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April 6, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
19:00
Ep. 280 - A Massive Bombshell Helps Trump
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On Monday, Marvel Comics admitted what those of us who actually read comic books have known all along.
The emphasis on leftist messaging in comic books is pretty much killing the appeal.
David Gabriel is the vice president of sales at Marvel and he said that comic book retailers were reporting a drop-off in interest in the new diversity-oriented comics.
He said, quote, What we heard was that people didn't want any more diversity.
They didn't want female characters out there.
That's what we heard, whether we believe that or not.
I don't know if that's really true, but that's what we saw in sales.
Any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up.
Okay, it's not racism and sexism driving people away from Marvel.
It's a feeling of irritation that classic characters are being redrawn and recast in order to assuage the feelings of social justice warriors.
Iron Man is Tony Stark, he is not Riri Williams.
Captain America is Steve Rogers, he is not Sam Wilson.
Thor is Thor, not female Thor.
Spider-Man is Peter Parket, not Miles Morales.
This isn't to say that the comics with Miles Morales aren't good.
They're actually really good if you read them.
Although the Iron Man series with Riri Williams actually kind of sucked.
It's to say that nobody wants to see iconic superheroes recast as completely different people to appease quotas on race and sex.
Superheroes are brands.
You can't twist those brands without hurting them.
When it comes to new superheroes, people are always skeptical, so this poses something of a challenge.
How do you better reflect diversity in comics without tanking sales, if that's something you want to do?
The answer?
You have to make new characters awesome, then worry about whether they're diverse later.
Or, use a historic character to infuse new life.
So Marvel did the latter.
With Black Panther, they hired Ta-Nehisi Coates to write the comic, which immediately became a big bestseller for them this year.
The comic, by the way, is actually unreadably bad, but at least Marvel tried doing diversity the right way here.
In the DC Universe, Harley Quinn, who was a marginal character 20 years ago, is now a major bestseller because she's interesting, not because Batman had to become Batwoman.
But the comic book industry keeps attempting to slam its constituents over the head with social justice messaging.
And that's actually killing the quality of comics.
See, for example, Batman, Advocate for Trayvon Martin, or Captain America, Illegal Immigration Defender, both of which happened last year.
Turning iconic characters into avatars of social justice actually kills sales.
It's throwback comics doing most of the heavy lifting at this point.
Marvel and DC should take note that it's not American racism driving that choice.
It's Americans' discontent with the left's willingness to sacrifice quality, and legacy for leftist politics.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All right, so we're gonna get to the big breaking news that is happening right now in just a second.
Something that is really bad for the Obama administration and pretty good for Team Trump.
We'll get to that in just a second.
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It actually broke a little bit over the weekend, but now it's been confirmed from Eli Lake at Bloomberg.
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Okay, so the big story of the morning was late breaking.
It actually broke a little bit over the weekend, but now it's been confirmed from Eli Lake at Bloomberg.
So originally it was broken with Mike Cernovich.
For some reason, the White House is now funneling stories to Mike Cernovich, which makes very little sense because he has very little credibility.
But Eli Lake then confirmed it, and so did Maggie Haberman over at the New York Times.
They actually did the legwork.
So, Eli Lake of Bloomberg has now reported that Barack Obama's National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, Repeatedly, requested information from the intel community on members of the Trump transition team and campaign, unmasking them to an audience beyond the intel community in the process.
Now normally, when you get a raw intel feed, and you're a member of the political branches, they basically black out all of the people who are American citizens caught up in the intel.
So let's say you're listening to the Russian embassy.
And they are talking to Mike Flynn.
The intel, when it is provided to people like Susan Rice, will say, Russian ambassador was talking to U.S.
Citizen One.
Right?
It'll just black it out, because it's not important if there's no crime being committed for people to know who this is, because they're afraid of exactly this sort of thing.
The whole point of masking is to prevent the dissemination of information about innocent Americans who are not actually doing anything criminal.
So, what happened is that apparently, according to Lake, in February, the National Security Council Senior Director for Intelligence, Elliot Cohen Watnick, discovered Rice's multiple requests to unmask U.S.
persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities.
He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel's Office, who reviewed more of Rice's requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.
The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations, primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also, in some cases, direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials.
One U.S.
official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition, such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters, and plans for the incoming administration.
Now just last month Susan Rice was on TV and she denied she knew anything About members of the Trump transition team being caught up in incidental intelligence gathering.
That now appears to be a lie.
As Eli Lake also points out, the revelation that Rice requested the documents would also help explain why House Intel Chair Devin Nunes went to the White House a couple of weeks ago.
Because he could only see the logs of what Rice was doing, not from Congress.
He actually had to go to the White House to do that because that's where she used to work.
It would also explain why Adam Schiff, the Democrat on the House Intel Committee, basically has now gone silent over the weekend after seeing those documents at the White House.
