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July 5, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
21:10
CNN Lights Itself On Fire For The Fourth Of July | Ep. 333
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Just when you think things can't get any stupider, they do.
On Sunday, President Trump tweeted out a GIF of himself clotheslining someone, knocking him to the ground, and then pummeling him at an old WWE event.
In the GIF, the head of Trump's victim has been replaced with the CNN logo.
So Trump appears to be tackling then beating the hell out of the network he most despises, the one he has used as a foil in his rise to power.
Trump's CNN tweet followed on the heels of his tweets from last week, in which he attacked MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough in the most personal terms.
Trump supporters responded with unrestrained glee to much of this.
Trump was fighting back.
CNN, meanwhile, responded with its typical restraint and objectivity.
Reporter after reporter declared that Trump's tweet didn't merely represent an obvious breach of decency, an unpresidential and apparently pathological outburst of spontaneous rage, tweeting, it promoted violence, and Trump would have blood on his hands if some rogue follower picked up a gun and decided to come after Brian Stelter.
Trump supporters responded to this outpouring of faux rage by CNN by shouting about Kathy Griffin carrying around a bloodied mock head of Trump, Julius Caesar presented by Shakespeare in the Park as an assassination of Trump, and Democrats from coast to coast have proclaimed that Trumpcare would end with grandma being shoved off a cliff by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
In this kabuki theater, both sides are right and both sides are wrong.
The media are right that the president is acting out in a fashion that makes my three-year-old's temper tantrum seem mature by comparison.
Trump supporters are right that the media's coverage is so wildly corrupt and hysterical it makes Leo Blum and the producers look like Mother Teresa.
The media are wrong that their liberties are some sort of existential assault from the president who's merely mouthing off the way he has his entire career.
Trump supporters are wrong that all evils can be excused by simply pointing at the latest media bad actor and yelling WAR at the top of your lungs.
So, here we are.
A media nobody trusts, school-marming a president who's the class clown.
Nobody looks really good in this particular fake wrestling match.
The question is actually why anyone engages in it at all.
After all, we know the match isn't real.
Trump so adores the media attention that if CNN and the New York Times were to stop covering him, he'd quickly set himself on fire outside their studios for the cameras.
Likewise, if Trump were to stop tweeting, CNN would have to go back to covering missing Malaysian airliners.
It's a romance made in hell, but the ratings are absolutely stellar.
So, the question remains.
Why does everyone treat this game as if it's being played for high stakes?
Well, it's entertaining.
And entertaining conflicts must have clear good and evil combatants.
Because the media are corrupt and Trump is immature, both sides must willingly blind themselves to the faults of their favorite characters.
So, the right says that Trump is a virginal political victim, a neophyte, undeserving of his critics' vitriol.
Even better, he's held up as an unparalleled political genius, the voice of the people, the populist revolutionary in the guise of the prince of the city, a sort of Bruce Wayne who dons the cape of justice by night and tweets rage at the media by day while the music from The Dark Knight thunders dramatically in the background.
The halo effect from Stopping the Joker, Hillary, never fades in the eyes of Trump supporters.
Meanwhile, the press overlooks its own participation in the corrupted political entertainment complex in order to paint itself as thoroughly painstaking and objective in its work.
Journalists see themselves, and the left flatteringly sees the journalists, as warriors for truth, exposing the light in every dark nook and cranny of the Trump administration.
They imagine themselves in battered hats and trench coats, walking around in the rain, looking for all of the evidence of the dark deeds, uncovering the seedy side of Trumpany Hall.
The halo effect from opposing Trump never dies for the fourth estate.
This Manichaean dichotomy means that there is no way for any reasonable or tempered debate to emerge over proper behavior or coverage.
Instead, there is glee for Trump's base in watching Trump bring justice to the streets of Media Gotham, flinging batarangs of acerbic nastiness at Mika Brzezinski's bloody face.
And for the media, there is similar glee in proclaiming Trump an incipient Hitler, a Willy Stark who must be stopped before he can transform into real-life Huey Long.
All of this makes the political scene a lot more fun and entertaining, but it's not very useful.
While the drama of Trump vs. the media is amusing, it's not quite WWE quality, because most people actually think that it's real.
We can find the WWE entertaining and amusing because we know it's scripted, but if we actually thought it was real, and then all of a sudden we were rudely disabused of that notion, it would probably ruin the fun.
The same is true of our politics right now.
The realization that Trump vs. the media is just overblown stupidity half-scripted on both sides makes the conflict less compelling.
