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April 20, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
23:27
Ep. 287 - Is America On The Verge Of A Mental Breakdown?
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One of the more irritating leftist tropes to emerge in the last year has been the rise of Fearless Girl, a hedge fund-sponsored bronze statue of a small girl standing defiantly in front of the Wall Street Bull, which would presumably trample her to death if both figures were real.
Now, Democratic politician after Democratic politician has come forward to pay homage to this bronze calf.
First, it was New York Mayor Bill de Blasio who criticized Wall Street, the same Wall Street that erected the annoyingly stupid icon.
Now it's Senator Elizabeth Warren, who took a break from writing shrimp recipes for Native American cookbooks to demonstrate that she, too, cares about metal effigies erected by disproportionately male investment firms.
And, you know, the picture's pretty amazing.
She did persist in irritating the rest of us.
Warren, of course, has been one of the lead Democratic voices in favor of so-called pay equality between men and women, ignoring all statistical evidence that the pay gap does not actually exist when all relevant factors are taken into account.
Worth noting, Warren's female staffers earned 71% less than her male staffers did last year.
Only one of Warren's top staffers earns more than $100,000 and was female.
But this is all virtue signaling, of course.
The notion is that if you don't stand in solidarity with a little girl against a giant bull, you must hate women and children.
Somebody ought to inform Warren and other leftists that the little girl was once an unborn little girl, and Warren would then, presumably, stand with the bull.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Alrighty, tons to get to today.
Lots of foreign policy news.
I feel like every time I take off a couple of days, the world just reaches a new level of chaos, and so it is and so it shall be.
Plus, in just a few minutes, we're going to be having on Lauren Southern, who, of course, a well-known right-wing commentator from Canada, and she was at the Berkeley riots again.
Berkeley does not seem like a nice place.
All these friendly hippies are not that friendly, and so we'll talk about that.
Starting to look like the Weimar Republic out there.
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Okay, so.
Lots going on in the world.
Among the things that are going on in the world, the Trump administration continues to kind of futz around on foreign policy and we'll talk about that.
But first I want to talk about the fallout that happened from this election in the Georgia 6th District last night.
So Georgia 6th District is a district that I think Trump won by a relatively small margin.
He won it by 1.5 or 2 percent because there's been some redistricting there.
There has been some significant movement in that district over time.
Four years ago, Barack Obama lost that district by 23% to Mitt Romney.
So, this particular district, last night, there was a runoff because Tom Price was the representative from that district, and now Tom Price is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
So, his name is John Ossoff, he's a Democrat, he doesn't even live in the district, and he ran against a slew of Republicans, I think there were 11 Republicans, And the idea was that if he crosses 50% in this original election, then he wins the seat outright.
If he doesn't cross 50%, there's a runoff.
If there's a runoff, he likely loses because it's a heavier Republican district.
So, Democrats poured a crap load of money into this district.
They poured $8.3 million into this local special election, trying to demonstrate that they were going to fight back against the Trump administration, and that was a giant fail.
So, the candidate, John Ossoff, won about the same percentage in the district as Hillary Clinton won in the district.
He came up just short.
One of the reasons he came up just short is because he doesn't actually live in the district and that came out a couple of days before the actual election.
Now that's not illegal, but obviously most people who vote for their congressperson like to know the person actually lives where they represent.
There was an Ossoff yesterday trying to explain why he doesn't live in the home district.
Well, I grew up in this district.
I grew up in this community.
It's my home.
My family is still there.
I'm a mile and a half down the street to support Alicia while she finishes medical school.
It's something I've been very transparent about.
In fact, I'm proud to be supporting her career.
And as soon as she finishes her medical training, I'll be ten minutes back up the road into the district where I grew up.
Okay, so that explanation did not really do a lot for him.
He's not going to win the general election in all likelihood because, again, now all the Republican votes are going to consolidate.
He won, I think, 46%, 47% of the vote last night.
All of that Republican support is going to now rally around a woman I actually know pretty well, Karen Handel, who used to be an executive at Komen for the cure, the anti-cancer institute.
She has been the Georgia Secretary of State before.
She ran unsuccessfully for governor in the past.
Really nice lady.
Very, very quality politician.
She's not somebody who gets enthusiasm up high, but she will do the work that she needs to do and she'll probably win.
That's why Ossoff yesterday, after he did not win outright, he was out there touting it as a victory for the ages.
The entire Democratic Party is now trying to overstate how big a victory this was for them because he didn't win.
So now they're trying to say that he just blew it out of the water and this is just what's to come under Trump, that the Democrats are going to win back the House.
Here is Ossoff overstating his case.
There is no doubt that this is already a victory for the ages.
Thermopylae or what?
I mean, victory for the ages.
Let's not overstate the case, dude.
You couldn't win an election in which there were a combined, looks like, less than 200,000 votes.
