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Feb. 28, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:52
How Late Night Went Left | Ep. 485
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Kimmel, Fallon, Colbert, all of them go after the NRA.
Americans are not buying what the media is selling.
And we're about to hit the DACA deadline.
So what does that mean for all the illegal immigrant dreamers?
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, we have so many things to get to today.
I'm speaking tonight in Omaha.
We are sold out.
1,500-seat theater.
I'm doing a full-on exposition on the Second Amendment, what its meaning is, where it comes from, and what it protects tonight.
So look for that online or if you're there in person.
I look forward to seeing you there.
We have a lot to get to on the show as well.
We're going to talk about the Security clearance status for Jared Kushner.
We're going to talk about the confirmation bias that has now overrun the media.
We're going to talk about Dick's Sporting Goods supposedly banning their sale of quote-unquote assault weapons, which they actually did five years ago and now they're just re-upping.
But before we get to any of that, I first want to talk a little bit about more facts that are now coming out about the shooting.
So every day there are more facts that are coming out about the shooting.
Now, we sort of know what we know at this point until a full investigation is undergone.
But here is a fact that should matter to you.
When it comes to how Americans feel about what happened in Parkland and who they blame about what happened in Parkland.
It is not the NRA.
It is not law-abiding gun owners.
So Rasmussen had a poll yesterday, a new survey, and it suggests, and this is after the CNN propaganda town hall, the two minutes hate on CNN.
Here's what Rasmussen reports, quote, 54% of American adults believe the failure of government agencies to respond to numerous warning signs from the prospective killer is more to blame for the mass shooting.
Only 33% attribute the deaths more to a lack of adequate gun control.
11% opt for something else.
Among Americans who have elementary children, elementary school children, or secondary school aged children, 61% think the government is more to blame.
Just 23% of those adults felt a lack of adequate gun control.
41% of respondents, by the way, say that they opt for stricter gun control.
40% say more action is needed to treat mental health issues.
Only 50% of Democrats, actually, said that a lack of gun control was the real problem here.
All of which is to say, whenever you see polls, there's some polls out today suggesting that even among Republicans, support for gun control is rising.
You need to take all of that with a grain of salt.
Because that's like asking Americans, as I've said in the past, it's like asking Americans, are you for less government spending?
The answer is always yes.
But then you say, OK, what do you want to see cut?
And suddenly Americans run for the hills.
Well, the same thing is true with regard to gun control.
People say, are you for more gun control?
Most people go, yeah, sounds good.
Why not?
Keeps guns out of the hands of bad people.
And then when you say, OK, well, that's going to mean we're going to have to ban all the rifles.
Then all the Americans say, well, no, we're not going to do that.
Then the polls suddenly shift.
So specifics are very different from general propositions that are put forward in these polling numbers.
All of which goes to show you that the media's attempt to paint this as the shifting point on gun control, it's just not true.
It's just not correct.
And the fact is that even Democrats are split on this.
They don't want to talk about it, but they are.
And that news is obvious since the Huffington Post reported yesterday morning That after the Las Vegas massacre, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's regional press secretary, Evan Lukasky, actually wrote to candidates in the Northeast not to politicize the shooting.
He wrote, quote, "Teams, last night's shooting will dominate the news today and will garner serious coverage the rest of the week.
You and your candidate will be understandably outraged and upset, as will your community.
However, do not politicize it today." Now, Lukaski was right.
Politicizing shootings in the aftermath of shootings is bad form, and it's gotten even worse over the past week and a half.
All the media reported this was just a grassroots movement that was happening on gun control, and now it turns out that the so-called March for Our Lives that's happening in Washington, D.C.
on March 24th, at which Some of the student witnesses and student survivors at Parkland are going to be the featured speakers that this is now being backed by Planned Parenthood.
It's being backed by Black Lives Matter.
It's being backed by MoveOn.org.
It's being backed by Everytown for gun safety.
So all of these organized leftist movements are now getting behind these kids and astroturfing what is going to be a very large march in Washington, D.C.
that results in virtually nothing.
