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April 6, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
21:35
Ep. 281 - Susan Rice Is Under Serious Fire -- And She Should Be
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On Tuesday morning, ESPN, which has been in a losing battle to keep its subscribers, issued a new set of guidelines, recognizing the connection between sports and politics.
ESPN public editor Jim Brady acknowledged the oddity of releasing those guidelines after a presidential election, but he said, quote, we are living in unique political times, which explains the revised guidelines for discussion of political and social issues.
According to ESPN Vice President Craig Benston, he said that Trump's election was the essential factor behind the new guidelines.
The first part of the guideline is a recommitment to objective journalism.
Of course, that's not going to help much.
CNN believes the same thing, and their reporting is slanted heavily to the left.
The left's version of objectivity says that a story, once decided upon, must not be overtly political.
But this ignores selection bias, which decides which stories are important to cover in the first place.
ESPN's heavy focus on Caitlyn Jenner, for example, pushes a political agenda through selection bias as well as political bias.
ESPN does make two more important changes to their policy.
First, they say that hard news reporters and editors at the company should not make any public statements in any forum that would reveal their political biases.
That's absurd.
It doesn't solve the problem of political bias in reporting itself.
But the most important change is the encouragement of More political talk from commentators.
Quote, Mike Ditka lost his job for speaking in favor of Donald Trump and against Barack Obama on NFL Countdown.
Curt Schilling was ousted for the great sin of comparing radical Islam to Nazism.
Chris Broussard was slammed by management for expressing his religious view of homosexuality.
Brady himself has stated in the past, quote, ESPN's far leftism has certainly alienated me. ESPN's far leftism has certainly alienated me.
I used to watch ESPN religiously.
Now I can't even bear to watch it for more than 15 minutes at a stretch since it's impossible to escape the leftist propagandizing.
That's not going to change under the new rules.
Let's see ESPN hire some conservatives and let them talk, rather than ousting them the moment they disagree with the prevailing leftist orthodoxy.
Then we can talk about a freer discourse.
Until then, ESPN should shut up about politics altogether or risk watching its ratings continue to tank and subscribers continue to cut the cord.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
We have an exciting show lined up for you today.
In just a few minutes, we're going to be having on F.H.
Buckley.
F.H.
Buckley is a professor over at George Mason University School of Law, and he has a new column out in which he says that Donald Trump should pursue nationalized health care.
So we'll be talking to him about that.
Plus, we have to get to all of the developments in Syria.
We have to get to the fact that Steve Bannon is no longer on the National Security Council.
He has been and his security clearance has been revoked for the National Security Council.
And we'll talk about, obviously, the Susan Rice scandal.
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Okay, so the media continue to insist that there is nothing going on with the Susan Rice scandal.
So yesterday, because I was stuck at the airport all day, we couldn't actually do the show yesterday, but I do want to talk about the Susan Rice scandal and why it's important.
So here is the reason that the Susan Rice scandal is important.
It's important for three reasons.
So to back up, what we found out over the weekend and a little bit on Monday was that basically Susan Rice, who is the National Security Advisor under President Obama, had been requesting what they call unmasked intelligence reports, unmasked raw intelligence from the intelligence community.
In other words, there was a paragraph that would come in and it would say, Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak was talking to U.S.
Person 1 and said blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
And so she would say, okay, who is U.S.
Person 1?
I want to know the name of that person.
Well, if there is no illegal nefarious activity at play, then it really shouldn't matter who US Person 1 was, but she was specifically asking for any time there was a Trump administration official, a Trump campaign official rather, and then after his election, a Trump transition official, she was asking that all those people be unmasked.
Apparently she had a database, an Excel spreadsheet, in which she was keeping all the information about the various members of the Trump transition team and Trump campaign who had talked to foreign actors, even though there was no accusation, no evidence of wrongdoing, which is targeting.
It is targeting.
Now, It's not wiretapping because, again, this is all the stuff that the intelligence community was picking up in incidental collections, so I want to be very careful about how we discuss this so that we are factual.
It is Susan Rice sort of spying on the Trump administration in the sense that she is using a Trump filter to go through all of the information that's being gathered by the intel community, but that's not the same thing as like in the lives of others where the government says, I want you to go spy on this person.
