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Feb. 19, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
56:46
The Gun Control Movement Ramps Up | Ep. 478
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Students take to the airwaves to push Trump on gun control, Fergie does the worst version of the National Anthem ever, and I saw Black Panther, and I have thoughts.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So many things going on.
F-E-R-G-I-E-L-I-C-I-O-M-G-W-T-F was that.
No one knows.
We will play Fergie's worst national anthem of all time.
Roseanne Barr can finally emerge from hiding after years of being shuttled off to safe spaces to prevent her being Hit with rotten tomatoes.
Fergie has now taken over that role.
We'll discuss that.
We'll also obviously get to more serious business with regard to the Trump-Russia probe.
We'll get to more serious business with regard to the shooting in Parkland.
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Okay, so we begin with continuing fallout from the situation in Parkland, Florida.
Obviously, there's a horrific Awful, evil event that occurred last week in Parkland, and that's what dominated the news over the weekend.
President Trump is apparently now considering whether he is going to push some gun control measures.
One of the reasons he's doing that is because the media have launched an all-out emotional assault on gun control.
Here is what CNN, Fox News, MSNBC have been doing.
They've been covering all of the students from Parkland.
They're high school students, and they're speaking out about gun control.
So here are some of the students announcing national demonstrations on gun control.
Today I'd like to announce that we have an event coming up to have everybody in the nation talking about what we're talking about.
And one of the things we've been hearing is that it's not the time yet to talk about gun control.
And we respect that.
We've lost 17 lives and our community took 17 bullets to the heart.
And it's difficult to come back from that.
So here's the time that we're going to talk about gun control.
March 24th, we have the March for Our Lives, which you can find at Marchforourlives.com, and expect to see us a lot.
The March for Our Lives is going to be in every major city, and we are organizing it so students everywhere can beg for our lives.
Because at the end of the day, this isn't about the red and blue, the GOP and the Democrats.
This is about adults and kids.
Now, whom are you going to beg for your life?
Are you going to beg Trump for your life, as though Trump could just flip a switch and suddenly these shootings would not happen anymore?
There's significant disagreement about the method that should be used in order to militate against these shootings.
There's significant and real disagreements on this.
I've suggested there ought to be wildly upped security standards at all of these schools, that there ought to be armed guards at virtually every door that you might consider at some of these schools actually putting into place some doors that can actually close across the campus and lock like they have at hospitals.
At many hospitals, they have lockdown procedures where somebody inactive shooters in the hospital, and so you actually lock off certain parts of the hospital from other parts of the hospital so that the shooter can't just walk through the halls with impunity.
And there's a lot of disagreement about this.
Democrats want, of course, bans on all sorts of weapons, including the AR-15, which is the most popular rifle in the United States.
But this idea that it's all about begging, that it's all about if we just cared enough, that all of this would be fine, we just agree on everything, that, of course, is not true in the slightest.
This, of course, however, is what the left is suggesting.
So the same student Cameron Kasky, he says, you're either with us or against us, which is pretty wild language, considering we are all with you.
No one wants to see kids get shot.
You're either with us or against us.
We are losing our lives while the adults are playing around.
And we have received endless support from your generation, and we thank everybody for that immensely because We really appreciate it.
We don't need you.
On March 24th, you are going to be seeing students in every single major city marching, and we have our lives on the line here.
And at the end of the day, that is going to be what's bringing us to victory, and to making some sort of right out of this tragedy.
I mean, what does victory look like?
What does victory look like?
That's the real big question, OK?
If victory is no more shootings, then we all agree on the definition of victory.
If victory is a piece of gun control legislation that may or may not actually help, then we don't agree on what victory for the country looks like.
And you can see that some of these students, obviously, they're very politically motivated.
That's OK.
I mean, they're allowed to have their political motivations.
My problem here is the same problem that I have with the country as a whole.
The country as a whole takes being on camera as some sort of imprimatur of knowledge, some sort of imprimatur of expertise.
And that's really silly.
So LeBron James speaks about politics.
That's his right.
He's allowed to do it.
Some of the stuff he says, I think, is not completely wrong.
But why would we treat, as a country, His version of politics with more credibility than people who have studied the issues and studied the personalities for a long time?
I don't, and I don't think other people should.
Why would we take a bunch of high school juniors and say that these are experts on gun policy now?
They're not experts on gun policy simply because their school was targeted.
These are people who have experienced significant pain, and obviously we all stand with them and mourn with them in that pain.
They have it to a far greater degree, I'm sure, than anybody who's far away.
But that does not mean that what they are saying on politics has any more legitimacy.
Or that it has any more expertise to back it?
And yet, there's a reason the media does this, right?
After the Boston Marathon attacks, did you see victims of the Boston Marathon attacks on TV every day stumping for a travel ban on Muslims?
Of course you didn't.
After the Orlando shootings, did you see victims of the Orlando shootings, who were not left-wing, going around and saying, what we need here is a restriction on the number of Muslim immigrants from countries we can't vet?
Of course you didn't.
The media go out of their way to put people on camera who are sympathetic.
This goes all the way back to the Sandy Hook shooting when Piers Morgan was attempting to do this routine and I called him on and on air.
It's highly irritating to me and it's intellectually dishonest.
But there's a reason that all these kids are being put on TV and to put pressure.
The idea, by the way, that a child shall lead them when it comes to politics is silly.
The idea that children are experts on policy because they have greater innocence?
No, that means that they don't know enough.
There's a reason that you don't let 17-year-olds define tax policy, and you shouldn't let 17-year-olds define gun policy either, depending on whether they've actually studied the issue in any significant way.
But again, the media have a real interest in trotting out these kids.
Here's another student talking about how Trump sickens the student.
President Trump, you control the House of Representatives.
You control the Senate.
And you control the executive.
No, he doesn't.
You haven't taken a single bill for mental health care or gun control and passed it.
And that's pathetic.
We've seen a government shutdown.
We've seen tax reform.
But nothing to save our children's lives.
Are you kidding me?
You think now is the time to focus on the past and not the future to prevent the death of thousands of other children?
