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Jan. 11, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

48:31

The Fight To Control Your News | Ep. 451

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	So, are big media companies cracking down on conservative news?
	We'll talk about it.
	A couple stories say they are.
	Plus, there's a Harvard professor who's now being ripped apart for supposedly supporting the alt-right.
	Is he?
	We'll talk about that, too.
	And the Obama library.
	I promised it to you yesterday.
	You will get it today.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	You're going to have to wait a little bit more for the Obama library, because I promise you, you're going to want to see the pictures.
	If you have not seen it, it is an atrocity.
	I mean, it's just an aesthetic atrocity.
	We'll get to that in just a second.
	Plus, Project Veritas actually does something really good today.
	I've said this before about James O'Keefe, that James, he does some really good stuff.
	He can be hit or miss.
	But he did, I think, a service to the conservative public today.
	I'll explain why first.
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	Alrighty.
	So let us begin with James O'Keefe.
	So James O'Keefe made some real news yesterday because he had talked to an insider over at Twitter, a former Twitter staffer.
	And this Twitter staffer explained in full living detail how it is that Twitter apparently shadow bans people, where Twitter will downgrade particular tweets, prevent people from seeing them.
	I've heard this about my own tweets in the past, that I'll tweet something out and people who follow me don't actually see the tweet.
	It's really disturbing.
	Here's a little bit from the James O'Keefe tape.
	This is undercover tape with one of the members of the Twitter staff.
	Let's say it was a pro-Trump thing and I am anti-Trump.
	I was like, "Oh, I banned this whole account.
	It'll go to you." And then it's at your discretion.
	And if you're anti-Trump, you're like, "Oh, you know what?
	What was right?
	Let it go." The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone, but they don't know they've been banned because they keep posting, but no one sees their content.
	So they just think that no one's engaging with their content when in reality no one's seeing it.
	I don't know if Twitter does this anymore.
	How do you know if it's a lie and not another person?
	You use machine learning.
	Look for Trump or America or any of like 5,000 keywords to describe a redneck.
	So it's a little bit hard to hear.
	Here's what they're saying.
	So there's a guy named Abhinav Vadraev, who's a former Twitter software engineer, and he says shadow banning takes place.
	He says one strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control.
	The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone, but they don't know they've been banned because they keep posting and no one sees their content.
	So they just think no one is engaging in their content when in reality, no one is seeing it.
	Twitter software engineer Stephen Pierre said, quote, every single conversation is going to be rated by a machine and machine is going to say whether or not it's a positive thing or a negative thing.
	And whether it's positive or negative doesn't.
	And then it's inaudible.
	It's more like if somebody is being aggressive or not.
	Right.
	Somebody is just cursing at somebody.
	They may have a point, but it will just vanish.
	It's not going to ban the mindset.
	It's going to ban a way of talking.
	Alinda Hassan is a policy manager for Twitter's trust and safety team, which is the most Orwellian name.
	And they say they are working on downranking bad people.
	It's something we're working on.
	We're trying to get the bleepy people not to show up.
	It's a product thing that we're working on right now.
	And then there was another guy who you heard at the very beginning, a guy named Mo Narai, who's a Twitter content review agent.
	And they say that in the past, they would manually ban or censor pro-Trump or conservative content.
	They said, yeah.
	And they said, if this is pro-Trump, I don't want it because it offends me.
	And I say I ban this whole thing and then it goes over here and they're like, oh, you know what?
	I don't like it too.
	Mo's right.
	Let's go.
	Let's carry on.
	What's next?
	They said that more left-leaning content would go through their selection process with less political scrutiny.
	This is not a tremendous shock.
	If you've ever been on Twitter, there's been a lot of talk about this for years.
	This has been rumored for years.
	Obviously, the people who have been banned on Twitter, and they're people who I am not particularly fond of, some of the alt-right Twitter trolls, the people who have been banned, I'm not a fan of their stuff, but the idea that they get banned and a bunch of people on the left don't get banned for similar content from the left is just insane to me.
	It's not a shock that Twitter is downgrading content.
	We found out earlier this week, by the way, that Google is basically downgrading content from conservatives.
	How do we know?
	Because right now, if you go over to google.com and you search the name of the website that I run, Daily Wire, which is a fully credible site, most of what we do is aggregate news from other sources.
	Most of what we are doing is taking the news and then adding a bit of commentary to it.
	So, it's very rare that we actually report original news at Daily Wire.
	Nonetheless, if you actually go over to Daily Wire on Google and you search Daily Wire, there's something that pops up.
	And what pops up...
	is something that says, on the right side of the page, writes about, and then it'll show some of our old pieces.
	And then, there's a thing that you click on, and it says, Reviewed Claims.
	Okay, Reviewed Claims are a bunch of claims that come from Snopes and Climate Feedback and FactCheck.org.
	In fact, all of the leftist fact-checking organizations.
	And Snopes is a left-wing fact-checking organization.
	They have a nasty habit of taking a factual statement a right-winger makes and then drawing some sort of conclusion from that statement and then arguing with the conclusion that they are drawing from that statement.
	Politifact, they do the same thing.
	A lot of these fact-checking organizations aren't actually fact-checking the fact that's being espoused.
