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April 21, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
23:56
Ep. 288 - O'Reilly's Out -- What Does It Mean For The Right?
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With the release of Jonathan Allen's and Amy Parnes' Shattered inside Hillary Clinton's doomed campaign, the patina of credibility surrounding Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has finally imploded.
We know that her campaign was plagued by infighting, stupidity, and arrogance.
We know that all of this meant she couldn't unify Democrats during the primaries, and she couldn't unify Democrats even after the primaries.
We know that she didn't take the most rudimentary polling data in swing states for weeks before the election.
And we know she had no centralizing message to her campaign.
Yet today, Democrats who worked on Hillary's campaign were concerned with demonstrating that everybody on the campaign got along famously.
Famously, do you hear?
Never mind that Hillary lost the most winnable election in history against Donald Trump.
Donald Trump.
No, everything was hunky-dory.
So, like moths to the Twitter flame, Hillary staffers emerged to show the mutual love from the campaign trail.
Yep, look at all these happy people with Hillary.
They love each other, ah!
Look at this.
Oh, it's so nice.
Everybody's so happy while she's losing to Donald Trump.
Yeah.
See, people sometimes mounted each other.
Like they liked each other and everything.
They had an awesome time while losing to Donald Trump, you guys.
Because as we know, pictures always demonstrate that people love each other and are not engaged in dysfunctional relationships that end in disaster.
Right?
Like Stalin and all those people and O.J.
and Nicole and the Menendez brothers and Yoko Ono and the Beatles and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Well, oh well, so much for that.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
They got nothing, gang.
I mean, really.
Hillary's campaign was a complete disaster.
It was a complete cluster f. And the reason that was is because the person at the top didn't know what she was doing.
But we'll get to all of that.
Plus, I want to get to Bill O'Reilly being ousted from Fox News.
What does that mean?
There are a bunch of lessons to be learned from that particular one.
Plus, a little bit later in the program, we're going to be having on Bass Stickman.
That's Kyle Chapman who became famous because he whacked somebody with a stick during a March 2017 rally for Donald Trump in which Antifa attacked and he defended.
So we'll be talking with him in just a little while about the goings-on, the latest goings-on at Berkeley and Ann Coulter and everything else.
But first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at MyPatriotSupply.
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Okay, so.
Big story of the day remains the ouster of Bill O'Reilly at Fox News.
So the biggest host in the history of Fox News is now out on his rear, and that is an amazing thing.
I mean, it's obviously a sort of earth-shattering move when it comes to the media.
And there's a reason why this happened, and that is that all of these women were coming forward and telling stories about how Bill O'Reilly was hitting on them.
They were all coming forward and saying that Bill O'Reilly had tried to solicit them for sex, and then when they had not given in, then he had refused to help them with their careers, that basically he held out the carrot of, I'll help you with your career if you have sex with me, and then he had backed off of that the minute that they wouldn't.
Or he had called them up on the phone and said dirty things to them.
All of this is bad stuff, and he had settled out apparently many, many times, and Fox News had settled out many, many times.
They did an internal review of all of O'Reilly's supposed escapades, and they had Paul Weiss, which is a major law firm, do the internal review, and apparently there was a split in the Murdoch family.
Rupert wanted to keep Bill O'Reilly, and the Sons wanted to get rid of Bill O'Reilly because they thought that he was a liability.
Now, a lot of advertisers had dropped out, and this, I think, is the first thing to say.
The first thing to say is that there is a real tendency on the right to run from people because they've lost their advertisers.
And the left knows this, and that's why Media Matters has been used for years as the tip of the spear in fighting the right-wing media.
When we were at Truth Revolt, we tried to apply the same tactics to MSNBC, and we were actually successful.
We wanted to establish a mutually assured destruction.
Here is my view.
Advertisers should generally not be boycotted based on the shows upon which they advertise.
I think secondary boycotts are generally not a good thing.
I think they create a less free culture in America.
It's not a legal thing, but it is a culture thing.
