All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 28, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
20:37
Ep. 216 - Democrats Collapsing, Trump Organizing
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
One of the reasons Donald Trump has become so popular with many Americans lies in his gut-level pro-Americanism.
Trump doesn't make blue-collar Americans feel bad about themselves.
He tells them they're not racist, they're not sexists.
Trump doesn't make those who earn feel rotten.
He tells them he's earned, too, and he's proud of it.
Most of all, though, Trump does not tear down law enforcement.
That last fact was on full display on Tuesday when the President-elect called the family of San Antonio Police Officer Benjamin Marconi, who was murdered on Sunday during a traffic stop.
Police Chief William McManus said the uniform was the target in the murder.
Marconi's son Dane got on Facebook and posted, quote, just got off the phone with future President Trump.
He sends his condolences to our family.
Trump's team has said nothing about the call thus far.
This isn't the first such call for Trump post-election.
Shortly after the election, Trump called the widow of murdered New York Police Department Sergeant Paul Tuozolo to offer condolences.
He said, I'm very sorry I cannot be here with you today.
My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family during this difficult time.
This is classy stuff.
It's also necessary.
President Obama sometimes called the families of slain cops.
He routinely called the families of black people shot by cops under disputed circumstances at best.
When he spoke at the funeral service for targeted and murdered Dallas police officers, he used the dais to rip police across the country as suffering from implicit bias and racism.
Americans rightly got the impression Obama didn't care nearly as much about targeted officers as he did about his misguided crusade to slander officers as the source of anti-black racism.
That is certainly not the message from Trump.
Trump isn't standing by bad police officers, of course, but he is making it clear that he stands by police officers across the country and that he takes their lives seriously.
That is a hell of a change from the current occupants of the Oval Office.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Alrighty, so much to get to here today, but we begin by saying hello to our sponsors at Helix Sleep.
So, Helix Sleep is a great company, and the way that this works is you go to their website, helixsleep.com, slash Ben, you use the slash Ben, you get $50 off your first order, helixsleep.com, and the way that they do this is they ask you questions about your body type, about your weight, about your height, they ask questions about whether you like a soft mattress or a hard mattress, do you like it to be warm or do you like it to be breathable, and then they send you the mattress in the mail.
They send it to you in the mail, and you can try it out for 100 nights for free.
And if you don't like it, you can just send it right back.
A customized mattress can cost you thousands and thousands of dollars, but Helix Mattress, they cost you a fraction of that.
In many cases, under $1,000.
Shipping is 100% free.
It comes in a box, and the way that it works is you unpack the box, and it automatically inflates.
It's really cool.
And it is super comfortable.
but it's so comfortable that we actually just got rid of a, of a mattress that we had very expensive mattress that we had.
We actually put it in the other room and we got a new bed frame because we liked our Helix mattress so much.
We actually just had the bed frame delivered yesterday.
That's how much we like the Helix mattress.
It's helix sleep.com slash Ben helix sleep.com slash Ben.
And you get $50 off your first order.
Again, it's truly customized and you can even customize it.
If there are two people on the mattress, you can customize it so that each side is different, And if you're Bill Clinton, you can make sure that one side is filled with spikes so that Hillary never sleeps in the same bed, I guess.
But in any case, HelixSleep.com slash Ben, that's the place to go to get this mattress, and it is terrific.
All righty, so lots to get to today.
We begin with the Democrats.
So, you know, the fact is that everybody's paying attention to the Trump transition, and we'll get to that in a little while.
There's been some more good Trump, bad Trump with regard to the picks that he's making for his cabinet.
Dr. Ben Carson has been picked, which is a...
But then also he just picked a woman in Betsy DeVos for the Secretary of Education, which is a great pick.
He's been stomping all over the grave of Kelly Ayotte, which is also a kind of... But he's made, apparently, Nikki Haley the UN Ambassador, which is a great pick.
So we'll talk about all of those and what they mean and why this is happening.
But first, we need to talk about the Democrats.
Because the Democrats are totally falling apart.
They are utterly falling apart.
Elijah Cummings...
He's a Democrat.
I believe that Elijah Cummings is from Alabama.
