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Jan. 17, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show

23:29

Ep. 234 - Media Smack Themselves In The Face With Russian Urine

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	On Sunday, Senator Bernie Sanders took to Twitter to deliver one of his usual messages.
	People go to the doctor because they're sick, get a diagnosis from their doctor, but they can't afford the treatment, he wrote.
	How crazy is that?
	So I responded snarkily, I go to a fancy store to check out a piece of furniture and I can't afford it.
	Totally crazy!
	This, of course, prompted spasms of apoplexy on the left.
	How could I dare to compare medical care to furniture?
	Was I equating the two?
	Was I suggesting that the necessity of furniture was somehow comparable to the necessity of medical care?
	Of course not, because that would be stupid.
	I was pointing out that medical care is a commodity, and that in life, we are often faced with commodities we cannot afford.
	But this mere observation caused a ruckus on the left.
	Necessities don't compare to luxuries, said one angry tweeter.
	Bless characters like Ben Shapiro for demonstrating the complete Soullessness of capitalist ideology, tweeted another.
	The idea here seems to be that unless you declare medical care a right rather than a commodity, you're soulless.
	That, as Marx might put it, necessity, rather than autonomy, creates rights.
	This is foolish, both morally and practically.
	Morally, you have no right to demand medical care of me.
	I may recognize your necessity, I may offer charity.
	My friends and I may choose to band together and fund your medical care.
	But your necessity does not change the basic math.
	Medical care is a service, and a good, provided by a third party.
	No matter how much I need bread, I do not have a right to steal your wallet or hold up the local bakery to obtain it.
	Theft may end up being the least immoral choice under the circumstances that doesn't make it a moral choice or suggest that I have not violated your rights in pursuing my own needs.
	But the left thinks that declaring necessities rights somehow overcomes the individual rights of others.
	If you're sick, you now have the right to demand that my wife, who is a doctor, care for you.
	Is there any limit to this right?
	Do you have the right to demand that the medical system provide life-saving care forever to the tunes of millions of dollars of other people's taxpayer dollars or services?
	How exactly can there be such a right without the government rationing care or using compulsion to force individuals to provide it or confiscating mass sums of wealth to pay for it?
	The answer?
	Nope.
	Doesn't work that way.
	Rights that derive from individual need inevitably violate individual autonomy.
	In response to my tweet, my colleague New York Magazine's Jesse Singel wrote, quote, free markets are good at some things and terrible at others and it's silly to view them as ends rather than means.
	That's not true.
	Free markets are expressions of individual autonomy and therefore they are ends to be pursued in and of themselves.
	Now practically, declaring medical care a right doesn't make it Actually happen.
	Just as Ruth Bader Ginsburg said at one point, she would model new constitutions on the South African constitution, which guarantees, quote, everyone has the right to have access to health care services, including reproductive health care.
	The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures within its available resources to achieve the progressive realization of each of these rights.
	That's what the South African constitution says.
	But the World Health Organization ranks South Africa somewhere near the bottom of the globe in terms of medical care.
	What happened?
	Why didn't the right self actualize?
	Because medical care is a commodity.
	And if you treat it differently, that's stupid.
	To make a commodity cheaper and better, you need two things.
	Profit incentive and freedom of labor.
	The government destroys both of these things in the healthcare industry.
	It decides medical reimbursement rates for millions of Americans, particularly poor Americans.
	This, in turn, creates an incentive for doctors not to take government-sponsored health insurance.
	It regulates how doctors treat with patients.
	The sorts of training doctors must undergo.
	the sorts of insurance they must maintain.
	All of this convinces fewer Americans to become doctors.
	Undersupply of doctors generally, and of doctors who will accept your insurance specifically, along with over-demand stimulated by government-driven health insurance coverage, that leads to mass shortages.
	The result, an over-reliance on emergency care, costs for which are distributed among government, hospitals, and insurance payers.
	So, what's the solution for poor people?