I'm gonna go with that's not a victory for the ages, especially if you don't end up with the congressional seats.
Most of the people who talk about moral victories are losers.
If you're talking about moral victory, it's because you didn't win.
So, there are some troubling signs for Republicans here.
The most troubling sign for Republicans in the Georgia 6th, to be accurate, is that the Democratic turnout was down from the general election cycle, but it wasn't down nearly as much as it was down among Republicans.
So, if you look at the Georgia 6th or the Kansas 4th, the Kansas 4th district was another case where there was a special election, Republicans won that one too, but the Democratic turnout was down 25%, From the Hillary election in this district in the special election, the Republican turnout was down 51% from the last election cycle in this election.
So in other words, twice as many Republicans as Democrats by percentage dropped out of this election cycle.
And that's not going to bode well for midterms because obviously Democrats are going to be more geared up for all of this.
It's a little early to say that this just demonstrates that Trump is not hurting people down ballot.
In fact, The number of candidates who ran in this Georgia 6th district, the people who are more closely tied with Trump, there is a heavy correlation between being closely tied with Trump and not doing particularly well in this election cycle.
But it's not clear what's going to happen in 2018 based on this.
Democrats raised an enormous amount of money, as I said.
They put forward a huge, huge amount of cash in this election and they still weren't able to get this guy over the top.
You know, it's going to be a good Democratic year, but is it going to be a good enough Democratic year to put them over the top?
I don't know that that's the case.
And the media, in search of some sort of victory, are, of course, overstating this dramatically.
Don Lemon, CNN, he says that John Ossoff, you just saw him, John Ossoff, he looks like, he looks like the guy from Ferris Bueller, who's not Ferris Bueller, the guy who drives his dad's Porsche out the window.
Don Lemon says he sounds like Obama.
So that was John Ossoff in a very tight race down in Atlanta.
He's projecting that it's going to be a runoff.
Am I the only one who said he sounded like Barack Obama?
No?
Did that sound like Barack Obama?
Yes, he did.
He's 30 years old.
He figured it worked for him.
Yes, we can, John Ossoff.
Yes, we can.
Everybody on CNN celebratory after not getting what they want here.
It is amazing that he raised that much money.
And again, he raised that much money and it still didn't help him.
That looks a lot like what happened with Hillary Clinton who raised an enormous amount of money and it didn't help her against Trump.
But there are some warning signs for Republicans and Republicans would be wise to pay attention to those warning signs.
Now meanwhile, Over the weekend, I didn't have a chance to discuss it, obviously, because it was Passover, but over the weekend there was this riot that occurred in Berkeley.
Basically, there was a pro-Trump rally in Berkeley.
The only reason to have a pro-Trump rally in Berkeley is to stick it to the left in Berkeley, obviously.
And a bunch of anti-Trump Antifa characters, these are the people who consider themselves anti-fascist, There's nothing more fascist than showing up to an opposing rally and then wailing on people and beating the living crap out of them.
It's actually pretty reminiscent of the Weimar Republic where the Reds and the Browns were beating the living crap out of each other and that actually led to the rise of a more dictatorial authoritarian government.
That's usually what happens when there's chaos.
People want more authority in order to tamp down on chaos because nobody wants to see this in their streets.
Apparently the cops were sitting by and doing nothing as all of this continued.
Here's a little bit of the footage from what was happening during this bloody battle basically.
I think you can see people beating each other with sticks.
You can see that they're really going at each other, really hitting each other, people punching each other, running in, duking it out.
There are pictures of people who are super bloodied, There are pictures of people who have been hit across the face.
And it wasn't the Trump people who started this.
It wasn't the Trump people who went there looking to fight it out with Antifa.
You can always tell who the bad guys are.
Now they're stomping on a guy.
Look at this.
It's disgusting.
Hitting people with skateboards.
Really horrifying.
You can always tell who the bad guys are in these situations.
The people who are wearing the masks are the bad guys.
If you feel the need to wear a mask, Because you're afraid that people are going to pay attention to you, see who you are, and arrest you.
Then you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
This was a free speech rally, so people were doing this in order to demonstrate that they would stand up against the Antifa group.
And the Antifa people showed up and they were beating people.
One of the people there pulled not only a skateboard but then pulled a knife.
Apparently somebody was stabbed.
I mean, just egregious, egregious stuff.
And where are the cops for all of this?
Why are the cops allowing all of this stuff to go ahead?
Nobody knows.
Where is the mayor?
I mean, this is now the second time that this has happened in Berkeley in a relative span of months.
Actually, it's the third time, if I remember correctly.
There's a rally that broke into violence here.
There's one that broke into violence in Sacramento at the Capitol in California.
And then there was, of course, the riot that broke out when Milo Yiannopoulos went to speak over there.
Well, joining us on the program right now is Lauren Southern.
