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Aug. 2, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
40:45
Venezeula Collapses, Left Panics | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 353
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On Tuesday, the Trump Department of Justice announced they would move to combat the racism inherent in college admissions affirmative action.
Instead of using the DOJ Civil Rights Division as a sort of defense mechanism for radical leftist groups, as the Obama administration did, the Trump administration is going to use the office to crack down on actual discrimination, pursuing what they call investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions, according to an internal document.
This is a welcome development, despite the left's quick move to demagogue the issue by claiming this is somehow a white identity politics defense mechanism from the Trump administration.
Often, the groups hurt most by affirmative action are not white people, but minorities like Asian Americans and Jews.
The left, of course, complains that the DOJ Civil Rights Division should be specifically dedicated to the interests of particular minorities.
As Kristen Clark of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law told the New York Times, The left thinks the Civil Rights Division was, quote, created and launched to deal with the unique problem of discrimination faced by our nation's most oppressed minority groups.
She called the move deeply disturbing.
Called it a dog whistle.
That's ridiculous.
First off, affirmative action has done nothing to advance black economic interests.
According to Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom of the Liberal Brookings Institute, "Not only did significant advances predate the affirmative action era, the benefits of race-conscious politics are not clear.
In the decades since affirmative action policies were first instituted, the poverty rate has remained basically unchanged.
Despite black gains by numerous other measures, close to 30% of black families still live below the poverty line." In fact, very often those who make it into the top universities through affirmative action are themselves hurt by the process.
Let's say a black student performed well enough to get into Duke, but not Yale.
Putting that student at Yale means that instead of flourishing in an environment in which the student has earned membership, that student will now be the low man on the totem pole.
In an article published in The Atlantic in 2012, Richard Sandard and Stuart Taylor Jr.
highlight some of the ways this mismatch issue impacts black students.
Mismatched students?
Students who got in through significant affirmative action, they're twice as likely to be derailed from pursuing a doctorate and an academic career.
Black law school grads are four times as likely to fail the bar as their white counterparts.
Black college freshmen want to go into science or engineering more than white students but are twice as likely to drop out.
About half of black college students rank in the bottom 20% of their classes and the bottom 10% in law school.
And, of course, affirmative action is unfair to those of other races who outperform the minorities who benefit.
A Princeton University study showed that blacks received a bonus of 230 points on SAT scores versus their competitors on the old 1600-point scale.
By contrast, Asians were penalized 50 points.
So, this isn't a dog whistle.
It's a solid policy aimed at ending the sort of discrimination that continues to divide us by race, assuming without evidence that a black kid who scores lower on the SATs than an Asian kid of the same socioeconomic status has somehow suffered more and requires the open university slot.
That's pernicious, it's nasty, and it should be fought.
Good for the Trump administration.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Alrighty, so a lot to get to today.
As always, I want to talk about President Trump apparently opening the Seth Rich can of worms, just a little bit.
But the biggest story in the news is obviously what's going on in Venezuela, where socialism has collapsed, as it always does, into full-scale disaster.
We're going to talk about that in just a second, but first I want to say thank you to our sponsors Over at Helix Sleep.
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Okay, so.
The latest from Venezuela is that there is total chaos.
Total chaos has broken out in Venezuela.
In the last three days, ten people, opposition people, have been killed.
Opposition to the socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, who was the guy who took over for Hugo Chávez.
Ten people were killed on Sunday.
There was a referendum or an election for a constituent assembly.
This means, in Venezuela, they want to replace, basically, the legislature with this new legislature run by the dictator.
That's essentially why all the opposition boycotted.
And you can see how awful everything is in Venezuela.
Here, last night, Maduro went and had his police arrest the two main opposition leaders.
Here's tape of that.
This is clip 22.
There's a woman shouting.
Venezuelan opposition leader Antonio Ledesma is taken from his home by force.
I'm shouting, this is a dictatorship.
Dictatorship.
I am in my building.
You don't need to close me out.
They're taking the Desmo away.
Please let them know the neighbors of Santa Rosa.
They're taking Ledesma away.
Okay, so they took away Ledesma.
They also took away a guy named Leopoldo Lopez.
These are both leaders of the Democratic opposition to the socialist regime in Venezuela.
On Sunday, there were riots in Venezuela in the middle of the election because the opposition was protesting, and ten people were killed.
Here's some of the video from the riots.