Yeah, it's not what's going on here.
At no point did Susan Rice say, I want the intelligence community to go and tap Trump's phone, for example.
She said, if Trump's name comes up in the communications, unmask him.
Now, the reason that's a problem, it's legal to do that.
The reason it's a problem, it's an abuse of power.
If you're just keeping tabs on your political opponents so you know their next move, or you're just keeping tabs on your political opponent so that you can presumably leak it out to the press, which is what happened with Mike Flynn, the national security advisor who followed Susan Rice, If that's your purpose, then that is nefarious.
It may not be illegal.
The leaks are illegal.
The unmasking may not be illegal.
But if you unmask, and then tons of people have access to all this information, and then it leaks, that's at least partially your fault.
So it is clear at this point that the Obama administration did target the Trump team.
They didn't target them with specific wiretaps, but they did target them in reviewing the information.
They were looking at it through the lens of, what are the Trump people saying, and can we use that in any way?
As the Wall Street Journal editorial board said, Ms.
Rice would have no need, no obvious need to unmask Trump campaign officials other than political curiosity.
Also worth noting, Rice lied.
So Rice was specifically asked about whether she knew about any of the intelligence gathered on Trump.
And she said she didn't know anything about any of the intelligence gathered on Trump.
What she actually said was that she knew nothing about surveillance of the Trump team.
This also does make theories about the relations between Trump and Russia a lot more strained.
Because if she was seeing all of the raw intel, and the raw intel have been telling her something really nefarious, wouldn't that have come out already?
Wouldn't we know about that already?
Wouldn't she be out there on the Sunday show saying, listen, we know a lot of bad stuff about Trump team.
And it's going to come out eventually, which is why we need an investigation.
But she's got nothing.
And the Obama team has nothing.
And so they've got a problem on their hands because basically they were monitoring Trump and they came up with nothing.
So Susan Rice was on television yesterday and she came out and she denied that she unmasked the Trump team.
Did you seek the names of people involved in, to unmask the names of people involved in the Trump transition, the Trump campaign, people surrounding the President-elect, in order to spy on them, in order to expose them?
Absolutely not for any political purposes to spy, expose anything.
Did you leak the name of Mike Flynn?
I leaked nothing to nobody, and never have and never would.
But let me explain this.
First of all, Andrea, to talk about the contents of a classified report, to talk about the individuals on the foreign side who were the targets of the report itself, or any Americans who may have been collected upon incidentally, is to disclose classified information.
I'm not going to do that.
The allegation... Will you stop it right there?
The idea that Susan Rice would never disclose classified information.
This administration was the leakiest administration until now.
I mean, it was a super leaky administration, the Obama administration, that continuously leaked American and Israeli national security information.
They leaked national security information at an increasingly high rate as the years went on in order to push a political agenda.
The idea that nobody in the Obama administration would leak is silly.
Also, I like how Susan Rice may be telling the truth here, but I like when she says, I didn't look at any of this for political purposes.
OK, how do you define a political purpose?
So maybe she didn't leak it.
Maybe she's telling the truth.
But there's no way that it wasn't for a political purpose.
I mean, obviously, if you come up with no evidence and you're just keeping tabs on people who are coming up in the incidental surveillance and you're just asking for every update on Trump, why would you do that if it didn't have a political purpose?
Really unclear.
Rand Paul is right.
He says that we need to call Susan Rice and she needs to testify under oath.
The facts will come out with Susan Rice, but I think she ought to be under subpoena.
She should be asked, did you talk to the president about it?
Did President Obama know about this?
And he is exactly right.
Meanwhile, the media are downplaying this.
So here's the question.
Why are the media downplaying this?
You can see a selection bias on TV, right?
Selection bias exists on every network.
So CNN is now being sued on diversity grounds, I guess, and they're not covering it.
Fox News is in trouble with Bill O'Reilly because there are all these new allegations about sexual harassment by Bill O'Reilly.
They're not covering that.
Basically, a lot of the networks don't cover stuff that they don't want to cover if it doesn't help them.
So, Fox News, of course, is all up on this Susan Rice stuff, but they have not been particularly up on any of the Paul Manafort stuff.
