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Feb. 21, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:31
Lies, Damned Lies, And Media Manipulation | Ep. 480
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Media malfeasance is out of control, President Trump moves to man bump stocks, and we examine the other gun proposals on the table.
We'll talk about all of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty, so we have a lot to get to today.
The media have just been utterly irresponsible in their coverage of the entire Parkland situation.
They are obviously pushing for gun control.
They don't have any specific proposals, but they're pushing as hard as humanly possible for gun control nonetheless.
I want to talk about all of that, including a smear by the Huffington Post against me personally, a bunch of other smears against people who are pro-gun rights across the board.
And I want to talk a little bit about some people on the right who have made fools of themselves over the last couple of days.
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All right, so.
I was going to start today by discussing all of the various gun proposals that are on the table, but instead, the media have forced me to discuss their absolute malfeasance throughout this entire debacle.
After the tragedy and the evil horror of what happened at Parkland, the media's first move was to jump to the suggestion that everyone who disagreed with them on gun control was, of course, nasty and mean.
Now, this is nothing new.
I mean, I sort of got famous off of saying exactly this to Piers Morgan, because Piers Morgan was famous for doing this.
I said to him that he was standing on the graves of the kids of Sandy Hook to push his agenda, and the media continued to do this.
Tonight, of course, CNN is supposed to have a big town hall event where they have a bunch of the students from Parkland.
We'll see if they have any of the students from Parkland who are not in favor of gun control.
The answer is probably not.
But the media have been using these students in order to push their gun control agenda.
I have never attempted to smear the students themselves.
I have never said that the students don't have a right to speak.
I have never insulted the students' pain.
I've never insulted what the students went through.
But because I say that you ought to have expertise on a topic if we're going to take you seriously, this is enough to get you labeled a smearer of the students.
So Huffington Post led the way last night.
They put up a headline that looked like this.
And it's just egregious.
It says, survivor smears, with a picture of me personally.
And it says, some conservatives are trying to discredit outspoken Florida shooting survivors.
I have not tried to discredit any shooting survivor.
I have not smeared any shooting survivor.
That's absurd, it's insulting, and it's disgusting.
The only thing that I have said about the shooting survivors is the same thing that I said about Jimmy Kimmel when it came to him bringing his son on the show after his son went through an open heart surgery, which is, just because you went through suffering does not make you an expert on a particular topic.
This has been my consistent stance on virtually every event of major consequence in the United States for my entire career, is that just because you went through something doesn't mean that you have been conferred with certain expertise.
And that's what I wrote over at National Review.
I had a long piece on it.
I've discussed it on the show.
But the idea that that is disrespect to the students, to suggest that perhaps They don't know all the details of what they're talking about, or at the very least, they have to show expertise in the topic for me to take their opinions more seriously.
I'm happy to take their opinions on what pain and suffering of people who have gone through a difficult situation looks like.
They are experts in having gone through a traumatic situation, so I'm happy to hear their advice on what it's like to go through a traumatic situation.
In fact, I think that's deeply important stuff for people to hear.
But I'm not willing to to sacrifice the point of public policy on the basis of, I went through something bad, because that makes for bad public policy.
Good public policy is not based on empathy.
Good public policy is based on reason and logic.
But that, of course, is enough to get you labeled a smearer of the survivors, according to the mainstream media.
And they've been doing this for days.
I mean, for days and days and days, they have been doing this, promoting lies about gun control, promoting lies about people who oppose gun control.
And for example, Van Jones, who I personally know and I like Van.
He's an opinion host.
But he retweeted a tweet from a woman named Lori Hsu who tweeted, Common denominators for mass shooters.
White males under 30, AR-15s, Republicans.
So first of all, maybe AR-15s, maybe not.
There are a bunch of other weapons that have been used in these mass shootings, but there is no indicator that these mass shooters were Republicans.
Even if you want to say that the Parkland shooter was a Republican because there's a picture of him wearing a MAGA hat, well earlier this year, or late last year, we had a shooting at a congressional baseball game from a Bernie Sanders supporter.
That didn't mean that Bernie Sanders was responsible for the shooting of the congressional baseball players.
That's absurd.
But Van Jones retweeted that anyway.
And that's not the only example of the media covering themselves in glory.
Chris Cuomo earlier this morning made a fool of himself by tweeting something out that was patently false.
Chris Cuomo tweeted out a story from an account called Cody Davis, I guess, USA Photo Dude.
And the tweet said, quote, I was able to buy an AR-15 in five minutes.
I'm 20 and my ID is expired.
Well, there's only one problem.
That never happened.
According to the article itself, quote, So in other words, he didn't present an ID, and no gun was offered to him.
He said that he wasn't going to present an ID.
He left the store.
That was the end of the story.
It didn't matter.
to think more before I bought an AR-15.
He told me it wasn't a problem and listed the store hours if I wanted to come back.
I then said thank you and walked back to my car.
So in other words, he didn't present an ID and no gun was offered to him.
He said that he wasn't going to present an ID.
He left the store.
That was the end of the story.
It didn't matter.
Chris Cuomo tweeted out the lie that he was offered an AR-15 without photo ID.
Now, when he was called on this, Chris Cuomo over at CNN, the block of wood who attempts to resemble a human being over at CNN, Chris Cuomo actually tweeted out, isn't the point that the kid's age and lack of ID wasn't a deterrent?
And this isn't all gun shops.
Place I bought my shotgun basically goes farther than law requires and makes judgments about whom to sell to.
Point is the system should be better.
Well, why?
The system worked here.
He didn't show ID, he didn't get a gun.
I'm wondering, they ran a federal background check.
If you go to a federally licensed firearms dealer in the United States, according to federal law, they must run a federal background check for criminal record, as well as mental health record, by the way.
The problem is that these records are not fully transparent.