Election day erupted again into violent clashes between anti-government protesters and the national police.
The opposition did all it could to block roads to polling stations and otherwise disrupt the voting.
They see President Nicolás Maduro's effort to rewrite the Constitution as yet another power grab.
Nope.
No paso.
There are people who think this is a step towards dictatorship.
What do you think?
No, not a step, said this man.
We're in a dictatorship.
The president went to vote early and called this the most important vote in the nation's history.
A move to restore law and order, he said.
And he thumbed his nose at international opposition to the vote.
The U.S.
is among those threatening further sanctions.
If you do not decide, who decides for you, he said.
Donald Trump.
If you, the Venezuelan people, do not decide, who will decide?
In some pro-Maduro areas, voting was largely uneventful.
But in the streets, over the past four months, more than 100 people have been killed, at least two today, in violent skirmishes.
It's important to note here that Venezuela is one of the most natural resource-rich countries in the Western Hemisphere.
I mean, they have enormous natural resources.
Their oil reserves are the largest in the Western Hemisphere.
And they were an incredibly rich country.
I mean, into the 90s, they were the richest country in South America.
Hugo Chavez took over.
He immediately began redistributionist programs, which I'll explain in a moment, and why this is important for the United States.
And he immediately sank the country into absolute poverty.
Here's some video from Venezuela's food lines.
People have now been reduced to searching through garbage.
I have a friend named Ami Horowitz who went down there, did a report from there.
He watched his cameraman be shot to death.
Caracas is the most violent city in the Western Hemisphere.
Again, this was one of the wealthiest countries in the Western Hemisphere.
It's just like Cuba.
These were wealthy, growing economies.
And they've been absolutely destroyed by socialism.
There are people now who are searching through the trash.
When Ami was there, he told me that he was watching normal citizens hunting dogs to eat in the streets, like stray dogs, hunting them down, killing them, and eating them.
Here's some video from CNN of some of the food lines.
Again, this is the capital city of what was one of the great countries in the Western Hemisphere.
Even in the driving rain, Venezuelans started their day in search of food, expecting to see the usual grim cues that form at government stores.
Not today.
The only stores with affordable food are shut.
Closed for the National Workers' Holiday, the sign explains.
It says sorry and thank you.
People walked away empty-handed, but full of dread, wondering where their next meal might come from.
I asked Julian Perez what he needs.
All the basics.
I have nothing at home.
Sometimes I go hungry.
Who can say that we, the people, aren't hungry right now?
And here's the thing.
These people aren't allowed to come back tomorrow.
Food is rationed here, doled out according to the last number on your government ID.
Carlos Chirinos explains his turn is today.
His number is 5.
This is insane.
This is insane.
This is happening in a modern country.
We can all see the tape of it, okay?
And this is happening because of socialism.
This is happening because of leftism.
When Hugo Chavez took power, he took power saying that there were these rich oligarchs who were running the country.
Now, the oil industry had already been nationalized in Venezuela, but what Hugo Chavez did is he grabbed up all of the foreign-owned drilling facilities and all of the sites.
He grabbed all those up, he nationalized those, and then he used all the money supposedly to redistribute, but really it was to enshrine his own dictatorship.
He paid off all of his supporters.
He made sure that if you were not one of his supporters, you couldn't get a job.
He ran people out of jobs.
He set up these neighborhood councils that were theoretically supposed to redistribute property.
He seized a thousand different plots of land all over the country for redistribution.
They were never redistributed.
Even when they were redistributed, it was very often to people who didn't know what they were doing.
So what you ended up with was a dramatic drop-off in all of the productive capacity of the country, which prompted him to ratchet up tariffs, right?
He said, okay, well, if we can't produce anything in the country, and we're buying everything from out of the country, we'll ratchet up the tariffs, which meant that no one could afford anything.
So nothing was being imported and nothing was being produced, so nobody actually had either the money to buy anything or the productive capacity to make anything.
He created wage controls, he created price controls, he ramped up the inflation, he entirely destroyed the economy.
I mean, entirely destroyed it to the point where you're seeing people literally searching through the garbage at bread lines.
I mean, not just at government bread lines, they'll go to bakeries, and this is according to the Associated Press, Hannah Dreyer of the Associated Press, The government of President Nicolas Maduro blames the U.S.
and right-wing business interests for the economic collapse, but most economists say it actually stems from the government-imposed price and currency distortions.
