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Dec. 12, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
20:49
Ep. 223 - Left Feels Punched In The Stomach, And They Deserve It
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Time Text
On Wednesday, Time Magazine announced what everybody already knew.
Donald Trump was their person of the year.
The left, of course, had a field day comparing Trump to 1938 Time man of the year, Adolf Hitler.
To be fair, the right made some of those same comparisons when Barack Obama was Time person of the year in 2012.
But there's something rather telling about the media in comparing and contrasting their 2016 and 2012 and 2008 people of the year.
Here is what the 2008 cover looked like, right?
There's Barack Obama in all of his shining magisterial glory.
Here is the 2012 cover from Time.
There's Barack Obama gazing into history somberly.
And then there is Trump on the cover of Time this year, right?
Kind of gazing over his shoulder.
In what looks to be a leather mafia chair.
Now, first of all, let's look at the art.
So, that 2008 Obama image poster is very clearly a mirror of the Hope poster.
Right?
Let's see the Hope poster, if we can grab that.
Right?
Upward, looking from Obama, gazing into history, beacon of change and light, all of the half colors going on.
That's obviously what that is a shout-out to.
The 2012 Obama image, that is a mirror of this famous JFK portrait.
That shows him contemplating his own place in history.
So here's the JFK portrait.
You can see him kind of looking down, and half of his face is in shadow.
And then here's the one from Obama 2012, if we can grab that again.
You can see it's very clearly meant to mirror that, including the shadowy kind of face.
In 2016, the Trump image mirrors the chiaroscuro of the Godfather, right?
It looks like that, right?
Let's look at the Trump cover again, and then there's the Godfather.
Right?
Very clearly that's what they're attempting to do.
The media are already attempting to tell their story.
Obama was a wonderful, deep, shimmering image of joy, a historic figure.
Trump is a gangster.
But even more clearly, Time is attempting to suggest that Trump is somehow indicative of the divide of an America that didn't exist when Obama was on the ballot.
In 2012, you'll notice, they simply labeled Obama President.
Trump, however, is President of the Divided States of America, as you can see.
How do we get divided?
Presumably, according to Time, that's due to Trump, or at least because of his supporters.
Now, does anyone believe that if 80,000 votes in the swing states had gone the other way and Hillary had been on the cover, Time would have labeled her President of the Divided States?
Of course not.
All of which shows why Trump regularly slapped the media and why it worked.
Most Americans know the country was not a paradisiacal place of whimsy and unity under Barack Obama.
We've been divided for at least a decade and Obama exacerbated that divide.
Trump didn't spring out of the ground like a demon.
He's the product of a divided America Obama helped make happen.
But the media continue to purvey the lie that only Republicans divide the country.
No wonder nobody trusts them.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty, so much to get to on today's Ben Shapiro Show.
Ooh, I'm so excited to be back, and it feels so good.
It's good to be back in a studio where we're not, you know, flanked by weird curtains from the Holiday Inn Express, but it's good to be back in a normal studio with a normal microphone and all of our capabilities brought to bear, so today's show must therefore be unbelievably spectacular.
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So I want to begin with just – it's been a very weird kind of experience being somebody who didn't vote for either of these candidates because I get to take part in the celebration that Hillary Clinton was not elected.
At the same time, I have some trepidation, obviously, about Trump being president.
We're going to get to all of that in a second.
But – I'm definitely... I do have to laugh when I see these just overdramatic, insane responses by the left.
They can't act like adults.
They have to act like spoiled, whining children about the fact that their candidate didn't win.
And it's pretty delicious.
So, Valerie Jarrett's a perfect example of this.
Valerie Jarrett was supposedly Obama's brain.
She was kind of his right-hand woman.
And she said that this was basically a gut punch this election.
We were surprised by the outcome of the election.
I'm not sure what the right analogy would be, but like a punch in the stomach, let's say.
Soul-crushing might be another description.
But that's the democracy that we have.
The people get to decide, and the elections matter, and we have to get about the business of doing Our job.
Valerie Jarrett, the architect of so much terrible policy, feeling the gut punch of having all of those policies rejected and many of them wiped away, that is absolutely delicious.
I love that soul-crushing.
It's just, there's a wonderful ring to that.
There's a wonderful ring to that.
Um, and then there's this article from New York Magazine, and I love New York Magazine because it's got some actually good content on rare occasions, and then it's got stuff like this, this taking very seriously the insanity of the left.
So, here is the article.
The post-Trump haircut by Heidi Mitchell.
For the past 20 years, Juliana Evans, the director of marketing for The Lumberyard, a contemporary performing arts company based in New York City, has had the same flowing brown locks.
