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Jan. 25, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:30
Ep. 60 - Democrats Choose Between 'Eat The Rich' and 'Fight Whitey'

Hillary versus Bernie turns into a cage match, plus #NBASoBlackand why students at Cal State want to stop Ben from coming to campus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's a Monday, and here we are.
We're back.
We're one week away from the vaunted Iowa caucuses.
We'll talk about all of the latest.
I'm almost done with this cold, and the Republic is almost done with being a Republic, so there's a coincidence for you.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Tend to demonize people who don't care about your feelings.
So the new poll numbers are out and Donald Trump is up by a large margin.
According to the latest Fox News poll, Donald Trump is up by 11 points in Iowa, 37 to 26, over the guy who I want to win Iowa, Senator Ted Cruz from Texas.
And...
Trump, I think, is bouncing back in a couple of ways.
I think that he's bouncing back because, number one, he was getting smacked around by a lot of people who were conservative last week, including me, but the real hit came for Trump from National Review.
People didn't make too big a deal out of this in the media outside of a certain sector.
The conservative media made a big deal out of it.
But I think it actually had impact because it looked like the conservative intelligentsia, the elites, were ganging up on Donald Trump and Donald Trump's entire strategy.
Throughout this entire race was, I whine and I whine and I whine until I win.
He actually said that on CNN last August.
And so anytime he can play the victim, he's in an opportunistic situation.
And that's basically what has happened in the last week and a half.
He's smacking at Cruz, Cruz is smacking at him.
The Sarah Palin endorsement gave him cover to pretend to be a conservative, even though, as we discussed last week, his record is not particularly conservative.
And then National Review strikes out against him.
So National Review last Thursday night, they put out an all Trump issue.
It was called Against Trump.
And it was 22 different conservatives, some of them establishment, many of them just conservative, who came out against Trump altogether.
And I said immediately, I thought this would backfire, because I didn't think it was calibrated to actually do Trump any damage.
See, here's the thing.
Most conservatives, most people who vote in Republican primaries, read a wide variety of sources.
They read everything from National Review to Breitbart, and in looking at various sources, they sort of get a wide spectrum on how people feel about a particular candidate.
So, if there'd been sort of a grassroots feeling, like, okay, everybody is sort of picking up on the fact that Trump isn't conservative, that's one thing.
But National Review, they basically did this as a publicity stunt.
Because what it looked like now was, here is what is widely perceived to be an establishment magazine that is now hitting Trump, and it's ganging people up on Trump.
So it looks like a gang-up beatdown of Donald Trump.
And so Trump says, well, you know, they're coming after me because they're failing.
They're coming after me because they're establishment.
And this undercuts the exact case that we were making last week, which is that Donald Trump is an establishment candidate.
That when it comes to Ted Cruz versus Donald Trump, the establishment would prefer Donald Trump to Ted Cruz.
All of the GOP senators have said this is the case.
A lot of the GOP donors have said this is the case.
But Sarah Palin endorsing Trump makes it look like grassroots conservatives are okay with Trump.
And then National Review smacking Trump makes it look like there is a concerted hit by the intelligentsia, the elites, to go after Donald Trump.
And so Donald Trump over the weekend was on TV talking about National Review.
Here is Trump on National Review.
And then all of a sudden these people are writing things about me.
So I can only say this.
The National Review is a failing publication.
It's not going to be around long and they'll get some publicity.
But I actually think, you know, a lot of the writers, you've seen it where they think it's going to help me more because people are tired of the negativity from these people.
All they do is talk.
But they don't have solutions to anything.
And so, I mean, I'm fine with it.
I'm not going to be reading it because I don't read it very much anyway.
But a lot of people don't read it anymore.
And, you know, the fact that not a lot of people read it is sort of the point.
The National Review has good circulation, for sure.
And I love reading a lot of the writers in National Review, but...
The fact that they took out this concerted hit on Trump was obviously about a publicity stunt for them and obviously not about damaging Donald Trump.
Now they're out there doing the self-righteous, we tried our best to stop Donald Trump routine.
No, you played right into his hands.
There's a strategic building of the narrative and then there's a one-shot, let's try and knock off the king routine.
And if you're gonna go to knock off the king, and Trump is the poll king, if you're gonna knock off the king, you actually have to knock off the king.
You can't take a shot just so that you can pose and you can do virtue signaling to your conservative readers.
It's a waste of time.
And there are so many reasons to hit Donald Trump, too.
You know, Donald Trump is not a conservative.
I've been saying this for a week.
Take, for example, his perspective on eminent domain.
So a lot of his defenders... Trump said over the weekend that he could be on Fifth Avenue in New York and shoot somebody and his supporters would continue to support him.
And he played this as a positive.
This is a good thing.
I think he's probably right.
I think there is a significant segment of Donald Trump supporters where Donald Trump could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue in New York and they would support him.
Of course, I think the same is also true of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.
I didn't think it was a right-wing phenomenon, but apparently there are people Who consider themselves on the right who will do this too.
They'll do a hero worship routine.
One of the evidences of this is that Donald Trump, one of his main issues where he is a leftist, not just not right-wing, an actual leftist, is on eminent domain.
So Donald Trump believes that the federal government or state government should be able to come to your house today and take your property and confiscate it from you and give you some money for it and then turn it over to me because I'm richer and I'm gonna build a second story and they can get more property tax from me.
Donald Trump actually believes this and Yeah, conservatives would say, well, this is ridiculous.
The same people who are looking at the Bureau of Land Management confiscating 80% of all land in Nevada and saying, this is bad, think it's fine for Donald Trump to do it with the help of the federal government.
Yeah, this is a problem for conservatism.
Donald Trump is a problem for conservatism.
He stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night and he talked about how it was a great place to stay.
He doesn't know much about conservatism, but he stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
So Donald Trump, here's Donald Trump on eminent domain over the weekend.
No, I did it, and I didn't do it, so I didn't.
But, you know, the word eminent domain, if you didn't have eminent domain, you wouldn't have highways, you wouldn't have the Keystone Pipeline, because they need it desperately if it's ever going to get built.