You sicken me.
Trump sickens him.
Okay, well, again, Trump does not control the House.
He does not control the Senate.
I mean, basic civics education would be useful here.
These are independent branches of government, and they have to propose and pass legislation.
Democrats would filibuster, presumably, a lot of the legislation Republicans would propose, but Republicans are not going to propose legislation that their base doesn't want and that their voters don't want.
This is how a republic works.
Again, the reason the media are going back to the well here is because they're attempting to create an impetus for action that there is no political impetus for right now.
This is aimed at the public.
It's not really aimed at Trump or even the legislators.
It's aimed at the general public, the suggestion being that if you disagree with these students and if you don't feel their pain in the same way that they do, and by feel their pain we mean agree with them, then that means that you are obviously an uncaring individual.
There was another student doing this routine yesterday.
We are going to be the kids that you read about in textbooks.
Not because we are going to be another statistic about mass shootings in America, but because, as Justice David said, we are going to be the last mass shooting.
Okay, but here's the reality.
That's probably not true.
And none of the gun control— I mean, it's an unfortunate reality.
But none of the gun control measures that are currently being proposed by the Democrats would have stopped what happened in Parkland.
I've yet to hear a concrete proposal.
Have you heard one?
I haven't heard any concrete proposal.
None.
This piece of crap who shot up the school had smoke grenades on him.
We still don't know how he got the smoke grenades.
Do you think it would have been impossible for him to go through and shoot all these students with a handgun?
That's what the student at Virginia Tech used, used a handgun in that shooting.
So blaming the AR-15 is not going to stop these mass shootings.
Again, all of this is about generating emotional appeal, not about making a logical appeal.
But the real goal here is to get politicians in front of these kids so these people can berate the politicians.
So Marco Rubio is falling for this.
He's going to go talk to the victims on camera in front of CNN.
It's not our job to tell you, Senator Rubio, how to protect us.
The fact that we even have to do this is appalling.
Our job is to go to school, learn, and not take a bullet.
You need to figure this out.
That's why you were unfortunately elected.
Your job is to protect us, and our blood is on your hands.
Okay, again, our blood is on your hands.
I mean, only if you think that the government is God and can prevent every single thing, or unless you have a piece of legislation that is backed by evidence and can suggest that there will be no more mass shootings if you pass this piece of legislation.
And then we can actually have a conversation.
But here's the truth.
We know why this shooting took place.
We know what failed here.
We know what went wrong here.
And I'll explain to you in a second what exactly that was.
And it was not lack of gun control.
I'll explain that in one second.
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Okay, so what exactly went wrong in Parkland?
We know what went wrong at Parkland.
The left insists that the government must have total control over guns in order to stop mass shootings like what happened at Parkland.
But we found out that the government won't do that.
We found out the FBI knew full well about the shooter in the Parkland, Florida school massacre and did nothing two times.
Two, first, they were informed in September that a YouTube user with the shooter's real name said, quote, I'm going to be a professional school shooter.
I'm not sure what you need more than that to go and check it out.
The FBI didn't even forward it to the field office.
They didn't bother to share the information with local authorities.
Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that in January, a caller told the FBI specifically about the shooter's, quote, gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting.
What happened?
Nothing.
It was ignored.
It was not even forwarded to the field office.
So when we talk about the government is big enough to save us, the government is big enough to protect us, there are thousands and thousands of people in this country right now who are felons, who have guns, and the government knows about them and is doing nothing.
There are thousands of people who are in the mental health roles, and they have guns, and the government is doing nothing about them.
And you're telling me that a mass gun confiscation is the way that you're going to take care of this?
Or that if we have a march in the streets, that somehow this is going to accomplish the end of this?
One of the ways that we could actually militate against this—there are two ways that I would propose, maybe three, that would actually—I can actually name, I think, maybe four things that we could do that would militate against all of this.
So, first thing that we could do is the media should stop naming shooters and providing glory to the shooters.
When we do this stuff, All we end up doing is promoting this.
These are copycat crimes.
A huge number of the school shooters are fans of Columbine, have downloaded information about Columbine, become obsessed with school shootings and want to imitate it so they can get their name in the papers.
The media should have an agreement all the way through, and we're going to start implementing this at Daily Wire now, I do it on my show, that we're not going to name the shooter.
That is something that I think everyone should work on in the media.
That's something that we can do firsthand.
Second thing, we should have massive security at the schools.
Idiotic notion that there is a school-to-prison pipeline is not backed by data.
That if you have a bunch of armed guards in the schools, then kids are being arrested for silly crimes and then being sent to prison.
It's just not true.
The data do not support that.
We have a whole article by Hank Barian over at The Daily Wire about this.
You can go and check that out.
It is not the case.
The mental health screenings that are already taking place, there needs to be more transparency.
All of this information needs to be transmitted to local authorities.
It all needs to be put in the databases.
People need to be fired or lose their jobs or lose their careers if they do not enter information that is relevant, and then something terrible happens.
Because I promise you, for every school shooting that happens like this where the FBI missed it, there are a hundred other instances where the FBI missed it, but there was no school shooting.
If this happened once, this happened a hundred times.
We've now had the FBI and the CIA miss things in the San Bernardino shooting, in the Texas shooting, in this shooting, in the Charleston shooting.
The government is not doing what they already have the power to do.
So that's something that we certainly should be taking a look at.
So those are three things right off the bat that we should be looking at.
David French has a proposal over at National Review that is called the Gun Violence Restraining Order.
And what he suggests, I want to find the actual verbiage, so he says that And what we should do here is we should have GRVOs.
He says, there are various versions of these laws working their way through the states.
California passed a GRVO statute in 2014, and it went into effect in 2016.
Broadly speaking, they permit a spouse, parent, sibling, or person living with a troubled individual to petition a court for an order enabling law enforcement to temporarily take an individual's gun rights away.
A well-crafted GVRO should contain the following elements.
Quote, it should limit those who have standing to seek the order to a narrowly defined class of people, like close relatives, people living with the respondent.