	Instead, what they are doing is fact-checking some conclusion that they draw from the fact.
	So, for example, I remember Politifact did a very long review of a video that I did about how many people in Muslim countries have extremist beliefs.
	My entire video was based on poll results from Pew Research Global, right?
	The entire video that I did, and you can view it, it has several million hits at this point, is me just saying a certain percentage of the population of Pakistan believes suicide bombings are okay, for example.
	So what did PolitiFact do?
	They couldn't argue with any of the poll numbers I was citing.
	Instead, they argued with my definition of extremist.
	So when I said that it is extremist to believe that Sharia law should rule, They would say, well, that depends on your definition of Sharia law.
	Are they just saying that Sharia law should rule in their own country or globally?
	Okay, that's you arguing with my definition.
	That doesn't mean what I'm saying is false, right?
	You're arguing with my conclusion, which is fine, but that's a matter of opinion.
	That's not a matter of fact.
	PolitiFact ranked my entire video false.
	The most hilarious part of that PolitiFact fact check is that they did their own calculation and they found that something like 20% of the entire Muslim population on planet Earth was extreme by their own calculation, meaning that some 200 million people are extreme.
	And then, in their own fact check, they say, but we don't want to draw that conclusion or anything.
	We're not comfortable with the conclusions that we're drawing.
	The reason all of this is a problem is because there's an attempt now to reassert gatekeeping from the top.
	There's an attempt that's happening right now, in real time, to reassert the gatekeeping of news.
	And a lot of this is driven by the fake news mania that the left has pushed in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton losing the election.
	So Hillary lost.
	We can't just say she lost because she's a crappy candidate.
	Instead, we're going to say the reason that she lost is because of fake news.
	It's because people were putting out stuff that was false.
	Now, there are stories that are actually false.
	There are stories about how Pizzagate was real, for example, where there's no factual basis to it whatsoever.
	That's actual fake news.
	Then there's stuff you disagree with.
	And unfortunately, because the left disagrees with so much of what the right has to say, what you see very often is the left actually engaging in a process where they will shut down the dissemination of conservative-oriented news because they're saying it's a-factual.
	Or counterfactual.
	That's not true.
	That's not true.
	So you've seen, there's been talk about this on some of the major websites.
	It's certainly true on Google.
	How you search on Google is very different than the search results that you receive from another web engine like Bing.
	Obviously, Twitter has been downgrading conservatives for a while.
	So what James O'Keefe uncovered here is something that's very troubling.
	It's one of the reasons why, for example, YouTube has gotten itself in serious trouble.
	They demonetized a video that I did with Dave Rubin the other day, which is the least controversial political video of all time.
	They demonetized a conversation I did with Blair White on transgenderism, which is a very friendly conversation with a transgender person about the pronouns that ought to be used in addressing transgender people.
	That was demonetized.
	YouTube has demonetized a lot of the Prager University videos, so much so that Prager University is suing YouTube.
	Now, is that a lawsuit that can sustain?
	I'm not sure it can, because these are all private companies.
	But it is certainly true that we do have a troubling situation that people should know about when all of the major ways that you gain your news are being curated by a bunch of lefties on the top who are biasing the news feed in favor of their own favorite political beliefs, knowing that other media outlets will praise them for doing so.
	So, good on O'Keefe for doing this, and this is something you should keep an eye on, just because News is being downgraded by an outlet does not mean that that news is fake news.
	I mean, as I say, Daily Wire now has these reviewed claims over at Google.
	Guess what doesn't?
	Slate, Huffington Post, Salon.
	None of these have this.
	None of them—CNN—none of them have the reviewed claims aspect.
	Instead, they're just using left-wing fact-checkers to fact-check.
	It's not just Daily Wire, by the way.
	It's Daily Caller.
	It's The Federalist.
	It's only right-wing sites, basically, which is just insane.
	Okay, in a second, I want to discuss another way that the left is shutting down debate.
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	Okay, so in other ways that the left has been shutting down debate, there is this tape going around of Steven Pinker.
	Steven Pinker is not a right-wing figure.
	Steven Pinker is a professor at Harvard.
	I took a class when I was at Harvard Law School with Pinker and Alan Dershowitz, which was kind of a fun class.
	And Pinker is, of course, the author of a book called The Blank Slate.
	One of the things that makes Pinker controversial among a lot of people on the left is that Pinker doesn't believe in the ultimate malleability of human beings.
	He believes that the reason he titled his book The Blank Slate is because he was saying that that perception of humans, that we are a blank slate, and that we don't have any natural inclinations, we don't have any natural presets, he says that's nonsense.
	And that means that we're constantly battling with our own nature in order to change.
	Well, Steven Pinker was doing a panel for Spiked Magazine, the unsafe space tour panel at Harvard.
	Pinker has come under fire recently because he'll say things that are true, like women may have different different interests than men do in the career space, which may account for some of the discrepancies between men and women in terms of science staffing.
	He'll say things like, statistically speaking, blacks commit crimes more often than whites.
	And then he'll explain why that is.
	That has nothing to do with race, per se.
	It has more to do with culture.
	It has more to do with history.
	It maybe has to do with poverty.