You wouldn't have roads, you wouldn't have schools, hospitals.
I mean, I don't love eminent domain, but you need eminent domain or you don't have a country.
Okay, but the eminent domain that we're talking about is not seizure of private land to create a highway.
We're talking about seizure of private land to give to Donald Trump to create a limo park.
I mean, that's actually what he did.
He actually tried to take an old widow off her land.
He tried to have the government force her off her land so that he could build a limo idling station in New Jersey for his Atlantic City casino.
Yes, that's not particularly conservative stuff.
And look, the left knows Trump isn't conservative.
Bill Maher was on... I'm trying to remember what show he was on.
Bill Maher was on one of these shows and he was saying that Trump isn't conservative.
In fact, he would prefer Trump to a lot of the conservatives like Cruz.
I guess I accept the emerging conventional wisdom that Trump would probably be slightly more manageable.
I agree.
I heard him yesterday say something that you don't hear Republicans say, and that happens fairly frequently, which is, Ronald Reagan made deals, I'll make deals.
Now, they've been getting by for the longest time, as Ted Cruz does, saying, I don't work with the Democrats.
That's why I'm great.
And they all applaud.
And Trump has this ability to come out there and tell them that they're idiots.
And no, Ronald Reagan, when he invokes, you know, peace and blessings be upon him, he made deals.
And I'm the deal maker.
Deals are great.
I make great deals.
I'm America's personal shopper.
I'm going to make it.
And this is why the establishment likes Trump and this is why the left likes Trump.
But the irony is that the concerted attack on Trump from National Review actually has allowed him to get away with being the establishment and the left's favorite candidate as against Ted Cruz.
Now on the other side of the aisle, Hillary Clinton continues to struggle and struggle deeply.
It's really quite fascinating to watch the Democratic side of the aisle.
Everybody's sort of ignoring what's happening on the Democratic side of the aisle because it's assumed that Hillary Clinton is going to win the nomination walking away, but there's no guarantee of that.
The FBI is now looking even more deeply into Hillary Clinton using her personal server for classified information, and Hillary is now relegated to her old standby, the vast right-wing conspiracy talk, right?
She says that it's the vast right-wing conspiracy.
That's gotten her into trouble over these emails.
Here's Hillary, blaming the Inspector General of the intelligence community for being corrupt, right?
She's the one who hid emails on her private server, but the people investigating her are corrupt.
That's how she's in trouble.
No, I'm not concerned because I know what the facts are.
I never sent or received any material marked classified.
I control what the Republicans leak and what they are contending.
And I think it was interesting, Chuck, you'll, as a political observer, understand why.
You know, back a couple of months ago, Kevin McCarthy spilled the beans that the Benghazi investigation was all about bringing me down.
Something that I suspected, but I went ahead, testified for 11 hours, answered all their questions, and even they admitted there was nothing new.
And now, Senator Grassley shows up at a Trump rally yesterday in Iowa.
He's the chairman of the Judiciary Committee who has and his staff have been, you know, behind and pushing a lot of these stories and announces he's there for the simple reason to defeat me.
I can't control what the Republicans are doing, but I know what the facts are and I will just keep putting them out there.
This is something that I think is very clear about what happened and I know it will be over and resolved at some point, but I can't control what the Republicans and their allies do.
But I think it's important for voters to know what they're doing.
This is the most animated Hillary Clinton ever gets, is when she's defending herself on corruption charges.
I mean, otherwise she looks like she's had a couple of doses of allium.
When she's defending herself, then all of a sudden she gets very animated and she's really into it.
That's because Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, everybody's been saying this whole time, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are the same person, right?
They're channeling the anger of the voter.
Okay, it's true that the reaction to Sanders and to Trump has been similar from the public.
But in terms of personality, Trump and Hillary are actually on the same page, and Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders are sort of on the same page.
What I mean by that is that Donald Trump is basically willing to say anything to become President of the United States in order to maximize his personal power, and Hillary Clinton is the same way.
By the way, what she says there is a lie, when she says that even the Republicans were admitting there was nothing new in my testimony.
In that testimony, if you recall, that's when the Republicans dropped the bombshell that Hillary had known right from the outset that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, had told her daughter and the Prime Minister of Egypt, I believe, that it was a terrorist attack and not a video.
She acts like that never happened, and now she's saying that the intelligence community is working with the Republicans to get her.
She's willing to say anything.
Trump is willing to say anything.
Bernie Sanders is much more of an ideological purist on the left, and Ted Cruz is an ideological purist on the right.
And that's why, in terms of the conservative base, I think the conservative base is actually more enthused about Cruz than about Trump, and they're certainly more enthused about Cruz than they are about somebody like Jeb Bush.
And on the left, the left base is more enthused with Bernie Sanders than they are with Hillary Clinton.
Which brings up a real issue for Hillary Clinton.
A real issue for Hillary Clinton.
And that issue for Hillary Clinton is the issue of race.
Here's the problem for Hillary.
If you look at all the polls right now, Bernie Sanders is up in Iowa and he's up in New Hampshire.
And not only that, Hillary has declined among every major demographic subgroup.
She's declined among women, she's declined among men, she's declined among the elderly, she's declined among young people, she's declined among white people.
There's only one group that Hillary has actually increased with in the last month, and that is blacks and Latinos.
So what we're watching right now in the Democratic Party, we're watching it play out, is we're about to see what's more important to the Democratic Party.
Class warfare or racism?
This is really the big question now, because on the one side you have Bernie Sanders, who's a socialist, saying that the people who we have to oppose are the rich, and on the other side you have Hillary Clinton, a rich white lady, saying the people that we have to oppose are the white people.
Right?
The white people are really the problem.
People like Bernie Sanders.
And Hillary is scurrilous.
I mean, Bernie Sanders has been consistent on this.
Hillary's just willing to say anything to get elected.
Because Hillary is declining with blacks and Latinos, she is trying to attack Bernie Sanders on his supposed racism.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is trying to claim that Hillary is in bed with the rich fat cats.
So basically what you have Is the race base left?
And you have the class base left.