Meanwhile, the folks on CNN are over the moon about the Paul Manafort stuff, former Trump campaign manager.
They're all over the moon about that, but they have nothing to say whatsoever when it comes to the Susan Rice stuff.
Now, two things can be true simultaneously.
It can be true that there were a bunch of people related to the Trump campaign who were suspiciously close to Russia.
It can also be true, by the way, that There's no proof of collusion.
And it can also be true that Susan Rice was inappropriately using the power of government in order to keep tabs on her political opponents.
But look how the media treat this.
They treat this, they immediately dismiss the scandal.
Then they wonder why people think there's media bias.
Don Lemon, here's Don Lemon basically dismissing this out of hand.
Uh, clip four.
The Washington Post today calls the latest claims about Susan Rice, anatomy of a fake scandal ginned up by right-wing media and Trump.
So let us be very clear about this.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the Trump team surveilled or spied on illegally.
There is no evidence that backs up the president's original claim.
And on this program tonight, we will not insult your intelligence by pretending otherwise, nor will we aid and abet the people who are trying to misinform you, the American people, by creating A diversion.
Not gonna do it.
Diversion from what?
It's a news story!
Diversion from what?
From Trump-Russia?
I mean, I understand that CNN has to devote 27 hours out of every 24 to Trump and Russia, at least when they're not covering Malaysian airliner 360 or whatever that Malaysian airliner was that Donald Trump thought was eaten by a black hole.
But this is ridiculous.
Chris Cuomo on CNN, the block of wood masquerading as a human anchor.
Here's what he had to say.
He wants you to believe he is the victim of a crooked scheme.
Those are his words.
And here are our words.
There is no evidence of any wrongdoing.
And in fact, if anything, the NSA asking for identities was a reflection of exactly how much traffic there was involving Trump people and foreign players.
The White House blasting the press for not reporting on another fake scandal.
Okay, just insane.
Okay, so he says that the reason that Susan Rice is keeping tabs is because there was so much traffic, so he turns it back against Trump that it's nefarious, but again, no proof that anything nefarious went on.
Again, demonstrating That the media have a particular agenda on all of this, and that agenda is to get Trump.
It is not to tell the truth.
We want to stop here for a second before we bring on F.H.
Buckley, Professor Buckley from the George Mason School of Law, the Scalia School of Law.
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Okay, so, do we have Professor Buckley on the line?
Okay, terrific.
Joining us now on The Ben Shapiro Show is Professor F.H.
Buckley.
He teaches at the Scalia Law School at George Mason University.
His most recent book is The Way Back, Restoring the Promise of America, and we're having Professor Buckley on because he has a new column in which he suggests that President Trump should actually pursue single-payer health care.
Professor Buckley, thanks so much for joining The Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, thanks for having me.
So let's jump right in.
So you wrote in this column that President Trump should basically ignore repealing Obamacare.
He should instead focus on the imposition of single-payer health care.
And you try to justify that on conservative grounds, which is odd because single-payer isn't really conservative.
You write that Trump said that he wanted a plan that would leave no one uninsured.
The simplest way to do this is universal health care on the Canadian model.
I actually agree that that's what Trump was promising when he said that he wanted to make sure that no one was uninsured, but he also promised hundreds of times on the campaign trail to repeal Obamacare.
Do you think that those two were in conflict?
Was he fibbing to his base or what?
I don't know if they're in conflict or not, but whether, that's a matter of verbiage, but let's just talk about whether or not something like the Canadian single-payer plan makes sense, and I think it does.
And I think it does because it, I think, would appeal to most American voters as well.
All those countries ahead of us on measures of economic freedom have something like single-payer.
So if one's worried about economic liberty in America, as one should be, it's not about single-payer.
It's about a whole bunch of other things that tend to get ignored.
Okay, so I agree with you that there are a lot of other things that tend to get ignored, but to say that single-payer healthcare is not an imposition on American freedom is just not true.
It creates massive bureaucracies.
It creates rationing, as it does in Canada.
I think that the best framework for thinking about this is that, as Dan McLaughlin in National Review said, you can have affordability, universality, and quality.
You can have two out of those three.
You can't have all three.
And universal healthcare, unless it's inordinately expensive, is not going to be particularly great quality.