The comedy actually becomes kind of tragic.
After all, it's a lot easier to laugh at the antics of The Undertaker than to laugh as the office of George Washington and the industry of Ernie Pyle both become punchlines.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so CNN has completely lit itself on fire.
So yesterday was July 4th, and in honor of Independence Day, CNN held a fireworks celebration in its own pants.
It lit all of the TNT that it could find, and then proceeded to blow it up, absolutely destroying itself wholesale.
We will talk about all of it because it is really amusing.
I just said we shouldn't talk so much about the WWE stuff, but I'm going to because it's hilarious.
So we'll talk about all of that stuff in a second.
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Okay, so CNN just – it's astonishing how basically – I tweeted last week that Trump destroyed CNN not by actually attacking them, by trolling them so hard that they destroyed themselves.
He really gave them enough rope that they decided not just to hang themselves, but to hang themselves by the neck until they were nearly dead, then pull themselves up back onto the platform and jump repeatedly.
This is basically what CNN is doing now.
So, here's how this works out over the course of the weekend.
On Sunday, President Trump tweets something that I assume my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter has the good sense not to tweet, a WWE wrestling graphic of himself tackling a person with a CNN logo for a head, and then jumping on top of them and pummeling them.
This is the President of the United States.
Lest we forget, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln once sat Well, George Washington didn't, but Abraham Lincoln once sat in the office where Donald Trump is tweeting in the middle of the night from the toilet, presumably, about rage tweets.
So he tweets this, and here's what it looks like.
Oh my god, what's gonna happen?
Oh my god!
Oh, everything is so stupid.
Okay, so he tweets that.
And then he, on July 4th, it's Independence Day, he decides to double down on that.
He starts mocking the fake media, which is his favorite thing to do, right?
North Korea may be firing an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting Alaska, but he's gotta hit the fake media.
I mean, come on.
So it's Independence Day, and in the middle of his speech, he dumps out the, he starts ripping on the fake media.
All right.
The fake media is trying to silence us.
But we will not let them.
Because the people know the truth.
The fake media tried to stop us from going to the White House, but I'm president and they're not.
Okay, so that's fair.
I mean, the media hated him.
They tried to stop him from going to the White House, and now they're trying to take him down.
All of that is fair.
They're not exactly silencing him.
He's pretty loud, it turns out, and he uses his Twitter a lot, so that really doesn't change anything.
But, yes, the media are bad.
Yes, the media are obviously trying to cover him in unfair fashion.
So, he tweets this stupid thing about wrestling.
The media has an obvious response.
They could say, Mr. President, that was a stupid thing to tweet.
Maybe you don't have a lot of self-control.
That would be true.
It would also be obvious, and it would be relatively objective.
Instead, they proceed to spend the next three days talking about how this means that Donald Trump wants to literally go and beat Brian Stelter's face in.
Really, he's a sick Nazi who wants to murder people, and that's why he's tweeting out wrestling tweets from the WWE.
First of all, it doesn't make any sense to me.
They used a CNN logo over Vince McMahon's face.
Is CNN's logo a person?
How can you even hit CNN's logo?
It's a logo.
It's not a person.
Unless Brian Stelter changed his face and had surgery, like in old Twilight Zone episodes, and now his face looks like the CNN logo.
I don't see how anyone would identify one with the other.
But in any case, the left went hysterical.
So Howard Dean says, it's just right-wingers and they want to shoot places up.
It's all because of Trump.
It's Trump and he's a Nazi.
So it's not enough for them just to say, That Trump is ridiculous in how he uses Twitter, which is obviously true.
No, no, no, he's evil and he's a Nazi.
And then you'll see, they went even further because they're totally insane.
They've lost their minds.
Trump has trolled them so hard that they have actually become that which they fear.
So here is Howard Dean first saying that Trump is evil and violent.
A lot of the Trump voters are not the far right nutcases with guns who want to, you know, shoot up the place.
Most of the Trump voters are people- Well, I don't think anyone was defining them that way.
No, but there certainly are some of them.
And the NRA put an appalling ad out there, which really basically made the statement... Okay, so the left, Howard Dean, who's a complete moron, is talking about how the right is full of violent people.
Lest we forget, three weeks ago, a Trump-hating Bernie Sanders supporter tried to assassinate several dozen Republican Congress people, but we're the violent ones, right?
It's the Trump supporters who are the violent ones.