Of course, the United States can't even trade with Venezuela because of Hugo Chavez and because of Nicolas Maduro.
There often seems to be a direct line, she writes, between economic policy and daily hardship.
One week, the administration declared that eggs would now be sold for no more than 30 cents a carton.
The next week, eggs had disappeared from supermarkets and still have not come back.
People started digging through the trash at all hours, pulling out vegetable peelings, soggy pizza crusts, eating them on the spot.
That seemed like rock bottom.
Until my local bakery started organizing lines each morning, not to buy bread, but to eat trash.
Okay, that's what's going on in Venezuela right now.
And this is what happens when you have a government that is completely dedicated to the notion of eradicating income inequality.
The reason I say that is that between 2000... well, Chavez took over in 1999.
Between 1999 and 2013, when Chavez died, the income inequality in Venezuela dropped dramatically.
It's a crap hole.
Okay?
It was the second least income unequal country in the Western Hemisphere after Canada.
Did it matter to these people who are starving on the streets?
Of course not.
Because one way that you create income equality is by destroying the economy.
Sudan has a lot of income equality.
You know why?
There's no one rich there.
Because it's a garbage country.
Okay, it's run like garbage.
So this is what happens in Venezuela.
You have now more income equality.
Unfortunately, everybody's poor and digging through the garbage.
In order to get out of this, they've now created hyperinflation.
They're trying to inflate their way out.
They've taken out loans and loans and loans and loans and trying to pay those back.
They're inflating their currency now.
In the last week, okay, you ready for this?
On Friday, $1 equaled 10,389 bolivars.
Bolivars are named after Simon Bolivar.
Simone Bolivar, that's their form of currency.
10,389 bolivars was $1.
On Monday, five days before, it was worth 8,820 bolivars.
At the start of the year, $1 equaled 3,164 bolivars.
On Monday, five days before, it was worth 8,820 bolivars.
At the start of the year, $1 equaled 3,164 bolivars.
Okay, so that means that they have increased inflation by 300% in the course of six months.
Okay, that is why you're seeing people who can't buy anything.
Your savings are worth nothing.
You spent your entire life saving up, building up a business, putting that money in the bank, and now your savings are worth nothing.
They're worth nothing.
And for all the talk of, you know, they've absolutely eradicated poverty, they've not eradicated poverty.
Look at this country.
Does this look like a country that's eradicated poverty?
The fact is their hospitals don't have gloves, don't have soap, don't have doctors.
10,000 doctors have left the country.
No one can make a living here.
This is what happens when you have a country that is solely dedicated to the proposition of dictatorship, the demagogues.
I mean, this is Bernie Sanders' land, okay?
This is when you demagogue and you say, it's big business that's doing all of this.
All we have to do is seize all the property from big businesses and redistribute it.
Or regulate it so deeply that we ensure that we spread around all the wealth.
Now, I think that we should not allow the left to get away with this because what the left did is for literally years, for literally years, they talked about how wonderful Chavez was, how wonderful Chavezism was, how great Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro were.
It's amazing.
You know, we on the right are criticized very often for the war in Iraq.
How many evil countries has the left declared were good before they actually turned evil?
The left actually liked Nazi Germany until it turned out that Hitler was Hitler.
The left liked Mussolini and turned out that Mussolini was Mussolini.
The left liked Lenin until it turned out that Lenin and Stalin were Lenin and Stalin.
The left liked Mao until it turned out that Mao was Mao.
The left liked Hugo Chavez until it turned out that Hugo Chavez was Hugo Chavez.
And each time, each time leftist dictatorship is tried, Every single time the left immediately declares after it fails, it wasn't honestly tried.
Socialism's never been honestly tried.
It's really funny, today I tweeted out that the World Bank calls Venezuela one of the most income-equal states on earth, and the Socialist Party, the official Socialist Party, tweeted at me, and they said, how dare you blame socialism for this?
Really?
This is what they tweeted.
Okay, I'm going to read it to you.
Venezuela is what happens when leftism goes wrong.
Don't blame socialism for a leftist failure to manage a profit-driven capitalist economy.
So in their opinion, if they just nationalized all the resources over at the Socialist Party, if they nationalized even more, it would go even better.
And then they attached a graphic that said, Question.
Which countries have tried socialism?
Answer.
With populations collectively and directly owning the means of production and distribution, therefore resulting in free access to all goods and services?
None.
Socialism has never yet existed.