So you have Stalin versus Hitler on a very mini-scale here, right?
I mean, Hitler was all about race, and Stalin was all about class.
But the question is gonna be, the American left, which one is more important to them?
Racism?
You know, exploiting divisions between races?
Or classism?
Exploiting divisions between classes.
So, on the one hand, you have Bernie Sanders, and here's Bernie Sanders making his pitch as to why the rich people have to be eaten.
I think it would be very interesting if Donald Trump became the Republican candidate who was a multi-billionaire, and Michael Bloomberg became an independent candidate who was a multi-billionaire, and it will tell people what I have been saying for a long time, is that this country is moving away from democracy to oligarchy.
Okay, so Bernie Sanders is obviously making the class pitch.
That is not what, to my view, American democracy is supposed to be about, a contest between billionaires.
If that takes place, I am confident that we will win it.
Okay, so Bernie Sanders is obviously making the class pitch.
He's saying that whether it's Trump or whether it's presumably Hillary, who's also extraordinarily wealthy or whether it's Bloomberg, you know, obviously the rich are running the show.
The rich are running the show, and we have to tear them down, and we have to tear them down right now.
Now let's be clear about one thing historically.
Historically, most of our great politicians have been very wealthy men.
Okay, let's just be real about this.
Abraham Lincoln was an exception.
George Washington was a very, very wealthy man.
Thomas Jefferson was a landed, very, very wealthy man.
Obviously, at the outside of the Republic, pretty much everybody who was voting and in power was a very wealthy person.
These were people who were coming from parochial backwaters, and if you had enough money to abandon your business for six months, you better have enough money.
Most of the people who were in Congress were pretty wealthy.
FDR was a scion of a very wealthy family.
All these folks were very, very wealthy.
Bill Clinton, by the time he took office, was not impoverished.
Neither was Jimmy Carter.
Most of these politicians were not from the bottom class.
The last time we had a truly blue-collar, like a really blue-collar president was probably Harry Truman, in terms of personal wealth.
It's been a long time.
Most of our politicians are very wealthy people.
Most of the people at the top of any industry are very wealthy people.
The question is, does the wealth make them corrupt?
So Bernie Sanders says, wealth automatically corrupts you, which begs the question, why wouldn't poverty automatically corrupt you?
I mean, poverty theoretically should corrupt you more than wealth.
Wealth means you're independent from other people and therefore don't want anything from them.
Poverty means that you are not independent.
You need something from someone else and so you're more likely to overthrow them.
But in any case, you have Bernie Sanders who is pitching classism as his chief economic goal.
And it's having an appeal among white folks, right?
White folks are into this.
On the left, this is what they're into.
So much so that Ben and Jerry, you know, Ben and Jerry's the ice cream makers.
They've been big Bernie Sanders backers.
They're from Vermont.
They've now released a flavor of ice cream, a temporary flavor of ice cream, called Bernie's Yearning.
Really, that's what it's called.
Which just makes it real awkward because nobody really wants Bernie's yearning filling their mouth.
It's just gross.
But in any case, Bernie's yearning, the ice cream flavor has come out with Ben & Jerry's.
Which also begs the question for Bernie Sanders, why do you need so many flavors of ice cream?
I mean, he already said that about deodorant.
Why do you need so many different types of deodorant?
Why do you need so many flavors of ice cream?
So, in any case, you have the classism on one side, and then you have the race appeal on the other side.
So, Bernie Sanders got himself into trouble last week because he was asked about slavery reparations, and he said he wasn't in support of slavery reparations.
He was asked again over the weekend, and here's Bernie Sanders kind of trying to soft-pedal his answer on slavery reparations.
Well, for the same reason that Barack Obama has, and the same reason I believe that Hillary Clinton has.
And that is, it is absolutely wrong and unacceptable that we have so much poverty in this country, and it is even worse in the African-American community.
That African-American kids between 17 and 20 who graduate high school have unemployment rates and underemployment rates of 51%.
The 36% of African-American children are living in poverty.
This is an issue that we have got to address.
And my intention, as President of the United States, is to be very aggressive in dealing with those issues.
To put our kids to work, rather than see them go to jail.
To improve our schools.
That's what we have to do.
And I think that's what the American people want.
I understand that, but you didn't answer the question why you weren't in favor of reparations.
Well, again, it's the same reason that the president is not, and I think... And what is that reason?
Hillary Clinton is not.
We have got to invest in the future.
What we have got to do is address poverty in America, something that very few people talk about, and especially poverty in the African-American community and the Latino community.
And if you look at my record and if you look at my agenda, raising the minimum wage to fifteen bucks an hour, creating millions of jobs or rebuilding our infrastructure, focusing on high rates of youth unemployment, I think our candidacy is the candidacy talking to the issues of the African-American community.
There's Bernie Sanders, and instead of pandering on the race question, he goes back to his socialism, right?
He says all of the racial inequalities in the United States, all of the fact that black people tend to be poorer than white people, all of that can just be solved with a little bit of redistributionism.
My socialism solves everything.
So he's still running on class, even on the race question.
On the other side, Hillary Clinton is getting very cynical now because she knows she's losing among white voters.
So what does she have to do?
She has to double down with black voters.
And there's a reason for this, right?
Iowa and New Hampshire, Iowa is 2.9% black, the state of Iowa.
The Democratic electorate in the primary in South Carolina is 50% black.
One out of every two Democratic voters in South Carolina is black, which means that all Hillary Clinton has to do if she dominates the black vote in South Carolina, she wins the primary walking away.
That's why she still has over 50% approval.
All the white people in South Carolina can vote for Bernie Sanders, and if she gets black people to vote for her, and she picks up 10% of the white vote, she wins in a walk.
And so what she's been doing, is she's been going after Bernie Sanders, now saying that Bernie Sanders is a racist, you see?
He's a socialist.
But socialism isn't good enough for black folks.
She has to pander harder.
So, this is all coming originally from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Ta-Nehisi Coates He's really a disreputable human being.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a guy who writes for the Atlantic, mainly.
He grew up in Baltimore.
