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Feb. 13, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:04
Making Wakanda Great Again | Ep. 474
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The Senate Judiciary Committee uncovers a very weird letter from the Obama administration to the Obama administration.
Plus, is Wakanda real?
We'll discuss all of the glories of Wakanda, the greatest place in the universe.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
OK, so we do have a lot to get to today.
I'm going to talk about the Senate Judiciary Committee letter, about another email from Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice.
I'm going to go through that in detail.
The Rob Porter fallout continues.
The media continues to worship at the altar of North Korea and go crazy over tweets from a New York Times writer.
But I'm going—and I definitely will talk about the Wakanda stuff, because everybody is going nuts over Wakanda, a place that does not exist, has not existed, and will never exist, but apparently is the great aspiration for black people across the planet or some such.
We'll discuss all of those things.
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All righty.
So we begin today with a little covered story that is actually, I think could We don't know enough yet to know, but we will find out, I think, pretty soon.
So, on Monday, the Senate Judiciary Committee Senators Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham sent a letter to former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and they asked her to explain an email that she actually sent to herself on the last day of the Obama administration.
So, January 20th, they're all getting ready to go to the inauguration, and Susan Rice is at her keyboard typing out an email to Susan Rice.
What exactly is in this email?
Well, it explained that President Obama had held a briefing on January 5th regarding a supposed Trump-Russia collusion.
So according to the letter from Grassley and Graham to Rice, it says, if the timestamp is correct, you sent this email to yourself at 12.15 p.m., presumably a very short time before you departed the White House for the last time.
In this email to yourself, you purport to document a meeting that had taken place more than two weeks before on January 5th, 2017.
So like, the last minute she's in the White House, she's sending herself an email about a meeting that was held in the White House Between James Comey, the then FBI director, the Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates—both of these people have been fired or are gone from the Trump administration—Vice President Biden was present, and Susan Rice was present, and President Obama was present.
So what actually happened at this meeting?
According to the email that Susan Rice sent to Susan Rice, it says this, quote, On January 5th, following a briefing by IC leadership, intelligence community leadership, on Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential election, President Obama had a brief follow-on conversation with FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in the Oval Office.
Vice President Biden and I were also present.
President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the intelligence and law enforcement communities, quote-unquote, by the book.
The president stressed he is not asking about initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective.
He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.
That's twice, she says, by the book.
From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.
The president asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team, and Comey said that he would.
So there are a bunch of things about this email that Rice sent to Rice that should be disturbing.
First of all, why was she sending a memo to herself?
The only reason that you send a memo to yourself, legally speaking as a lawyer, the only reason you do that is to create a paper trail.
So she wanted a paper trail suggesting that this meeting was totally hunky-dory, which is why it says twice in the email that this was all happening quote-unquote by the book.
That in and of itself is suspicious.
How exactly would Obama have planned to prevent the intelligence community from handing over information to the incoming commander-in-chief?
I mean, that's disturbing stuff.
We talk about violation of presidential norms.
Well, one of the presidential norms is—not just norms, what is the law—is that when the chief executive comes in, when the commander-in-chief enters, He now has access to all the classified materials.
But here is Obama saying to Comey, tell me what I should not tell the president of the United States, the president-elect of the United States.
Tell me what I should not tell him.
The implication being that the outgoing administration was going to hide information about the incoming administration from the incoming administration with regard to, quote unquote, Trump-Russia collusion.
Right?
Trump has full constitutional power over the executive branch, including the IC.
But Obama said he might want to prevent the full sharing of information regarding Russia.
I mean, talk about violation of norms.
Shift the names here, and then imagine the fallout.
Imagine that George W. Bush, in the last days of his administration, had had into his office the heads of his intelligence community and Vice President Cheney, and he said to them, listen, I'm very suspicious of this Obama guy.
It seems like he has a lot of conflicting feelings about the United States.
What if we just don't give him all the information?
What if we just keep that hidden?
People would say, well, that's insane.
I mean, he's the president-elect of the United States.
He can't do that.
The president-elect of the United States is owed this information.
And yet, that's apparently exactly what Obama was talking about.
Third, Obama said he didn't want to interfere with anything from a law enforcement perspective.
But how about from an intelligence-gathering perspective?
So, Andy McCarthy, over at National Review, has been aces on this.
He says, since the beginning, there's been a major distinction people have missed between the Mueller investigation as a counterintelligence investigation and the Mueller investigation as a criminal investigation.
These are not the same thing.
A counterintelligence investigation is an investigation where you're attempting to determine if someone's trying to influence our elections, if somebody in the United States is maybe working with those people.
But it is not a criminal investigation in the sense that you need to gather evidence for possible prosecution.
Well, Obama seems to be making the same distinction.
He's not saying we're going to prosecute anyone from the Trump administration.
He is saying that we're in the middle of a counterintelligence investigation, and maybe that means that we shouldn't hand over information to Trump.
So Grassley and Graham asked a series of questions that do deserve answers from Susan Rice.
She's not famous for giving forthright answers to straight questions.
Some of these questions, why did Rice send the email in the first place?
When was she aware of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation?
Because if this meeting was about the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, and they were using that as an excuse not to hand over information to Trump and team, that's a problem.
Was Susan Rice aware of the FISA warrants on Carter Page?
Was the Obama administration using a thinly obtained FISA warrant on Carter Page in order to target the Trump administration for future curbs on their intelligence gathering?
Did Comey or Yates mention any media coverage of the Steele dossier?
Was Susan Rice aware of the Steele dossier?
Were there any more meetings of this sort?
You know, we don't know the answers to any of these questions, but we better get the answers to some of these questions, because this is a violation of serious norms.