Her stylist in her hometown of Washington, D.C.
has been trimming her hair every 12 months, for as long as she can remember, and always colors it the same medium brown shade.
Then came the November 8th election upset.
And Evans fell into a downward spiral.
I cried for three days, the Atlanta native 45 recalls, which is, by the way, insane.
If you cried for three days over an election result, you're a crazy person.
I remember in 2004, when I thought Bush was going to lose, I went and I bought Mozart's Requiem.
And I figured, OK, that would be my my kind of wallowing in the depression.
And then when it was over, I'd go out and live my life three days.
I felt like it was the worst thing politically that ever happened in my lifetime.
Really, the worst thing politically that ever happened in your entire lifetime?
You're 45.
Like, a lot of bad stuff has happened in your entire lifetime.
I mean, that goes all the way back to, like, 1961.
So that means that—or at least to 1971.
So you've watched, like, American cities burn down.
You've watched race riots.
In the last few years, you've watched race riots.
You've watched terrorist attacks.
I mean, you've seen a lot of bad stuff in the United States.
And this is the worst thing that happened politically in your lifetime?
It was catastrophic.
By Friday, she noticed Gray's growing in, so she put on her big girl panties and dragged herself to the drugstore.
Yeah, it sounds like she's a real big girl.
Literally without thinking, I grabbed the natural black box by Garnier.
She said, I was like, F it!
This election, dead in my soul!
I think I wanted to do something defiant to feel stronger.
Again, this goes back to a critique that I had of Lindsey way back when.
Lindsey, of course, you'll remember.
She used to do makeup on the show.
She's now back in Texas.
We all miss Lindsey.
But Lindsey had a tattoo on her wrist that said Brave.
And I said, that's only something that women can get away with, is a tattoo that says Brave.
If you're a dude, you better have served in Afghanistan to get a tattoo that says brave, and you better have been wounded, right?
For women, it's like, I got out of bed this morning, brave tattoo, go!
So this woman feels very special.
She had to feel defiant to feel stronger, so she dyed her hair black.
She didn't, like, go pump iron or something.
She went and she dyed her hair, and it made her feel stronger.
Okay, then.
So that sense of malaise is spreading across D.C.
as women stare up at that glass ceiling still hanging over them.
And contend with a bleep-grabbing kleptocrat moving into the nearby White House there collectively, however subconsciously, making their own statements of rebellion by challenging traditional notions of beauty.
Good idea, let's just be ugly to challenge Trump.
That sounds awesome.
See, whenever people say non-traditional, usually when people say non-traditional it means really crappy.
When they say things like, we're going to have a non-traditional Christmas, that usually means that we're going to throw out all the nice things about Christmas, and then we're going to like an art show at the Modern Art Museum and stare at a pair of shoes.
When somebody says that they're going to challenge traditional notions of beauty, what they really mean by that is we're going to look all fire ugly.
That's the idea.
Traditional standards of beauty, it turns out they're traditional because people like them, typically.
I love this.
It says, when you see that much blonde hair on the floor, you know something is going on, says Nicole Butler, creative director and master colorist at Daniel's Salon in DuPont Circle.
During the notoriously slow month of November, her salon received a startling number of bookings, with at least three women a day sitting in her chair asking for a drastic change, like cutting off six inches, going black, or going platinum.
Usually stuff like this is planned for weeks and put on the books after several consultations, but this was very spontaneous.
First of all, is that true?
I mean, Taylor, you do this kind of stuff for a living.
Is that true that if someone wants to change their hair, they go in for several consultations first?
Is that something ladies do?
If it's a big change.
If it's a big change.
Okay, I guess that's a real thing.
Okay, so ladies really take this stuff seriously.
Like, for a guy, it's like, okay.
Usually you could spend up to $200 or $300 if you're doing it.
That's true.
So Taylor says you can spend up to $200 or $300.
Usually a guy, it's like, for a guy to have a drastic change, usually it's like, you go in there, the guy starts giving you a bad haircut, and then you're like, continue, it's too late, you buzzed me too close.
And that's how Jonathan Hay ends up with his current haircut.
That's usually how this works.
I love this article.
They say, clients, especially those over 40, expressed a feeling of loss and uncertainty.
Maybe this is some kind of compensation for not getting what we wanted in the election.
By changing our hair, we can control the outcome.
No, it turns out you can't.
It turns out that changing your hair did not control the outcomes.
It reminds me of this story that was out of, where was this out of?
It was Pakistan or India.
There was a story recently that a man's wife wouldn't sleep with him for 10 years, so he cut off his willy.
And I just thought, that seems like a really poor solution to a pretty big problem.