Sometimes the information is not conveyed down to the federal government, to the FBI.
So Charles Cook over at National Review called Cuomo on this.
He said, the point is that the kid lied about buying a gun that he didn't, and now you're lying too.
So Cuomo immediately misdirected to an unrelated topic.
He said, Well, that's a complete misdirect.
That has nothing to do with the fact that Chris Cuomo, a respected, objective news source, tweeted out something that is objectively false.
He has to call out 97% of people want better checks.
Why fight that?
Well, that's a complete misdirect.
That has nothing to do with the fact that Chris Cuomo, a respected objective news source, tweeted out something that is objectively false.
It is just not true.
Now, in a second, I'm going to talk about the stupidity of people on the right who are pushing myths about people who actually are smearing the school shooting survivors by suggesting that one of them, particularly a guy named David Hogg, who's 17 years old, is some sort of crisis actor that...
They're putting out this video that shows that he was interviewed by, I guess, local CBS News in Los Angeles a few months back.
Over some incident where he was a witness, and they're saying, well, this shows that he was a child actor because he was out in Los Angeles, and so he's acting.
Well, he was at the shooting.
Whether he is a child actor or not makes no difference.
I have no evidence that he is.
What the hell are you talking about?
Is the suggestion that he's being paid for his perspective?
I mean, my understanding is that from his Twitter account, he was anti-gun before this happened.
Is the idea that he is being paid as an actor to pretend that he saw a shooting he did not?
Because there's no evidence of that either, and that's a smear and that's a lie.
That's the number one trending video on YouTube, by the way, and it's disgusting.
Anybody who's trafficking in that Should immediately be discounted as a decent news source.
That's stupidity.
Dinesh D'Souza got himself in hot water yesterday because Dinesh tweeted something out about how there are a bunch of kids who are crying when a piece of gun legislation didn't pass in the Florida legislature and Dinesh Tweeted something out about how this is the worst these kids have suffered since their parents told them that they were scaling back their allowance or they couldn't get a summer job.
That, of course, is ridiculous.
There was literally a shooting in Florida last week.
Dinesh got shellacked for that, as well he should have, and he ended up backing down and apologizing for it.
But there's been inordinate media focus placed on that YouTube video, particularly, and on the comments of folks like Dinesh.
Every member of the mainstream media... That's all deserved, by the way.
I mean, there should be focus on lies.
But the lies extend to the mainstream media itself.
And it's much more prominent in the mainstream media because virtually every major host in the mainstream media is engaging in this type of lie.
Virtually all of them, or at least in selective coverage that is designed to shade your emotions in a particular direction.
So as an example of this, last night Anderson Cooper was talking about gun violence, about shootings involving guns, and here's what he had to say.
I actually think we don't focus on the reality of what an AR-15 does to a child.
I mean, if anyone has been on a battlefield and you've seen what a weapon like this does to a soldier, I mean, I think if people actually saw this and saw the reality of this, I mean, it's...
It would open people's eyes.
I mean, we're talking about, we're not talking about, you know, we all say, oh, these children lost their lives.
They didn't lose their lives.
Their lives were ripped out of their bodies.
Their brains were splattered on the floor.
Their intestines are hanging out.
I mean, it's sickening.
And like, we're all talking about it in this antiseptic way, and we're shocked that these kids are angry when they've been hiding in closets and their friends are dead.
Okay, that's all fine.
I mean, if he wants to discuss this in graphic terms, that's fine.
I'm not sure that the graphicness of the act actually changes the logic behind gun control, because the whole point here is not a lack of sympathy.
See, what Cooper's trying to do, and a lot of folks in the media are trying to do, is they're trying to say, look how horrible things are.
Therefore, if you don't agree with me on policy, it's because you don't think these things are horrible.
That's backwards logic, and there's no real, there's no reason to it.
I'm going to explain more about that, and also I have an additional note for Anderson Cooper in just a second.
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All right, so back to Anderson Cooper.
So you heard Anderson Cooper there talk about the brutality and the violence and the horrible imagery of kids being shot.
Yes.
And all Americans agree.
That's terrible.
I will point out the selective coverage of the media when it comes to antiseptic coverage of killings.
So, one of the videos that I've done that's been seen the most is a video of me from this show talking in specific terms about what actually happens during an abortion.
The dismemberment of bodies in the womb, in late-stage abortion, the cracking open of the skull of babies and sucking their brains into sinks.
No one in the mainstream media will ever talk about that, ever, not in one million years.
Anderson Cooper will never do a 30-second description of what an abortion actually is like.
Instead, he will just use antiseptic terms to describe it.
The point here being that if the media want to get graphic about how they cover crime, if the media want to get graphic about how they cover killings and violence, then that's fine with me.
Get graphic about how you cover crimes and killings and violence.
I have no problem with that as a general rule.
I think that, in fact, that's sometimes useful if people really are unable to connect what a crime is with the nature of the crime itself.
But you can't be selective about it.
You can't just say that you're going to do it with regard to shooting victims but not with stabbing victims.
You're going to do it with regard to shooting victims but not bombing victims.
We didn't hear graphic descriptions of what happened to people on 9-11.
And the news media, and I was actually critical of this, the news media stopped showing the video of people who are hurling themselves from the top stories of buildings because they didn't want to lead people to feel angry or feel bad.
And I said, I don't like that the media is censoring that.
So I don't really have a problem with Anderson Cooper talking about the effect of guns.
This is what, it's true.
This is what a bullet fired at high velocity does, right?
It mauls the human body.
It destroys the human body.
It destroys anything that it's shot at.
This is why the first rule, literally the first rule of gun training is do not point the gun at anything that you are not willing to destroy.
That is literally rule number one when it comes to guns.
If you pick up a gun, then don't point it anywhere where it is possible that you will destroy something that you care about.
And that includes human beings.