We keep hearing, over and over again, that the Trump administration has breached norms.
This is not normal.
We hear that all the time.
And listen, I'm the first to say when I think something that is not normal is going on.
I don't think that it's normal to have this level of turnover in the White House in the first year.
I don't think that it's normal the President of the United States to say what he said after Charlottesville, or for him to suggest that he doesn't want Haitian immigrants.
I don't think that it's normal for the president of the United States to be making excuses for an alleged child molester in Alabama, or for him to suggest that a guy on his own staff, who there's evidence of wife beating, that that guy says he's innocent, and therefore, meh.
Right?
I don't think that any of that is normal.
But if we're going to talk about breaches of normality that actually go to the heart of the system, this is one of them.
For all the talk about Trump being the incipient tyrant, the Hitlerian figure who is going to come in and overthrow all constitutional boundaries, just destroy the Constitution piece by piece, that's not what's happened.
The norms that Trump has destroyed have been norms of behavior.
That's bad, right?
That's stuff that I don't like, because a lot of those norms I think are good.
But if you're talking about who perverted institutions, the Obama administration perverted institutions far more than the Trump administration has.
I mean, the Obama administration had an attorney general, who now wants to talk about running for president, who called himself the President of the United States' wingman.
The Obama administration militarized the IRS for use against conservative nonprofits.
The IRS had to apologize for that just in recent months.
The Obama administration used the HHS as a center of corruption under Kathleen Sebelius.
The Obama administration was utilizing the FBI in order to let Hillary Clinton off the hook.
The Obama administration corrupted institution after institution, so when we talk about violation of norms, that's where we should start.
You know, everybody's focused on the shiny object of the silliness of some of the stuff happening inside the Trump administration.
When we talk about norms that have been destroyed and violated, that did not begin with Trump.
Trump is a response to violation of norms.
And the American public said, fine, you want to violate some norms?
We will violate all norms.
How about that?
And ironically, the norms that have been reinstated are those constitutional checks and balances.
The norms that have been broken are the cultural taboos that, in many cases, probably should have stood in the first place.
And none of that is good.
Now, in a few minutes, I'm going to talk about Some of the norms that have been violated by the Trump administration and one that has not been violated, but the media are looking for an excuse to say that that has been violated.
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OK, so the media, while they haven't been focusing on the violation of institutional norms by the Obama administration, they're focusing in on supposed breaches of protocol by the Trump administration.
Well, some of those breaches are actual breaches, right?
Like, why was Omarosa working in the Trump administration?
So, Omarosa Manigault was on The Apprentice, fired three times, and then Trump hired her for the White House, and then fired her again.
And now she's on Celebrity Big Brother, where apparently there are rumors that she was slipping out of her robe.
I haven't actually watched the show, so—and now I have no desire to do so.
But Omarosa actually—on the show last night, she ripped into Mike Pence.
Can I just say this?
As bad as y'all think Trump is, you would be worried about Pence.
So everybody that's wishing for impeachment might want to reconsider their lives.
We would be begging for days of Trump back if Pence became president.
That's all I'm saying.
OK, the violation of norms that went on here is why in the hell was this woman anywhere near power?
She was a celebrity reality TV contestant, and then she was ousted, and now she's back on celebrity reality TV.
I mean, there's a hell of a career arc.
To go from reality TV to the White House and back to reality TV, just spectacular.
But is that violation of presidential norms severely damaging to the United States in the same way as, say, a prior administration refusing to hand over intelligence data?
I don't think so.
And the media have been attempting to spot violations of norms in every nook and cranny.
Everywhere, there are violations of norms.
This is not normal.
This is what they're constantly saying.
So yesterday, for example, they decided to jump on Jeff Sessions, the attorney general.
Attorney General Sessions, I think, has overall been doing a fine job.
And Attorney General Sessions was giving a speech about the sheriff's office, and here's what he had to say.
Since our founding, the independently elected sheriff has been the people's protector, who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elected process.
The Office of Sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.
Okay, so everyone, everyone jumped on that phrase, the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.
Oh, he's saying white people.
Ooh, controversy, he's saying white people.
Brian Schatz, the idiotic senator from Hawaii, IQ of 7.
He says, Do you know anyone who says Anglo-American heritage in a sentence?
What could possibly be the purpose of saying that other than to pit Americans against each other?
For the chief law enforcement officer to use a dog whistle like that is appalling.
Best no vote I ever cast.
OK, this is, as Charles Cook says over in National Review, politely, this is moronic.
OK, this is idiotic.
The Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement and the Anglo-American heritage of America's legal system has been commented on by virtually every president.
It springs all the way back to—you can go all the way back to William Blackstone, which was used as the basis for a lot of American law.
British common law was the basis for a lot of American law.
Here's Senator Obama in 2006, before he was president, talking about habeas corpus, quote, I sincerely hope we can protect what has been called the Great Writ, a writ that has been in place in the Anglo-American legal system for over 700 years.
Clearly, Barack Obama was a racist.
In 2008, during the campaign, quote, calling it the foundation of Anglo-American law, he said that the principle of habeas corpus says very simply, if the government grabs you, you have the right to at least ask, why was I grabbed, right?
So again, talking about the Anglo-American law.
And then there's President Obama saying, quote, How dare Jeff Sessions?
How dare Jeff Sessions?
This is what I'm saying about why people don't trust the media.
When you guys go looking for reasons to say this is not normal about Trump, but then you completely ignore this is not normal about Democrats, then we start to think that maybe, just maybe, you have a little bit of bias.
