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May 4, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
43:43
Ep. 112 - There Are Things Worth Fighting For

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You finally did it!
You finally did it.
You blew it up!
Donald Trump is the nominee.
After all the fighting, after all the lies, after all the conspiracy theories and bloviating and position shifting and leftism, after all the insults and the racist pandering and the economic illiteracy, after all the cruelty and the full-fledged idiocy, Donald Trump is the guy you chose.
So what does that mean?
Well, It means that standing against Trump now means more than ever.
Early in the race, I stated repeatedly the only way to defeat Trump would be to point out to Republican primary voters he wasn't a conservative.
After all, I thought conservative voters were outraged with the Republican establishment that had caved over and over and over again to President Obama.
They'd probably want to nominate somebody who wouldn't cut deals with the wild leftists in the Democratic Party.
For once, I got it wrong.
Turns out that a huge bulk of Trump supporters don't care that he's a leftist.
They think he's a tough guy who's gonna fight for them.
They think he'll fulfill the promise emblazoned on his ridiculously idiotic and stupid-looking red Make America Great Again hat from 1985 family reunion.
They buy his two-bit promises.
They buy his stripper glitter showmanship.
They buy his foghorn bravado.
And they do so because they don't give two good dams about conservatism.
As the man who calls Trump daddy, Milo Yiannopoulos tweets, quote, The alt-right is Western civilization's only hope.
You and your friends failed to protect America from the left.
The barbarians are at the gates because conservatives failed.
They failed horribly.
It's time for something new.
You are, if you don't vote for Trump, choosing the progressive left over the grassroots right.
Your country will never forgive you.
The alt-right, these people that Milo says are the future, for those who missed it, that's a group of white supremacists who unite under the banner of resistance to both the Constitution and the cultural left.
These are the people that Yiannopoulos cheerily touts as the future.
An ugly, moronic agglomeration of intelligent skinheads, stupid white supremacists, idiots who conflate everything vile with political incorrectness, and the odd Hitler fan or two.
So just the people you'd want at a dinner party.
Yiannopoulos is right about one thing.
The Trump movement does reject conservatism.
They don't care about the Constitution.
It's a passé document that must be discarded so that dear leader can lead America back to greatness again.
They don't care about the Declaration of Independence.
They're an interest group.
They want their payoff.
They don't care about traditional concepts of negative rights or economic freedom or foreign policy strength.
They don't care about conservatives.
So, conservatives have to stand against them.
As I replied to Milo, the alt-right are also barbarians.
If you fight against America's founding philosophy, you are the enemy.
Trump's something new, the something new that Yiannopoulos touts, is actually something quite old and quite un-American.
If conservatives want a future, they have to stand against Trump and his corrupt, bankrupt philosophy.
2016 could have been a time to reap the harvest of conservatism.
Instead, Donald Trump burned down the field with the help of his supporters.
It's time now to plant anew.
We should do so now, with alacrity, rather than embracing the man holding the match.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
I tend to demonize people because they don't care about your feelings.
So last night was a terrible night for the country, not just because Donald Trump is the nominee, but because now we are guaranteed a choice between predator and alien.
The next president of the United States is going to suck and suck hard.
It's going to be Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Your choice is now between, as I've said before, the spawn of Satan and the Antichrist.
Hope you enjoyed it.
Thanks for playing.
It's really quite terrible.
We do have some live shots from last night from the campaign coverage.
This was conservatives last night after they received the results from Indiana making Donald Trump the nominee.
No.
No.
That's not true.
That's impossible!
Yeah, yeah.
And then we had a live shot of the Trump voters.
here they were.
We appreciate it.
We also had a live shot from the RNC headquarters.
So yeah, it got real ugly over there.
And finally, a live shot from Hillary Clinton's headquarters at the news that she'd be facing off against the most unpopular candidate in the history of the republic.
Yes, yes, indeed, you do.
So there was a wide variety of human emotion last night.
Well, you had to do it.
You just had to do it.
My theory of checkoff was correct after all.
The gun was over the mantelpiece, and the three-year-old had to lose it.
They had to use it.
They couldn't help doing it.
I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and it's like, if she's near the stove, doesn't matter how many times I've told her, the stove is hot, she's going to wobble over toward the stove in the attempt to touch it, and this time, the adults weren't in the room to prevent it, and so it turned out that it wasn't a stove.
It was a nuclear button, and the Trumpsters pushed it.
Okay, so here's where we are.
Ted Cruz, And we will examine all the ramifications of this today.
We'll talk about whether it is time to build the coalition, whether it is time to consolidate behind Donald Trump, whether we have to get behind this terrible, horrible man in order to stop this heritant of a screeching, shrieking harpy.
And we'll get to all of that.
First, this was kind of sad.
Ted Cruz gets up and he suspends his campaign last night again.
Ted Cruz was the guy I supported.
Even when he's conceding, he's grading.
I mean, it's just that the speaking style is just awful.
It was awful the entire time.