Sorry, Maryland.
My bad.
So Elijah Cummings is from Maryland.
And he is basically, the Democrats are struggling for identity.
They're struggling for identity.
And that means that they have to fall back on the tried and true strategies.
Those strategies include, of course, saying that black people are going to be victimized by white Republicans and saying the gay people will be victimized by Trump.
They have to play identity politics.
There's been a lot of talk in the aftermath of Trump winning About Democrats dumping identity politics at the door.
Stop alienating white folks by claiming they're all racist.
Stop alienating men by claiming they're all sexist.
Stop alienating rich people by saying that they're all greedy.
You know, actually start pitching your policies.
Elijah Cummings, however, he says, no, we can't do that.
There's no way.
I think that we, I think we need to, no, I don't necessarily agree.
I think we need to deal with economics.
I think economics is very important, but I think that we need to still Pay attention to so many people who have been left out of the system in one way or another, just like what I just talked about, voting rights of certain segments of our population.
I think we can do both.
But we've got to concentrate on economics, because a lot of people are suffering, and African-Americans and Hispanics are suffering probably more than other parts of our communities.
And so that would be my answer there.
Okay, so he says that we need to double down on the identity politics.
Of course he thinks they need to double down on the identity politics.
The Democrats have created this new Obama coalition that is largely based on pressing forward identity politics.
And that, of course, has driven a sort of quasi-identity politics from the right.
That is not my favorite thing.
Cummings is wrong, obviously.
The way the Democrats, if they actually wanted to win, could win is by abandoning those identity politics.
Or maybe they're so far down that road there's no way to do it.
Maybe they're afraid that if they abandon identity politics, maybe more black people will vote Republican because they won't feel pressured to vote Democrat because those Republicans are evil racists.
So they keep doubling down on this.
One of the ways they're doubling down on this Is the push for Keith Ellison, Muslim congressperson from Minnesota.
The reason I say Muslim congressperson is because there are only two Muslims in the United States Congress.
I believe the other one's Andre Carson.
And Ellison, of course, was the first, I think, Muslim congressperson in the Congress.
And so he's gotten major play politically over that.
He's being talked about very seriously for head of the Democratic National Committee.
There's a problem there, and that is that Keith Ellison is a radical, radical anti-Semite.
I mean, he's radically anti-Israel, he's associated with the Nation of Islam, and the Democrats don't know what to do.
They're endorsing Ellison because they're doubling down on the identity politics.
So here's Elizabeth Warren, the senator from Massachusetts and the supposed god-queen of the hardcore left, talking about why Keith Ellison would be a terrific choice.
I talked with Congressman Ellison.
I really, really like Keith, and I think he's terrific, and I think he would make a terrific DNC chair.
I just recently heard that Howard Dean, I mean literally just a few minutes ago, I heard that Howard Dean may be in this.
He says I'm in.
Talk to him, fine.
I'd like to hear what his vision is.
But I want lots of Democrats in, engaged, and ready to go.
You would never have all this discrimination against religious minorities, but for 9-11.
She was professor-born when I was at Harvard Law School.
She was irritating then.
She's become twice as irritating now with her faux sincerity.
But just a little bit of background about Keith Ellison.
So the person she just praised is a terrific choice for the DNC.
This is tape of Keith Ellison in 2007 when he was asked about 9-11.
Here's this sort of bootleg tape.
You would never have all this discrimination against religious minorities but for 9-11.
I mean, you had it, but you didn't have it to the degree that you have it now.
9/11 is this juggernaut event in American history And it allows... I mean, it's almost like, you know, the Reichstag fire kind of reminds me of that.
Does anybody know what I'm talking about?
Who benefited from 9-11?
Well, I mean, you know, you and I both know.
Yeah, of course.
But the thing is, is that, you know, after the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the communists for it.
Okay, so he compared the 9-11, if you missed it, to the Reichstag fire, which was a faked fire by the Nazis in order to allow Hitler to consolidate his power.
Okay, so he compared the 9-11, if you missed it, to the Reichstag fire, which was a faked fire by the Nazis in order to allow Hitler to consolidate his power.
