This week’s episode of the Mike Gallagher Show dives deep into the controversies of the Super Bowl halftime show featuring Bad Bunny, which sparked debates about cultural shifts and media portrayal in America. The episode covers intense discussions around Ring cameras and the growing concerns of surveillance in our everyday lives.
Welcome to the Mike Gallagher Show Week in Review podcast. It’s Friday, February 13th, 2026. This week, the Ring camera stirs a big controversy in America, Turning Point USA cuts into the big game audience, and there are new revelations about President Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. We begin with the halftime show, where Bad Bunny sang entirely in Spanish. Hope you had a great weekend. Hope you had a chance to enjoy the Turning Point USA halftime show reality of what Americans wanted, the alternative to the Bad Bunny abomination. Man, was that grotesque. And it wasn’t grotesque because of the style of music that this popular entertainer engages in. It wasn’t grotesque because it was not really red, white, and blue. It was grotesque because the NFL made a decision to give a giant middle finger to its own fan base. I know a lot of people who were livid at the Colin Kaepernick-inspired taking of a knee after George Floyd. Remember that? People who were never going to watch the NFL again? What they did last night with the halftime show was a thousand times worse than that. And the reason it’s worse is because it was sanctioned and condoned and provided by the NFL itself. That wasn’t in a vacuum. They made a decision a long time ago. This is what we’re going to subject the American people to. I saw a lot of great commentary on X. And right now, it feels like that’s all anybody wants to talk about is the horrific, vile, despicable abomination of a halftime show. And it really was that bad. If you don’t think it was that bad, you better know the lyrics of the music that the entertainer was performing. because they’ve been translated. How the FCC doesn’t have to regulate that is beyond me. That’s on broadcast. That’s not on cable. FCC guidelines should apply, and yet, since it was in Spanish, maybe they thought they could get away with it at the NFL. Filthy, disgusting, obscene lyrics performed by this guy… Entirely in Spanish. And I sure do appreciate what this guy wrote, somebody named Drew. This is a guy in Australia. Check out this comment from Drew. If you told someone… If you told someone in the year 2000 that within one generation… the Super Bowl halftime show would be performed completely in Spanish, and they would set up a sugar cane plantation on the set, complete with Hispanic field laborers as part of the set, you’d be considered a deranged far-right lunatic conspiracy theorist. The guy says, I’m watching this from Australia, and it is literally a woke fever dream. I can’t even believe that leftists decided to push demographic and cultural change this hard. Literally just a national humiliation ritual for the United States designed to make white people feel bad for existing. Meanwhile, the Ring camera released their big Super Bowl ad. The intentions were good, but many Americans wound up pretty angry. And they have a feature that a lot of people weren’t aware of called the search party on Ring. Okay? So picture this. You’ve got people in your neighborhood with Ring cameras on their front porch or on their gutter or on the garage corner of the house, you know, keeping an eye on your property. letting you know if you’re inside, who’s outside, who’s on the front porch, who’s in your front yard. And Ring decided to do a Super Bowl ad, spent a lot of money, millions and millions of dollars, to promote using its network of outdoor cameras to find lost dogs. Here’s the spot.
SPEAKER 07 :
This is Milo. That’s our family. But every year, 10 million go missing. And the way we look for them hasn’t changed in years. Until now. One post of a dog’s photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now.