The feeling of insincerity from Ted Cruz really doomed him in a pretty significant way in this campaign because he just felt insincere and put up against Trump's freewheeling style.
Everything seemed calculated.
It's actually forecasting forward to Hillary.
It's a good example of how a very calculated politician From the beginning, I've said that I would continue on as long as there was a viable path to victory.
at all times like Trump does.
Here's Ted Cruz conceding last night, and it was not a good moment for the Republic.
- From the beginning, I've said that I would continue on as long as there was a viable path to victory.
Tonight, I'm sorry to say, - No! - It appears that path has been foreclosed.
- No!
Together, we left it all on the field in Indiana.
We gave it everything we've got.
But the voters chose another path.
And so, with a heavy heart, but with boundless optimism, For the long-term future of our nation, we are suspending our campaign.
But hear me now.
I am not suspending our fight for liberty.
Okay, and then he went on to talk about the fight for liberty and I'll talk in a little while about what we have to do next and what actually has to happen here.
We have to build a movement outside of Trumpism.
We have to build a movement that's a grassroots movement outside of the Republican Party.
It has to be a movement that is geared toward action in the cultural and media sphere.
It has to have actual targets because the truth is that as Trump has shown, What happens in culture matters a lot more than what happens in the political sphere.
We all play every day here in the political kiddie pool.
The truth is most people are out there in the broader ocean of culture.
They don't pay attention to any of this.
When they hear Donald Trump's a bad guy, he's a racist, he says stupid things, most people don't even compute this.
They just remember the master of the universe from The Apprentice and they think that's the real guy.
Even though that's the guy who's being edited in a back room somewhere by a series of reality TV producers.
Um, so there was Cruz, you know, saying all of this.
And then, of course, it wouldn't be a complete Cruz press conference without an awkward moment.
At the very end, he turns around to embrace, I think it was his father behind him, he turns around to embrace his dad and proceeds to elbow his wife in the face.
So it's just perfect, perfect synopsis of the Cruz campaign all the way through.
And again, I don't think he ran a terrible campaign.
I just don't think he's a very good candidate.
I think he ran about as good a campaign as you can run if you're a bad candidate.
I do think that he should not have embraced Donald Trump quite so hard at the beginning.
He gave him, not just a, not just a, I'm not gonna mess with Donald.
He gave him a bear hug.
I think Donald's terrific.
I think Donald's wonderful.
It was a campaign strategy.
I understand it.
It wouldn't have helped Cruz to go after Trump.
It wouldn't have hurt Trump for Cruz to go after him.
But it certainly contributed to this feeling of insincerity.
This guy you were embracing five minutes ago, now you're turning around and saying is the worst thing that ever happened to the country.
Okay, so that was Ted Cruz.
So much for the Cruz campaign.
That's over.
And let it be known that you voters who think Hillary is so weak and Trump is going to beat her, You just rejected the chance at having an actual, honest to God, constitutional conservative as president in favor of a bloviating, blowhard leftist who contributed money to Hillary Clinton and openly brags about how corrupt he is.
That's who you decided on.
Okay, so let's go to that guy.
Our new Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump and his coterie of geniuses, Ben Carsons and Sarah Palin and Because we're going after Hillary Clinton.
just the entire bevy of intellect.
Here's Donald Trump saying, now that this campaign is over, he's going to turn his fire on Hillary Clinton. - Because we're going after Hillary Clinton.
She will not...
She will not be a great president.
She will not be a good president.
She will be a poor president.
She doesn't understand trade.
Her husband signed, perhaps in the history of the world, the single worst trade deal ever done.
It's called NAFTA.
And I was witness to the carnage over the last six weeks especially.
Okay, first of all, let's just put aside for a second the complete and utter idiocy of his economic statements there.
I mean, this is nincompoopery on a very high level.
The worst trade deal ever done?
Worse than Smoot-Hawley that led to the Great Depression?
Like, worse than that one?
Okay, NAFTA is not to blame for America's economic woes.
It was passed in the 90s, and the 90s were a boom time for the United States.
So this idea that free trade leads to bad economics, I love that his first critique of Hillary is the only thing she's right about.
Literally, of all the things in the world, Hillary is only right about one, and that is free trade.
And that's the thing that he chooses to hit her on.
It's amazing.
But this was Trump's speech.
I heard Dennis Prager this morning on his show, and I love Dennis, but Dennis was saying, He was surprised and disappointed that Trump didn't give his vision for America.
And I thought to myself, have you not been watching him?
Have you not seen him?
Like, why would you possibly expect that this guy, the Orange God King, That the Kool-Aid man, why would you expect that he was gonna give some sort of highfalutin speech about what America will be when he's president?
Like, that's not what he's done at any point.
At no point has he ever said this.
He's just done what he's good at, which is diagnosing the problem, and then failing to come up with any solution.
He's doing the same thing that everybody else can do.
He's just saying it out loud, and then his solutions suck.