And the reason it's going to result in virtually nothing is, again, because the American people do not support this.
The American people look at what happened in Parkland and what they see is a failure of law enforcement, which is why yesterday a North Texas sheriff put out a notice that got him wide acclaimed.
The Denton County Sheriff Tracy Murphy told his deputies, quote, with the recent tragedy in Florida, I wanted to make clear my policy on responding to an active shooter.
All commission deputies, if you respond to an active shooter, you are expected to take immediate action.
We do not stage and wait for SWAT.
We do not cover in a parking lot.
We do not wait for another agency.
We go in and do our duty.
We go in to engage and stop the shooter and save lives.
If for any reason you feel you cannot follow this directive, please inform your supervisor and we will work to get you Reassigned.
This is the way that most Americans feel about what the authorities ought to be doing, even though the left wants to suggest that this was not a failure of authority.
The left would prefer to jump into the debate on this moralistic level.
The left would prefer to suggest that there's a moral failure that's taking part on the place of those who do not support widespread gun control.
And that, of course, is not true.
Marco Rubio is one of the people who's been hit hardest from that.
Senator Rubio from Florida.
You remember he was at that town hall, two minutes hate on CNN, and he was shellacked by a bunch of the students.
One of the students even comparing him to the mass shooter himself.
Rubio put out a tweet today that I think sums up the state of our gun control debate.
He said, quote, "The debate after Parkland reminds us, we the people don't really like each other very much.
We smear those who refuse to agree with us.
We claim a Judeo-Christian heritage but celebrate arrogance and boasting.
And worst of all, we have infected the next generation with the same disease." Now, he's getting ratioed.
There are a bunch of people on the left who didn't like that he said this.
There are a bunch of people who thought, oh, it's just terrible that he would say something like this, but he is 100% correct.
The fact is that the left has turned this into a referendum on the moral character of people who disagree with them, and most Americans are not up for that.
Most Americans are not interested in castigating their fellow Americans as murderers and murderer supporters, which is why it's really fascinating.
There have been a bunch of corporations that have disassociated from the NRA over the last week.
There was a pullout today from Morning Consult that showed every single corporation, every single corporation that disassociated from the NRA in the aftermath of this gun control debate has been losing, losing public support because they'll gain four or five points in public support from Democrats, but lose 60% of public support from Republicans who feel like they're under attack.
And the reason Republicans feel like they're under attack is because they are under attack.
The left, they say they're not for removing Second Amendment rights, they only want rational, reasonable gun controls.
That's just not true.
They want to remove semi-automatic weapons from every person in the United States if they could have their way.
That is the end goal.
They won't be honest about it, many members of the left, but this is actually what they want.
And you can see it in the arguments that they're making.
So today, the New York Times has a full piece about how the AR-15 is essentially military technology in the hands of civilians.
Well, that's true of any semi-automatic rifle.
They say, well, look at the AR-15.
Look at its muzzle velocity.
It has 3,000 feet per second muzzle velocity.
This is true of any .223 or 5.56 millimeter ammo-firing rifle.
The muzzle velocity on those rifles is very high.
It always has been.
It will continue to be.
The notion that it's just military technology in the hands of civilians Again, every rifle then is military technology in the hands of civilians because every rifle was at some point military technology in the hands of civilians.
Even bolt action rifles were military technology in the hands of civilians.
This argument is akin to saying that the engine in your car is just like the engines in the cars of people in the military.
Okay, that's true, but it doesn't take you very far.
And when people on the left rip on the AR-15 and suggest the AR-15 is the root of all evil, this just demonstrates complete lack of gun knowledge.
There are a thousand types of the AR-15.
There are many, many different types of semi-automatic rifle that fire at similar velocity with similar caliber ammunition.
Banning the AR-15 or the branded AR-15 would do nothing to stop the spread of rifles and it would do nothing to stop the the actual problem of school shootings.
By the way, there's a study out today showing that school shootings have actually been declining in recent years.
Not increasing, declining.
We're not allowed to talk about these statistics, of course, because to do so is seen as somehow undermining the case in favor of pushing against school shootings.