If the idea is you don't like Bill O'Reilly and so you're going to boycott his advertisers, then you are effectively cracking down on a certain amount of free speech.
Not that you can't do it legally.
Not that it's not, in some cases, moral to do it.
But as a general rule, this kind of ease with which we do this now, where we call up advertisers and say that we're going to boycott your company unless you pull advertising from a particular show.
This is how the left really slammed Rush Limbaugh after the Sandra Fluck incident.
This is how the left has gone after people like Michael Savage.
The left has also gone after, obviously, now Bill O'Reilly.
So Media Matters basically astroturfed 500 or 1,000 people to call up the advertisers on Fox News and say, we don't want to see your We don't want to see your commercial on Bill O'Reilly, or we're going to pull all the money.
They've done this to Glenn Beck as well.
Basically, if you're anybody on the right and you've reached a certain level of notoriety, the left will at some point attempt to go after your advertisers, which is really nasty stuff, and advertisers should know going forward that this stuff happens, that there is astroturfed attempts to destroy particular hosts because the left wants to destroy the host, not because the advertisers are really in any danger.
Usually if 500 people sort of in in the advertising industry They don't want controversy and they are not interested in having 500 people call their headquarters And so the easiest thing to do is just pull your ad and put it someplace else where you can get an equal number of eyeballs But it would be great to see advertisers actually do a little bit of deeper digging and see whether it's Media Matters creating a list serve that they send out to 100,000 people and then 500 of them call, or whether it's actually 500 potential clients of the advertiser who have decided they're really, really angry, whether there's really widespread outrage over all of this.
So that's point number one, is that just because boycotting on O'Reilly worked doesn't mean that boycotting in general is a good tactic or a worthwhile tactic or a useful tactic, particularly with mainstream commentators of either side.
I think that's sort of a problem.
The second point here is the O'Reilly-specific points.
That one's not specific to O'Reilly, because this happens, as I say, to a lot of conservative hosts from time to time in their career, which is why, for example, you will see And the right doesn't engage in this.
The right will not boycott advertisers because they advertise on Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow.
The left will boycott advertisers, or at least say they're going to boycott advertisers, based on them advertising on Sean Hannity's show, for example.
And that's why when you watch Fox News, a lot of the advertisers are gold companies or walk-in shower companies.
And when you watch MSNBC, it's all institutional advertisers, meaning car companies, beer companies, because Even though MSNBC has way lower ratings than Fox News.
And the reason for that is obvious, and that's because these advertisers are wary of being slammed with bad publicity.
Now, boycotts work on both sides, and in some cases I think boycotts are justified.
Like, I think that you're perfectly within your rights to say, I don't feel like going to Target if I'm afraid that I'm gonna bring my child into a bathroom and then a man's gonna walk into the bathroom in the girl's bathroom.
I think that's perfectly legit.
It's a perfectly responsible action.
I don't think it's legit when you say, I don't like the point of view on this particular show, therefore I'm boycotting the advertiser on this particular show.
That's directed at the exercise of free speech.
Again, legal, I don't think it's particularly moral.
I'm not a big fan of it.
So, that's point number one.
Point number two is the O'Reilly specific point.
And this is a real problem for the right.
There are a bunch of women who have now come out and made allegations about Bill O'Reilly.
Margaret Hoover was one of the women who used to be on Fox News a fair bit, and yesterday she was talking about never being alone in a room with Bill O'Reilly.
Bill O'Reilly never hit on me.
Bill O'Reilly never sexually harassed me.
I will say, though, as a young woman, many of us have experiences that are uncomfortable.
And I had some experiences that were uncomfortable enough for me to know, never to put myself in a position where I was alone with Bill or alone with people that made me feel uncomfortable.
And so when I first read Gretchen's complaint, and when Gretchen Carlson's complaint, who was really the hero and the unsung hero of all of this story, because she is the one woman who stood up in the face of a culture that was condoning bad behavior for years and years and years and years, It was eminently believable because there was just a feel of interacting at times that was deeply uncomfortable and it was easy for me to extrapolate that if I hadn't been doing things to protect myself that I might have ended up in a position where I could have been vulnerable.