But Trump was trying to be more presidential last night, so here he was saying that Ted Cruz, trying to be nice to Ted Cruz after spending months saying his wife is ugly, and saying that his father tried to assassinate John F. Kennedy, and saying that Ted Cruz is the greatest liar in human history.
In history, not just in this election cycle.
In history, he's the greatest liar.
Like, in the reams of liars of human history.
It goes something like Judas, Ted Cruz, right?
That's according to Donald Trump.
So here's Donald Trump trying to make nice with Ted Cruz because now he's supposed to be presidential.
Here we go.
And just so you understand, Ted Cruz, I don't know if he likes me or if he doesn't like me, but he is one hell of a competitor.
He is a tough, smart guy.
And he has got an amazing future.
He's got an amazing future.
So I want to congratulate Ted.
And I know how tough it is.
It's tough.
It's tough.
I've had some moments where it was not looking so good.
And it's not a great feeling.
And so I understand how Ted feels and Heidi and their whole beautiful family.
And I want to just say, though, that One tough competitor.
Okay, so now he's being nice to Ted Cruz after basically saying that he's the worst person who ever lived.
Now, everybody was saying last night there are a lot of optimistic Republicans and they were thinking, okay, so he got nominated.
All right, we're gonna have to get behind him now.
We're gonna have to get behind him.
We'll talk about these quizlings in a second.
We have to get behind him.
It's important that we get behind Donald Trump to stop Hillary Clinton.
We'll go through all of these arguments in just a moment.
Because he'll moderate.
You know, he'll turn into the presidential guy he's promised that he will be.
He's promised us.
Now that he's locked it up, he's fought his fight, and now he's gonna move on to other enemies.
Then came the morning.
And as I said yesterday, Deuteronomy 28, you wake up in the next morning and you think, boy, wasn't it nice when it was last night?
And that's Donald Trump.
So this morning, Donald Trump was on Good Morning America and George Stephanopoulos asked him about his smear of Rafael Cruz yesterday.
Asked him about his ridiculous claim that Rafael Cruz was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
This is the guy you morons nominated.
And here was Donald Trump's response.
Remember, he finished off Cruz.
Cruz is done, right?
Cruz is out of the race.
It doesn't hurt him at all to just say, you know, I was citing a National Enquirer piece and maybe it was inaccurate of me and I shouldn't have done it.
It wouldn't hurt him an iota to do that.
It would help him pick up some of the Cruz support.
Here's Donald Trump not doing that because he's pathologically incapable of that.
Do you owe his father an apology for saying he was with Lee Harvey Oswald before JFK's assassination?
All I was doing was referring to a picture that was reported in a magazine, and I think they didn't deny it.
I don't think anybody denied it.
Now, I don't know what it was exactly, but it was a major story in a major publication.
And it was picked up by many other publications.
It was the National Enquirer, and even the expert at their site had said it couldn't be true.
The National Enquirer gave you John Edwards.
It gave you O.J.
Simpson.
It gave you many, many things.
I mean, you can't knock the National Enquirer.
It's brought many, many things to light, not all of them pleasant.
The fact is that it was a cover story on the National Enquirer.
It was picked up by many and other people and magazines and periodicals and newspapers, and all I did was refer to it.
So no apology?
I'm just referring to an article that appeared.
I mean, it has nothing to do with me.
Okay, so no.
He's going to double down on it.
It has nothing to do with him.
He just mentioned it.
He's the one who promulgated it.
By the way, the other outlets that mentioned this idiotic National Enquirer story, those outlets debunked it repeatedly.
But there's Trump.
That's Trump.
And here's the great unifier Trump, right?
What I'm hearing now, you know, because I'm a prominent Never Trump guy, I'm not going to vote for him.
Now, Never Trump is based on the notion that Donald Trump will not change.
If magically he strips off his face tomorrow, And underneath is Ronald Reagan, who had been hiding there.
They resuscitated him and put him under Donald Trump's skin, and he's a completely different guy.
Obviously, evidence changes the basis of my statement.
If Trump remains as Trump is, I will not vote for him.
He's a disgrace to the Republican Party.
He's a disgrace to politics.
Okay, Trump was supposed to, though, bring everybody together, right?
He's gonna reach out to all the people he alienated, and now we're all gonna come together, big group hug, and then we're gonna turn on Hillary and go whale on her.
Okay, so Donald Trump was interviewed by Politico yesterday, and Donald Trump said that we don't need to come together.
He said there are certain people he doesn't want in his coalition.
Here we go.
The question is, I do love self-funding, and I don't want anything for myself, but we do need money for the party.
The party will come together.
I don't think it's imperative that the entire party come together.
I don't want everybody.
I don't even want certain people that were extraordinarily nasty.
Let them go their own way.
Let them wait eight years.
Or let them wait 16 years or whatever because I think we're going to have a great success against probably Hillary because the system is totally rigged against Bernie.
I've been totally rigged against him.
So they can wait eight years.