Speaking of bias and normalization of terrible behavior, a top DNC official, Keith Ellison, dined with Louis Farrakhan and the president of Iran in 2013.
This is according to Fox News.
Democratic National Committee Deputy Chair Keith Ellison, who is an anti-Semite, a raging anti-Semite, attended a private dinner hosted by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in 2013, along with the head of the black nationalist group Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan.
You'll remember that this guy was endorsed by Chuck Schumer to become head of the DNC.
You'll also remember that he said at the time that he had completely cut ties with Louis Farrakhan.
Yet there he was, in 2013, having dinner with the president of a genocidal anti-Jewish state in Iran.
And the head of the Nation of Islam, the anti-Semite, Louis Farrakhan.
Ellison also visited with Farrakhan again in 2015.
Ellison attended the 2013 dinner with two other members of the CBC, the Congressional Black Caucus, Representatives Andre Carson, Democrat from Indiana, and Gregory Meeks, Democrat from New York.
Rouhani invited Muslim leaders from around the United States to dinner after addressing the UN General Assembly.
And the Nation of Islam website confirmed the attendance of Louis Farrakhan.
And then there were articles at the Nation of Islam publication confirming Ellison there, with photos of Ellison and Farrakhan at the table.
After the guests were hosted at a dinner, the Iranian president entered an engaged and warm discussion with guests, including Democratic Congressman Greg Meeks of New York, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who is a Muslim.
This is what Final Call wrote on October 2, 2013.
This, of course, is not the first time Ellison has been associated with Louis Farrakhan.
Ellison attended the Million Man March in 1995 and publicly defended Farrakhan years ago, even after Farrakhan made a bunch of anti-Semitic remarks and called Jews satanic.
Farrakhan slammed Ellison in 2015 after Ellison tried to distance himself from Farrakhan.
But this is what's truly amazing.
The media are willing to go crazy over Jeff Sessions saying Anglo-American, which is totally fine.
Totally fine.
Barack Obama said it.
There's nothing wrong with saying Anglo-American law enforcement heritage.
The Office of Sheriff It's an actual smashing together of two terms from British common law.
Shire and Reeve.
Right?
Shire and Reeve.
Sheriff.
That's where it comes from.
Of course, it's a feature of Anglo-American law.
That is something the media have to comment on.
That's something we have to be deeply concerned about, is that it was coded white people language.
When it comes to actual Democrats dining with actual terrorist leaders and actual anti-Semites, Nothing.
Not a word.
We all have to pretend that Keith Ellison is totally normal.
We have to pretend that Keith Ellison is just a normal part of American politics.
This is not normal.
You want to talk about this is not normal?
That is not normal.
That is not normal.
Now, speaking of not normal, the media continued to fawn over North Korea because North Korean sister Kim Yo-jong, I can't remember her last name, Young-yo, or her first name, because in Korean the names are opposite Western.
In any case, The media continued to fawn over North Korea.
Remember, they were fawning over North Korean cheerleaders.
It is worth noting, that is an update to yesterday, North Korean cheerleaders have been sent to prison camps before, according to Vice News.
It says after a 2005 performance, 21 members of the cheerleading squad were sent to a prison camp after speaking out about what they saw in North Korea.
In South Korea.
Critics say the Army of Beauties is an effort to hijack the games and spread propaganda, which of course it is.
The head of propaganda is the sister who everybody was praising as just wonderful and glorious.
Kim Yo-jong is her name.
Sorry, that's the name of the sister.
Again, the media continue to cover Vice News doing something most of the media did not do.
There was some talk yesterday about the fact that Fox News gave even some fawning coverage to the North Korean charm offensive that Breitbart did as well.
Well, we didn't hear it at Daily Wire, nor did we tolerate it, because that's silly.
So just because, whether it's right or left, if you're crediting the North Koreans with a wonderful PR push, Then number one, you're demonstrating complete ignorance of the system in North Korea and South Korea.
The truth is that the South Korean government was going to portray all of this as fine and dandy because the South Korean government, the recently elected government, is called a sunshine government, meaning that one of their stated purposes is to push the idea of a unified Korea with conciliation with the North Korean regime.
And it wouldn't have mattered what North Korea did.
I mean, the sister could have come down and taken a dump on the president's table in South Korea, and they would have portrayed it as some sort of great diplomatic coup.
The people of South Korea, however, are not happy with the North Koreans, and they're not happy with the North Korean regime.
So, all of the talk about this charm offensive are wildly overstated.
Now, speaking of media stupidity, I'm going to come to the defense of a woman named Barry Weiss.
He writes for The New York Times, and she was shellacked.
She's an opinion writer and staff editor.
She was shellacked because she did something terrible.
The NBC Olympics covered a woman named Marai—I haven't been watching any of this, so I'm going to mispronounce all the names—Marai Nagasu, who is an American ice skater, an American figure skater, who was the first American woman to land a triple axel in competition.
And Barry Weiss tweeted out, immigrants, they got the job done.
And now she knows that Mariah Nagasu is the daughter of immigrants.
She's not actually an immigrant.
She was born in the United States, but her parents immigrated.
And she was just taken to the woodshed over this.
She's an American citizen, having been born to Japanese immigrants living in California.
The line there, right there, where she says, immigrants, they get the job done, is actually a reference to the musical Hamilton.
No, that's not what she was saying at all.
It's amazing.
The level of anger, the level of disdain for anyone suggesting that perhaps a child of immigrants is successful in the United States is just insane, right?
poetic license in saying she looks Asian, so she must be an immigrant despite being born in California.
No, that's not what she was saying at all.
It's amazing.
The level of anger, the level of disdain for anyone suggesting that perhaps a child of immigrants is successful in the United States is just insane, right?