	But he's willing to say facts that people on the left aren't willing to say.
	So Pinker, in discussing this, starts talking about how political correctness has really led to the rise of the alt-right.
	That what political correctness has done is it has said to a lot of people that you're not even allowed to say facts like men and women are different or that races commit crimes at different rates.
	Because if you say that, then people are afraid of the conclusions you're going to draw.
	So we were talking earlier about how the fact-checking organizations do this.
	They don't like the poll results that I cite.
	So instead, they argue with the conclusion that I cite, and then label the polls that I cite false.
	This is what Pinker says.
	He says, if you can't even acknowledge the on-the-ground facts, what you're actually doing is helping people in the alt-right.
	Because here's the logic.
	There are a bunch of people in the alt-right, or who are not even in the alt-right yet.
	And they will say, listen, I'm looking at the statistics.
	And what I see is that black people commit more crimes than white people on an average per capita basis.
	And then people on the left will go, that's not true, you can't say that, you're a racist.
	And then people on the right will say, you know, people who, not even on the right, people who will see that fact will say, well if it's taboo for me to even cite that fact, maybe it's taboo, maybe it's also taboo but not false to be racist about that fact, to suggest that the race is inherently what's driving the crime.
	If the politically correct people would say, that's a true fact, now here's the explanation that has nothing to do with racism, which, by the way, is not a left thing.
	It's something that I do on a regular basis when I'm arguing against the alt-right.
	But the left won't do that.
	The left won't acknowledge the common basis of fact.
	Instead, they'll just say, you're not allowed to mention the fact because the fact itself is racist.
	So this is what Pinker says, and Pinker just got shellacked for this.
	I mean, he's just getting destroyed by the left.
	Here's what Pinker had to say in his own words.
	The other way in which I do agree with my fellow panelists that political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population that might be, I wouldn't want to say persuadable, but certainly whose affiliation might be up for grabs, comes from the often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right,
	Internet-savvy, media-savvy, who often are radicalized in that way, who swallow the red pill, as the saying goes, the illusion from the Matrix, when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or in the New York Times or in respectable media.
	that are almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity.
	And they are immediately infected with both a feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable and no defense against taking them to what we might consider to be rather repellent conclusions.
	So here is a fact that's going to sound ragingly controversial but is not, and that is that capitalist societies are better than communist ones.
	Here's another one.
	Men and women are not identical in their life priorities, in their sexuality, in their tastes and interests.
	A third fact that is just not It's controversial, although it sounds controversial, and that is that different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates.
	Now, if you've never heard these facts before and you stumble across them or someone mentions them, it is possible to come to some extreme conclusions, such as that women are inferior, that African Americans are naturally violent.
	That we all ought to be anarcho-capitalists and do away with all regulation and social safety nets.
	That most terrorism in this country is the fault of Muslims.
	The first time you hear them, you're apt to say, number one, the truth has been withheld from me by universities, by mainstream media.
	And moreover, you will be vindicated when people who voice these truths are suppressed, shouted down, assaulted, all the more reason to believe that the left, that the mainstream media, that universities all the more reason to believe that the left, that the mainstream media, that universities So the politically correct left is doing itself an enormous disservice.
	We can stop it there.
	So we can hear him say, right, is that the point here is that people are taking these facts and then they're drawing the wrong conclusions.
	But when the left argues that the facts don't exist, it's driving people to embrace the wrong conclusions.
	So he's anti-alt-right.
	He's trying to explain why the politically correct left is creating the alt-right.
	It's the same stuff that I've been saying on this program for years.
	It's the same thing that I've said about the identity politics of the left, that when you push an identity politics that suggests that race and ethnicity are primary, you can't be surprised when people who are not of your race and ethnicity start to treat their own race and ethnicity as primary.
	It's a mistake by those people.
	They shouldn't be doing it.
	But you have to acknowledge the forces at work in the universe that are pushing people toward these nasty, horrible groups.
	And there's no one who's more anti-alt-right than I am.
	I think I can safely say that, considering I was their number one target in 2016, and that I've been ragingly anti-alt-right ever since they became a prominent force in the American political scene.
	Pinker just gets destroyed for this.
	So there are a bunch of people on the left who think now that Pinker isn't—who's acting—they think Steven Pinker, the leftist Harvard professor, who is on the left, okay?
	I took a class with him.
	I've read his books.
	Steven Pinker is not a right-winger.
	He's an atheist.
	He believes in government programs, big government programs.
	He's ripped as an alt-righter.
	So PZ Myers of Free Thought Blogs wrote that Pinker sympathies lie with the alt-right.
	That's an absolute slander.
	He says, I am shocked that a Harvard professor would promote such ignorance and falsehoods.
	But of course, none of the facts that Pinker states there are mildly rebuttable.
	They're not rebuttable.
	And Myers makes no attempts to rebut them.
	Joshua Loftus, a professor at New York University, he said that Pinker's ideas were worse than the edited clip.
	They're just amazing.
	Jamal Bowie of Slate, who I've had fights with over this sort of stuff before, he suggested that Pinker had claimed that blacks cause crime and Jews control the world.
	Which, of course, is not what Pinker is saying, right?