But, you know, instead of arguing over the merits of universal healthcare, Well, one way of measuring quality is to ask whether or not people are satisfied with what they get.
Americans are quite dissatisfied with what they get.
Go ahead.
That's fine.
If you want to argue with that, go for it.
Well, one way of measuring quality is to ask whether or not people are satisfied with what they get.
Americans are quite dissatisfied with what they get.
The country whose citizens are most satisfied with what they get is, in fact, Canada.
I want to talk a little bit about what Professor Buckley wrote here.
He basically made the case that he was a conservative.
Professor Buckley portrays himself as a conservative, so I want to ask him the question.
But he wrote in August 2016 that Trump was actually more conservative than a lot of the conservatives who didn't support him.
And I don't want to hint at all.
I don't want to hit him while he's off the air here, but the fact is that measures of satisfaction are not a particularly good measure of whether a system is good or not.
Americans are highly satisfied with Medicaid, and there are no improved health outcomes from Medicaid.
But, Professor Buckley, I didn't want to hit you while you were off the air there, but I would just argue that the measure of satisfaction is not, in my view, a good one, because virtually everyone is satisfied with welfare systems.
It's very rare that people are dissatisfied with stuff that they think they're getting for free.
Yeah.
Well, another question to ask is, is there any movement in any of these countries to get rid of what they have?
You turn to some of the most conservative politicians around, the people in Stephen Harper's cabinet, for example, in Canada.
They wouldn't want to touch it at all.
What they would want to do is tweak it with respect to things like wait times.
You can make that better.
There are a lot of things you can do to make it better.
It's a very different kind of playing field now than it was when these things were introduced.
But in general, I think what I'm arguing against is a certain libertarian view that entitlements are the problem, and entitlements, you know what that is?
That's ordinary Americans, that's regular Americans.
It's services provided by the government, and in fact, Americans would not be satisfied with anything less than all people are covered.
I think that, you know, you cast kind of a libertarian streak as something that is out of line here.
But again, you know, I think that that's a more traditionally American view, traditionally conservative view.
So do you think it's conservative?
Let me ask you this.
Do you care about the term conservative at all when it comes to President Trump?
Because you wrote in August 2016 that President Trump was more conservative than conservatives who didn't support him.
And you talked about entitlements in that column for The New York Post.
And you said that America has, quote, a deeper kind of rot of departures from the rule of law, of corruption, of regulatory state on steroids, of a constitutional structure that lacks a reverse gear and that has given us wasteful laws that seem impossible to repeal.
I totally agree with all of that.
But if you're talking about wasteful laws that seem impossible to repeal, adding new entitlements are the definition of that.
And if you're talking about a regulatory state on steroids, then a massive new entitlement that regulates how people obtain their health care is the definition of a regulatory state on steroids.
Well, in fact, you've got all of that with respect to the present system.
You have that with respect to Medicaid, Medicare, and so on.
You also have a really perverse incentive with respect to employers who are obliged to carry insurance.
That makes them non-competitive with respect to companies in, say, Canada, which don't have that kind of burden.
So not only is it good for Americans to have something like this, but it's also a jobs creation plan.
It's really win-win.
So I have a question.
Don't get hung up on what us would have to do to shrink the state.
Well, I mean, considering that that is the vast majority of the budget, is these massive entitlement programs, it's very difficult to say that should be cut.
Unfortunately, I think we lost Professor Buckley there.
Not much we could do, bad connection.
But my big question to Professor Buckley is basically, I understand that people want Trump to remain in power, but if they think the Democrats are going to work with Trump, and they think that socialized healthcare is conservative, then why not just become a Democrat?
I mean, if the point is just we're going to create a new economic nationalism that involves adopting every socialist position, then why not just do it outright?
And that is the big question, I think, that remains.
Okay, so, in other news, we'll get to—I have a bunch of other news that I want to discuss here.
For that, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com.
We're going to be talking about this amazing Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad.
We're going to be talking about what's going on in Syria.
We're going to be talking about Bannon's ouster.
So Bannon has just been basically ousted from the National Security Council.
I'll explain why that happened and what that means and why that's a good thing.
And we'll talk about all of that.
But you have to go to dailywire.com to do that.
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