Ishan Theroux said, so she's not white, so she has to be an immigrant.
I mean, and Barry White's tweet, Barry White's tweet, Weiss tweeted back, wow, this is utterly breathtaking in its bad faith.
Her parents are immigrants, and my tweet was obviously meant to celebrate her accomplishments.
Well, yes, perhaps you'd be more comfortable with an outlet like ThinkProgress making the same point.
This is, it's all true, but people are so oversensitive now.
People are so crazy that they decide that Barry Weiss is the person who has to pay the How dare Barry Weiss make a point about the children of immigrants doing really well in the United States?
I mean, this is how far left everybody's moved.
What utter, utter insanity.
OK, in just a few minutes, in just a few seconds, I'm going to talk about the continuing fallout from the Rob Porter scandal and what's going on inside the White House.
We're going to talk a little bit about—and then we'll talk a little bit about Black Panther.
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Alrighty, so.
The fallout continues over at the White House over Rob Porter.
And you can see that the media are all over this, largely because they think that this is a way to get Trump.
They think that if they can get Trump to acknowledge that Rob Porter is probably guilty, then they can get Trump to acknowledge that Trump is probably guilty of sexual harassment and sexual assault.
Now, what's the difference between Rob Porter and Donald Trump?
The difference is that everybody knew about all the allegations against Trump when he was elected.
I said this with regard to Roy Moore, because people were comparing the two.
The difference here is that the allegations against Trump had been widely aired by the time of the election.
Okay?
That doesn't excuse the vote, if you think that needs an excuse.
But it does suggest that people took all of that into account when they made their binary choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
The same is not true for Rob Porter.
Rob Porter was supposed to be this clean-cut guy that everybody in the White House liked and trusted, and then it comes out that he allegedly beat two of his ex-wives.
That comes out, and now people are suggesting that that's akin to Trump.
Well, whatever you think of Trump, the American public have already judged whether they think Trump is guilty or innocent on the basis of the allegations that have already been aired.
If they're new allegations, maybe that changes the math a little bit.
But the media are attempting to use Rob Porter to ensnare Trump.
Jim Acosta trying to do that on CNN last night.
It seems like the President was believing Mr. Porter as opposed to his alleged victims.
Why did the President tweet that over the weekend?
Why is he seemingly defending Mr. Porter publicly?
Is it because he has faced his own allegations?
Is there some sensitivity there?
Is that why that is?
Look, as I just said, and I'll repeat it again, the President and the entire administration take domestic violence very seriously and believe all allegations need to be investigated thoroughly.
He certainly supports the victims of domestic violence above all else and believes that everyone should be treated fairly and with due process.
The president is simply saying that there should be a due process that should be followed and looked at.
Is there tone deafness there?
Is there just being on the wrong side of things?
I don't think the president being on supporting due process.
Okay, so there's Acosta trying to grill Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and the entire media was doing this yesterday, doing the work of the Democrats as well.
Terry McAuliffe, who obviously wants to run for president, the governor of Virginia, he said that President Trump has no sympathy for victims of abuse, obviously.
This president has more sympathy for domestic abusers than the victims of domestic abuse.
I mean, it's just sad.
It's a continuing litany we've heard from this president.
And this is a very serious issue.
This is taxpayer-funded money being used to cover up domestic abuse.
Rob Porter's domestic abuse.
Absolutely.
Okay, bringing on Terry McAuliffe to talk about this is just absurd.
Terry McAuliffe was one of the Clinton's biggest supporters and he was perfectly fine with everything Bill Clinton was doing to women and was alleged to have done to women.
Again, Democrats are using this as a club against Trump.
This is really less about protecting victims of domestic violence because we're not even talking about Rob Porter anymore, are we?
We're not even talking about what happens to Rob Porter.
We're now talking about Trump.
Rob Porter's been gone for Part of a week, right?
He's been gone for several days at this point.
But Rob Porter has faded into the background.
Now we're going to talk about Trump, because this is a way to get Trump.
Bring on Terry McAuliffe to talk about this is obviously a partisan exercise by members of the media.
Kirsten Gillibrand doing the same thing.
She says we should force Trump to resign.
And if not, then Congress should hold him accountable on all this domestic violence.
Again, not the allegations that Trump himself was involved in domestic violence, but the allegations that his own staff didn't tell him that Rob Porter was alleged to have been involved in domestic violence.
You know, it's not clear that goes all the way up to the chain of Trump.
From what I hear, it absolutely does not.
Anyway, here's Kirsten Gillibrand, the senator from New York, a woman who spent most of her career defending Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton.
Once President Trump was elected, I think something changed, and I think it changed for women.
Do you think he'll be held accountable in any way?
Well, I think he should resign, and if he's unwilling to do that, which is what I assume, then Congress should hold him accountable.
We are obligated to have hearings.
I mean, this is the same woman who Meghan McCain took apart in two questions on The View simply by saying the name Clinton and Kirsten Gillibrand ran for the hills.
And this is the point.
If Democrats are hoping that they're going to be able to win Congress, win the Senate, win the presidency simply by being anti-Trump, I don't think that's going to work.
It's all baked into the cake.
OK?
It's all baked in already.
I've made this clear with regard to Trump.
I think that Trump is a mud monster, meaning that if you throw more mud at him, it doesn't even show up.
Everybody knows what Trump is at this point, but Democrats are going to continue beating this drum.
Chuck Schumer, I think, knows better, right?
He's saying you can't just run against Trump.
He's not the only one, by the way.
But our mistake, I think, you cannot just run against Donald Trump.
