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Sept. 19, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:03
Was Trump Right About Wiretapping? | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 386
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President Trump goes to the UN and smacks Rocket Man.
Plus, was President Trump indeed wiretapped?
Because there's new news suggesting his campaign manager certainly was.
And we'll talk about Obamacare repeal, which is back on the table.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So now I have Rocket Man stuck in my head, as does everyone in the United States, because President Trump decided to drop that reference during his UN speech today.
We will play it for you.
President Trump went to the UN and he gave what I thought was the best speech of his relatively young presidency.
I thought it was quite a good speech.
We'll go through what was in it and what it shows about American foreign policy, because it does sort of lend credence to the idea that all this talk about realism versus neocons, that a lot of these gaps are a little bit exaggerated, but I'll explain what I mean by all of that Ha ha ha ha.
Because now I've got Rocket Man stuck in my head.
Okay, we'll get into all of that.
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Okay, so, President Trump was at the UN this morning, and he gave what was, by virtually all accounts, a very good speech.
A lot of people on the left are very upset because he was too mean to Iran and North Korea.
He was too militant.
How dare he be mean to these countries?
Dianne Feinstein sent out a, the senator from California, she sent out a note saying that it was just terrible.
How could President Trump do such a thing?
She complained.
That he greatly escalated the danger we face from both Iran and North Korea.
She said, the goals of the United Nations are to foster peace and promote global cooperation.
Today, the president used it as a stage to threaten war.
He missed an opportunity to present any positive action the UN could take with respect to North Korea, and he launched a diatribe against Iran, again offering no pathway forward.
Okay, a couple of things about this.
Number one, the Trump administration was responsible for a unanimous resolution in the UN Security Council levying more sanctions on North Korea.
So Trump has done more with the UN on North Korea than Obama ever did.
And with regard to Iran, it is the Iran deal that has allowed the Iranians to gain power in the region.
It's the Iran deal where President Obama sent literally pallets of cash, like tens of millions of dollars, pallets of cash, to the Iranian regime, which were then funneled toward terrorism, and gave them a pathway, a legal pathway, to a nuclear weapon in ten years or less.
And Dianne Feinstein is ripping Trump over all of this?
No.
Actually, it's the Iran nuclear agreement that essentially has made it clear to North Korea that they should continue to pursue a nuclear weapon because once you get close enough to a nuclear weapon, then no one will attack you ever, ever, ever again.
What nation would negotiate with the United States when the agreements we reach with other countries are so easily undermined?
We reached a negotiation with the North Koreans during the Clinton administration.
Dianne Feinstein should know.
She was still Senator of California at the time.
And it didn't make any difference.
They developed a nuclear weapon anyway.
So the Democrats are fighting mad and they've been forced into the awkward position of now having to defend some of the worst people on planet Earth.
So President Trump at the UN today gave what was a very Interventionist speech.
I mean, people are portraying this as a realist speech, but this is not really a realist speech, okay?
What he was talking about today, he said things like, we don't want to intervene and change other people's systems for them, that's not our goal.
But then he talked about Venezuela, and he suggested properly that they need to return to some sort of democratic rule in Venezuela.
Well, if you're a hardcore realist, like a Rand Paul realist, and a non-interventionist, you'd say, what does Venezuela have to do with us?
Okay, so they're oppressing their own people.
Okay, so their people are starving en masse.
What does that have to do with us?
The reality is the vast majority of Americans, as realist as we consider ourselves, still have a moral spine to what we believe about foreign policy.
That doesn't mean we can afford to be the world's policemen, or that we should intervene everywhere.
It does mean that when we see egregious abuses like in Venezuela, that the U.S.
does consider action because the American people generally demand such action.
We generally do.
Now, the big problem is the American people don't then have patience for such action very often, but the fact that we actually care about Venezuela demonstrates that this is not a hardcore, realist, America-first administration.
You can be America-first and still pursue America's goals because one of our goals is the fomenting of democracy and liberalism, like old-school classical liberalism, around the world.
Again, that doesn't mean military overthrow.
Sometimes that means sanctions.
Sometimes that means diplomacy.
But the idea that Trump is a non-interventionist, I think that didn't survive this speech today.
So, President Trump starts off by ripping into Venezuela and talking about socialism in Venezuela is pretty spectacular.
It's clip 14.
The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented.
Okay.
Can you hear total silence in the room?