	What Pinker is saying is that black people in America have a higher crime rate.
	But then he explicitly denounces the idea that the race is connected with the crime rate.
	He says there are other factors that are relevant in assessing whether race is connected with crime.
	And to come to the conclusion that race causes crime is stupid.
	Right?
	But people are ignoring that because they're using exactly the same sort of PC censorship that Pinker is talking about that drives people to the alt-right.
	Professor Jesse Daniels of Hunter College says, if one were, say, writing a book about the mainstreaming of white nationalism, one would certainly consider featuring this as supporting evidence for one's main point.
	It's just, this is insane.
	Okay, that's not real.
	That's not what Pinker is saying at all.
	But that's the astonishing thing about the left, is they are so utterly incapable of even looking internally at what they've done to promote this nastiness, that instead they continue to engage in exactly the same tactics that make the nastiness more likely and more prominent.
	It's really an incredible thing.
	When you're ripping down Steven Pinker, it's so funny, when I was going to Harvard Law, Alan Dershowitz was on the left and Steven Pinker was on the left.
	And now, by the time I went there, I graduated in 2007, now 11 years later, Steven Pinker is on the right apparently, he's now an alt-righter, and Alan Dershowitz is a Trumpkin.
	Okay, I don't think that Alan Dershowitz and Steven Pinker changed all that much.
	I think the left changed all that much.
	I think the same left that decided that Larry Summers, who was ousted from the presidency of the university when I was there, for stating that women may have different aptitudes and interests in science and math than men.
	That same university now says that Steven Pinker is to be ousted.
	That Steven Pinker has to be targeted.
	You wonder how people like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker and I all end up on the same side of the aisle on this stuff?
	And we disagree about virtually everything else?
	Maybe the reason is because the left is so extreme and radical that they're driving away an entire contingent of people who just want to talk about facts, even if they draw different conclusions from those facts.
	I cannot have a discussion with people who will not operate in the same world of facts that I operate.
	I can have a discussion with Steven Pinker.
	And that, I think, is what drives the left up a wall.
	And so instead they use censorship as a way of preventing honest and open discussion about issues that matter.
	Okay, before I go any further, and I will, I do have to show you the pictures of the Obama library.
	I think it does say something about Obama as a human, really.
	I'm not exaggerating.
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	Okay, so...
	I promised yesterday I was going to show you pictures of the Obama library, and they are just incredible.
	So here are some of the pictures of the Obama library.
	Okay, this is Obama approved this library, really.
	It looks like, for those who can't see it and are just listening, it looks like GONK from Star Wars Episode IV.
	Remember the robot with the feet that kind of walks around?
	Yeah, there's GONK.
	So it kind of looks like that.
	So it looks like GONK from—it looks like a Chinese food takeout box that was opened and then left in the sun.
	And it's this weirdly Orwellian-looking building.
	It's supposed to symbolize four hands coming together, which I don't understand at all.
	I don't understand how this is hands.
	It looks like just a weird building.
	It looks like a tower off the side of the Death Star.
	I mean, it really does.
	And then it has a sports center so people can play sports at the Obama Presidential Library.
	And it's supposed to overlook a walkway outside so that you can look down on all the little people.
	It really is an amazing thing.
	Now, here's what it says about Obama.
	Look how hideous this is.
	I mean, this is just hideous crap.
	If you look at the Bush Presidential Library, it's kind of a classy-looking building.
	If you look at any of the old presidential libraries, they're all nice-looking.
	The Nixon Presidential Library is beautiful.
	The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is beautiful.
	This is just a hideous eyesore that apparently is being built by modernists, and those modernists do not know how to build anything remotely interesting-looking.
	It looks like a Soviet Bloc era modernist Art piece.
	Just ugly as all sin.
	My goodness gracious.
	And then, my understanding is that this weird segment on the corner is supposed to be words.
	Now, I can't actually read any of those words because I think they only use the top half of the letters.
	But it's supposed to emphasize how important words were to Obama, which makes perfect sense because the guy sucked at governing.
	So words were the only thing that he was good at.
	Here's the part that I find really interesting.
	So, in 2011, he said he wanted to be an architect, did Obama.
	So he said, "When I was younger, there was a time I dreamed of being an architect.
	So, as you might guess, I've been pretty hands-on in the plans for this center.
	And Michelle has too." So Obama, who thinks he's an architect, helps come up with the plans for this hideous, hideous monstrosity.
	That's not a shock because you remember in 2008 he said, "I think I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters.
	I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.
	And I'll tell you right now, I'm going to think I'm a better political director than my political director." It was that sort of arrogance and self-centeredness that led him to being a bad president.
	He was not better at any of these things than the people he delegated it to.
	And he is not a better architect than my one-and-a-half-year-old child who can at least build a box out of magnet tiles.
	This is hideous crap.
	And it's fitting for a hideous presidency.
	So there you have it.
	Just ugly, ugly, ugly.
	I don't know what it is about Democrats and ugly presidential libraries.
	Here's a picture of the Clinton Presidential Library.
	Let's grab that one.
	This has been mocked for years because it looks like a double-wide trailer.
	It's a very weird-looking presidential library.
