mile Bataan Death [March]’

'No basis in law'

'I’ve cut the deficit by over one trillion dollars'

'Undermine taxpayer investments'