	Well, not to declare medical care a right, certainly not to dismiss reliance on the market as some sort of perverse cruelty.
	Markets are the solution in medical care, just as they are in virtually every other area.
	If you treat medical care as a commodity, that means temporary shortages, and it means some people won't get everything we wish they would have.
	But that's also true, but worse, with government-sponsored medical care, as the most honest advocates will admit.
	And whereas government-sponsored medical care requires a top-down approach that violates individual liberties, generates over-demand, and quashes supply, markets prize individual liberties.
	They reduce demand.
	You don't demand more of what you have to pay for.
	And they heighten supply through profit incentive.
	So, back to the furniture now.
	Let's say your life depended on this choice today.
	You either have to obtain an affordable chair, or an affordable x-ray.
	Which would you choose to obtain?
	Well, if you're not stupid, you'd choose the chair.
	That's because there are lots of types of chairs, produced by scores of different companies, widely distributed.
	You could buy a $15 folding chair, or a $1,000 antique, without the slightest difficulty.
	By contrast, to obtain an x-ray, you'd have to work with your insurance company, wait for an appointment, and then haggle over price.
	Why?
	Because the medical market is way more regulated, thanks to the widespread perception that healthcare is a right, than the chair market.
	Does that sound soulless?
	True soullessness is depriving people of the choices they require because you're more interested in patting yourself on the back by inventing rights than by incentivizing the creation of goods and services.
	In healthcare, we could use a lot less virtue signaling and a lot less government.
	Or, we could just read Bernie Sanders' tweets while we wait in line for a government-sponsored surgery, dying, presumably, in a decrepit chair.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	All righty, so there's a lot to get to today.
	For some reason, there are certain songs playing in my head, like, raindrops keep falling on my head, and shower the people you love with love.
	But we will get to all of that.
	The media have lost their minds, by the way.
	They've completely lost their minds.
	Trump did a press conference today, and basically, I can give you the short version of what that press conference looked like.
	Here's this short version, right there.
	Yeah, that was Trump versus the media.
	And then we have, actually, a quick live shot of CNN headquarters right now.
	Yeah, there's that.
	So, we'll get to all of that in just a second.
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	So many things happened since we last spoke.
	So many things.
	And they are all hilarious.
	So no one said the end of the world wasn't going to be an absolute circus of joy.
	And that's exactly what it has been.
	It has been a circus of absolute joy and wonder.
	So all of this starts last night.
	When CNN begins a news tsunami by running a story about how U.S.
	intelligence officials have briefed President-elect Donald Trump and President Obama about these rumors, these intelligence reports that suggest that Trump has been working with the Russians and that the Russians have what they call kompromat, which means they have, I guess, they have some compromising information on Trump and that they're going to blackmail Trump, essentially.
	Here's what CNN reported, quote, The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
	The allegations came in part from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative whose past work U.S.
	intelligence officials consider credible.
	The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the memos about Trump.
	The classified briefings last week were presented by four of the senior most U.S.
	intelligence chiefs, that'd be DNI Clapper, FBI Director Comey, CIA Director Brennan, and NSA Director Mike Rogers.
	So, basically they present these supposedly classified documents to Obama and Trump, including allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information About Trump.
	And that's the extent of the story.
	And so the entire world goes nuts.
	This is nuts, right?
	I mean, Trump is being briefed on the fact that the Russians now have all this dirty info, and maybe this explains why Trump is so warm toward Russia all the time.
	Now, to skip forward in the story for a second, CBS News appears to now be blowing this out of the water.
	They now say that this never happened.
	According to CBS News, a senior U.S.
	intelligence official with knowledge of the preparation for the meeting with Trump said that Trump was not briefed on the two-page addendum to the dossier.
	And multiple officials say the summary was included in the material prepared for the briefers, but the briefing was oral.
	No documents were handed to Trump.
	So that means that even the CNN story wasn't true if the CBS news report is true.
