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Nov. 2, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:51
How Hillary and Obama Wrecked The Democratic Party | Ep. 409
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Well, there's a new bombshell report out today from the former head of the DNC, tearing the DNC apart.
We'll talk about it, plus the Republican tax bill and President Trump goes after immigration.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Alrighty, so this Donna Brazile report in Politico is pretty astonishing for a number of reasons.
I'm going to go through them, and it just demonstrates how in the tank the media were for the Democratic Party, that so little of this came out over the past couple of years during the center of the election cycle.
It does demonstrate also how in the tank the DNC was for Hillary Clinton and how Bernie Sanders really got jobbed.
And furthermore, it demonstrates why Bernie Sanders is the future of the party.
But I'll explain all of that in just one second.
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Okay, so we begin with this bombshell report from Donna Brazile.
So you remember Donna Brazile.
Donna Brazile was a CNN commentator, former part of the Al Gore campaign in 2000, and she was made interim head of the Democratic National Committee after Debbie Wasserman Schultz was basically ousted for handing the DNC over to Hillary Clinton and using it as a weapon against Bernie Sanders.
And Donna Brazile had already at that point, I believe, been leaking questions to Hillary Clinton, debate questions to Hillary Clinton from the CNN desk.
Before the debate, she was actually let out of her CNN contract.
She was essentially fired, as I recall.
And she is now coming out trying to explain that she is not at fault, right?
She is fine.
It's just the DNC that was a wreck.
And what she has to say about the Democratic National Committee really does demonstrate that the sort of division that I was talking about, I've been talking about for a year now on this show, the tripartite division inside the DNC, the division between Hillary followers, Obama followers, and Bernie followers is very real, and that Bernie is actually winning this battle.
So here are some of the revelations from Donna Brazile's piece at Politico.
This is from her new book that is coming out shortly.
First of all, Brazile is obviously trying to shield herself.
She's obviously doing the, I'm shocked, shocked to find there's gambling going on here routine.
She portrays herself as Hercule Poirot, as Encyclopedia Brown, entering the situation and trying to determine where the malfeasance has been at the DNC, like she didn't know.
She talks in this article about it's a week before the election, and she's been sussing out how Bernie Sanders got screwed, and she is just so devastated by it.
She says, I love this, she says, before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music.
I wanted to censor myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.
I mean, really, if you're going to write a movie about yourself, try not to make it so cliché, Donna.
Really?
You put on candles?
You lit candles and put on gospel music?
Really?
Come on, I guess if she'd been the villain, she would have put on Beethoven.
Right?
That's the way that all the bad movies work.
In any case...
This is the same lady who, as I say, leaked debate questions to Hillary, now claiming that she was trying to just bring honesty to the Democratic National Committee.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, her predecessor, was a disaster who turned the entire party over to Hillary, according to Brazil.
She says, "My predecessor, Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when Barack Obama's neglect had left the party in significant debt.
As Hillary's campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party's debt and put it on a starvation diet.
It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield controls of its operations.
So according to Brazil, basically what happened is that the Democratic Party had run up on hard times.
Obama had cleaned the place out.
And Debbie Wasserman Schultz didn't want to do the fundraising, so instead she went to Hillary and said, you do all the fundraising, you fill back in that hole, you backfill that gap in our funding, and I'll let you run the DNC, basically.
This is according to Donna Brazile.
All the Bernie people who are complaining that the thing was rigged, all of Trump's statements that it was rigged against Bernie, all of that was true.
Third point here, Obama cleaned out the party.
So for all of the talk about how Barack Obama was the great savior of the Democratic Party, the new FDR, the man who had revitalized the Democratic Party, not only did Obama devastate the Democratic Party down ballot, losing over 1,000 state seats in legislatures across the country, losing 13 gubernatorial seats, losing 12 Senate seats, Not only did he do all of those things, he also cleaned them out financially.
Brazil says that by the time she took over the DNC, the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.
This is in the middle of an election cycle where Hillary is raising oodles and gobs of cash.
According to Brazil, Obama, after 2012, left the party $24 million in debt.
$24 million in debt.
Barack Obama, that great beacon of light for the Democratic Party, he basically bankrupted the party.
And his campaign said they wouldn't pay it off until 2016.
So what did they do?
Wasserman Schultz had grown the staff.
She actually grew the staff.
She didn't cut, she didn't put the party on a starvation diet.
She grew the staff and allowed the DNC to pick up the check for Obama consultants.
So Obama had already run the party into the ground, but the DNC was continuing to pay using the credit card for all of Obama's consultants, which is pretty amazing.
So what happened?
They turned it over to Hillary, and Hillary was supposed to come in and fill in the gap.
So Hillary used that debt to pick up power.
Gary Gensler, who is the chief financial officer of the Hillary campaign, apparently, quote, And here's where you get into some dicey territory.
under the control of Hillary's campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp.
The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving him money every month to meet his basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fundraising clearinghouse.
And here's where you get into some dicey territory.
Hillary Clinton was apparently using the DNC almost, Almost to launder money.
I mean, not in a strict legal sense, but in a sort of colloquial sense.
She was basically using the DNC to launder money.
Here's what Brazil explains.
She says, "Less than half of 1% of all the money that Hillary raised for the DNC actually went to the state parties.
Instead, it all went right back into campaigning for Hillary." Brazil says, "When the Politico's story described this arrangement as, quote, 'Essentially money laundering for the Clinton campaign,' Hillary's people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady.
Bernie's people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.