This is a huge story for the Trump White House.
Now, does it mean that Trump was right to say that he was wiretapped by the Obama administration?
No, there's still no evidence that he was wiretapped by the Obama administration.
There is, however, tremendous evidence now, and it is building day by day, that the Obama administration was seeking to compile all of the intelligence information in which the Trump team was incidentally swept up, and then disseminated it broadly, which led to it being leaked.
That is a scandal.
That is the Obama administration targeting Trump team officials.
That is the Obama administration, without any sort of evidence of nefarious activity, targeting the Trump team.
They're not doing it specifically by saying we're going to plant a wire in Trump's office, which is the next step, but it is them saying we have a higher level of suspicion and we're going to unmask Trump team members in the process, which is truly a big story.
It's a really big story, actually.
And the media have been ignoring that story in favor of focusing in on Team Trump, which is really silly.
Because again, we have no evidence on Trump-Russia.
We have no evidence that Obama wiretapped Trump.
What we do have evidence of, again, and I'm being very specific about this because I want to be truthful and I want to be clear.
I, unlike so many others in this field, I actually care about what is true and what the facts are.
As opposed to what backs a particular narrative.
So Trump's narrative that Obama was wiretapping him or surveilling him, that is not true.
He was not being wiretapped or surveilled in targeted fashion.
He was being targeted, in targeted fashion, by Susan Rice, according to this report, the National Security Advisor under Obama, who is always the fall person, right?
She's always the person they trot out to do the dirty work because she's an Obama loyalist.
She was, in fact, unmasking all of the Trump team officials by going to the intel community and requesting raw intelligence be provided to her And then disseminating that apparently broadly, it was widely dispersed across the government.
That meant lots of people knew that Mike Flynn was talking.
That's number one.
to Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, which of course led to Flynn's resignation eventually.
And all of this on the basis of nothing.
Because there's still two questions that haven't been answered.
One, what exactly did anybody do wrong?
I haven't seen the Trump team actually do anything wrong at this point.
It looks like all the stuff that Flynn did that was nasty and terrible, he was doing two years ago.
He wasn't doing well.
He was a member of the Trump team.
That's number one.
And then number two, if Team Trump knew about this, and apparently the White House General Counsel's office knew about it, Why didn't they just declassify this information and blow it out there?
Why instead try to get it to Nunes?
Why instead try to funnel it through House Intel?
Maybe the idea here is that they knew that they had their trust compromised with the American people?
And that if they trotted this out, everybody would accuse them of bias, so instead they tried to funnel it out through the House Intelligence Committee?
Maybe that's what's going on?
But that's a question that has yet to be answered.
And then, of course, the last question is a small one, but an annoying one, which is, why in the world is the Trump administration trying to leak information to places like InfoWars and ZeroHedge and Cernovich?
ZeroHedge is actually much better than InfoWars and Cernovich.
Why are they using them as the outlets, as opposed to, you know, if you're gonna leak, then leak to outlets that have a higher level of public trust.
I mean, forget about what I think of those outlets.
Those are not outlets with a high level of public trust.
If you're gonna leak, leak to somebody like Eli Lake, who actually has a level of public trust.
Well, all of this is leading the Democrats to sheer panic, because they do not actually have anything here.
It's kind of fascinating.
The left keeps focusing in on Trump-Russia, and Adam Schiff, Representative Schiff, he basically admitted, we've got nothing.
I mean, there's no hard evidence linking Trump to Russian collusion.
Whether or not there was collusion among members of the Trump campaign or surrounding the Trump campaign, Trump advisors, can you say definitively that there was collusion?
There were people affiliated with the Trump campaign who were working with Russians to time the release of damaging information about Hillary Clinton that had been hacked either from John Podesta or the DNC?
I don't think we can say anything definitively at this point.
We are still at the very early stage of the investigation.
The only thing I can say is that it would be irresponsible for us not to get to the bottom of this.
We really need to find out exactly what the Russians did, because one of the most important conclusions that the intelligence community reached is that they are going to do this again to the United States.
They're doing it already in Europe.
So we can say, you know, conclusively, this is something that needs to be thoroughly investigated, but it's way premature to be reaching conclusions.
And basically there he's saying, no, we don't have any evidence of this whatsoever, so what exactly are you going to do about it?
I mean, the left has nothing here.
They have nothing here.
And Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who's been bashed around a lot for not being a particularly great surrogate, she's exactly right when she says the media are talking about something of which there is very little evidence at this point.
The media constantly wants to talk about something that doesn't exist instead of something that does.
We have spent the last couple of months doing major policy initiatives and rollouts in the forms of executive order, rolling back regulations, creating an environment where businesses are confident in hiring again.
We've heard from CEO after CEO, small business owner, that they're excited about this president.
They're excited about the economy.
And yet the media refuses to cover that.
But they're more than happy to talk about a story, frankly, that is just fake.