And finally, there's a little bit of applause.
I like Trump just staring out at all the socialist countries who have been imbibing this nonsense for a while.
And what he says here is exactly right.
This is what I've said for a long time.
It's not about socialism being a great idea misapplied.
It's about a bad idea being applied properly.
Every place that socialism is tried to its full capacity, it leads to massive amounts of human suffering, death, and starvation.
So, good for Trump on this.
Trump also suggested that the world has a moral responsibility to side against aggressors.
Here's President Trump talking about Iran and saying that we have to confront evil or evil will triumph.
If the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph.
When decent people and nations become bystanders to history, the forces of destruction only gather power and strength.
No one has shown more contempt for other nations and for the well-being of their own people Then the depraved regime in North Korea.
Good for him.
Okay, well what he's talking about here is exactly correct.
This is a far cry from President Obama who went in front of the United Nations virtually every year and then whined about how the United States was responsible for all the world's ills.
He would go up there and he would talk about how America in the past had been too braggadocious.
How we in the past?
We've been too interventionist.
It's been our fault.
We've made people angry.
We've been too arrogant.
None of that from President Trump.
Good for President Trump.
I mean, all this is good.
The fact is that we're going to need to see some actual hard policy backing the words.
You know, how far is he willing to go?
What is he willing to do?
That's always the question, right?
It's always the Sean Connery question from the Untouchables.
What are you willing to do?
That's always the big question in foreign policy.
And we don't really have a clear answer from President Trump on that.
But I know one thing he's not willing to do, and that is apologize for the U.S.' 's presence on the world stage.
And that's a very good thing.
And it's reassuring because the truth is that in the past, President Trump has made sort of Ron Paul-ian comments about the role of the United States in the world.
You remember just a few months ago, he was talking about how the U.S.
has killed people like Vladimir Putin.
And one of the criticisms that I think is actually not unfair of this speech is that Trump nowhere in the speech mentioned Russia and Russia's aggression continues.
And I think that's perfectly appropriate to point out that President Trump should have mentioned Russia.
That's one critique.
The other critique of his speech is this line that he dropped halfway through that is totally Trumpian where he's talking about North Korea and he just decides to drop an Elton John song in the middle of his speech about North Korea.
Here's what he had to say.
Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.
Rocket Man is on a suicide mission?
He's just reading straight from his Twitter feed now.
I think it's going to be a long, long time until touchdown brings me around again, man.
Apparently the North Korean delegation walked out.
Apparently they were not here for this.
They said they'd let a junior diplomat sit in.
They packed their bags last night, pre-flight, zero hour, nine a.m.
I don't understand what the purpose of the Rocketman thing is.
It's funny, but it also undercuts the seriousness of the situation.
There's a great tweet today about this.
I do love that there's somebody who tweeted out about Ronald Reagan suggesting that Ronald Reagan should have gone to Brandenburg Gate and said, Birthmark head, tear down this wall.
Might not have had quite the same impact if he'd said that to Mikhail Gorbachev.
So I'm not sure what the purpose is of this.
It is funny.
It is funny.
The media are jumping on it and they are suggesting that this demonstrates that he's not serious.
Suggesting that he is obviously stupid and that's why he did all of this.
He's Trump and that's why he did all of this.
You know, how serious he is about North Korea?
Well, we're going to find out.
We're going to find out because I don't think North Korea is going to stop this sort of activity.
I really don't.
It is amazing to watch, however, the media go completely nuts over this speech as though he said something wildly different.
Now, here's the thing that's funny.
The left is going crazy over this speech because they're suggesting that President Obama never would have been so confrontational.
He never would have done anything like this.
President Obama launched a virtually useless and counterproductive war in Libya.
President Obama signed off on the Iran deal.
President Obama did nothing about North Korea.
And he used to go there and talk consistently about human rights.
President Trump doesn't like talking about human rights very much.
But when he goes to the UN, what he is saying is more conducive to human rights than what President Obama said.
Niceness on the world stage does not equal the promulgation of human rights.
It doesn't equal the spread of human rights.
American strength on the world stage equals the spread of human rights around the world.
It doesn't mean we're always right.
It doesn't mean everything we do is good.
It doesn't mean every choice we make is the right one.
But it does mean that a stronger America is a freer world and a weaker America is a less free world.