And should require petitioners to come forward with clear, convincing, admissible evidence that the respondent is a significant danger to himself or others.
It should grant the respondent an opportunity to contest the claims against him.
In the event of an emergency, an ex parte order—an order granted before a respondent can contest—should be scheduled quickly if there is an ex parte order.
The order should lapse after a defined period of time, unless petitioners can come forward with clear and convincing evidence that it should remain in place.
So this would be something that we could all agree on across the board.
These seem like reasonable gun control measures to me.
And they're not just gun control measures, they're societal control measures in the sense that they are restrictions we place on ourselves in order to try and tamp down the possibility of violence here.
Unfortunately, we're not going to have real conversations about all of this.
We're just going to shout at each other about how we don't care enough.
And chief among those people shouting is, of course, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
So Neil deGrasse Tyson is very angry when people talk about praying for the victims or praying for the families of the victims.
He says, quote, evidence collected over many years obtained from many locations indicates that the power of prayer is insufficient to stop bullets from killing school children.
OK, evidence gathered from all over the world from many locations across thousands of years indicates that no religious person in history has ever claimed that prayer stops people from shooting other people.
There's not a religious person in America who actually believes that if I pray, school shootings will end.
Nobody thinks that.
But the left is fully intent on using school shootings as a club to wield against their favorite political enemies.
Steven Pinker, whose book I'm going to talk about a little bit in Things I Hate, I talked about his Things I Like last week, and then I actually had a chance to read it, so now I'm going to talk about Things I Don't Like about it, but Steven Pinker is a psychologist over at Harvard, and he was talking about atheism on MSNBC, and suggesting that we should quit it with all of the religion talk, because obviously God doesn't exist.
All of which really cast doubt on the idea that there's a benevolent shepherd who looks out for human welfare.
I mean, what was the benevolent shepherd doing in Florida while that teenager was massacring his classmates?
So I don't write in order to win popularity contests.
And I say many things, some of which readers will agree with, some of which they'll disagree with.
I assume that readers have enough sophistication to evaluate different propositions.
They may disagree with me on some things, and that's fine.
Okay, so this is the problem of theodicy.
Okay, theodicy is the problem that has been literally considered thousands of times by thousands of different religious thinkers.
Why would a good God allow bad things to happen?
I do love it when people who are on the atheist left simply declare that the problem of theodicy is unsolvable and therefore God doesn't exist.
As though their mind is God's mind.
Bad things happen, therefore God doesn't exist.
If you're using a school shooting to make the case against God, let me suggest that your priorities are misplaced.
One of the things that can help here might be a society that takes virtue more seriously, that inculcates manhood more seriously, as opposed to a society of atomized individuals who apparently have no responsibility for one another.
Maybe that's where we should start when we have these societal discussions.
But again, it's all taking advantage—Bernie Sanders taking advantage of the gun control debate in order to push his agenda, even though Bernie Sanders' voting right on guns is actually a lot softer than a lot of other Democrats.
Of course we have to make it harder for people to be able to purchase weapons.
We have people now who are on terrorist watch lists who can purchase a weapon.
Does this make any sense to anybody?
Bottom line here, Republicans are going to have to say that it's more important to protect the children of this country than to antagonize the NRA.
Are they prepared to do that?
I surely hope they are.
Weird, I mean, because Bernie Sanders has said this, quote, And yet there's no proposal there.
There's just casting aspersions at people with whom he disagrees.
in this country, 99.9% of those people obey the law.
I want to see a real serious debate and action on guns, but it's not gonna take place if we simply have extreme positions on both sides.
I think I can bring us to the middle.
And yet there's no proposal there.
There's just casting aspersions at people with whom he disagrees, which is quite gross.
Again, all of this is silly.
And you see John Kasich doing the same thing.
John Kasich, one of the more gutless politicians of my lifetime, the governor of Ohio, who had a pretty pro-gun record when he was in Congress, and had a pretty pro-gun record as governor of Ohio, now, of course, he's coming out and saying we should ban AR-15s.
Why should we ban AR-15s?
Let's hear some of the worst logic we're going to hear today from the insufferable John Kasich.
I said, if all of a sudden you couldn't buy an AR-15, what would you lose?
Would you feel as though your Second Amendment's rights would be eroded because you couldn't buy a goddarn AR-15?
These are the things that have to be looked at, and action has to happen before, and look, you're never gonna fix all of this, but common sense gun laws make sense.
Okay, common sense, well that, I've never heard circular logic like that before.
Common sense gun laws make sense.
Thank you, definitionally idiotic human.
The question is, what is a common-sense gun law?
How about an evidence-backed gun proposal?
How about that?
Say an evidence-backed gun proposal makes sense.
Not common-sense gun laws.
Common sense is very often the last reserve of people who don't actually want to do the fieldwork of having to look up the evidence.
Common sense.
When people say common sense isn't so common, that's because common sense would actually involve you looking at the evidence and then making a policy proposal based on it.
By the way, the verbiage here is so stupid.
The idea that, you know, here he is saying, if I can't buy an AR-15, do I feel like my Second Amendment gun rights have been violated?
Well, if I didn't have to listen to John Kasich, would I feel like my First Amendment rights have been violated?
Actually, yes.
I don't like John Kasich.
But if I couldn't listen to John Kasich, my First Amendment rights would be being violated.
I have a right to hear what he has to say.
What we like and what we don't is not the measure of a right.
What we like and what we don't is a measure of preference.
A question of right is what I have a right to do and what I have a right to have.
I don't have to take advantage of that right in order for that right to exist.
I have a right to sleep with as many people as I want to in the United States.
I'm not going to do that.
I don't like people who do do that.
But I have a right to do that?
I have lots of rights in the United States that I don't take advantage of.
John Kasich apparently thinks that if the calibration of reduction of a right does not affect me, then somehow it's not a reduction of a right.
That, of course, is completely evidence-less and foolish.
But that's the nature of this debate.
Evidence-less and foolish is, I think, what it comes down to in the end.