Which of course it was.
All the money was coming into the DNC vis-a-vis Hillary, and it wasn't being used for Democratic Party operations, it was being used to campaign for Hillary Rodham Clinton personally.
So they let Hillary have run of the shop, and she immediately corrupted the DNC in the same way that she corrupted the State Department, in the same way the Clinton Foundation was corrupt.
All of which leads to the sixth point here.
Bernie got completely jobbed.
Okay, Bernie got completely jobbed.
If the DNC had not handed all of its operations over to Hillary, to the point where Hillary for America was basically running the DNC from Brooklyn, from her Brooklyn offices, every press release from the DNC apparently had to be vetted through Hillary's office.
If that had not been happening, Bernie probably wins the nomination, or at the very least, it's an extraordinarily close race, even closer than it ended up being.
Brazil basically admits that Hillary was in charge of the DNC from August 2015.
August 2015.
The first primaries didn't take place until January 2016.
So before Bernie was even seriously running, the party had been turned over to Hillary Clinton, a candidate for the nomination, which is insane.
Brazil says, quote, And all of this leads to the final point here.
that Hillary for America and the Victory Fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical.
If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead.
And all of this leads to the final point here.
It is very obvious that Bernie Sanders lost the battle in 2016, but he absolutely won the war.
If Bernie had won the nomination, maybe he doesn't beat Trump, right?
Maybe he's just a crazed old loon bag socialist from Vermont who couldn't defeat Donald Trump and Hillary is sitting somewhere crying into her beer and we get Hillary running again in 2020.
But Bernie Sanders didn't win the nomination.
And now the widespread perception, apparently correct, is that Bernie Sanders was cheated out of the nomination by the Democratic Party establishment.
And so Bernie can now run as the anti-establishment outsider again in 2020 and as the loyal soldier.
Because according to Brazil, she went to Bernie with all of this one week prior to the election.
Bernie didn't say, I want to blow this up or I'm going to go public with this.
Instead, Bernie swallowed hard and he said, I'm going to campaign for Hillary against Trump.
If Bernie runs for the nomination in 2020, he will win the nomination in 2020, and he may win the presidency, which is very scary for the country, very frightening for the country.
But Bernie Sanders is now where the power lies in the Democratic Party, and Brazil is making that clear.
Donna Brazile is a political animal.
Donna Brazile is a political survivor.
And what she is doing here is she is basically tossing Hillary Clinton to the wolves so that she can get in good with the Bernie Sanders folks, who she feels are the next wave in the Democratic Party.
And you can see this.
All of the major Democratic players in 2020 are already endorsing Medicare for All.
They're already moving along Bernie Sanders' lines, trying to outflank Bernie Sanders.
Good luck with that.
Their only hope is that Bernie stays out of the primaries in 2020 and then endorses someone.
That is their only hope.
If Bernie runs in 2020, he will win the Democratic nomination.
He will defeat Joe Biden.
He will defeat Kamala Harris, for sure.
Bernie Sanders will have the power of revenge behind him, plus Bernie Sanders has a better feel for what voters want to hear in some of the swing states that Hillary lost than Hillary Clinton's in.
There's a significant possibility that Bernie Sanders is president in 2020 because of Hillary Clinton.
If that's not scary to you, then you haven't been following Bernie Sanders' career in any significant way.
So that's the news out of Democratic land, where they've torn each other apart.
Bernie Sanders owns the party because Hillary Clinton corrupted the party and Barack Obama bankrupted the party.
And Bernie Sanders is the only solution?
Pretty amazing stuff.
Pretty amazing switch from a guy who was at the fringe of the Democratic Party to basically now being the center of gravity inside of it.
Well, I want to talk a little bit about the new tax proposal that Republicans just put out.
I think it's quite good, but it's quite bad for people like me.
I'll explain why that is in just a second.
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Okay.
So, back to the Republican tax plan here.
So the Republicans have now released their tax plan.
And it's got some good stuff, and it's got some bad stuff.
Basically, if you're in California and you own a home, you're screwed.
This is basically how this works.
If you're anywhere else in the country, this plan is probably quite good for you.
But if you are in California, you just get...
Jobbed by this plan if you're in the upper tax bracket.
So for people like me, I'm in top tax bracket in California.
That means I am just going to get nailed.
I would vote for this tax plan anyway because I think the tax plan is quite good.
So here's what the tax plan does.
It lowers the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%.
This is a good thing.
It also lowers the pass-through tax rate on what they call S-corporations from close to 40% down to 25%, which is also a good thing because our corporate tax rates are the highest in the industrialized world.
They are higher than France, they are higher than Japan, they are higher than the UK, they are higher than Germany.
Bring it down to 20% would put us right in the middle of the pack.
That is a good thing.
It also narrows the tax brackets.
Right now there's seven tax brackets.
This would get rid of four of them.
It would bring it down to, or it would get rid of three of them rather, it would bring it down to four tax brackets as opposed to seven.
It would actually negatively impact people who are making over $400,000 a year.
$400,000 a year.
If you were making over $400,000 a year, then you are paying 39.6% in the, you're paying, sorry, if you're paying, no matter what, you're paying 40% tax bracket, if you're making about $420,000 a year, then you're paying 30%.
This new program would lift that cap to $500,000 a year, but it would also make it that if you're making more than $400,000 a year, you're paying a 35% tax as opposed to a 33% tax.
So it raises taxes slightly for people in that tax bracket, but then increases the next station on the belt.