So in any case, the Democrats are panicking over all of this.
And so their language is becoming more and more extreme, excuse me, on all of this.
So you have the Newark mayor who's now coming out and he's trying to say that Trump is like a slave catcher, right?
They're just getting more and more extreme because they're panicking, which is weird.
They shouldn't be panicking.
Trump's approval ratings are like 35% right now, but By the same token, there's nothing that they've got on Trump that's hard evidence.
They actually, this is the thing, they're not content to live with Trump being an unpopular president.
Instead, they are trying to go for the kill shot, and they don't have the kill shot, so they're becoming more desperate.
So here are the Democrats struggling.
Here's Newark's mayor saying that Trump is basically like a fugitive slave catcher.
Well, I think that them targeting sanctuary cities is a way for them to tell mayors and other folks around the country, one, that they're sticking to what I think is a very unconstitutional and un-American policy, and trying to intimidate us into being what I've called and trying to intimidate us into being what I've called fugitive slave catchers, the run around and do their bidding in our cities.
And if we refuse to do that, then it makes it difficult for them to continue their policy because they don't have the resources The desperation is setting in.
That is pathetic, okay?
The fact is that illegal immigrants are not slaves in the United States who are attempting to escape bondage, which is against both God's law and man's law, okay?
The idea that people who are coming into the country illegally and we don't know who they are, that you shouldn't be helping out the feds to figure out who they are...
That's just absurd.
But this is the, this is the language that is escalating now.
The Democrats think that because Trump won, their answer is to escalate their language.
They don't understand that the reason that Trump won, I just spent some time in Pennsylvania, and I just spent some time in Indiana, and I just spent, I'm spending time now in Florida.
The reason that Trump won is because there was a whole group of people in America who feel like they were forgotten by the Democrats because the Democrats were too focused on inflammatory language dividing American from American.
To worry about their jobs, to worry about their lives.
That's the reason why Trump won.
But the Democrats are thinking, they're looking at Trump and instead of seeing that Trump appealed to a certain number of people who felt forgotten by the Democrats, instead they think that Trump won because Trump was loud.
And so they're just getting louder.
So here's Nancy Pelosi getting even louder and more obnoxious.
Well, it's always been Paul Ryan's agenda.
If you look at the Ryan budget of the last couple of congresses before now, you will see that the agenda... When did Donald Trump sign on to that?
I think when he decided to become the nominee of the party.
Bought into the deconstruction of government, the radical right-wing agenda.
I don't even know if Donald Trump will go as far as the Republicans in Congress.
People say, well how long will it take for the Republicans in Congress to say enough Donald Trump?
I said don't wait for that because their agenda is very similar to his.
If you look at their budget over the last few years, if you look at their Opposition to anything to do with the environment, climate change, and the rest.
If you look at their anti-woman agenda, LGBT agenda, you name it, they've been there.
Okay, so, again, getting more and more extreme in the rhetoric.
Now, what this may help them do, what this may help them do is win back the House.
So, Nancy Pelosi did this in the aftermath of Bush winning in 2004.
After 2004, she got more and more extreme.
And right now, Trump is cruising for a bruising in the House.
He's probably going to keep the Senate because there are too many Democratic seats up for play.
But in 2018, the House races do not look good for Republicans.
Right now, when the president of the United States is below 40%, the chances that he's going to retain the House become lower and lower.
But again, the Democrats are just going to get more extreme in their language.
That's not going to help defeat Trump.
It is going to help drive his approval ratings down.
Tom Perez did the same thing.
He's the chair of the DNC.
We'll play him in just a second.
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Okay, so Tom Perez is the head of the DNC and he, like Nancy Pelosi, like this Newark mayor, he thinks that the way Democrats are gonna win is by mirroring Trump's rhetoric rather than mirroring Trump's positioning with regard to blue-collar workers.
So here's Tom Perez ranting about the GOP.
January 20th was undeniably an important day in this country, but January 21st was far more important.
We want the American people, especially women.
Yay!
What's up?
Happy Washington!
Happy Washington!
March in Los Angeles.
March in Topeka.
March in Paris.
March all over the world and say, Donald Trump, you don't stand for our values.
That's what they said.
Donald Trump, you didn't win this election.
And then he starts cursing as well.
Now a lot of people on the right have been saying, oh, how dare he curse.
Donald Trump's the president.
We don't get to say how dare he curse anymore.
Okay, that cat is long out of the bag.
But it does demonstrate that the Democrats, as always, take exactly the wrong lessons out of their loss.
Instead of figuring out that they need to appeal to the same people that Trump won away from the Obama acolyte, they instead have decided to double down on his sort of rhetoric.
As we continue here, I want to talk about Donald Trump's credibility, what Donald Trump is doing right, what Donald Trump is doing wrong, and now what an opportunity he has and how he needs to push it forward.
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