Those of us on the right who are the violent ones.
Okay, so.
Trump tweets out this WWE thing, and the media's first reaction is, Trump is violent.
And then, they get their second reaction.
So it's not enough for them to be clown themselves the first way, they have to be clown themselves every way.
They have to find new ways to be clown themselves every single day.
So...
What do they do?
CNN goes ahead and runs a story trying to find the source of the meme, right?
Because Trump didn't create this little video of himself tackling the CNN logo.
Somebody took the WWE video and pasted the CNN logo in there.
So where did he get it?
So he got it, supposedly, according to CNN, from some guy at Reddit.
For those who don't know, Reddit's sort of an underground political thread.
It's a very big website.
A lot of people visit it.
R the Donald.
is where all of these memes pop up.
And I sort of have a love-hate relationship with R. The Donald.
Sometimes they like me, sometimes they don't.
It's always an inverse relationship with how nice I'm being to Trump that day.
So, I'm sure they'll love this episode.
In any case, R. The Donald posts this meme.
There's a guy whose name is... I can't actually say it out loud because it's cursing.
It's Han Bleephole Solo.
Okay?
And this is now national media coverage.
We have to discuss these things because this is the news.
Everything is stupid.
So, he puts out this meme, right, Han Bleephole Solo puts out this meme, and CNN traces it back to him.
And then CNN goes and looks at all the other memes that he's put out, and it turns out he's put out a bunch of racist, anti-Semitic memes, because there are a lot of people on Reddit who do this.
I know, because I was the personal recipient of 40% of all anti-Semitic memes that were tweeted on the internet at Journalist last year.
I personally was the recipient of, so I'm well aware of this entire crowd.
I'm well aware of the bleep posters, as they call themselves.
In any case, They decide to dig up all of this ancillary material and then pretend that Trump is somehow linked to that.
So first of all, this is bad journalism.
It's bad journalism because it would be one thing if Trump tweeted an anti-Semitic meme and then they said, okay, here is the world of anti-Semitic memes from which he is drawing.
That would be a legit story, right?
Or if they'd said, he keeps going over to Reddit and 4chan, He has a long-standing relationship with Reddit and 4chan where he takes their memes.
Why is he so warm toward these people?
That's a fair story.
What is not a fair story is he picks up one piece of material from the rthedonald thread, and now we're gonna find the person who created that, who Trump has never met, probably never seen, and never, and none of this came, like Trump probably had no relationship with this person ever.
He doesn't know who they are from Adam, and then we're gonna find everything that guy ever did, and then we are going to link all the bad things that guy did with Trump.
So you can see how far they're stretching.
So already this is a stupid story.
Already this is an idiotic story.
Trump didn't tweet anything racist or anti-semitic, he tweeted something dumb.
And now they're trying to link him with racism and anti-semitism because the original creator of this wrestling gif was some schmuck who tweets out anti-semitic, racist stuff.
Okay, so that's dumb in and of itself.
But then, they go a level dumber.
Okay, I told you, things are just gonna get stupider from here on in.
Eventually, as I said last week, America will disappear because we all go brain dead from loss of IQ points due to following politics too closely, because this is all so stupid.
So, it goes a level deeper in the stupidity.
So now, CNN doesn't just track down Han A-hole Solo's name, right?
They don't just track down who he is.
They don't just track down what else he's tweeted.
Now, they go to him, and they reach out to him, and he immediately sees what's happening.
He sees they're now going to target him.
And so what he decides to do is apologize, or he puts a big apology, He takes down all of the terrible tweets, he takes down all of the terrible memes, and then CNN prints the story.
And here's what they print, okay, this is from the CNN story, direct quote, quote, CNN is not publishing Han A-hole Solo's name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again.
In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
Okay, so, for those of you who missed what just happened, that's called blackmail.
Right, what CNN is doing now is they are now saying, he took down all this stuff that we didn't like, he took the racist anti-male, also he took down the CNN stuff, but should he renege?
Should he become a recidivist?
A Reddit recidivist?
Should he become a meme recidivist?
Should he go out on the streets and threaten America again with other WWE-linked videos?
Then we will reveal his name to the public at large.
Right, CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
What?
So now they have taken what was an obvious and clear win on Sunday, right?
Trump making fun of them with some stupid meme, and they could make fun of him back, and it's an obvious win.
And they have destroyed themselves three separate ways.
First, by claiming that Trump is violent, and this is promoting violence.
Second, by trying to track down everything possible about this meme guy.
