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Sept. 12, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:36
Ep. 178 - Hillary Stars In 'The Walking Dead'

The alleged corpse of Hillary Clinton reanimates, you're all a bunch of deplorables, and Donald Trump acts like a human being. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On Friday night, ailing Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton spoke at a fundraiser where she said, quote, to be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables, right?
Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.
And unfortunately, there are people like that and he has lifted them up.
He has given voice to their websites that used to have only 11,000 people now have 11 million.
He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.
Hillary tried to walk back the slur afterward.
She said, quote, last night I was grossly generalistic and that's never a good idea.
I regret saying half.
That was wrong.
Donald Trump immediately responded, correctly, quote, isn't it disgraceful that Hillary Clinton makes the worst mistake of the political season and instead of owning up to this grotesque attack on American voters, she tries to turn it around with a pathetic rehash of the words and insults used in her campaign.
For the first time in a long time, her true feelings came out, showing bigotry and hatred for millions of Americans.
The media have covered Hillary's comments with kid gloves they certainly never used with Mitt Romney, who infamously stated that there were 47% of people who are with Obama, dependent on government, believe they're victims, believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe they're entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.
That, of course, is because Hillary's a Democrat, which means she can rip Americans as closet bigots, and she can get away with it.
Democrats are all hard-working folks who never suffer from a victim mentality.
Republicans, however, are all terribly evil.
Hillary is simply saying what Democrats actually think about Americans who don't vote Democrat.
We're morally inferior humans.
The great surprise of Hillary's alt-right speech several weeks ago came when she specifically disassociated conservatives from the alt-right lunatics who rapidly support Trump.
It turns out that was a politically motivated lie.
It was a blackmail offer to slice off conservatives from the alt-right if they just dump Trump.
In reality, however, Hillary thinks anyone who votes for Trump, even as a mere instrument to stop her from gaining high office, is a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot.
That's how the left justifies its dishonesty and its nastiness, and the fact that it always routinely victimizes Americans in order to serve its own political purpose.
You are the bad guy.
Now, that's not to say the alt-right isn't terrible.
They are.
They're a fringe element, though, in Trump's support, even if they carry outsized weight in Trump's political calculation.
No more than 5% of Trump's base is actually alt-right, and that's a real upper-end estimate.
But for Hillary, everyone on the right is alt-right.
I'm alt-right, you're alt-right, we're all alt-right.
That's what makes it okay for her to lie to get ahead, because bad people deserve to be lied about, and also too.
Hillary can apologize for being generalistic, but her entire campaign is based on that generalization, just as the entire Democratic Party relies on that generalization.
The moment Americans realize the basket of deplorables is a giant, giant lie, Democrats can't win elections anymore.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty, folks.
And as you can tell, my voice is still a little bit gone, so you'll have to bear with me if I'm taking sips of water and such.
And the stain on my shirt is due to a baby spitting up on me because I'm a wonderful father as well as a brilliant host.
So, just excusing my own slavishness on the fact that I'm the world's greatest human.
So, in any case.
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Okay, so.
Obviously, big news over the weekend.
Big news over the weekend.
First of all, I just have to preface the big news over the weekend with the fact that Hillary Clinton has a problem.
And that is that one of her big spiels is that she is very strong.
It's not just that she claims that she's a normal woman.
She claims she's superhuman.
So, for example, Hillary Clinton just last week Just last week, she said that Donald Trump projects phony strength.
Here's what she said.
Like and need the idea of a strong leader.
What do you say to the supporters of him who resonate with that message?
Well, there's phony strength and there's real strength.
And it's phony strength to not know what you're talking about and to make outrageous statements that will actually make our job harder, no matter how, in the moment, it sounds.
Real strength is leveling with the American people.
Oh!
And making it clear we will defeat ISIS.
Okay, let me stop there.
Real strength is not lying to people, and also not being a dead body on CNN.
So over the weekend, we actually did, we have exclusive footage.
You've seen a bunch of angles of Hillary Clinton falling over.
If you haven't seen that by now, we'll show you it in just a minute.
But we have exclusive footage of Hillary Clinton at the 9-11 memorial yesterday.
Here's what it looked like.
Hey, wait!
Wait up!
I want to talk!
You're fun.
Can I walk with you?
Brenda!
Brenda, get back here!
Don't pay any attention to him.
You're not going anywhere!
Oh, yeah?
Who says so?
I do!
What are you doing?
Stop it!
See, Arnold, he's not afraid of you.
Arnold, why do you have to hit everybody?
Who do you think you are?
You always have to beat everybody up!
Yeah, it went poorly.
So after that, they actually, they took Hillary, and they threw her into a van, and they drove her off, and then here's what happened next.
Something has happened to the president.
What about the vice president?
The vice president is mentally unbalanced.
Is this legal?
Oh, yeah.
Probably.
We think so.
Yes.
Suddenly, Dave has a great job.
I can't tell you the whole story.
It's kind of a national emergency kind of thing, but you gotta help me cut the budget a little.
You've gotta cut the budget.
Okay.
He has a great job.
So, and that's how Kate McKinnon ended up as president.
Basically, Hillary Clinton apparently was taken away where she perished and the Democratic establishment desperately attempted to get Kate McKinnon on the phone so they could substitute her in to run for the rest of the primary.
Okay, so that's not actually—here's what actually happened.
Here's the tape of Hillary Clinton.
Yesterday.
