Jan. 12, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
09:31
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| Ben Shapiro is the editor-in-chief of dailywire.com, syndicated columnist, and the host of The Ben Shapiro Show. | |
| He joins us right now from the West Coast. | |
| Ben, good morning to you. | |
| Morning. | |
| I'm sure you've been watching. | |
| It's a feeding frenzy on some of the other channels regarding what the president may or may not have said yesterday when he was in that DACA deal. | |
| And it was reported by the Washington Post initially that he said, Word we're not going to use on this program referring to certain countries, but the president then tweeted this out about an hour ago He said the language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made a big setback for DACA. | |
| All right, so we've set the table Where would you like to start? | |
| Well, I mean, I think that we can start with the denial. | |
| It's unclear, you know, whether this was said or not. | |
| Now the president has denied it. | |
| I would have preferred that if he was going to deny it, he did it right away, obviously, rather than waiting 15 hours to do so, because obviously things sort of blew up in the meantime. | |
| As far as the comments that he's accused of saying, there are really two comments that he made, right? | |
| There's the one where he said, why are we letting all these people from bleep hole countries into the country? | |
| And then he said something about all these Haitians, they should be deported or something. | |
| Something along those lines. | |
| The second accusation, yeah, get him out, something like that. | |
| That second accusation seems less well substantiated than the first in terms of the sourcing that the Washington Post used. | |
| And it's the second accusation that I think is worse in a lot of ways. | |
| The first comment that there are a lot of reasons people seem offended this morning. | |
| One is the idea that Trump said some countries are bleepholes. | |
| To be fair to the president, some countries are really crappy, right? | |
| Sudan, North Korea, Haiti is not a great place to live. | |
| It has a life expectancy of 63 years and an average annual GDP per capita of like $730. | |
| It's not a great place to live. | |
| So, and the cursing, is it something that we love? | |
| Nobody said it behind closed doors, unlike Joe Biden, who actually said on a live mic that President Obama's Obamacare deal was a big effing deal, right? | |
| So the vulgarity, I find the media is jumping up and down over that a little bit extreme, considering that they're happy to actually say the word that none of us are saying on air right now, over and over on other networks. | |
| The second question is whether he's actually saying that people from bad countries should not come to the United States because there's for some nefarious reason, Now, there are two reasons why you could say that people from those countries shouldn't come over or shouldn't be privileged in, for example, the diversity visa lottery program. | |
| The first reason is not actually bigoted, right? | |
| That's the idea that depending on the country that you are from, you may not be as well able to assimilate. | |
| And that's not a black white thing. | |
| If you're from Russia, maybe you're not as able to assimilate easily as if you're from Great Britain. | |
| And in this case, the president's choices of countries are really unfortunate, because when he contrasts Haiti and Norway, it gives people the ability to say, well, he's meaning black and white. | |
| When really all that he means is maybe assimilation rates aren't the same from different countries, which seems relatively... Well, Ben, I'll go further than that. | |
| Norway was here 48 hours ago. | |
| That was on the forefront of his mind, number one. | |
| And number two, per capita income is through the roof. | |
| So they say that in terms of quality of living. | |
| But people saw it in black and white. | |
| Right, exactly. | |
| So I think that's correct. | |
| The second way of reading it is the way which imputes bigotry to the president. | |
| I think it requires a little bit of a jump. | |
| And that's the idea the president was saying we don't want people from these bleep hole countries because they're bleep hole people. | |
| And I think that the media are taking it that way. | |
| Again, I think that requires a little bit of a leap. | |
| I'm not sure that that's exactly what the president was saying. | |
| And without his exact wording and without any context as to what he was saying, you know, I think that how you view this is a Rorschach test on how you view the president. | |
| If you want him to be seen as a bigot, if you think he's a bigot already, you're going to jump to he's a bigot from these comments. | |
| If you don't think he's a bigot, you're going to say that's not what he meant by this at all. | |
| Now, would I prefer he had not said this? | |
| Of course. | |
| But that's true about like half the stuff the president says for me. | |
| That's fair, Ben. | |
| This is Rachel Campos-Duffy talking to you. | |
| I agree. | |
| Listen, I think some of our best immigrants have come from crappy governments and countries. | |
| So I'm, you know, a little bit perplexed by that, hoping he didn't actually say that. | |
| That said, you know, when is he going to stop trusting the Democrats? | |
| I mean, we all say irreverent things, you know, un-PC things when we think we're in a private setting. | |
| But gosh, I mean, he probably should know by now that the Democrats are out for blood. | |
| And no question that if you're going to say stuff like this, it's not particularly smart to say it in front of people who are not your political allies. | |
| You shouldn't say stuff like this to begin with, as you mentioned. | |
| And you're exactly right. | |
| One of the arguments in favor of bringing in people from bad countries is that they know what they're leaving. | |
| Right. | |
| A lot of our best immigrants are coming from places that are quite terrible, including my great grandparents when they came over. | |