But the reality is that just as gun violence in the United States has declined markedly from its highs in 1992-1993, school shootings have been declining in recent years pretty rapidly.
That doesn't mean that what happened in Parkland isn't tragic and horrible and an act of evil.
It does mean that we ought to take a look at the measures that we are purporting to push and compare those to the rights that we are attempting to infringe.
And what rights are we attempting to infringe?
Well, the answer is all semi-automatic rifles.
So Ari Melber made this case on MSNBC.
He's given a lot of credit for the left from this, because Ari Melber is a lawyer.
But he does really bad legal analysis here, and I will explain why.
He explains the Second Amendment, in his view, does not protect AR-15s.
His logic here makes no sense.
The Second Amendment does not apply to AR-15s.
It does not apply to assault-style weapons.
It never has.
Congress may legally ban those weapons without touching the Second Amendment.
That's a legal fact.
Okay, that is not a legal fact.
That is not a legal fact.
Okay, what he says there, if you go back to the screen where he puts up some text on the screen, the screen that he says there, what he says is that the Supreme Court has never ruled that AR-15s are protected by the Second Amendment.
Well, that does not mean that there is no right to an AR-15.
The Supreme Court has never actually ruled on whether Twitter is protected by the First Amendment.
Because that's never come up before the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court rejects certiorari on cases all the time.
Doesn't mean that the right doesn't exist.
The case is legally illiterate.
I'll explain why it's even more legally illiterate in just a second.
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Okay, so, Melbourne makes the case, makes this argument, that because the Supreme Court has rejected certiorari, certiorari is an appeal, so the way it works is that You have a case, it goes to a district court judge, that is then appealed up to a circuit court judge, it goes to the circuit court of appeals, and then finally it's appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court.
What is sent to the Supreme Court is something called a writ of certiorari, which is essentially a petition asking that the Supreme Court take up the case.
Now the Supreme Court will reject writs of certiorari for a variety of reasons.
Some of those reasons include the fact they agree with the court of appeals.
Sometimes they say the case isn't ripe.
It's a very common claim that a case has not actually reached ripeness because there are a bunch of other circuit courts that have not ruled on the case.
There are cases where they say that it's not just an issue of law they want to take up.
There are a million reasons to reject writs of certiorari.
And it is also true that none of the cases that have been brought before the Supreme Court specifically deal with AR-15s because there's not a state in the country that has attempted to actually ban AR-15s.
Even in California, there was only recently an attempt to quasi-ban AR-15s, but even that ban is not supremely clear.
And certainly, confiscation of AR-15s has never been tried.
And if it were to go up to the Supreme Court, there's a very good shot that it would be shot down.
But Melber suggests, and this is actually a really dangerous constitutional point that Melber is making, because it essentially says that if the Supreme Court has not ruled on an issue, you don't have a right to it.
So if the Supreme Court hasn't ruled on whether Twitter is protected free speech, then that means that you don't have a right to it.
Now, you see, Melba would never agree to the same logic with regard to, say, same-sex marriage before Obergefell, right?
So before Obergefell, the Supreme Court rejected same-sex marriage cases over and over and over, rejected a bunch of writs of certiorari, and would Ari Melba have said, there is no right to same-sex marriage at that time?
No, of course he wouldn't have said that.
He would have said, in my view, there's a right to same-sex marriage, it's inherent in the text of the Constitution, and just because the Supreme Court has not accepted the case yet, doesn't mean the right doesn't exist.
The reality is that under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, the Constitution explicitly states that rights that are not overtly stated in the Constitution of the United States itself are still rights that are held by the people.
In other words, the Bill of Rights is not meant to be a comprehensive charter of rights.
It's meant to point out some of the most specific rights that it wants protected from the federal government, but that does not mean that there are other rights that don't exist.
All other rights don't exist.
Beyond which, the Second Amendment is pretty clear about what it means.
It says a well-regulated militia being necessary to the preservation of a free state.
The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
It's specifically talking about civilians having access to guns that they can then use when they go into the militia.