So remember, the run-up to all of this is that Hillary went on a coughing jag like a week and a half ago.
We played it for four minutes, she's coughing.
By the way, my wife, who's a doctor, when she saw that she said, looks like pneumonia to me.
But Hillary Clinton said, nothing wrong with me, it's just allergies.
Then she goes on and she campaigns.
And remember, the media was saying anybody who has even mild questions about her health is a sexist.
Chris Chaliza of the Washington Post wrote a piece five days ago, five days ago, in which he said, you must stop asking questions about Hillary's health.
There's nothing there.
There's no reason to ask questions about Hillary Clinton's health.
And then this happened on Sunday.
This is at the 9-11 memorial.
It was 75 degrees and breezy outside.
She's not dancing, gang.
She's wobbling because she's falling over.
And down she goes.
And they take her, and they then proceed to shovel her in the van like Freddie Gray in the back of a Baltimore police van.
And then they speed off, and they leave the media behind.
And then after that, you know, so all that happens, and we'll add a closer angle.
This was slightly suspicious.
They say that this is glasses falling out of her pants, but look at her right leg.
Okay, look at her right leg in this particular video.
They slowed it down so you can see.
Okay, something fell out of her leg, pant leg right there, and you don't know what it is.
See?
Here we go.
And doink, something falls down.
People said it was her glasses.
Okay, maybe it's her glasses, maybe it's not.
Every conspiracy theory is now at least tenable because Hillary is lying about her health.
And we know she's lying about her health.
I mean, remember, just five minutes ago, Hillary had her coughing jag.
And if you don't recall this, this is gross, folks, so prepare yourself if you're eating breakfast or lunch.
This is what Hillary Clinton did just last week when she got into her coughing jag and took a glass of water.
That is some yucky stuff falling right in the glass from Hillary's face.
So, again, something is wrong with Hillary.
Hillary is sick.
Okay, she's sick.
So they drive her off.
And the media don't even cover this.
Only Fox News covers this, and the only reason they cover it is because one, they have a reporter on the ground, and two, these angles that we're seeing, they're not coming from members of the news media, they're coming from civilians.
So if this had not been caught on tape, you know Hillary would have lied about it.
You know that the Clinton campaign, that the media, they would have said, how dare you imply anything happened.
This is all just conspiracy theory nonsense.
No way any of this happened.
It just can't have happened.
You must be crazy.
They caught it on tape.
So they shove her in the van like a sack of old turnips, and then they drive off, and they leave her shoe behind.
She's like old, frail, dying Cinderella.
They leave her shoe behind, and the NYPD has to come back and grab it and take it to her later and fit it back on her foot.
So they take her away, and we don't know where she goes for like an hour.
We have no clue where she went.
And then they release a statement.
Don't worry.
She didn't go to the hospital.
She went to Chelsea Clinton's apartment.
Okay, now let me tell you something.
If my mom collapsed, my mom's 60, if she collapsed and they shoved her in a van, I hope they're going to the hospital.
Because that's a bad thing.
I wouldn't say take her to my house, I'd say take her to the hospital so she can get hydrated or something.
They take her to Chelsea Clinton's because they're trying to claim no big deal.
They say she overheated.
And then the media start claiming that this is, you know, Manila, that this is like, it's the hottest place on earth.
It's so humid, it's so hot, it's like the bowels of hell.
And it was the bowels of hell in New York City yesterday.
I know a bunch of people in New York City yesterday.
They were out having a good time, walking their dogs.
Apparently it was really nice yesterday.
It was like mid-70s, kind of 40% humidity.
It was actually the coolest day of the weekend.
And they were claiming that, no, no, no, Hillary, she was brave for even going out there.
Now, nobody bothers to ask.
So how many people?
Say, how many people?
Actually fainted like Hillary?
How many people just collapsed like Hillary?
They didn't bother asking that.
They also claimed that Hillary stumbled.
She didn't stumble.
When you look at the tape, she's wobbling, wobbling.
She's not moving.
Stumble implies I take a step forward and trip over somebody.
Unless she tripped over Harambe's ghost, she didn't trip over anybody.
Okay, she lost control over her legs, and she lost control over her consciousness, and she fell over.
So they take her away, and then we find out she's at Chelsea's.
And then, she emerges from Chelsea's.
She emerges from Chelsea's, and she comes out, and a little girl breaks through Secret Service and runs up to her for a hug.
Now let me tell you something about Secret Service.
You don't break through Secret Service.
Okay, this is what we call a pre-planned photo op.
So she walks out and this little girl breaks through and gives Hillary a big hug.
Oh, for Christ's sake.
You're a member of the media.
Oh, for Christ's sake.
Because they know how ridiculous this is.
And the little girl comes out, and Hillary's waving to the crowd, and then she gets back in that van, she goes up to Chappaqua, she cancels her events for the next couple days.
So what happened?
Well, hours later, they say what actually happened is that she's been coughing because of allergies, but she was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday, but she's on antibiotics, and then she was overheated on Sunday.
None of this makes any sense.
That cough was not allergies.
The media were on top of her on Friday.
I'm not sure when she had time to go to the doctor to be diagnosed with pneumonia.
And then they came out with another story later in the day where they said there's this virulent contagious disease, basically.
This virus that has struck down half of Hillary's staff.
It struck down half of her staff.
Robbie Mook had to go to the hospital, which begs one question, which is, so you've got patient zero in the stand over here, hugging a small child knowing she's contagious and ill, right?
