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May 11, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
20:32
Ep. 299 - This Trump-Russia Garbage Is Getting Old
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Since President Trump's election victory, we've heard experts proclaiming that it was Trump's blue-collar appeal that led him to the win.
Free trade left Americans in Rust Belt states behind.
Trump promised to quash that free trade.
Government subsidies went only to the areas beyond the horizon.
Trump promised to bring them back.
A solid mix of Democratic redistributionism and protectionism brought these voters home to the Republican Party.
But now a new study says the real reason so many white blue-collar workers went for Trump had nothing to do with their hillbilly elegy economic status.
Instead, the data show that these voters were simply alienated by the cultural myopia of Democrats who have focused on an intersectionality-laden definition of American politics, labeling straight white men the bad guys in their bizarre morality play.
According to PRI, The Atlantic, A new model has been developed to measure the five most significant factors leading to support for Trump among white working-class voters.
The first was obvious, identification with the Republican Party.
But the second was fear of cultural displacement.
The data showed that white working-class voters who say they often feel like a stranger in their own land and believe the U.S.
needs protecting against foreign influence were 3.5 times more likely to favor Trump than those who did not share these concerns.
This is where the Democratic Party has truly gone off the rails.
By trotting out Hollywood celebrities who deride flyover America as a bunch of Bible-thumping simpletons, more and more Americans feel alienated inside their own country.
And no Lena Dunham speeches and Laverne Cox diatribes are going to reverse that.
In fact, the more Dunham and Cox are thrust to the floor by Democrats, the more people will vote Republican in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
The third factor in the study, support for deporting immigrants living in the country illegally.
Voters who supported deportation were 3.3 times more likely to express a preference for Trump than those who did not.
This was Ann Coulter's thesis and it was right.
People feel that the culture is changing in the United States not only due to the acidic effect of leftism, but due to the left's overt desire to change American culture through unfettered immigration without concern for assimilation.
Workers in Ohio aren't all that concerned about losing their jobs to illegal immigrants, but they are concerned about losing their country to people coming from lands that do not share the same basic values.
The fourth factor, disdain for higher education.
Again, this is a cultural hallmark, not an economic one.
According to PRI, quote, white working class voters who said that college education is a gamble were almost twice as likely to express a preference for Trump as those who said it was an important investment in the future.
That has less to do with people disdaining an engineering degree than people seeing that liberal colleges have become breeding grounds for anti-American globalism and anti-traditionalism.
The notion that these blue-collar workers were deeply concerned with trade and subsidies is belied by the fact that the fifth factor evaluated under this study, economic hardship, actually correlated in reverse fashion with Trump voting.
Quote, being in fair or poor financial shape actually predicted support among white working-class Americans rather than support for Donald Trump.
These people, the people the media have suggested were completely taken in by Trump's man-of-the-people shtick, were actually 1.7 times more likely to support Hillary Clinton.
All of which suggests that the call for moderate Republicans to embrace democratic economics is a fool's errand, and that dumping the Reagan combination of social conservatism and free markets won't actually guarantee a winning combination in the Rust Belt.
Trumpism is less about Trump than about rejection of Obamaism and Clintonism, and that is a very good thing for conservatism and for America.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Alrighty, I want to get to the latest from the Yates Clapper hearings that happened yesterday.
We're also going to be talking about some amazing comments from Condoleezza Rice.
We'll be talking about the latest on Trumpcare and Jimmy Kimmel and all the rest of it.
But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at MyPatriotSupply.
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Okay, so the big story of the day yesterday was, of course, the Yates Clapper hearings.
So Sally Yates was the former acting Attorney General under Attorney General Sessions.
She was there for a very short period of time because he recused himself in the Trump-Russia investigation.
And then she had said that she was not going to defend the Trump executive order with regard to refugees, with regard to travel ban.
And he fired her for good reason.
So she's coming back now and she's testifying.
She's testifying because the Democrats think she has secret information linking Trump to the Russians.
James Clapper, who is the head of the intelligence agencies under Barack Obama, he was also called before Congress to testify about the supposed Trump-Russia connections.
And there was nothing new, really, as far as the Trump-Russia connection.
So the idea that There was all sorts of new material being broken about Trump and Russia that suddenly they dropped a bombshell that said that Trump was indeed colluding with the Russians in order to fix the election.
That didn't happen.