So he's actually, I mean, this is a far left radical Islamist lie that has been pushed by people from those contingents.
And there's Keith Ellison, by the way.
You hear the guy in the audience saying the Jews benefited from 9-11, and Ellison basically going, yeah, maybe.
I mean, this is the guy they're talking about for head of the DNC, but that's not the only thing that we know about Keith Ellison.
Joel Mowbray, my friend who writes over at the Daily Caller, he wrote, the man poised to head the Democratic Party was a spokesman for the Nation of Islam well into his 30s.
The Nation of Islam is a radically anti-Semitic group led by Louis Farrakhan.
He publicly spewed anti-Semitism And later in life, as a congressional candidate, knowingly accepted $50,000 in campaign contributions, given and raised by Islamic radicals who openly supported Islamic terrorism and were leaders of front groups for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
By the way, the period during which Ellison defended the Nation of Islam, the spokespeople were openly Jew-hating.
In 1995, that guy, you saw on tape, Keith Ellison, he led a rally featuring a guy named Khalid Abdul Mohammed, who was a Nation of Islam member.
Mohammed got up and said, quote, if words were swords, the chests of Jews, gays, and whites would be pierced.
Ellison also defended Louis Farrakhan as, quote, not a racist, not an anti-Semite.
Farrakhan has called Jews devils.
And that's not where it stops, by the way.
Here is tape of Representative Ellison saying that he voted against funding for Iron Dome.
This is in the middle of a war in which Israel is being hit by rockets.
He voted against funding Israel's capacity to defend itself.
The point is, for John Kerry to run around trying to achieve one, I think is exactly what he should be doing.
Can I ask you on that point, you always supported Iron Dome, which is the miscellaneous system.
I always did.
But you just voted against more money for it.
Why?
Because a ceasefire is what we should prioritize now.
A ceasefire protects civilians on both sides.
It doesn't just say we're only concerned about people on one side.
I am, I've been to Starot, I have stood with those people talking about those rockets and that indiscriminate rocket fire.
And I've also been to Gaza three times since 2009 and I think those people are absolutely devastated.
We need a peace ceasefire now.
Okay, so the way that he wants to ceasefire is by removing Israel's protection from indiscriminate rocket attack.
That's Keith Ellison, the guy they're talking about for head of the DNC.
Just a couple of months ago, he wrote in the Washington Post, quote, as I have talked with ordinary Gazans, I have not encountered anyone representing Hamas.
The Gaza Strip is literally run by the terrorist group Hamas.
Ellison openly associates with the campaign to end the Israeli occupation, which is a virulently anti-Israel interest group that labels Democrats like Chuck Schumer.
Chuck Schumer is a Democrat, right?
An Israel firster.
Democrats, by the way, will not talk about this.
He won't talk about this.
He's been avoiding interviews for literally weeks now.
Josh Crashauer at National Journal, he tweeted this morning, Dems really don't want to talk about Ellison's record on Israel.
No comments at one Schumer ally.
Many stories avoiding elephant in the room.
Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League, which has done yeoman's work on criticizing the alt-right, they have nothing to say about Keith Ellison and the fact that the leader of the DNC may be this guy who is openly associated with anti-Semites and in fact has engaged in openly anti-Semitic behavior.
Here is the statement from Jonathan Greenblatt.
Greenblatt, by the way, I've met him, nice guy, but Jonathan Greenblatt was an Obama staffer, okay?
And here's the statement from the ADL, quote, We spoke with the leadership in the Jewish community in Minnesota, who confirmed what ADL and other national organizations have seen, that Keith Ellison is a man of good character.
We have seen him through his work in Congress as an important ally in the fight against anti-Semitism and for civil rights.
Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.
He has been on the record in support of Israel.
Ha ha ha ha.
And supports a two-state solution.
However, the congressman has also made statements and taken positions, especially regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and on the JCPOA, that would be the Iranian agreement, on which we strongly differ and that concern us.
We hope that candidates for this post will make clear where they stand on these issues and that the Democratic National Committee will make a choice that affirms the long-standing bipartisan consensus to a strong U.S.-Israel relationship.