So it raises taxes slightly for people in that tax bracket, but then increases the next station on the belt.
So if you're making precisely $500,000, this is not necessarily a good deal for you.
If you're making more than $500,000, then the deal is probably fine for you.
You don't really lose much through it.
If you are making below $200,000 a year, your taxes go down no matter what tax bracket you're in.
If you make under $37,000 a year, your tax bracket goes down from $15,000 to $12,000.
If you are making under $200,000 a year, your tax bracket goes down from $28,000 to $25,000.
The capital gains and dividend tax rates stay exactly the same.
The estate tax is basically chopped in half.
So, if you are, right now, you pay, the estate tax I think is evil.
This idea the government gets to raid your coffin for cash.
You die.
The government immediately runs into your safe and just takes out the money that you've already paid taxes on.
Pretty terrible, but...
Right now what this plan would do is to take the estate tax which is 40% on estates above $5.5 million and doubles it so that the estate tax only applies on estates above $11.2 million and then in 2024 it just is eliminated completely.
It just goes away completely so no more estate tax which of course is the proper Solution considering that anybody who knows what they're doing with taxes simply signs a living will and then they don't have to pay an estate tax Anyway, right a living will just allows you to essentially transfer your assets over before your death to your children So that way they're not inheriting from you.
It's only inheritance that they get screwed here The GOP tax plan does repeal the deduction for state and local income and sales taxes This is why I say if you're in California, you're screwed.
Okay now I don't think this is a bad thing.
I think it's a bad thing for me, right?
I think I'm in trouble here because California has a 10% state income tax, which is insane.
So basically, the way that it used to work is that I would take that as a deduction against my federal tax.
Now I can't do that anymore under the Republican tax plan.
So basically, if I'm in the top tax bracket, or at least the portion of my income that's in the top tax bracket, I'm going to be paying 39.6% on that, and then I'm going to be paying an additional 10% on that from the state of California.
Right?
Which is pretty insane.
So I'm paying 50% of all that money to the state or federal government, which is pretty crazy.
Especially because, as I've said, I don't agree with tax plans that increase taxes on people who are wealthy, because the people who are making a lot of money are also the people who are investing a lot of money, saving a lot of money, and allowing free commerce to flourish.
That it also allows a deduction for property taxes, but it caps it at $10,000.
So again, it punishes people in California.
California has some pretty significant property taxes, even though it's been capped by Prop 13.
In places like Massachusetts, which have a huge property tax, that is going to just destroy them.
The purpose here, on a political level, is to force a lot of the blue states to reconsider whether their taxes should be quite this high.
And it is not fair that Texas has been basically paying the freight for California through this particular tax deduction.
Republicans are going to curtail the deductions.
This is according to the Wall Street Journal.
Individuals take for state and local tax payments and the ones businesses get for the interest they pay on debt.
But it doesn't charge the 401k savings accounts, which is good.
It also calls for leaving the top individual tax rate at 40%, but pushing the income threshold to $1 million for married couples.
There are some holes that I think Democrats are going to try and exploit here.
The holes they're going to try and exploit are, again, the failure to take into account state income taxes, and also that it gets rid of deductions for medical expenses.
So people who have HSAs don't really have to worry about it, but if you have a serious medical problem and you're paying lots of money, and now you can't take that deduction in the same number as you were before, that is going to hurt you.
And that's where the Democrats are going to attack.
They're going to say, you're killing Obamacare already, and now you're trying to take away my deduction for the medical care.
Why are you punishing people who have health problems?
That's where the Democrat line of attack is likely to come.
So as I say, there are a couple of political landmines.
Also, speaking of people who it's going to hurt in California and Massachusetts, the bill limits the home mortgage interest deduction.
So right now, you can take a home mortgage interest deduction for loans up to a million dollars.
Now, it would only be deductible on loans up to $500,000.
Well, that's not just, you know, that's not just rich people in the state of California.
Basically, any home in a major city in the state of California, any single family home in the state of California, you're taking a loan above $500,000.
The average price for a three bedroom in like LA is probably $750.
So that's going to hurt some people who are middle class.
And because of the larger standard deduction, so the standard deduction has gone up.
That's kind of the max deduction you can give.
Fewer people would have a tax incentive to make charitable deductions.
So, you used to give charitable deductions in order to increase your itemization.
That is going to go away a little bit.
Life insurers lose some tax breaks.
Bank with assets exceeding $50 billion would get no deduction.
Tax exempt—this is good, actually.
Tax exempt bonds can no longer get a tax deduction for building professional sports stadiums.
No more subsidizing the stupid L.A.
football teams to build more stadiums.
No more of that.
Overall, this is quite a good tax plan.
I think that it does pick and choose in some areas that I don't exactly love.
It retains the earned income tax credit, which is basically a welfare program.
It also increases the child tax credit, but not as much as people like Mike Lee and Marco Rubio have suggested.
Under current law, a married couple with two children making $60,000 would get a $13,000 standard deduction and four personal exemptions worth $4,100, $4,150.
That means they pay taxes on $30,000 of taxable income, which means that they are only going to be paying a very small tax bill as opposed to a significantly larger tax bill.
So, bottom line is that it does lower taxes for virtually everyone except the people who are at the top of the income spectrum and people living in states like California and Massachusetts.
Will Trump have a majority for this?
It's going to be difficult for him to cobble together a majority for anything, particularly because there's the say no to anything Trump wants caucus now, which may or may not include people like John McCain, Jeff Flake, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins.
We'll see how bad the blowback is from the Democrats.