So those conservatives who don't like him, the conservatives who say he's both insufficiently conservative and he doesn't have presidential temperament, that he's a dangerous man who is narcissistic in the extreme, that he has authoritarian impulses, those people, he says, well, we can live without them.
We don't need them as part of our team.
It's amazing how quickly he throws those people off.
Literally within hours of winning the nomination, he throws those people off.
Yet I seem to remember a time when he was asked about David Duke and the KKK, And he just couldn't bring himself on national television to condemn them because it was two days before a Louisiana primary.
Which is to say that he's comfortable with some people supporting him and he's perfectly fine with others not supporting him, and that's a little bit telling.
Okay, so there's Donald Trump, your presidential nominee.
Astonishing.
Astonishing.
So, here's what's going to happen next.
First, there's going to be the building of the myth.
So, the media has an interest in this being a horse race.
So, the media have sort of a conflict here.
They don't like Trump as much as they like Hillary.
They do like Trump because he raises the ratings.
So, Trump versus Hillary is clash of the awful, awful titans.
And it's Godzilla vs Mothra and they think that this is going to be good for them.
So now what you're going to get from the media is a lot of, oh, this is going to be a competitive race.
Oh, it's just going to be so competitive.
Now, I'm not saying that it won't be competitive.
I'm just saying that the narrative from here for the next few weeks is going to be how competitive this race really is, how Hillary is going to start to fall apart.
In the face of Trump's Machiavellian manipulations, even though, by the way, latest poll out, Trump down 13 points to Hillary Clinton, 13.
Worth noting at this point in the election cycle with Mitt Romney, he was up by almost double digits over Barack Obama before losing.
In any case, Trump is losing by double digits.
We'll see if that gets better or worse for him.
And 12 million votes in the Republican primaries is not quite the same thing as 70 million votes that you're going to need in order to win this election cycle.
Carl Bernstein at the Washington Post.
He's building up the myth that Hillary is going to experience some bad times and Trump will come back.
Here he is on MSNBC.
And I think there are going to be some leaks that are going to be very damaging to Hillary Clinton.
Look, what she did was an act of recklessness and entitlement that there's no excuse for, and she's going to have to go to the FBI under oath and explain why she did this.
And it'll be the first time that she'll have to give a really straight explanation, and it's not going to be pretty.
But it's all part of this distrust, crooked Hillary, as Trump is going to play it.
Okay, so this is the idea that Trump's going to be competitive.
And meanwhile, you've got the Republican Party saying, we want consolidation.
We want consolidation.
To which I have two words, only one of which is printable.
Okay, the second one is you.
Okay, you want consolidation behind this guy that you allowed to gain control of the party?
You want consolidation behind this guy?
You can all just go, you know what.
So, Reince Priebus is the head of the RNC.
He came out last night and he tweeted, Real Donald Trump will be presumptive GOP nominee.
We all need to unite and focus on defeating Hillary Clinton.
Hashtag never Clinton.
Hashtag go screw yourself, dude.
I have no interest in backing you.
I have no interest in backing your party.
I have no interest in backing your boy, Donald Trump, who is a leftist.
He is a leftist through and through.
I have no interest in pretending that he's anything but that.
I'm not going to pretend that he's a conservative or a conservative standard bearer.
And the reason for that is, if he's bearing the conservative standard, he's burning it down.
It doesn't exist anymore.
We have to stand aside from him and say, that's not us.
That's not us.
That's not our guy.
Now, there can be an open debate whether you can stand.
I think there's a problem if you stand apart from Trump and say, yeah, but we'll still back him.
He's not our guy.
You know, we don't like him that much, but he's still better than that guy.
I'll still vote for him.
This seems to me insufficient.
And it's and it's a problem because the fact is that if the way the reason you vote for him is because you want him to win.
Yes or no?
Yes.
The reason you vote for Trump is because you want Trump to win.
If you want Trump to win and he becomes the President of the United States, if you get your wish, he's the President.
As the Republican President, he is the head of the Republican Party.
As the head of the Republican Party, he is the de facto head of the conservative movement in the United States.
If you're voting for him, you are actively saying you want him to be the de facto head of the conservative movement in the United States.
There is no way around that logic.
You can still criticize him from the outside.
It's going to have very little effect, just the way the conservative critiques of George W. Bush didn't have a lot of impact on the conservative movement, which moved markedly to the left during the George W. Bush administration and continued to move to the left through McCain and through Romney.
So Ryan says we should all get together.
Trump's the presumptive nominee.
Newt Gingrich, who has been a de facto Trump surrogate, he was on Fox News, of course, of course, and of course, he was on Hannity, of course, of course, talking about how Trump was going to expand the reach and breadth of the Republican Party, presumably by alienating 70% of all people.
So here is Newt Gingrich and his infinite electoral genius.
And I think there is a potential for Trump to bring into a much larger tent And then that's the key.
This will be a much bigger Republican party three months from now.
Oh, will it?
Oh, will it?
How?
So he says that he'll be bigger Republican Party.