In addition, we want to make clear to those who disagree with Congressman Ellison that in doing so there is no room for innuendo or slander because of his race or faith.
It's not about his race or faith.
It has everything to do with his views and the views that he has openly espoused.
Right, but again, left-wing Jews are not criticizing Ellison, they're criticizing the alt-right only, and you got a bunch of people in the media who are completely ignoring the fact that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and the entire left wing of the Democratic Party are supporting for the head of the DNC, a guy who's interested in doubling down on identity politics and who also has spent his entire adult life associating with the worst kinds of vile anti-Semitism you can imagine.
And again, these people are all over Steve Bannon, which is okay, but they are completely leaving alone Keith Ellison.
And I do want to point out here that there's a mistake that people on both sides seem to make, and that is they play the double standard game.
They say, well, you know, they're focusing on Bannon, but they're not focusing on Ellison.
Therefore we shouldn't focus on Bannon.
No, that's not the proper conclusion.
The proper conclusion is you should focus on Bannon, and you should focus on Ellison.
By the way, Ellison is a significantly more dangerous character than Bannon is, with regard to his views.
Bannon's just a cynical opportunist who's willing to use the alt-right to get where he wants to go.
Ellison is somebody who actually believes all these things, right?
He's somebody who spent his time in the 90s calling himself Keith X Ellison, because he was an actual member of the Nation of Islam, and the media have nothing to say about it.
The point of the double standard argument should be to restore the standard, not to tear it down.
The point of saying, why aren't you covering X when you're covering Y, is not to say you shouldn't cover Y, it's saying you should cover all of it.
But again, people tend not to buy into that because everybody's a partisan, unfortunately.
Now, the Democrats are falling apart over this stuff because a lot of them are saying, like Congressman Tim Ryan from Ohio, why are we doubling down on the identity politics that just lost us this election and are leading to ever-increasing numbers of white folks in the rural areas running away from the Democratic Party and running instead toward the Republicans?
And then you've got people saying, we've got to double down on the gal that brung us.
We're building this new coalition.
The demographics favor us.
We've got to double down on the identity politics.
The Democrats are tearing themselves apart, and they're becoming in the process a regional party, a party that only exists in California and New York and some major cities around the country, but nowhere in the rural areas.
The entire middle of the country is basically now red, with the exception of Illinois.
That's an amazing thing.
I mean, look at the map.
It's pretty incredible.
But the Democrats do have one hope, and that hope is that Donald Trump is a complete crap show.
That's their hope here.
And Elijah Cummings basically says that.
He says, you know, while he's trying to figure out what the strategy ought to be, he's saying, well, Trump's business is a minefield for conflicts.
The president can't have a conflict of interest.
Is that problematic in your view?
It is problematic because, clearly, I don't think Mr. Trump Realizes how significant the minefield is in this area.
Keep in mind, Wolf, that during the campaign, he said one of his top priorities would be to bring honesty to government.
He also talked about draining the swamp and used a lot of terms, basically saying that he was going to clean up government and he was going to make sure that there would be transparency.
When you're dealing with so many businesses in so many countries, it's basically a minefield for conflicts.
And to say that because you are the president that the law does not apply to you, it's not so much just the law, it is the appearance of conflict.
Okay, so Cummings here is basically saying, we're banking on Trump to blow this thing.
And if you're rooting for Trump to actually be a successful president, to do good things, particularly conservatives, if you're betting on him to do good things, you want him to stop doing the stuff where he's associating his business interests.
The only hope for the Democrats is that Trump disgraces himself, and then they come back.
Because 2018, the map looks terrible for Democrats in the Senate.
It looks awful for them.
They have a bunch of vulnerable seats in red areas.
They're going to lose a lot of senators.
They're going to lose six to eight senators in 2018.
It's a disaster area for them, unless Trump blows this, unless Trump blows this.
So you have to be rooting instead for Trump to actually get his act together.
And that means holding him to the same standard to which you'd hold Hillary Clinton.
If you are able to portray, rightly, Hillary Clinton as a corruptocrat, you do not get to turn around and then proclaim that Trump is clean as the driven snow, pure as the driven snow, when he's intermingling his business assets and his presidency.