And it is the job of we Democrats to put together a strong, cohesive, economic, Okay, but they're lazy, so they're not going to do that, okay?
And they're even being encouraged by their own people that they need to get away from bashing Trump full-time.
According to McClatchy today, a leading Democratic group, Priorities USA, which is a vile group, right?
They are warning party leaders they could squander a strong political climate in 2018 if they don't start to emphasize pocketbook issues over loose and unfocused critiques of Donald Trump.
According to internal polling by the Super PAC, President Trump's approval rating climbed to 44% in the first week of February, compared to 53% who disapproved.
That mirrors Trump's improving position in public polls.
In November, the same survey found his approval rating at 40% with 54% disapproving.
The group's survey also showed the Democratic Party's generic ballot advantage had shrunk, with 46% preferring Democrats to 42% for Republicans.
That's not going to be enough for Democrats to win back the House.
They need about a 7 to 10 point ballot advantage in the generic ballot if they even hope to win back the House.
The memo says that a broad range of metrics show the political climate is still favorable for Democrats, but it also makes an unambiguous diagnosis for Trump's recent rise.
Democrats this year have stopped focusing on economic and health care issues, topics that demonstrably hurt his approval during his first year in office.
Priorities polling found that while people in November readily mentioned Trump's health care and tax reform measures, by February they were instead more cognizant of his tweets.
Well, one of the reasons for that is because Democrats can't argue health care.
Democrats can't argue the economy.
The economy is doing well, and millions of people are not dying because of the reforms to Obamacare.
So all of the talk about that has gone by the wayside, and they've fallen back on their secondary argument, which is that President Trump is a garbage person, right?
This is why they're going after the Rob Porter scandal with Alacrity.
What they should remember is that every time they attempt to get Trump with one of these sorts of scandals, it fails.
Alright, Bleepholegate was three weeks ago.
Does anyone even remember that?
Is that even a thing that happened?
Stormy Daniels was like two weeks ago, right?
The allegation the President of the United States had nailed a porn star and then paid her off to shut up about it during the election cycle?
That lasted for like five minutes in the media.
And the idea that Democrats are going to win back the House of Representatives simply by bashing Trump about Rob Porter is inane.
Now, does that excuse the behavior of the White House on Rob Porter?
Of course not.
I spent a lot of this week bashing, and last week, bashing the White House over their treatment of the Rob Porter situation.
Obviously, no one who is alleged to have done that stuff and was forbidden FBI clearance because of it should have been anywhere close to the Oval Office.
But if Democrats are hoping that they're just going to be able to rail against Trump and this is somehow going to drive people out to the polls, not so much.
Not so much.
The memo, according to Priorities USA, they say there's no question Trump benefits when a critique of his tax and health care policies is not front and center, especially when voters are hearing Trump's side of the story on the economy.
So, fascinating.
Democrats are beginning to see that what they're doing is a problem, but they can't stop themselves.
They're so addicted to Trump hate that they're having a really tough time breaking away from it.
They're going to have a tough time moving away from basing their entire Okay, so in just a minute, I want to discuss the most important thing happening today.
We haven't discussed it yet.
The most important thing happening today is, of course, Black Panther is coming out in two days.
And this has been true for several days.
The most important thing happening yesterday was that Black Panther was coming out in three.
The most important thing happening four days ago was that Black Panther would be coming out in seven days, right?
All of this has been deeply important for years.
The most important things happening on the planet right now are the happenings of a Marvel movie in a fictional country.
Very, very important.
We're going to talk about that in just a second because it's so importantly important.
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Okay, so everyone in the media is talking about the most important thing that has ever happened in the history of humanity, or at least since Caitlyn Jenner became a woman, a transgender woman.
And that, of course, is the release of Black Panther.
It is so deeply important.
We've heard it's deeply important to millions of black Americans who, after all, were not Liberated from slavery 200 years ago and liberated by the civil rights movement with federal legislation and not been gradually restored to what always should have been full civil rights in the United States.
None of that has mattered up till they made a Marvel movie about a superhero who is black in a country filled with black people.
That's the change, right?
Blade was not enough.
Catwoman with Halle Berry?
No.
Wakanda is where it is.
This is the most important moment in black American history.
Not Martin Luther King.
Not Frederick Douglass.
Not the Civil War.
Not the end of Jim Crow.
None of that.
Not Brown vs. Board.
The most important thing is that Chadwick Boseman puts claws on his hands and a mask on his face and runs around Jumping off cars in CGI fashion.
Deeply, deeply important.
Black children everywhere will now believe that they, too, can be superheroes who jump off cars in fictional countries.
It's very important.
Now, you may sense that I'm mocking a little bit.
The reason I'm mocking a little bit is because I hate this kind of identity politics.
I think it's incredibly stupid.
I think it's incredibly stupid because, again, I grew up as an Orthodox Jewish kid where no American president has been Jewish.
No American president has been an Orthodox Jew.
And yet, I grew up on 1776, essentially worshiping the Founding Fathers, none of whom were Jewish.
And yesterday, my daughter—actually, it was on Shabbat.
I was sitting around with my daughter, and my daughter was talking about how—she was talking about the presidents, because she was learning about the presidents in preschool.
She's very politically active, my daughter.
She's four years old, and she knows many of the presidents.
She is familiar with the life stories of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.
And she said, Daddy, was George Washington Jewish?
And I said, No, he wasn't.
And she said, Is Donald Trump Jewish?
And I said, No, he's not.
And she said, Have any of the presidents been Jewish?
And I said, No.
And she said, Why haven't any of the presidents been Jewish?