This is what the NRA teaches in every one of its gun safety courses.
But the point is that the media are only doing this with regard to shootings now because they're pushing a particular political agenda.
And the problem here is that if you want to be an opinion host and do this, that's fine.
If you want to say that you're an objective news host and do it, that's a completely different story.
Brooke Baldwin doing the same routine over on CNN.
She was lecturing the Trump administration, suggesting that the Trump administration was hiding somehow from the media on all of this stuff.
Even though that was not the case, they had a press conference yesterday, but here's Brooke Baldwin when the press conference was delayed by about 15 minutes, saying that Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the White House were hiding from the media on gun control.
Memo to the White House, you cannot avoid us.
Stop trying to dodge us.
This briefing needs to begin.
It was supposed to begin an hour and 15 minutes ago, and then it was supposed to begin 25 minutes ago.
There was a lot to talk about, and we need to see Sarah Sanders behind that podium.
Jeff Zeleny and Gloria Borger are with me, and I think it is entirely fair, Jeff Zeleny, to be tough on this White House, because there are so many things They need to answer for before the ceremony at the half hour.
Okay, does that sound like objective news coverage to you or does it sound like we want you out there so we can grill you on our preferred agenda with regard to guns?
And that's, of course, what the media continue to do.
So, one reporter was grilling Sarah Huckabee Sanders yesterday, suggesting that the president wasn't doing anything.
Now, as we will talk about, the president actually is looking at doing some stuff with regard to guns.
It may not be all the things the left wants him to do because maybe he doesn't think those things are going to be particularly effective in stopping mass shootings.
One of the big problems with a lot of the gun control proposals that are being put on the table is that there is no clear link between the gun control proposal put on the table and the actual lessening of mass shootings.
The only gun control proposal that the left has really put on the table to lessen mass shootings is confiscation of all guns, which is completely unrealistic.
It's never going to happen.
And then if you say it's unrealistic and it's never going to happen, they accuse you of smearing shooting survivors or some such nonsense or not caring about the kids who died, which, again, is total crap.
But here's what it looks like when the media grills the Trump administration on gun control.
We're working hand in hand with both the federal government as well as state and local law enforcement officials on what we legally can do.
Unfortunately, we can't just flip a switch, but there is a process.
We are a law and order country, and the president is trying to do everything that he can under his capacity to address these concerns, and certainly when it comes to mental illness.
The media wouldn't have any of that, and they were just grilling Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
How dare you not have a one-size-fits-all solution to mass shootings?
And the answer is nobody does.
Even Obama said that.
When he was in office and he was pushing particular gun control proposals, like banning AR-15s, for example, he would say in his speeches, this may not stop all mass shootings.
This may not stop any mass shootings.
He would say that sort of stuff.
And the media would just ignore that, which leads a lot of gun owners to believe, hey, well, if that's not what you're doing, then what exactly are you doing here?
Now, look, the media obviously have an agenda here.
They have it in how they cover these stories.
They have it in the people they choose to interview.
There is a Katie Turrer over at MSNBC interviewed a guy who said that he was going to become a school shooter, but he didn't become a school shooter because he didn't have access to guns.
Here's what that interview looked like.
Some people blame this violence on the media or video games or music.
We call those people morons.
But there is one thing that would have made it all different.
I didn't have access to an assault rifle.
I was almost a school shooter.
I am not a school shooter because I didn't have access to guns.
Guns don't kill people.
People kill people.
But people with guns kill lots of people.
And there's the guy who says that he was a would-be mass shooter.
Well, how do we know what would have stopped him or what would not have stopped him?
Is it legal in the state of Colorado, at least in Colorado, for him to walk into a gun store at the age of 15 and buy a rifle?
I don't know the gun laws in the state of Colorado.
I somehow doubt it.
But it doesn't matter.
This is the agenda, and the agenda must be pushed at all costs, regardless of the underlying facts.
It's just...
This is not how the media should be doing their jobs.
And they're not doing their jobs.
What they're doing is the job of the left.
And then they wonder, it's so funny, they sit around going, Trump.
Trump attacks us.
And that's why our credibility is shot with the American people.
Their credibility was shot long before Trump.
In 2012, Newt Gingrich made a lot of hay.
He won a couple of primaries based on him, in the debates, criticizing the media.
I said at the time that if anyone wanted to win primaries, they should criticize the media.
I've been saying that for years.
Trump was the only one who did it on a regular basis, and he tapped into something.
That was a pre-existing wellspring of distrust of the media that exists specifically because it is obvious that they are pushing a political agenda.
CNN's been the worst of all the networks on this.
I mean, they've just been garbage on this.
CNN is now pushing an agenda saying that 16-year-olds should vote.
Here's what they tweeted out.
Really?
Is that what it shows?
that it says, should 16 year olds be able to vote?
The response at Stoneman Douglas High is showing that youth in this country can and should have a significant role in political debate, writes law professor Joshua Douglas via CNN opinion.
Really, is that what it shows?
Because what it seems to me is what it shows is that you are willing to use as the media the most sympathetic person that you can find in order to promulgate your agenda.
That's what it is saying to me.
Because here's what the data say to me.
The data say to me that 18 to 29-year-olds are more pro-gun than people who are older.
So it's funny.
The media will never report these polls.
2015 Pew survey, that's put out by Lachlan Markey over at Daily Beast, found 18 to 29-year-olds are less likely than older Americans to support a ban on assault weapons.
Just 49% of millennials were for the assault weapons ban compared to 55% of 30 to 49-year-olds, 61% of 50 to 64-year-olds, and 63% of those 65 and older.
Meanwhile, 18 to 29-year-olds leave the country in support for concealed carry, according to a 2015 Gallup poll.
They're more likely to support the practice of carrying a hidden firearm in public by a full 10 points at 66%.
So the idea that all these kids are sitting around looking to seize the guns?