And even President Trump, who sort of began this campaign as an anti-interventionist, the Iraq war was evil and conspiratorial, all of this.
He's moved beyond that now, as all presidents do, okay?
There's a general foreign policy consensus no matter how much we wish to buck it.
Obama was the first one really to try to buck it.
Uh, that says that America needs to be strong on the world stage, because otherwise the world becomes a worse place.
I think Trump understands that, and good for him.
Okay, before I go further, there's some big news about Trump and Paul Manafort, and was Trump right when he tweeted that he was wiretapped?
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Okay, so, in other news, the big news last night, Is that there were two stories that broke about President Trump and the Russia investigation.
Okay, so the first big story came courtesy of CNN.
So CNN reported Monday evening that investigators, quote, wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret orders before and after the election.
Furthermore, according to CNN, Manafort was tapped when he was having conversations with Trump, or may have been, and Manafort had a residence at Trump Tower.
So it's actually unclear if the FBI tapped him at that location.
Now you'll recall that back in January, President Trump tweeted about how the FBI under Obama had wiretapped him at Trump Tower, or they tapped his wires at Trump Tower.
So there's a lot of talk about how that was a lie, it wasn't true, that he wasn't specifically tapped, that his phone wasn't tapped, for example.
So there are three things that we're talking about here.
One is Trump's wires.
Were Trump's specific wires tapped?
And the answer seems to be no.
The second is Manafort's wires.
Yes, they were tapped.
And the third is, were they tapped at Trump Tower?
So, were their wires tapped at Trump Tower?
We don't know the answer to that.
There's a fourth question too, which is, was Trump on the other end of those calls?
Even if Trump was on the other end of those calls, that doesn't mean that he was deliberately surveilled.
It means that Manafort was surveilled.
Manafort's been a very dirty player for a very long time.
People have known about this for a few years now, that he was basically in bed with the Putin regime.
CNN reports, the conversations between Manafort and Trump continued after the president took office, long after the FBI investigation into Manafort was publicly known, sources told CNN.
They went on until lawyers for the president and Manafort insisted they stop, according to the sources.
It's unclear whether Trump himself was picked up on the surveillance.
So Manafort was campaign chair for Trump for about five months.
He was not surveilled during that period.
After he was ousted, from March to August, after he was ousted, the FBI surveillance began again.
So it's very possible the FBI did not tap Trump's wires, but they may have picked Trump up while tapping Manafort's wires.
So there are a couple of questions here too.
One is, was the FISA warrant justified?
Was this attempt to get Trump and get his campaign?
Now, the case against that is that Manafort was being tapped before he was on the Trump campaign, and that while he was on the Trump campaign, they ceased the tap, basically, and then they started it up once he was off the Trump campaign again.
So that cuts against the idea that Obama was deliberately targeting Trump with these wiretaps.
In favor of the idea is, again, Manafort was the campaign manager, and these taps continued for a long time, and we still don't know what exactly they were tapping or how they obtained the FISA warrant.
In order to believe that this was wrong, you have to believe that the FISA court was basically corrupt.
That they granted the warrant in order to go after Manafort in order to get Trump.
These were a bunch of Obama appointees doing his bidding in order to sink Trump.
If that were the case, then you would imagine that President Obama would have had a lot at stake in leaking out information about Manafort's wires being tapped during the election cycle, right?
I mean, that would have been the time to do it.
That's not exactly what happened.
So, I'm a little skeptical of the claims that this is, you know, an Obama setup, that he was setting up Manafort in order to get Trump.
I'm not skeptical at all of some of the unmasking accusations.
The idea that Susan Rice was deliberately unmasking Trump with the hope that that would leak into the press.
That, I think, is quite possible.
But I do not buy entirely the argument that Trump was being wiretapped by evil Obama forces.
Manafort, again, is a dirty player.
It's very likely he's going to end up prosecuted.
And that's the story from the New York Times today.
The New York Times is reporting that special investigator Robert Mueller's team has told Manafort he will likely face charges.
According to the Hill quote, the warning, allegedly a shock and awe tactic, came as federal agents combed through his computer files, documents, and any other potential pieces of evidence that could help them in their federal investigation.
The New York Times reported on Monday, citing two people close to the investigation.
Now, one of the things that's interesting about this is that why would you tell Manafort you're going to indict him unless you're threatening him with indictment to get him to flip?
This is the most dangerous path for Trump.