And she's four, so I didn't go into the full explanation, but what I said is, you know, they just haven't been, but maybe there'll be a Jewish president in the future.
Would you like to be president one day?
She said, I don't know.
It sounds boring.
And so, which I think is an astute observation on the part of my daughter.
But the point is this, right?
If you're not telling your kids they can be anything in America, you're doing something wrong as a parent.
And if you had to wait until Black Panther came out, right?
We heard this about Barack Obama when he was elected, too.
Now that Obama's been president, black Americans will feel like they, too, can be president.
It's a transformative moment.
And yet, all we hear now is that America is deeply racist, and black people are still systemically discriminated against, and that black people are still victims in American society.
So it turned out it didn't mean anything.
When Obama was president, we were told it meant everything.
And then he was president for two terms, right?
Re-elected overwhelmingly.
And then it turns out it didn't mean anything because we needed Chadwick Boseman to somehow make sure that black people felt accepted in American society because a bunch of white executives at Marvel greenlit a film about black people in a fictional country in Africa.
The insanity that has attended Black Panther, it's crazy.
I'll see the movie this weekend.
I hope that it's good, because I'm going to spend money on it.
So anything I spend money on, I hope is good.
But I will give you an honest review of that.
I know that's been forbidden by the media.
There's actually a law that you're not allowed to give your opinion on Black Panther.
Emily Lakdawalla, I think, summarizes the feelings of a bunch of insane leftist white social justice warriors.
She tweeted this out yesterday, and it's totally crazy.
She tweeted out, quote, So I carefully did not buy Black Panther tickets for opening weekend because I did not want to be the white person sucking black joy out of the theater.
What's the appropriate date for me to buy tickets?
Is next weekend okay?
I think the appropriate thing for Emily Locke DiWalla to do is never to leave her home again or tweet.
I think these would be because, honestly, you never know when you're going to offend someone just by your very presence.
Like, the necklace that she's wearing here, I think it's ugly.
And it's ruining my white person joy today.
What kind of insanity is this?
What does she think of black people?
Like, how derogatorily do you have to think of black people to think that if you're in a theater with a bunch of black people, they're going to think, that white person, sitting here in a theater, watching a movie, talking about how black people are awesome.
That's ruining my black joy!
First of all, what is black joy, and why is black joy different from white joy?
Or different from almond joy, for that matter?
I'm just—I'm confused.
What are we even talking about here?
That the sensitivity police have gone so far that we now have to have fully segregated theaters to make sure that black people are not offended by the presence of white people, according to Emily Lakdawalla?
No, we actually have to segregate the theaters.
It's amazing.
I mean, we could do the converse.
We did the converse for a couple hundred years in this country, right?
The converse was black people won't be allowed into white people theaters because that will offend the white people and ruin their white joy.
This is stupid, folks.
This is not only stupid, it's counterproductive to the notion of a good and honest and free American society.
And then, the New York Times has run a series of pieces this week, these long think pieces about Ryan Coogler's film.
Okay, so there are two that I spotted right off the bat.
One by Salomeesha Tillett.
I don't know who Salomeesha Tillett is.
I guess Salomeesha Tillett is, well, I guess they don't give this person's biography, so I don't know if this is a man or a woman.
But the piece is called, Black Panther Brings Hope, Hype, and Pride.
And here's what it says.
It says, I suppose neither of us is used to the spotlight.
A dapper T'Challa, the prince of Wakanda, says upon meeting Natasha Romanova, a.k.a. the Black Widow, in Captain America Civil War.
A few scenes later, a recently orphaned and vengeful T'Challa swapping his bespoke blue suit for a full-body bulletproof one reappears as a new Marvel movie superhero.
The prince will have to live with the attention.
Even before its February 16th release, Black Panther smashed box office records, beating out Captain America Civil War on first-day ticket advances and surpassing Batman v. Superman, Dawn of Justice, to become Fandango's top-selling superhero movie in history.
Great.
Okay.
That's fine.
I mean, sure.
I mean, I hope the movie's good.
But I do love this idea that, you know, this is some sort of amazing moment.
Not since Spike Lee's Malcolm X has there been so much hype and hope for a movie among African-American audiences.
From special group outings planned by excited fans to crowdfunding campaigns to ensure children can see it, Black Panther is shaping up to be a phenomenon.
In December, a viral video of two African-American men excited to see the movie's poster with its all-star black cast This is what white people get to feel like all the time, one man wrote on Twitter.
Seemed to capture the anticipation, garnering more than 2.5 million views.
Okay, a couple of things about this.
One, Black Panther, the superhero, was created by two Jewish guys.
And just FYI.
Two, This is not what white people feel like all the time.
White people don't go around thinking, oh, Captain America, my favorite white superhero.
Oh, it's Iron Man, white superhero.
And if you think like this, I would suggest that you might need to start thinking less tribally.
If you spend your life going around thinking, oh my god, I'll bet white people feel just like this every time they see Tom Cruise in a movie.
First of all, do black people feel like that when they go see Denzel Washington in a movie?
I doubt it.
Oh man, Denzel, now I know what it's like for white people who see Tom Cruise.
I've never once gone to a Tom Cruise movie and thought, oh look at that, that white guy, he's representing.
That has never occurred to me, not one time.
Because that's crazy talk, and you shouldn't think like that.
So it was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
Those were the two Jewish guys.
And now Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a new series of comic books.
By the way, Ta-Nehisi Coates' comic books are garbage.
I've read them.
They're so bad.
The Black Panther comic books.
So I hope the movie is much better than the comic books.
But here's Deirdre Hallman.
Listen to this.
Wakanda is a kind of black utopia.
This is the country where this takes place.
