All Episodes
Previous Next
July 19, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:49
Ep. 152 - Glitz, Glamor, Chaos -- It's RNC Time!

The RNC opens, Hillary lies to the NAACP, and Heather MacDonald joins the program! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
So on Monday night, the media went totally apoplectic over Pat Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, who was murdered in the Benghazi terror attack of September 11th, 2012.
Smith blasted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying, quote, He was murdered by radical Islamic terrorists.
I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son.
She lied to me and then called me a liar.
She looked me squarely in the eye and told me a video was responsible.
Then Pat Smith concluded, how could she do this to me?
How could she do this to any American family?
So the media lost what was left of its collective mind, quote, Chris Matthews, the man who presented the show, he said this was a gross accusation that ruined the night.
Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post said the accusation was extraordinary.
Rachel Maddow said Smith was, quote, playing with a very specific kind of fire that is almost impossible for me to watch, I have to say.
These are the same people who cheered wildly when the Democrats trotted out the Jersey Girls' Widows of 9-11 during the 2004 convention, you remember.
These are also the same people who will cheer wildly when the Democrats unveil their latest round of absurd pseudo-victims in order to target cops at the DNC in Philadelphia.
Here are just some of the speakers slated for the DNC.
Really, this is real.
Sabrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin.
The Democrats have tried to play Trayvon Martin's killing as a case in point of white police racism.
There are only a few problems.
First, the guy who shot him, George Zimmerman, was not white.
Second, George Zimmerman was not a cop.
Third, Trayvon Martin was, by all available evidence, sitting on top of George Zimmerman's prone body and slamming his head into the concrete when Zimmerman shot him.
Zimmerman was not only acquitted of a murder charge, the Department of Justice couldn't find anything to charge him with either.
Here's another one.
Leslie McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown.
Michael Brown, you may remember, was a thug whose strong arm robbed a convenience store, then punched Officer Darren Wilson, tried to grab his gun and shoot him, and finally tried to charge the officer before being shot himself.
That's true according to witness testimony.
Even Holder's DOJ could not find something wrong with the shooting.
Which didn't stop the left from manufacturing from whole cloth a narrative of evil white police officers shooting black men, surrendering by shouting, hands up, don't shoot.
Or how about Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner?
Eric Garner, you may remember, was not murdered by the cops.
He resisted arrest.
He was placed in a submission hold by the cops.
He then died of a heart attack because he was dramatically overweight.
He had a long history of health issues ranging from diabetes to sleep apnea to asthma that was so bad he actually had to quit a city job.
Garner certainly shouldn't have died over selling Lucy's loose cigarettes, but blaming his death on cop racism is asinine.
How about Maria Hamilton, mother of Dontre Hamilton?
You haven't heard this name, it's not really a household name, because Hamilton grabbed an officer's baton and hit him in the neck with it before the officer shot him.
The officer was fired because Hamilton was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic.
Here's another one.
Lucia McBath, mother of Jordan Davis.
Jordan Davis was murdered by Michael David Dunn, a white guy, at a gas station in Florida.
Davis was playing his music loudly in the car.
Dunn confronted him, then got a gun and shot 10 rounds into the car.
Davis was convicted of first-degree murder.
So what exactly is the problem with the criminal justice system or the cops?
Mmm.
How about Geneva Reed Veal?
She's the mother of Sandra Bland.
Remember, Sandra Bland committed suicide while in police custody.
Rumors of an evil police murder and cover-up circulated on the net.
There's no evidence to back any of it.
All of these women are deemed mothers of the movement, although what the movement is remains unclear.
There's actually one person who should speak, who's a mother of the movement.
Cleopatra Pendleton Calley, the mother of Hadiyah Pendleton.
Pendleton, you may remember, was a 15-year-old girl who performed at events surrounding Obama's second inauguration, then was murdered by gang members in Chicago weeks later.
But I doubt she'll target Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, for his failure to crack down on crime in the city.
She's not going to blame the culture of gang violence fostered by the Democratic Party, which ignores single motherhood and cultural deprivation as rationales for violence.
Probably she'll talk gun control.
Next time Democrats, leftists, complain about Pat Smith, everyone should remind them she's Her son died, Hillary did nothing to stop it, and then Hillary lied about it.
But Democrats drag out grieving mothers to push nasty smears about the cops, the criminal justice system, and gun control without any evidence at all.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
- Hey Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show. - The other political stuff. - Tend to demonize people who don't care about your feelings.
Okay, so here we are.
First off, I just want to thank our new sponsor.
We have a new sponsor, Harry's Razors.
So if you haven't tried Harry's Razors, I'm a person, I hate shaving.
It's one of those things you thought was really cool when you were a kid, and now it turns out it's really just a drag.
You have to go to the store and you have to have the attendant, you know, kind of unlock the razors for you because for some reason they think you're gonna either steal the razors or knife yourself or something.
Harry's Razors sends you the razors directly to your door, and they send it to you cheaper and faster than you would get it from a convenience store.
I've shaved with Harry's this morning.
I shaved with it last night.
Their shaving cream is terrific.
I actually shaved with it last night, not this morning, which is why I see the stubble.
But last night, I shaved with it, and it is terrific.
The razors are sharp.
They're great.
They're just as good as anything that you'll get anywhere else, and you get them for half the price.
Plus, the cream smells really good.
My wife likes it, so it's really terrific.
It's a good shave.
It's a good price, and they send it to you.
So they have a Harry's starter set, which is a great option.
For $15, you get a razor handle, a moisturizing shave cream, and three of Harry's five-blade German-engineered razors.
And if you're a fan of The Ben Shapiro Show and you not only want to help support Harry's, you want to support The Ben Shapiro Show, you'll shop at Harry's.