SPEAKER 04 :
Join the neighborhood at ring.com. Okay, you have any problem with that? Do you see what’s wrong here? All right, here’s the headline from PCMag.com. Ring search party looks for lost dogs. Its Super Bowl ad sparks surveillance fears. People are concerned that, first of all, the search party feature is on by default, meaning that all Ring devices automatically monitor… unless the user turns it off. So here’s this ad that comes up. They say, oh, 10 million dogs a year are lost. Since we launched Ring Search Party that uses AI, we’ve been able to find a dog a day, one dog a day, in a country that has 10 million missing dogs. But here’s the thing. All the network, everything in your, every Ring camera in your community gets an image apparently through some AI process of the missing dog. So then every camera is now looking for that particular dog. Well, guess what? If they can do that with dogs, they can do that with people. And a lot of people are very concerned about that this is dark wave propaganda to normalize that Ring is using data for a lot of other things besides checking our doors. One user called this training wheels for mass human surveillance. Now, I was talking to my buddy Mark Davis about it this morning. I could tell Mark wasn’t all that concerned. He’s like, well, you know, look, surveillance videos, that’s closed circuit cameras. That’s a reality that we all have, right? But this is different because this is equipping everybody’s cameras in a neighborhood, in a city, in a county, maybe even in a state to look for one particular entity, be it dog or human. And don’t kid yourself. Obviously, if they can do it with dogs, they can do it with people. So to be able to program everybody’s Ring camera with a specific image that essentially has all the cameras in a community seeking out that one image, is that a problem? Sure seems to be to me. I don’t like it at all. On the heels of that story, we found out this week that the investigators looking into the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie worked with Google to recover video from her Nest camera. If you had any doubt, now you know. Someone is definitely always watching. I was listening to Tara this morning here in South Carolina, and she was talking today about the comparison between our surveillance system and China’s. You know, she was quoting information about how in China they have the citizens there surveilled by over 200 million cameras. And Xi’s government, the CCP, taps into all those cameras to keep an eye on the citizenry. Well, is that what we’re going to? Is that where we’re going to be? Are we going to be like the CCP? I understand the argument that says, well, if you’re not doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about? Well, on the other hand, China is the universe’s leader in the surveillance state. As Tara this morning was quoting the Chinese surveillance state, and you realize that what Joey said is true. Clearly, if you’ve got a camera in your house or on your house, even if you’re not connected to a monitoring system, even if you’re not a subscriber to the Nest Google Cloud, and apparently Mrs. Guthrie was not, they can still figure out a way to obtain video from your camera. I mean, we all joke about how if you’re talking, you know, you’ve got the Alexa system in your home and you wanted to, hey, Alexa, play the Mike Gallagher show. You can do that, right? Well, but you use phrases. Hey, honey, let’s take a trip to Niagara Falls. Yeah, maybe we could go. Let’s take the kids to Niagara Falls this summer. You’re talking about it in your living room. Before you know it, you’re getting ads for Niagara Falls on your phone and on your computer. So and again, China’s situation. Listen to this. China’s citizens. live under the most oppressive surveillance regime in the world. Every day, the Chinese are monitored by more than 200 million cameras, many of which have been installed since President Xi Jinping became paramount leader of the Asian nation in 2013. Not only do these devices surveil citizens as they go about their daily routines, according to worldfinance.com, They also feed this information back to a central government database where it is used to determine each person’s position in society through China’s infamous social credit system. Now, you don’t think lunatics on the left want to have a similar credit scoring, a social credit scoring? You don’t check all the right boxes? You don’t think you’re going to be targeted? by some of these tyrannical lunatics on the left. So, you know, to say you don’t mind surveillance cameras because you’re not a bad guy and you don’t have to worry about anything, that’s too simplistic. That’s way too simplistic. That’s not thinking through how we could become China. This article at worldfinance.com says mass surveillance has been a facet of China’s political regime since the 1950s. But it has become more widespread as access to intelligence-gathering technology has improved. You know, AI is also a huge part of this. AI is being used by these surveillance cameras that we have