What's interesting about this proposal is because Trump is not actually giving tax breaks to people at the upper end of the income spectrum like me, it's going to be difficult for the Democrats to say that he's attempting to create tax cuts for the rich at the expense of people lower in the income scale, because that simply is not true.
Okay, so there is your tax breakdown.
I want to talk a little bit more about immigration and President Trump's plans there on where he is right and why he's right, but not for quite the right reasons.
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I have a lot to talk about still.
I want to talk today about internet censorship.
Both Republicans and Democrats are going to go after some major internet companies.
I have pretty epic things I hate that I'm going to talk about.
We're going to go after Stephen Colbert a little bit.
So lots to talk about here.
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So yesterday I was talking about this New York terror attack.
I want to make a correction to something that I said sort of in the heat of the moment.
I got a fact wrong.
I said there are more people who have been killed by white supremacist terror attacks in the United States since 2001 than Islamist terrorist attacks.
That, of course, is not true.
There have been more white supremacist attacks than Islamist terror attacks overall, but the number of people who have been killed in Islamist terror attacks is greater than the number of people killed in white supremacist terror attacks because there are places like Orlando, Where he had 59 people killed, or I think it was 59, right, who were killed in Orlando.
I'd have to check the number, but a solid number of people who were killed in the Orlando nightclub shooting.
That was an Islamic terror attack.
58 non-fatal injuries, 50 deaths, including the perpetrator.
So, more deaths in Islamist terror attacks, more attacks by white supremacists.
Okay, so I wanted to correct the record on that, because I think it's important to correct ourselves when we make mistakes.
I also said yesterday that I didn't think that it was the right time to talk about immigration policy, mainly because I think that the immigration policies Trump is espousing are exactly correct, but we have to do this outside the heat of a terror attack.
And here is the reason why.
I want to show you.
So here is Laura Ingraham making the argument that Trump was making yesterday with regard to immigration policy.
Now remember, I agree with Laura Ingraham's argument on the immigration policy.
I agree with Trump's argument on the immigration policy.
But I think the justification you're about to hear Laura Ingraham use here is actually a really problematic one.
Although we can't stop all terror attacks in the United States, the safety of the American people demand that we do what we can to stop those attacks that are preventable.
9-11 should have made it obvious to everyone that Islam has a hideous radicalization problem.
Donald Trump put the onus on Muslim leaders on his first foreign trip to get their houses in order and reform from within.
Here at home, we should not lose one more American life because politicians don't have the nerve or the will to do what's necessary to secure the homeland.
Our safety is their primary responsibility.
Okay, so here's the problem with what she's saying to a certain extent.
Of course, we should take policies that minimize terror attacks.
But this basically boils down to, we cannot lose one more life.
That's essentially what she's saying here.
She's basically saying, we cannot lose one more life.
You know, if this even saves one more American life, right?
She says, here at home we should not lose one more American life because politicians don't have the nerve or will to do what's necessary to secure the homeland.
That last line, we shouldn't lose one more life, that's the exact same line that gun control advocates use when they're talking about banning guns, right?
If it saves just one life.
Well, I hate that logic because pretty much everything could save just one life.
Right?
I mean, if we ban cars, would that save just one life?
It'd save tens of thousands of lives in all likelihood.
Right?
Should we ban knives?
I mean, if we did that, presumably we'd save some lives.
Should we ban swimming pools or buckets?
Right?
There are lots of things we can do to save just one life.
The question is, is that good policy or not?
So, I think Trump's recommendations on policy here are basically correct, but I think that using the logic of terror attacks in order to push for particular Policy changes.
The problem with using terror attacks is the same as the problem with using mass shootings.
Statistically speaking, they are an anomaly.
That does not mean we shouldn't take policies that minimize them, but if you're going to use that to justify broad policy changes...
Then, you know, I think that you're gonna end up in a world of hurt because the logic itself supports bad policy as well as good policy.
You really only want logic that supports good policy.
Plus, we now know there are red flags about this guy.
As always, there are red flags.
One of the things that's amazing is that, you know, when they released the JFK documents, it showed that the government was really nervous about releasing those documents.
I think the reason the government is really nervous about releasing those documents is they had all sorts of red flags on Oswald.
For the same reason the government was nervous about the 9-11 report.
For the same reason the government is always nervous whenever there's a terror attack and a report on it.
There's always the problem of, we botched our job.
That is usually a more plausible explanation for why there was some sort of terror attack or some sort of shooting or some sort of assassination.
A botch in the middle, right?
A policy that was already on the books was not enforced.
That's almost always a more plausible explanation for why something happened than a broad-based policy failure.
So the question here is, what is the broad-based policy failure?
So there are a couple of broad-based policy failures here, but they are failures not because of an anomalous terror attack.
They are failures because these broad-based policies have writ broad-based changes in American social standards and cultures and mores, right?
So here is Trump yesterday talking about chain migration with this New York City terrorist.
And what he's saying about chain migration is absolutely true as a general matter.
And we want to get rid of chain migration.
This man that came in, or whatever you want to call him, brought in with him other people.
And he was the point of contact, the primary point of contact, for, and this is preliminarily, 23 people that came in, or potentially came in with him.
And that's not acceptable.
So we want to get rid of chain migration.
And we've wanted to do that for a long time.
And I've been wanting to do it for a long time.
Okay, and it is right to get rid of chain migration.
What he's saying here, as a general rule, the big problem with chain migration is not a bad guy enters the United States, brings in 23 bad relatives, right?