Socialism has existed, and the closer you get to a government-run economy, the worse things get.
For all the talk about the socialist economies in Western Europe, they are not socialist economies.
They really are not.
They're capitalist economies with heavy taxation placed on top of them.
Even the taxation levels on businesses are very low.
The reason that Denmark continues... I mean, it was a thriving society, they created a massive welfare state on top of it, that killed the economy, and now they're moving to the right and looking to slash taxes.
The fact is you cannot tax and spend your way into prosperity.
That's not the way business works.
That's not the way prosperity works.
Now, before people say, well, the left never identified with Venezuela, I mean, the left never sided with Venezuela, let's just go through the left's quick record on this.
Let's go through the left's record on Venezuela.
So, let's start with Michael Moore.
Here's what Michael Moore tweeted.
This is in 2012, uh, 2013, March 5th, 2013, about Hugo Chavez, upon his death.
Quote, Hugo Chavez declared the oil belonged to the people.
He used the oil to eliminate poverty, to eliminate 75% of extreme poverty, provide free health and education for all.
Really?
Does that look like a place with no extreme poverty?
How about the healthcare?
You know, the place where they don't have gloves or soap?
Yeah, Michael Moore.
That guy was seated at the 2004 Democratic National Convention next to Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter, by the way, has also praised Hugo Chavez.
When Hugo Chavez died, Jimmy Carter had this to say.
Let me find the direct quote.
Jimmy Carter praised Chavez's, quote, commitment to improving the lives of his fellow countrymen, adding that he would be remembered for his bold assertion of autonomy and independence for Latin American governments, and for his formidable communication skills and personal connections with supporters in his country and abroad, to whom he gave hope and empowerment.
Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post called Chavez quick and popular.
Larry King called him huggable.
The AP called him a fighter.
The Atlantic stated, quote, passionate and charismatic.
Chavez slipped comfortably into the role of romantic Latin American revolutionary, championing the poor against an unfeeling local oligarchy and its imperial paymasters.
Today, millions of Venezuelans will weep tears of genuine anguish at his passing.
ABC News and Univision said he was revered by Venezuela's poor, who considered him one of their own.
The New York Times sounds it off, calling him a dreamer with a common touch and enormous ambition.
All he had to do was crush his adversaries, destroy the economy, destroy press freedoms in the country.
No problem at all.
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist who leans to the left, he said this in 2007, quote, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez appears to have had success in bringing health and education to the people in the poor neighborhoods of Caracas, again, now the most violent city in the Western Hemisphere, to those who previously saw few benefits of the country's oil wealth.
It is not only important to have sustainable growth, but to ensure the best distribution of economic growth for the benefit of all citizens.
Once you redistribute, you cannot hope to grow.
That's what redistributionism does.
It destroys the incentive for profit creation.
I want to talk more about what the left has had to say about this regime because they own this.
The left owns Venezuela.
Don't allow Bernie Sanders to escape responsibility for Venezuela.
Bernie Sanders believes in the same principles as Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.
He pretends he doesn't.
He lies about it.
The left lies about this routinely.
When they say there's a leftist utopia, the leftist utopia looks a lot more like Venezuela than it does like Denmark.
Because the bottom line is that even Denmark is based on a capitalist system that the left really doesn't like very much.
By the way, even Denmark, if it didn't have the United States holding up its military budget for years and years and years, and if they hadn't been using capitalist corporate tax systems for years and years and years, would have been in serious trouble, looked a lot more like Greece than it would like Denmark.
But before we get to any of that, first, I want to say thank you to our friends over at the USCCA.
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Okay, so here are just a few of the key figures on the left who have spent years praising Hugo Chavez.
Here's Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labor Party.
I'm Jeremy Corbyn, a member of the British Parliament.
I'm also a very good friend of Tony Benn.
It's a very sad time as he passed away last week.
Thanks, President.
I'm Jeremy Corbyn, British European, also a very good friend of Tony Benn.
It's a very sad time as he passed away last week.
He was a leader in the fight against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And also a leader in the struggle against the policies of the European Bank.
And others which were detrimental to the poor of Britain and other countries.
for this ultra-payee.
During his life, we discussed many times the problems for building socialism in the fight against capitalism.
He's the leader of the Labour Party.
He's the leader of the Labour Party.
During the huge strike in 1984-85 by the British coal miners.
And we're close with him in support of the miners' strike.
It's a very sad time for the British people right now.