Wakanda is a kind of black utopia.
In our fight against colonialism and imperial control of black land and black people by white people, said Deirdre Holman, a founder of the annual Black Comic Book Festival at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, to the black imagination that means everything.
In a comic book, it is reality.
And through a major motion picture, it's even more tangibly and artistically a reality we can explore for ourselves.
There's so much power that's drawn from the notion there was a community, a nation that resisted colonization and infiltration and subjugation.
So a few things about this.
One, sorry to break it to folks, Wakanda is not a real place.
It does not exist.
It is just as real as Asgard.
It's not a thing.
Number two, this idea that it's a fight against colonialism and imperial control, here is the reason why so many people are going crazy over this.
So one of the reasons people are going crazy over this is that supposedly the Wakanda, the country of Wakanda in the movie, I haven't seen the movie yet, so this is speculation based on all of the news reports, The country of Wakanda has basically been separated from society for a long time.
So it's sort of like 17th century Imperial Japan.
It's been separated from the rest of the world for a long time.
White people have not come in.
There's been no trade with the outside world except through a vibranium, which I guess is some material, some alien material that landed there and is extraordinarily valuable and is used in weaponry like Captain America's shield.
And they've been able to guard from the influences of outside culture.
And therefore, according to the movie, Wakanda is the most technologically advanced country on planet Earth.
It is incredibly advanced.
It is filled with beautiful, wonderful people who all treat each other wonderfully.
It is utopia.
It is just the greatest place that ever was.
And this is being portrayed as reality.
The problem that I have with this is that there is no utopia for white people, for black people, for any people.
It doesn't exist anywhere.
There are two countries in Africa that technically have not been colonized.
They're Ethiopia and Liberia.
Ethiopia was conquered twice by the Italians, but was never colonized in the formal sense of colonies being placed there with Italian folks who then ruled the roost for a long period of time.
was originally founded by the United States, which granted sovereignty to the local black population.
And the idea was that a lot of black slaves in America who had been shipped here against their will would be shipped back to Liberia.
It was never really colonized in the technical sense.
Both of those places have severe problems.
Countries have severe problems.
And countries that are isolated have severe problems, too.
Japan was isolated from Western civilization for centuries.
That was not great for Japan.
It wasn't great for China.
This policy—North Korea is completely isolated from different countries.
The idea that trade, isolation, racial unity, that these are the things you should be aiming for in a country, is a really bizarre idea in a liberal order, in a new order where free movement of trade and population and money is considered a generally good thing and is better than life all around the world.
If you actually founded a country on the basis that it wouldn't trade with outsiders, that there wouldn't be any cultural exchanges, and that you would actually produce all you needed in-house, it wouldn't be utopia.
It would be garbage.
That'd be a bad country.
And just because it's a country filled with black people, that wouldn't make the country any better.
This was sort of the founding ideology of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
This is the Yush ideology in North Korea.
This is not a good ideology, and this is not a race-specific thing.
I'm not saying Wakanda is bad because it's black or anything.
That's stupid.
I am saying that if your idea of a utopia is a place where there is no quote-unquote white influence, I'd like to see a place on the planet where that's a good thing.
Just as I think I'd like to see a place on the planet where a white-only country has been a good thing with no cross-cultural pollination.
It's silly.
The whole reason that cultures survive and thrive is because they adapt and advance thanks to technological advances they bring in from the outside.
And yet this is being seen as sort of a model.
And the problem is that if you're creating a racial separatist model, and I haven't seen the movie yet, but if the worship of Wakanda seems to be this, if the worship of Wakanda is that a racial separatist model is good and that all of the evils that have been suffered by folks on the continent of Africa have been suffered because of colonialism and imperialism, that is historically inaccurate.
There are a lot of reasons that countries in Africa have suffered tremendously over time.
They were suffering tremendously, by the way, before white folks ever got there.
There was tremendous tribal antipathy.
There was lots of tribal warfare.
There were people selling each other into slavery.
The idea of a utopia does not exist anywhere on Earth.
There is no utopia.
The closest that we've come to utopia is a place like the United States where people of any race, any color, any background, any ethnicity can live in freedom together while respecting each other's civil rights.
That's the closest we've gotten to utopia.
And trying to build an alternative fictional utopia and then suggesting that we wish that this were a model for a country on planet Earth is silly and counterproductive.
So there's my critique of Wakanda.
Here's what it says, by the way, in the New York Times article.
"Wakanda's rulers have wisely kept their homeland "and its elemental riches hidden from the world, "and in its isolation, the nation has grown wildly powerful "and technologically advanced.
"There is no nation in human history "that has become wildly powerful and technologically advanced "simply through isolation.
"That is not how things work." And it's a mistake to think this way.
It's a Malcolm X point rather than a Martin Luther King point, and I think that that's a problem.
Okay, so we're going to get to some things I like and some things I hate now.
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Alrighty, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So...
Let us begin with some things that I like.
So this was just hilarious.
OK, I didn't like it because it's a great thing.
I liked it because it's just a funny thing.
OK, so WLS in Chicago, their TV station, was doing a broadcast about the Olympics.
And they accidentally put up a graphic.
Instead of saying that it was taking place in Pyeongchang, which is in South Korea, they said that it was taking place at P.F.
Chang.
2018 is the most delicious Olympics that you have ever experienced.
The only problem is that apparently you're hungry for more an hour later.
So, well done, WLS.
Apparently it was just a graphic script.
Some guy in the back room didn't understand what Pyeongchang was, and so he just grabbed what it sounded like, which was P.F.
Chang's 2018.
So just well done.
That's pretty spectacular.