If you go to harrys.com, that's H-A-R-R-Y-S.com, and then use promo code SHAPIRO, then you get $5 off your initial order.
So $10, $10.
Okay, so lots going on in the world.
Tons and tons going on in the world.
candle, and the moisturizing shave cream.
So it's a pretty good deal.
So it's harrys.com, and use promo code Shapiro, and obviously help them.
They're a great advertiser, and we're so happy to be working with them.
Again, that's harrys.com, promo code Shapiro.
Okay, so lots going on in the world, tons and tons going on in the world.
You know, we'll start today.
I really do want to get to, first of all, this is why you need to subscribe at Daily Wire, folks, because in just a few minutes, we're going to be bringing on Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute, author of the new book the war on cops which i think is the most important book of the year We'll be talking with her in a little while.
We will also be going through Hillary Clinton's NAACP speech, which is just awful.
It's just another example of the left pandering on the basis of race.
It's gross.
It's terrible.
But, obviously, we have to start with the RNC.
Yesterday was the first day of the RNC.
Now, before we start with the RNC, note, the polls are very close right now.
The polls are basically dead even.
Donald Trump has 6%, Hillary Clinton has 6%, everybody else wants to commit suicide.
Now, they're actually really around 40.
They're both around 40.
And 20% of the population wants to commit suicide.
So the point here is that Donald Trump needs a bit of a bump from this convention.
In order to get a bit of a bump from this convention, he should come out, he should be unifying, he should let people have their say and yell at him, and then he should be above the fray, right?
He should just—that's how he should play it.
He's won the nomination.
There's nothing he has to say to these people, to people like me who don't like him.
You know, all he has to do right now is just go out there and attack Hillary Clinton.
I've been saying this for weeks.
If all he does is go out there and attacks Hillary Clinton, and if he does just talk about the news cycle and gets his surrogates to do the same, puts a lot of pressure on folks like me to vote for him just to stop Hillary because, indeed, she is evil.
So, that's what he should be doing, right?
Not very difficult.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump is the most easily distracted candidate in the world.
I mean, he just turns around and every squirrel must be chased.
Every squirrel.
So he opens the RNC.
And he starts off, before the thing even starts, by ripping John Kasich, who's the governor of Ohio.
Now, as you know, I am no John Kasich fan.
Every single time John Kasich talked in any debate this year, all 97 debates this year, I would tweet in all capital letters, oh god no, please god not John Kasich.
I am not a fan of John Kasich's.
But, he is the governor of Ohio.
If you're gonna try and unify the party, you don't go out there and rip on the sitting governor of the state in which the convention is taking place, right?
It's happening in Cleveland.
That said, here is Donald Trump ripping John Kasich.
I wanted it to be here.
The Republicans wanted it to be here.
But honestly, even if this were for the Democrats, he should at least show up and say hello and say, how are you doing?
He got beaten very, very badly.
He could have, you know, left.
He should have left probably many weeks earlier than he did, but he just hung around.
Do you think he's being a sore loser?
Well, I don't want to say that, but you know what?
Uh, it was a very contentious primary.
He lost very, very badly, and maybe if I were in his position, I wouldn't show up either.
Yep, so there is a- okay, so he attacks- so he attacks Kasich.
Again, you know, I understand why he's doing it, I understand why he doesn't like Kasich, but it's not exactly smart politics.
His campaign manager, Paul Manafort, the guy who's supposed to get him under control, he also attacks Kasich.
Again, this is before the convention starts, basically.
Except for one or two, as you call them, Republicans not coming to town, the city's going to have most of the Republican leadership.
Where's John Kasich?
Is he coming and speaking?
Except for one or two.
He's the governor of the state.
Yeah, and you know what?
He's making a big mistake.
He's making a big mistake.
He's looking at something that's not going to happen.
He's hurting his state.
He's embarrassing his state, frankly.
But most of the Republicans who aren't coming are people who have been part of the past.
And the people who are part of the future of the Republican Party are, frankly, going to be here and participating in the program.
See, this sort of stuff is not useful.
Ivanka Trump tweeted, said something similar.
She said, "Everybody who doesn't back my dad "is part of the past of the Republican Party." To which I responded, "You are an actual registered Democrat." Right, so I mean, when you talk about the future of the Republican Party, I mean, first, why don't you start by registering for the party you're supposedly the face of.
This is not smart.
Put everything else aside.
Whether you like Trump, don't like Trump, put it aside.
The distractions are not smart for Donald Trump, are they?
Are they?
I mean, wouldn't it be better for Donald Trump to just get down to brass tacks?
And people who like Trump are begging him to do this.
They're begging him to do this.
I have fellow talk show hosts like Hugh Hewitt who keeps getting out there saying, you know, when's Trump going to pivot?
People want him to do it.
OK, so that's what starts the convention.
The next thing that happens is there's chaos on the convention floor.
So there are a bunch of people who say, OK, we want to unbind the delegates.
Remember that failed in committee last, in the last week, over the weekend, basically.
Now they go to the floor of the convention and people want a voice vote.
They want a roll call voice vote on whether Donald Trump should be elected to the nomination based on the delegates being bound to their primaries, basically.
And he's going to win this vote, by the way.
He's going to win this vote.
The delegates are going to vote to bind themselves because they don't want to be held accountable for throwing Trump overboard at the last minute.
So what happens?
Excuse me, they go out there and they want a roll call vote, and instead, the chair gets up, this guy gets up, and he starts banging his gavel and he says, we're gonna have a voice vote.
Now a voice vote just means whoever shouts the loudest, right?
We're just gonna take like a consensus in the room.
Here's what the voice vote looked like.
Without objection, the previous question is ordered.
The question is on adoption of the resolution.
All those in favor say aye.
All those opposed, no.
In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it, and the resolution is agreed to.
Without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid upon the table.
People lose their minds, right?