Again, he's talking to Nicholas Mindora, the dictator of...
I mean, he's talking about socialism and the glories of it with the dictator of Venezuela.
Sean Penn, that idiot, praised Hugo Chavez.
He went down to Venezuela, and here he is in 2012 with David Letterman talking about how wonderful Hugo Chavez, this evil dictator, was.
What was your impression of the guy?
What was your impression of the guy?
Well, I think if people have oil under their ground, they're called wacky.
I found him a very fascinating guy.
He's done, at the moment, incredible things for the 80% of the people that are very poor there.
But a fascinating character, somebody I'm writing about.
Just a genius, Sean Penn.
Noam Chomsky, great thought leader of the left.
He praised Hugo Chavez, of course.
...had a significant role, but he also was significant in helping to bring about some form of unification of the hemisphere and move towards freeing themselves from imperial control, but he was not the only one.
It's happened in most of the countries, and it's dramatic.
The left owns Venezuela.
It gave them a sense of empowerment.
This is what leftism looks like.
The left owns Venezuela.
Everyone concedes that gave the population a sense of empowerment, that there's a government for them.
In fact, if you look at them, there are polls.
It gave them a sense of empowerment.
This is what leftism looks like.
The left owns Venezuela.
And now they've never heard of it.
What is this Venezuela country you're talking about?
Never heard of it.
Who?
Nicholas?
What?
Okay, the left does this every time.
Okay, when people say to the right, what do your ideal countries look like?
What are your ideal economic systems?
Very often people like me will point to places like Singapore, right?
We'll talk about places that have open trade, places that have attempted to lower taxes.
Not necessarily every aspect of their culture is something that I want the United States to emulate, but economically free systems benefit.
We don't like socialism and redistributionism, because inevitably, once you take the line of redistributionism far enough, you end up destroying the economy, and if you continue down that line, and you don't tack back to the center, you end up destroying it even more.
Honest leftists will say that leftism is basically a dose against capitalism, and if you take it too far, it'll kill the patient, but maybe you need a little bit of it.
But that's not- but the true honest leftists who really believe this stuff believe that what Chavez did was great, and then they're shocked when the dose killed the patient.
I want to talk a little more about this, and then I want to get to some of the stuff happening inside the Trump administration in just a minute.
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All righty.
So, uh, the, the, as I say, bottom line is that the left loves this guy.
I mean, I don't want to do more actors because, you know, actors are stupid, but Jesse Jackson ran for president.
He's still a prized character in the democratic party.
Here's Jesse Jackson praising Hugo Chavez when he died.
Hugo fed the hungry.
Hugo alimentó al hambriento.
He lifted the poor.
Él luchó y enalteció a los humildes.
He raised their hopes.
You helped them realize their dreams.
And so today we do mourn.
Because we've lost a lot.
But we have a lot left.
A stable government.
because we've lost a lot, but we have a lot left.
A stable government, an orderly transition.
We pray the presence of our great nations will meet soon and that soon Just wonderful.
By the way, Barack Obama once called Will Chavez harmless.
Harmless.
Does that look harmless to you, what's happening in Venezuela right now?
The left owns this.
Don't let them forget it.
And next time they say that a country is engaging in this sort of revolutionary experimentation on economics that is going to lead to widespread prosperity, understand that the end result No matter how you approach it, the end result is when you tack to the left, when you tack too far to the left, you end up in Venezuela.
Okay, so, in other news, more kind of silliness from the White House.
So yesterday, there was a report, there was a lawsuit that broke in which a guy named Rod Wheeler, who was an investigator, he was investigating supposedly the death of Seth Rich, and he had a lawsuit suing a bunch of people, including Ed Butowsky, who was the guy who funded him, and in his lawsuit he alleged that basically Fox News and the White House cooperated in order to push the Seth Rich story.
For those who don't remember, this is a conspiracy theory.
Seth Rich was a DNC staffer.
He was killed at four in the morning on a Washington, D.C.
street.
And there were accusations that he was killed having something to do with the fact that he, the idea, it's not a fact, the idea that he was leaking information to WikiLeaks and maybe the Democrats didn't like it and killed him or some such nonsense.
So Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the White House, when she's asked about this, she said, listen, we had nothing to do with the Seth Rich story, so this is all nonsense.
Did the president know about the story pre-publication and did he have an influence on the way the story was written?