No, it's just that you want to feature certain children.
It's not that you care that 16-year-olds vote.
You don't want 16-year-olds to vote.
You want 16-year-olds to be treated as children when they commit crimes, but adults when it comes to voting.
It doesn't work that way.
Either kids are kids or kids are adults.
You can't have it both ways.
But obviously the media's agenda here, Uber Alice, that's all that matters in the end, is how the media decides to cover all of this stuff.
And that's just, it's just gross.
It's just gross.
Because it's not about providing the American public with information, it's about providing them with a fully created narrative that is going to be used to club all rivals into submission.
Okay.
Meanwhile, Trump is actually doing stuff.
So Trump yesterday said that he was going to move to ban bump stocks.
That doesn't make a lot of sense in response to the Parkland shooting, but it does make some sense in response to the Las Vegas shooting.
I suggested it at the time.
Bump stocks are an addendum that you can put on the back, on the butt of a rifle, that essentially allows the rifle to move back and forth against your shoulder very quickly.
And if you hold your finger steady, then the trigger hits your finger.
So the trigger goes like that over and over and over very, very quickly using the momentum from the kickback of the gun to power that sort of bouncing action.
So the shooter in Las Vegas used a bump stock.
There was no bump stock ban on the books.
Trump says yesterday that he's going to move to drop regulations to ban bump stocks.
In addition, after the deadly shooting in Las Vegas, I directed Attorney General to clarify whether certain bump stock devices like the one used in Las Vegas are illegal under current law.
That process began in December and just a few moments ago I signed a memorandum directing the Attorney General Okay, so it is not clear, by the way, that it is actually legal for the DOJ to use existing law in order to ban bomb stocks.
You might need a separate piece of legislation because the gun itself is not a machine gun.
This is an addendum to a semi-automatic weapon.
It's a piece that you add to a semi-automatic weapon.
For those in the media who don't understand the difference between a semi-auto and an auto, a semi-auto means that every trigger pull is one round that is chambered and fired.
And an automatic weapon means that as long as you're holding down the trigger, Multiple bullets are being fired.
So that's the difference between the two.
The White House also said that they would look into the possibility of raising the age limit for purchase of AR-15 type rifles.
Again, there's a certain inconsistency here.
If you're going to raise the age limit for buying a rifle, then you should also raise the age limit for presumably joining the military, maybe, or voting.
The bottom line is, are 18-year-olds adults or are they not adults?
Right now we have a very inconsistent view of when people become adults.
You're 18 for purposes of voting, but you're 21 for purposes of drinking.
I'm not sure how that works exactly.
So you can be in the military at 18 years old, but you can't actually have a beer until you're 21.
That's a sort of weird thing.
Or you can be in the military at 18, but you can't leave the military and then go purchase a rifle even though you were just in the military.
There's a little bit of incoherence there.
I'm not completely opposed to the idea of raising the age limit on this stuff, but I'm not sure that it's going to have a tremendous effect, given the laws around the nation already with regard to buying AR-15s.
There was a lot of hubbub yesterday after Florida voted down An assault weapons ban as well.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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Okay, so other things that are on the table.
Florida just voted down a full-on, quote-unquote, assault weapons ban.
It wasn't an assault weapons ban.
That's bad media coverage.
Again, instead, it was actually a ban on AR-15s.
AR-15s are not assault weapons.
Assault weapons are a legally dubious definition.
There's no clear definition of what constitutes an assault weapon.
An AR-15 is just a high-grade rifle.
That's all it is.
But if you add a few gadgets to it, it becomes an assault weapon.
If you add like a pistol grip to a rifle, then in some cases that becomes an assault weapon.
If you add a sight to it, sometimes it becomes an assault weapon.
If it's painted black as opposed to being brown, Sometimes that's an assault weapon.
In any case, this made a lot of media, a lot of, garnered a lot of media attention because a bunch of the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School went to Florida lawmakers in Tallahassee and asked for a full ban on the R-15.
The final motion vote was 36 to 71, so it was overwhelmingly voted down.
The Democratic representative, Keon McGee, asked for a procedural move that would have allowed it to consider the ban.
The bill to ban, quote, assault rifles in large capacity The bill had been assigned to three committees but was not scheduled for a hearing.
So the House will determine whether they choose to do that or not.
Obviously, the media ran with the photos of the weeping students because they want to generate sympathy for the anti-gun agenda.
This doesn't mean the students should be mocked, as Dinesh did yesterday, obviously.
I understand that kids have really strong feelings about, everyone has very strong feelings about these issues, and these kids just went through a trauma.
That's why I'm not in favor of what I think is media exploitation of people who just went through a tragedy in order to gin up sympathy for a particular agenda.
I think that the media only does this, again, with particular circumstances.
They didn't do it after the Boston bombing.
They didn't have big town halls with victims of the Boston bombing talking about immigration policy, for example.
But they do do this every time there is a gun An issue of gun violence that crops up.
By the way, worthwhile noting here that some of the statistics that have been going around with regard to mass shootings in the United States are just as wrong as I've explained before.
It is just not true.
It is a falsity that there were 18 mass shootings in the United States in January.
It's not true.
It was more like two.
That's horrible, but it's not 18.
Also, It's been promoted by the media that the United States is the only advanced country in which mass violence occurs and mass shootings occur.
That is not true.
If you actually look per capita, if you look per capita mass shootings, the United States actually comes in 11th.
So the way that you calculate that, this is the Crime Prevention Research Center headed by economist John Lott, who's famously the author of More Guns, Less Crime.
Which has been true in the United States for a while.
The gun murder rate has been declining rapidly in the United States for the last 20 years, even though the number of guns in circulation in the United States has been rising rapidly for the last 20 years.
John Lott says that the U.S.
does not lead the world in mass shootings.
In fact, it doesn't even make the top 10 when you measure death rate per million population from mass public shootings.