Because in that voice vote, you can't hear anything, right?
They actually shut off their minds and told by people on the floor.
The chair now recognizes the delegate from the state of West Virginia for the purpose of offering a resolution.
Okay, and then they just move right on, and the guy walks away from the podium.
So it turns into a ruckus, right?
Because all the people who wanted the roll call vote, they were going to lose anyway, right?
They were going to lose the roll call vote.
But the idea was, let's at least get the delegates on record supporting Donald Trump.
What happened here is that the convention knew it's so embarrassing for some of these people to support Donald Trump out loud, they wanted to prevent the roll call vote, so they just had the voice vote, and then they said the voice vote was good enough, even though it wasn't.
I was at the DNC, the Democratic National Convention in 2012.
They did the same thing when they tried to take Jerusalem out of the Democratic platform.
It wasn't in the Democratic platform.
Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.
And there was a voice vote.
And Jerusalem lost.
And Antonio Villaraigosa stood up there and he said, no, it passed.
You know, Jerusalem is back in.
It was sort of like that, and it's just, it's not smart.
It's not smart.
So Ken Cuccinelli, who ran for, I think he was governor of Virginia, very narrowly lost to Terry McAuliffe, he was one of the delegates, and he just, he literally takes his credentials and he throws them on the ground.
Well, they quashed the Louis Philippe.
Ken Cuccinelli is the next one.
He's out of the convention, right?
He throws away his delegate tag and he walks out of the convention.
So this was thing number two, right?
So thing number two is they, instead of just letting the vote, again, what they should have done politically, is they just should have allowed the roll call vote, or they should have allowed another voice vote, So there's a roll call vote.
Who cares?
No one's going to remember any of that.
And Trump gets the nomination overwhelmingly, and he can say, we won, we're done.
Right?
That's all.
This is not difficult stuff.
But it's more important that they ram through this thing without anybody objecting, because they don't want to make Trump look bad.
They don't want people embarrassed by having to vote in favor of these rules on the floor of the convention.
OK, so that's not even before we get to the night, right?
Then we get to the night, and Donald Trump Okay, this entrance is spectacular.
I mean, I have to say, it's classic Trump.
He promised glitz and glamour.
You have to laugh.
I mean, if you don't laugh during this convention cycle, you're going to cry.
So here is Donald Trump opening.
He introduced his wife, Melania, which we'll get to in a second.
And here was here was Donald Trump entering the convention.
We are the champions, my friend.
And we'll keep our fight until the end.
We are the champions.
Okay, so there's the entrance, right?
The full-on WWE entrance, just for a little bit of context.
Here is what it looks like when Darth Vader enters a room.
And also, here's what it looks like when The Undertaker enters a room at WWE, because this is pretty much it.
It is the mystique that is simply The Undertaker.
Oh my god, is that The Undertaker's music?
Is that Donald Trump's music?
Oh my god!
It's pretty spectacular.
So, he starts that.
Okay, fine, you know, that's Trump's shtick.
I get it, it's cheesy.
The thing about Trump's taste is that, yeah, it's big, but it's also the cheesiest taste in the world.
I mean, like, everything he does is super cheesy, but again, none of that is a big deal.
Here's the thing, none of these things are a particularly huge deal.
Just in aggregate, they start to become distractions, right?
They become a little bit distracting in aggregate.
So, you know, Donald Trump... So then Melania gets up.
And this has been the headline of the thing.
The headline of the thing has been that Melania spoke.
And Melania, who, again, it's weird to have your third wife speak for you at a convention after she marries you when she's 28 and you're 52, and there's all sorts of weird issues where she's a trophy wife, and she's going on Howard Stern talking about having sex with you while you're still married to somebody else.
Like, it's weird, okay?
Just a little weird.
Call me crazy, it's a little weird.
But she speaks at the convention, and she gives what is a pretty good speech, right?
She actually goes out there, and she gives a speech that is very well-received, that seems decent, and then it comes out...
that Melania stole a couple of paragraphs from Michelle Obama's 2008 convention speech.
Here is the juxtaposition of Melania and Michelle.
Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values.
From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values.
You work hard for what you want in life.
That you work hard for what you want in life.
That your word is your bond, that you do what you say you're gonna do.
That your word is your bond, and you do what you say and keep your promise.
That you treat people With dignity and respect, even if you don't know them and even if you don't agree with them.
That you treat people with respect.
Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values and to pass them on to the next generation.
And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow.
Because we want our children and all children in this nation Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them.
That the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.
Okay, we can stop it there.
I mean, obviously this is, look, it's plagiarism.
It's not her fault.
She's got speech writers.
She clearly didn't write this.
I mean, you think she's browsing old Michelle Obama speeches?
Come on, she's out there spending $2,500 on this dress.
I mean, that's not happening.
She's, no.
So, but the media have made a huge deal out of this.
They made a huge, is it a big deal?
No, it really isn't a big deal.
Okay, Obama plagiarized Deval Patrick.
Joe Biden plagiarized Neil Kinnock, and he's now the vice president of the United States.
Do I care that Melania's speech writer copied Michelle's speech writer?
Not really.
This doesn't make much of a difference to me at all.
There are a couple of things about it, however, that are mildly important.
That are mildly important.
The first is what I've been saying, which is that when you commit this number of unforced errors, at a certain point it's a distraction from the news cycle.
If this were a focused campaign, Donald—forget about replacing Trump.
Even with Trump, if this were a focused campaign, Trump would be up five to ten points right now because Hillary is so unpalatable.
If you told me that at this point in the race, Hillary would be running at 40%, I'd say, well, then the Republican has to be up, right?
I mean, there are only so many people in the United States.
There are only so many percentage points that you can hand out.
But he's not.
He's not up.
And he should be up.
I mean, this is convention time.