At the time, these were military light weapons, right?
I mean, these were rifles, these were muskets.
And that same principle carries forward.
So what Melber is saying here makes no sense on a legal level.
But here's the more important point.
When Ari Melber says he wants to ban an AR-15, when the New York Times points out the AR-15, that means they want to ban every semi-automatic rifle in the United States.
Because there is no serious distinction between a Bushmaster 223 and an AR-15.
There is no significant distinction between a Springfield rifle and an AR-15.
There are a thousand types of rifle.
All of which fire the same sort of caliber ammunition, and just because some look scarier than others doesn't mean that they are less scary than others, which is why when you take a course in guns the very first thing they say is that of course you don't fire it anywhere near a person.
Of course you don't fire it at something you're not willing to destroy.
Rifles are meant to do damage.
Rifles are meant to kill things.
Rifles are meant to destroy things.
They are meant to kill people, presumably people who are bad who come into your home.
But a rifle, as a tool of killing, that does not mean that a rifle itself is so inherently dangerous that we have to ban all of them.
This one-to-one correlation the left attempts to draw between the number of guns in a particular society and the level of murder in a particular society just does not hold.
And that's particularly true for rifles.
More people are killed by hands and fists every year in the United States than are killed by rifles in the United States.
And gun ownership, you know, owned by a civilian population generally, is not a good proxy for crime rate.
Gun ownership rates in places like Vermont are extraordinarily high.
Vermont has an extraordinarily low crime rate.
The same thing is true in New Hampshire.
And if you go to other states, some places, Louisiana, there's a very high gun ownership rate, there's a very high crime rate.
Now, important to note, most of that crime is not taking place in the boonies.
Most of that crime is taking place in the major cities, most of which have actual gun control regulations on the books, and most of which are governed by Democrats.
All of which is to say that the simplistic attempt to draw a point of concurrence between a cross-point of data, between gun ownership and murder, that doesn't really hold.
It doesn't even hold in Europe, by the way, where Norway has many more guns per civilian than Britain does, and Britain has twice as bad a murder rate.
So, the statistics just do not hold for any of this.
Now, in a second, I'm going to show you how it is that there are so many folks on the left who ignore all of this in favor of the virtue signaling.
And that begins, of course...
With our late-night hosts.
Now, one of the great irritants, I think, one of the things that's helping to destroy comedy in the country is the feeling that there are certain areas of American life that used to be off-limits for politics, where we didn't feel like we were going to be assaulted based on our politics when we turned on our TV and we watched Johnny Carson.
Johnny Carson was studiously anti-political, meaning that he was a Democrat, apparently.
He was not a Reagan fan, although he got to know Reagan and ended up liking him.
Johnny Carson was a Democrat.
But you wouldn't have known that from watching Johnny Carson.
Jay Leno was a sort of halfway Republican.
You wouldn't have known that from watching him because Jay Leno was studiously nonpolitical.
Now all of our late night hosts have basically become political hacks.
And you can see that at work.
So last night Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon, all of them are ardent leftists and all of them have decided With the Olympics, over 90 countries have departed South Korea.
for gun control.
So here's a mashup of Colbert and Kimmel and Fallon.
Here are them talking about Trump's gun proposals.
With the Olympics, over 90 countries have departed South Korea.
Yep, 90 groups waving goodbye, or as the NRA calls those, sponsors.
Although gun owners, if you go into almost any business and show them your gun, you get It's really... Here in reality, there was an armed sheriff's deputy on site and it made no difference.
But Trump even has an explanation for that.
The reason a teacher with a handgun would be able to neutralize a shooter with an automatic weapon is because teachers love the kids more.
See, this is what happens when we elect a president who thought Paul Blart Malkoff was a documentary.
It would be ridiculous coming from anyone, but especially from Trump.
He's gonna run in?
Yo, when Trump ran for president, that was the first time he ran in his entire life.
Come on, man.
And so all of the late night hosts universally talking about how stupid it is to talk about why good people with guns can stop bad people with guns.
Of course, this is idiocy.
Kimmel's point particularly is incredibly stupid.