His dad had, I think, seven kids by four different women.
He blamed whites for this because presumably there were white people forcing his dad to strip a bunch of single women and have babies with them.
He blamed the white community for his own inequality.
He then went to Howard University, where he did well, and then he became a writer, and now he's won a MacArthur Genius Grant for writing absolutely Opaque prose that makes no sense, but he uses words like he uses phrases like black bodies.
He doesn't say black people He says black bodies white people are not attacking black people white people are attacking black bodies And because that's how brutal white people are.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has been a big advocate of slavery reparations Because he makes this vague case that America's historically been racist, so white people have lived off the back of that, but black people have not benefited from America.
Which is patently insane, given the fact that black people in the United States are significantly more well-off than black people pretty much anywhere else on planet Earth.
It's also ridiculous to suggest that white people now have all benefited from slavery way back when, when literally hundreds of thousands of white people died to end slavery.
Plus, if you look at the white community, approximately 2% of white Americans are descended from slave owners.
Plus, if you look at people like me, my great-grandparents got here.
Great-great-grandparents?
Got here in 1913, 1907, and 1913, respectively.
And had nothing to do with slavery or Jim Crow, so the idea that I should deprive my own child of her educational opportunities by paying money to some black family that's been out of slavery for 200 years seems a little bit odd to me.
I don't know, at least 165 years.
That seems a little bit odd to me.
But, you know, slavery reparations make no sense in any real sense, especially given the fact that the black community was on an upward trajectory from the end of slavery all the way up through the 1950s, hampered by Jim Crow, obviously, hampered by racism.
But after the 1950s, with the advent of what were supposed to be de facto slavery reparations, according to Lyndon Baines Johnson, the black community basically collapsed in terms of its social standards and its economic Standards of living.
Their poverty rate now is the same as it was back in the 1950s, and their single motherhood rate has more than tripled.
20% of kids in 1960 in the black community were born out of wedlock.
Today, it's upward of 70% in the black community.
That's not because of slavery.
There wasn't a re-imposition of slavery between 1960 and 2015.
So slavery reparations are an idiotic idea for a wide variety of reasons, and if you're really going to imply that all white people have lived off the backs of black people, I would ask you how I confiscated any wealth from a black person.
Particularly given the fact that black people have a disproportionate share of no wealth.
The reality is the reverse.
Black people in the United States, at least during my lifetime, have taken a lot more money from me than I've taken from them.
But that has nothing to do with racism.
That has to do with the fact that poor people take more money from rich people than rich people take from poor people.
The fact is, one of the great lies is that the rich are living off the backs of the poor.
How?
The poor have nothing.
How?
How does that work?
I've never worked for a poor person.
A lot of poor people have worked for me.
That's the way that this works.
But in any case, So, Ta-Nehisi Coates got all over Bernie Sanders because he says Bernie Sanders' socialism isn't good enough, right?
His Stalin-esque redistribution schemes aren't good enough.
We have to campaign on the basis of racism now, right?
Anti-white racism has to be the basis.
So here's Ta-Nehisi Coates, this genius, talking about Bernie Sanders.
Well, I simply didn't understand his answer.
I mean, to be blunt, the senator, you know, whose campaign I respect, who I respect, who I've considered very, very courageous, who some people in my household that are a lot younger than me actually support and have been very vocal about supporting, I think has inspired quite a, you know, quite a number of people with his willingness to put solutions on the table that, you know, a lot of folks consider outside of the politically doable.
And so then to see him dismiss reparations simply because, you know, it...
He's not politically doable in his opinion.
It just felt completely off.
It felt out of tune with the entire spirit of his campaign.
He mentioned that the chances for getting reparations through Congress are nil.
In fact, the senator advocates several things, whose chances in Congress are also nil.
I'm not saying he shouldn't be advocating those things, by the way.
My point is that he should.
You need those ideas out into the world.
That should be part of the political debate.
I'm a fan of that, but I'm a fan of doing it across the board and not being selective about it.
Okay, so Ta-Nehisi Coates, by the way, you can see, for those who can see, Ta-Nehisi Coates has the Arc de Triomphe behind him.
He lives in France now.
He moved out of the United States because of the egregious racism of a country that made him incredibly wealthy.
He's moved to France, where he lives with his family.
By the way, in France, at soccer games, fans chant Monkey at black players sometimes, apparently.
So, the idea that racism doesn't exist in Europe is obviously asinine.
In any case, what he's saying there, to try and decode the muddy thinking, what Ta-Nehisi Coates is saying is that Hillary doesn't pretend to be a radical, so you're not surprised when she doesn't say radical things.
Bernie Sanders says he's a radical, so he should embrace radical positions.
Okay, that still doesn't explain why you would support Hillary Clinton, a non-radical, over Bernie Sanders, a radical.
It's silly.
It's like a Ted Cruz... It's like you're asked a question, who's better, Donald Trump or Ted Cruz?
And you say, I don't like Ted Cruz because he's not conservative enough.
He said, wait a second, he's way more conservative than Donald Trump.
Yeah, but he says he's a conservative, and Donald Trump doesn't really.
Okay, but he's still way more conservative than Donald Trump.
Like, it's not a really sensical answer, but his idea is that real radical, a real radical like Bernie Sanders would embrace slavery reparations.
What does the Hillary Clinton campaign do?
The Hillary campaign, cynically, they don't back slavery reparations either, by the way.
Hillary doesn't back slavery reparations.
But she wants black votes.
So what does she do?
She trots out a bunch of spokespeople, all to say that Bernie Sanders is now a racist.
Now, understand something.
I think Bernie Sanders is a scuzzbucket.
I think Bernie Sanders, beyond his personal life, where he abandoned his first wife, beyond the fact that he honeymooned in Cuba in the USSR, I think his policies are egregious.
I think they harm people.
I think his class warfare is disgusting.
But, one thing you can't say about Bernie Sanders is that he's anti-black people, as a general rule.
Now, his policies are anti-black people, but Bernie Sanders is not someone who hates black people.