But part of the problem is, in the last week, Donald Trump—this is the last week.
Five days.
Actually, it's not even a full week.
The last five days alone.
Donald Trump has sued a campaign staffer for $10 million, leaked his vice presidential pick, and attempted to walk it back, then tweeted it out, created a bizarre Trump-Pence logo that looked like the letters were engaging in sexual congress, had to walk back, a prospective convention speaker, including Tim Tebow, attacked Kasich, as you saw, unleashed his minions to shut down a roll call vote, booked Scott Baio and Antonio Sabato Jr.
to speak, and by the way, after Sabato spoke, he then went on ABC News and called Obama a Muslim, called in live to Fox News, we'll get to this in a second, During Pat Smith's speech.
So Pat Smith was giving this beautiful speech about her son, and Trump calls in to Fox News and kicks her off the air because he's calling in to Fox News.
He trumps his own convention.
He entered the stage, obviously, like a character from WWE or Beyonce, sends his wife on stage with a speech plagiarized from Michelle, and deployed his campaign team to cover for the plagiarism.
In other words, if you are rooting for Trump, if you are rooting for Trump, you have to root for him to do better than this.
Right?
You have to root for him to do better.
I don't think that's too much to ask, that he does better than this.
And you have to root for his campaign to stop being idiotic.
So, Chris Christie responds to the Melania plagiarism charges.
And Chris Christie's the saddest man in Cleveland.
I mean, Chris Christie legitimately just sits there on like a small folding chair, straining the... He's the second saddest object in the arena after the folding chair upon which he sits.
And Chris Christie, he just brushes this off, right?
Not a big deal at all.
Could you make a case for plagiarism?
No, not when 93% of the speech is completely different than Michelle Obama's speech.
And they express some common thoughts, and so, you know, listen.
Almost word for word, though.
But the worst, listen, Matt, the worst day of a convention is the first day, because everyone's building up to it, and everybody gets breathless, both the delegates and the media, about something to cover and a controversy to talk about.
I think after tonight, we won't be talking about this.
We'll move on to whatever comes up tonight.
Yeah, and whatever comes up tonight will be in it.
That's always the exciting question.
What will happen tonight?
So Chris Christie brushes it off, obviously.
And then he goes and shines Donald Trump's shoes.
Paul Manafort, who's Trump's campaign manager, is also spinning it.
And he defends Melania by attacking Hillary Clinton.
Listen, I'm all for attacking Hillary Clinton, but she didn't write the speech.
Who's at fault for cribbing Michelle Obama's speech in 2008?
Whose fault is that?
Well, there's no cribbing of Michelle Obama's speech.
These were common words and values, that she cares about her family, things like that.
I mean, she was speaking in front of 35 million people last night.
She knew that.
To think that she would be cribbing Michelle Obama's words is crazy.
I mean, this is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, how she seeks out to demean her and take her down.
It's not going to work.
All I'm saying is the language is— Okay, we can stop it there.
This is one of the big problems, okay?
There are so many legit critiques of Hillary Clinton.
When you paper those over with critiques that don't make any sense, you end up just throwing the whole kit and caboodle out, right?
Instead of us worrying about the fact that Hillary is legitimately a criminal, he's throwing at her that she's attacking Melania unfairly because of plagiarism, Like, this is so stupid.
It's such a distraction.
It's such a waste of time.
You do have to love the schadenfreude of Corey Lewandowski sitting there on CNN and ripping into Paul Manafort, though.
Corey Lewandowski's the old campaign manager.
Paul Manafort's the new campaign manager.
And Corey Lewandowski's on CNN saying Manafort should be fired for the plagiarism in Melania's speech.
It's really kind of amusing.
I think Mrs. Trump's a very smart, articulate woman.
Her thoughts are her own thoughts, and I think if it was a mistake, it was at the staff level, and staff should be held accountable.
Coming from Corey Lewandowski, the man who wasn't fired for months after grabbing a reporter by the arm and yanking her backwards, and then was finally fired quietly but is still being paid by the Trump campaign.
In other words, all of this is bizarre.
But just for a final laugh, and this isn't at Melania's expense, she didn't write this speech, but this is going around the internet and it is funny, and that is Melania accidentally Rickrolled the audience.
And I've pointed out, by the way, that Trump has done this before, that Trump uses this line a lot, and so it's not Melania's fault, obviously.
You sort of feel bad for her, but here's Melania Trump rickrolling the audience.
He will never ever give up.
And most importantly, he will never, ever let you down.
Never gonna give you up.
Never gonna let you down.
Never gonna run around and desert you.
Okay, so here's my big problem with all of this, okay?
There was real stuff going on on the stage yesterday.
Real things happening on the stage yesterday.
Rudy Giuliani spoke yesterday, and Rudy Giuliani gave a barn burner of a speech about the cops.
Like, a really good speech about the cops.
A good case to be made that Rudy Giuliani should have been the VP pick for Donald Trump here, since they're two peas in a pod.
They're both kind of brash New Yorkers, and this is their shtick, this is their routine.
So, here's Rudy Giuliani, and this got completely overlooked by the media.
Right, it's gone now.
All we're talking about is Melania Trump and plagiarism and Donald Trump's WWE entrance.
Giuliani, you know, watch Giuliani and tell me this should not have been the theme of the night.
And we say thank you to the Cleveland Police Department for protecting us!
Thank you!
We, we know We know the risk you're taking, and we say thank you to every police officer and law enforcement agent who's out tonight protecting us, black, white, Latino, of every race, every color, every creed, every sexual orientation.
When they come to save your life, they don't ask if you are black or white.
They just come to save you.
We also, we also reach out, we reach out our arms with understanding and compassion to those who have we reach out our arms with understanding and compassion to those who have Because of police shootings, some justified, some unjustified.
Those that are unjustified must be punished.