That's the opposite of what you want to do there, fella.
So these women, I'm going to chop off my hair to show Trump.
Like Trump gives a crap?
Like anybody sitting around going, Oh my god, look at all these women!
They have platinum blonde hair!
They're coming for us!
No, Trump, resign!
I don't think anybody really is that concerned about a bunch of women dying their hair black.
I really don't.
Plus, let's face it, women's hair has been getting significantly uglier over the past few years.
I don't know what the hairstylists are saying or why they're doing this, but I know several very good-looking women who have decided for no reason at all to just color their hair like Harley Quinn, and it turns out that that's not nearly as good-looking in real life as it is on the chick who plays Harley Quinn in the movie.
Mainly because the chick who plays Harley Quinn in the movie is extremely good-looking.
Okay, so, putting all this aside, the insanity of the left, I want to talk a little bit about About some of the new Trump department picks.
Trump has picked some new secretaries, and some of them are quite good.
We haven't had a chance to talk about all of them.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis is the General James Mattis, Mad Dog Mattis.
He's terrific.
This is a very good pick.
What I really want to talk about, I'm going to do a couple of things next, and this is why you should subscribe so you can see the whole analysis.
The big question about Trump.
We don't know what he's going to be yet.
We just don't.
We don't know what he's going to be, because he's been a Rorschach test the entire time.
He has a position on immigration, then he switches the position on immigration.
He has a position on the environment, then he invites Leonardo DiCaprio to Trump Tower to talk it over about green jobs.
Or he invites Al Gore to talk about the environment.
Or he invites Ivanka Trump to come in and say whatever stupid Democrat thing Ivanka Trump is going to say.
I don't care what you say about Trump.
Ivanka's a Democrat.
But in any case, We don't know what Trump is going to be.
So all we can do is try to read the tea leaves that are in front of us, or at least make our judgments based on the evidence that are in front of us.
So this breaks down into really two categories.
Category one is the cabinet picks, which I would say 8 out of 10.
Very, very solid cabinet picks for President-elect Trump so far.
If he picks somebody good for Secretary of State, that'll raise to a 9 out of 10.
I think that he's made a lot of very solid cabinet picks, and we'll go through some of those in a minute.
You can almost do good Trump, bad Trump this way.
His cabinet picks?
And then there's what he does and says on Twitter and what he's been doing with these companies, which I think is absolutely abysmal.
And who you think Trump is going to be sort of depends.
Do you think that Trump is going to be the guy who appoints and delegates?
He appoints a bunch of people who he's going to delegate to, and they're going to take care of business, and he's just going to sit there and reap the rewards for having appointed good people?
If you're a good manager, by the way, most of the work is done by your subordinates, and maybe that's Trump.
Or, Or is Trump going to be the micromanager who keeps sticking his thumb into the pie because he needs the attention, he wants to get the headline, he needs to be the man in control, like he is on Twitter and as he has been with the economy.
And so we're going to go through sort of the two sides of this coin and we're going to determine which Trump is the real Trump, which is the one that we ought to watch, or should we watch both and then just take it as it comes, which has been my approach thus far.
But let's start with the Cabinet pick.
So this is obviously good Trump, okay?
A lot of these picks are really good.
So here is the new pick for Defense Secretary James Mattis.
Here's some of the things he's had to say in the past.
- You go into Afghanistan, you go into Afghanistan and you've got to slam women around for five years 'cause they didn't wear a bagel.
You know, guys, I got no man to have left anyway, so it was a hell of a lot of fun to shoot 'em. - We're up against an enemy that means what they say and we should not patronize them.
This is a group that deserves no support from anyone and we should try to shut down its recruiting, shut down its finances, and then work to fight battles of annihilation, not attrition, but annihilation against them.
So the first time they meet, the forces that we put against them, there should be basically no survivors.
The enemy gets a vote, is the way we put it.
You may want a war over, you may declare it over.
The enemy may not agree, and you have to deal with that reality.
And that's great.
Okay, so James Mattis, very good pick for SACDEF.
Obviously, this is somebody who takes no prisoners, or if he does, that's only because he failed to shoot them the first time.
That apparently is sort of the mentality.
Great pick for defense.
Here are some other great picks that he's made.
I think Tom Price at Health and Human Services is going to be a very good pick.
Somebody who actually knows how Obamacare works and hopefully will help dismantle it.
Mike Pompeo at CIA will be very good.
I think Jeff Sessions as Attorney General will be a very good pick.
Nikki Haley as UN Ambassador, I think, is a pretty decent pick.
Now, not all of them are great.
I think that, obviously, I think Bannon's a bad pick for White House Chief Strategist.