Now, to be fair, there's a fair margin of error here because mass shootings everywhere are pretty rare.
When you have a country of 330 million people, and let's say 100 people a year are killed in mass shootings, which is very high.
That's not high.
That number is a lot higher than it actually is in the United States.
That recedes into margin of error territory.
But if you look at 2009 through 2015, if you look at the top death rate per million people from mass public shootings, it goes Norway, Serbia, France, Macedonia, Albania, Slovakia, Switzerland, Finland, Belgium, Czech Republic, and then the United States.
Also, as far as frequency, that is also not true.
The U.S.
ranks 12th compared to European countries in terms of frequency per capita.
Now, per capita matters because the United States is a very large country with a lot of people.
And so you're going to have to measure the rate of violence in the United States as opposed to rates of violence per capita in other European countries.
So, don't buy into the notion that the United States is replete with mass shootings that are happening every day on every corner.
Does that mean that there's nothing we can do to stop it?
No, of course it doesn't mean that.
I've suggested on this program multiple things we can do, ranging from better security in school situations to the gun violence restraining orders promoted by David French over at National Review, in which family members can apply to the court to have your capacity to buy a gun or own a gun temporarily removed from you if you're a danger to yourself or others.
But that's not enough.
The left just wants to shout about how everybody who doesn't agree with them is a bad person, and they're not going to stop until that happens.
This is a fool's errand for the White House.
So the White House...
is going to hold a listening session with students, according to Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
This is because the media have been putting a lot of pressure on the White House, saying, you're not listening to the victims, you're not listening to the victims again.
I don't remember anybody doing this with Barack Obama and, for example, the victims in Benghazi.
I don't remember them doing this with the victims of the Boston bombing.
I don't remember the family of the beheaded by ISIS doing this with Barack Obama.
But I guess we have to do this with President Trump.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders says Trump is actually going to get in a room with a lot of these students and presumably take it from them.
Trump is actually good at this.
It'll be good for Trump politically.
The aftermath probably won't be heavy gun legislation, but it's smart of him politically to get in a room with these kids because Trump, contrary to popular opinion, does have a capacity for sympathy when he is listening to people one-on-one, as virtually everyone who's dealt with him one-on-one will tell you.
Here's Sarah Huckabee Sanders announcing this.
Tomorrow, we will be hosting parents, teachers, and students here at the White House to discuss efforts to ensure safety at our schools.
Members of the Parkland community will be attending this listening session, as will individuals who were impacted by past school shootings, including the Columbine and Sandy Hook tragedies.
On Thursday, we will be hosting local officials, including members of the law enforcement community, to continue that conversation.
As the president has said many times, it is the right of every American child to grow up in a safe community.
That begins in America's neighborhoods.
Okay, so this is, I think, a smart move by the Trump administration to demonstrate that there's no lack of sympathy, even if there is a lack of agreement on public policy.
Some of the agreement on public policy, the lack of agreement, is coming from the fact that folks on the left refuse to even consider possibilities that they haven't thought about, right?
So Doug Jones, the senator from Alabama.
He was asked about the possibility of arming teachers, and I've said that I think the teachers who are trained and qualified should be able to carry firearms.
Doug Jones says, oh, that's idiotic.
We shouldn't arm teachers.
I'm not even going to consider it.
Arming teachers in schools, and that's an idea that Representative Bradley Byrne and Senator Doug Jones have different opinions about.
There are some teachers that I think could be appropriately armed if they have the training and they feel comfortable doing it.
I certainly wouldn't want to require them to do it if they don't feel comfortable with it.
I think that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard.
Why?
I think it's crazy.
You don't need to arm America in order to stop this.
Well, actually, you do need to arm Americans in order to stop mass shooters because it's always the police who stop the mass shooters.
But again, this debate is so dishonest and it's so yucky and really it churns your guts because there are so many people who are not willing to lend the other side the credibility of hearing out their proposals.
Okay, so, speaking of media bias, let's talk a little bit about a new poll that's out with regard to the GOP tax cut.
So there's a brand new poll that's out, and it shows that the GOP tax cut is up to 51% support overall from 37% in December, 89% among Republicans, and 19% among Democrats.
Okay, that is a massive growth in the level of support for the tax cuts.
And one of the reasons is because people are finally starting to see the tax cuts at their paycheck.
They got their February paycheck and the tax cuts were present in the paycheck.
And so suddenly it's more popular.
It also goes to show you the level of media lies and malfeasance on the tax cut.
And you can see that at the time.
I talked about this while they were passing the tax cut.
You could actually see in the polls, the vast majority of the American public thought they would not receive a tax cut still.
Only 35% of the American public believes that they're going to receive a tax cut It's closer to 80-90% of the American public.
And then the media wonder why we don't trust them?
Why we think that they're biased on these issues?
They are biased on these issues.
And I'll show you how biased they are also on the Trump-Russia stuff in just a second.
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Speaking of Trump-Russia collusion, there's another Robert Mueller investigation indictment.
Somebody has pled guilty.
Again, it has nothing to do with actual collusion between the Trump administration and Russia.
And the last few weeks have not been good for people who have been pushing the lie that the Trump administration was clearly colluding with Russia.
Now, maybe there will be new evidence that emerges.
Maybe we will find out later that the Trump administration was working hand-in-glove with Vladimir Putin to swivel the election in Wisconsin.
Maybe that's what we'll find out.
But I haven't seen the evidence of that.
You haven't seen the evidence of that.
Because nobody's seen the evidence of that.
But that is not actually stopping members of the Democratic Party and the media from pushing that lie anyway.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic representative, he came out yesterday and said that Trump did collude to steal the election.
But we also have to stay focused here on what the problem is.
It seems that the Trump campaign conspired with Russian spies to sell out our democracy and now you have members closely affiliated with the Trump administration and possibly the president who are engaged in a cover-up.