	In fact, I know a local radio host in Arkansas who went and stuck a bunch of pink flamingos in front of it as a prank because it looks like a double-wide trailer.
	I don't know why.
	Maybe only Republicans are capable of building beautiful presidential libraries because this one is just—they're all ugly, ugly oogly.
	So, to get to some actual news, today the President of the United States decided to confuse everyone with a couple of tweets.
	This is the breaking news.
	So, the House is now reconsidering the renewal of the FISA Act.
	The FISA Act is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the FISA Act sets up a system whereby intelligence agencies have to go to secret FISA courts in order to obtain warrants for domestic wiretapping.
	Particularly.
	And the idea is that you're not supposed to give a warrant for domestic targets.
	You're supposed to be targeting foreign surveillance, right?
	Foreign targets.
	And if people get caught up in that, they get caught up in that.
	This is one of the big arguments over whether Trump was wiretapped or Manafort was wiretapped when the FBI was attempting to wiretap foreign sources.
	When they were looking for a wiretap on Carter Page, were they actually looking for a wiretap on Carter Page?
	If so, did that violate the Fourth Amendment?
	Or was that they were having a wiretap on foreign sources, and those foreign sources were talking to Trump and talking to Manafort, and therefore they were sort of swept up in this foreign intelligence surveillance.
	So the Trump administration had come out and endorsed the re-offering of Section 702.
	702, again, sets up significant limitations on the warrants that may be granted.
	Wiretaps most significantly, quote, may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States and shall be conducted in a manner consistent with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, meaning that you could sue and say that you were wiretapped wrongly and it would violate the Fourth Amendment.
	So yesterday, the White House press secretary gave this statement.
	They said, "The administration strongly opposes the USA Rights Amendment to the FISA Amendment Reauthorization Act, which the House will consider tomorrow.
	This amendment would reestablish the walls between intelligence and law enforcement that our country knocked down following the attacks of 9/11 in order to increase information sharing and improve our national security." So there was an attempt to amend Section 702 so that intelligence agencies couldn't share information as easily, supposedly in order to protect Fourth Amendment rights.
	But there was one problem.
	Trump watched Fox & Friends this morning.
	So his administration comes out and says, don't endorse USA Rights.
	Trump watches Fox & Friends.
	Judge Napolitano comes on and gives a monologue at 6.47 a.m.
	urging Trump not to back FISA reauthorization.
	And minutes later, minutes later, Trump tweets, quote, House votes on controversial FISA Act today.
	This is the act that may have been used with the help of the discredited and phony dossier to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump campaign by the previous administration and others?
	So then, he got calls from his administration, like people inside saying, uh, Mr. President, we endorsed this yesterday.
	Literally yesterday.
	So 90 minutes later, Trump comes out and he tweets, With that being said, I've personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office.
	And today's vote is about foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land.
	We need it.
	Get smart.
	So within 90 minutes, he has completely reversed his position.
	And by the way, fibbed about this.
	He's directed the fix to the unmasking process.
	You can't direct a fix to the unmasking process.
	It's part of the law, right?
	I mean, the law itself would have to be changed.
	Now, does any of this matter in the end?
	No, because I don't think anybody takes Trump's verbiage on policy completely seriously.
	But for probably 90 minutes, every Republican in the world was panicking.
	And for 90 minutes, all the Republicans were going, what in the world is he talking about?
	And that's why I think that a lot of the emphasis, a lot of the fear about what Trump is doing on policy is a little bit overblown.
	You can't take Trump seriously on policy or literally on policy.
	All you can do is watch what the administration does.
	Because Trump, frankly, doesn't know what he's talking about on policy a lot of the time.
	We saw that in his immigration meeting the other day when he reversed himself on DACA, a Clean Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals bill.
	He reversed himself on that in the course of 40 seconds when informed by Kevin McCarthy that he didn't know what he was talking about.
	So a lot of his base is very upset with him over this.
	A lot of Trump's base.
	He's very angry at him for supposedly signaling that he's going to show tremendous flexibility on illegal immigration.
	I think that his base is getting out in front of itself.
	I think that a lot of the people like Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, I think a lot of these people are taking Trump literally and seriously and they should not be doing either.
	The reality is Trump was having a meeting.
	He thought of it as a meeting.
	He doesn't care that much about the policy, and he's not going to be the one who is setting policy, as he made pretty clear.
	He said, basically, congressional Republicans, you're the ones who are in charge of this.
	So I'm going to show you what I think the base is doing wrong and how the media has responded in just a second.
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	All right.
	So yesterday, the base lost it over Trump's words on illegal immigrations.
	So we'll start with Laura Ingraham, Laura on Fox, who's been an immigration hardliner through and through.
	She says that she is very unhappy with how Trump was talking.
	And all I would suggest to Laura, I sound like a Trumpkin here, but I'm not, right?
	I'm going to suggest to Laura that she's not trusting Trump enough.
	And what I mean by that is not that you should trust Trump on policy.
	You should trust the people around Trump on policy, because Trump ain't shaping the policy.
	See, this is the great problem if you are a worshipper of Trump personally, is you think this is all part of Trump's plan.
	You think that Trump is sitting around playing that 4-D MAGA MAGA MAGA chess.