As we continue here, we're going to talk about Trump-Russia, and the Mueller—Robert Mueller brought down an indictment on Friday that does some serious damage to the Democrats' claims that he was colluding with Russia.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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Okay, so, quick update on Trump-Mueller stuff.
So, the Trump-Mueller investigation.
continues to unspool.
And it is not providing the sort of evidence that Democrats would wish that it would provide.
On Friday, the Mueller investigation's grand jury indicted 13 Russians associated with election meddling.
But that was not the real headline.
The real headline is that among all of this activity, nothing all that serious seems to have occurred.
I'm just going to be frank about this.
It doesn't look like any of this weighed anything having to do with the election.
None of this looks particularly damaging.
And beyond that, None of it had to do with the Trump campaign apparently knowing about what was going on with Russia at all.
The indictment targets 13 Russian nationals, three Russian entities the government says were utilizing, quote, information warfare during the election cycle.
According to the indictment, these people, quote, supported the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald Trump and worked on disparaging Hillary Clinton.
But after Trump's election, according to the same indictment, quote, defendants and their co-conspirators used false U.S.
personas to organize and coordinate other false U.S.
personas to organize and coordinate U.S.
political rallies protesting the results of the 2016 presidential election.
And one of those rallies actually included a Trump is not my president rally held on November 12, 2016.
So in other words, it was the Russians trying to make trouble during the election, not necessarily backing Trump.
Per se.
So what about election coordination with the Trump campaign?
Here's what the indictment says.
Folks, that's not collusion.
Collusion, you actually have to know who you're talking to.
I don't understand the argument that this is collusion.
individuals associated with the Trump campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.
Folks, that's not collusion.
Collusion, you actually have to know who you're talking to.
I don't understand the argument that this is collusion.
If I were to call up the Trump campaign and say, "I want to do a rally for you in Texas," and they say, "Sounds great.
Let's do a rally in Texas," and I'm not Russian, then it's not collusion.
If I'm Russian and I say, let's go do a rally in Texas, and they don't know that I'm a Russian agent, then how is it collusion?
It's only collusion if they know they're forwarding the agenda of the Kremlin.
If the Kremlin's agenda is the Trump victory, that's not Trump's fault.
Trump's victory is his own agenda.
The logic that you did something and it happens to be coincident with something the Russians wanted, not that you coordinated with Russia and that's collusion still, that logic does not hold.
So what exactly did all of these organizations do?
They created, quote, certain fictitious U.S.
personas into leaders of public opinion in the United States.
Like what?
They created thematic group pages including Blacktivist, Secured Borders, and Army of Jesus, and they created Twitter accounts like 10GOP, which ended up with more than 100,000 followers.
By the way, that's the extent of what they did, that they created one Twitter account that was successful and had 100,000 followers.
You know how many people have accounts with 100,000 followers?
A lot.
You know how many people have accounts with over a million followers?
Not all that many.
I have about 1.2 million followers right now.
If the Russians really wanted to pour resources into Twitter, you'd figure they would get one account that was really, really influential.
100,000 followers is not all that influential.
So who did they support?
They engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump.
They encouraged U.S.
minority groups not to vote in the 2016 U.S.
presidential election or to vote for a third-party U.S.
presidential candidate.
So pushing for Jill Stein and against Hillary Clinton.
It sounds like they didn't like Hillary very much.
It sounds like it was more anti-Hillary than pro-Trump, per se.
But regardless, there is no evidence of actual Trump-Russia collusion in these indictments.
Now, could there be evidence that appears later?
Sure, but we're still waiting to see some.
Rick Gates is a member of the Trump campaign who's now going to be indicted.
Looks like he's going to be indicted on charges having nothing to do with Trump.
Looks like it has to do with corrupt activities with regard to Ukraine and Paul Manafort.
So thus far, we've had zero evidence that the Trump campaign actively colluded with the Russians.
The best that they can do is say there was intense collude.
That would be the meeting between Donald Trump Jr.
and Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and the exchange that Trump Jr.
had with a friend of his in Russia, who was saying the Russian government wants to help out.
So intense collude is not a crime.
Actual collusion is probably not a crime, actually, depending on how exactly it went down.
But the story we've been told for over a year is that the Russians skewed the election to Hillary Clinton, and then the evidence they provide for this is really scanty.
Like putting up memes on Facebook that have 15 shares?
Putting up dumb memes that have 100 shares on Twitter?
One Twitter account that's successful enough to have 100,000 followers?
That's it?
So Trump, rightly, comes out and starts blasting away against the Democrats for all of the Trump-Russia stuff in an epic tweetstorm.
He says, Russia started their anti-U.S.
campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for president.
The results of the election were not impacted.
The Trump campaign did nothing wrong.
No collusion.
Fact check, true.
And then he says, "Charges deal Don, a big win, written by Michael Goodwin of the New York Post, succinctly shows the Russians had no impact on the election results.
There was no collusion with the Trump campaign.
She lost the old fashioned way by being a terrible candidate.
Case closed." Again, fact check true.
This is Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein stated at the press conference, "There's no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity." There's no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.
Check.
True.
And he continues, funny how the fake news media doesn't want to say that Russian group was, sorry, was formed in 2014 long before my run for president.
Maybe they knew I was going to run even though I didn't know.
First of all, a lot of the fake news media did—fact check, false—the fake news media did actually point out that this interference started in 2014.
in 2014.
And then he says, I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was not the main goal.
Rob Goldman, vice president of Facebook ads.
Fact check true.
So all of this is true.
This is very sad.
Now, here's where he goes off the rails.
Here's where Trump cannot help but be Trump, and it's not good.
He tweets, quote, This is stupid.
This is counterproductive.
This is very dumb.
This is stupid.
This is counterproductive.
This is very dumb.
That last comment there, were not the FBI agents who are investigating Trump-Russia collusion.
That is a very, very stupid comment.
It's a comment that—linking those two issues is really gross and nasty and vulgar, and Trump never should have done it.
Then he said, quote, I never said Russia did not meddle in the election.
I said it may be Russia or China or another country or group or maybe a 400-pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer.
The Russian hoax was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
It never did.
Well, that's really not true either.