That led President Trump to do what I thought was actually the most suspicious thing about Trump-Russia connections that I've seen, and that is he changed the header on his entire Twitter feed.
So, President Trump has, what is it, 24, 25 million Twitter followers at this point on this particular account.
You know, a stunning number of people follow President Trump on Twitter.
And he changed the entire header on his, on his, on the top of his Twitter feed.
He changed it again this morning to remove the tweet.
But yesterday, he had this picture of him with the entire Congress, basically.
And then it said, Director Clapper reiterated what everybody, including the fake news media, already knows.
There's no evidence of collusion between Russia and Trump.
That's what it said on the top of his Twitter feed.
Now, if that doesn't sound suspicious to you, that's because you've never heard of the Streisand effect.
The Streisand Effect, of course, is named after Barbara Streisand.
She apparently wanted to keep the beach in front of her house clear for her view, and so she had tried to stop people from building in front of her house, even though she's obviously super rich and can afford to drive down to the ocean, and she made a big fuss over people finding out about this.
She sued some news outlet, and this, of course, made it a huge story.
The Streisand effect applies here too.
This is sort of the equivalent of Richard Nixon putting I am not a crook at the top of his Twitter page.
It's just not smart.
Even if it's true, it's just not smart all the way through.
He was tweeting incessantly about Yates yesterday.
He said the Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax.
When will this taxpayer-funded charade end?
Biggest story today between Clapper and Yates is on surveillance.
Why doesn't the media report on this?
Hashtag fake news.
Sally Yates made the fake media extremely unhappy today.
She said nothing but old news.
Well, it's not totally true that she said nothing but old news.
She sort of confirmed some stuff that we already knew, which is true, but the fact is that it's a mistake for Trump to be commenting publicly about this sort of thing, because all it does is drive more attention.
It makes people feel like the lady doth protest too much.
In any case, Sally Yates was testifying before Congress yesterday, and here was sort of the big news portion of what she had to say.
It was about Mike Flynn, the National Security Advisor, and she's obviously been called in because She was the person who supposedly warned the Trump administration that Mike Flynn was in a compromising position because Flynn had been paid by the Russians and he had been talking to the Russians and therefore he couldn't be trusted with national security secrets.
Here was Sally Yates.
weren't the only ones that knew all of this, that the Russians also knew about what General Flynn had done, and the Russians also knew that General Flynn had misled the vice president and others, because in the media accounts, it was clear from the vice president and others that they were repeating it was clear from the vice president and others that they were repeating what General Flynn had told them, and that this was a problem, because not only did we believe that the Russians knew this, but that they likely had proof
And that created a compromise situation.
A situation where the National Security Advisor essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians.
So this is what people are latching onto on the left today, was that Flynn was compromised.
She told the Trump administration that Flynn was compromised, and then they waited 18 days to fire Flynn.
They futzed around, they pretended that nothing was wrong, and so this has created some serious questions about why they didn't fire Flynn earlier.
Those questions, I think, are legitimate.
I don't think that's an illegitimate question.
Once you inform somebody that there's a member of your team who might be compromised by foreign intelligence services, it seems to me that you'd want to move a little bit faster than three weeks on that sort of thing.
It is not proof, however, that Trump was colluding with the Russians, and in fact, there really is no evidence of collusion.
James Clapper, who is the head of the intelligence agencies under Obama, he came forward and he said that there was no real evidence of collusion, or at least that he had none.
The intelligence community assessment concluded first that President Putin directed an influence campaign to erode the faith and confidence of the American people in our presidential election process.
Second, that he did so to demean Secretary Clinton.
And third, that he sought to advantage Mr. Trump.
These conclusions were reached based on the richness of the information gathered and analyzed and were thoroughly vetted and then approved by the directors of the three agencies and me.
Okay, so he comes forward, he says that there really is no evidence that he's seen.
Sally Yates then tries to walk that back a little bit, and this is what the media are hanging their head on today, because Trump is hanging his hat on the Clapper comment here, that there's no evidence of collusion.
The media are hanging their hats on the idea that Clapper didn't know about an FBI investigation that was ongoing into possible collusion.
Here's Sally Yates saying that yesterday.
If I could try to clarify one answer before as well, because I think, Senator Graham, you may have misunderstood me.
You asked me whether I was aware of any evidence of collusion, and I declined to answer because answering would reveal classified information.
I believe that that's the same answer that Director Comey gave to this committee when he was asked this question as well.