	But the CNN story breaks and the entire world is lit aflame.
	The It just blows up.
	And then the world ends, right?
	So it's already blowing up and then the pieces implode themselves and create a black hole of news.
	That's because of Ben Smith and BuzzFeed.
	So, BuzzFeed releases the actual memos that were supposedly compiled for this briefing for Trump and Obama.
	And these memos are insane.
	They're insane.
	I mean, they say things like Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, was in the Czech Republic meeting in Prague with Russian agents to get information on Hillary Clinton.
	They say things like Trump is deep in bed with Russian business sources and that they've paid him lots of money.
	It says that Putin has been cultivating Trump as an asset for years.
	And of course, the most trafficked allegation, and the reason I'm making pee-pee jokes today, I'm not enough of a man not to make A good urine joke.
	I'm sorry.
	I can't.
	If you wanted pee-pee jokes, you're in luck today because today is your day.
	But one of the allegations is – and it's too salacious not to mention – the allegation is that Trump went to Russia and stayed at the Ritz in Moscow and stayed in – it's so ridiculous –
	Stayed in Barack Obama's suite, the one that he used to stay in with Michelle Obama, and then proceeded, because he hates the Obamas, to hire a bunch of Russian whores to come in and have a golden shower party, to pee on the bed in front of him, because that's how much he hates the Obamas.
	And so this thing is flying around the web, Golden Shower is trending, and Ben Smith releases this statement trying to explain why it is that he even put this thing out, because he himself says in the report, they say that this stuff is unverified, we don't know how to check it, there's no way to check it, we're going to put it out anyway.
	Screw it, we're putting it out anyway.
	By the way, it had already been run by a bunch of other people, including David Corn, David Corn of Mother Jones.
	He didn't put out the full report.
	Here's what he tweeted about it.
	He said, I accurately characterized the memos.
	This is important stuff, but did not publish details.
	Even Donald Trump deserves journalistic fairness, but not from BuzzFeed.
	So Ben Smith writes, as you have probably seen, this evening we published a secret dossier making explosive and unverified allegations about Trump and Russia.
	I wanted to briefly explain to you how we made the decision to publish it.
	We published the dossier, which Ken Bensinger obtained through his characteristically ferocious reporting.
	It's not ferocious reporting to just release a document.
	So that, as we wrote, Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the U.S.
	government.
	So we're just going to release this information.
	We're not going to provide you any way to verify it, but you do it.
	You do the verification.
	Like, I don't know how I'm supposed to do the verification, or you're supposed to do the verification.
	That's sort of BuzzFeed's job.
	It's why all of these other news outlets ripped into BuzzFeed and said, what the hell are you doing?
	But BuzzFeed releases it anyway.
	This report that is chock full of total crazy towns.
	I mean, total crazy towns.
	Now, it's possible that the CNN report is quasi, it's somewhat more legitimate than the BuzzFeed report.
	The BuzzFeed report is just, here's a document we obtained, boom, put it online, and we're not gonna tell you whether it's true or false.
	Also, Russian whores peed on Trump, right?
	That was basically the BuzzFeed report.
	The CNN report said, okay, we have sources that say the intel community reported this to Trump.
	That raises questions about how CNN knew that.
	Is the intel community leaking?
	I mean, this entire campaign has been about leaks, so I guess eventually we're going to arrive at this point where it's leaks about leaks.
	But, you know, that said, there's Mark Ambinder at The Atlantic.
	He said that the intelligence community didn't just summarize the dossier.
	It also included other information.
	In any case, BuzzFeed runs this, and the world goes insane.
	And very quickly, Trump is able to debunk some of this stuff.
	Very quickly, Trump is able to—but we'll get to Trump's response in just a second.
	So first, before we get to that, 4chan, which is sort of the trolling The trolling website, all of the best trolls are on 4chan.
	It's troll central.
	It's where all the cave trolls hang out.