The most dangerous path for Trump is not that he was tapped, not that he said anything egregious to Manafort, but that Manafort thinks he knows something and is going to bargain his way out of trouble by flipping on Trump.
This is one of the reasons why there is a lot of suspicion When Mueller started getting involved with the New York Attorney General, State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
Schneiderman considers himself part of the anti-Trump resistance.
He is a far leftist.
He has always been a far leftist.
And Schneiderman, if he is used as a proxy for Mueller in order to bring state charges against Manafort, Trump does not have the power under the Constitution to pardon Manafort for a state crime.
And that's a serious problem for Trump, because you could see Schneiderman bringing charges against Manafort, Manafort flipping against Trump, and all that information getting to Mueller, and then you actually have a real problem on your hands.
So, this looks like there could be, in order for Mueller to retain his patina of objectivity, he's going to need to ask Schneiderman to step aside.
If you really believe state crimes have been committed here, Schneiderman cannot be the face of the people going after Manafort.
It's just, it's too political.
It's a disaster.
If you think that Jeff Sessions was right to recuse himself, I think he probably was, then you also have to believe that Schneiderman should recuse himself in this investigation into Manafort because he's just too politically driven.
He's just too politically driven.
Okay, all of this, the reason that I go into all of this is because it's so easy to look and see these bizarre sort of parallel universes that the right and the left live in.
So the left is looking at this story and they're saying, aha!
Manafort was tapped because Manafort is guilty and that means Trump is guilty.
No evidence that Trump is guilty.
No evidence that Trump was even caught on the tapes.
No evidence of any of that.
I've said for well over a year at this point that Manafort was a bad pick by Trump.
I've said for months that if anyone was going to get indicted from the Trump campaign, it was going to be Manafort, not Trump.
Again, Manafort could have been working with the Russians and not told Trump.
That's quite plausible.
Manafort's worked with the Russians for years.
And why would he tell Trump?
Trump's a big mouth.
Trump would go blow that thing wide open.
So it's quite possible that Manafort is guilty and Trump isn't.
And for the people on the right who are saying, this justifies Trump's tweets about wiretapping.
Okay, first of all, I really don't, I'm not sure that it does.
I don't think that it does.
But beyond that, I think that it is, I think it is important to recognize that that's not a good story for you.
If you're a Trump supporter, if your defense is, Trump was right about the tapping.
He was so right that they were tapping his line because they suspected Manafort of a crime.
And so Trump's probably involved in a crime.
I'm not sure that's a good line of defense for you.
I mean, you can celebrate him being right about the tweet and then get him more deeply involved in the Manafort investigation.
That doesn't seem brilliant.
That doesn't seem great.
I just don't see the upside there for President Trump.
So, that's the story with all of this.
Again, I think that while it's being blown up into a headline on CNN, I don't think this is actually huge news.
And while it's being blown up by people on the right to say Trump was right all along, this whole shtick of Trump was right all along about a tweet that doesn't matter seems to me counterproductive because the only thing that matters here is whether there's going to be any underlying crime that's found, not whether Trump was right about the tweet.
Unless, again, you believe that...
That Obama was deliberately targeting members of the Trump team in order to bring him down, and I do have some questions about that.
Believe me, I'm more than happy to talk about President Trump misusing the levers of government.
I wrote an entire book about it.
It's called The People vs. Barack Obama, in which I suggested that the Obama administration engaged in criminal activity in things like the IRS scandal.
But I want to see the evidence that President Obama did something wildly improper in targeting Paul Manafort or the FISA court did something wildly improper in issuing the FISA warrant before I jumped down Obama's throat and suggest that this was all a targeted attempt to get Trump.
I'm not sure that I see that here.
Okay, so...
Before I go any further and explain the latest news on Obamacare repeal and the Democrats completely falling apart, by the way.
I mean, I need to show you some footage of Nancy Pelosi being yelled at by her own side, which is just incredible.
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Okay, so...
In other news, before September 30th, the Republicans now have about a week and a half to pass Obamacare repeal.
If they do not pass Obamacare repeal in a week and a half, they're not getting it done this year.
If they don't get it done this year, it's very unlikely they're going to get it done next year.
The reason being, once we hit a midterm election year, everyone is really antsy.
No one wants to be seen as voting for something super controversial.