The president said over and over and over that he doesn't really believe that Russia meddled in the election.
He said that Vladimir Putin keeps telling him, and he sees no reason not to believe him, that Russia didn't meddle in the election.
He's expressed his doubts about Russian meddling a thousand times.
But with all of this said, you know, the president can't help himself.
He gets on Twitter.
He says silly things.
It's what he does for a living, aside from being president.
But with all of that said, The basic notion promoted by the Trump-Mueller investigation, the new allegations put out by the Mueller investigation, it basically suggests that Trump is not wrong here.
There's never been a lot of strong evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, and the media that keep trying to push this story are going to have some real trouble if they continue to push this story.
Trump can be as dumb as he wants on Twitter, and he will, but that has nothing to do with the underlying accusation made by the media Which is that Hillary Clinton didn't lose the election, the Russians won it for Trump.
There is no evidence of that whatsoever.
Any suggestion to the contrary is evidence-free.
OK, so in just a second, we're going to get to sports and politics, because I need to play for you the worst rendition of the national anthem in human history.
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So I do want to talk sports and politics, but in order for me to lead this off, I do have to discuss the worst national anthem in the history of national anthems.
This, of course, was from Fergie, who gave the National Anthem a black eye.
Get it?
Get it?
She gave it a black eye.
Fergie?
Yeah, F-E-R-G-I-E.
I'm going to make the joke again in case you missed it the first time, because it's so good.
F-E-R-G-I-E-L-I-C-I-O-M-G-W-T-F.
Here it is Fergie singing the worst national anthem of all time.
Watch the reactions of the NBA players who are listening to her.
Kneeling would have done less dishonor to the anthem than the way that Fergie sang this national anthem.
It's just horrifying.
I'm never going to cut it, man.
I'm just going to let it play.
It's so good.
- Go ahead. - - - What so proudly we hailed - What in the world? - - At the twilight's last gleaming - - Steph Curry, he's like, what is going on, man?
Everybody is trying so hard not to laugh at this.
Look at LeBron trying to hold in the laugh.
He's really trying hard there.
It comes to a point in this clap where the entire crowd actually starts laughing.
We have to wait at least till we get Draymond Green's reaction.
Oh no.
And she's a terrible singer too.
Oh no.
Oh no!
Oh!
Okay, watch Draymond here.
He's the best.
Wait till we get to Draymond Green.
It's so good. - - - - - You can hear the crowd laughing, 'cause it's so terrible. - Jimmy Kimmel can't hold it in.
Jimmy and I are on the same side here.
What the hell is this?
Oh, so great.
Okay.
Everybody's laughing now.
They can't hold it in.
Oh, the capper is so good.
Oh, no.
No.
Let's play some basketball!
What in the world?
I think we can all come together around Fergie is awful.
Oh my goodness.
That is just hot garbage.
Roseanne Barr finally gets off the Schneid because of Fergie.
Wow.
Wow.
Carl Lewis off the Schneid.
If you haven't seen them sing the anthem, by the way, go to YouTube and look it up.
Pretty spectacular.
Yeah.
How about this?
How about we just sing the National Anthem like it was supposed to be sung as opposed to Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to JFK while having sex with him?
How about we don't do that with the National Anthem?
Because that was not good.
Wow.
Okay, now, the sports community has decided that it is imperative that they all speak up on politics.
Very, very important that if you are good at basketball, that you speak up on politics.
It's fine.
You want to speak up on politics?
Everyone in the United States has the right and the capacity to speak up on politics.
Whether we should respect your opinion is another question.
Lots of people have very dumb opinions.
So among those who have very stupid opinions is Adam Rippon.
So Adam Rippon is an ice skater.
And he says that, quote, I'm not like a gay icon or America's gay sweetheart.
I'm just America's sweetheart, and I'm just an icon.
So Milo Yiannopoulos coming back as an ice skater there.
He finished 10th.
Like 10th.
Okay, you know who finished 10th in the NFL last year?
It was the Atlanta Falcons with a 10-6 record.
The Jacksonville Jaguars also were 10-6.
This does not make you an icon.
If you finish 10th, that does not make you an icon.
But the media are so perverse that they actually moved to give Adam Rippon A job as a commentator after finishing 10th at the Olympics.
Can you name the person who finished 10th at the last Olympics?
You can't!
You know why?
Because they're not an icon!
Definitionally, you finish 10th at the Olympics, you're not an icon.
So NBC briefly hired him to serve as a correspondent for the rest of the 2018 games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
He's one of the first openly gay athletes to compete at the Olympics.
And he won a bronze medal for figure skating at some point, I guess.
Will work for NBC as a correspondent on TV, digital, and social media.
The only reason they're even talking about having him— First of all, anyone who thinks that he's a gay icon in figure skating, guys, Have you watched the figure skating coverage at all?
I haven't.
But if you have, then you've seen Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir.
Johnny Weir is dressed like Lady Gaga every day, commentating on this.
That guy is ten times as gay as Adam Rippon.
Or at least if you're talking about gay stereotypes, he's stereotypically gay, much more than Adam Rippon.
He's a gay icon.
Johnny Weir is much more of a gay icon than Adam Rippon, but Adam Rippon Ripped on Mike Pence, and therefore he's a gay icon now for some odd reason.
The media wish to prop up these cultural figures because they think that the American people actually listen to them.
The American people don't listen to them.
Other people who the American people don't really care about hearing from on politics as a general rule, LeBron James.
So LeBron James can say whatever he wants on politics.
Laura Ingraham, when she said, shut up and play basketball?
Now LeBron James can say whatever dumb thing he wants.
That's his prerogative.
But LeBron James responded to Laura Ingraham, and so now we're going to have a LeBron James-Laura Ingraham fight for no apparent reason, which is just awesome for the culture.
Here's LeBron.
I would definitely not shut up and dribble.
I would definitely not do that.
I mean too much to society.
I mean too much to the youth.
I mean too much to so many kids that feel like they don't have They don't have a way out and they need someone to help lead them out of the situation they're in.