I assume that means that he's going to swivel to the left.
So this is the conflict that you have now inside the pro-Trump camp is, is he going to consolidate the people he alienated during the primaries, or is he going to move to the left to fight Hillary during the general?
And you can't really have it both ways, but they want it both ways, so that's how it'll be.
He has legitimately, I have to say this is just humorous, he's got legitimately the worst surrogate on the planet, Ben Carson, working for him.
And Ben Carson is I don't know how you could possibly have a worse surrogate than Ben Carson.
I mean, honest to God.
The guy was great at brain surgery and he's terrible at this.
And here is Dr. Ben Carson talking about why you should vote for Donald Trump.
He's moving in the direction of trying to unify the party, and I think that is an extremely positive finding.
You know, I know Donald Trump, and I've had a chance to talk with him in private on a number of occasions, and he is a very reasonable and accommodating person.
And all you have to do is talk to the people who know him, who've worked with him for a long period of time, and you'll see he is not the monster that many people try to portray him.
He's not a monster.
He's just a man.
He's a nice man.
And I've met with him, and he's been nice to me, personally.
And I think that if I were really, truly to be nice to him, he would also be nice to me.
Yes, he called me a pedophile in public, but, you know, that's just things.
Like what?
His job for the past eight months has been we get to know him as a presidential candidate and you're telling us ignore everything you know about the man.
I know him down deep.
He likes his dog.
I don't care.
But this is surrogate.
Oh, we're all going to get together.
We're all going to get together.
Bobby Jindal, I think, made the most compelling case for voting Trump.
And as you'll see, I don't think it's particularly compelling.
Bobby Jindal is a conservative.
He's somebody who I thought would have been a much better candidate in this election cycle than a lot of the other folks who gained prominence.
Governor of Louisiana, here's what he had to say about this.
Secondly, look, I think Donald Trump's going to have the hardest time beating Hillary of all the Republican candidates that ran for president.
Having said that, third, however, if he is the nominee, I will be voting for him.
I will be supporting him.
Quite simply because I think there are too many important issues.
I think at least there's a chance he would get rid of Obamacare.
I think there's 0% chance that Hillary Clinton would do that.
So yes, if it comes down to a binary choice between Donald Trump, if he is the nominee, I'm going to be supporting him.
I'm not happy about it.
I don't think he's the best qualified candidate.
I don't think he's the one most likely to be successful, but I would vote for him over Hillary Clinton.
So this is the typical line, and I've heard this from a lot of people I'm very friendly with.
People who say, okay, so yeah, he's a complete hurricane of human feces, but Hillary's a double hurricane of human feces, and therefore I'm still going to vote for him.
Again, I've said this before, I'll say it again.
If your timeline is the next seven months, if you think the country is over in four years, by all means, go and vote for Trump.
By all means, go and vote for Trump.
If all you care about is that we're already speeding 70 miles an hour toward the cliff, Hillary will put us at 90 miles an hour, Trump will take us at 75 miles an hour toward the cliff, by all means, vote for Trump.
Just recognize that when you do, what you're actually doing is, again, making him your standard bearer and burning out the reverse gear.
That car no longer has a reverse.
There's no way to throw it into reverse now.
Because Donald Trump has converted an entire generation into alt-right Milo Yiannopoulos followers.
That's what he's done.
He's taking an entire generation of people who could have been conservatives, and he's telling them, you get in the back of this Trump train, and now we're gonna run down those conservatives.
The conservatives are the people who are tied to the tracks.
Those people have to be put out of the way.
The conservatives are Trump's enemies.
They're not his friends.
They're not his friends.
People like Bobby Jindal are not allies of Trump.
They're convenient allies of Trump, until such time as he no longer needs them, and then they become part of the fuel for the Trump train.
That's how this works.
And this is why I'm quite frustrated with all these folks who are immediately schwifting.
And it just demonstrates again, this is why anybody who's doing this, you were the Republican establishment that brought this about.
The anti-establishment feeling that was created inside the Republican Party was predicated on the notion The Republicans kept caving over and over and over to Barack Obama.
They kept caving to Obama.
They kept saying big things.
We're going to fight Obamacare.
Nope.
We're going to fight amnesty.
Nope.
We're going to fight the Iran deal.
Nope.
We're going to fight his budget increases.
Nope.
And they kept making these big promises, and then they compromised, saying, well, the alternative would be even worse.
The alternative would be we would lose elections to the Democrats, and they would do even more terrible things.
And Republicans, after a number of these elections, we said, you know what?
Enough.
You guys are terrible.
You keep putting bad deals on us.
So what happens?
The reactionary voters go full reactionary, but they don't go to Ted Cruz.
They go to Donald Trump, who's a leftist establishmentarian.
And then the establishment caters to Trump, because this is what they do, always.
Well, we better go for Trump, because otherwise we'll get an even worse deal.
We'll always get a... There's always a worse deal.
Guess what, folks?
There's always a worse deal.
There's always a worse deal.