First of all, he says that the shooter had an automatic weapon.
The shooter did not have an automatic weapon.
People on the left who are talking about this stuff should at least learn basic terminology so they don't sound like complete morons.
But they're not bothering to do that.
And it's evident.
And all of this is really quite terrible for the level of political discourse in the country, because when you have laughing audiences scoffing at the idea that an armed teacher can save anyone, and you suggest that maybe we ought to arm more security guards in schools, and Jimmy Kimmel just laughs that off by suggesting that an armed security guard did nothing at this school, even though there are many schools all over the country where armed security guards every day are stopping people with weapons.
Legitimately, there's armed security guards.
I think over 50% of schools have some form of armed security.
And those armed security guards, metal detectors, there are a lot of weapons that are stopped every year going through those metal detectors.
Apparently, Jimmy Kimmel opposes those as well, simply because he thinks that a generalized regime of gun control is better.
And then he and Colbert and Fallon, all of them suggest that if you oppose their agenda, which they've not made clear, they haven't exactly said what they want other than mass banning of guns, which is never going to happen.
There are 300 million weapons in the country and 100 million rifles.
But when you say it when they suggest that if you oppose them, this means that you are a bad person.
And what's amazing is that they felt no blowback in the ratings.
Now, part of this, I think, is the universality of leftist feeling and late night means that you have no alternative.
What are you going to switch from Kimmel to Fallon so you can hear the same gun control messaging?
But part of it is also that the ratings are so far down on all of these shows overall that the audience is fragmented.
OK, Jimmy Kimmel's ratings are not anything like what Johnny Carson's ratings used to be, because there are lots of networks.
Very few people are actually watching these late-night shows in comparison to the number of people who were watching late-night shows before.
So they're really not broadcast.
They're narrowcast, even though they are on the networks.
And so Jimmy Kimmel can say, in full honesty, that there's no way to go too far in bashing President Trump or the GOP.
Not at all.
I don't think he can go too far.
I think that, you know, I'm still doing a comedy show, and I need to be funny and entertain my audience, but I also think that we've matured enough to the point where we can accept late-night talk show hosts speaking about a serious subject, and I think that it's almost necessary now.
Okay, it's almost necessary now for late-night hosts to talk about political subjects?
Well, actually, what Jimmy Kimmel has shown is it's necessary for our late-night hosts to study the subjects before they talk about them, because literally every day he says something that's stupid about politics, including in that clip, a very short clip, him talking about automatic weapons being used in the shooting, which, of course, they were not.
And it's not just Jimmy Kimmel, unfortunately.
The entire media have shown themselves, virtually the entire media have shown themselves to be activists on gun control issues rather than objective journalists.
So today's examples come courtesy of CNN.
So CNN has been the worst on this.
It's so funny.
There are all these folks in the media who are constantly complaining that people like President Trump are ripping on the media, that people like me are ripping on the media.
How dare we rip on the media?
Or that Trump, more importantly, Trump rips on the media and therefore Americans don't like the media.
No, as I said in my speech at CPAC, we didn't like you before.
We had serious problems with the media before, because we feel like you're lying to us when you claim that you're objective, when you are clearly not objective.
When you are clearly not objective.
Okay, now, as an example of CNN not being objective, today, Dick's Sporting Goods announced that they were going to immediately halt sales of assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines at all of their stores, including their Field & Stream stores, I guess they have these things, and ban the sales of all guns to anyone under 21.
After Sandy Hook, they'd already stopped the sale of assault-style weapons, which is a meaningless term, meaning essentially rifles that look scary.
They'd done that after Sandy Hook.
They're reiterating that today and extending it to a few more of their stores.
The chairman and CEO said on Good Morning America, In other words, there was an emotional appeal.
through and the grief of the parents and the kids who were killed in Parkland, we felt we needed to do something.
In other words, there was an emotional appeal, they responded to the emotional appeal.
Now, who cares?
I mean, the reality is who cares, because most people who are buying from Dick's Sporting Goods were not actually buying assault-style rifles from Dick's Sporting Goods.