Okay, other things that I like.
So yesterday I recommended that you go and you give money to LibertyInNorthKorea.org.
You should.
Go over to LibertyInNorthKorea.org.
I suggested they help smuggle people out of North Korea.
That is not technically true.
Instead what they do is they help to ensure that people who have escaped North Korea are able to make passage to the West, particularly to South Korea where they get automatic citizenship.
So check out LibertyInNorthKorea.org.
Please give them some money and help people.
Who have escaped one of the worst regimes on planet Earth get to freedom.
That I think is a worthwhile thing, of course.
Okay, other things.
Let's do some things that I hate.
Okay, so thing number one that I hate is everybody's going crazy because Boston Dynamics is a company that makes machines, and they decided that they were apparently going to make machines that are from Black Mirror, because there's an exact episode of Black Mirror where these machine-like dogs are basically murdering humans.
Here's what it looked like from Boston Dynamics.
So that's the last sound you hear before you die, apparently.
Oh, here comes another one.
Apparently it signaled to the other crazy robot dog, and the crazy robot dog has a giant arm attached, and it's now going to open a door, because this is one of the problems that it had, it wasn't able to open the door.
So now it's able to open the unlocked door.
So while you and your children are hiding in the closet screaming, this machine can open the door and then these robot dogs can come and kill you.
So everybody's going crazy about these robot dogs.
Oh my god, we're all going to die from the robot dogs.
I don't think we're all going to die from the robot dogs.
They have made these dogs capable of running incredibly fast and jumping and all of this sort of thing.
I don't think we're looking at Fahrenheit 451 with the hound.
The reason I don't think that is because my guess is that you could probably just hit it and then the battery would die.
One of the things that this is good for, people are asking, why are you making these things?
For military purposes, of course.
If you actually need to open up a place where, for example, you think there's an IED, better to send in a machine that can open the door and get itself blown up rather than a human.
And these machines serve us.
For the moment.
But I don't actually have a particularly negative view of this sort of machinery.
Honest to God, the only type of robot dog that I really care about is if they would somehow make a robot dog out of kosher pork.
Because I'd really want to try bacon.
But other than that, I don't care that much.
People who are going crazy over this, I think, are a little bit nuts themselves.
Tomorrow is Valentine's Day.
I don't hate Valentine's Day per se, although if your spouse or significant other tells you they don't want to do anything for Valentine's Day, in the words of Admiral Ackbar, it's a trap!
So do not fall for that one.
I will say that this is pretty funny.
So yesterday, President Obama and Michelle Obama had their portraits unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery.
We talked about it and made fun of it yesterday.
The President of the United States praised Michelle's portrait.
He said it makes her look hot, which is sort of weird because she looks like Kerry Washington in the picture, not Michelle Obama.
But here is Barack Obama talking about it.
Amy, I want to thank you for so spectacularly capturing the grace and beauty and intelligence and charm and hotness of the woman that I love.
Okay, so number one, I'd just like to point something out.
When a man talks about a woman's hotness, even if it's his wife, I do it all the time about my wife, but I don't care about politically correct scruples.
It is funny that if, let's say, Donald Trump said this about Melania, the entire left would lose its freaking gourd.
If he said, my wife Melania, so unbelievably hot.
Right, if he had said that, the left would go utterly insane.
Barack Obama's allowed to because he's a good family man.
insane.
How dare he be a sexist?
Saying Melania can be reduced to her hotness.
Barack Obama's allowed to because he's a good family, man.
Other things that I hate.
So President Trump continues to maintain this idiotic, It's a reciprocal tax.
We are going to charge countries outside of our country, countries that take advantage of the United States.
He said yesterday that our allies are not allies on trade.
He doesn't know anything about trade, and it's really painful to listen to him talk about it.
It's a reciprocal tax.
We are going to charge countries outside of our country, countries that take advantage of the United States.
Some of them are so-called allies, but they're not allies on trade.
Then their product, and we won't charge them anything.
And we send them our product, same product as they're sending us, and they'll charge us 50 and 75 percent tax.
And that's very unfair.
One of the examples, Scott, is Harley-Davidson.
They're treated very unfairly in various countries.
You know the countries I'm talking about.
So we're going to be doing very much a reciprocal tax, and you'll be hearing about it.
OK, we should not be having reciprocal taxes on trade.
The idea of a reciprocal tax on trade is economically illiterate.
The idea that if you go to the grocery store and they hike the prices on you, therefore, when somebody who works at the grocery store comes to you, you should hike the prices on them is foolish.
They will just go to another place to get their stuff.
Okay, the idea here is that if you are going to... It's so dumb.
The idea that if you trade and somebody puts a tax on the good that is entering their country, making it more expensive, that you should therefore buy from them at a more expensive price by taxing yourself is just insipid.
But this is because people don't understand trade, and people who critique free trade don't know anything about how the global economy actually works.
Here's a great chart on what they call neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism means freedom of trade, free movement of labor and cash.
This is what Oxfam, which is a lefty organization, calls the era of neoliberalism, where so much suffering has gone on.
Look at this chart.
It shows the percentage of people living in hunger, poverty, illiteracy, and child mortality.
Look how it has dropped precipitously from 1990 All the way down to 2015.
Particularly take a look at poverty, which has dropped down to below a 30% global rate.
And yet this is what we are critiquing when we critique free trade and the free movement of goods and labor.
Just silly.
By the way, when I say free movement of labor, I don't mean that everybody should become a citizen of the United States.
What I am suggesting is that if people want to come in and do a job and work, I'm not opposed to that.
All right.
So, we'll be back here tomorrow with all of your latest news updates.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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