Those that are justified, we must apologize to.
This is Giuliani.
Okay, this is great stuff.
How is this not the headline?
You can stop it.
This is what should've been the headline last night, right?
Come on.
This should've been the headline.
We've got police shootings happening, anti-cop massacres taking place in this country, and the headline is Melania Trump's plagiarism?
Okay, now I understand that the media are corrupt.
I understand the media are looking for an excuse not to talk about the issues.
But that's not gonna change.
Don't give them the excuse.
This is why discipline in politics is important, folks.
We can complain about the media all day long.
I do it myself.
But at a certain point, you have to say to yourself, at a certain point, you have to say to yourself, be disciplined.
Stick to message.
And there was so much good stuff at the convention last night.
Real good stuff at the convention.
Sheriff David Clark spoke last night.
He did the same thing.
Great speech.
Here's Sheriff David Clark from Milwaukee.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to make something very clear.
Blue Lives Matter in America!
This should have been the focus, right? right?
Right?
Right?
I mean, come on.
You got this powerful black man, by the way, who's a sheriff in Milwaukee.
A place where a cop just got shot, apparently.
Right?
And he's speaking the truth about the cops.
Is that the headline this morning from the media?
Of course that's not the headline.
The headline is, Melania Trump said the same thing that Michelle Obama said in a speech that nobody cares about because who cares?
Honestly, who cares what the wives of candidates have to say or the husbands?
It's silly.
It's just silly.
This is why, you know, when we say that Donald Trump needs to get his poop together, he really needs to get it together.
I mean, this is not a game anymore.
If you want to win, you know, I'm not even a Trump backer, but if you want to win, if you think it matters that Donald Trump beats Hillary Clinton, you should be rooting for Donald Trump to stop making these kinds of mistakes, because it's just foolish.
It's just foolish.
Again, it's all distraction.
One more example.
Pat Smith, right?
She rips into Hillary last night.
Here's what Pat Smith had to say.
This is, again, great stuff.
Should have been the headline.
We lost four brave Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for the country they chose to serve, and the American people lost the truth.
for all of this loss, for all of this grief, for all of the cynicism the tragedy in Benghazi has brought upon America, I blame Hillary Clinton.
I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son.
That's personally.
Now, Democrats were complaining about this, and we'll get to the complaints in a little while, but this is very effective stuff.
This should have been in primetime.
This should have been the stuff everybody's watching, right?
This is the stuff that resonates with people.
A mother standing there saying her son is dead because Hillary Clinton didn't do her job, and then she was lied to.
The mother was lied to, right?
Shouldn't this be the headline?
Here's what was being shown on Fox at the same time.
At the same time Pat Smith was doing this.
Here's what was being shown on Fox.
This is clip 19.
And she's been a great wife, and I'm going to give her an introduction, and she'll go up, and I think she's going to do really well.
All right.
Look, we know how busy you are tonight, and we can't thank you enough for taking the time to talk to millions of people watching you right now.
And we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll come back to the convention floor as the Factor continues recovering the Republican convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
In other words, he calls into O'Reilly Factor at the same time Pat Smith is speaking, taking viewers away from one to the other.
So, all of this is just not smart.
Okay, so, joining us on the program right now is Heather McDonald.
Heather is from Manhattan Institute.
She also writes for City Journal, and she's the author of a fantastic new book called The War on Cops, the most important book of the year.
I said this months ago when I first saw it come into my mailbox, long before it was released, so I was ahead of the curve on this one.
Heather, thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you so much, Ben.
I appreciate the kind words.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, I want to start off by asking you, did you see any of Hillary Clinton's speech at the NAACP yesterday, or read any of her speech at the NAACP yesterday?
Yeah, to my unhappiness, I did read it and it's absolutely appalling and it's a dangerous portent for the country.
You know, when you say it's dangerous, how much of the current anti-cop violence do you attribute to rhetoric of people like President Obama and Hillary Clinton and Black Lives Matter?
And how much do you just feel that sort of anti-cop sentiment has grown?
There's this debate going on now between the level of violence and the level of rhetoric.
Do you correlate them?
Absolutely, there's no difference whatsoever.
The two things you mentioned are both the same thing.
The assassinations in Dallas and Baton Rouge are just more extreme examples of what cops are experiencing in inner city areas across the country on a daily basis.
A Chicago officer told me about six weeks ago when I was out in Chicago to look at the amazingly terrifying crime spike they're experiencing.
He said he's never experienced such hatred in his 19 years on the job.
He said the job is basically undoable now.
Cops can't get out of their car without being surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds.
And when you have people being told relentlessly by President Obama, by Hillary Clinton, by the media, by the activists, that racist cops are on a homicidal vendetta against blacks, we should not be surprised when people take we should not be surprised when people take up arms against what is alleged to be the They're KKK oppressors.
Heather, I want to talk a little bit about sort of the facts of policing, and then I want to talk about the rhetoric, because it seems like some of the Democratic rhetoric, some of the left rhetoric, is now seeping into the right.
You have people like Marco Rubio and Newt Gingrich suggesting that white people just can't understand the black experience with regard to cops.
You have, you know, Donald Trump even said something similar on the air last week.
Let's talk a little bit about the facts, and then we'll get to why this seems to be becoming such a popular issue and why it's politically palatable.
So there's a study that came out last week, you and I have been corresponding on this, this new study from this professor at Harvard University who finds that the police shootings are actually biased against whites, that whites are 20% more likely to be shot than blacks, but he also makes the case that low-level uses of force are more likely to happen to black people, and then he suggests this is why blacks hate the cops, is because of low-level uses of force being used against innocent black people.
What do you make of that claim?
Well, first of all, let's note that he's changing the subject, and so is all the media.