Okay, so there's a point she makes here that I think is kind of amusing in one sense.
She says that she makes a point never to be alone in a room with a man.
And the entire left goes, yeah, that makes perfect sense because men are pigs.
Mike Pence says he makes a point never to be alone in a room with a woman, and the entire left goes insane, right?
And his assumption is that men are pigs.
So Mike Pence makes the exact same assumption as Margaret Hoover, and Margaret Hoover is right and Mike Pence is wrong.
But the broader point that she's making is that there was a culture at Fox News that tolerated this sort of stuff.
Kirsten Power says the same thing.
Here's what she said.
I was on air, actually, with Margaret Hoover, who's at CNN now, on a regular segment.
We were on every Monday.
And he got Margaret's name wrong, and Margaret said, hey, get my name right.
And he said, oh, I'm sorry, there's a lot of blondes in this operation.
I can't keep you all straight.
Megyn Kelly's coming up, starts throwing all these blonde names.
And then at the end of the segment says, thank you for your blondness to both of us.
So I went to his executive producer, and I said, he needs to apologize, and he needs to never do that again, or I'm not doing his show anymore.
And I was told basically, well, you know, Bill, there's nothing we can do about it.
He's a throwback.
He's kind of an Archie Bunker.
And I said, well, if you mean he's a Neanderthal, then we're on the same page.
He can never do that again.
I'm a political analyst here.
Went to Bill, came back, said, no, he's not going to apologize.
So then I went to my I was called into my boss's office.
I was told, what can we do?
It's Bill.
There's nothing we can do.
You know, we're sorry this happened to you, but there's nothing we can do.
I complained to Roger Ailes.
I was told the same exact thing.
There's nothing we can do.
It's Bill.
He's a jerk.
Nobody likes him.
And then Roger said, you know, Bill, he likes to put up dirty pictures and ask pretty girls to talk about them.
Okay, so the idea that O'Reilly would have to apologize for the fact that Fox News has lots of blondes on the air, and he made a comment about it, I think that's a bit of a stretch.
I mean, let's be real about this.
Fox News has lots of blondes on the air.
I mean, I think that there is definitely a blonde affirmative action program that exists at Fox News.
And, you know, making a comment about that is not even close to the bad stuff that Bill O'Reilly is accused of doing.
There's an entire list of bad things that Bill O'Reilly has been accused of doing.
This one does not even chart.
But here is the problem.
There was indeed a culture at Fox News that basically was tolerant of what appears to be a lot of allegations of sexual harassment, not just about O'Reilly, but also about Roger Ailes, of course.
Roger Ailes was said to have said really dirty things and threatened people's jobs based on their refusal to have sex with him.
All of that is deeply troubling stuff.
And as far as the O'Reilly allegations, I always find it hard to believe that none of the allegations are true when you have like 10 allegations.
There's a bunch of allegations about this whole shtick.
There's people who... Andrew Macris, who's one of his producers, who I knew when she actually had me on O'Reilly's show a while ago, she won, I think, a $10 million settlement from O'Reilly.
That was the famous case where he was calling her up in the middle of the night, allegedly, and then he was suggesting that there was a...
That she's a loofah and all this kind of stuff.
That sort of stuff, too many allegations to simply dismiss all of them.
I'll give you a quick list.
Andrea Macross receives that $9 million settlement after O'Reilly allegedly made sexual references to her via phone.
Former guest Wendy Walsh accused O'Reilly of offering to help her at Fox but cutting her dead when she refused his sexual advances.
Former guest Juliette Huddy received $1.6 million settlement from Fox News after she allegedly made sexual phone calls to her and then tried to harm her career.
Former host Andrea Tanteros filed a lawsuit against O'Reilly and Roger Ailes who was ousted last year after similar allegations.
Lori Due, similarly sued both over similar allegations, received a settlement in excess of a million bucks.