That's probably not the problem.
The real problem here is That but not with terrorism, right?
People who come in, not necessarily bad people, but people who come in with different cultural mores and then they bring in their entire family, right?
People who are not educated.
You get one guy who comes in through the diversity visa lottery, has a high school degree and two years of work experience.
He comes in and he brings his entire extended family, none of whom have any high school degree or any work experience, none of whom have been acclimated to Western traditions and morals, and they all come in, right?
Chain migration has always been bad policy.
Chain migration has always been garbage policy, but it's not garbage policy necessarily 'cause of this guy, it's been garbage policy for years, and this is why I don't like using sort of single instances as the excuse.
Same thing here.
Here's Trump saying he's going to try and terminate the diversity lottery.
I talked about this yesterday.
The diversity lottery, the idea that we are going to give affirmative action to countries that don't have enough people coming in, is really stupid.
Originally, it was designed to get more Europeans in.
It's largely been used for countries that are majority Muslim now.
And it's bad policy.
Why should we give affirmative action to countries?
Why not just apply individual standards to the people coming in instead of trying to do it by ethnicity or country?
It's a problem.
That's the real reason we should terminate the diversity visa lottery.
Trump instead is trying to say that it's because of the terror attack.
I am today starting the process of terminating the diversity lottery program.
I'm going to ask Congress to immediately initiate work to get rid of this program.
Diversity and diversity lottery.
Diversity lottery.
Sounds nice.
It's not nice.
It's not good.
It's not good.
It hasn't been good.
We've been against it.
Okay, well, you know, he's right.
But again, doing this on the back of a terror attack is my problem here.
So he's doing the right thing for what I think is sort of the wrong reason here.
But Because he's doing the right thing, and because he is saying things that I think most Americans think, this is why Trump is popular.
Let's be real about this.
You know, Trump last night tweeted out that he was very upset, obviously, over the attack, and he said, this terrorist should get the death penalty.
That's it.
The president should not say that.
OK, it poisons the jury pool.
It actually creates legal problems because now the defendant gets to claim that he can't get a fair trial.
So Trump shouldn't have said it.
But what Trump said is, of course, what most people believe.
Trump said yesterday, for example, that we should just send the terrorists to Gitmo.
Most people in the United States have not really considered the legal ramifications of whether a green card holder who's a terrorist should go to Gitmo.
We already know an American citizen who's captured overseas as a terrorist cannot go to Gitmo in the Hamdi case, which was during the Bush administration.
But there are a lot of Republicans who feel this way.
And it is the passion with which Trump speaks about these particular issues that endears him to so many Americans who feel that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party have been soft on terror for years.
Mr. President, do you want to be a salient from New York City to Gitmo? - Thank you, Mr. President. - I would certainly consider that, yes. - Are you considering that?
I would certainly consider that.
Send him to Gitmo.
I would certainly consider that, yes.
Okay, so whenever, first of all, whenever he says I would certainly consider that, that's him buying time to a certain extent.
He doesn't know the answer so he always says I'll consider it.
But even if he says that, you know, the fact is that people resonate to the fact that Trump basically sees these terror attacks in the same way that they do.
Now, the media, of course, responds to all this, how dare Trump politicize?
How dare Trump politicize?
And we talked about this a little bit yesterday, but I just want to show you the level of hypocrisy of the people who have been calling Trump political on these issues.
Here's Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, saying that these Trump tweets, it's not the time now to foment hate.
How dare he?
How dare he politicize and foment hate? - I don't think this is the time to get political.
We had a policy, an immigration policy, in place in the '90s.
It was a bipartisan policy.
It was signed by a Republican president.
There's no doubt that we have to be smarter and have more intelligence.
But there's also no doubt that this is not the time to play politics.
This is not the time to foment hate.
This is not the time to divide because they all exacerbate the situation, right?
This is the time to forge alliances with our allies.
Okay, so it's not the time to divide.
Here's Andrew Cuomo on the radio a couple of years ago.
Their problem is not me and the Democrats.
Their problem is themselves.
Who are they?
Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, a pro-assault weapon, anti-gay?
Is that who they are?
Because if that's who they are, and if they are the extreme conservatives, They have no place in the state of New York.
Yeah, but now we can't be divisive, right?
Let's definitely not be divisive, right?
Extreme conservatives have no place in his state.
Americans have no place in his state, but it's divisive for Trump to talk about how terrible the Democrats have been on immigration.
Really, really terrible and divisive.
Here's Nancy Pelosi doing the same thing.
It's inappropriate to get political.
President Trump accused Chuck Schumer and the Dems for the terrorist attack in New York.
Do you agree?
That one was so inappropriate in a time of tragedy for him to get political.
That's so inappropriate, says Nancy Pelosi.
Here's also what Nancy Pelosi said the very day of the Las Vegas shooting.
I urge you to create a select committee on gun violence to study and report back common sense legislation to help end the crisis.
The bipartisan committee would make recommendations to prevent unspeakable tragedies such as the mass shooting in Las Vegas.
So she was willing to politicize the shooting in Vegas, like, a month ago, right?
But now, how dare Trump politicize?
How dare he politicize?
And when we talk about being divisive and politicizing things, you know, Trump, he's so divisive.
Chris Matthews, you don't have anything to say!
Because Trump's reigniting a civil war, it's crazy!
Look at, what's he talking about?
This crazy guy, get up in the morning, come to the show, come in, talk about this crazy man with his crazy hair, go!
The politics, the mannerisms of this president are always look for the partisan divide.