I'm ill.
You know what I do when I'm ill?
I sleep in a different room than my wife, and I sleep in a different room than my kids, because I don't want them to get sick.
Hillary Clinton says, well, as long as I'm not going to suck out the soul of the child, I may as well get the kid sick with pneumonia.
Like, where are the parents?
You think the parents feel good about that?
Yeah, honey, go on.
Hug the old lady who's disease-ridden.
Great idea.
What a great idea.
So it's going to be, it is going to be the height of irony when our decisions about who to vote for are completely decided by the fact that Hillary was, again, patient zero in some sort of tragic epidemic that wipes out three-quarters of the American population.
But what was amazing about that — there are a few things that are amazing about this.
One, Hillary is deeply dishonest.
She lies about everything.
So people were theorizing that she has Parkinson's disease.
People were theorizing that she's got the bubonic plague.
People were theorizing that she's got pneumonia as a secondary infection from something else, right?
People aren't theorizing all of this.
And before, that was all conspiracy theory crap.
Now, you can't believe anything Hillary says.
You can't believe a word that comes out of their mouth.
And she's still not releasing her full medical records.
So we're going to continue in just a second by explaining what the media did about that, because there are three big stories here.
One is Hillary's a giant liar, so you can't believe anything she says.
Two is, because she's a giant liar, she may in fact be a walking corpse.
Any minute, she may reanimate and start trying to eat people's brains.
It's possible.
And third, The media are just, you can't believe anything the media tell you.
So this makes people crazy.
This makes people nuts.
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All righty.
So, as I say, there are three issues with Hillary Clinton.
One is, she's a pathological liar.
Even on things—imagine that six months ago, she'd come out and she'd said, you know what?
I'm suffering from some ill health.
Would that be a big deal?
Last week, I was out for three days, right?
Or two days, because—I guess yesterday, because we had Labor Day last week.
But two days, I was out last week.
And I said, I have laryngitis.
Today, I'm under the weather.
Right?
I'm fully transparent with you.
I do not have cancer, I have laryngitis, and I'm still finishing the after-effects of it, and I'm on an antibiotic.
See how easy that was?
But Hillary, because she is so paranoid, and she really is, she's like Nixonian paranoid, because she's so deeply paranoid, she has no capacity not to lie.
So in any situation where there's controversy, she feels the need to lie.
So that's story number one.
Because of that, we can't believe anything she says about her health.
So when she says, yeah, I'm fine, the rest of us look at her and go, well, then why do you look like you were just excavated from some sort of archaeological dig, and you're going to try and kill Brendan Fraser?
That's number two.
Number three is the media are just egregious on this.
So Brian Stelter over at CNN.
Watch what Brian Stelter had to say.
This is Sunday.
As this is unfolding, here's Brian Stelter.
Let's be honest, Jeff.
They had this horrible photo on the cover of that supermarket tabloid.
Clearly, Hillary was photoshopped in the picture.
I thought it was disgusting.
And yet, even though there's these conspiracy theories, which we should not give oxygen to, saying that she's secretly ill, suggesting she's on her deathbed, which we can see she's not, there are legitimate questions asked by reporters.
And I think that's the distinction here to make.
You can't ask questions.
Don't give oxygen to conspiracy theories.
And NBC's Alex Witt says the same thing, that Hillary has a traveling physician who travels with her everywhere, like she's a traveling potentate.
And she says, that's not a big deal.
That's just a precaution.
It's not because she's sick or anything.
It's just a precaution.
May I ask you, though, the extent to which Secretary Clinton travels with a physician.
There has been some hay made of that.
I will also say anecdotally, Kristen, that my father's a physician.
I've spoken with him and other family members and other physicians about the prospect of, if the Secretary travels with a physician, it is merely a precautionary measure.
When someone is taking blood thinners, It is important to have sort of a protective layer there in case there were to be a fall.
It's not necessarily some emergency focus, but rather something that just in case it's a wise thing to do.
Okay, hold on.
How many people do you know who have a doctor who travels around with them on a daily basis because it's just a wise thing to do?
Anybody?
Like, my dad is on blood pressure medication.
He doesn't have a doctor who follows him around 24 hours a day.
If he has a problem, he goes to the doctor or calls the doctor.
Hillary's got a doctor on call for her 24 hours a day.
Does Trump?
I miss the part where Trump does.
So the media start covering this up.
And they, again, as I mentioned, the media start saying, oh, she stumbled.
She didn't stumble, okay?
They say that she had a little wobble.
She never wobbles.
She pitched face-first forward like a comedy drunk.
I mean, she goes face-first and they catch her and they dump her in, like, a sack into the van.
And then she pops out for 30 seconds and disappears again to Chappaqua and everything is fine.
We're supposed to believe everything is cool.
Again, none of this makes sense.
None of this makes sense.
Right?
They're saying that the cough was not the pneumonia, but she had pneumonia, but she wasn't contagious enough to give it to the little girl, but everybody on the team had a disease.
Okay, none of this makes any sense.
Their story has shifted about eight different times here.
The first rule to a good lie is that you stick with it.
You don't change your lie every single moment.
I mean, this is, seriously, I'm looking for the actual narrative over the last 24 hours from the Democrats was, quote, was, there were really six steps here.
She's fine.
She has allergies.
She's overheated.
She's fine.
See, she's hugging a child.
She has pneumonia.
Everybody has a terrible virus.
I'm not making that up.
That's their actual timeline here.