	And 4chan releases a statement, basically, or people from 4chan saying that they have actually created this stuff from whole cloth and they sent it to an anti-Trump operative named Rick Wilson, a Republican named Rick Wilson, and Wilson gave it to the intel community so they trolled the entire intelligence community.
	There's no evidence that this is true.
	Other than a couple of people on 4chan saying some stuff, there really is no evidence that this is true.
	Wilson himself denies this.
	He says that all this information has been out since August.
	That's the same thing that was being reported by CNN.
	So there's no reason to think that what 4chan said is true.
	There's also no reason to think that what BuzzFeed put out there is true.
	So we have a bunch of unverified information floating around and people taking sides.
	And then Russia jumps in.
	So the Kremlin gives a response.
	And the Kremlin tells CNN, quote, the Kremlin has no compromat.
	On President-elect Donald Trump, according to Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
	Compromat is the Russian term for compromising information intended to be used against someone.
	And Peskov said the Kremlin does not have kompromat on Trump.
	Information does not correspond to reality.
	It's complete fiction.
	And then he also said that we don't even do this.
	They actually said that they don't even spy on people, they don't even do Kompromat.
	Kompromat isn't even something that we do.
	Which is, uh, no.
	If you think the Russians don't gather information on people, that'd be crazy.
	So, now we finally get to the Donald Trump team response.
	And Trump has been handed the ultimate gift, just this massive gift by BuzzFeed, because Imagine it had just been the CNN report that said that there were reports that he had heard about all of this and that the intelligence community was checking it out and that's all we knew.
	Well, then he'd have some questions to answer, wouldn't he?
	But that's not all that happened, right?
	Instead, you get this BuzzFeed report that very quickly people start going through and debunking.
	So, for example, Michael Cohen, who is the lawyer for Trump and is mentioned in this compilation of supposed intelligence on Trump, he immediately tweets out and he says, no, I've never been to Prague.
	And then that's confirmed, that he's never been to Prague.
	USC says that he was actually at USC on the date that he was supposed to have been in Prague.
	CNN comes out and says, oh, it was a different Michael Cohen.
	A different Michael Cohen.
	Not one who worked for Trump, just some guy named Michael Cohen.
	Okay?
	Well, that's weird.
	All right.
	And then the Trump team comes out and they say, this is just pure garbage.
	Reince Priebus, White House Chief of Staff, he says, this is just nonsense.
	This is made up.
	So, what is the President-Elect's response to the BuzzFeed and CNN reports, and will he talk about them at 11 o'clock today at his press conference?
	Well, I mean, the BuzzFeed memo is total, complete garbage, is what it is.
	Look, BuzzFeed themselves said it was garbage.
	The New York Times wouldn't even print the document because it was unverifiable.
	This is what this is.
	Tens of thousands of retired agents all over the world.
	You've got some agent somewhere, maybe in the UK, that hangs a shingle and says, pay me a rate.
	I'm going to do opposition research.
	He does a memo or she does a memo.
	This thing circulates for months.
	It's unsubstantiated.
	And voila, it shows up.
	I talked to Michael Cohen.
	One of the basis of this entire report is that a guy named Michael Cohen, who works for the Trump Organization, went to Prague and had a meeting with Russian agents.
	He'd never been to Prague in his life.
	I don't know what it says about the report.
	In fact, the coach of USC Baseball in Southern California said, wait a second, he wasn't in Prague, he was with me in Southern California with his son.
	The guy's never been to Prague.
	There are parts of Southern California that look Prague-like.
	No, they're not.
	And obviously, you know, he's doing that on good sourcing.
	This is the beauty of what BuzzFeed did actually in favor of Trump.
	By releasing all this information, half of which is, I mean, a lot of which, for all we know, all of it's garbage.
	But some of it certainly is garbage.
	By doing that, they allow Trump the ability to come out and say, everything that we've ever heard about Russia is untrue, there's nothing going on with Russia, all of this is crap, and the media's out to get me.
	Because guess what?
	The media was out to get him here, right?