And if you can, if you're really lucky, look for an ethnic divide.
If you can break it along racial, ethnic background lines, it's a winner for Donald Trump.
It just seems like he always looks for the statues issue.
He's back in there again with his chief of staff looking for north-south blue-gray fighting again.
Sure.
Trying to reignite, reenact.
I don't mind reenactors, but he's trying to reignite the Civil War.
What do you make of your fellow Republican?
He's trying to reignite the Civil War?
Really?
Like he's bringing back slavery and then he's going to embolden the people from the South to fight the people from the North?
That's really his thing?
I do love when the Democrats talk about how divisive the Republicans are.
I'm playing a clip from Michelle Obama yesterday.
I want to talk about divisive rhetoric.
This is Michelle Obama, one of the great uniters of our time.
The unity figure.
I mean, yeah, I know, in 2008 she was saying that she didn't love her country until Obama was nominated, but she's now a unity figure, a unifying force in America.
Here she is ripping on men.
That's one of the questions.
It's like raising our men.
We got to rest talking to my mother about that the other day.
It's like the problem in the world today is we love our boys and we raise our girls, you know?
We raise them to be strong and sometimes we take care not to hurt men.
And I think we pay for that a little bit.
And that's a we thing, because we're raising them, you know?
And it's powerful to have strong men, but what does that strength mean?
You know, does it mean respect?
Does it mean responsibility?
Does it mean compassion?
Or are we protecting our men too much, so they feel a little entitled?
And a little, you know, a little self-righteous sometimes.
But that's kinda on us, too.
You know, we're raising our men to feel entitled and self-righteous because we've never seen an entitled or self-righteous woman anywhere in America.
Anywhere.
And we just can't find them.
Hillary Clinton.
We can't find an entitled, self-righteous girl anywhere.
Yeah, I just, I don't see any of them.
It's only men who are entitled and self-righteous.
And it's because we're raising men to be this way, right?
Men are the bad guys.
It's men who are the problem in American society, not women.
Yeah, that's not divisive at all.
Not divisive at all.
Okay.
So, another issue that, where I think there's bipartisan stupidity going on.
So, there's a big discussion now going on over internet censorship.
And it's all based on the 2016 election.
There's been a lot of talk in recent days about how Hillary Clinton, she was jobbed, basically, by the Russians.
The Russians used Facebook and Twitter in order to push their own political agenda, in order to push political chaos in the United States.
There's a study that came out and said that the Russians had, I guess, 150 million engagements on Facebook, and this was supposedly shifting the election.
Okay, let me put that in perspective.
Okay, I know my own Facebook engagement numbers.
You know how many?
They said the entire election cycle, I guess.
They had 150 million engagements, something to that effect.
I want to look up the exact statistics so I make sure that I get this right.
Engagements, Russian bots.
Okay, so they say that 126 million people in the United States may have seen posts, may have seen posts.
Presented by the Russian government.
Maybe 126 million users may have seen those posts.
My weekly reach on Facebook, from my Facebook page alone, is almost 30 million.
So I do that every month.
Did I swing the 2016 election?
Do I have the numbers to swing the 2016 election?
Obviously not, because if I did, no one would have voted.
Right?
So that obviously is not the case.
But what's amazing is that the Democrats are so ensconced in this idea that Hillary must have won the election that they have to say that it was the Russian bots that really won her the election now.
Now, before I show you what these idiot senators are saying, and I think it's from both parties, the stupidity, I want to show you some of what the Russian bots were putting out that supposedly swung the election.
Okay, so here is a, we're going to show a couple of these graphics, Austin.
Can we get the Bernie Sanders graphic here?
Um, the Buff Bernie.
So this is one of the Russian fake pages.
Okay?
It is an animated picture of a very gay-looking Bernie Sanders, uh, doing a muscle man pose in multiple colors.
And it says, LGBT United.
You can color your own Bernie hero.
There's a new coloring book called Buff Bernie.
A coloring book for Berniacs.
It's full of very attractive doodles of Bernie Sanders in muscle poses.
The author of the book said she wanted people to stop taking this whole thing too serious.
The coloring is something that suits for all people.
So first of all, the English in it is just atrocious.
Second of all, did this shift the election?
This picture of Bernie Sanders in a thong?
An animated Bernie Sanders in a thong.
That's what shifted the election.
Oh, if only we'd been able to stop that sort of nefarious activity by the Russians.
That wasn't the only one.
Do we have any more of these?
Because they're really absurd.
This one is from some sort of Group called American Made and then it's a picture of a father and a son both carrying guns and it says, this is the way our children have to be raised.
It's not the promotion of violence, it's the motion of confidence and the ability to defend yourself or whatever it is.
And this was, I think the number of times these were clicked on, the first one was clicked on like 100 times, this one was clicked on like 800 times.
Wow, just shocking material.
It was this sort of thing that shifted the election.
This was my personal favorite.
I loved this one so much.
Okay, this one was from a group called Army of Jesus.
If you can't see it, you should really check it out.
Again, this is what Democrats are saying won the election for Donald Trump.
OK, it is an animation of Jesus wrestling with the devil.
And then it says, Satan, if I win, Clinton wins.
Jesus, not if I can help it.
And then it says, press like to help Jesus win.
And then the caption says, Again, look at the grammar here, right?
Again, look at the grammar here, right?
The grammar isn't even English.
And even though Donald Trump isn't a saint by any means, he's at least an honest man and he cares deeply for this country.
My vote goes for him.
