Ellison’s CBS Pushes Out 60 Minutes Star Over Trump Reporting

352,000 Russian Soldiers Are Dead in Ukraine; Epstein Heir Is Caught Smuggling 50 Human Teeth; Daily Wire’s Slow Collapse Goes Public

Good afternoon, and welcome to Raw America.

The billionaire takeover of CBS continues: Sharyn Alfonsi, the 60 Minutes correspondent who reported critically on Trump’s torture prison in El Salvador, reportedly won’t have her contract renewed. Russia’s death toll in Ukraine just hit 352,000. Jeffrey Epstein’s heiress was caught smuggling 50 human teeth into the United States. And the Washington Post just published an autopsy of Ben Shapiro’s collapsing media empire. Let’s get into it.

60 Minutes firing a critical reporter is what media capture looks like. CBS’s new MAGA boss pushed out one of America's most respected investigative reporters for telling the truth. This is the new normal, and we need your help to fight back. Once CNN becomes part of the Ellison empire, MAGA billionaires will control roughly 78 percent of cable news.

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Bari Weiss Pushed Out the 60 Minutes Reporter Who Covered Trump’s CECOT Prison

Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran 60 Minutes correspondent whose recent segment on Trump’s CECOT prison in El Salvador raised eyebrows in the new CBS regime, won’t have her contract renewed at the end of May. That’s per Page Six. She’s retained Bryan Freedman, the litigator who’s repped Megyn Kelly, Don Lemon, and Tucker Carlson on their way out the door at major networks. That’s a tell.

Alfonsi clashed with Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief CBS installed after Skydance — controlled by the Ellison family — completed its takeover of Paramount. Weiss reportedly told Alfonsi her CECOT segment was “incomplete” because it lacked an interview with a Trump official.

Alfonsi had actually approached the White House. They declined. The piece ran anyway. And now Alfonsi is out.

Alfonsi accused Weiss of running cover for the White House. That’s not vague handwringing from a critic on Twitter. That’s a working investigative journalist saying out loud that her boss is shielding the administration from accountability journalism. The reward for saying so was a contract that didn’t renew.

This is what we’ve been writing about for months: the Ellison capture of CBS, happening in real time. A wrecking ball to the most prestigious investigative news show in American broadcasting. CBS is the model. CNN is next.

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352,000 Russian Soldiers Have Died in Ukraine

About 352,000 Russian soldiers have died in the war on Ukraine through the end of 2025, according to a new estimate released Saturday. The figure comes from the exiled Russian outlets Meduza and Mediazona, extrapolated from probate records and a database of nearly 218,000 individually confirmed names compiled with the BBC Russian Service.

Add roughly 140,000 Ukrainian dead, per the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and we’re at close to half a million soldiers killed in what’s now Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.

The figure doesn’t include this year’s dead, foreign fighters, or militias formed in occupied territory. Russia’s actively deleting public databases researchers use to count. The real number is almost certainly higher.

Half a million human beings are dead. Meanwhile, “very stable genius” Donald Trump threatened to pull troops out of Germany because the German chancellor hurt his feelings, and bragged about identifying a bear on a cognitive test in front of a Florida retirement crowd.

Putin’s willing to feed an entire generation of Russian men into a meat grinder to hold occupied territory. The Trump administration’s response has been to weaken NATO, threaten allies, and pretend the war Trump started in Iran is somehow over. Meanwhile the body count keeps climbing, and almost no one in the American press is paying attention because we’re all drowning in domestic chaos.

Epstein’s Heir Was Caught Smuggling 50 Human Teeth Into the United States

If you thought the Epstein story couldn’t get any stranger, we’ve got bad news.

Veteran journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez has been digging through the DOJ’s Epstein files release. She surfaced a 2017 email exchange between Karnya Shuliak and an Indian dentist named Rajesh Kannan. Shuliak is described in the files as Epstein’s “last partner and main heiress.” Kannan, at one point, reportedly held the world’s largest private collection of extracted human teeth.

Yes, that’s a real thing.

The exchange is exactly what it sounds like. Kannan confirms payment received for “50 anteriors” — 50 front teeth — and instructs Shuliak on how to receive them. The teeth were to be glued to a piece of cardboard to look like artwork, in order to evade postal inspection. Shuliak helpfully responded with her shipping address and phone number.

Shuliak, who got into Columbia’s dental school after Epstein allegedly bribed two of its leaders with $600,000 when her initial application was rejected, had no legitimate dental need for 50 black-market human teeth.

Anterior teeth are among the highest-quality sources of human DNA; pulp protected by enamel preserves genetic material for decades. Forensic identification of remains relies on dental DNA precisely because teeth outlast almost every other biological material.

Smuggling human biological material into the United States this way is a federal offense, carrying up to two years in prison. Epstein changed his will two days before his death to leave most of his estate to Shuliak, a Belarusian national who reportedly got her U.S. citizenship through a fraudulent marriage Epstein arranged.

We don’t know what Shuliak was doing with 50 smuggled human teeth. Valdes-Rodriguez doesn’t know either. What we do know is the corporate press won’t touch it.

Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire Is Collapsing

Last week we covered the Daily Wire announcing mass layoffs. The Washington Post just dropped a deeper look, and the picture’s uglier than we knew.

Daily Wire’s YouTube subscribers have plateaued or shrunk in 15 of the last 16 months. Web traffic in March is half what it was a year earlier. Co-founder Ben Shapiro’s podcast now ranks 43rd on Spotify, at least 30 places behind shows by Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. His YouTube views have dropped nearly 70 percent since December 2024. Clips that once drew millions now pull 20,000.

The company’s cut 13 percent of its staff since the start of this year. Shapiro told the Post revenue has fallen but insisted the company’s “not going anywhere.”

What killed it? Two things. The Daily Wire bet enormous sums on becoming a Hollywood studio: a $3-million-per-episode fantasy series filmed in Hungary, a children’s network meant to compete with Disney, branded cigars and candles and razors. And ideologically, Shapiro’s hawkish support for Israel put him sideways with a Republican base that’s drifted toward Tucker Carlson’s anti-establishment line. Owens, fired in 2024, told the Post the company “became what they claimed they were getting into the business to fight.”

We’re not gloating. People are losing jobs. But the Wire’s collapse is a useful preview of where ideologically captured media ends up. The Ellison bet at CBS — that you can take a legacy news brand, install a political loyalist, and get a different result — is the same bet, just bigger. It’ll end the same way.

This Is Why Raw America Exists — And Why We Need You

We hate asking for money. We’ll be honest with you about that. What we believe in is independent journalism that doesn’t answer to a billionaire, doesn’t sell wars, and doesn’t spike stories because they make the wrong people uncomfortable.

That independence is exactly what’s under threat. Sharyn Alfonsi just got pushed out of 60 Minutes for covering Trump too honestly. The government’s threatening broadcast licenses. The Ellisons are buying CBS and CNN. Newsrooms that once did this work are being handed to political operatives and told what not to cover.

Raw America was built for this fight. We’re here to be the thing that doesn’t get bought.

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—John, Justin and The Raw America Team