The president had no knowledge of the story and it's completely untrue that here the White House involvement in the story and beyond that this is ongoing litigation and I'd refer you to the actual parties involved which aren't the White House.
Okay, so good for her.
Okay, that's good news.
Then it's followed up with somebody asking, okay, so does Trump believe the Seth Rich conspiracy theory that the leaks, the Russian leaks, were not actually Russian, they were Seth Rich talking to WikiLeaks?
And here is Sarah Huckabee Sanders' answer.
Very quickly on Seth Rich, does the president believe the predicate about original Fox News reporting that Seth Rich was responsible for the release of DNC emails to WikiLeaks?
I'm not sure, Peter.
Thanks guys, we've got a small business event coming up shortly and hopefully you'll all tune in.
That's a pretty amazing statement there that she's not sure what Trump believes about the Seth Rich conspiracy.
The reason that's amazing is not because she couldn't say that he doesn't believe it, you know, like maybe she's never talked about it with him, but this is the inherent problem with having Trump as your president and you being his press secretary.
Well, maybe it happened.
A lot of people are saying it happened.
Imagine a situation in which she went out there and she said, of course he doesn't believe it.
That's an unsubstantiated theory.
And two minutes later, Trump gets on Twitter and he says, well, maybe it happened.
A lot of people are saying it happened.
People.
Right?
I mean, you could easily see him doing that because he's done that over and over and over again.
Perfect example.
Yesterday.
You know, yesterday.
Okay, so flashback.
There's the Donald Trump Jr.
meeting with a bunch of Russian lawyers, Russian-connected lawyers.
He's been promised there's going to be some dirty Hillary information and that the Russian government will pledge their support basically to Donald Trump.
He initiates this meeting.
Jay Sekulow, this is a few days ago, this is just a couple of weeks ago, he's on with Chris Cuomo and he has asked, so Donald Trump Jr., if you recall, released a statement initially about the meeting.
And he said, we only discussed Russian adoption.
We didn't discuss anything having to do with the campaign.
And that ended up not being true.
So the original statement, there were rumors that had been drafted by Donald Trump himself, not by Trump Jr.
And Jay Sekulow was on TV a few weeks ago.
And here's Jay Sekulow saying no, Trump had nothing to do with the statement.
Let's focus on what the president was aware of.
Nothing.
He was not aware of the meeting, did not attend the meeting, and was only informed about the emails very recently by his counsel.
So he didn't have anything to do with the statement that Don Jr.
put out that was being worked on with his team?
No, it was the statement that Don Jr.
put out.
Are you talking about yesterday's, Chris?
Um, the one over the weekend that the president's team was helping with.
That was written, no, that was written by Donald Trump Jr.
and I'm sure in consultation with his lawyer.
Because the New York Times has reporting that the president okayed the statement.
Well, they're incorrect.
The New York Times is wrong.
Yeah, I know.
Is that shocking?
That sometimes I make a mistake?
Um, yeah.
I'm not trying to be disparaging.
I mean, the president's coming back from all the crisps.
He issues a statement.
That statement was, um, and I don't, by the way, I wasn't involved in the statement drafting at all, nor was the president.
Okay, so again and again and again, he keeps saying the president was not involved in the statement.
Yesterday at the White House, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was Donald Trump involved in the drafting of the Trump Jr.
statement?
The statement that Don Jr.
issued is true.
There's no inaccuracy in the statement.
The president weighed in as any father would based on the limited information that he had.
This is all discussion, frankly, of no consequence.
There was no follow-up.
It was disclosed to the press.
This is the problem.
If you're Sarah Huckabee Sanders, you don't know on a day-to-day basis if you're going to be undercut.
This has to stop from Trump.
But it's not going to stop from Trump because this is who Trump is.
Yesterday, Trump came out and there was a Boy Scout, you know, he spoke to the Boy Scouts and we played the audio of it last week and the video of it last week and it was pretty ridiculous.
I mean, he went out there and basically did a campaign rally in front of a bunch of 15-year-olds and it was really quite hilarious.
And then he said, I was called by a leader of the Boy Scouts who said it was the greatest speech they'd ever heard.
The Boy Scouts came out and they said, uh, no we didn't.
In fact, we sort of said that the speech was inappropriate.
No one here called him.
So, if he's fibbing about the Boy Scouts, it makes it very difficult to be his press secretary.
Again, this is not on Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
It's just to point out that whoever is the president's representative is going to be in a bit of trouble because you can't say things that any other person would think were normal because Trump might undercut you.