Former host Rebecca Gomez-Diamond alleged sexual phone calls from O'Reilly.
And then there was a report this week from attorney Lisa Bloom that one of her clients was called hot chocolate by O'Reilly and that O'Reilly leered at her.
There's some people who write this kind of stuff off.
I don't, as somebody who works in an office and runs an office, I don't think it's appropriate for people to be acting in this manner.
I think just as a gentleman, forget about the office environment, just as a gentleman, it's not appropriate to be acting in this manner.
And there was a tolerance of this sort of behavior, obviously, up to and including Roger Ailes and by Roger Ailes also.
And that's a big problem.
Now, the reason that I point this out Is not to suggest that all males are pigs and all males are sexual harassers and that there's a rape culture in the United States.
What it is to suggest is that powerful people are able to get away on both sides of the aisle with behavior that would have the rest of us in serious trouble.
And that's a problem.
And that's not just because powerful people are able to manipulate the system.
That's also because we as citizens look up to powerful people, people we see on TV a lot, people who are in politics, and we are willing to excuse their sins based on the fact that we like all the other things that they are saying and doing.
So Wendy Walsh, who was one of the people who sued O'Reilly or alleged bad activity by O'Reilly, she spoke out yesterday and she talked about O'Reilly and Trump.
And remember, Trump defended O'Reilly over all of these allegations originally.
Would you like to see the President of the United States address it?
Do you think it was appropriate for him to do it in the first place?
Yeah, I mean, does he have better things to do?
We got a problem with Korea right now and Syria.
I mean, come on.
But I do think these two are birds of a feather.
They're men of a certain generation who thought of women as, you know, ornaments in workplaces.
And I'm hoping, I have faith in the President's daughter, Ivanka, that she is going to do more for women than her father.
Okay, so the reason that I have a problem with Republicans going along with all this... The hypocrisy point.
Democrats always went along with this, right?
Democrats are fine with Bill Clinton sexually molesting the help.
They don't have any problem with that whatsoever.
When it's on the right side of the aisle, it's the end of the world.
But this is a tendency...
That now crosses the aisle.
I was always under the impression that people on my side of the aisle, people on the right, were not willing to stand for bad behavior just because you happen to agree with somebody.
It's one thing if the allegations are not credible, or it's one allegation that gets settled out of court for purposes of just getting it off the table.
But if it's multiple allegations, you do not look askance at the people who are alleging it if it's tons and tons of allegations.
Just because you like the guy.
It's one thing if the allegations are not credible, but again, if you have lots of credible allegations, lots of settlements out of court, the law firm at Fox News saying this is a problem, then you do have to look at yourself and determine whether the reason that you are supporting a character is because you think that they are in the right and truly innocent.
Or is the reason you're supporting the character because you agree with a lot of the things that they have to say?
And that is a problem because it means the hijacking of particular philosophies about character, about life, about the economy, about everything, simply because you like a lot of what the guy is saying.
We saw this with regard to polls about Trump, you know, that say that now more Republicans than Democrats think it's okay for a politician to cheat on his wife or have sex outside of marriage.
That's only due to Trump, and that's because there's a follow-the-leader mentality that is natural to human beings that we all have to fight, and the idea of having a good ideology, a good philosophy, a good religious perspective, is that you follow principle above personality.
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Okay, so the reason that I lead with all this O'Reilly stuff and the tendency, the human tendency, of attempting to swallow the bad along with the good, that somebody does something bad and now we're just going to go along with them the whole way, is this involves a certain amount of corruption of the soul, and that means corruption of the political soul.
And the perfect example of this, You know, aside from the sexual stuff with Trump and O'Reilly, there's a tendency, because people like Donald Trump, that they're going to swallow his agenda wholesale, even stuff that is clearly heretical to basic conservative principles.
So, today, perfect example, today, Breitbart News runs a piece in which they basically say that there is a libertarian case for Trumpian redistributionism.
This is actually written in Breitbart News today.
It's called The Libertarian Case for Donald Trump's Buy American Order.