So the latest version of Obamacare quasi-repeal, it's not full repeal because the only way to do full repeal, presumably, would be to Would be to get 60 votes in the Senate or to get the Senate parliamentarian to rule that a majority can overthrow regulations.
Right now, so here's how it works in the Senate.
There's a weird rule called reconciliation in the Senate.
Reconciliation means that the Senate can vote with 51 votes.
They don't need 60 votes.
They need 51 votes.
He can't filibuster it to alter American law in a way that is budget neutral, that does not increase the budget, and that affects standing versions of American law.
So that means that getting rid of regulations, it's kind of difficult to determine how that's going to impact the budget.
And so getting rid of regulations purely, the general rule according to the Senate parliamentarian is that that doesn't fall under reconciliation.
You need 60 votes.
This is why Obama needed 60 votes for Obamacare, because he was creating new law.
It wasn't just getting rid of old law, he was creating new law.
Okay, so here is the new version that's being rolled out.
It's being rolled out by Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy.
It is a much better version of what we saw before.
It is a better version of what we saw before.
So we're going to go through it briefly here so you know what it is.
I've been talking with several Senators, and it seems like there's some good momentum behind this particular bill.
It's not a full repeal of Obamacare.
It doesn't get rid of all of Obamacare's taxes.
It doesn't get rid of all of Obamacare's regulations.
At the federal level, it doesn't get rid of the regulations.
It does allow state waivers, and those state waivers could theoretically First of all, Medicaid gets slashed.
So one of the big problems with Obamacare is that it has this open-ended commitment to increase Medicaid exposure by the federal government.
Its advocates say it's federalist, that it devolves power to the states.
People like Rand Paul say it doesn't do enough.
So here's what's in it.
First of all, Medicaid gets slashed.
So one of the big problems with Obamacare is that it has this open-ended commitment to increase Medicaid exposure by the federal government.
We're going to pay for your Medicaid expansion basically ad infinitum on an as-needed basis.
Well, this bill, the Cassidy-Graham bill, it slashes Medicaid growth pretty dramatically.
Instead of the federal government sending money to states on a need basis, states are instead given block grants, which means that we just send them a set amount of money, it's not based on need, and all the money in these block grants, instead of going to the states that have already expanded their Medicaid rules, as Obamacare did, right?
That was the incentive.
Obama said, you want this money?
You need to increase your Obamacare exchange.
You need to create an Obamacare exchange, then we'll send you money.
This new bill gets rid of that provision.
It basically says, we're going to allocate to all the states evenly, rather than to states that expanded their Obamacare subsidized Medicaid rolls.
So that means that states like Texas would benefit, states like California would lose.
The goal would be to cut expected Medicaid funding on the federal level by one third by 2026.
And eliminate it entirely by 2027.
Now the problem with this, of course, is that really kicks the can down the road.
If you think Congress is going to eliminate the subsidies, you have another thing coming.
Congress has never heavily limited medical subsidies.
Okay, as I say, Medicaid is redistributed.
The state's hardest hit are the ones that have already expanded their Medicaid rolls based on Obamacare's False and lying expansion of regulations around the actual law.
It does get rid of the individual mandate, so you no longer have to buy health insurance.
This does drive up prices, right?
Remember, the individual mandate is a funding mechanism for redistributive health care.
The Obamacare mandate forces me, as a healthy person, to pay for my health care so that an old sick person can pay less for theirs.
That's what Obamacare's individual mandate does.
So how do they fill in that gap for the insurance companies?
Well, what they do is they allow states to waive essential benefits.
So this sort of halfway brings back the ability for insurance companies to sell plans that do not include pre-existing conditions.
So that's how they are going to bring down the cost is by allowing more competition in the marketplace by allowing them to sell different types of insurance.
So it relieves some of the regulations.
Now, getting rid of the pre-existing conditions planned brings down the overall cost of health insurance, but for a select few people who are already sick and don't get insurance through their employer, those people are going to see increased health care costs.
They will.
They'll see increased health care costs.
There's an increase in subsidies to try and make up for that.
The question is whether that is enough.
So, this is a better bill than the one that Republicans rejected a couple of months back.
It still won't do enough to open up competition because it leaves a lot of these key regulations in place.
Until all pre-existing conditions on regulations are removed, you're going to see prices increase because competition won't be free and open.
It doesn't get rid of all of Obamacare's taxes either, but it is a step in the right direction.