In 1963, Bernie Sanders got arrested trying to protest segregation, and in 1964, he traveled to Washington, D.C.
to watch Martin Luther King speak at the March on Washington.
So, Bernie Sanders is not somebody who hates black people.
Well, that didn't stop the Hillary campaign from trotting out a bunch of spokespeople to say Bernie hates black people, right?
So now we're gonna have a fight between the classists on the one side, in the Democratic Party, and the racists on the other side.
So David Brock, who is the... there's something about Mary-haired dude.
He's the one with the white hair that sticks straight up, and we sort of have guesses why.
David Brock, he came out and he said that Hillary Clinton, unlike Bernie Sanders, she likes black people.
Bernie Sanders doesn't care about black lives.
He actually said that.
And then they trotted out Brian Fallon, who's a spokesperson for Hillary Clinton, to say, yeah, the only reason that Bernie doesn't support slavery reparations is because he doesn't like black people.
Here's Brian Fallon.
We'll see over the coming weeks if he can explain some of these plans that he's laid out on health care.
He hasn't said how he would achieve a single-payer system when we couldn't even get a public option with an entirely Democratic Congress.
And yet when it comes to something like reparations, he says that he dismisses it as completely unfeasible.
Okay, Hillary Clinton has done the same thing.
How is Hillary Clinton's spokesperson sitting there and criticizing Sanders for that?
Because this is how cynical they are.
Remember, the Hillary Clinton campaign, they're willing to throw anything at the wall.
If they have to call someone a racist, they'll do it without evidence.
This is why I say Hillary and Trump are very similar in this way.
They'll do anything in order to win.
And you're seeing the groundswell, because they have to support Hillary, because the media need to get behind Hillary Clinton, you're starting to see now this bizarre groundswell on behalf of slavery reparations.
Here's Chris Matthews from MSNBC embracing slavery reparations.
He loves them!
They're just great!
Chris Matthews, MSNBC, let's go!
He believes in reparations now.
Why does he believe in reparations?
I believe in reparations because Hillary Clinton says she does, even though she doesn't.
- I know Malley could matter in Iowa and here's how. - By the way, I do believe in reparations if he could figure out what it would be. - That's right, that's right, there's a problem. - He believes in reparations now.
Why does he believe in reparations?
I believe in reparations 'cause Hillary Clinton says she does even though she doesn't.
And so I think reparations are, here's the bottom line for the Democrats.
One of the problems that they have, and this is, they keep talking about the diverse coalition they're gonna build.
This is actually a problem for Hillary Clinton.
They keep talking about this vast, diverse coalition they're going to build.
By diverse, Hillary means the same thing Democrats always mean when they say diverse.
She means Hispanic and black.
Right?
She doesn't mean anybody else.
Hispanics and blacks.
There's one problem.
70% of the country is still white.
So, that leaves a real opening for somebody like a Donald Trump, somebody like a Ted Cruz, who is not going to pander along racial lines.
And this stuff should come back to haunt her.
It really should come back to haunt her.
So, if Bernie Sanders runs, this is going to be a class warfare campaign.
If Hillary Clinton runs, this is going to be a race warfare campaign.
This is how the left makes America a deeply ugly place.
Because on the left, this is the battle right now.
It's between racist Bernie Sanders and tool-of-the-rich Hillary Clinton, right?
This is how they label each other.
By the way, Hillary Clinton, she apparently gave a bunch of $200,000 speeches.
Two Goldman Sachs.
And she has now refused to release any of those speeches, even as she campaigns as a class warrior like Bernie Sanders.
It really is quite incredible.
So that's the latest there.
By the way, I do want to mention real fast, when we talk about the polls from Iowa, it's important to realize that there are real flaws in the Iowa polling models this year.
And I'm not a poll doubter, I'm not a poll truther, as a general rule, so this stuff is not coming from me.
This is coming from Nate Silver.
Who's the statistician at FiveThirtyEight.com.
He's the guy who called all 50 states right.
Last time he's become something of a guru.
He's on the left.
He has two measures of who he thinks is going to win Iowa on the Republican side.
He has the poll measure and then he has what he calls the polls plus measure.
The reason he has those and they're they're widely different is because in Iowa it's a caucus state which means the way it works is that a bunch of people get together and they all go to a room together and then people make speeches on behalf of the candidates and then you actually And then you poll the people in the room as to whom they support.
And so that longer process where people are lobbied, that's called the caucus.
And so what that means is a lot of people in the course of the day, they get rid of their first choice and they move on to their second choice.
In any case, the problem with the Iowa caucus polling has been widespread.
In 2008, Rick Santorum, one week out.
Sorry, in 2012, Rick Santorum, one week out from the Iowa caucuses, was polling at 7.7%.
He ended up winning 25% and winning the Iowa caucuses in one week, right?
So you can have these major swings.
And one of the problems with the polls right now is that the polls are too broadly sampled.
Meaning that they are assuming that 13% of the Iowa electorate is Republican.
Typically, only about 5% of the Iowa electorate is Republican.
That means they're including an awful lot of blue-collar Democrats who like Donald Trump.
So the polls plus model suggests that Ted Cruz has a 48% chance of winning the Iowa caucus, Trump at 41.
The polls model for Nate Silver has Cruz with a 37% chance of winning.
Yeah, in the end I think ground game will matter.
I would be surprised if Trump wins.
I wouldn't be super surprised, but I'd be surprised.
If Trump wins, the Iowa caucuses.
Okay, time for some things that I like and time for some things that I hate.
As I said last week, I got a lot of letters on this.
I was shocked by the number of musical theater fans that we have in the audience, but I will talk about something that I like and also sort of hate, and that is Stephen Sondheim.
So, Stephen Sondheim.
I am a big fan of Sweeney Todd.
I love Sweeney Todd.
It's a magnificent musical.
Don't watch the movie.
It's garbage.
See if you can grab the original cast production CD with Len Carreau and not Johnny Depp, who's the most eff- He's just been playing effeminate pirates since Pirates of the Caribbean.
An effeminate Sweeney Todd doesn't work at all.
He's not scary in any sense.
Len Carreau's actually scary.
