I used to watch his show occasionally. His popularity was the real deal and he was pulling half a million live viewers on Rumble around the election, more than Crowder. With the exception of Israel, he was reliably incisive and entertaining on most issues and was pretty effective in his mockery and criticism of the previous admin. In some ways he was a bit like thedonald personified, so his chat was an unreadable fastscrolling wall of cheering boomers, but his own zeal seemed genuine and he also wasn't hesitant to examine possible foul play by glowies like the FBI and Secret Service. He kept hammering for further answers about the Trump assassination attempts and the Jan 6 pipe bomber.

The pipe bomber is the big one. Bongino wasn't typically an Alex Jones type throwing around wild speculation. So it felt significant that of all the things he got angry about on his show, he chose to single out the Jan 6 pipe bomber and go on about it repeatedly. He gave insight from his own secret service background and used that as a basis for saying that the entire official narrative was unbelievable. He went further and insisted that he thought it was an FBI false flag, meant as insurance if the other DC protests couldn't be used as a narrative; he said it was possibly the biggest scandal in the history of the FBI and that heads would definitely roll. He was literally a conspiracy theorist on this issue.

So it is remarkable and unrecoverable for him now to be going after those on the right who are demanding accountability from the administration. There is just no plausible way back for him into the world of political commentary because he hung so much of his credibility on issues like this, the pipe bomber especially. The only way back IMO is if he is now run like an op - with a fake chat, with bots, with narrative nudgers and with supplied talking points to damage control his shattered credibility and keep his mouth shut about whatever went on in his FBI tenure. And if that's the play now, I have to wonder if that's what was going on with him all along - that he was always a pied piper fed fake. I suspect not though, because it would have been easy for him not have laid a massive trap for himself by going after the pipe bomber story so hard, if he instead stayed focussed on safer ragebait for boomers.

The other most likely alternative is that getting close to power revealed to him just how much Israel runs things, and that he'll tell any lie and suffer any indignity to prevent others learning the same.