And he made clear, and I'd like to make clear, that just because I say I can't answer it, you should not draw from that an assumption that that means that the answer is yes.
And I also think, if I may, sir, that this illustrates what I was trying to get at in my statement about the unique position that the FBI straddles between intelligence and law enforcement.
I just want the country to know that whatever they're doing on the counterintelligence side, Mr. Clapper didn't know about it, didn't make it in the report, and we'll see what comes from it.
Ms.
Shates, what did you tell the White House about Mr. Flynn?
I had two in-person meetings and one phone call with the White House Counsel about Mr. Flint.
The first meeting occurred on January 26.
I called Don McGahn first thing that morning and told him that I had a very sensitive matter that I needed to discuss with him, that I couldn't talk about it on the phone, and that I needed to come see him.
And he agreed to meet with me later that afternoon.
Okay, and so, what she is saying now, she's denying what Clapper had said, which is that he saw no evidence of collusion.
So, Yates is saying there might be evidence of collusion, but that's classified.
The way that Trump solves all of this is by just declassifying the material, right?
Trump is the President of the United States, he has the capacity to declassify.
If he wants to declassify the material, he certainly can, and he probably should at this point if he wants all of this to come to an end.
It's a very weird situation where you have members of the intelligence community who are basically coming forward and creating the appearance of smoke without any evidence of fire.
And that's what's happening here.
Sally Yates, who obviously is a political figure, she makes a bunch of political points in this particular testimony.
She went at it with Senator Cruz over the travel ban, and people were saying that she destroyed Cruz over the travel ban.
She didn't.
She was citing a different provision of law than Cruz was citing.
That is the entire legal debate over the travel ban.
She is a political actor.
To pretend that Sally Yates is not a political character is just silly.
James Clapper also is a political actor.
But this is why it's sort of dangerous to, number one, have political actors in positions of power and intelligence.
They have the ability to see intelligence that we don't see.
And number two, then to question them in an open forum because what you end up with is a situation where they say, well, we have a secret.
But we can't tell you.
And all that does is it leads people to believe that there's something nefarious going on without any actual proof of anything nefarious going on.
Now remember, no matter what Sally Yates said here or what Clapper says here, no evidence has actually been presented of collusion between Trump and Russia surrounding this election cycle.
But that doesn't seem to matter to the media.
They're jumping on the idea that Yates is not willing to just say there's no evidence to say, well, that means there must be evidence.
Well, it works both ways.
I mean, if it's classified material, it's possible that she can't say that there's no evidence because it's still in the process of investigation.
So, again, this sort of politicization of intelligence is really, really dangerous.
It's been happening under Obama.
It's now happening under Trump.
And it's not leading people to have any confidence in these agencies.
If Trump really wants all of this to go away, he should be moving swiftly to have his people going through whatever intelligence they have security clearance to see and then reveal it as fast as possible because the American people do have a right to know about all of this stuff.
Now, the stuff that Trump does want to focus on is the stuff with regard to unmasking.
So if you remember, The case that Trump was making with regards to the intelligence community is that while Yates and Clapper may be focused on Mike Flynn being complicit with the Russian gang, and while they may be concerned about Trump-Russia collusion, while that may be the priority of the left, the priority of the right is that the Obama administration was unmasking Trump officials in an attempt to basically target them for leaks.
So the idea would be that they saw a communication that was masked, and it said something like, Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak was having a conversation with unnamed American Citizen One.
And unnamed American Citizen One said X. And so, the Obama administration said, okay, we want to know the name of unnamed American Citizen One, and then we can leak it to the press.
That's the accusation that Trump is making anyway.
Both Yates and Clapper yesterday admitted to viewing unmasked Trump campaign communications, meaning that they saw materials that had members of Trump's name, his team's names, on them.
That's not illegal, by the way.
But it is a problem when you have Susan Rice and members of the Obama administration going out of their way to deliberately unmask only American citizens associated with the Trump campaign.
That is the big debate, and we'll see both sides of it here.
Here's Chuck Grassley.
Did either of you ever review classified documents in which Mr. Trump, his associates, or members of Congress had been unmasked?
Oh, yes.
You have.
Can you give us details here?
No, I can't.
Ms.
Yates, have you?
Yes, I have.
And no, I can't give you details.
Okay.
And she's obviously very happy about not being able to give details because she doesn't want to give details, obviously.