So next thing we know, it's going to be, she unleashed contagion.
We're all going to die.
Sorry to break it to you, but Hillary was fibbing the whole time.
Well now, now even the media realizing they can't cover this sucker up much longer.
Sanjay Gupta, who really likes Hillary, he said, yeah, she should probably see a doctor.
If you were her physician, would you tell her, you know, maybe do some medical exam before you do that?
Would you check her in, at least have a physician take a closer look?
What would you do?
Yeah, I think I would.
And this has less to do with the fact that she's Hillary Clinton or a candidate for president.
But I think if you hear of anybody who's having this episode, that's a little bit unusual, maybe not surprising, given again the heat of the day and the medications.
But I think, as you said, out of an abundance of caution, you know, I'd probably want to make sure that our blood pressure...
Do routine EKG, check some basic lab values, and that's not, you know, in medicine you have your strong suspicions, and I think, again, the most common conclusion here is what we've been talking about.
Okay, so he says you should get checked out by a doctor, and that's exactly right.
Tom Brokaw says Hillary should have gone to a hospital to see a neurologist.
Just this morning, I had a rather detailed message from a Republican who was inside, and he was raising questions about As well as saying, I don't know whether this is true, but here are the incidents that we're all watching.
So that's in play.
And we're already seeing today the social media activity that is going on.
I think that she should go to a hospital and see a neurologist and get a clean report if it's available to her.
This is not something that can be dealt with at her daughter's apartment in the context of where we are.
Okay, so she says she should go to the hospital.
And then you got Cokie Roberts saying maybe Hillary should step down.
Democrats were already saying that Hillary was the only candidate who could not beat Trump, and it's taking her off of the campaign trail, cancelling her trip to California today.
It has them very nervously beginning to whisper about having her step aside and finding another candidate.
That is no small thing.
Okay, quick point to make here, okay?
For all the people who are very- I don't understand people who are on the Trump side who are very upset about Hillary Clinton being very ill.
They should be happy, presumably, because she's supposed to ruin the world, right?
She's the most dangerous person in history.
What happens if she drops out?
Then, presumably, the most dangerous person in history isn't gonna run this thing anymore.
Basically, at this point, I'm almost to the point where I think that whoever pledges to get sick enough to resign from the presidency first May get my vote, because I really don't like either one of these candidates very much, as you may have noticed.
But, obviously, you know, Hillary has problems, and even the media are beginning to take notice.
But they're undercutting their own case, because they spent months saying she's fine.
They spent months saying she's totally cool, everything is hunky-dory.
And then, and then, they turn around, they say, no, it turns out everything is not hunky-dory.
Meanwhile, by the way, okay, let's do some good Trump, bad Trump.
Today, a lot of good Trump.
So thanks to Brandon Snipes for our theme song.
Actually, a lot of good Trump today.
A lot of good Trump today.
This is starting off to be a very good week for Donald Trump.
I mean, it's sad that a good week for Donald Trump has to start off with his opponent collapsing into the back of a van, but there you have it.
But Donald Trump actually maintained his non-total crazy.
So Donald Trump has been—well, we'll get to bad Trump, which is more kind of from late last week, because I didn't have a chance to talk about it, but good Trump is Donald Trump Not saying stupid things.
That's the best you can hope for from Trump in this situation.
Don't be stupid, right?
Donald.
Somebody's in the back room saying to him, Donald, Hillary collapsed into a van.
And he says, well, that's great.
And they say, no, no, Donald, you can't say that publicly.
So here's what we're going to do.
We need you to go out there.
And we need you to say that you're sad that she feels bad.
That's what we need you to say.
And he's like, but I don't.
And they're like, no, no, but really, just tweet that you feel bad, that she's feeling bad.
And then they took him and they actually duct taped him to a wall for 12 hours.
And then finally, when they released him, here's what Donald Trump had to say on Fox and Friends this morning, and this is the right answer.
Was a week ago, so I assume that was pneumonia also.
I mean, I would think it would have been, so something's going on.
But I just hope she gets well and gets back on the trail.
And we'll be seeing her at the debate.
Okay, exactly the right answer.
I hope she gets well, and we'll see her on the trail, and we'll see her at the debates.
Right answer, Donald Trump.
Look at that.
Acting like a normal human being, this is the correct answer for a presidential candidate.
Then he does something smart.
He says, okay, she won't release any of her medical records.
I had a physical last week, and I will go on Dr. Oz's show, and I will release my physical records.
Here's Trump.
I think it's an issue.
In fact, this week I took, this last week I took a physical.
And I'll be releasing when the numbers come in.
Hopefully they're going to be good.
I think they're going to be good.
I feel great.
But when the numbers come in, I'll be releasing very, very specific numbers.
Okay, so smart, smart.
This is what he should be doing, right?
This is discipline Trump.
Discipline Trump is better Trump, right?
This is good Trump.
Discipline Trump is better Trump.
And then he says one more thing, and this last one is really not a big deal for Trump.
I don't think it's bad Trump.
I don't really think it fits into either good Trump or bad Trump.
It's just sort of Trumpy.
But Trump says something, and you'll see how corrupt the media is by how quickly they jump on this statement.
Here was Trump talking more at length about Hillary's health issues.
And, you know, it was interesting because they say pneumonia on Friday, but she was coughing very, very badly a week ago, and even before that, if you remember.
This wasn't the first time.
So, it's very interesting to see what is going on.
I want her to get better.