	That's not what's going on.
	Trump is saying stuff.
	What you see is what you get.
	Trump is just saying things.
	And those things that he is saying, he'll flip on them inside of an hour.
	He tweeted out a bunch of stuff that completely contradicted what he had said to Dianne Feinstein about illegal immigration.
	He had sent out his press secretary to say that they would consider amnesty for illegal immigrants, and then five minutes later, they sent out Pence to saying that they are committed to the promises that they made.
	Let's do Mike Pence, actually, first, and then we'll show the reaction.
	So Mike Pence, the vice president, he's asked about Trump on illegal immigration, and here is the vice president.
	This president and this administration are absolutely committed to keep the promises we made to the American people.
	As the president said last weekend at Camp David, there's no DACA fix without a wall.
	We're going to build a wall.
	We're going to end chain migration.
	We're going to end the visa lottery program.
	And we're going to deal with DACA, but we're going to do it in a way that will meet the expectation of the American people.
	Okay, so there it is.
	Pence basically is defining policy, I think, a lot more than Trump is on a lot of this stuff, which is a good thing, right?
	That is a nice, wonderful, good thing for conservatives.
	But Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson are very angry.
	Listen, I'll give them credit.
	Good for them for actually being critical of the president when they think the president is doing something wrong.
	I think that they are underestimating, or they're both underestimating Trump and overestimating Trump.
	They're underestimating Trump in the sense that they are saying that Trump is gonna break promises because he's not a promise keeper.
	I agree with that to a certain extent.
	They're overestimating Trump if they think he's actually in control of policy, because he really is not.
	Here is Laura Ingraham going after Trump on exactly these grounds.
	I'm going to wait to see what the final DACA proposal looks like.
	But if it does not include a wall, a real wall, not a see-through wall, expect a political revolt from the base, which means losing the House and maybe even losing the Senate.
	And by the way, chain migration, absolutely necessary.
	OK, so what she's saying there is right on policy.
	Build the wall.
	The wall, by the way, is like fourth priority in terms of if you're going to reform immigration.
	The other priorities are E-Verify, making sure that employers aren't allowed to hire illegal immigrants.
	You have to have also the end of chain migration.
	So if you come in legally and then you bring your entire family in, that has to be ended.
	And the visa lottery program has to be ended as well.
	The wall is like fourth on that list.
	But in any case, she's not wrong on policy.
	All I'm suggesting is that all these people who are members of the base, listen, I'm happy that they finally arrived at the point that I was at a while ago calling balls and strikes with Trump.
	I'm glad that they're finally saying that if Trump does something that they don't like, that they'll break with Trump.
	But if they think that Trump is actually, that yesterday was anything more, that his meeting with Democrats was anything more than posturing, I think that that's wrong.
	Tucker Carlson was on the same page.
	He was saying the same thing on Fox News last night.
	Listen, it's good to pressure Trump.
	I've been doing it too.
	Welcome to the party, pal.
	Congress is full of people from both parties who believe that the point of our immigration policy is to provide cheap labor to their donors and to atone for America's imaginary sins against the world.
	They couldn't care less about immigration's effect on you or your family.
	Yet these are the same people the president now says he trusts to write the immigration bill, the one he'll sign no matter what it says.
	So what was the point of running for president?
	OK, so he's not wrong on this, but again, I would suggest that Trump is not actually—the policy is not going to look like this.
	The policy is going to look like what Congress shapes, and whatever Congress is able to get through the Republican Senate.
	They're not going to get any Democratic help on this.
	The question is what they get through the Republican Senate.
	I would hope that they get the ending of chain migration, the ending of the diversity visa lottery, some funding for the wall so Trump can claim victory on the wall.
	But the idea that Trump was serious about any of this, I think, is utterly untrue.
	The part that I would be disquieted about here is not what Trump does on immigration, actually.
	The part that I would be disquieted about is what Trump does when there's a Democratic Congress.
	Which, as I've been saying now for weeks, is why Congress matters.
	And it's why Republican scandals matter.
	So speaking of Republican scandals, a really bad Republican scandal broke yesterday.
	It's not good.
	So late on Wednesday evening, News broke that, in all likelihood, will end the career of the Missouri governor Eric Greitens, who is sort of an up-and-coming Republican star, ex-Navy SEAL.
	So, apparently, he'd been having an extramarital affair.
	But that's not the worst part of the story.
	The worst part of the story is that the ex-husband of Greitens' ex-mistress came forward with a tape in which the woman talked about her relationship with Greitens.
	And apparently, here's what happened.
	It is according to the woman.
	Basically, she says that he invited her over to his house.
	That he told her that he was going to show her how to do a proper pull-up, which is a very interesting come online, that she acceded to his request, that he proceeded to tape her hands to rings, blindfold her, get her naked, and then take a picture of her.
	And then take that picture and say, basically, if anything ever comes out about this, this picture is going to hit the press.
	So he's basically attempting to use revenge porn as a way to blackmail this woman, allegedly.
	Now he denies that.
	He says the governor has now seen the TV report that ran tonight.
	This is his team.
	The station declined to provide the tape or transcript in advance of running their story, which contained multiple false allegations.
