The Big Ben Show: Miranda Devine on J6 Bomber, Brian Cox on Double Tap

And why Jasmine Crockett and Jen Welch are speaking the same language

Dec 11, 2025

The latest Big Ben Show is out for your listening pleasure, or watch it here:

The Candidate Democrats Can’t Stop Arguing About

She’s only been in the Texas Senate race for a few days, but Rep. Jasmine Crockett is already breaking brains. In the Dallas-based Democrat’s launch video, she lets one person do the talking: Donald Trump. Across 45 seconds, Crockett pivots to face the camera without saying a word as the president rattles off a string of insults against her, among them calling her a “very low IQ person.”
She says nothing about her vision for Texas. There’s no message to local voters. It’s a non-traditional, polarizing, yet oddly attention-grabbing video. That makes it on-brand for the 44-year-old Crockett, a progressive lightning rod whose candidacy in one of the nation’s highest-profile Senate races has divided Democrats across the nation and sparked a debate over the kinds of Democratic candidates who can win statewide office in the Trump era.
Online, some lauded her video announcement as a bold and effective use of media — an example of her ability to generate excitement on the left through mega-viral moments and stinging one-liners. Her fiercest supporters see Crockett as a breath of fresh air for a creaking party: a sharp communicator and deft social media user, a master of the attention-economy who is unafraid to take the fight to Republicans.
But others viewed the video in precisely the opposite terms — self-centered and unserious, not grounded in issues tailored to Texans. They saw it as a metaphor for her candidacy: a splashy but politically tin-eared video that speaks only to a small portion of a huge state.
Crockett has at least one thing working to her advantage. As one of her party’s foremost provocateurs, she is a fundraising juggernaut, poised to compete in a state where it is expensive to run statewide. She’s already monetized her self-described “Crockett clapbacks,” selling merchandise emblazoned with notorious retorts like “bleach blonde, bad built, butch body,” an insult she famously once lobbed at a rival House firebrand, former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Indeed, Crockett’s finances far outpace her peers in the U.S. House. In the first half of the year alone, she raised $3.8 million, the fifth-highest amount among House Democrats.
There’s little doubt that, with her fundraising chops and name recognition, Crockett would be a formidable candidate in a Democratic primary. The question is whether her campaign is doomed from the start in a red state like Texas, where no Democrat has won a statewide race since 1994 and the GOP controls the governorship and both chambers of the legislature.
For all the longstanding chatter about how demographic changes will turn the state blue, there’s little evidence of a path to victory for a candidate quite so liberal and with her record of brash, off-the-cuff statements (she once claimed that Republicans are “inherently violent”).
Democratic operatives worry that Crockett can’t build the broad coalition she needs to win a general election. Some see rising star state Rep. James Talarico, her opponent in the primary, as a better fit for a general electorate. An aspiring minister, Talarico has charmed voters with his faith-first agenda and plainspeak messaging — which could prove particularly fruitful next November, especially for voters who have soured on Trump or if Republicans have fractured after the primary.
Crockett’s own theory of the case hasn’t won over many converts in a state that elected Trump by a 14-point margin just a year ago.
“I don’t know that we’ll necessarily convert all of Trump’s supporters. That’s not our goal,” Crockett told CNN yesterday. “We don’t need to.”
Her path to victory, she argues, hinges on expanding the electorate — engaging with voters who “historically have not been talked to.”
Republicans have expressed elation at the prospect of Crockett atop the Democratic ticket. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has described Crockett’s decision to run as “one of the greatest things that’s happened to the Republican Party;” one Republican operative likened it to the GOP’s “Christmas morning.”

U.S. Seizes Oil Tanker Off Venezuela Coast

WSJ:

The U.S. seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, President Trump said Wednesday, marking a major escalation in the administration’s pressure campaign against the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro.
The move came just hours after Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado left the country on a boat, an escape that potentially gave the Trump administration an opening to take more aggressive action against the Maduro regime.
“As you probably know, we’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela—a large tanker, very large. The largest one ever seized, actually,” Trump said during an event at the White House on Wednesday afternoon.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Coast Guard executed a seizure warrant for the tanker with support from the Defense Department. In a video she posted on social media, uniformed men can be seen fast-roping onto the ship from helicopters and entering the bridge with guns raised.
“For multiple years, the oil tanker has been sanctioned by the United States due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations,” Bondi wrote on social media. The vessel had been used to transport “sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran,” she said.
In a statement, the Venezuelan government called the seizure blatant theft and an international act of piracy. It accused Trump of seeking to seize Venezuelan oil and plunder the country’s energy resources.
A Pentagon official said the move was a warning to other tankers waiting to dock and load up Venezuelan crude. Maritime tracking data shows around a dozen off the Venezuelan coast, but the official said others have their Automatic Identification System turned off to avoid detection.
The U.S. has sanctions in place that prohibit companies from trading Venezuelan oil, though it has given exemptions to some companies, including Chevron, which this summer received a narrowed license to operate in the country. Trump has warned that he will level hefty tariffs on countries that buy oil from Caracas.
Asked about the seizure at the White House, Trump joked that journalists should follow the tanker with a helicopter and said he assumed the U.S. would keep the oil. He also said that information about the ship’s owner would be forthcoming.
Brokers in Singapore told The Wall Street Journal that a tanker called the Skipper was the vessel seized off Venezuela. The tanker, formerly called the Adisa, had been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control for carrying Iranian crude
The Skipper, a so-called Very Large Crude Carrier, was covertly loaded in Venezuela with about 1.1 million barrels of heavy sour Merey crude in mid-November, without its transponder switched on, according to Matt Smith, an analyst at energy consultants Kpler.
“The VLCC has previously been used for dark activity, moving Iranian crude,” Smith said. “We believe its destination is Cuba, but it has been stopped waiting offshore Venezuela since loading.”
Venezuela has exported an average of 750,000 barrels a day this year, with half of it going to China, according Kpler.
The oil is mostly moved by around 800 old and uninsured tankers with obscure ownerships that popped up after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to move sanctioned Russian crude to China and India.
Overseas oil sales are a major driver of Venezuela’s flailing economy. Maduro’s government received between $1.8 billion and $2.2 billion tied to licensed foreign oil activities in both 2023 and 2024, according to estimates from José Ignacio Hernández, a law professor, consultant and public-debt expert at Aurora Macro Strategies. Chevron accounted for much of that revenue.
Oil futures rose on news of seizure.
The seizure was the latest move in the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign against Venezuela. The U.S. has amassed the biggest American military buildup in the Caribbean in decades to exert pressure on Maduro. It has labeled the Venezuelan leader as the head of drug cartels. The Pentagon has carried out airstrikes on alleged drug boats in the region. Trump has warned that land targets could come next.

12 Top Execs on the Fallout of a Warners Deal:

The Ankler:

Some of the dozen-plus industry figures I spoke with believe that Netflix isn’t quite sure what it plans to do with all the Warner Bros. assets — should a deal indeed close. Sarandos said Dec. 8 that making programming like Ted Lasso for Apple is a “healthy business” and he wants Channing Dungey and her Warner Bros. TV Group “ to continue to do that.”
The streaming giant will also have to contend with preexisting licensing deals and second-window streaming deals for some of television’s biggest hits — WBTV Group’s The Bachelor, Abbott Elementary and The Voice — with competitors across the television spectrum. What’s more, the company that famously erased television’s profitable back-end business in favor of buying shows for one upfront payment will have to start paying residuals to profit participants on such Warners library titles as Friends, ER and The Big Bang Theory, among scores of others.
“It’s a very disruptive move but it will also disrupt them,” says the veteran studio exec.
Then there’s the syndication space that has become instrumental in keeping the linear networks backed by Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal and Paramount afloat. As I posed in my Friday column, are these spaces that Netflix actively wants to be in?
“Whatever Netflix thinks they’re doing, we don’t know yet,” this same source says. “I’m not scared or terrified; I’m intrigued. Netflix is attempting to create the next iteration of Netflix.”
With the Ellisons publicly trying to secure the future Paramount with a Warners acquisition, Netflix likely realized that not one, but two vital programming pipelines were about to close. No matter who winds up with Warners, HBO Max will no longer need to buy from outside studios, and if Ellison has his way, a supersized Paramount would likely want to keep everything from originals to library fare in-house. That would mean Netflix could no longer license sticky library programming for its service (Friends, NCIS, Big Bang Theory) or buy new originals from Paramount (Emily in Paris, the upcoming Little House on the Prairie) or WBTV Group (Running Point, The Sandman).
With Warners, Netflix would lock up a massive amount of library programming across multiple genres — prestige (HBO’s Game of Thrones, The White Lotus), kids programming (Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes), comedies (Friends, Big Bang) and massive franchises including Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and DC Comics — that could provide the backbone of its service. And, perhaps most importantly, without having to pay more to rent them.
“There’s value in owning the content and being able to have that content long term,” the exec adds. “They’ve made it hard for Peacock or Paramount+ to compete [if the deal happens].”

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