Lauren Southern was there.
She, of course, is well known on Twitter and on YouTube.
Canadian conservative libertarian political commentator and provocateur.
She's the author of the book, Barbarians, How Baby Boomers, Immigrants, and Islam Screwed My Generation.
You can follow her on Twitter, at Lauren underscore Southern, or on YouTube, as Lauren Southern.
Lauren, thanks so much for joining the show.
I appreciate it.
Hi, Ben.
Thanks for having me.
So, Lauren, can you give me some details?
Because I'm just seeing sort of the secondhand coverage.
Obviously, you were there.
So, what exactly went down?
Yeah, for sure.
Every time there's been a pro-Trump, pro-free speech right-wing event in Berkeley, it has been shut down by militant leftists.
And the people there are just so sick and tired of it.
So they said, no more.
We're not going to live in a world in Berkeley where we cannot have a certain political idea without fear of being physically injured.
So they had an even bigger rally this time.
And the police assured myself and the organizers that there would be an impressive presence there, that the left wouldn't be able to shut it down this time.
But it was under one condition that the police would be there, that everyone that went into this protected zone by the police disarmed, that we didn't have any sticks, any bear mace, any pepper spray.
So all the Trump supporters went into this kind of They put up a little mesh orange fence around an area where we were going to have the free speech event, and then Antifa showed up and started surrounding the place around a bunch of disarmed people, but we were like, you know what?
It's going to be fine.
The cops are here.
We're good.
Then Antifa starts throwing M-80s, little explosives and fireworks.
And suddenly...
Boom.
The cops were gone.
They'd gotten stand-down orders, and we were left in the center of this area, surrounded by Antifa, totally disarmed, and things just turned into chaos.
It was fists flying everywhere.
That's absolutely insane.
And did you ever get an explanation from the police as to who actually ordered the stand-down?
Right.
Well, that's the interesting bit.
I was really frustrated during it and I was like, I can't believe the cops did that.
But another journalist went up to the cops and asked them, why are you standing down?
And one of the guys sitting in the front seat said, well, that would be a question for our boss, wouldn't it?
And he looked really mad.
So it wasn't the individual cops.
It was someone from higher up for sure.
And that's pretty typical.
I mean, even when I speak at college campuses and the cops get stand-down orders, it's never the cops.
It's always the people who are in charge of the cops telling them they need to stand down on this sort of thing.
So, for people who don't know what Antifa is, you've obviously now had dealings with them.
What are Antifa, what do they think they're doing, and why are they doing it?
They are the anti-fascists.
They actually come from a wing of the German Communist Party, and they're a militant group that believe by any means possible, anything that can remotely be perceived as right wing, anything to the right of Marx basically has to be shut down violently.
And they use a tactic called black bloc where they cover all of their faces so that they can commit crimes because the cops can't know who did it.
And one of the big tactics they used during this one was they would grab individuals from this crowd and they pull them to the back and start beating the crap out of them.
So their tactics are always cover their face to commit crimes and 10 people versus one.
And it's really kind of it's really scary going against them because they have zero morals, zero.
Zero whatsoever.
They're hurtling bricks and giant rocks into the crowd.
Literal attempted murder.
Would have killed someone if it hit them in the face.
Were there any arrests at this thing or literally it just sort of ended and everybody went home?
At the beginning, there were a couple arrests of Antifa that were trying to go over the mesh and, I guess, Trump supporters that were trying to fight back.
So there were a few at the beginning.
And after the fact, when the police had just disappeared, they looked at a few of the videos and made a couple arrests.
I think there were Eleven or twelve arrests in total?
So one of the things that's horrifying about all this is that if you look at the media coverage of it, they treat it as though it's just sort of spontaneous chaos that erupts between the two sides, as though nobody actually launched the chaos in the same way that when Milo went to speak at Berkeley and then the Antifa people showed up and tried to burn down buildings basically, that that was an equal distribution of blame.
That it was half Milo's fault and half the protesters' fault.
And here it's half the Trump people's fault.
If the Trump people hadn't been there being so provocative, then it wouldn't have been up to the Antifa people to hit them.
What do you make of all the media coverage?
BBC actually uploaded one of those little short videos to Facebook where they spliced together the tax protests and this Berkeley protest and wrote that Trump supporters showed up to the tax protest and started attacking the anti-Trump protesters.
That's exactly what they did.
After I called them out on Twitter, they've made a few edits to the Facebook post.
That was the coverage, just complete and utter lies.
It's beyond fake news.
It's deliberately lying to people, and they knew what they were doing.
So, it's horrifying the state of media.
I couldn't believe the coverage after the fact.
Yeah, I mean, we saw that obviously throughout the campaign.
We kept hearing that it was Trump who was pushing violence at his rallies, but then it would be It would be protesters from Black Lives Matter shutting down an actual Trump rally in Chicago or protesters from the left beating the crap out of Trump supporters in San Jose.