Listen to the original- Cast recording.
It's beautifully orchestrated.
The music is glorious.
The lyrics are tremendous.
So here's what I dislike about Stephen Sondheim.
So Stephen Sondheim writes Sweeney, which is a masterpiece.
I mean, legitimately a masterpiece.
And he also wrote Pacific Overtures, which is a very, very good musical.
And he wrote most of the lyrics to—all the good lyrics in West Side Story.
Are Stephen Sondheim all the bad ones are Leonard Bernstein.
So the lyrics to tonight are Leonard Bernstein because they're stupid lyrics and stuff about Planets spinning in the sky and all this garbage.
That's Leonard Bernstein all the stuff from something's coming Is Stephen Sondheim, and it's brilliant.
His word choice is spectacular.
For people who love words, for people who love the use of proper English, Sondheim is just a godsend.
In the song Pretty Women in Sweeney Todd, there's one point where he says, Pretty women, fascinating, sipping, coughing, glancing, stay within you, always, pretty women.
And then there's one line where he says, something in them cheers the air.
It's a beautiful use of the word.
Like, who uses cheers as a verb like that?
It's really spectacular.
His word choice is quite wonderful.
The problem with Sondheim is he's sort of like Aaron Sorkin.
At a certain point, Aaron Sorkin wrote one of the great speeches for all of film, right?
In a few good menu rights, one good speech.
That's his entire career, right?
Then, from then on, every character is Aaron Sorkin.
And that's because Aaron Sorkin deep down really doesn't like his audience very much.
He thinks that they're kind of stupid, and he thinks he's really intelligent.
Sondheim, over the course of time, has become a guy who revels in his own inability to connect with audiences.
So he went from Sweeney, which is at least has some popular appeal, he did Into the Woods after that, where the first two-thirds of Into the Woods are really, really good.
The first half is brilliant.
The first half of Into the Woods is fantastic.
You know, the light and how all the plots intertwine.
The second half is less good, and then you get to the end, and they sing the final number, and the final number is garbage leftism that has nothing to do with the story, and it's stupid.
And that's what Stephen Sondheim started to do.
He did Sunday in the Park with George, it was the same sort of thing.
It's this pointless score that only the elites loved.
You can't sing, and there are two tunes in the entire thing that you can sing.
There's nothing wrong with the tune.
If it was good enough for Mozart, it should be good enough for Sondheim.
But he decided to get deliberately obscure because he really dislikes his audience, and he wanted to prove to the neurocritics how brilliant he is by continuing to do things that were further and further off the beaten track.
So he ends up doing Passions, which is nonsense, and Assassins, which is garbage, and just a bunch of shows that are deliberately obscure just so he can show people how brilliant he is.
It's something that I hate in art.
I hate when people do this.
My view is that good art is art that connects with people.
It's not art that proves how smart the artist is.
The best artists are people who put their art above their own ego, and Sondheim doesn't do that.
Sondheim, I think, can be encapsulated in this one story that I heard from an actor, a relatively well-known actor, who apparently had dinner with Sondheim at one point.
So this is all alleged, this is secondhand.
But apparently, uh, they were at dinner together, and Sondheim had a long table, with a bunch of people there, and he's sitting at the head of the table, and there's a bowl of potato salad, and Sondheim, halfway through the dinner, he just reaches out with his hand, and he takes some of the potato salad, and he puts it in his mouth, and kind of slurps it off his hand, and then, he reaches back into the potato salad, and starts slurping it off his hand, just to prove to everybody I'm here, and I'm the one who kind of rules the roost, just to show no one's gonna say anything to me, because I'm Stephen Sondheim.
So, you know, that's sort of how his art is, too.
Meaning that it's a tragedy to me.
It's an artistic tragedy that he didn't make the most of his talents.
And I really don't think he did.
I don't think he's written anything very good since the 80s.
And that's sad to me, because this is a guy who truly was gifted.
I mean, really, really gifted.
Again, listen to some of the lyrics in West Side Story.
If you listen to the lyrics in America, they're amazing.
He was such a perfectionist that when he did the lyrics to I Feel Pretty in West Side Story, there's a lyric in which Maria sings, I feel charming, oh so charming.
It's alarming how charming I feel, right?
Which is a really kind of fun rhyme.
And later he said he felt bad that he used that rhyme because he felt like a shop girl from Puerto Rico wouldn't know the words alarming and charming.
Which is exactly right.
This is how well thought out all of his stuff was and I've read pretty much, yeah, I've read a lot of what Sondheim has written.
So again, I'm a big Sondheim fan, so that's something I love and something I hate, is the perversion of art.
You see it in the movies all the time.
All these great directors, and they just get more and more deliberately obscure, and they make movies that don't connect with anybody anymore just to prove how smart they are.
And it's like, just stop being a jackass.
You know, you're allowed to give us what we want.
We like it better.
What people forget is that Shakespeare was not only able to write glorious monologues, he was also writing fart humor for people.
Right?
I mean, if you actually look at Shakespeare's comedies, Half of it is sex humor, right, for the common man.
And even half of- in Hamlet, there's a bunch of sex humor in Hamlet.
Whenever he's doing his mad scenes, there's a bunch of sexual humor that he's doing with Ophelia that- that- for the common man to get and laugh at.
So, there's nothing wrong with making your art understandable to people.
It doesn't make you bad.
It makes you good, actually.
It makes you good at what you do.
Art is supposed to be about the connections that we feel for each other.
Okay, so there's things I like and things that I hate.
Okay, a couple of more things that I hate.
I'm supposed to speak at Cal State Los Angeles on February 25th.
And apparently, apparently, this is really frustrating to all of the lefties over at Cal State Los Angeles.
Young America's Foundation is sponsoring me, as I mentioned last week.
I've now been sponsored to do a 10 school tour, at the very least, maybe more, where I go to various campuses.
And the kids over there, the precious little snowflakes over there, are very upset about it.
So you've got students who are concerned that this is going to create stigma.
That it creates stigma around social justice issues.
Some of these students are saying that I'm a threat to safety.
I'm a threat to safety because clearly, look at me.