I want her to get out there.
I look forward to seeing her in the debate.
I will say this.
The scheduling, you know, if you look at my scheduling and compare it to anybody else's scheduling, it is not a contest.
Okay, so people are, you know, I would not be surprised if the media jumps on this and says, he's trying to overreach.
This is their favorite thing.
Whenever a Democrat has a scandal, the media cover the Republican overreach.
Whenever a Republican has a scandal, they cover the substance of the scandal.
Okay, so let's put all of this aside for a moment.
This wasn't the only bad thing Hillary did over the weekend.
So over the weekend, Hillary Clinton goes in front of her supporters and she says that the Trump people are what she calls a basket of deplorables.
We mentioned this up top at the front of the show.
Here's what she said.
Be grossly generalistic.
You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.
Right?
The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.
But that other basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down.
The economy has let them down.
Nobody cares about them.
Okay, so she takes half the Trump people and she says, basically they're the alt-right.
Okay, that's a wild exaggeration.
At best, 5% of the people who support Trump are actually alt-righters.
Most of the people who support Trump don't like her, or are not happy with what the government has done, or they think her vision for what the government should be is wrong.
There are a lot of different reasons to vote for Trump.
There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.
category is really stupid and really silly.
But she says it anyway.
And what's amazing is, I want to contrast something.
Here's the flashback.
Mitt Romney making his famous 47% comments.
This is back in 2012.
There are 47% of the people who have voted for the president no matter what.
There are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they're entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.
That's an entitlement.
And the government should give it to them.
And they will vote for this president no matter what.
And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 40, he starts off with a huge number.
These are people who pay no income tax.
47% of Americans pay no income tax.
Stop it there.
The, the, The point I want to make here is that he's sort of going after people on the left side of the aisle saying that there are people who believe in a victim mentality, there are people who believe that the government owes them something.
Okay, there is a percentage of Democrats who definitely believe that for sure.
Then there are a bunch of people who vote Democrat because they've been told that we're evil and nasty.
There's something important here that people are going to miss, and that is, notice the setting.
So in the Romney tape, Romney is saying this in a private setting, not in a microphone.
Hillary is on camera.
She knows she's on camera.
She's on mic.
She knows she's on mic.
Which means that for Democrats, this is not just a by-the-way sort of thing.
For Democrats, this is the root and branch of their entire philosophy.
Their entire philosophy rests on the idea that you are evil, that I am evil, that we are racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes.
When she said earlier in the campaign, we're not all alt-right, what she was trying to do was say to people like Shapiro, okay Shapiro, I know you're not alt-right, but if you really want to show you're not alt-right, you have to vote for me.
But if you vote for Trump, or if you say you're not going to vote for either, then that means that you must be a member of this alt-right.
It was really a blackmail attempt, not a true distinction between normal conservatives and the alt-right.
But the entire left philosophy rests on this notion that we're the bad guys.
We're just morally bad people.
That we're morally bad people.
And this is one of the problems that I have just generally with this election cycle.
One of the things that we keep hearing is what I'm about to show you from this Home Depot co-founder.
This is Bernie Marcus.
Well, you know, before I get to that, I want to make one more quick point about this.
I think the right can overplay this deplorables thing.
I know that my company that I work for, Salem Communications, they have what they're calling their deplorables tour.
Now, they've renamed it after what Hillary Clinton said.
And I think that's a mistake, too, because the truth is there are some deplorables inside the Trump camp, and by claiming that we're all deplorables, like taking Hillary's label and then sticking it on ourselves, we're actually sort of saying there's no such thing as deplorables, and there are such things as deplorables.
For example, here was a deplorables meme that was put out yesterday, and this was put out I believe.
Was this David Duke, this one, or Roger Stone?
This one was Roger Stone.
And Roger Stone put it out with pictures of him, and it's the Expendables, for people who can't see, and Alex Jones, who's legitimately a nutcase, and Peppy the Frog, the meme, and Milo Yiannopoulos.
This wasn't even the worst one.
David Duke put one out that had himself in it, right?
The deplorables.
So the idea that there are no bad people in the Trump side of the aisle is not true.
If you just embrace Hillary's definition, yeah, we're all deplorables, and, you know, you're calling us all racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes, that's a mistake, too.
OK, but the real point I want to make is back to this Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus.
So Bernie Marcus is a big Republican supporter, and from everything I've heard, a very good guy.
And Bernie Marcus was on TV making the case that if you're not actively supporting Trump, meaning if you're not just shilling for Trump, then you're supporting Hillary Clinton.
But his actions now just confuse me terribly.
And all of the Republicans out there who... I say the same thing.
I had dinner with somebody last week who, out of the Midwest, was a great supporter of the Republican Party for many, many years and said, I'm not voting.
I'm just not voting.
And that's the end of it.
I hate Donald Trump.
So I said, well, therefore, you're going to vote for Hillary Clinton.
He said, no, no, she's corrupt.
I can't vote for her.
I said, well, if you don't vote for her and you don't support Donald Trump, are you going to stay neutral?
You might as well vote for her because your lack of vote for Donald means that she's going to get elected anyway.
Some of them don't care, Bernie.
Some of them don't care.
They go so far as to say, all right, so be it.
I actually prefer her.
Hillary Clinton, you have Meg Whitman out in California doing that.
What do you think?
Okay, so we can stop it there.
But the math here is so wrong.
I mean, obviously, we've made this argument a thousand times.