And that's why I would not just shut up and dribble because I mean too much to.
My two boys here, their best friend right here, my daughter that's at home, my wife, my family, and all these other kids that look up to me for inspiration.
Okay, that's his prerogative.
That's his prerogative.
And it is worth pointing out.
People were saying this is a race thing.
Joy Reid came out and she said that it's just that Laura Ingraham wanted to slam a black guy.
That's why Laura Ingraham did this.
Yeah, this is ignorant.
Here's what Joy Reid had to say.
There is this extent to which Fox News has decided that the grist for the ratings mill is black people.
Black NFL players, black NBA players.
I mean, you had Eminem make a music video attacking Donald Trump.
That's not interesting to them.
And the grist is always black and brown people because they know what it sells.
And yet you have Laura Ingraham taking such umbrage and saying, Oh, how dare you say my words were racist?
Her words weren't racist.
She wrote an entire book.
It was a New York Times bestseller called Shut Up and Sing about the Dixie Chicks.
The Dixie Chicks, last I checked, are the whitest people on planet Earth.
And she wrote an entire book about how people who are in the music business should shut up and sing.
This has been Laura's shtick for a very, very long time.
Let's at least be honest about the critiques that we're making of people.
If you think that Laura Ingraham shouldn't have said that LeBron James should shut up and dribble because you think that everyone has a right to speak, that's fine.
But if you want to say that that's a racist thing, Laura Ingraham's been saying this about every celebrity that she can find for the last 15 to 20 years.
I know, I was there.
But Joy Reid wants to say it's a racial thing.
Also, the idea that Fox News is somehow ignoring the Eminem music video.
They covered the Eminem—I was on Fox & Friends, I think, the morning they covered it.
They've covered the Eminem music video over and over and over again.
Then they covered the Snoop Dogg music video.
One of the reasons that they keep covering, quote-unquote, black folks in athletics is because it's a lot of black folks in athletics who are becoming very political these days.
Because they think that Trump is racially biased and they think Trump's a racist and all the rest of it.
The vast majority of players who are kneeling for the anthem in the NFL were black.
The vast majority of players in the NBA who are wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts were black.
Because the vast majority of players in the NBA are black.
It's not that Fox News is... This attempt to graft racial issues onto what are really political issues, I don't like very much.
Another note about LeBron, when LeBron says, I'm too important to people not to speak up, That may be true.
There are a lot of people who find LeBron James very important and they want to hear from him.
That may be true in the same way that it was true for Muhammad Ali.
I don't like making sports figures into political figures because I don't think they know very much about politics as a general rule.
The mistake that Laura Ingraham made here was suggesting, if she made a mistake, was suggesting that Innately, LeBron James is not capable of talking about politics because he's a basketball player, as opposed to he doesn't know what he's talking about, therefore we shouldn't pay any attention to him.
The problem isn't LeBron speaking out.
The problem is a society that takes celebrities seriously on politics.
How do I know that our society takes celebrities seriously on politics?
The President of the United States is Donald J. Trump.
Okay, yes, we take our celebrities seriously on politics.
It's true on the right, and it's true on the left.
You can't critique LeBron for speaking out on politics if you were willing to vote for Kid Rock in the U.S.
Senate race in Michigan.
You can't talk about how you don't like celebrities talking about politics if you are excited every time Clint Eastwood makes a political statement.
It doesn't work for one side and not for the other.
And on the left, you can't whine about Donald Trump as a celebrity.
What does he know about politics?
If every time a celebrity comes forward like Lena Dunham whining about abortion, you take her super seriously because she writes a terrible show on HBO.
Either we're going to have to judge people based on their expertise, or we're going to have this whole other ancillary set of gauges that we use for determining legitimacy.
How close were they to a situation?
So we'll use sympathy.
How close were they to a situation that affected them?
Or we'll use celebrity as a marker of decency and genius.
Or we could say, well, does this person know anything about what they're talking about?
And if the answer is no, then maybe we shouldn't, as a people, Take them particularly seriously.
Maybe Adam Rippon's take on politics is not particularly relevant because Adam Rippon doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
He went on national television and suggested that the Vice President of the United States is for gay conversion therapy, which is factually false.
Maybe we shouldn't offer him a slot on ice skating coverage so he can do his politicking at NBC.
By the way, they withdrew the offer apparently after there was some blowback.
The reason that people are up in arms about sports and politics is because there's been a whole set of media elites who have decided that sports figures and cultural figures have something deep to say.
And you see it every time there's one of these controversies, and a bunch of people come out and say, where's Taylor Swift on this issue?
Where's Taylor Swift been on Me Too?
Where's Taylor Swift been on the Pussyhats?
Who cares where Taylor Swift has been on any of this?
She writes poppy teen beat songs.
Who cares?
Why does it matter where she is on this?
Why would I possibly care what a boxer has to say about this stuff, unless the boxer's actually spent some time learning about the political issues at issue?
There are boxers, by the way, who have spent time on politics.
I mean, is it Vladimir Klitschko, the heavyweight?
Or his brother, who is very involved in Ukrainian politics?
But the mark of expertise should not be how many cameras are on you on an ancillary thing.
The mark of expertise should be whether you actually know what the hell you're talking about.
Jennifer Lawrence, by the way, says she's taking off time from acting to save our democracy.
So she apparently thinks the Hunger Games is a real thing.
She's going to go get her bow and arrow and run out there.
If the previews for Red Sparrow are any indicator, then I think we've all been blessed by her decision.
But, Jennifer Lawrence, why are we paying attention to her on politics?
Who cares what Jennifer Lawrence has to say on politics?
The answer is, no one should, because she doesn't know what she's talking about.
But we all will, because celebrity now dominates the roost.
Okay, time for some things I like, some things I hate, and then we will get to a Federalist paper.
So, things I like.
We could really do a thing I like and a thing I hate together for "Black Panther" because it is really some of both.
So, I saw "Black Panther" over the weekend.
It is a very good Marvel movie.
I am not a Marvel fan.
I am a DC over Marvel guy.
I have to analyze it on two levels, the "Black Panther" film.