Thank goodness, given my vast rap sheet of physical violence, doing physical violence to my enemies, clearly that's what they should be worried about.
There are people who are threatening.
There's some student named Samaria Zomez who writes, all I'm gonna say is you chose the wrong campus.
Get ready, we don't play.
So thanks for that, appreciate it.
Don't worry, there'll be security on hand and they will have guns.
And then finally, there's a professor who actually wrote to all the students who invited me.
He wrote, "FYI, tough guy provocateurs, "we have open mat on campus in the gym "in the USU building at 1:00 PM Friday "and noon on Saturday, "if you wanna show us your white supremacy." So you're white supremacist if you invited me, because clearly, when I think of white supremacists, this is part of the uniform right here.
This yarmulke is part of the white supremacist uniform.
All the white supremacists are into it now.
It's their favorite thing.
If you look at any of the Sheeny forums, those are the ones where they really love on me.
Nothing white supremacists like better than an orthodox Jew.
As a general rule, they just love Jews.
And so, I'm glad to be part of the white supremacist movement.
Clearly, I'm part of it, obviously, since I say things like, merit before diversity.
And so, now he's threatening, he says, heads up, I lift bros.
So this professor is threatening his students to beat them up.
He's a sociology professor.
Believe me, I have plenty of friends who I could send to fight this guy.
I thought civilization meant I didn't have to fight people.
I thought that was sort of the principle of Western civilization.
I guess now it's cowardice.
I love the left, right?
It's cowardice if you don't physically fight them, but if you do physically fight them, then you're a brute.
So if I own a gun, I'm a brute.
But if I don't physically fight them, then I'm a coward.
So this is the way that it works now.
Which is just ridiculous.
Again, I don't need to physically fight you.
I'm smarter than you, I make more money than you, and you have no part of my life.
I just laugh at you, honestly.
I can't physically fight you.
Why?
I hired three people to beat you up, idiocy.
In any case, I get Andrew Klavan to do it, Drew's a black belt.
So in any case, okay, so that's one thing I hate.
Another thing that I hate, there's this hashtag, #OscarsSoWhite, continues to go around, and all these rich black people are really, really upset that rich white people aren't giving them meaningless statuettes, so it's very upsetting.
And in fact, Danny DeVito, fabled Shakespearean actor Danny DeVito, has now said that Hollywood is deeply racist, Yes, Hollywood is deeply racist according to a small, ugly man who has made millions and millions of dollars in Hollywood.
And Danny DeVito, by the way, is actually... I met him once when I was much younger because my cousin, Mara Wilson, was the star of Matilda and he was the father of Matilda and directed it.
Uh, and he and his wife, at the time, I'm not sure, is he still married to Rita Perlman?
They may have divorced.
Um, but they, I think they still live together.
In any case, they were very nice people.
I mean, they came to my aunt's funeral, and they were very nice people, but that doesn't mean that he's not a nutty leftist.
So here's Danny DeVito, suggesting that everybody is a racist.
And it's unfortunate that the entire country is a racist country.
So this is one example of the fact that even though some people have given great performances in movies, they weren't even thought about.
Yeah.
So it's like, you know, we are living in a country that discriminates and has certain racial tendencies, racist tendencies.
So sometimes it's manifested in things like this and it's illuminated.
But just generally speaking, we're a racist.
We're a bunch of racists.
Yeah.
Generally speaking, we're a bunch of racists, according to Danny DeVito, who works, by the way, in the most leftist place on earth, Hollywood.
And this is the common perception of folks on the left.
So Macklemore, who is a deeply untalented white rapper.
I mean, when I say deeply untalented, I mean, this guy, if talent were a load of bricks, it would never have hit him.
I mean, it wouldn't matter how big that load were.
I mean, he could have been born on the talent tree.
And if he dropped off the talent tree, he would somehow avoid every branch.
I mean, he has never been struck by an ounce of talent, Macklemore.
Everything that he does that is of any quality at all is done by his partner, right?
I can't remember the guy's name, but his partner is the one who's talented.
Macklemore's just a doof.
And so Macklemore, he has now cut a new clip, a new song, called White Privilege 2, The Revenge.
The Revenge is my, just White Privilege 2.
He did White Privilege 1, I guess, back in 2005, and it's been 10 years, so he's gonna revisit his other unbelievably crappy song, and he's gone back with White Privilege 2, So we'll play a little bit of this, because this is something that I hate, and I'll tell you why.
He's doing this, and Danny DeVito's doing this, and they're just obnoxious blowhards.
Here we go.
God, we could be here a while.
Hold on to the parking lot, parked it, zipped up my parka, joined the procession of marchers.
In my head like, is this awkward?
Should I even be here marching?
Thinking that they can't, how can I breathe?
Thinking that they chant, what do I sing?
I wanna take a stance, cause we are not free.
And then I thought about it, we are not we.
Am I on the outside looking in?
Or am I on the inside looking out?
Is it my place to get my two cents?
Or should I stand on the side and shut my mouth?
No justice, no peace.
Okay, I'm saying that.
That shitting out black lives matter.
But I don't say it back.
Is it okay for me to say?
I don't know, so I watch and stand in front of a line of police that look the same as me, only separated by a badge, a baton, a can, a mace, a mask, a shield, a gun, with gloves on hands that gives an alibi in case somebody dies behind a bullet that flies out of their nine, takes another child's life on sight.
Bam!
Not in this house, no.
Okay, so this song is absolute garbage.
I mean, just on a musical level.
We can pause it.
I mean, on a musical level, it doesn't even have a decent rhythm.
I thought that was the purpose of rap, right?
Is that there is no melody, and there is no harmony, so at least you better have a decent rhythm.
I mean, here, you don't even have a decent rhythm.
But putting aside the aesthetic abomination that this song is, the lyrics themselves are so ridiculous.
So, he says that he attended a Black Lives Matter march, and he didn't know whether to participate or not because he's a white guy.
Because that's what Martin Luther King wanted.