I get this literally every five seconds on Twitter.
Almost literally every five seconds on Twitter.
This, if you don't support Trump strongly enough, then you're really supporting Hillary.
If you don't shill for him.
First of all, people who say this to me, my vote doesn't matter.
And they know my vote doesn't matter.
And if I said right now, today, I'm voting for Donald Trump, it wouldn't make any difference so long as I continue to criticize Donald Trump.
The reason that I oppose this lesser of two evils logic, the reason I oppose it is because it literally justifies any bad behavior because you just point to the other person.
You just point to the other person.
So for example, let's say that Donald Trump, and we've seen it throughout this election cycle, on both sides.
So Hillary Clinton won't reveal her medical records, right?
And we're mad about that.
She should, because it's not fair.
What if she gets elected and she dies three months in and the American people were never given the opportunity to vote on the actual person who was running for president, Tim Kaine?
Or Joe Biden, whoever substitutes for her, right?
What exactly is it?
Presumably Cain, if she's elected.
So what Democrats say, their response to that is, well, we just voted for her to stop Trump.
And Trump won't release his IRS returns anyway.
So why should she release her medical records?
He won't release his IRS returns.
And every time somebody says about Trump, why don't you release your IRS returns?
He says, well, you know, Hillary won't release her medical records.
She just won't do it.
Let's say that Donald Trump tomorrow, let's say that he hit a woman with his car and she died.
Let's say that happened.
Trump supporters could plausibly say, they could plausibly say, well, what do Democrats have to complain about?
They can't complain about this.
After all, they elevated Ted Kennedy, who drove a car off a bridge and drowned a woman, and then made him their Senate leader.
He was the lion of the Senate.
I did the same thing with Trump on the KKK.
When Trump went soft on the KKK several months ago, people said, well, yeah, but Robert Byrd.
And you see with Hillary Clinton, when Hillary Clinton lies about her private email server, her supporters just say, yeah, well, Donald Trump's corrupt, and he says he brags, and he brags about bribing people.
The problem with the lesser of two evils thinking is that if the other person is, everybody has done things that are wrong.
If the other side has done all the wrong things, no matter what wrong thing you do, you can always claim you're superior to them, which means you end up with the lowest common denominator.
So this week's example of that was Donald Trump on Vladimir Putin.
So Donald Trump, I didn't have a chance to comment on this last week, but I really think this is worthy of comment.
Because what I've always worried about with Trump, and the reason why I have said that I'm not voting for either of them, is because I'm concerned that conservatives are shifting the definition of conservatism to meet Donald Trump, and then they just point at Hillary and say, it's okay if we do that, because at least we're not as bad as Hillary.
We're watching it happen on Vladimir Putin, we're watching it happen on free trade.
People who were pro-free trade are now anti-free trade.
The polls show this.
Vladimir Putin is now viewed significantly more positively.
Inside the Republican Party, he's at a negative 27.
Two years ago, he was at a negative 66 with the Republican Party.
That's because of Donald Trump.
On free trade, we were net positive on free trade.
We're now 20 points underwater on free trade.
That's because of Donald Trump.
That's because people are willing to shift their definition of conservatives or be more enthusiastic about his definition than about real conservatism.
So here's Donald Trump on Vladimir Putin last week.
But the fact that you say you can get along with him... I think I'll be able to get along with him.
Do you think the day that you become President of the United States he's going to change his mind on some of these key issues?
Possibly.
It's possible.
I don't know, Matt.
It's possible.
And it's not going to have any impact.
If he says great things about me, I'm going to say great things about him.
I've already said.
He is really very much of a leader.
I mean, you can say, oh, isn't that a terrible thing he called?
I mean, the man has very strong control over a country.
Now, it's a very different system, and I don't happen to like the system.
But certainly in that system, he's been a leader far more than our president has been a leader.
We have a divided country.
OK, and he says he's been a Marvel leader more than Obama has been.
And then Lauer follows up with him and says, well, he's done all these bad things.
And Trump says, yeah, but Obama's done bad things, too.
That's nothing new.
He said this back in October, too, when an interviewer asked Trump, yeah, but he kills people, right?
He kills people legitimately.
And Trump said back in October, yeah, well, we kill people, too.
I mean, this is bad stuff.
It's bad stuff, okay?
Hugh Hewitt, who, again, I don't want to pick on Hugh, but Hugh's become a real cheerleader for Donald Trump throughout this campaign.
And Hugh, you know, he went out of his way on Twitter to go around basically backing up Donald Trump.
Yeah, Putin's a strong leader.
First of all, there are two definitions of a strong leader.
One is what Trump was saying, and one is what Trump was not saying, okay?
The idea that Putin's a strong leader, by definition, a dictator is a strong man.
It's a synonym.
Right?
If you control a country, then presumably you're a strong man.
But I don't hear him doing the same routine, for example, about the mullahs in Iran.
I don't hear him doing the same routine about Kim Jong-un in North Korea.
He only does it about Putin.
Because he's really talking about how he kind of likes the moral quality of Putin.
Putin's a guy who stands up for his country.
Stands up for his country's interests.
Hugh Hewitt was saying Mao was a strong leader, too.
He was a bad guy who killed 45 million people in four years during the Great Leap Forward.
But Mao was a strong guy, too.
But look at Trump's—but the key here is how Trump justifies himself, right?
The way that Trump justifies himself is he says, yeah, at least he's not Obama.
At least Putin's not Obama.
