Conservative talk-show host Dan Bongino is telling his syndicator: Your vaccine mandate or me. “You can’t have both.”
Prefacing his challenge with “I don’t work for anyone” and is merely a “partner with Cumulus,” Mr. Bongino challenged the radio giant on Monday’s episode of “The Dan Bongino Show” to cancel his program, vowing to “not let this go.”
“You can have me, or you can have a vaccine mandate, but you can’t have both,” Mr. Bongino said. “I grew up without a lot of money. … I’m not leaving those guys behind.”
Cumulus Media announced this summer that employees who work out of offices would be required to get the COVID-19 vaccination before returning to the office.
According to Inside Radio, multiple Cumulus employees including some show hosts who refused to get vaccinated had either been fired or quit as of last week.
Mr. Bongino reacted to those reports Monday and railed against Cumulus, saying it didn’t own him and that he will leave the network that carries his show on hundreds of stations, in an act of solidarity.
“There’s been some reporting about some people who’ve had to separate from their jobs or moved into different positions because of it. And I’m kind of done with that. Yeah, I’m not going to play along with that,” said Mr. Bongino, who is both fully vaccinated and has repeatedly decried vaccine mandates.
He invited the hosts who’d been fired from Cumulus or quit to appear on his show to speak out against their ex-employer.
“I have no intentions of letting these guys get let go, get harassed, because they made a private and personal medical decision on only one of the biggest issues of our time,” he said.
Addressing himself to Cumulus, Mr. Bongino told the syndicator that “you have a choice. I work with you. I do not work for you; I never will. You may have had other people in a corner, but you don’t have me.”
CEO Mary Berner said the rule would not apply to employees who permanently work from a remote location or have legal exemptions. But Mr. Bongino decried the mandate as unscientific and a violation of people’s rights.
“There is a real thing called natural immunity. There is an even realer thing called freedom and liberty. This is a constitutional republic. People have the right to make their own medical decisions,” he said.
He said Cumulus’s bosses were just “a bunch of people in the C-suite [who] thought it would be a good idea to play ‘Pretend Dr. Fauci’ for a minute.”
