Saagar Enjeti on Who’s Profiting From Trump’s New America of Gambling, OnlyFans, and Drugs

**Tucker Carlson** (0:00)
A couple of years ago, leaked internal documents from APEC showed that the single largest donor to the organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, number one donor was a man called Leonid Rydvinsky. Rydvinsky was a Ukrainian born pornographer. He was the owner of OnlyFans, one of the largest porn sites and human exploitation sites in the world. The site that has effectively turned thousands upon thousands of American women into prostitutes. According to these documents, Rydvinsky and his wife had pledged $11 million to APAC. He later denied that, but the documents remain. You had to ask yourself, and many people did ask themselves at the time, why would someone who runs a pornography site, donate this much money to a pro-war organization, to a neocon organization like APAC? What's the connection between the two? Huh.
Then of course, it was that same year, 2024, that Miriam Adelson became one of the biggest donors to the Trump campaign, hundreds of millions of dollars. Now Miriam Adelson is not in the pornography business that we know of, but very much the beneficiary of the gambling business. Her late husband was one of the largest proprietors of casinos in the world, Sheldon Adelson. And she became one of the biggest donors, and partly because of those donations, became one of the driving forces behind our war with Iran, and also immensely powerful within this administration. In fact, literally, one of the people who picked employees of the Department of Justice, Miriam Adelson, calling up PPO, Presidential Personnel Office at the White House, I want this person at DOJ, bam, that person gets a job at DOJ. That happened.
But again, you have to ask, what is the connection between pornography, in that case gambling, and neocon politics? You wouldn't have thought there was one, but the connection keeps showing up. Here, for example, is a pretty amazing and telling clip from Ben Shapiro's recent podcast. Watch this.

**Ben Shapiro** (2:08)
In my opinion, as I said at the time, I thought the MOU was counterproductive, that it signaled weakness, that it actually gave credibility to the Iranian regime. Well, now, things are starting to reverse. You have Operation Economic Outcasts, led by Secretary of the Treasury Scott Besson. The goal is to economically strangle the Islamic Republic. So the odds have been steadily going down about when we will actually have full traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, according to our friends and sponsors over at Kal-She. But they are rising, actually, rather sharply recently.
Before April 1st of 2027 is now up to 42 percent. Before July 1st of 2027 is up to 53 percent. Honestly, I think we will probably get there before that.

**Tucker Carlson** (2:47)
So that's a pretty amazing clip. Here's Ben Shapiro. And if you see the whole show, he spends a lot of it, as he always does, pushing the United States to send more money and, well, more of our American soldiers and airmen into harm's way, fighting Israel's war in Iran. And then he kind of seamlessly moves to a pitch for Kalshi, a gambling company with whom he's a partner, apparently. Not only am I excited about the war, he's effectively saying, you can bet on its outcome. Here, sign up now for Kalshi. So here's Ben Shapiro using his daily lecture on why war is good when it's fought by Americans on behalf of a foreign country, to seamlessly pitch a gambling company. If war wasn't good enough, how about some gambling for you?
Why not pornography? Why not weed? Here's some prescription drugs. Well, of course, virtually everybody who pushes for wars like the war in Iran or the war in Iraq or toppling the Syrian government or killing the leader of Libya, that group, we call them neoconservatives, almost all of them are on board with all of these other public policy questions, every one of which has the net effect of hurting Americans, weakening people. So what's the connection here? There clearly is one, and we're just guessing, but maybe the connection is exploitation. So the idea of the Iran War, like the Iraq War before it was we used the world's best funded military, backed by the world's most powerful economy, to fight a war on behalf of another country, a tiny country that can't fight its own wars. In other words, take the United States and use it for our purposes to achieve something that we can't achieve ourselves.
Basically, treat the population of the United States, the 340 million Americans who live here, like livestock, and just use them.
And that's really not so different from the attitude that, I don't know, gets you to buy OnlyFans, or promote gambling companies, or push legalized weed or prescription drugs on the population. None of those things is good for people. And of course, you know that.