I think there's a good shot that it passes and it should.
It should pass.
This is a bill that I think is actually worth voting for as long as we don't say that this is all.
This is not the end of the story.
This is the first step toward Obamacare repeal.
This is not the entirety of Obamacare repeal.
And so it's deeply important that we make that distinction because we don't want to lie to constituents who expect that this is going to fix everything.
Okay.
Meanwhile, while Republicans are struggling over the Russia investigation and Obamacare repeal, there is something else happening among Democrats, and that is a full-scale disaster.
So Democrats, you know, there's this idea that when you're in the opposition that you're unified and you're cohesive and you have the ability to push things.
And President Trump lately has been giving up to Democrats pretty easily.
Well, the Democrats have some problems of their own.
This was demonstrated last night when a bunch of illegal immigrant protesters descended on a Nancy Pelosi press conference.
Here's what it looked like.
Why don't we do this?
Since you don't want to listen, since you don't want to listen, we'll have to just go.
You don't want to listen.
How radical are the Democrats?
How radical is their base?
Nancy Pelosi is too far right for them.
They're protesting DACA because they say it doesn't do enough.
They were protesting because they want ICE to be completely disbanded.
They want a completely open border.
This is the Democrat base, or at least part of the Democrat base, and they don't know what to do about it.
They don't know what to do about it.
It's completely and utterly bereft of reason.
It's totally amazing.
And the Democrats are moving further and further to the left in order to take advantage of these people.
But in doing so, they're leaving the middle.
Like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.
She's considered a 2020 contender.
And she came out and she said that, who are the leaders of our party?
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
My God.
I think you have your congressional leaders, of course.
But I think Senator Sanders is out there talking about things that have big ideas, like Medicare for All.
I think Elizabeth Warren's out there talking about a rigged system that we desperately need to fix for working families.
Okay, amazing that this is their new party.
Their new party is Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Good luck with that gang.
I mean, they're so radical that Luis Gutierrez, the representative, he was ripping on John Kelly, who is Trump's chief of staff.
He said that John Kelly was basically a traitor to the United States despite his military service and said that he had basically sold out Americans and all this.
And Gutierrez refuses to apologize because that's how polarized you have to be to demonstrate to your base that you're crazy enough to represent them.
Do you regret speaking that strongly and criticizing John Kelly?
Let me just say this.
I could have been more careful with the use of my words.
And there are times that you need to re-evaluate.
Having said that, I saw him as head of Homeland Security deport grandmothers who had been for 15 years reporting dutifully to Homeland Security with their American citizen grandchildren.
Heartless actions and increasing deportation against people who presented no threat.
So in other words, no apology to General Kelly for basically calling him a sellout to the United States of America.
That is the new Democratic Party.
They've got some serious problems.
And meanwhile, they still have Hillary trolling around for book money, trying to claim that she's going to challenge the legitimacy of the election.
I'm old enough to remember when it was crazy when President Trump said that he might challenge the legitimacy of the election.
In fact, I criticized him for it.
Here was President Trump, then-candidate Trump, saying that he might challenge the legitimacy of the election way back when.
This is in October.
I am a victim of one of the great political smear campaigns in the history of our country.
They are coming after me to try and destroy what is considered by even them the greatest movement in the history of our country.
There's never been anything like it.
Okay, so there was Trump back in October and the media went nuts over this.
He was asked about it in debate.
Hillary said it was despicable for anybody to challenge the results of an election.
Here is Hillary Clinton yesterday talking about challenging the legitimacy of the election eight months after it took place.
Would you completely rule out Questioning the legitimacy of this election if we learn that the Russian interference in the election is even deeper than we know now.
No, I would not.
I would say... You're not going to rule it out?
No, I wouldn't rule it out, but I also... So what are the means, like, this is totally unprecedented in every way.
It is.
What would be the means to challenge it if you thought it should be challenged?
Basically, I don't believe there are.
There are scholars, academics who have arguments that it would be, but I don't think they're on strong ground.
I mean, amazing.
So this is the new Democratic Party.
Hillary Clinton whining about her life, and Bernie Sanders and Kristen Gillibrand and illegal immigrants shouting at Nancy Pelosi for not being crazy enough.
So while we talk about the Republican Party having some problems, the Democrats are far worse off than the Republicans right now.
Okay, so before I get to things I like and things I hate, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Dollar Shave Club.