They have quickly suppressed his finding that blacks are actually 24% less likely to be shot by the police than whites, and are moving on to the second part of his study, which is that allegedly low-level uses of force are higher against blacks.
What he completely, I think, does not take into account enough is levels of resistance.
He bases his findings on Stop question and frisk forms that police in New York City fill out when they make a pedestrian stop.
There is no way that those forms can account in sufficient detail to be able to make judgments about the level of resistance that blacks and whites offer.
And again, when blacks are getting the message every day that they are oppressed by racist cops, It's not surprising that they are resisting arrest more, and that's certainly what I'm hearing from officers across the country who say, you know, I used to be able to put handcuffs on somebody without being fought or surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds.
Now everybody wants to fight them.
Okay, so one of the things that the Republicans have done is the new Republican platform includes a nod to so-called criminal justice reform.
This is what I was mentioning before, this kind of crossing of the aisle with regard to the idea that the criminal justice system is biased or racist or incredibly oppressive.
What do you make of the call for criminal justice reform?
I understand what the left is doing.
The left is race-baiting for political gain.
But why is the right starting to embrace the notion of criminal justice reform as though there's some sort of mass incarceration of innocents that's going on all over the country?
Well, first, Ben, if I can just rebut the premise on which it's based before we get to the deep motives behind it.
It is simply not the case that the over-representation of blacks in prison is due to criminal justice racism.
And let's also be clear that the whole push for criminal justice so-called reform is due to one fact only, the over-representation of blacks in prison.
If that were not the case, nobody would be caring at all.
So this is all about race.
And criminologists have spent decades trying to prove that that over-representation of blacks in prison is due to bias on the part of officers, prosecutors, or judges, and they always come up short.
The most liberal of criminologists, we can even say left-wing, have been forced to conclude that the Presence of blacks is due, unfortunately, to their very high rates of violent crime.
Blacks, for instance, commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined.
And if you take Hispanics out of that equation, you get a homicide differential of about 11 to 12 times.
The arrests match the description of Criminal offenders and felons given by victims.
So it's not as if police are somehow ignoring all those white drive-by shootings in favor of blacks.
They are going where the victims and witnesses to crime are telling them crime is happening.
And again, making arrests congruent with who is being victimized and who the perpetrators are.
As to why this is happening, I just think that the narrative is taken on such power and Republicans simply don't have the guts to stand up and have this difficult conversation.
We've been talking about phantom police racism for the last 20 years, Ben, in order not to talk about a far more difficult and uncomfortable truth, which is black crime.
And Republicans are no more willing to go there, it turns out, than Democrats.
So moving forward, do you see any hope for this situation at all?
Because the way it looks to me is it looks like if I'm number one, I think it's gonna be very difficult to recruit any cops at all in this environment.
Second of all, if you're a cop, why not just pull out of the cities, of the areas that are most high crime?
And basically you end up with the situation during the Rodney King riots in L.A., where Daryl Gates basically pulled the cops out of south-central L.A., created a cordon around that area of the city.
There were riots, there were killings, there were beatings, there were lootings, there were burnings.
And then everybody said, well, the cops are racist.
And he said, well, yeah, but if we go in there, you call us racist.
Do you see, to me, it looks like the people who are going to pay the most for all of this are, of course, black people who are living in areas that the cops simply won't go anymore.
Well, Ben, you're absolutely right.
We are seeing a slow motion Rodney King riot situation every day in inner cities, what I've called the Ferguson effect, which is the twin phenomenon of officers backing off of proactive policing in inner city areas and the resulting rise in crime.
Already last year, in the 56 largest cities, we saw a 17% homicide increase, 17.
That's nearly unprecedented.
But if you look at cities with large black populations, You get an increase anywhere from 54% increase in homicides in Washington D.C.
to 90% in Cleveland.
This is only going to get worse.
The assassinations are going to make it worse, but the rhetoric is what's really driving this.
And as you say, recruiting has basically come to a dead halt.
Why would anybody want to be a police officer today when the first day you step into the job, it's assumed that you're a racist, and you're surrounded by people interfering with your lawful authority?
Well, the book is called The War on Cops, and you definitely should go buy it.
It's a national bestseller, obviously.
It's soaring up the charts.
I think it's number two on the New York Times list this week, or it's very high on the New York Times list, and it should be.
It's a very important book.
Heather McDonald from Manhattan Institute, thanks so much for joining the program.
Really appreciate it.
I appreciate it so much, Ben.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
Okay, so with that said, and with that background, Hillary Clinton spoke at the NAACP yesterday.
And the reason I saved this for the end of the show is, number one, because I wanted to interview Heather first, but second of all, because the fact is that Heather McDonald's points are completely ignored.
Completely ignored.
by Hillary Clinton and the left, which seek, they're fine, not just seek, they are fine with cops getting shot so long as it forwards the narrative.
Hillary Clinton spoke at the NAACP yesterday.
She gave a speech that basically mirrored President Obama's disgusting speech at the Dallas Police Memorial a week and a half ago.
Here was Hillary Clinton at the NAACP yesterday.
So as the president has said, indeed, as he exemplifies, we've come a long way, but you know, and I know that we have so much further to go. and I know that we have so much further to We're going to be talking about the
We were cruelly reminded of that with the recent deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two more black men killed in police incidents this time in Louisiana and Minnesota, Okay, the fact that she's lumping together, again, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile is disgusting.
She's lumping them together with the cop shootings.
It's just insane.
Suggesting there's racism there.
She has no evidence of racism in either of those cases.
In one case, the shooter was Hispanic in Minnesota.
In the other case, it looks like, by all available evidence, the guy probably grabbed for his gun.
And the reason I say that is because the officers are warning him not to grab for his gun.
And then he does something and they shoot him.
You know, without any other evidence, you would have to basically rely on the cop's word, and he did have an illegal gun in his pocket.