	The claim that this nearly three-year-old story has generated or should generate law enforcement interest is completely false.
	There was no blackmail and that claim is false.
	It doesn't matter.
	The allegations are serious enough that this is now going to dog him.
	I think the chances that he remains in office are relatively low.
	Again, if this woman comes out and says that this is true, particularly, then it sounds like—I wouldn't be surprised if there are other shoes to drop here, if it turns out that this is a tactic they've used before.
	Because this doesn't sound like something you do as a one-off.
	You're going to have an affair and you just think of this on the spot.
	OK, I'm going to get you naked, tape you up, and then I'm going to take a picture of you.
	That sounds rather unlikely.
	One of the things that I find so disturbing about stories like this is it does go to whether character matters in politics, because there will be a group of people, undoubtedly, who will say, OK, so he did all this stuff.
	Can he govern?
	This is where we've now landed.
	I do wonder if we've hit rock bottom with this.
	If there are still people who are outraged enough by this activity, if it's true, to oust Greitens, or if there are going to be a bunch of people who say the same thing they said about Roy Moore, which is, OK, well, even if it's true that he was allegedly molesting 14-year-old girls, even if that turns out to be true, Maybe he'll be a good senator.
	Has character gone so far out that there's no way to bring it back in?
	And does that matter?
	We've been discussing this.
	It's been an ongoing topic for a couple of years now among Republicans.
	Does character matter at all?
	Not that it doesn't matter a little.
	It doesn't matter at all.
	Because we've been continuously defining deviancy down.
	Yes, JFK was a perv.
	But that was secret from the American public.
	And if the American public had found out that JFK was a perv in 1963, he's not reelected in 1964.
	Yes, LBJ was a piece of crap, but none of that information was public knowledge.
	So there have been bad men who have been president before, going all the way back to the beginning, but that was hidden from the American public because the public did not tolerate that.
	And that does have an effect on the culture that we all inhabit together.
	Maybe it's true that people of low character can be good politicians.
	Maybe it's true that Ted Kennedy can leave a woman to drown after presumably having an affair with her and leaving her in the back of a car in the middle of the river.
	Maybe it's true that he can go on to be a very powerful and influential senator.
	But what is also true is that a society that suggests that character does not matter when it comes to people who are making policy is a society that is going to treat character as completely irrelevant.
	And that's, I think, where we are going.
	Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined this phrase, defining deviancy down.
	In 1993, he wrote this about crime.
	He said, over the past generation, the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can afford to recognize.
	And accordingly, we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the normal levels in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard.
	This is certainly not true only of crime.
	It is also true with regard to personal behavior of politicians, and that bleeds down to what we accept in our personal lives.
	Not just with regard to career, but what you're willing to accept in a friend.
	What you're willing to accept in a community.
	What you're willing to accept in a church.
	These do have widespread effects, right?
	I mean, there was a lot of talk after Bill Clinton that there are a lot younger people who are engaging in oral sexual activity because Bill Clinton had basically made that a byword.
	I think that there's been statistics to show that various types of sexual activity that were hitherto considered taboo, as they are defined down, as those are no longer considered deviant, they are tried more often, and then the human psyche is just to look for the new taboo.
	As we continue to search for the new taboo, we're going to continue to lower the character of the American people.
	It doesn't mean every taboo is worthwhile or that certain taboos shouldn't be broken.
	Obviously, there are certain taboos that should be broken.
	For example, the most obvious example would be interracial marriage, which was a taboo for centuries.
	And that was broken, and no harm, no foul.
	Not only no harm, no foul, I think positive good.
	But the idea that every taboo should be shattered, and that when we shatter taboos, we're definitely moving society forward instead of backward, I think it's a mistake, and it leads to a lower character for the American people, for sure.
	OK, so in a second, I want to get to some things that I like and some things that I hate.
	So let's do a couple of things that I like.
	So we begin with Black Mirror Season 4.
	So Black Mirror Season 4, I've watched a couple of episodes.
	The first episode of Black Mirror Season 4 is really tremendous.
	If you haven't seen it yet, it's called USS Callister.
	It features Jesse Plemons, who's become one of my favorite character actors.
	I really like him.
	And he plays this tech guru But we can.
	And we must.
	Anyone?
	reality for himself inhabited by other people that he knows.
	And it's, it doesn't go the direction you think it's going to go.
	It's really, it's funny.
	It's, it's, it's interesting.
	It's R-rated.
	Black Mirror is always R-rated.
	But here's a little bit of the preview for season four of Black Mirror.
	It's hard to imagine a bright future, but we can and we must.
	Anyone?
	Hello?
	Must have been mental before the system.
	Nothing is gonna happen.
	- You're gonna be fine.
	Where am I?
	- Hip hip hooray! - In a sunnier future.
	- Okay, so the whole point of Black Mirror is that technology is twisting us in ways that we don't even think about.
	And that's why it's interesting to watch it.
	It does raise some issues about exactly how we treat technology that are worth thinking about, and that's what makes it fun.
	It's sort of like Twilight Zone, but technology-based Twilight Zone.
	Really good series.
	If you haven't seen the beginning episodes, I'd say that season one is the best.
	Season two is also quite good.