There's a worse deal than Hillary.
There's a worse deal than Sanders.
There's a worse deal than Trump.
There's a worse deal than everybody.
The question is, where do you personally draw your moral line?
Where do you personally draw your moral line?
Where is it?
Can you vote for somebody like Trump who's going to take the heart out of your ideology just because there's somebody worse?
There's always somebody worse in the room.
There's always somebody who's going to be more of a problem than the person you think is going to be the good guy.
But if you really think that Donald Trump is going to be your savior, if you're willing to burn out the possibility, if you're willing to take the bird in the hand rather than gamble on the two in the bush, knowing that the bird in the hand is poisonous and it's just going to poison you more slowly than the snake that it's going to kill, You know, then you're not thinking long-term enough.
You're not thinking about movements.
You're not thinking... Elections are, as I put it in a column today, elections are just the wave breaking on the shore.
Where politics really gets done is where that wave started, miles offshore, the currents offshore.
And what you do with the beach has effects on the currents.
If you're going to focus only over and over on that wave on the beach, you're going to neglect the currents that really matter in American politics.
That's how Bernie Sanders becomes successful and drives the next wave of democratic movement.
That's why the conservative movement has not done that and has been taken over by this alt-right nonsense.
Charles Krauthammer was asked by Bill O'Reilly last night, could he back Trump in the end?
And here's what he had to say to Bill O'Reilly.
But let me just say, from what I've seen up until now, heard from Trump and watched him, I don't think I'd be capable of voting for Donald Trump.
Question is, what do I do?
I don't know yet.
He doesn't know yet, and I think there are a lot of people who feel that way.
A lot of people who feel that way.
Now, again, Trump could win.
He could.
I'm not going to pretend that Trump has no possibility of winning.
Hillary Clinton is terrible at this, and Donald Trump is a street fighter, which was the only affirmative case for him in the first place.
Here's Hillary Clinton yesterday talking about Donald Trump and how mean he is.
But what he was saying and going after my qualifications is very familiar to a lot of women.
And, you know, we're not going to be counted out anymore.
We're going to stand up and express our opinions.
We're going to claim what is rightfully ours in the workplace, in our society, in our economy, in our political system.
And I've been thrilled by the response to his negative comments, because most women see it not just as about me.
They see it about themselves.
They see it about their own situations.
And there's been an outpouring of support.
We've raised millions of dollars.
We came up with the idea of a woman's card, which unfortunately doesn't give you a discount, even though we don't get equal pay for the work we do.
You can't show it when you're checking out at the supermarket and say, hey, you know, I want a discount.
But we're making a point.
You know, he can continue to attack me.
That's fine.
I really, you know, don't mind at all.
But I'm going to stand up for the people of this country, women and men.
But as he goes after women, as he goes after literally every group, I'm going to be their voice.
And I'm going to say, wait a minute, you know, we have a lot to contribute to our country and we're doing it.
Okay, so Hillary, you can see she's excited, by the way.
You can see that she's upbeat here.
She's about to learn differently, because this is so boring and so terrible, and if she thinks that she's gonna Jeb Bush her way through this thing, didn't work for Jeb Bush, didn't work for Hillary either.
She's gonna have to come up with something slightly better than this to help her.
The media, by the way, they might think that they can stop Trump.
They may have created a Frankenstein monster here.
This is Jeremy Boring, Managing Editor.
This is his theory, is that the media have now created a Frankenstein monster and Trump they can't control.
That basically the media have crafted this persona of Trump that is immune to all of the charges of racism, sexism, and bigotry and all the rest of it.
I'm more skeptical than he is, but it's possible.
It is possible.
So that's the story as far as Hillary versus Trump.
Now I want to give a quick rundown, a very quick rundown, of five arguments that are being made for why you should vote for Donald Trump and why I think these are insufficient.
First, but Hillary's worse argument.
As I say, there's always somebody who's worse.
That does not explain why you should hire a murderer to do your dirty work.
This idea that there's always someone worse out there, right.
But you have moral standards, so that doesn't exactly watch.
But Trump will be better than Hillary.
So this is now an affirmative case for Trump that he will be better than Hillary.
I see no evidence of this whatsoever.
There are people who says, well, he'll work with the Republican Congress.
I think he's more likely to cut deals with the Democratic Congress than he is to work with a Republican Congress.
And the fact is that Donald Trump is an authoritarian.
I think that he'll bully his own party far more than he far more than he concedes to his own party.
He's not somebody who is subject to the vagaries of congressional manipulation.
He'll just keep going to the public, he'll just keep ensconcing himself in a bubble full of people who love him, and then he'll assume that he can do whatever he wants.
The Supreme Court argument, the people who say, well, you know, Hillary Clinton.
Donald Trump, he might not appoint someone bad to the Supreme Court.
Donald Trump will definitely appoint someone bad to the Supreme Court, number one.