That's a problem and we should just allow the Mueller investigation to run its course.
Okay, I'm in favor of allowing the Mueller investigation to run its course, but it seems like you're jumping to conclusions there, Hakeem.
I mean, you're suggesting something that is just not in evidence.
You're assuming facts not in evidence.
So yesterday, President Trump tweeted out that he had been much tougher on Russia than President Obama had been.
Fact check true.
The media ran with the most bizarre headlines.
So look at this from CNN.
This is clip 17.
Look at this from CNN.
You'll see a headline that they put up.
Okay.
The one on the left says, Trump has been tougher on Russia than Obama was in eight.
He's been tougher on Russia in one year than Obama was in eight.
And then it says in parentheses, right, they're fact-checking in the chyron, in the parentheses it says, no, he hasn't.
And Natasha Bertrand, who covers the media, says, CNN not pulling any punches tonight.
That's not only them not pulling punches, that's them lying.
Trump has been tougher on Russia in one year than the Obama administration was in eight.
I love this idea that suddenly the Obama administration was tough on Russia.
In 2012, President Obama, running for re-election, said directly to Dmitry Medvedev that he should tell Vladimir Putin that there would be more flexibility after the election if the Russians backed off.
He said that on an open mic.
He said that Mitt Romney, who was calling Russia the number one geopolitical threat, in the 1980s called and wanted their foreign policy back.
Then he handed over leadership of the Syrian situation to the Russians, and the Russians have continued to prop up a regime that is engaging in massive human rights violations.
Human rights violations so massive that the UN literally put out a resolution, I think two days ago, saying that we have no more words to condemn what's happening in Syria.
That's what the resolution actually said.
And yet we're now being told that Obama was tougher on Russia than Trump was?
Obama wasn't even tough on Russia interfering in the election.
Obama, Trump has a point here.
He does have a point when he says that if Russia was interfering in the election so much, where was Obama?
Well, they were interfering in the election, and where was Obama?
And the answer is that Obama didn't want to piss off the Russians because he thinks that the Russians were a valuable strategic ally on the Iran deal.
That's the reality of why he didn't want to tick off the Russians.
He thinks that the Russians should have a leadership role in the Middle East.
So CNN is lying about that, too, when they say that Obama was tougher on Russia than Trump is.
It's just a joke.
It's not true.
Jonah Goldberg, another person who is not pro-Trump, I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, if you've ever listened to the show, a President Trump lackey.
Neither is Jonah Goldberg at National Review.
I don't think either one of us voted for President Trump.
In fact, I know neither one of us did.
Here is what he writes.
He says, there's one unfortunate thing with the Trump tweet.
Trump has a point.
Barack Obama sold out our Eastern European allies on missile defense.
He slow-walked aid to Ukraine, as opposed to Trump, who's actually provided material aid to Ukraine.
He did little more than shrug when Crimea was annexed.
He said never mind on his own red line in Syria, and turned a blind eye to Putin's intervention there, in large part because of his obsessions with getting the Iran deal.
The Russian meddling in our elections started on Obama's watch, and not just our elections, but those of many of our allies.
When Romney famously said Russia was our number one geopolitical foe, Obama mocked him for it, as did countless liberal journalists who are now converts to anti-Russia hawkery.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made life harder for Russia, diplomatically and economically, thanks to revving up our oil and gas production.
It hasn't been as tough as some, including me, would like, but it's been tougher than the Obama administration, or at least it's not unreasonable.
So the reason that the media are mocking Trump on this stuff is because Trump has said so many nice things about Putin and because he seems to lend a lot of credibility to Putin.
This is another case.
There's so many cases in the Trump administration where good policy is at odds with bad rhetoric, where Trump's policy is actually pretty good, decent, in some cases great, and then he goes down and he says something dumb and he undermines the policy.
But the media are lying when they say to you that Obama was tough on Russia and Trump is not tough on Russia.
It's just not true.
It is not factually accurate.
Doesn't matter.
The media will lie about it anyway.
Jim Sciutto over at CNN says it's delusional to say that Trump has been facing down Russia.
Listen, you know, you can argue, and it's a fair criticism to say, did the Obama administration act quickly or strongly enough with Russia?
And that's a criticism you've heard from both Democrats and Republicans.
But when you compare the Trump administration response, particularly this president's response and the Obama administration's response, Ms.
Sarah Sanders is entering really delusional territory there.
No.
It's not.
Okay, so if you want to say that the Trump administration response to Russian election meddling has been lackluster at best, I agree.
If you want to say the Trump administration response to Russia generally has been weaker than the Obama administration, that is just not true and it's foolish.
And again, you wonder why people don't trust the media?
Because you keep lying.
Because people in the media keep lying.
I think the truth on all sides would be a good thing.
I have criticized President Trump when I think that he is not telling the truth.
And I have criticized the media when I think they are not telling the truth.
Right now the media are doing themselves no favors, especially because they shouldn't be in the business of pushing an agenda.
Trump's agenda isn't to tell truth.
Trump's agenda is to push Trump's agenda.
And Trump's agenda very often is to push Trump.
Well, that means sometimes it's going to be dishonest, just like other politicians are dishonest, in some cases more so.
But CNN's agenda was supposed to be objective truth, which they are not providing on any level at this point.
Their coverage in the last couple of weeks has been really disheartening.
These are the people who say, an apple is an apple, not a banana.
Well, then stop creating apple banana smoothies and calling them apples because it's just ridiculous.
It's just ridiculous.
Now, I'd be remiss if I didn't take a minute to note the death of the world's best known evangelist, Reverend Billy Graham.
He died on Wednesday.
He was 99 years old, and he was responsible for an enormous amount.