	They actually were out to get him.
	Seth Meyers had on Kellyanne Conway last night, and he asks her about the Russian reports, and Kellyanne Conway slaps him around a little bit.
	Meyers has her on, he's grilling her, but what she's actually saying is true, because NBC News came out and said that it was not addended to the document and it wasn't mentioned during the oral briefing.
	So, she's actually telling the truth here, and Seth Meyers is just refusing to believe her.
	And this is what's happened in our politics, is that if there's a bad story about Trump, everybody who doesn't like Trump immediately leaps to believe it.
	If there's a good story about Trump, everybody who likes Trump immediately leaps to believe it.
	The truth has no bearing anymore.
	It's just pure partisan hackery on all sides.
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	OK, so we're going to say one more thing and then we will have to break here.
	So Trump himself responds.
	And the way that he responds is less... He has a clear win here.
	Let me just say, Trump has a clear win, right?
	The BuzzFeed report comes out, it's a bunch of crap, and Trump has a very clear win.
	And the clear win should be him coming out and saying, all of this is crazy.
	Are you guys crazy?
	Like, what in the world?
	What in the world?
	And then Trump does what Trump does, which is he makes some boo-boos.
	And this is going to be one of the more epic episodes of Good Trump, Bad Trump that we've ever done here on the Ben Shapiro Show.
	It's pretty, it's pretty epic.
	So why don't we play the song real fast?
	Good Trump, Bad Trump, which one will we get today?
	There was some certainly epic good Trump here, and there was some relatively epic bad Trump.
	So Trump immediately comes out tweeting about the BuzzFeed story, and here is what he tweets.
	He tweets, Russia just said the unverified report paid for by political opponents is, quote, a complete and total fabrication, utter nonsense, all caps, very unfair exclamation point.
	Okay.
	So.
	Tip to the wise.
	If you are trying to tell people that you do not have associations with Russia, nor do you trust them, nor are you in their pocket, it's probably not a wise move to quote them denying the report.
	Okay, there are lots of reasons to deny the report.
	You should know whether the report is true since you are the subject of the report.
	Quoting the Russian intelligence community that just said that they don't spy on people, that's not your best tack.
	But he continues along these lines.
	Russia has never tried to use leverage over me.
	I have nothing to do with Russia, all caps.
	No deals, no loans, no nothing.
	Which may or may not be true.
	He's not releasing his tax returns as we'll get to in a minute, so we don't really know that, but let's assume it's true for a second.
	And then he tweets, and this one's correct.
	I win an election easily.
	Well, not easily.
	A great movement is verified, and crooked opponents try to belittle our victory with fake news.
	A sorry state.
	Fair.
	And then finally he finishes, intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to quote unquote leak into the public.
	I don't know if he's trying to make a P pun or if he just doesn't know how scare quotes work.
	This is one last shot at me.
	Are we living in Nazi Germany?
	No, President Trump.
	We are not living in Nazi Germany.
	President Trump, who is the President of the United States because you were elected in a presidential election as the President.
	Also, typical tactics of the Nazis did not include leaking damaging but false information to the press.
	Typical tactics of the Nazis included murdering your political opponents, imprisoning millions of people, and then systematically killing them.
	Also, invading foreign countries for no reason other than you needed some more room for Germans.
	So, no, it's not Nazi Germany.
	And again, there's just some typical good Trump, bad Trump.
	We have to break here.
	And if you want to watch the rest, and there's so much more to come, you need to stop by.
	You need to go to dailywire.com right now and become a subscriber, because the visuals on this are amazing, and you're going to want to see the tape.
	It's dailywire.com.
	$8 a month gets you a subscription.
	If you get an annual subscription, I believe that we're in the waning days of the... You get a free copy of my novel, True Allegiance, signed by me.
	If you become an annual subscriber, we have a bunch of new things that are about to come out for subscribers.
	So you want to go and get an annual subscription right now at dailywire.com.

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