| And I think pretty much everybody in the country's great-grandparents came over from somewhere they considered bad, including the Pilgrims. | |
| So the idea that, you know, that line works. | |
| But you're right that, you know, the president, I swear, if the man could just stay off Twitter and watch his mouth, he would rise five points in the approval ratings almost immediately. | |
| And the proof of this is that every time he goes out of the country and he doesn't have access to Twitter and he doesn't actually speak to the press and he's not talking to Democrats, His approval ratings rise 5 to 10 points. | |
| And he does actually very good in these settings, in these international settings as well. | |
| That's right. | |
| Sure. | |
| Alright, so let's talk about Nancy Pelosi if we can, because she's getting a total pass here, about what she says about the money that so-called average people are making and getting increases off this economic plan, and how she described the meeting that was held without her. | |
| First off, when she was told that $1,000 bonuses were being handed out and places like Walmart were raising up their minimum wage, this was her reaction. | |
| In terms of the bonus that corporate America received versus the crumbs that they are giving to workers to kind of put the schmooze on, it's so pathetic. | |
| Hmm. | |
| Crumbs to put the schmooze on. | |
| Could you please, you live in California, can you explain what she's talking about? | |
| No, I, no. | |
| I have no idea what she's talking about. | |
| As a Jewish person who uses the word schmooze pretty regularly, you don't put the schmooze on. | |
| That's not actually a thing. | |
| And beyond that, when Nancy Pelosi says that people who are low income and getting raises because of the President's tax cuts and the Republican tax cuts, when she says that that doesn't mean anything for those people, that's pretty derogatory toward People who she's supposed to be courting. | |
| I mean, I think the whole problem for the Democrats, they didn't win a lot of blue collar votes in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. | |
| And now they're going around saying that if you get a thousand bucks back from your employer, you get a raise from your employer. | |
| It doesn't mean anything because it's not enough money. | |
| Maybe she should stop hanging out in Marin County and start hanging out in rural Ohio. | |
| Now the second thing we wanted to bring up is what she said about the meeting that was taking place without her. | |
| The highest ranking person there was Steny Hoyer. | |
| Nancy Pelosi came out and said, what do you mean, that meeting? | |
| With a bunch of white guys? | |
| Five white guys. | |
| Five white guys? | |
| Maybe they should open up some type of other stand? | |
| I don't even know what that means, but Steny Hoyer was offended. | |
| I mean, is that, I mean, number one, do people have to worry about her stability? | |
| Well, I mean, I'm not sure that Nancy Pelosi has been all there for a while, but I'm not going to play Iron Church psychiatrist. | |
| I think the voters are going to have to decide whether or not they want Nancy Pelosi representing them. | |
| And in San Francisco, apparently they do. | |
| But Nancy Pelosi doing this routine about intersectionality with regard to congressional leadership. | |
| Well, the negotiations definitely would have gone differently if Nancy Pelosi were there. | |
| She's going to have to explain why she would have negotiated any differently than Steny Hoyer, who's her deputy. | |
| I'm just confused. | |
| Is she on a different page than Steininger? | |
| Did Trump not invite her because she's a woman? | |
| Is that the implication? | |
| Because that seems pretty stupid, actually. | |
| Well, maybe President Trump should put the schmooze on her then and invite her next time. | |
| One other thing we wanted to ask you about, and apparently there is a newspaper report that the Obama administration tipped off Iranian terrorists that Israel planned to assassinate him just because they wanted to make sure the Iran nuke deal, a Barack Obama legacy item Well, it wouldn't be the most surprising story. | |
| This comes from Haaretz, which is an Israeli newspaper that's usually well-sourced. | |
| They're reporting it second-hand based on another report. | |
| Ben Rhodes, the former national security advisor, essentially, to President Obama, apparently quasi-denied it on Twitter. | |
| But it wouldn't be a particular surprise for the Obama administration to be making provision for Iranian terrorists, considering there's an entire political report from Europe all about how they had done so for Hezbollah because they wanted to pay off the Iranian regime in order so they could ram through this nuclear deal. | |
| So your hackles always have to be up. | |
| Your kind of antenna have to be up whenever there's a story about the Obama administration trying to bend over backwards to help evil people on behalf of that Iran nuclear deal. | |
| They were lying to the American people continuously about it, of course. | |
| And if this is true, this is the most powerful person in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who is responsible really tangentially for many American deaths. | |
| This, that would be, you talk about a foreign policy disaster that needs to be investigated, Soleimani. | |
| This guy, we basically, we told him he's not allowed to leave the country, yet he turned up in Russia. | |
| So this, this would be something extraordinary if this is proven correct. | |
| It definitely would be a bombshell. | |
| And one of the things that's amazing is Tommy Veeder, who of course used to be a member of the Obama administration, apparently not when this story was broken, he came out and he said, well, why exactly is everybody so exercised? | |
| It's not like this guy Soleimani was like Osama Bin Laden or something. | |
| That demonstrates the gap in understanding about terrorism that the Obama administration evidenced nearly every day in office. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| All right. | |
| Joining us today from the West Coast, Ben, thanks for getting up early. | |
| Have a great weekend. |
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