It doesn't matter to Hillary Clinton.
The narrative is all that matters.
Well, we have to cut off the live feed.
You got plenty more than you were counting on today, so congratulations to you.
But if you want to watch the rest, go to dailywire.com.
Eight bucks a month will get you in.
That also allows you to submit to the mailbag, which means that I will answer your questions, you personally.
You're a very special person, as long as you're part of the Daily Wire crowd, so go to dailywire.com to subscribe.
Right now.
Or you can listen on SoundCloud or iTunes later.
Download the rest of the show.
All right.
New.
Okay.
So, Hillary Clinton speaks at the NAACP and first she starts off by once again mirroring this idiocy that Philando Castile and Alton Sterling are basically the same as these cops being killed.
And she reiterates that.
Here's Hillary Clinton doing more of that routine.
This madness has to stop.
Watching the news from Baton Rouge yesterday, my heart broke.
Not just for those officers and their grieving families, but for all of us.
Okay, so for all of us, it's breaking for all of us, not just for the officers.
And then she goes on and talks about Philando Castile and Alton Sterling again because this is the routine that she does, right?
And she trots out all of this stuff to claim that the police are racist.
So what is she going to do about it?
What is she going to do about it?
Well, she's going to restrict guns.
She's going to yell at the police.
No time in this speech does she talk about single motherhood and how it destroys inner-city communities because there are no fathers to keep kids in line.
And no point does she discuss the gang culture that has destroyed inner-city communities all over the United States.
And no point does she discuss the nasty feelings that so many black Americans have about the cops that are not driven by Jim Crow, because we're talking about kids who are younger than I am by 10 years, right?
When you're talking about the high crime population, you're talking about generally young males of all races between the ages of 17 and 25.
In the black community, those people are not coming from Jim Crow America.
They're younger than I am, right?
They're born in the 90s, many of them.
And so here she is doing the same routine.
And it's just, it's devastating.
It really is devastating.
None of it is helpful.
All it really is, is just more of the same because she feels like she can win black votes if she continues to push this forward.
The deaths of Alton and Philando drove home how urgently we need to make reforms to policing and criminal justice.
First of all, she doesn't know Alton and Philando, right?
I mean, come on, she's so mechanical that she can't even pronounce their names.
And then she says it drives the need for criminal justice reform again.
Not one shred of evidence, not one, that those two guys were shot for racial reasons.
Not one.
But that wasn't the end of it.
I mean, she would go on to talk about pushing more government spending and backing bad loans.
I think this is clip 9 or clip 21 for us.
This is where she talked about how the real solution here is that we need to give cheaper loans subsidized by the government to black folks.
That's why my plan includes steps to help more African-American families buy a home, which has always been one of the surest ways to build wealth and security for a family.
Okay, so she wants to go back to the era of subsidized home loans.
I seem to remember that ended in a massive economic collapse, when it turned out that if you give subsidized home loans to people who can't afford them, and then they go bankrupt, then the money's just gone.
Right, but she's preaching this out there as though there's some systemic racism that's going to be cured by bad loans, and then she gets to the truly galling part.
The truly galling part comes at the end of the speech, so...
She starts lecturing white Americans on what we can do better.
Which is just... She's standing in front of a black audience lecturing white people, which is just... That is the definition of pandering.
Here's Hillary doing it.
I'm tired.
Physically and emotionally, he wrote.
In uniform, I get nasty, hateful looks.
And out of uniform, they consider me a threat.
He went on.
These are trying times.
Please don't let hate infect your heart.
I'm working in these streets, so any protesters, officers, friends, family, or whoever, if you see me, Montrell said, and need a hug or want to say a prayer, I got you.
Let me pause it again.
What she's actually talking about there, she did another section where she talked about white privilege, which we'll play in one second because it's truly galling, but this is even more galling.
This is the height of galling.
This is where she's talking about Montrell Jackson, who's one of the cops who was just murdered in Baton Rouge, inciting Montrell Jackson to talk about how he would support her agenda.
Montrell Jackson was a cop who was posting about why people have bad perceptions of the police and should stop it.
And there she is, using his memory as a prop to club cops, Just vile.
Vile stuff.
And then just to complete how vile she is, she went off on white privilege.
This would be clip 21.
We white Americans need to do a better job of listening when African Americans talk about the seen and unseen barriers you face every day.
We need to recognize our privilege and practice humility.
Rather than assume that our experiences are everyone's experiences.
We all need to try as best we can to walk in one another's shoes.
To imagine what it would be like to sit our son or daughter down and have the talk.
About how carefully they need to act around police because the slightest wrong move could get them hurt or even killed.
Can we stop it there?
So, number one, as I've said about white privilege, white privilege is crap.
The fact is, privilege is what exists in law.
We're all born with certain privileges, of course, as I've said before.
Some of us are born poor, some are born rich.
Some of us are born in certain circumstances that are less beneficial than other circumstances.
I was born into a solid two-parent family.
I would like everyone to have a solid two-parent family.
Heterosexual family, preferably, because people need a father and a mother.
But we're all born in different circumstances.
To suggest there's a systemic white privilege that means that cops shoot black people for no reason is not statistically true, but she pushes that out there and then suggests that it's true, and it really is just disgusting.
And she earns points from the left for apologizing, basically, on behalf of white people, but she doesn't get to apologize on behalf of anybody but herself.
You don't get to do that in this life.
You don't get to apologize for anything except for the things you actually did.
And last I checked, I didn't shoot a black guy, I didn't mistreat a black guy, I didn't do anything wrong to a black person, so I'm not going to apologize for doing things that I didn't do.
And in fact, I'll call out white people who do things that are bad to black people, and I'll call out black people who do things that are bad to white people.
It turns out decency is the standard.
Not color.
Decency.
Okay.