And that leads to a serious problem for the Trump administration itself.
You could imagine a whole spate of questions day after day.
The media going in there and asking, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, does the president believe that the moon is made of green cheese, and that the wizard, and that the Wicked Witch of the West surrounds it on her broom every evening?
And Sarah Huckabee Sanders goes, no, of course the president doesn't believe that.
And then the next day, Trump comes out, he says, well, I don't know.
Maybe.
Right?
And the problem is that Because she's cautious about this, she's going to have to say, I don't know the answer.
And then the headline the media are going to run is, Trump doesn't know whether Moon is made of cheese.
That's what they're doing on the Seth Rich thing.
This is why having an unpredictable president, or really an unstable president when it comes to these sorts of issues, is really not helpful in any way.
And it's why I'm very skeptical, you know, we'll find out, but I'm very skeptical that putting General John Kelly in charge of his staff is going to help Corey Lewandowski yesterday, Another one of Trump's fabled wonderful picks.
He was saying that Kelly is the chief of staff, but he's not going to be chief of the president.
Corey, let's talk about General Kelly.
You know him.
I know him just very much on the surface.
I've never really spent any time with him.
But by all accounts, he was a loyal implementer and enforcer of the Trump agenda over at the Department of Homeland Security.
I don't know how it would get anyone really, frankly, much better at DHS.
And now he's in the West Wing, someone with very little political experience, or none, now managing that sometimes unmanageable place.
Well, it's very interesting.
Look, I think the choice for Donald Trump, President Trump, was a clear reflection of his desire to move in a different direction and to put a reset together.
But what I think is, you know, General Kelly, Secretary Kelly is going to be successful, which he's going to learn very quickly.
And, uh, it's a phrase that I have coined and I think people understand is you have to let Trump be Trump.
And you're not going to change the president because for the last 40 years, he's been an unbelievably successful business executive, a television executive author, uh, you know, real estate executive, and he doesn't want to change.
And that's not what the American people voted for.
They didn't vote to have Donald Trump change.
They voted for him to be himself.
And what I think general Kelly is going to bring is, The discipline to the staff.
He's the chief of staff.
He's not the chief of the president.
And if he is able to do his job, which I think he will, which will be limiting the backbiting and the infighting amongst the individuals who are serving inside the administration.
Uh, that is a very, very important thing and put everybody on one agenda, which is the Trump agenda.
Okay, so again, this is the big problem here, and it does remain a large problem for the Trump administration.
Trump's gotta lock it down.
It's about Trump.
It's not about his staff.
It's not about all the people who surround him.
At a certain point, if you, as a human being, are realizing that everybody around you doesn't want to be around you, maybe it's not the people around you who are the problem.
Maybe it's you.
And the president needs to start thinking about that a little bit more if he wants to have a successful administration.
Okay, and by the way, I think he's done a couple of good things in the last couple of days.
I mean, I started the show talking about his affirmative action policy.
That's good stuff.
He's doing the right thing on Venezuela.
The Trump administration released a statement yesterday in which they condemned Maduro, and they said that the United States hold Maduro personally responsible for the health and safety of Mr. Lopez, Mr. Ledesma, and any other C's.
That's good.
I mean, he's doing some of the right things.
That can continue so long as he contains his own id.
Uh, and that's imperative.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things I hate.
So, things I like, um, all week long we've been paying tribute to the late, great Anthony Scaramucci, uh, the greatest of all characters in the Trump saga thus far.
Now, today's comparison to Anthony Scaramucci comes courtesy of Kevin Williamson at National Review.
He wrote a fantastic piece in which he talked about how a lot of people who are kind of Trump followers are fans of Alec Baldwin's speech from Glenn Gary Glenn Ross, the famous always be closing speech.
He says there's like a bunch of people who think that this guy's the hero of the film when in reality he's a jerk.
Right, and that is Anthony Scaramucci.
It's almost impossible not to see Alec Baldwin's performance here, and think of Scaramucci, a bloviating guy, you know, over the top, talking about how powerful he is.
Because only one thing counts in this life!
Get them to sign on the line which is dotted!
You hear me, you f***ing f***s?
A, B, C.
A always b.
B. B. C. Closing.
Always be closing.
Always be closing.
A. I. D. A. Attention.
Interest.
Decision.
Action.
Attention.
Do I have your attention?
Interest.
Are you interested?