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Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
I figured that since I did Rebecca yesterday, the book by Daphne du Maurier and the movie with Laurence Olivier, we'll do some Laurence Olivier Gothic stuff.
And so, this is Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights.
This has one of the great scores of all time.
It's sort of a forgotten classic, Wuthering Heights.
It won some Oscars in 1939.
It's really a terrific film.
Old school, kind of glorious.
If it had been in color, you'd say that it was in glorious color, but it really is in glorious black and white.
It's really terrific.
Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, very, very young David Nevin.
It's a terrific film.
The book is also quite good, obviously.
And you should check it out.
it out here's a little bit of the trailer greatest love story of our time or any time .
Or any time.
Don't you see what he's been doing?
He's been using you to be near me.
To smile at me behind your back.
To try to rouse something in my heart that's dead.
You can't.
Heathcliff's not a man, but something dark and horrible to live with.
You imagine, Catherine, that I don't know why you're acting so.
Because you love him.
Oh, Heathcliff, you must not do this villainous thing.
She hasn't harmed you.
You have.
Then punish me!
I'm going to.
When I take her in my arms, when I kiss her, when I promise her life and happiness.
Oh, Heathcliff, if there's anything human left in you, don't do this.
Oh, Heathcliff, why won't you let me come near you?
You're not black and horrible as they all think.
You're full of pain.
I can make you happy.
Let me try.
You won't regret it.
I'll be your slave.
I can bring life back to you, new and fresh.
He's a very dark character, obviously the Laurence Olivier character, and it is very romantic.
It's great.
The score is really terrific.
I'm trying to remember who wrote the score.
Alfred Newman, of course.
Yeah, the great Alfred Newman, and one of the great film scorers of all time.
Go and check it out tonight.
It's a great date movie, and you'll think of what your parents' date movie was like, because that's when it came out.
Okay, other things that I like.
I think that it is amazing that the media are still going nuts over Sean Spicer.
So last night I was on CNN with Don Lemon and Don was upset with Sean Spicer appearing at the Emmys.
Oh, how dare the Emmys go easy on Sean Spicer.
They should have taken him out there and beaten him with sticks.
They should have taken him out there and they should have poured a bucket of pig's blood on his head just like Harry.
That's what it should have been.
CNN, they had a commentator who said the Emmy that The Emmys honoring Sean Spicer, it was just terrible.
How could they?
This is White House reporter Caitlin Collins, the CNN White House reporter.
Objective journalism at its finest.
So, uh, there was some laughter, there was some awkwardness.
What did you think?
I did not find it humorous at all as someone who sat in that press briefing room every day that Sean Spicer was the press secretary.
I just don't think it's humorous when the former White House spokesman comes out at this awards show with all these Hollywoods that they often rail against to make fun of the fact and, you know, pretty much admit that he lied to the American people while he was being paid by the American people to be a spokesman for the White House.
This is someone who, when he came out a few days after that inauguration statement, he promised not to lie and to tell the truth.
It's the self-righteousness here that I kind of enjoy.
It's the idea from the media and from Hollywood that we are the arbiters of truth.
The great and grand arbiters of truth, the people who had no problem with Michelle Obama at the Oscars in 2013, or Joe Biden at the Oscars in 2016, who did a legitimate sitcom, Hollywood did a legitimate sitcom with a guy named John Lovett, who's now over at Pod Save America.
He was an Obama staffer, okay?
The Obama administration was chock full of untruth for years, but nobody seemed to object.
Sean Spicer, the reason that everybody is laughing at Sean Spicer is not because Sean Spicer was a liar, okay?
We're used to that from our politicians.
It's because Sean Spicer was uniquely horrible at lying.
That's why we all think it was funny.
Okay, he was really terrible at it.
Like Sean Spicer, there's a part deep down inside Sean Spicer that when you watch him, you know there's a part of him that cringes when he lies.
That's why you could see the deadness in his eyes when he was lying about crowd size.
And so when he did that the other night, Like, that was actually a blow in favor of truth, because now, I guess we're all moving beyond the idea that he wasn't fibbing.
I don't understand why that's a terrible thing, and why Hollywood is gonna get, and the media are gonna get so upset about this.
Oh God, he's, how could Hollywood honor such a man?
They weren't honoring him, he was the punchline of the joke.
He was the punchline.
I mean, they were laughing at him, they weren't laughing with him.