The reason I say this is because Donald Trump does not want to appoint someone to the Supreme Court who, one, will vote to restrict his executive power, two, will vote to restrict any of his social leftism, three, will vote to restrict any of his actual feelings on gun rights.
He is not a pro-gun guy.
He has turned into an anti-assault weapons ban guy in the last 35 seconds.
Ronald Reagan got it half wrong and half right.
George H.W.
got it half wrong and half right.
George W. got it half wrong and half right with his Supreme Court picks.
If you think that Trump is going to do as well as any of those guys, you have another thing coming and he's not going to pander.
All the names he's throwing out there right now, these will go by the wayside as soon as he has a Democratic Senate, which is likely to happen.
And if he has a Democratic Senate, he's just going to go along to get along.
He's going to throw up somebody who is not good.
So this is, if that's your sole reason for voting Trump, I don't buy it.
Beyond that, I happen to think the Supreme Court is not as important an institution as everybody else thinks it is.
It's an outrageous institution, but I don't think they're all that important.
I think the Obergefell decision, for example, still requires the executive branch to enforce it.
I think that there are states that have resisted successfully bad Supreme Court decisions and continue to do so on issues up to and including guns.
I think that's what will happen.
If you are placing your hope for the future of conservatism on Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, I would suggest that more hope should be placed in governors like Greg Abbott in the state of Texas and other Republican governors who actually predominate at the state level.
Fourth argument is that if you sit out, that's moral cowardice.
You have to make a choice.
You have to make a choice.
No.
Voting, because you're pressured to do so, that seems to be the greatest moral cowardice of all.
I don't feel a compunction to vote between two Democrats, because that's not the way that life works.
I don't feel the need to vote between two Democrats.
I don't endorse either of them.
Voting is an act of endorsement.
I will not endorse Donald Trump.
Finally, the down ticket races.
If you don't show up for Trump, you won't show up for anybody else.
Nope.
You should show up for everybody else.
You shouldn't vote for Trump.
That's my view.
Those are the five most common arguments.
Okay.
So now some things that I like, and some things that I hate.
So...
Today, I've been holding this in abeyance for a long time because I figured we might need to use it now.
My favorite films of all time are the Lord of the Rings films, the three Lord of the Rings films combined.
They're just phenomenal.
And this seems an appropriate speech to play from the Lord of the Rings film.
This is Samwise Gamgee at the end of The Two Towers.
And it is, if you're not feeling like this today, you don't care enough about the Republic.
Let's just put it that way.
Here's Samwise Gamgee from Lord of the Rings.
It's so wrong.
By rights, we shouldn't even be here.
But we are.
It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo.
The ones that really mattered.
Full of darkness and danger, they were.
And sometimes you didn't want to know the end.
Because how could the end be happy?
How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?
But in the end, it's only a passing thing.
This shadow.
Even darkness must pass.
A new day will come.
And when the sun shines, it'll shine out the clearer.
Those were the stories that stayed with you.
That meant something.
Even if you were too small to understand why.
But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand.
I know now.
Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't.
They kept going.
Because they were holding on to something.
What are we holding on to, Sam?
There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo.
And it's worth fighting for.
Yep, there it is.
In a nutshell, that's basically it.
But there is no brighter tomorrow if you embrace the darkness.
If you just say, okay, the best it's ever going to be is Trumpism.
The best it's ever going to be is Donald Trump.
If you think the best it's ever going to be is Donald Trump, the best it's ever going to be is Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
The best it's ever going to be for the conservative movement is the hope of a demagogue like Donald Trump.
Then there is no brighter tomorrow.
If you want a brighter tomorrow, you have to stand for it and you have to stand for it right now and you have to start building outside.
So here's what we're going to do.
Here's what we're going to do.
First of all, you should register at Daily Wire so you can email me directly and we'll read your emails in the bags.
But the fact is that we're going to build a consolidated movement.
We're going to spend the next...
Several years building up a database of all the people who actually believe in conservatism.
We're going to be taking concerted action more and more here at The Daily Wire to make change in the media.
We're going to be looking at ways to make change in the culture.
We will be targeting politicians.
We will be going after people who don't hold to conservatism.
Here's how we're going to cover the rest of this election cycle, okay?
Because there are people who say, well, if you don't back one of them, how are you going to cover it?
Here's how I'm going to cover it as a conservative.
I'm gonna cover this just like I always did.
I started off as somebody who was open to Trump.
I was willing to give him a chance.
And as the layers of Donald Trump peeled off and revealed the leftist rot underneath, that's when I got off the bandwagon and I said I would not vote for this man.
I will hold both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to the standard of conservatism.
This probably means that Trump will actually do slightly better than Hillary in my coverage, because Donald Trump is a broken clock who is right twice a day.
Hillary Clinton is a clock that was obliterated by a nuclear explosion in 1952 in New Mexico.
Okay, so the fact is Hillary will never be right, except maybe on trade, and Donald Trump will likely be wrong a lot, but he might be right occasionally.
We'll cover it just straight, okay?
You'll get the full story here.