I know you are, because it's f*** or walk.
You close or you hit the bricks.
Decision.
Have you made your decision for Christ?
A-I-D-A.
Get out there.
You got the prospects coming in.
You think they came in to get out of the rain?
A guy don't walk on the lot lest he wants to buy.
They're sitting out there waiting to give you their money.
Are you gonna take it?
Are you man enough to take it?
Okay, so one of the great speeches in film history.
This isn't actually part of the original play, which I didn't know.
It was written specifically for the movie.
Alec Baldwin's only in the movie for this five-minute segment, basically.
But the truth is that people who think that this kind of stuff is real life are wrong, okay?
There's a whole group of business people who think of themselves as this hard-charging guy who's really gonna get things done because this is how business... Not really how business works.
The way that successful business actually works is by making deals that are mutually beneficial for the two sides, not by screwing people.
The people who tend to screw people are the people who have great image, you know, like Trump and Scaramucci, but aren't necessarily the world's best business people because they're not actually providing a mutual benefit in their dealings.
Okay, other things that I like.
I just had to show you this catch from MLB last night.
This is Austin Jackson playing for the Detroit Tigers.
Actually, he's playing for the Cleveland Indians, I believe, against the Boston Red Sox.
And he's going to make one of the great catches you've ever seen in center field.
This is just amazing.
Off the bat of Hanley Ramirez.
Great hitter too, Andre.
Switch hitter at that.
There's a long fly ball!
Deep center field!
Jackson's back!
He leaps!
He made an unbelievable catch!
He flipped into the bullpen!
Did he hang on?
That's the only question at this point.
He sure did.
What a play by Austin Jackson!
That just might be the play of the year!
Hanley Ramirez is stunned!
Did you see how high Lindor jumped after he saw him jump over the fence with the ball?
Austin Jackson can still go get him with the best!
This might be the best time play you'll ever see.
Pretty amazing.
The thing I love about baseball is that the Boston Red Sox- I mean, it's happening in Fenway Park.
The Boston Red Sox fan gave him a standing ovation, and then after they showed the play again on the big screen, they gave him a second standing ovation, which is a pretty cool thing.
Okay, time for a thing that I hate.
So, let's do it.
So CNN ran what I think is the world's stupidest headline.
This is two days ago.
It has also resulted in my most retweeted tweet ever.
So here is the headline.
It's a picture of what is clearly a woman who has had hormone treatment with her husband, a gay man.
Yeah, try to keep up with me here.
It says, transgender man assigned the female gender at birth gives birth to a healthy baby boy.
There are a couple of problems with this headline.
One, Transgender, that's a woman.
That's a biological woman who gave birth to a boy, right?
And then it says gives birth to a healthy baby boy.
How dare CNN assign a sex to the baby?
How dare they?
They say that that this transgender man was assigned the female gender at birth, you know, just arbitrarily, randomly, randomly.
How dare they say that this was a baby boy?
Maybe the boy doesn't want to be a boy.
We don't know yet.
Why don't they just say, gives birth to a baby?
Why don't they say it just gives birth to a being?
We don't know if the baby even wants to identify as a human.
It wants to identify as a cat.
Do you know?
I don't know.
So I tweeted, and this made the rounds, it's a big story.
Ooh, big story.
I tweeted out, after this headline came out, I tweeted out, woman gives birth to baby boy.
That was my tweet.
That tweet now has, I believe, 96,000 likes?
96- I mean, it's like a Trump tweet.
Like, 96,000 likes.
Because that's obviously what this story is.
Like, why is it a headline that a biological woman gave birth to a boy?
Why is that a headline at all?
It's only because this is a biological woman who's had some hormone treatments but hasn't had any of her parts changed, obviously.
I mean, it is a pretty amazing scam when you come to think about it.
This is a gay man who's having sex with a woman who is apparently a man, so...
I guess this is a really weird way of getting gay men to marry women and have babies.
What?
I would also wonder, I tweeted out about this, that I wondered what this woman's perspective was on abortion until I realized she was a transgender man and therefore she can't speak about pregnancy because men can't get...
It just doesn't work.
None of it works, so that's all confusing.
Okay, well, normally I would spend some time deconstructing the culture, but we've come to the end of our time together today.
So we'll have to come back here tomorrow.
You'll have to come back to Mr. Shapiro's neighborhood.
And when you come back, we will have many things to discuss, including the big idea of the week and the latest news.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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