Or at least I'm not Obama.
Maybe I'm praising a bad guy, but at least I'm not Obama.
Newt Gingrich sort of did the same routine.
He was asked about, are you comfortable or uncomfortable with Donald Trump praising Vladimir Putin?
Here was Giuliani.
Or Gingrich.
But you can't be comfortable with this continued praise of Vladimir Putin?
I'm not comfortable or uncomfortable with it.
I think that Putin is a fact.
I don't think our effort to say bad things, it's been pathetic.
There was a red line on Syria, it didn't work.
There was a red line on Crimea, it didn't work.
I mean, at what point do we recognize that this guy exists and calling him names may not be the best strategy we have?
Insane.
This is insane what Newt Gingrich is saying.
I don't care, I'm not comfortable or uncomfortable with him saying wonderful things about a guy who's a thug who murders journalists and his political opponents.
Why?
Because, well, at least he hasn't been weak like Obama.
If that's how we're going to do elections from now on, folks, there will never be another candidate you like.
There won't.
Because we're just going to keep nominating the person who's the worst person, because the worst person is the person who's the most effective.
We're going to keep nominating the worst person, and then we're going to say, but at least they're better than X. At least they're better than X. You need to make an affirmative case to me for Donald Trump.
Not just a negative case about Hillary Clinton.
Because you can always tell me that Hillary Clinton is the worst person in the world, and I'll believe you.
But that doesn't make the affirmative case for Donald Trump.
And if we keep just saying, we have to avoid the worst thing, by picking the second worst thing, you're never gonna get an opportunity in the future to pick somebody who's not the second worst, but is actually affirmatively good.
Somebody who's affirmatively good.
And this is my problem with the whole binary thinking of, you gotta pick Trump or you gotta pick Clinton.
Right now, in California, we're about to have a Senate race.
The Senate race is Loretta Sanchez, who's a Democrat, against Kamala Harris, who's another Democrat.
Presumably Loretta Sanchez will be a little bit better than Kamala Harris.
But I have no intention on voting for either of them.
I'm not planning to vote for either of them because neither of them meet my minimum qualifications morally for me to vote for them.
Because I want the opportunity at some point to vote for somebody who's actually going to be good.
And at least in that case, they're both Democrats.
In this case, one of them's a Republican who I have other Republicans now defending bad behavior on the basis that at least he's not Hillary.
This is my objection.
This is my objection.
Now, you want to vote for Trump because you think he's the lesser of two evils.
Again, that's your logic.
It's tenable.
I don't buy it, but it's tenable.
But don't pretend that just because Hillary Clinton is the world's worst person, and she really is a terrible person, don't pretend that just because Hillary is super dangerous, that that's all you require to vote for the other guy.
Because if you do that, I promise you, we're just going to have a series of bad elections from here until the end of time.
At some point, again, any bad behavior can be justified by pointing to the other guy.
This is the danger of the misinterpreted phrase in the New Testament about not commenting on the speck in the other person's eye until you remove the moat from your own, the moat in the other person's eye until you remove the plank from your own.
It's misinterpreted.
The point there is not that you're not allowed to criticize sin.
The point is that you're not allowed to think that you're better than somebody else.
It's the reverse.
You're not allowed to think that you're better than somebody else because they sinned.
But we're actually doing the reverse now.
The reverse now is, well, I can't criticize the plank in my guy's eye because there's a moat in the other guy's eye.
Or I can't criticize the moat in my own eye because there's a plank in the other guy's eye.
We should be having candidates who are affirmatively good, who actually do good things.
And you can still back Donald Trump and still call him out when he does bad things.
And that's the other point here.
You don't actually have to turn into Sean Hannity.
Sean was on Twitter on Saturday night ripping on everybody, saying, if you don't back Trump strongly enough, you own Hillary.
No, I've said it's perfectly tenable to vote for Trump to stop Hillary.
But if you shill for Trump, if you lie about Trump, you better own that.
Because that's something you actually do have to own, is the moral content of the person that you vote for if you uphold their moral content.
If you say Trump's a crap show, I understand, Hillary's worse, got it.
But if you justify the crap show by claiming that Hillary is worse, you're now justifying a crap show.
And it doesn't matter why you do it, you're justifying a bad guy.
You don't have to do that to vote Trump.
You don't.
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Okay.
Time for things I like and then some quick things that I hate.
So, things I like.
Today's Things I Like, there's this book that's now at the top of the New York Times bestseller charts called Hillbilly Elegy by J.D.
Vance, and it's really, really a good book.
It's a very well-written book.
It's about a guy who grew up in Middletown, Ohio, and he comes from Kentucky originally, and it's sort of about hillbilly culture, and he ended up going to Yale Law School, so it's about how he sort of went From being in this hillbilly household where his dad ran out on him, and his mom ran through a series of men, and his mom was a drug addict and an alcoholic and had mental illness, and his grandparents were taking care of him, and this really kind of terrible culture, how he got out of it.
And what's really fascinating is that the whole thing is a critique of individual decisions.
What he says is the way to escape kind of the hillbilly culture is to just not engage in bad decision-making.
There are good things about the hillbilly culture, like familial loyalty, but There are bad things, too, and the government can't solve these bad things.
Now, one of the problems that I had with hillbilly elegy is not the message.
The message, I think, is totally right.
I think that there's a whole group of people, and it's across America, crosses racial boundaries, isn't just true for what he calls the hillbilly culture.
It's true virtually everywhere in America.