It is amazing how the media is able to flip this on its head.
So are you guys planning any more of these events?
And if you do plan these events in the future, how can you do that knowing that You know, if anybody from the pro-Trump side or the pro-free speech side, because it doesn't matter if you like Trump or not, it's really more of a free speech issue.
From the pro-free speech side, if anybody shows up with a weapon, you'll probably immediately be arrested, but if anybody from the left shows up with a weapon, then they probably get off scot-free.
Well, Ann Coulter is supposed to be speaking on the 27th.
I can't get too much into it, but I think there's some troubles already with that event, with Berkeley trying to shut it down.
And this is the thing.
We're at the point where we have to defend ourselves.
I don't like to see that the state of political discourse in 2017 is fists and mace instead of signs and bullhorns.
But that's the reality is that we have to defend ourselves I can't blame the Trump supporters for punching back or the free speech activists for punching back because the cops are gone So I think this is going to continue to escalate until the police stop getting stand-down orders in Berkeley.
So what do you think is?
Just a final question here.
How much of this do you think are the students at Berkeley and how much is it this outside group Antifa?
Because there's a lot of talk about that with Milo speaking there, that it wasn't really a bunch of the, it wasn't really a bunch of lefties from Berkeley.
It was really this Antifa group that was coming from outside, infiltrating and then making trouble here.
It looks like a bunch of Antifa people.
And I spoke at Berkeley two years ago.
It was not a problem at all.
Obviously Milo speaks there as a riot.
Ann Coulter is going to speak there.
There probably will be a riot.
I think it's because Antifa was not a presence when I was there a couple of years ago, and it seems like a pretty recent development, but how much of this do you think is organic, and how much of this is astroturfed?
Well, I will say, I went for a walk around the area before the event, and everywhere in Berkeley, the whole damn city is covered in spray paint that says Antifa Zone.
And that could be people that have come in.
There were definitely people that were brought in from different areas to fight, like the one girl who got decked in the face.
She drove down from quite a while to be there.
But it's definitely been, over the past two years, I would say, these kids also in university have been Radicalized more and more and more over the media, saying all right-wingers are Nazis.
Of course they want to fight and stop Nazism.
When they've watched Indiana Jones and Glorious Bastards, they want to get their 100 Nazi scalps, right?
And they've truly been convinced this last year that Trump supporters and free speech activists are Nazis.
So it's a mix between people coming down and between young people being radicalized over this past year.
Lauren Southern, thanks so much for doing what you're doing.
Lauren Southern, you can follow her at Lauren Southern on Twitter.
It's Lauren underscore Southern, or on YouTube as Lauren Southern.
She does terrific work.
Lauren, thanks so much for joining the show.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
Okay, so before we continue with the analysis of what Trump is doing on foreign policy, and it's a real mixed bag there.
There's a bunch of stuff happening on foreign policy that demonstrate continued divided mind among the members of the Trump administration.
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Okay, so meanwhile, on foreign policy, there's a lot of chaos going on all over the world.
And I want to take it kind of area by area because there's a lot of lack of clarity out there on everything from North Korea to Turkey to Iran.
So big story of the day is that the Trump administration has now stated that Iran is abiding by its commitments under the Obama nuclear deal.
This is just a terrible move by the Trump administration.
It is asinine to suggest that everything is hunky-dory with regard to Iran.
That Iran is doing everything that it can to abide by the nuclear deal.
They obviously are not.
There have been multiple reports Then not only are they violating it with regard to attempting to buy certain types of uranium on the open market, but also they have been violating the nuclear deal by test firing ballistic missiles.
They've been doing that repeatedly since November.
And yet, this is from Rex Tillerson, he says, The U.S. Department of State certified to U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan today that Iran is compliant through April 18th with its commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
However, the Secretary also raised concerns about Iran's role as a state sponsor of terrorism and alerted Congress to an effort directed by the President to evaluate whether continuing to lift sanctions would be in U.S. national security interests.
They're trying to split the baby, saying everything is hunky-dory under the deal.
The easiest thing to do would be to say they're not complying with the deal.
Therefore, the sanctions are back on the table.
They immediately snap back and we're done here.
This deal is a crap deal.
There's no reason why we should be involved this way.
But I think there's a split inside the Trump administration.
They don't want to start some sort of firefight politically with Iran.
They are obviously divided on what to do about Iran because Iran is sponsoring Assad and they're divided about what to do about Assad.
They're not sure that Iran is not a solidifying influence in Iraq.
This is always my fear about Trumpian foreign policy is that it's just so vague and so all over the place that it opens the door to the continued growth of evil regimes like Iran.
But that's not the only problem with Trump foreign policy that's cropped up this week.
I want to talk about Turkey and North Korea, but we'll do that If you go and subscribe.
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