So, one is the movie level.
The answer is yes, I think it's a good movie.
I think it's a well-made movie.
I think it's compelling.
I found the characters interesting.
I thought the story moved.
I liked the movie.
I thought that it was better than most of the Marvel movies that I've seen recently.
I think it would probably fall, I said top three, it would probably fall top five for me in terms of the Marvel films.
I think, what, have they made 17 of them now?
I made a bunch of them.
My top five Marvel films, this would be on there.
I really liked Thor Ragnarok.
It didn't take itself too seriously.
That would be on there.
Ant-Man would be on there.
I know that I'm in the minority believing this.
Ant-Man would be on there.
I really liked Doctor Strange.
I thought Doctor Strange would be on there.
I have a weird Marvel list of movies that I like, and they tend to be lighter.
Black Panther is heavier, and I think that it's pretty good for that.
So it's well-made.
The acting across the board is really good, except for Forrest Whitaker, bizarrely, who plays the same character in every film now.
So Forrest Whitaker has basically become the guy he played in Rogue One, and he's like that in every single science fiction film.
He's kind of like Jeff Goldblum that way.
When you cast Forrest Whitaker, you know you're getting Forrest Whitaker.
You're not going to get really a performance.
But everybody else in the film is great.
Michael B. Jordan steals the film as the villain, Killmonger.
He's the best thing in it.
But the performances across the board are quite good.
Okay, so that's level number one.
Is the film good?
So things I like, I like that.
That's good.
It's a good film.
So we can show a little bit of the preview, and then I will explain some things about the film that I did not like.
Tell me something.
What do you know about Wakanda?
It's a third-world country.
Textiles, shepherds, cool outfits.
All the front.
Explorers have searched for it.
Called it El Dorado.
They looked for it in South America.
But it was in Africa the whole time.
I'm the only one who's seen it. - I'm tired, I'm tired.
- Okay, so the movie's good.
Andy Serkis, by the way, is terrific in the film, and they should have him in more films where he's not CGI'd as a monkey or something.
He's quite a good actor, and I really enjoyed him in the film.
He's a crazy guy.
Okay, so I analyzed it as a film.
Very enjoyable.
Very good movie.
Okay, now.
The politics.
So, before I go any further, I want to point something out.
I did not politicize this film.
You politicized this film, media.
It was you guys who made this into a big issue.
I'm going to read you some of the headlines from the New York Times.
These are the headlines from the New York Times about this film in the last two weeks alone.
One, Black Panther smashes box office records in Hollywood myths.
I took seventh graders to see Black Panther.
Here's what they said.
Black Panther and the revenge of the black nerds.
How Black Panther got its gorgeous Afrocentric hair.
Why Black Panther is a defining moment for black America.
Black Panther brings hope, hype, and pride.
Hey, people last week were saying, I was very upset that there was this movie being made.
No, I don't care whether the movie is made.
It was a good movie.
I enjoyed it.
What I care about is that the media are treating this as some sort of glorious moment, like this is a very, very important cultural moment.
It's not a very important cultural moment.
I'm sorry, it isn't.
There have been blockbusters with black leads, black comic book characters in films, including Nick Fury, hit movies primarily about black people for years, critically acclaimed movies about black people for years.
In the last five years, I think, 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight both won, both about black people.
So the idea that Americans are not willing to go see a movie with primarily black people, like, what are you talking about?
I just don't see the evidence for any of that.
And there's this kind of virtue signaling that's now going around, people saying they love the movie a little more than they do because they want to prove that they went to see a movie with black people and liked it.
I think that's really dumb.
The movie's good.
Is it Citizen Kane?
No, it's not Citizen Kane.
Is it a very good Marvel movie?
Sure.
Okay.
The politics didn't go beyond that, though.
So it's not just it's important for black kids to see a black superhero, which I find a dubious measure.
I don't think it's important for white kids to see a white superhero.
I think it's fine for white kids to see a black superhero, like Black Panther.
I think it's fine for black kids to see a white superhero.
I don't care.
It makes no difference to me.
But there's something beyond that.
So Carvel Wallace wrote this in the New York Times, quote, And then he said also in this article that there's a video posted to Twitter in December, which has since gone viral, Three young men seen fawning over the Black Panther poster at a movie theater.
One jokingly embraces the poster while another asks rhetorically, this is what white people get to feel like all the time?
There's laughter before someone says as though delivering the punchline to the most painful joke ever told, I would love this country too.
Except nobody's ever gone to see a Captain America movie and said, wow, look, a movie with a white hero.
I'm so excited, he's white.
Nobody does that in America.
That's not a thing.
And they certainly don't go to a movie and say, wow, look, a movie with all white people and all the black people are bad, because that would be a racist movie.
That would be Birth of a Nation.
That's bad.
No, this is not true.
OK, so what are the politics that are actually in the movie?
I didn't politicize it.
You politicized it.
So now I have to break down the politics.
Sorry I have to do that.
Shouldn't ruin your experience of the film.
It's a good film.
OK, so here's what's good.
Martin Luther King defeats Malcolm X. So, there are two main characters in the film.
One is T'Challa, who is a stolid Chadwick Boseman, and one, and he sort of plays the MLK figure, he's taking over for Wakanda.
So I have to explain the plot of the film, so spoilers ahead.
If you don't want to hear the spoilers, tune out now.
Here are the spoilers.
So, There's a fictional kingdom that does not exist, because the entire—none of this exists, right?
It's a Marvel universe.
But we're going to pretend that it does exist for purposes of this conversation, because when you analyze the politics of a film and the messages that are being promoted by the film, you have to take it on its own terms.
So, here is what's going on.
There is a country called Wakanda.
Wakanda was hit with a meteorite that is filled with vibranium.
Vibranium is basically unobtainium.
It is the greatest metal that has ever been created.
It can heal spinal wounds.
It can give you visions of your forefathers.
It can do anything, vibranium.
It's just unbelievably cool crap.
And it can turn your entire civilization, apparently, so long as there are no white people in your civilization, it can turn your entire civilization into a fully westernized, fully liberal place with gay rights and women running the military and women running all the science, running all the science institutions.