The whole thing is just very silly.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate, so...
There's an astonishing poll out today from Brookings Institute.
It is unbelievable.
Okay, the poll is about whether or not speakers like me should be shut down on college campuses.
Okay, here's the question.
A public university invites a very controversial speaker to an on-campus event.
The speaker is known for making offensive and hurtful statements.
A student group opposed to the speaker disrupts the speech by loudly and repeatedly shouting so that the audience cannot hear the speaker.
Do you agree or disagree that the student group's actions are acceptable?
Democrats, 62% agree.
62%, 6 in 10 Democrats.
Republicans, 61% disagree.
Independents, 55% disagree.
Males particularly agree with the statement that it's okay to shout down speakers.
So it's okay to just go and shout them down.
Okay, this is even worse.
A public university invites a controversial speaker to an on-campus event.
A student group opposed to the speaker uses violence to prevent the speaker from speaking.
Is this okay?
Is this okay?
20% of Democrats agree.
22% of Republicans agree that it is okay to use violence to shut down speakers on the other side.
1 in 5 Americans believe this.
Totally insane.
Totally insane, okay?
This is un-American.
It's un-American.
And you see this, unfortunately, pervading the highest levels of the left intelligentsia.
I'm shocked by that Republican statistic, by the way.
The 22% of Republicans are okay with violence shutting down a speech.
That's an amazing thing.
But a Princeton professor was legitimately on TV, this was a couple days ago, opposing my appearance at Berkeley for some of these same reasons.
Do you think it's productive for people to interrupt a conservative speaker to walk up on the stage to block his ability to give a message to the point where that person has to be let out by security?
No, that doesn't make- but in some instances I think there are moments where I don't feel it necessary for me to have to endure an argument that questions my presence.
Okay, just amazing.
Just incredibly amazing.
Their actual intellect who suggests that it's okay to shut down speeches on these grounds.
So, amazing stuff.
Okay, time for a quick deconstruction of the culture.
So, one of the things that happened at the Emmys the other night that I didn't have a chance to comment on is there's an actress named Issa Rae.
I'm not sure what show she's on.
I guess that she's on Insecure.
She's the creator and star of HBO's Insecure.
And she was very candid about who she wanted to win.
Here's what she had to say.
Who are you rooting for tonight?
I'm rooting for everybody black.
I am.
Okay, so, imagine a white person said that.
I'm rooting for everyone white.
And imagine an Asian person said, I'm rooting for everyone Asian.
This notion of racial solidarity, I'm rooting for everyone black, and we're supposed to pretend that's not racism, of course it's racism.
Why wouldn't you root for the best person?
Why wouldn't you say, I root for my friends?
Why wouldn't you say, I root for the people who even have the same political beliefs that I do?
Right?
Why does it have to be based on race?
By the way, I don't think that that's true.
I think that if there were a documentary about Clarence Thomas, and Clarence Thomas were up for an Emmy for some odd reason, that she would not be rooting for Clarence Thomas to win.
I think what she does is she, like a lot of people on the left, identifies her own politics with blackness and then suggests that blackness is a reason why people should win Emmys.
Pretty gross.
She said that she was pleased with the number of people of color who are nominated this year.
Again, I don't understand what the color has anything to do with it.
The quality of the stories is fine.
Why didn't she just say that?
committed to telling authentic, real stories that haven't been seen on television before.
And you have audiences embracing it because they're tired of seeing the same old, same old stories.
So it's a pleasure to be among such great company.
Again, I don't understand what the color has anything to do with it.
The quality of the stories is fine.
Why didn't you just say that?
Why didn't you just say all the people who write great stories that haven't been told before?
I'm eager to see those people win.
But the focus on color ruins the country.
It ruins the country whether it's coming from white people or black people and pretending that it is only a problem when it comes from one race is just absurd.
It's absurd, it's silly, it's backward, and it is indeed racist.
It's amazing how people get away with this in the cultural world in a way they never would be able to in the political world.
Kind of astonishing.
But I'm the threat to American civility.
When I speak on campus and say, we should judge people individually, I'm the threat to American civility.
But Issa Rae is the person who stands up for the great tradition of diversity by saying that she's rooting for all the black people.
Pretty incredible.
Well, we will be back here tomorrow.
I want to give you a further breakdown of President Trump's UN speech.
Plus, as always, the news of the day.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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