There are people who believe that all of the problems in their life are due to some outside force.
We're seeing that election happen right now.
Hillary says the outside force is evil American racism, and Trump says the outside force is China.
Right?
This is the routine.
Somebody outside you is hurting you.
J.D.
Vance says, no, really, I grew up in this.
The people who are hurting you are you.
If you make good decisions, there are enough resources for you to do well.
The only problem I have here is that there's this idea that if Trump says that to the black community, or if I say that to the black community or the white community, or if somebody black says that to a white guy who's growing up in Middletown, Ohio, that it has less relevance than if somebody from your own culture says it.
This identity politics.
I must have lived the experience in order to speak a basic truth.
This is what I object to.
And J.D.
Vance isn't doing that by any stretch of the imagination, but the reason the book's getting so much attention is because it's someone from inside the culture saying the culture has problems.
Well, something is either true or it's not.
Single motherhood is more damaging to children than being married and staying with the person you're married to while you have kids.
End of story.
There are always exceptions, but as a general rule, that is true.
And that's true regardless of your race, and it's true regardless of whether you've had the experience.
We need to read these books and take away the message, but we don't need to take away the idea that you must be an outgrowth of the bad culture in order to speak about bad culture.
I don't have to be a member of Middletown, Ohio culture to understand that it is very bad to get involved in drugs and alcohol and abandon your children.
And it's not me being racist or elitist to say so.
They're just things that are true and things that are not.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
Alrighty, so over the weekend, the NFL had a series of people who were sitting down for the national anthem and for the flag waving and all this stuff.
One of the people who was at one of the NFL games and was sitting was Chris Brown.
And we have some video, I believe, of Chris Brown sitting.
Look, I'd love it if everybody in this building could sing along with me.
Y'all ready?
Let's do it.
Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Okay, so, there's some sort of, I don't know if it's a preseason NBA game, because the season hasn't started yet, but in any case, Chris Brown is sitting there.
Presumably because the national anthem represents American racism.
Chris Brown, dude, if we're going to talk about injustices in the racial criminal justice system, you beat the living crap out of Rihanna.
I mean, you put her head on, like, another planet than the rest of her body.
And you were in jail for five seconds.
You don't get to complain about the racism of the criminal justice system.
If the criminal justice system were racist, you'd still be rotting in prison for a long time.
And probably you should have done that even if the criminal justice system weren't racist.
But this is what's so ironic.
I really wonder how many of the members of the NFL who are sitting down here have had run-ins with the law before.
I would guess that some of them do, because there are a lot of players in the NFL who have.
Generally.
You know, I'll research it and get back to you, but the bottom line is that Chris Brown certainly does not get to complain about racism in the criminal justice system when the man is an absolute beneficiary of the preference for celebrity inside the criminal justice system.
OK, well, the other thing about this that I that I dislike is there are a couple of people who responded to the to the.
I think every American has the right to say and do whatever it is that freedom offers us.
However, during the National Anthem is not a time or a place to show that kind of thing.
I have no tolerance at all for it.
And I support their right to say what they believe and how they believe it.
But that's the wrong place in time.
So if they don't like it?
So the famous Wayne Newton commenting on Colin Kaepernick because our news cycle isn't weird enough.
Then Kate Upton gets involved as the supermodel and she posts, on Facebook, in my opinion, the national anthem is a symbolic song about our country.
It represents honoring the many brave men and women who sacrifice and have sacrificed their lives each and every single day to protect our freedom.
And she defends it, right?
And there are a bunch of members of the Patriots who do the black power symbol in the middle of the national anthem.
What I hate about this is that it seems like this is largely breaking down along racial lines.
That's what I hate about this.
I don't understand I really don't understand the idea that the American flag stands for, for some people, I understand this is a leftist concept.
I wish that the white people on the left were honest enough to kneel.
And I wish that the black community were more divided on this.
And I think the black community is pretty divided on this, by the way.
I think that if you took a poll, I think you'd see a large percentage of black people don't want to sit down for the national anthem.
But all of that said, in public, this is breaking down into a black versus white issue, and it really shouldn't.
We're creating divisions where none exist.
Nobody wants to see police officers shoot innocent black people.
Nobody wants to see police officers shoot innocent white people.
Nobody wants to see police officers shoot innocent people.
Nobody wants to believe that the American flag stands for racism, because it doesn't.
The American flag has flown over racists and it's flown over non-racists, but it flew over the Union Army when hundreds of thousands of Americans sacrificed their lives to free slaves.
And it flew over the federal troops who went and occupied the South in the aftermath of Jim Crow in order to ensure that black kids could go to school in some areas.
So this whole motion that the American flag is inherently racist, why can't we just unite around the idea that the flag is supposed to represent our highest ideals?
We don't always hit those ideals, but that's what the flag represents.
And we're all fighting for the same thing.
Who exactly is fighting against innocent—who's fighting on behalf of innocent people getting shot by the cops?
I missed it.
I missed it.
So that's the thing that I hate for today, is this sort of false racial division that's taking place over things about which we all agree.
Okay, tomorrow we will find out whether Hillary Clinton is indeed alive.
Every day we're now on Hillary Clinton Death Watch 2016.
Hopefully she is healthy.
Hopefully she is doing well.
We don't want to see people with health problems, obviously.
Even if something bad were to happen to her, I guess they could just get Kate McKinnon and just lie about it for the next six months, because that's obviously well within the purview of rational conversation now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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