in America. Look at the ring ad on the Super Bowl Sunday. This spot. Think about this. Now, I know they mean well. With all the anger over the Bad Bunny halftime show, Turning Point USA got into the halftime act. Their ratings for the alternative show ought to make everyone sit up and take notice. I was reading, rather, from a guy named Tyler Farnsworth who says, this TPUSA halftime show is a much bigger deal than people understand, and it should have NBC and every legacy media exec very, very nervous. Because last night, the Rubicon got crossed on the most expensive advertising real estate in the world, and there is no unringing this bell. This guy writes, I’ve spent the last 15 years in advertising. I’ve worked on multiple Super Bowl campaigns. And the numbers I saw last night should put the fear of God into anyone whose business model depends on the Super Bowl being an unchallenged monoculture moment, regardless of where you land politically. NBC proudly announced that demand pushed a 30-second Super Bowl spot to an eye-watering $10 million, plus a mandatory $10 million in matching spend across the NBC media umbrella. Brands are paying $20 million to sit inside the, quote, biggest moment in media. Nielsen reported the 2025 Super Bowl averaged 127.7 million live viewers across roughly 50 million households. Final numbers are still pending, but early estimates show the TPUSA halftime stream pulled just north of 11 million concurrent households live. And because the Super Bowl is proudly group viewing, with industry averages around 2.5 viewers per household, that puts the live audience north of 27,500,000 for the Turning Point halftime show. Let that sink in. Turning Point USA potentially siphoned off roughly 22% of the total households watching the NFL broadcast during halftime. Changing the channel completely. He says that’s an absolutely psychotic number for counter-programming. He said, I would pay good money to be a fly on the wall at today’s meetings where some poor agency media buyer has to explain to a Fortune 100 CMO why the audience fell off a cliff for the spots that booked halftime, which are often the most expensive placements of the entire game. Mock it, cope, lampoon it, do whatever you want. But don’t ignore this moment. Because last night proved something legacy media never thought possible. The Super Bowl isn’t a captive audience. And when given a better option, people will take it. The Super Bowl advertising landscape just changed forever. Even with Charlie Kirk gone, Turning Point pulled off the unthinkable. And I want you to get a little taste of that Turning Point USA All-American alternative to the Super Bowl Bad Bunny filth and garbage. Man, oh man. Portions of our show brought to you by MyPillow. Get to tell you every day about the MyPillow text line. I love your feedback on the text line. I love hearing from you on the text line. Mike Lindell and his MyPillow employees want to thank you for supporting them the way you have. They’re bringing back the Mega Sale. I almost want to call it the MAGA Sale. But it’s the mega sale, classic MyPillow, normally $49.98. That’s the pillow that started it all. With the wholesale pricing, you’re going to get it for just $14.98. Have you been thinking about getting a MyPillow once and for all? Hey, you get it now for $14.98. 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For the best night’s sleep in the whole wide world, visit MyPillow.com. promo code mike g and don’t forget free shipping on everything on at the site it’s the mega sale free shipping on everything mypillow.com promo code mike g this is the mike gallagher show week in review podcast there’s new information about president trump and epstein the mainstream media doesn’t like this new information one little bit The Epstein Files is difficult, and let me tell you why. A while ago, I visited the White House, did a broadcast from the White House, you may remember. While I was there, I talked to a couple of key people in the Trump administration, and the Epstein Files came up. And it was shared with me, and I think this is not private. I mean, this is public knowledge. Trump’s concern, I think, even though he’s called for the release of the Epstein Files and Pam Bondi and the Justice Department, the whole thing is a mess. There’s been a lot of speculation as to who’s implicated, who’s in the list. The concern that people have… is that anybody who’s involved with Epstein in any way, shape, or form is going to get smeared. Just like Chris Murphy smeared Trump in this Twitter post, this X post. He said the President of the United States was in the middle of the most serious child sex trafficking ring of the last quarter century. He’s in the files thousands of times, blah, blah, blah. Journalist Alex Berenson responded this way. He said, this is disgusting slander. He said, I know you hate Donald Trump, but pretending the Epstein files show the most serious child sex trafficking ring of the last quarter century is dangerous fiction. Both sides should be telling the truth about this, not trying to rouse the crazies. And