With all that said, time for a thing I like and then a couple quick things I don't.
So, we've been doing the worst movie villains of all time, the scariest movie villains of all time.
This is a movie that not a lot of people remember or saw.
It's called Rob Roy with Liam Neeson.
The character that's the most memorable, though, is Tim Roth.
Tim Roth plays this kind of effeminate, horrifying dandy who happens to be an absolute sociopath.
And this is a scene where Jessica Lange is married to Liam Neeson in this film.
And this kind of dandy shows up at her house, and they're burning the village because Rob Roy has started a rebellion against the local governor.
And here's just a piece of that scene.
Outlaw Robert McGregor.
You think he'd be lying in his bed waiting for you?
You're more of a fool than you look.
Search the outsheds.
Burn them.
Kill the stock.
- I guess this time to say to Mr. Silverberg.
- Good ask of all, you make up. - And it's brutal.
In the whole movie he's just super effeminate and there's a sword fight.
This has one of the best sword fights in all of the movies.
The concluding sword fight is just fantastic because it's Tim Roth fighting with basically a rapier and Liam Neeson fighting with a broadsword.
It's a very good movie.
It's very gritty but it's a very good movie.
Alright, time for some things that I hate.
So the media are terrible, as we already know.
After Pat Smith gave this speech about how Hillary Clinton lied to her and didn't do anything to defend her son in Benghazi, the media lost its poop.
I mean, they went crazy.
So Chris Matthews, over on MSNBC, he decided that it was time to scold the mother of the Benghazi victim.
Here he was doing that.
I have to say I'm overwhelmed because I thought that Marcus Luttrell's remarks were fabulous and it's from a real warrior.
I saw the movie.
It's an amazing story about a guy who survived and at one point really was generous to saving the lives of some people potentially on the other side and it ended up causing the danger he faced.
And of course, you know, Bob Dole, he was shot and really maimed for life, if you really understand his injuries, trying to save the life of someone else on the battlefield in Monte Cassino.
I mean, these are true, wonderful stories, and then to pile onto that this gross accusation that somehow Hillary Clinton had anything to do With the death of Chris Stevens, Ambassador, she had nothing to do with it.
Even if all the arguments about the PR afterwards, as Gene pointed out, are true.
Worst case scenario, she didn't give a straight story afterwards.
That had nothing to do with the death of...
Great ambassador over there.
I don't understand why the Republicans would choose to put this on primetime television when they have such wonderful stories of American heroism to speak to the American people.
I think it was wrong.
I don't care what that woman up there, the mother, has felt.
Her emotions are her own.
But for the country and choosing a leader, it's wrong to have someone come up there and tell a lie about Hillary Clinton.
It's not true.
It's logically not true.
It's manifestly not true.
She had anything to do in that case, even if all the arguments about what she said afterwards Or as Susan Rice said afterwards on Meet the Press, are true.
And anybody who thinks about it for a second knows it's not true.
Well, no, it's not true.
I mean, I get up here in the morning, go to Cleveland, which is a stinky place.
I comb my hair like shit.
I roll out of bed.
I come out of here.
My hair looks a little nicer than usual because I really did it up this morning.
I got three hairs like Homer Simpson that come over my forehead.
And that means I'm beautiful.
But now I'm here and I'm talking about what happened in Benghazi.
And it's not true.
It's manifestly not true.
It's clearly not true.
It's evidentiarily not true.
Nothing is true.
And if they say it's true, That's just because they're Republican hacks!
Republican hacks!
Okay, so, here's the deal.
It is true that Hillary Clinton and her State Department rejected literally dozens of requests for additional security in Benghazi.
They did so because they didn't want people to catch on to the fact that Hillary Clinton's war was a complete disaster.
That is true.
Also, I'm not going to take lectures on what's appropriate to show on television from the same people who thought it was wonderful when they brought out the Jersey Girls in 2004 to suggest that George W. Bush was responsible for 9-11.
You don't get to play that game.
You guys honored Cindy Sheehan for years before she turned on you.
When she was complaining that George W. Bush got her kids killed in Iraq for a lie.
Her son killed in Iraq for a lie.
But it's the whole thing, right?
This is what Democrats do.
So this is my problem.
The Democrats are always going to attack.
But let's make them attack.
Let's make them attack Pat Smith.
Let's make them attack the mothers of victims.
Let's make them do that.
Matt Lauer did the same thing.
He says that all the speakers should just tone down the rhetoric.
It's just too much.
It's just too much for Matt Lauer and his delicate sensibilities.
There's been so much violence in the country in the last couple of weeks.
People are on edge.
They're tense.
You add to that the passion that comes with political debate, and there are people who are truly afraid that things could boil over here in Cleveland.
Would you be willing to make a pledge to speak to everyone involved in this convention and say, please tone down the rhetoric?
So can you say to the people who are going to take to that podium this week, no personal attacks, no vitriol, keep it civil?
Okay, have you heard him make a similar plea to Hillary Clinton?
The woman who goes on national TV and says Republicans are her enemies?
And that Donald Trump is basically—she said yesterday he's the worst man ever to run for president, which is just historically ignorant.
I mean, there was a guy named John W. Davis in 1924 who ran on the platform against anti-lynching legislation.
So, no.
No.
But, you know, this is how the media acts, and this is why it's so important.
You don't have to play into their game, and this is why I really wish that Donald Trump would at least provide an alternative by doing the right thing.
We'll see how this convention unfolds.
Maybe it'll get better.
Maybe Chris Christie's right.
Maybe the first day's always the worst, and now it improves.
We can hope for that because, at the very least, we should hope for an elevation of the level of this campaign.
I know it's a lot to hope for.
So we'll bring you all the updates tomorrow.
And again, subscribe at dailywire.com.
You can be part of the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
▲
Export Selection