John Carney writes, he says, today's critics of trade orthodoxy are so far removed from those of the past that perhaps we shouldn't call them protectionists at all.
Let's call them what they are, economic nationalists.
No.
Protectionists are protectionists.
He says, but here's the part that's crazy.
He says, it is altogether possible that one may prefer lower living standards in favor of a more humane distribution of wealth, or a government procurement policy that recycles dollars taxed and borrowed back into the domestic economy.
I'll read that again because it's insane.
Okay?
It is altogether possible one may prefer lower living standards in favor of a more humane distribution of wealth.
Now I'm going to read that in the voice in which it belongs.
You ready?
It is altogether possible that one may prefer lower government living standards in favor of a more humane distribution of wealth.
It's Bernie Sanders.
It's on-the-mark Bernie Sanders.
Okay?
And they are now parroting this stuff.
People on the supposed right are parroting this stuff because they like Donald Trump.
That is not excusable.
And it's not just Breitbart News, which you would expect, because Breitbart News is Breitbart News and they love Trump.
Okay, that's fine.
It's also Tucker Carlson.
So Tucker Carlson has on Mark Cuban.
Mark Cuban is a billionaire.
And here is Tucker Carlson with Mark Cuban.
And Cuban Shockingly, is taking the more capitalist position.
This is about H-1B visas.
This is the program that allows people with high-tech degrees to come into the United States and work for a job.
The reason that is good is because otherwise these companies are simply going to outsource the jobs, or they're going to move the company altogether.
They're going to lower their labor costs or raise their prices.
Okay, free flow of labor is a crucial ingredient to having lower prices and better products.
Here's Tucker Carlson with Mark Cuban.
Cuban is right, and Carlson's about to say something that is full-on Marxism.
It's pretty crazy.
Would you apply market forces to your marriage, to your family?
I mean, there are limits to how far... I'm serious.
Capitalism is not a religion.
It's an effective way of generating wealth, but to the extent it hurts Americans, shouldn't we respond?
I mean, we don't do something just because it's, like, consistent with capital.
I don't know.
You're the one who said, well, that's... Are you against capitalism?
I like capitalism.
But when it hurts Americans, I'm willing to make adjustments.
Wouldn't you be?
Okay, stop.
That's... Okay.
When he says, would you apply market forces to your family, to your marriage?
Market forces... What does that have to do with anything?
A marriage is a voluntary agreement I make with my wife.
Okay, that has nothing to do with market forces.
I don't want the government intervening.
Okay, we're talking about government interventionism now.
And here's the crazy part.
When he says capitalism is not a religion, it's an effective way of generating wealth, capitalism is not only good because it generates more wealth and better products and services.
Capitalism is good because it is virtuous.
Capitalism and the free market is virtuous.
You know why the free market is virtuous?
Because it says you own your own labor.
You own your own money.
You own the fruits of your own labor.
And no one can tell you how to spend those fruits.
No one can tell you with whom you can do trade.
No one can tell you that you are not able to do trade because there's some other guy somewhere else who's been hurt.
Because you're not doing trade with him.
He'd be better off if you traded with him.
If you were forced to trade with him, he'd be better off.
So we're going to force you to trade with that guy instead.
What Tucker Carlson says right there is anathema to conservatism.
When he says, I like capitalism, but when it hurts Americans, I'm willing to make adjustments.
That is Bernie Sanders' case.
It is almost word-for-word Bernie Sanders' case.
He says, I like capitalism, I like private property, but, but, whenever someone finishes with but, you know they're gonna go in a direction that has nothing to do with capitalism or conservatism, and again, that's being done because people want to be loyal to Trump, not because it's actually good policy or anything like that.
Well, we're going to have to go to break right now, but if you want to see the rest of the program, we're going to talk more about this.
Plus, we're going to have on Bass Stickman, so you're going to want to subscribe for that.
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We're going to be talking about Ann Coulter at Berkeley.
We have a lot more to talk about here on the program today.
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