And third, by then threatening the meme guy that if he doesn't back down from this, they are going to out him.
CNN has now blown all journalistic credibility out of some pathetic, sick attempt to get Donald Trump and anyone who is remotely linked with Donald Trump.
That's how insane all of this is.
I mean, it's totally crazy.
And this is what CNN is doing.
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Okay, so it just keeps going.
The story gets even better.
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Okay, so we're through three of the four steps in CNN's total self-beclowning.
I mean, at this point, the only way to describe this is that they deliberately decided to kick themselves in the groin as hard as humanly possible, and now all of their appendages are out of order because it just continues.
Okay, so here's where it goes from here.
Now, CNN defends itself from the blackmail accusations.
They say, no, no, no, we never blackmailed anyone.
They said, we decided not to publish the name of the Reddit user out of concern for his safety.
Here's the problem.
You also threatened to release his name if he changed his behavior.
So, where is the safety threat coming from now, CNN?
It's coming from you!
Because you're threatening to release his name if he doesn't obey you.
But, that's not the bad part, okay?
That's not the bad part.
Here's the worst part.
They got the wrong guy.
Okay, they got the wrong guy.
They tracked down Rebel Alliance hero Han A-hole Solo.
They tracked him down on planet Endor, and then they failed to get the right guy.
They got the wrong guy!
So BuzzFeed, here's BuzzFeed reporting on this.
You ready for this?
This is amazing.
According to BuzzFeed, quote, one user pointed out that what Trump tweeted wasn't actually Han A-hole Solo's GIF.
Trump's GIF included both video and audio, whereas the Rebel Smuggler wannabe's GIF did not include audio.
Furthermore, the original Han A-hole Solo GIF was shorter, had a different aspect ratio, and had a WWE logo in the corner.
Not even the colors are processed in the same manner.
Han A-hole Solo's GIF has an NTSC aspect ratio because it was cut directly from a taping of an analog WrestleMania footage.
Trump's video has an aspect ratio of 16 to 9.
And it continues.
Someone downloaded the GIF that Han A-hole Solo originally posted to Reddit.
The person cropped it to better fit a video player like Facebook or YouTube.
They went through the effort of syncing it back up with the audio from the original clip.
Then they put it where Trump or one of Trump's people could see it and download it.
So in other words, Trump didn't even get it from Reddit.
Okay, Trump got it from Facebook.
Trump got it from Facebook or from YouTube and then he put it up.
So they're trying to link this guy who made it on Reddit Who's not linked to Trump in any way.
They're trying to link his ancillary stuff that Trump has never seen to Trump in order to call Trump a racist anti-Semite.
And then they got, and then they're threatening the guy and they got the wrong guy.
Trump had no... I mean, this is just, it's sheer incompetence of the highest order.
And all this does, of course, is it helps Trump, right?
I mean, Trump is just sitting there going, I've been calling them fake news all the time.
Sure, I say they're fake news, even when they're reporting real stuff, but now they're fake news all the time, right?
It's just like, Could he have paid them?
Like Trump doesn't even have to buy them because he now owns them, right?
Or if he doesn't own them, they self-owned.
I mean it's just it's unbelievable.
It's just incredible.
And that wasn't, by the way, even that is not the end of the story because yesterday, CNN, two times, two times, apparently, had fake quotes.
One from Abraham Lincoln.
Do you know how dumb you have to be to run a story that has a fake quote from Abraham Lincoln?
It's not like he's making new stuff up every day, Abraham Lincoln.
It's not like he's coming out with new material that you have to vet.
He's been dead for 150 years.
I mean, President Trump may not know that.
He thinks Andrew Jackson's still alive, and so is Frederick Douglass.
But the fact is that Abraham Lincoln, I think Trump is aware that he's dead, and certainly CNN should be.
I mean, they're the ones saying Trump is so stupid.
Well, then don't quote Abraham Lincoln when he's not saying new stuff.
It's just, it's unbelievable.
And then everyone wonders why trust in the media may be declining.
I can't imagine why trust in the media is declining.
So, when we continue on the other side here, I want to talk about some Republican silliness that happened over the weekend also on the media, because we can't just have... Republicans have gone... We've gotten to the point where there can't just be partisan silliness, there has to be bipartisan silliness.
Like, everyone has to drink the cuckoo juice, and now everyone has lost their minds.
So we'll get to more insanity, July 4th insanity, but first, you're gonna have to go over to Daily Wire and subscribe.
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