Video News Clips: In Their Own Words

‘Total Flop’: Democrat Guest Rips His Party Over Shutdown Livestream Fail

Screenshot/Rumble/Fox News

Democratic strategist Julian Epstein ripped his party’s congressional leadership on Friday over a bug-ridden livestream addressing the government shutdown.

Fox News host Harris Faulkner played excerpts from the livestream run by House Democrats, which went on for 11 out of a planned 24 hours, and generated only 24,000 views during its run, which was replete with technical difficulties. Epstein described his party’s leadership as lacking “self-awareness” about how protests and social media campaigns have come across to Americans.

“Okay, it is only an hour show. We can’t sit on it waiting for the microphones to work, it just won’t happen,” Faulkner said after playing the clip, before covering reactions to the livestream and comparing the viewership to a livestream from independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

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“I felt like I was watching a ‘Star Trek’ convention,” Epstein said, before Faulkner, a self-described “Trekkie” who appeared as an extra on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” cut in, saying, “No, they are pretty well attended, actually.”

Epstein turned his attention to Democratic leadership, saying they appeared unable to show any sign of “competence.”

“The party leadership has so little self-awareness as to how cringe the stagecraft has been this year, whether it’s choose your fighter or all of these street protests that turned out to be violent or just all of the social media efforts have all just been a flop,” Epstein said. “I think the basic issue is competence. The Democratic Party doesn’t seem to be competent in its ability to do anything other than to call people names or protect a polluted welfare state that the country can no longer afford.”

“The biggest example of incompetence, I think, within the party, is the inability of the party leadership, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, to cabin the progressive left, which is popular only amongst the urban deep blue bubble elite, but deeply unpopular amongst… the rest of the country and the inability of the Democrats to sort of cabin this very unpopular left-wing movement is just another indicator that the party lacks basic competence in things small and things big,” Epstein continued.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York came under fire from left-wing media figures and Democrats in Congress over his decision to help pass a GOP-backed spending bill in March, with many arguing the government should have been shut down in an effort to hamper efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The federal government entered a partial shutdown at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Wednesday after the Senate failed to pass a seven-week continuing resolution on Tuesday, falling short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster after the House passed the short-term funding bill on Sept. 19. Democrats have demanded over $1 trillion in funding for various priorities, including health care spending and restoring funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CBP), which will shut down after its funding was clawed back in a rescissions package passed in July.