that’s the problem with this Epstein files story. It’s a lot of crazies circling around, waiting to pounce. I found a – actually, Tracy found a timeline, an actual timeline of what really happened. And for those who think that Trump is somehow implicated, they just don’t know the Trump-Epstein timeline. And clandestine over at X broke this timeline down in the following way. And this is what is an uncomfortable truth for people who hate Donald Trump. In 2005, Trump bans Jeffrey Epstein from all Trump properties. In 2006, Epstein was arrested in Florida after Trump helped victims go after Epstein. I’m going to interject that last night it was revealed in an FBI document that Trump actually called the Palm Beach police chief in 2006, thanking him for going after Epstein and what he called his evil accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. In 2008, Epstein was convicted on minimal charges and got an 18-month sentence from a Bush-appointed judge and was let off the hook by the Clinton-allied FBI. From 2008 until 2016, Obama and the Democrats did absolutely nothing about Jeffrey Epstein. Zero. Media didn’t touch it. It was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. In 2017, less than three weeks after he was inaugurated, Trump signed an executive order targeting transnational criminal organizations and preventing criminal trafficking. It was one of the first things Trump did as President of the United States. Trump targeted not just Epstein’s operation but others like it around the world. In 2019, Trump’s Department of Justice arrested Jeffrey Epstein, seized his island, and threw him in jail for crimes against children. In 2020, Trump’s Department of Justice arrested Ghislaine Maxwell and threw her in jail for crimes against children. Okay, now 2021 to 2024. Democrats under Joe Biden don’t say a word about Jeffrey Epstein. Anyone who is spreading that Trump is somehow implicated in crimes related to Jeffrey Epstein is simply proving they are ignorant to the entire situation and timeline. Trump, as Clandestine writes here at X, Trump is not Epstein’s buddy. Trump used the full force of the U.S. government to take Epstein out, shut down his operation, seize his island, and threw his butt in jail. Trump has been after Epstein for 20 years. After Trump found out the monster that he was, Trump knew what he had to do. That’s the truth about the Trump-Epstein timeline, a truth that Trump haters do not want you to hear about. Shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, President Trump believes in law and order. The latest crime statistics prove it. Meanwhile, look around. There’s a lot of great things happening in this country. I got the biggest laugh this morning out of Scott Jennings reposting an article by Axios about crime in major American cities. Something very exciting happened in 2025. Violent crime, according to Axios, dropped sharply across America’s biggest cities in 2025, according to new data reviewed by Axios. Now, do you want to know how Axios framed that? Because you don’t need me to tell you what was different in 2025 from 2024, right? or 2023, or 2022, or 2021. Hmm, what changed in 2020? What happened in January of 2025 that set this course on a different path? Hmm, wonder what’s different. Wonder what’s new about 2025. Oh yeah, that’s right. Donald Trump is back in the White House. And in 2025, under President Donald J. Trump, Axios studies crime data and determines that crime, it didn’t just reduce, wasn’t just reduced minimally, it’s dramatic. I mean, big time drop. How did Axios frame it? Are you ready? Here’s their headline. Crime plunges in major cities despite Trump’s crackdown rhetoric. That’s an actual headline. They just can’t do it. They can’t bear to give him any credit for anything great that’s happening in this country. And there’s tons of things happening great in this country. Axios’ takeaway, crime plunges in major cities despite Trump’s crackdown rhetoric. As Scott Jennings posted on his ex-account, that’s a funny way of saying crime went down under Trump. You think? Despite all the heated rhetoric, Democrats were not always deeply opposed to border security. Don’t just take my word for it. Take theirs. I was listening to Tara this morning in South Carolina, and I pledged to you that I would play this every hour today. I’m going to play this a lot in the weeks and months to come. In fact, we should put this on a loop. As the Democrats lecture us about how cruel and evil it is, to object to the mass illegal immigration that this country is experiencing, the tens of millions of people who have just strolled into this country thanks to the Democrats’ open borders policies. As you hear them lecture us about being cruel and mean and ugly, well, check out this article. clip from an online site called Western Lensman. This is something that everybody ought to hear, that everybody who’s objecting to Trump’s mass deportation effort should remember. Because we haven’t changed. The only thing that’s changed is the message from the Democrats. Don’t believe me? Check this out.