When Martin Luther King, what he really wanted is when you were gonna march on behalf of racial solidarity, he wanted you to think about your own skin color before you did it, because you wouldn't want to culturally appropriate.
And this idiocy goes on and he says, "Blood in the streets, no justice, no peace, no racist beliefs, no rest till we're free." And then he does a whole routine about Miley Cyrus and Elvis Presley, I guess, I mean, he makes a reference to an Elvis.
I assume that's Elvis Presley.
And Iggy Azalea.
By the way, Macklemore's white, okay?
So he's talking to them about cultural appropriation.
He's just as white as any of these folks.
He says, you've exploited and stolen the music, the moment, the magic, the passion, the fashion you toy with.
The culture was never yours to make better.
First of all, cultural appropriation is the stupidest crap that ever was.
Cultural appropriation is called free trade.
Cultural appropriation is where we look at stuff, think, hey, that's cool, and then engage in it.
And if people want to end cultural appropriation, I'm fine with that.
Macklemore can give back rap and never rap again, and I am perfectly fine with that.
Now, if only black people can rap, Macklemore can go back to being an unemployed, useless person.
And, by the way, black and Latino and Asian people, they can give back Western civilization and the invention of pretty much everything.
Okay, this is why cultural appropriation is stupid.
Because humans create art, humans create science, humans create all the good things we live with, not particular races.
It's not that Isaac Newton was white that made him discover the theory of gravity, right?
I mean, that's not why Isaac Newton was important.
Isaac Newton could have been black.
It doesn't matter.
But he was the product of a civilization that sprang up in white Europe.
I mean, there's no question about that.
But it doesn't have anything to do with color.
It has to do with civilization.
The left doesn't acknowledge this, which goes back to Hillary being a racist and trying to divide race from race, which is counterproductive.
Well, this begs a question.
Macklemore, at a certain point in here, he rips on all these white rappers and then he says that they use their cultural appropriation and they go buy a big-ass lawn, go with your big-ass house, you can join the march, protest, scream and shout, get on Twitter, hashtag and seem like you're down.
Okay, in case you were wondering, white rapper Macklemore owns a $2.1 million house and bought a similar, I think $2 million house for his parents.
So, he's doing all the things he accuses people of, but the idea is that he now has done something.
He's used his art to forward the cause.
And so has Danny DeVito.
They've used their platform to forward the cause.
What cause?
Was there one less single mother in the black community this morning because of Macklemore?
Was there one less black person engaging in crime because of Macklemore?
Was there one more black person who went to college because of Macklemore?
Was there one black person in America who kept a job because of Macklemore?
What did they do?
Of course not.
All this is is what we call virtue signaling, right?
This is so Macklemore can pretend that he is down with the black folks, and so he can sell CDs to the people he's down with, and so Danny DeVito can seem like he's down without actually having to do anything.
This is what Democrats are all about.
Leftists are all about the virtue signaling.
I never have to do anything for anybody or make lives better for anybody, but so long as I say all the other white people are racist, and even if I say I'm racist, right, I'm racist and so are all other white people.
What is the implication?
I'm not really racist, right?
Because I'm recognizing my own white privilege too, right?
I'm recognizing my own white privilege.
That means I'm not really a beneficiary of white privilege, or if I am, I've inoculated myself to charges that I'm somehow a beneficiary or that I'm...
Unwilling and blind to my own white privilege.
I've made myself a better person by doing absolutely nothing.
So this is a thing that I hate.
This culminated last week, the very end of last week, David Blatt, who was the Jewish coach of the of the Cleveland Cavaliers.
The Cleveland Cavaliers had a record of 30 and 11, I think, so they're one of the better teams in the NBA.
And the Cleveland Cavaliers fired their Jewish coach, the only Jewish coach in the NBA.
So I tweeted facetiously, They just fired the only Jewish coach in the NBA.
There's only one reason for this black privilege.
Hashtag NBA So Black.
He was replaced by Tyronn Lue, who's a really not particularly great basketball player, who ended up coaching the team and is a black guy.
Of course I was joking because I don't think that David Blatt was fired because he's Jewish.
I think he was fired because he didn't do the job.
And I don't think that 77% of the NBA is black because all the people in the NBA are racist.
I think that 77% of the people in the NBA are black because disproportionately the top basketball players in America happen to be black.
I'm pretty consistent on this.
What was amazing is that people on the left actually took this seriously.
They got very, very... I got ESPN writers getting very upset with me for hashtag NBASoBlack, and they're so stupid.
They started texting and they started IMing and tweeting things like, well, yeah, but only 30% of the coaches are black.
Okay, that still doesn't undermine my point.
Only 10% of Americans are black.
So that's still three times out representing the population.
So that doesn't change anything.
So all the owners are white.
So what?
So the racist white owners hired a disproportionate number of black people because they're racist against white people?
Like, this makes no sense.
The whole point I'm making is that merit before diversity.
But all the folks on the left who were really upset about hashtag NBASoBlack are the same people who say Oscar's so white.
So apparently the NBA can't be racist in any way, but the Oscars have to be racist.
Why?
Because white people benefit in one system and black people benefit in the other.
When black people benefit, it can't be because of racism.
When white people benefit, it must be because of racism.
All these people are idiots, obviously.
The fact is, thank God we live in a free country.
Thank God, still.
Temporarily.
We live in a free market economy where people can make their own business choices.
And the reality is that no matter how much I lobby for more Jews in the NBA, five, nine Jews who can't jump and have a terrible jump shot, like me, are not going to be playing in the NBA because merit before diversity, gang.
Merit before diversity.
And I would say in the presidential race, Merit before being a blowhard on both sides of the aisle.
And please, it's so funny, everybody keeps saying they want unity, and then they say that Ted Cruz is the least unifying candidate.
Of Bernie Sanders, who divides on the basis of class, Hillary Clinton, who divides on the basis of race, and Donald Trump, who divides on the basis of everything, of all the candidates, Ted Cruz of those four is certainly the most unifying candidate, because at least he doesn't see Americans purely in terms of rich, poor, black, and white, or Donald Trump's friends and Donald Trump's enemies.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
We'll see you tomorrow.
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