Okay, so yes, it's a pro-Trump ad.
Look at the number of shares at the bottom of this.
29 shares.
29 shares, okay?
When I put up a video, we're talking thousands and thousands of shares.
This is the sort of stuff Democrats say shifted the election, and we have to punish Facebook and Twitter and Google, because if they had shut down the Russian bots, then Hillary certainly, certainly would have won.
Here is Dianne Feinstein openly threatening Facebook, Google, and Twitter, saying to them, That if you don't find a way to crack down on material we don't like, we will find a way to do it.
This is a threat to the First Amendment, what she's talking about here.
You have a huge problem on your hands.
And the United States is going to be the first of the countries to bring it to your attention.
And others are going to follow, I'm sure.
Because you bear this responsibility.
You've created these platforms.
And now they are being misused.
And you have to be the ones to do something about it.
Um, or we will.
Okay, you do something about it or we will is the government-threatening regulation of an industry that's not violating the law.
Okay, it's not a violation of the law for Russia Today to put out propaganda, or for Russian bots to put out propaganda, or for Russian groups to put out propaganda.
It isn't.
The big problem here is not that the Russians were trying to exploit the system.
The big problem is that Americans are gullible and will click on anything that hits our buttons in the right way.
I would venture to say that if you're gonna talk about propaganda that benefited the Trump campaign, start with Infowars, don't start with Russia Today, right?
And if you're gonna talk about propaganda that benefited Hillary Clinton, don't talk about the Russians, okay?
Talk about the ACLU.
I mean, there are groups in American life, in the Huffington Post, there are groups in American life that put out material like this to try to censor Facebook, Twitter, and Google and suggest that it's their fault.
It's really absurd.
Tom Cotton did the same thing from the right.
Again, I like Senator Cotton, but I think he's dead wrong here.
Thank you, gentlemen, for your appearance this morning.
Mr. Edgett, I want to discuss Twitter's history of cooperation with our intelligence community.
Last year, in an open hearing before this committee, I asked then-CIA Director John Brennan about Twitter's decision to prohibit a subsidiary called DataMiner from working with our intelligence community.
Director Brennan stated that he was disappointed in Twitter's decision.
But at the same time, we learned that Twitter was refusing to work with the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community.
We also learned that Twitter was pitching Russia Today and Sputnik propaganda arms of the Kremlin to sell advertisements for profit.
So in essence, last year, Russia was beginning its covert influence campaign against the United States, and Twitter was on the side of Russia, as opposed to the national security interests of the United States.
Okay, so first of all, if Twitter, if there's, if there are Russians who want to put out political messages, you know, the only thing that's illegal here is if there's actually, like, a campaign contribution.
Like, if Russia's making active campaign contributions, so if they said, we want to back Trump and we want to put out ads, that's a violation of law by Russia.
Right, but the idea that Twitter has to, like, what if there's a Russian citizen living, an American citizen living in Russia who wants to put out these messages?
And if the messages are exactly the same as messages that would be put out by Team Trump or Team Clinton, I'm, let's put it this way, I am much more worried about the government cracking down on Facebook, Twitter, and Google than I am about Twitter, Facebook, and Google somehow falling into the pocket of the nefarious Russians to shift our election system.
And I think we better be careful with all of this.
Okay, time for some quick things I like, things I hate, and then I'll do a very quick big idea.
So, first, things I like.
So I've been doing books on children that are really good.
Not by Kevin Spacey.
Here's the book, Nurture Shock.
Okay, it's by Poe Bronson and Ashley Merriman.
It's all about ideas about what it is that makes children grow in certain ways.
And it's sort of a, it's one of these Pop social psychology books all about how children grow and think.
It's really fascinating.
They talk about whether children are naturally racist.
The answer is kind of yes.
They talk about what makes children grow up smarter.
Is it nature or nurture?
And all of this is really fascinating stuff and gives you some pretty solid hints as to how to raise your child in the most productive possible way.
This is not the only book I've recommended by Poe Bronson and Ashley Merriman.
They wrote another one about competition that I quite liked.
So this one is called Nurture Shock, Poe Bronson and Ashley Merriman.
You can check it out.
Okay, other things that I like.
You know what?
Let's get the rest of the things I like.
More things I hate.
That's what the people demand, and they shall have it.
So I'm going to start with people targeting my sisters.
So my sister is not a public figure.
She's a public figure in the sense that she has her own career.
Over in New York, she's an opera singer.
She's a world-class opera singer.
She got into USC with a full scholarship after singing for like a year.
She just sang.
She starred in Aspen, the Aspen Music Festival.
She starred in Mozart's Clemenza di Tito over there.
This is a clip of my sister Abigail Singing there.
Abigail is completely non-political as far as I'm aware.
She may disagree with me on certain political issues, but she certainly is not part of the political debate.
Here's Abby singing from Mozart, and then I'll explain to you exactly what happened here.
Here's Abby singing
from Mozart, and then I'll explain to you exactly what happened here. .
Justo!
CHOIR SINGS
So as you can see, I mean, she's super talented, right?
I mean, she's obviously great at what she does.
The alt-right got a hold of the fact she was my sister.
I'm not even friends with my family members on Facebook because of this, because I know that there are people out there targeting them.
People asked why my dad, who used to work at Breitbart, was writing under a pseudonym.
This is the reason, because I don't want people who I love targeted by people who are jackasses.
They found my sister, they targeted her, they spammed her entire YouTube, every YouTube video that she put up, they spammed with nasty, openly anti-Semitic stuff about how she was a Jewish whore, essentially, and they targeted her this way.