And even the appearance of that is something that should be shunned.
And there's an article today, we mentioned it a couple of days ago, there's talk that Trump had gotten on a call with the president of Argentina, and the president of Argentina had called to congratulate him, and Trump had brought up this permit for the Trump Tower in Argentina.
And both sides denied it.
Today, that permit went through.
Today, that permit went through.
So if nothing was said, that's just a giant coincidence.
This kind of stuff does not look good.
And it's going to allow Democrats to drag Trump through the mud, rightly or wrongly.
Because where there is smoke, there usually is fire.
Now, before we go any further, I got a signal to our other advertisers.
DSTLD.com is distilled.com.
These folks make jeans.
And the jeans are terrific.
So instead of buying $200 jeans or $100 jeans at distilled, you can get these jeans for like $65 a pair.
And they have many different types of jeans.
The material is really friendly to your skin, I will say.
They fit really well.
And again, you can get two pairs of jeans for the same price that you get one someplace else.
They're really terrific.
They don't waste material.
They are environmentally friendly for those who care about that sort of thing.
It's dstld.com.
And if you use slash ben, dstld.com slash ben, you get $10 off right now.
They also have a new line of fall jackets as well that you can check out.
They don't work with middlemen, which is why they can do this so cheaply.
This is high-end denim.
It's really good stuff.
I own a pair, and I'm buying another pair, dstld.com, slash Ben, for $10 off your first order.
Okay, so now on to what Trump is actually doing.
So he's made a bunch of cabinet picks in the last 24 hours.
One of them makes, I think, a whole world of sense for him politically.
It doesn't necessarily make sense in terms of the job, but it makes a lot of sense politically, and that is the choice of Nikki Haley for UN ambassador.
So the governor of South Carolina, Trump has now picked her for UN ambassador, and she is going to, she's going to accept.
This makes sense for a number of reasons.
First of all, does she have any foreign policy experience?
Nah, not really.
You know, at the UN, your entire job basically consists of just yelling at other useless people at the UN.
So that doesn't necessarily require anybody with great foreign policy chops.
As governor of South Carolina, she did stand strong with Israel against the boycott-divest-sanctions movement.
That is worth noting.
But the real reason that Trump appointed her is pretty obvious.
One, it gets rid of a potential rival.
If he does a bad job and someone's going to primary him, it could be somebody like Nikki Haley.
Two, it gets rid of these charges of racism.
People have been saying his cabinet is filled with white men.
Nikki Haley is a woman of Indian descent, as Ann Coulter has made eminently clear.
And Donald Trump is attempting to sort of get past the alt-right thing by appointing a woman of Indian descent.
Third, it actually has the effect of elevating Trump allies.
So even though Nikki Haley was not a strong Trump ally, she critiqued Trump a lot during the campaign, criticized him a lot.
The person who is the lieutenant governor of South Carolina, who will now become the governor, is a guy named Henry McMaster.
McMaster was a huge Trump supporter throughout the primaries, endorsed him as early as January, even before the first primaries were held in Iowa.
Finally, it makes Trump look a little bit more broad-minded than he probably is, because it looks like he's bringing someone in who disagrees with him about foreign policy.
Again, the reason I say that that's exaggerated is because UN ambassador doesn't really have much of a say.
If he picks Mitt Romney for Secretary of State, then you start to change your calculus about the kind of administration he's gonna run.
Maybe he's gonna bring in some people who disagree.
So that's one of his cabinet picks.
You want to hear me talk about the rest of his cabinet picks, however, you'll have to go over to dailywire.com right now and become a subscriber.
$8 a month.
We'll get you your subscription.
You can become part of the mailbag today.
We're going to do a live mailbag in just about 20 minutes here on The Ben Shapiro Show.
We usually do it on Thursdays.
Tomorrow's Thanksgiving.
If you're an annual subscriber, then you get a free copy of my novel signed by me, and you also get the ads removed from the website and all the rest of it.
You get Andrew Klavan's show as well.
You get that live.
You get to be part of his mailbag, and we're adding new goodies all the time.
▲
Export Selection