I think Mike Flynn at NSA is far too pro-Russian and also very erratic.
I think that's not a very good pick, but, I mean, he does know more than certainly the fiction writer who currently occupies that office, Ben Rhodes, who literally wrote fiction and then Obama made him National Security Advisor because, I don't know, he likes his unpublished fiction?
But some of these other picks are not so great.
Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development, I think, is a silly pick.
But most of these picks are pretty good.
And he just added three yesterday that are quite good.
One of them is Scott Pruitt at the EPA.
Another is General John Kelly at Homeland Security.
And the third is Andy Puzder.
He announced that one this morning.
As Secretary of Labor.
So Pruitt is the most controversial pick and also the best.
He says he's a guy who has said in the Wall Street Journal that the debate or I think it's National Review, the debate is far from settled on climate change.
He said, quote, scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connections to the actions of mankind, which is true.
Even if you believe that climate change is man-caused, that doesn't necessarily explain to what extent it's man-caused, doesn't explain how you're going to fix that.
The biggest problem with the climate change argument is that you sort of have to have a solution to it, and nobody on the left has a solution other than living 19th century standards of living, and that's unworkable.
Pruitt's been an outspoken opponent of EPA over-regulation.
He sued the EPA before, and now he's gonna head it up, all of which led Dan Pfeiffer, who is an Obama advisor, to tweet this, which is a great indicator.
He said, at the risk of being dramatic, Scott Pruitt at EPA is an existential threat to the planet.
At the risk of being dramatic?
Well, don't overstate it, boy.
An existential threat to the planet.
He's like Zod, or the Death Star.
Scott Pruitt of the Death Star.
You always knew that the guy who was gonna destroy Earth was gonna be a guy named Scott.
You just knew that was coming.
So it's just, again, the fact that the left is going nuts over this, it's a great pick.
Scott Pruitt's a really good pick.
Then there is John Kelly.
So Kelly has linked the danger of terrorism to the loose coverage of the southern border.
So he says that it's more of a, the reason to police the southern border is much less about the economy and much more about terrorism.
He served, obviously, with distinction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He's a Gold Star father.
He's run U.S.
Southern Command for years, working with countries south of the border.
He will be a far cry from soft foreign policy notions of the Obama administration.
There are questions for people whether he's going to be as hard on illegal immigration, unrelated to terrorism, but there's not a lot of indicators he's going to be soft on illegal immigration.
And finally today, Trump also named this Labor Secretary, Andy Puzder.
So you've heard of him because he's been in the news before.
He's the longtime CEO of CKE Restaurants, which is Hardee's and Carl's Jr., and he understands how economics works, and the left is losing their mind because he's not going to cave to the labor unions.
He spent his entire career saying to the labor unions, guys, you can protest as much as you want, but flipping a burger, flipping a burger is not exactly a job that requires a $20 an hour salary.
And you can pretend that's not the case, but we'll just end up building machines that can do it for less.
This is the sort of stuff that really, really ticks off the left, and that's why he's a really good pick.
Here's a little clip of perspective labor secretary Puzder.
The policy guys call it the welfare cliff.
Because you get to a point where if you make a few more dollars, you actually lose thousands of dollars in benefits.
And quite honestly, these benefits are essential for some people.
They're how they pay the rent, they're how they feed their kids.
So what happens is, we have people who turn down promotions, or if minimum wage goes up, they want fewer hours, they want less hours, because they're afraid they'll go over that cliff.
And we really make the distance between dependents and independents too broad to gap.
Instead of these handouts, there's something called the Earned Income Tax Credit, which actually could help people better than any of this stuff.
Yeah, it's already lifted millions of people out of poverty, and what it is basically is right now it's an annual check, it should be a monthly or maybe a bi-weekly check, but it's a government supplement, so you don't end up in all these complex programs.
You know, they're difficult to satisfy, people have to figure them out, they have Okay, so I'm not a big fan of the Earned Income Tax Credit, but Puzder is very up on what businesses need, and that is obviously something that is necessary.
So his cabinet picks are quite good.
His cabinet picks are quite good.
your supplement would decrease, but it never decreases so much that your income, your overall income declines. - Okay, so I'm not a big fan of the earned income tax credit, but Puzder is very up on what businesses need, and that is obviously something that is necessary.
So his cabinet picks are quite good.
His cabinet picks are quite good.
And in just a minute, we're gonna get to the other side of the coin, which is, you know, what about all the other things he's doing and which one is the true Trump?
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Well, as we continue here, we're going to be talking, as I say, about what Trump's been doing not with the cabinet picks and how much cabinet picks matter.
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