They started emailing her through her website.
They targeted her on some of the neo-Nazi websites.
These people are scum, and anybody who has granted them an inch of space is similarly scum.
So I just want to call them out and note, you are scum, you are pathetic, and the fact that you sit in your basements masturbating to anime does not mean that you are of worth in any human level, you stupid...
Despicable human beings.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So, Stephen Colbert did an entire shtick yesterday, because Donald Trump Jr.
put out a tweet.
And the tweet that Donald Trump Jr.
put out was a tweet of his daughter, and he said that he was telling her that he was going to take half her candy on Halloween to teach her what socialism was.
Okay, you know, kind of funny.
And Stephen Colbert goes after Donald Trump Jr.
as Stephen Colbert is apt to do.
Last night, Don Jr tweeted a picture of his young daughter holding her candy bucket and said, I'm going to take half of her candy tonight and give it to some kid who sat at home.
It's never too early to teach her about socialism.
Yes, it's never too early to teach kids the danger of sharing.
On Halloween, kids literally go door-to-door to get free candy from the neighbors because the kids don't have it, and the neighbors do.
That's socialism.
Also, give it to some kid who sat at home.
You know Halloween is fun, right?
No child in the history of childing has ever voluntarily missed Halloween.
I'm worried that kid didn't go out.
Why?
Is he okay?
Is that child caring for a sick parent?
You know what would be a nice thing to do?
Give him half your Halloween candy.
Okay, so this is such a misread of socialism it's quite astonishing.
So first of all, Halloween is not socialism and sharing is not socialism.
Voluntary sharing is not socialism.
Okay, voluntary sharing is not socialism.
It's called charity.
We do it all the time.
Okay, when you give out candy on Halloween, you're not being a socialist.
You are sharing things.
Okay, socialism is when the government forces you to share things.
Socialism is when the government comes in and mandates that you share your candy, Stephen Colbert, you stupid idiot.
Okay, the idea No, not quite the same thing.
socialism is just sharing is belied by only 100 million dead people over the last century who failed to share voluntarily enough and therefore were taken off to the gulags or shot in mass graves.
So no, not quite the same thing.
As far as this idea that, you know, there's a poor child in need and so you should really give that child half your candy.
Again, that's up to me.
I may agree with you, Stephen Colbert, but the idea that Donald Trump Jr.' 's daughter should have to give half her candy, I think that the better plan there would probably be for Donald Trump Jr.' 's very wealthy man to get that kid some candy if that kid needs charity.
But I'm not going to enforce it with the power of government.
So again, the deliberate misread on socialism here is pretty astonishing, and it just shows how the left thinks about socialism.
They think about it as a benevolent, wonderful thing that really has no downside.
You know, except for the whole, we have to shoot people if they refuse to abide by my version of what charity ought to constitute.
Okay, quick big idea here on The Ben Shapiro Show.
So every Thursday, we go through a big idea.
One of the big ideas today that we're going to do is stare decisis.
So Clarence Thomas did an interview with Laura Ingram, which was quite good yesterday.
Laura clerked for Thomas on the Supreme Court, and Thomas was asked about his judicial philosophy, and I'm going to explain what differentiates Clarence Thomas from Justice Scalia, and why I actually prefer Clarence Thomas to Justice Scalia's jurisprudence, even though I love Justice Scalia's writing.
Your philosophy is described as alternatively formalistic, rigid, strictly conservative.
How do you describe your philosophy, Justice?
I think it's get it right.
I think we are required to reason to a conclusion.
And that's what we try to do and try to do it in a way that it is accessible to regular people.
And when you read Thomas's decisions, first of all, they are very clear and they're very easy to read.
But one of the things that differentiates Clarence Thomas from from Justice Scalia is Justice Scalia believed to a certain extent in stare decisis.
That literally means the case has been decided.
It's what we call precedent.
And the problem with Justice Scalia's take on this is that if you believe in precedent, you have to pick and choose which precedent you choose to uphold.
You either have a blanket rule that a case that has been decided on similar merits must stand, or you can choose a rule that says, I don't care what the case decided before.
If it's not right, then it's not right.
Cases in which this comes up, Roe v. Wade, right?
Do we abide by Roe v. Wade?
It's stare decisis, right?
It's a case that's been decided about abortion.
Do we just abide by it?
Or is the case wrong?
Thomas would say, I don't care whether the case has already been decided.
They got it wrong.
I'm going to overrule it.
The same thing holds true for things like Dred Scott, or Plessy v. Ferguson, or Buck v. Bell.
There are a bunch of really bad cases in American history.
Korematsu.
A bunch of really bad cases in American history.
Do you just abide by them because stare decisis?
So Justice Scalia never really had a consistent rule as to which cases he would abide by, which precedent he would abide by.
Thomas does have a consistent rule.
That rule is, if the case is wrong, I overrule it.
And the case can be wrong based on them getting the case wrong at the time.
This is why I think that Justice Thomas is actually a more conservative justice, a more constitutional justice than Justice Scalia, even though they voted together most of the time.
Thomas's jurisprudence is, I think, more solid and a better basis for constitutionalism than Justice Scalia's, even though I'm a big Scalia admirer and Scalia was quite brilliant.
Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow with the mailbag.
If you want to be part of the mailbag, now is the time for you to subscribe.
So go over and subscribe at Daily Wire, and you can ask me any question that is on your mind, and we'll get to it tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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