	I thought season three was a bit of a fall-off.
	What I've seen so far in season four, I think, is actually better than season three.
	So, check it out.
	Black Mirror Season 4.
	Okay, other things that I like.
	So this I just found hysterical.
	Apparently, there are a bunch of people on the left who no longer want to engage with pink pussyhats.
	So these are now a thing of the past.
	These people on the left are no longer interested in pushing it.
	Why?
	Because according to the Detroit Free Pass quote, the pink pussy hat excludes and is offensive to transgender women and gender non-binary people who don't have typical female genitalia and to women of color because their genitals are more likely to be brown than pink.
	Yes! - Peak wokeness, as Jamie Kershick says.
	Just, these people are geniuses.
	They are just wonderful, heartbreaking geniuses.
	Because genitals are of different colors.
	We cannot have pink pussy hats.
	Now we have to have pussy hats that resemble the actual genitalia themselves.
	I can't imagine why you guys are alienating voters.
	I cannot imagine it.
	Please, keep going down this path because it's working out fantastically for you.
	God, these people are so stupid.
	Okay, other things that I like.
	So, there's a story out and people are going crazy over it.
	Mark Wahlberg was paid 1,500 times more than Michelle Williams for the reshoots.
	On his, on the movie, what's the name of this movie?
	All the Money in the World.
	They had to reshoot it because Kevin Spacey was in it, and then they used Christopher Plummer, and so they had to reshoot.
	So Mark Wahlberg got 1.5 million bucks for the reshoot.
	Williams received an $80 per diem that amounted to less than $1,000.
	And so people were like, oh my God, William Morris, Endeavor, how dare they not get great pay from Michelle Williams?
	She volunteered.
	It's a free country.
	If Mark Wahlberg was smart enough to understand that he had the studio over a barrel, and he could do whatever he wanted, and he'd get paid a lot of money, that's fine.
	Also, if you're talking about box office draws, there is no doubt that Mark Wahlberg is a much bigger box office draw than Michelle Williams.
	I mean, there's no doubt about it.
	I mean, just look at the statistics.
	It's not true.
	I love the idea, though, that this is blatant sexism, as though Wahlberg's getting paid more not because he's a better negotiator, but because he's a man.
	Not because he's a bigger star, but because he's a man.
	If that's the truth, I'd like to talk about pay discrepancies on Ocean's 8.
	Everybody is a woman.
	I guarantee you that Julia Roberts was paid significantly more than other women on the film.
	In fact, Olivia Munn, who does a cameo in the film, says that she had to pay out of her own pocket to be in the film.
	That they made her pay for her own costume.
	I promise you, Julia Roberts was paid several million dollars to be in Ocean's 8.
	Obvious sexism.
	Obvious sexism.
	Because Olivia Munn is a woman and Julia Roberts is a man or something.
	This stuff is so stupid.
	You know, before you start claiming sexism, racism, privilege, why don't you look to the complicating factors in the same way that before you claim that race is responsible for crime, you might want to look to the complicating factors.
	So stupid.
	Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
	All right, so a couple of things I hate.
	First of all, I saw one of the worst movies that I've ever seen.
	I was in a car from Las Vegas.
	I had flown there.
	The flight back was delayed, so we drove.
	There's a movie called Good Time that just came out with Robert Pattinson getting all sorts of great reviews.
	It is awful.
	Avoid this.
	Run the other way.
	It is so bad.
	He's a very good actor, Robert Pattinson.
	It is shocking that you could take Robert Pattinson, who's a very good actor, and Kristen Stewart, who's also a good actress, and make Twilight, which is a horrific, Horrific film, right?
	It's just an amazing truth.
	But there's good evidence that good acting doesn't mean good movie.
	Good time is just, ah, it's sheer garbage.
	I won't even play any of the preview.
	I had our guys pull the preview.
	I won't play it because I wouldn't subject you to that.
	OK, other things that I hate.
	This, I have to show you.
	Apparently, this has become a new trend.
	It's called pose dancing.
	It's a new dance style, I suppose.
	And it's being pushed out there.
	I guess it's...
	It's called figuring, is the new thing, where you're supposed to form certain figures.
	Here is what it looks like.
	If you can't see this, it's people who look like they're about to hurl, kind of convulsing and posing.
	What now?
	They look like they're about to be taken up by aliens.
	Like the beam is about to come down.
	Or like they're being controlled by an out-of-body experience.
	They're on the end of it.
	They've got no strings to hold them down.
	So this is a thing.
	So let me just say, if there are a lot of worries about why people can't dance before this, I think it is fair to say that white people cannot dance is going to become a thing after this, because what the actual F?
	What in the world are we even looking at right now?
	You remember that time when I said that art is different from skill?
	Remember that time when I said that actual skill, actual craft matters?
	When you look like you're having some sort of seizure, Um, just no.
	Just, just, just no.
	Okay, I can't go anywhere from there.
	We're gonna have to end the show there because it has blown my mind.
	It's just, it's too much.
	Guys, please, don't do that anymore.
	Just stop.
	Just stop.
	For the love of God, stop!
	Okay, so, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest in news and opinion, of course.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
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	Edited by Alex Zingaro.
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