SPEAKER 05 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 02 :
Americans are right to demand better border security and better enforcement of the immigration laws. We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked. We’ve had five million undocumented workers come over the borders. It has become an extraordinary problem. All Americans.
SPEAKER 08 :
Not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. And we must do more to stop it.
SPEAKER 09 :
Biden, yes or no, would you allow the cities to ignore the federal law? No.
SPEAKER 11 :
Any city should listen to the Department of Homeland Security. The city made a mistake not to deport someone that the federal government strongly felt should be deported. Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay.
SPEAKER 10 :
We do not think the comprehensive health care benefits should be extended to those who are undocumented workers and illegal aliens. We do not want to do anything to encourage more illegal immigration policies.
SPEAKER 03 :
people say well why can’t you stop illegal immigrants from coming here and the number one answer we give is when they come here they can get jobs get benefits against the law because of fraud illegal immigration is wrong plain and simple open borders you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state our nation
SPEAKER 02 :
like all nations, has the right and obligation to control its borders. And no matter how decent they are, no matter their reasons, the 11 million who broke these laws should be held accountable.
SPEAKER 05 :
For decades, these weren’t controversial or radical ideas. The only thing that changed is them.
SPEAKER 04 :
How powerful. The only thing that changed is them. Incidentally, if you want that video clip, and you should send it to every single person who’s complaining about the mass deportation that’s underway, because that’s a who’s who of Democrat superstars. Every one of them. Obama, the Clintons, Schumer, even Bernie Sanders. And finally, we had a chance to talk to author and podcast host Mark Malkoff about his new biography of the one and only Johnny Carson. Let’s talk about Joan Rivers. You mentioned that he wanted to put Joan under contract. And, of course, that was a very famous split. And, you know, I guess the key word here in that complicated relationship was loyalty. Johnny expected loyalty. And he felt, didn’t he feel betrayed by Joan Rivers?
SPEAKER 01 :
He made her the permanent guest host in 1983, and she broke Frank Sinatra’s record for residency, either in Atlantic City or Vegas. Yeah, that was the first time ever she had all this power. Johnny gave it to her. And then in 1986, without telling Johnny, she signed a deal with Fox to go opposite Johnny. Barry Diller told me here in New York, he told Joan. Joan, you have an obligation to tell Johnny. Barry Diller said, I’m in a poker game with Johnny. We’re friends. You need to tell him. And she just her husband, Edgar, said there’s going to be unforeseen circumstances. Don’t tell Johnny. And she listened to her husband. And unfortunately, Johnny found out from an NBC exec and it was too late. And then Miss Rivers tried and she admits this. She tried to take Johnny’s producer, Peter LaSalle, to Fox, tried to steal all of Johnny Carson’s talent coordinators, offered them double their salary. And Johnny just could not understand why he did so much for this woman. His heart was absolutely broken.
SPEAKER 04 :
You know, speaking of his heartbroken, he had a lot of personal heartache in his life, didn’t he? He had tragically, he lost his son in a tragic accident, right?
SPEAKER 01 :
1991, it was a really horrible time. His son, Rick, was 39 and was photographing. Yeah, he was on a cliff and his car went over a ravine. And Johnny took a month off and then eulogized his son. And he mentioned his good friend, Michael Landon. The last week of his life, Michael Landon called Johnny to comfort him in his last days. So. Yeah, Johnny definitely. He took weeks off when he’s the best drummer maybe in the world of all time. Buddy Rich passed away. Johnny was heartbroken and took some time off. I mean, he they told me before Buddy Rich, when he died right before the show, he was in his office sobbing. And I’ve watched the tape when he does his monologue. His eyes are all red for crying. It’s more emotional than people think.
SPEAKER 04 :
That wraps up the Mike Gallagher Show Week in Review podcast for Friday, February 13th. Be sure to subscribe to all our podcasts. Follow us Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, be sure to share it with a friend. We’ll see you back here next week for the Mike Gallagher Show Week in Review podcast.
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