You can make up your own mind whether where you draw your line, whether this is a line you want to draw, whether you think the hope for the Republic lies in embracing Trumpism, or whether you think we should hold out for a brighter day and a better tomorrow.
That's how we're going to proceed from here on in here on The Ben Shapiro Show, as well as at The Daily Wire.
We're going to call it like we see it.
Principle above god-kings.
Principle above people.
Principle above individuals.
It was never about Ted Cruz versus Donald Trump.
It was always about the Constitution and constitutional conservatism above all.
And I am not going to allow anybody, or I'm certainly going to fight, to prevent people who want to undermine that in the name of some alt-right garbage.
Some nasty nationalist progressive ideology.
Some nasty populist Bizarro world strength to overcome the greatest philosophy in the history of mankind and the one that created this country.
I'm not going to stand still while that happens just in the name of victory for a powerful man.
That's not what I'm going to do.
I don't find my fulfillment in following around powerful men.
I don't find my fulfillment in holding the train in the Okay, so a couple of things that I hate.
Speaking of holding the train in the Donald Trump battalion, when I say that Donald Trump is going to smear conservatism, I just want to give you a couple of examples of how it is that the rest of this election cycle is going to go from the left.
Because I think that a lot of Trump supporters have been chortling at how Trump tweets the media.
They've been chortling.
Okay, well, you know, he knows how to handle the media.
He's been doing great.
Here's how things are actually going to go for Trump supporters from now on.
Get ready, folks, because you wanted this, you got it.
Here comes the tsunami.
And if he goes down, it's going to be on you.
You don't get to make bad decisions and then blame me for your bad decisions.
I warned you I wasn't going to go along with this.
So don't get all upset at me when I don't go along with something I didn't want to go along with.
You made this call.
So, CNN's Jeffrey Lord, who used to be an intelligent guy.
I don't know what happened to Jeffrey.
Jeffrey is on CNN and he's a Trump backer.
He's a Trump surrogate.
And he's asked about the Cruz conspiracy theories.
Here's what this election is going to look like in a nutshell.
We all are talking about, say, this National Enquirer thing.
I mean, I have to tell you, when we're talking about Indiana, do you really think, does anybody really think that somebody who's lost their carrier is talking about this or they're talking about their job?
So why is Trump?
But he has been talking about Carrier.
He has been talking about Carrier.
Do you admire Donald Trump?
Huh?
Do you admire Donald Trump?
Sure, sure, of course I do.
David, I mean... Do you think this is a good standard for the presidency?
David, I think that we are taking this far too seriously.
Far, far, far too seriously.
When you sit around and talk with regular folks who are not inside the Beltway, they talk about this Ted Cruz thing and they laugh.
They think it's hilarious.
Okay, they think it's hilarious.
This is what we're gonna be relegated to.
We're gonna be relegated to, oh, our guy's just a joke and everybody laughs at it.
I hope they all enjoy that, because that's the direction.
This is moving in an anxious, Jeffrey Lord.
Bobby Knight, who's the former Indiana basketball coach who endorsed Donald Trump, he was on, what is this, ABC News?
CNN?
Okay, so this is on CNN, and he was asked also about Donald Trump's foolishness, and here's Bobby Knight flailing about for an answer.
Among other things, he says he wants to temporarily ban Muslims from coming into the United States.
Does that concern you?
Well, no.
I mean, what does... I don't even know what controversial means.
Well, banning Muslims... A lot of people think banning Muslims... A lot of people think banning Muslims from coming to the United States is controversial.
It's un-American to prevent people from coming to the United States based on religion.
Well, that's okay.
That really doesn't mean anything to me right now, because we're talking about a guy that I think can handle things far better than anything that we've had recently.
You know, tell you one thing about Donald Trump.
There will never be a Benghazi in a Donald Trump administration.
I'm not sure in my lifetime I've seen anything where Our government failed to do something for people overseas that were in trouble.
That won't happen with Donald Trump.
Those are the things I'm concerned with.
Okay, well, you know, he may be concerned with that, but that's not what the rest of the public's gonna be concerned with.
A lot of this is going to hurt, and it's gonna hurt a lot.
It's gonna hurt a lot.
The New York Times has a whole editorial today.
The Republican Party is now the party of Trump.
The Atlantic has an editorial today.
The Republican Party is the party of Trump.
It's easy to defend against leftist slander.
It's harder to defend against leftists who are telling the truth.
And the fact is that when leftists say that Donald Trump represents a brand of republicanism that is nasty, and that is cruel, and that is based on lies, It's hard to argue with that when it's true.
It's hard to argue with that when it's true.
Okay, so we need to build a movement together.
We will do that.
We'll be doing that every day right here on The Ben Shapiro Show.
Subscribe over at dailywire.com.
Join the movement.
We will be talking with each other.
It won't just be a lecture.
It'll be a conversation.
And as we move forward, we're going to need a new conservative leadership.
You want to be part of that.
I want to be part of that.
Let's do it together.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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