He was responsible for an enormous number of conversions, an enormous number of celebrities came to Christianity through Billy Graham, and Billy Graham was not, The media tried to portray him in many cases as this sort of odd, Elmer Gantry character.
That's not who Billy Graham was.
If you ever listen to any of Billy Graham's lectures, it was deeply Not only religious stuff, but stuff about self-sacrifice and stuff about responsibility.
Billy Graham had a great impact on the world.
And this is why when people talk about how religion has had a nasty impact on the world, look at the followers of Billy Graham and ask how many followers of Billy Graham have made their lives better because they followed Billy Graham.
In the aftermath of tragedy, there's an Easy swing toward atheism, agnosticism, the idea that you'd be better off if you didn't believe in God, better people don't believe in God, that somehow the world would be better if atheism were to rule the roost.
We've heard this from thinkers I respect, including Sam Harris and Steven Pinker in the last couple of days.
This is not true for the vast majority of individuals around planet Earth.
People who become atheistic are less likely to engage in communal activities.
People who become atheistic are less likely to give to charity.
People who become atheistic are less likely to engage in the sort of social fabric building that's necessary in order for a thriving society to survive.
And that's not even a case for the veracity of Christianity or Judaism that I'm making.
This is a case for the social utility of Christianity or Judaism.
All the folks who are living in a free and open and good country can thank people like Billy Graham for turning the lives around of people, many people, who would otherwise have led terrible lives.
I mean, there are a lot of people who are hell-bent on leading bad lives, and Billy Graham was instrumental in preventing that from happening, as are so many other religious leaders.
Now, that doesn't mean that religion is always a force for good.
Of course not.
It doesn't mean that religion always makes people better.
That would be silly.
It does mean that religion, when used properly, can be a solution to a lot of people's life problems and it can be an encouragement to do better because there is someone who expects something more of you and it's not just your friends or family and it's not even just you.
It's a higher power that expects you to make something of your life.
And discover a purpose.
I think the death of God in American society has been a contributing factor to the sort of political fractiousness that we've seen here.
We used to at least hold it in common, not only that we were all made in God's image, but that if we all held common values in common, we knew our neighbors cared about the dead kids in Sandy Hook, or cared about the murdered children in Parkland.
We took that for granted because these were the same people that we saw at church every week.
These are the same people who are giving to the same charities that we were.
But because we've lost that communal space, it's a lot easier to sit in your house and go on Twitter or Facebook and malign people who you've never met.
Because you've never met your neighbors.
How many of us have actually met our neighbors?
Now, in California, it's become really uncommon.
I know that there are still places in the country where you know your neighbors, particularly in small-town America.
I grew up in Los Angeles.
Knowing your neighbors was not a prereq.
One of the things that you see when you drive through different areas of the country, it's really fascinating, is which areas have fences between yards and which don't.
So if you go over to Dallas, for example, big city, but if you drive around suburban Dallas, there are no fences between the actual yards.
All the yards are basically connected.
There may be some driveways, but they're not big fences.
If you drive through the valley, which is where I've lived most of my life, you drive through the San Fernando Valley, what you'll see is that most of the yards are not connected.
Most of the yards are separated by walls.
Most of the yards are separated by fences.
They're fenced off.
There's nothing wrong with a wall, there's nothing wrong with a fence, but it is indicative of the fact that community is less common in big cities than it is in small towns, and it's less common in urban areas than it is in rural areas, and it's less common in non-religious areas than it is in religious areas.
This is why you've seen in the last few years the rise in atheist get-togethers.
They've been trying to create almost an atheistic religious get-together, where you have community events and all the rest of this, and it hasn't been working, because why should atheists get together?
To talk about why God doesn't exist?
That seems like a rather uninspiring vision of the world.
Why would you get together with people who also don't believe God exists?
That frees you to find any purpose in life, supposedly, but you're gonna end up with a lot of different purposes, and a lot of those purposes are going to be working at cross-purposes with one another.
So Billy Graham's death is a reminder That building the social fabric is one of the chief roles of religion, particularly American religion.
Billy Graham's life is pretty amazing.
Every year since 1955, Graham was on Gallup's list of most admired men and women, according to Hank Berry and Over the Daily Wire.
His fierce hatred of segregation meant churches had to integrate for his revivals as far back as 1953, when at a revival in Jackson, Mississippi, ushers set up ropes to segregate the races.
Graham asked for the ropes to be removed.
When the usher refused, Graham took them down himself and told all the people to sit where they wanted.
At a Madison Square revival in 1957, he invited Martin Luther King to preach together.
As King said, quote, Had it not been for the ministry of my good friend, Dr. Billy Graham, my work in the civil rights movement would not have been successful as it has been.
Graham often paid the bail and fines that King received when he was in jail.
This is, again, one of the lies about the civil rights movement.
It was pushed by a bunch of atheists.
It was pushed by a bunch of religious leaders.
Dr. Martin Luther King was a reverend.
Reverend Billy Graham was a reverend.
He was born November 7th, 1918, the oldest of four children born to Morrow Coffey and William Franklin Graham Sr.
He grew up on a dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina.
As a child, he loved to read books.
And in 1933, his father forced him and his sister to drink beer until they got sick, which prompted both children to swallow alcohol and drugs for the rest of their lives.
Children were raised differently back in 1933.
The next year, having seen the evangelist Mordecai Ham, He was converted by him.
He went to Bob Jones College in Tennessee, where he was almost expelled, but Jones told him, quote, And so Graham transferred to Florida Bible Institute.
Baptist preacher somewhere out in the sticks.
You have a voice that pulls.
God can use that voice of yours.
He can use it mightily.
And so Graham transferred to Florida Bible Institute.
He preached his first sermon at Boswick Baptist Church in 1937.
He became a national figure in 1949 when he held a series of revivals in L.A. and had circus tents erected in the parking lot, which led to national media coverage And he hosted TV, of course, from 1947 until 2005.