And all this.
Outside cultural influences don't matter.
All that matters in this universe is that a big meteorite landed right here and that there were no white people to ruin it.
That's pretty much the premise of Wakanda.
And then, Wakanda hides from everybody, but they still have the greatest country ever without any trade.
So they have this metal, but the metal magically can grow things and it can make everything super cool.
It can be isolationist.
You can have a complete state with no outside interference at all.
Now, pause.
In real life, this doesn't work out for anyone.
Japan was the closest thing to this.
America basically opened Japan with a couple of gunboats.
China was like this.
In the 1860s, the United States sent a couple of gunboats into China during the Boxer Rebellion and basically took over, or during the Opium Wars, and basically took over large swaths of China and opened it to trade.
So this is not accurate.
When you cut yourself off from the outside world, it typically makes you weaker, not stronger.
Put that aside.
So Wakanda is fantastic.
It's the greatest place ever.
But Wakanda didn't help out black people around the world when black people were suffering at the hands of white people.
So, the king of Wakanda, before T'Challa, was T'Chaka.
That's his dad.
T'Chaka had a brother.
His brother was sent as a spy to Oakland.
Why would you send a spy to Oakland?
No one knows.
What's in Oakland?
Were you trying to get the Raiders playbook?
There's nothing going on in Oakland that needs spying on.
If you're gonna send a spy, you send him to Washington, D.C.
Did the Russians spend time sending their spies to help Trump in Oakland?
No.
Okay, so, that's stupid, but they send him to Oakland, he sends his brother to Oakland, and his brother in Oakland then turns into basically like a Black Panther, like an actual militant guy who says that America—he gives a whole speech about how America is filled with discrimination and how black people in America are essentially living in poverty because the white people have flooded their neighborhoods with drugs and over-policing.
There's an actual Black Lives Matter speech in the middle of the film.
Okay, then he tries to smuggle some vibranium out to all of these Black Panther-type groups, and T'Chaka has to kill him.
So T'Chaka kills his brother.
The brother had a son.
The brother's son is Michael B. Jordan, who grows up to be Killmonger.
His entire agenda is, Wakanda has all of its awesome vibranium, why don't we help out oppressed peoples around the world overthrow their colonialist masters?
Okay, that's the premise of the film, and that's the conflict.
T'Challa wins, and Killmonger loses.
So MLK defeats Killmonger.
That's good, right?
MLK's program is better than Malcolm X's program.
Militant and separatism is not better than integration and the belief that life should get better for everybody.
However, the film's real message is that Killmonger is right.
It's impossible to watch the film and not feel sympathy for Killmonger because of the way the script is written.
That's for a couple reasons.
One, Wakanda's incredible.
In this film, the United States is garbage for black people.
Terrible place to live for black people.
Now, again, break to real life.
America is the best place on Earth for black people.
There is no better place on planet Earth for black people as a group of human beings, just like there is no better place for women or Jews or any place else on planet Earth for anyone than the United States.
Just a fact.
Measure it in terms of income.
Measure it in terms of lifestyle.
However you want to do it, America is a fantastic place for black people.
That does not justify colonialism, it does not justify slavery, evil things are evil, but that is not the same thing as saying that black people in the United States right now are somehow under the boot of the white supremacist institution, which is sort of the premise of the film.
So, the United States in the film is garbage and Wakanda is great.
That being the case, Killmonger's actually right.
He's suggesting that black people in the United States are oppressed and that the system in the United States is legitimate because of colonialism and slavery, and therefore you have to overthrow that with violence.
That seems like not the worst logic.
That doesn't seem completely wrong.
Now, the reason it's wrong in real life is because colonization can be wrong and unjustifiable, and so can slavery.
But the suggestion that the problems of modern-day Africa lie in colonization and slavery, as opposed to a lot of internal problems that have existed for centuries in many places around the world, including in Africa, And that those problems continue today, that's too simplistic.
That's too simplistic to blame that on colonization and slavery.
Because that's silly.
But the message is, the wrong message here, which is that Killmonger is basically correct.
There are a couple lines in here that underscore this.
One of the people in the film who's sort of the Q figure, as in James Bond, Q. One of the people in the film is the sister of T'Challa, and for no reason at all, she just calls a white guy white boy.
Bilbo Baggins, white boy for no reason.
And then she also says, she calls him colonizer.
Like literally for no reason.
He walks out of bed and she goes, "Don't surprise me like that colonizer." It's like, really?
Yeah, you just dropped that in the middle of a film and it's totally cool 'cause all white people are colonizers now?
By the way, the United States, the least colonizing power in the history of great powers.
Okay, so some of the stuff that I dislike.
There's also some rips against the U.S.
military.
The solution at the end of the film is apparently not militants, but spending lots of money in the inner city.
So T'Challa decides that he's gonna buy up the portion of Oakland.
Where his cousin grew up, and he's going to spend a lot of money on STEM technologies or some such.
We've tried that.
It has not been a giant success.
The problem inside a lot of communities, failing communities in the United States, white, black, and green, is lack of fathers, crime rates that are too high, lack of social institutions, not lack of monetary investment.
We've spent lots of money on the war on poverty.
It has not been particularly effective.
There's some mixed messaging on walls.
We learned that walls are bad.
One of the characters actually said things to T'Challa.
He says, we don't need to build walls, we need to build bridges.
Except for the fact that the entire Wakandan empire is built because of a wall, and that two of the four people who have entered Wakanda have tried to destroy Wakanda.
So that's not a really great immigration program, apparently.
But, not every, listen, not everything is, all the messages are bad.
It says that women can be great at science, which is fine.
It says that, it's good.
I mean, great.
It says that race is not an obstacle to success, which is true and good.
I hope people take away the good messages and not the bad.
But there's the full breakdown of that.
You know what?
We're out of time here, so we're going to have to do our Federalist paper tomorrow.
So we'll save our Federalist paper for tomorrow.
We do that every week.
But you'll just have to come back here tomorrow for that.
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.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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