Clapper then went on and he said that, you know, to pretend that it was just about Trump campaign being unmasked.
Lots of people get unmasked under the way the law works.
My former office publishes a report on the statistics of how many U.S.
persons' identities are en masse based on a collection that occurred under Section 702 of the FISA Amendment Act, which I'll speak to in a moment.
And in 2016, that number was 1,934.
So here is the takeaway.
We don't know.
We don't know more today than we did yesterday.
In fact, in some ways, we know less today than we did yesterday.
The rationale being that on the one side, as I say, the right is trying to claim there's no Trump-Russia collusion.
And then you have Sally Yates saying, well, there might be material there, but I can't talk about it because it's classified.
So we don't actually learn anything there.
There's a lot of smoke for the left to play with, but no fire.
On the other side, you have the right saying, The Obama administration unmasked all these members of the Trump team.
They apparently wanted a FISA warrant against a member of the Trump campaign, presumably Carter Page.
And the left is saying, well, we unmasked lots of people.
So again, smoke, no fire.
So lots of smoke everywhere and no fire.
Again, this is the problem when intelligence becomes politicized, because there really is no way, once the intelligence is politicized, for anyone to trust what's coming out of the intelligence community, absent mass declassification.
And that's probably, unfortunately, what has to happen here now, because no one trusts the intelligence services all the way through.
The other story that was being pushed by the left very hard yesterday was the story that said that Obama had warned the Trump administration about the dangers of Mike Flynn, that Mike Flynn was actually compromised by the Russians.
No evidence that Obama actually warned Trump about this before Trump nominated Flynn to become NSA.
And in fact, the Trump administration basically said that Obama didn't like Flynn personally, and that's why he was complaining about Mike Flynn.
Sean Spicer came out yesterday, and he talked about what Obama had actually said to Trump about Mike Flynn.
Well, the president doesn't disclose details of meetings that he has, which in this case was an hour-long meeting, but it's true that President Obama made it known that he wasn't exactly a fan of General Flynn's, which frankly shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, given that General Flynn had worked for President Obama, was an outspoken critic given that General Flynn had worked for President Obama, was an outspoken critic of President Obama's shortcomings, specifically as it related to his lack of strategy confronting ISIS and other threats around that
So the question that you have to ask yourself really is if President Obama was truly concerned about General Flynn, why didn't he suspend General Flynn's security clearance, which they had just reapproved months earlier?
Additionally, why did the Obama administration let Flynn go to Russia for a paid speaking engagement and receive a fee?
There were steps that they could have taken if that was truly a concern more than just a person that had bad blood.
Okay, and that's exactly correct.
Good for Sean Spicer for calling it out.
The media headlined yesterday that it was such a disaster, that Obama had warned Trump and Trump didn't take the warning.
A lot of us were warning that Flynn wasn't a good pick.
That's not the same as saying, here's some specific intelligence saying that Flynn has been compromised by the Russians.
For the stupidest reaction to all of this, we can always turn to our good friend Chris Matthews over on MSNBC.
Man, it comes out of the shoe!
Get up in the morning, comes out of the shoe, come on in there, talk about Trump!
Russia.
Yates.
You know why he hates Yates?
He doesn't hate Yates because Yates is a political hack.
He hates Yates because Yates is a girl.
That's what I think.
Go!
Trump watch Monday, May 8th, 2017.
Well, today Donald Trump found himself against a prosecutor who should scare the daylights out of him.
I'm talking about Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general who dared to blow the whistle twice in his face.
First, she informed Trump's White House lawyer that the Director of National Security might be up to his neck with the Russians.
The second strike was calling out his notorious Muslim ban as a violation of the First Amendment, which bans the government from recognizing an official religion.
And both those charges by Yates against Trump make him look bad, make her look very good.
It could be the last part making Sally Yates look good that's driving the man in the White House up a wall.
Remember how, as Senator Elizabeth Warren once wonderfully put it, He can't stand the fact that he's losing to a girl.
Okay, and so I love that everything for the left always comes back down to that same argument about how Republicans hate women and they can't stand losing to a girl and all of this routine.
And then they wonder why Trump won.
Trump won mainly because of stuff like this from Chris Matthews.
Just silliness.
Okay, so I want to talk about the latest on Trumpcare.
I want to talk things I like.
Condi Rice did something amazing today that I want to talk about.
And some things that I hate as well.
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