It's worthwhile paying honor to a man who did a lot more good than he did bad in this world, Reverend Billy Graham.
Okay.
Time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
I've started the show Long My Hero, which has been recommended to me on Netflix.
Is it the best show I've ever seen?
No, I mean I've only seen the pilot episode.
I tend to like less episodic shows where you don't wrap up a plot in one episode, but it is well written.
And it is kind of taciturn Western.
So I love Westerns.
You put on a cowboy hat and you have a guy speaking in short phrases with faux profundity, and I'm into it.
So that's what Longmire is.
So check out Longmire.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
Don't matter if you're in the city or the country, crime don't change.
There are always suspects.
What about your girl?
They move around so folks like you can't find them.
I asked you a very simple question.
And there are two types of people that like to kill from a distance.
Cowards and pros.
They're always victims.
Afraid I have some very bad news.
Okay, so it's that kind of show, right?
I mean, if you like that kind of voice, you like that kind of show.
It's pretty simple.
So you can check out Longmire over at Netflix, where it is now available.
Okay, other things that I like.
So Nikki Haley gave a speech yesterday at the UN, the Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian dictator, because he is now in the, what, 17th, let's see, I think he was elected 2005.
So he is now in the 13th year of a four-year tenure.
So that's exciting.
He had told Nikki Haley, our UN ambassador, to shut up.
She came out yesterday firing.
Again, Nikki Haley at the UN is my spirit animal, so here she is.
I sit here today offering the outstretched hand of the United States to the Palestinian people in the cause of peace.
We are fully prepared to look to a future of prosperity and coexistence.
We welcome you as the leader of the Palestinian people here today.
But I will decline the advice I was recently given by your top negotiator, Saeb Erekat.
I will not shut up.
Rather, I will respectfully speak some hard truths.
Okay, love it.
Nikki Haley doing yeoman's work over at the UN, so that is fantastic stuff.
Nikki Haley is the best.
Okay, a quick thing that I hate.
So Alyssa Milano came out and tweeted about the Second Amendment.
And what she tweeted about the Second Amendment was a particularly stupid thing.
So what she tweeted out was, it said, also popular in 1791, the year the Second Amendment was adopted.
And then it's a list of things.
Slavery, the three-fifths compromise, bloodletting, lead paint, being literally owned by your husband, cholera, smallpox, typhus, dying in childbirth, a lot, using chamber pots, unsanitary surgical procedures, traveling by horse or foot, dying at the age of 40.
Things change, y'all.
We can do better.
Hey, I wasn't aware that smallpox was actually popular in 1791.
People had smallpox parties.
They got together and they said, oh, you got that hot smallpox?
Pass it on, man.
Just hand me the smallpox.
Dying in childbirth.
Also not aware that that was supremely popular in 1791.
I think people saw that as bad in 1791.
Even slavery, which was popular in certain parts of the United States in 1791, was certainly not popular in certain other parts of the United States in 1791.
If you're going to talk about things that are in the Constitution of the United States, which seems to me closer than smallpox to resemblance to the Second Amendment, you might try the First Amendment.
You know some other things that were popular in 1791?
Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, no quartering of troops, no illegal search and seizures, a right to a jury trial, a right against torture.
These were things that were pretty popular in 1791, it turns out, because they're in that same document, you stupid idiot.
So again, there's a notion on the left that all of time began with their birth.
I remember that Barack Obama said something about how Bill Ayers, what Bill Ayers did before he met Bill Ayers was irrelevant because Bill Ayers basically didn't exist as a human.
Bill Ayers did all this stuff when I was a kid.
Okay, so what?
So what?
The world didn't start turning when you were born.
But folks on the left seem to think that all of the good things in life began just spontaneously when they were born or discovered them and that they never pre-existed that.
The same ideology, the same philosophy that brought you freedom of speech and freedom of religion brought you the right to keep and bear arms.
They were part and parcel of the same philosophy.
As far as the notion that the Three-Fifths Compromise was some sort of ideological commitment to the non-peoplehood of black people, that's idiocy.
If you look at the actual negotiations under the Three-Fifths Compromise, which is a bad provision of the Constitution, the reason that it is in the Constitution is because it was there to prevent a worse provision of the Constitution, which would have been counting black people as full people for purposes of voting, but counting them as property for purposes of not being able to actually vote or do anything.
That's what the South wanted.
The South wanted, slave owners wanted, that if there were a bunch of black folks who were living in slavery in South Carolina, for purposes of representation in the Congress, for South Carolina, black folks would be counted as people, but they would not be able to vote and they would still be considered property.
And the North said, no, we're not going to do that.
You don't get to count black people as full people.
Excuse me, because it skews the representative sample.
If the North had caved to that and said, sure, black people are full people for purposes of representation, but not people for purposes of property, guess what?
Slavery would have lasted longer because the South would have had more votes in the Congress.
But again, knowledge and historical learning are apparently somehow—there are a lot of folks on the left who are allergic to them.
They kill a lot of the narratives they love so much.
Alrighty, so we'll be back here tomorrow from CPAC.
I'm speaking at CPAC, and I will have—I promised some notes on CPAC, but I ran out of time again today.
I'll have some notes on CPAC.
CPAC apparently—quick note—just banned.
They just got rid of Jim Hoft as one of the speakers over at Gateway Pundit because Jim Hoft had been tweeting out stupidities about the school shooting victims in Parkland.
I think that is perfectly appropriate.
As far as Marion LePen who's been invited, I'm not sure why Marion LePen is representative of conservatism.
I didn't book her.
I wouldn't have booked her.
That said, I'm more than happy to speak to the thousands of students who are going to hear about some real conservatism, and that's an opportunity I look forward to having tomorrow at CPAC.
So if you're at CPAC in the Washington, D.C.
area, show up, and I'll see you there.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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