They haven't been able to for years.
If they want to raise their age of buying to 21, that's fine.
It just means the person who's 19 and wants to buy a handgun is simply going to walk across the street to the local gun store and buy a handgun in accordance with law.
But this is widely celebrated in the media.
Stack said, we support and respect the Second Amendment.
We recognize and appreciate the vast majority of gun owners in the country are responsible, law-abiding citizens.
But we have to help solve the problem that's in front of us.
Gun violence is an epidemic that's taking the lives of too many people, including the brightest hope for the future of America, our kids.
Well, if you believe that, if you believe that, then why not just stop selling all guns?
If you believe that the problem in front of us is that all guns are the threat and that the sale of legal weapons to law-abiding citizens is the real threat, then maybe you should stop selling all guns.
In fact, Stack revealed that the shooter in this case had purchased a shotgun at a store, at a Dick's store, within the past four months.
Okay, so is anything that they're doing?
Apparently, I guess, you know, their new rules that they won't sell to anybody under 21 would have stopped him from getting a gun at a Dick's store.
Okay, so he waits until he's 21 and he buys a gun at a Dick's store.
Like, if they actually think the shotgun is the threat, not the person, then they should be banning the sale of all guns.
They should just stop selling guns, Dick's sporting goods.
And I'm amazed, sort of, that the media have fallen for this PR trap from Dick's, but this is what they have fallen for.
The anchors over at CNN have made mockeries of themselves as, quote-unquote, objective journalists.
I mean, true mockeries of themselves.
So Erin Burnett, right, is now—she's supposed to be an objective journalist, right?
She's an anchor.
She's not an opinion host.
She tweeted this out, quote, Is that journalism or is that advocacy?
Obviously, that's advocacy.
Chris Cuomo had on the CEO, and the big headline in the back said, Dix takes a stand.
Wow.
That's not advocacy at all, that's journalism.
Dix takes a stand.
Now, the NRA is also taking a stand, it's just that Chris Cuomo doesn't like that stand.
So you'd never have Andean, Alash, and then the background say, NRA takes a stand.
Of course not.
Because there are only certain stands that CNN actually likes.
And CNN has been doing this for weeks now, from that awful town hall event to botching basic reporting about weapons.
There was a CNN host yesterday who talked about a full semi-automatic, which doesn't even make any sense.
What the hell is a full semi-automatic supposed to mean?
A semi-automatic just means you pull the trigger once and a bullet comes out.
But it's a full semi-automatic, and then there's a really funny video of him trying to fire a semi-automatic weapon, and the gun jumping in his hands because he doesn't know how to fire a weapon, doesn't know how to lock it into his shoulder.
And my wife fires an AR better than he fires an AR.
And then, you know, botching basic facts about the weapons, allowing these students to go on national television and make unquestioned assertions about the evils of the people with whom they are talking.
Make unquestioned assertions about Marco Rubio being an evil person.
And then we're supposed to take CNN seriously?
Here's a CNN expert yesterday saying that women can't carry guns because they wear dresses.
Like, this is a real thing that they said.
One of the things that people don't talk about a lot of these schools, Sandy Hook had an all-female faculty, from principal to teachers.
And for a woman, where are you going to hide that gun during the day?
You can't put it in your desk drawer.
Somebody might steal it and you can't get to it.
You're not going to have it in a safe in the principal's office.
You can't get to it.
On your person, if you wear a dress, if you wear a skirt, are you going to have to wear a jacket every day with a belt and a holster the way a detective, you know, on duty would do?
It's not a real practical solution, even for a variety of reasons.
OK, look how stupid this anchor is.
Or it's the anchor.
I don't even know who that anchor is.
She's sitting there nodding through this whole thing.
Women wear pants.
I mean, I hate to break it to CNN, but, you know, outside of hijab land, you know, outside of, like, places where women are forced to wear skirts, you know, and forced to wear dresses all over the world, I'm not talking all Muslim communities.
There are lots of Muslim women who wear pants.
Outside of places where women are forced to do that, in a free society like the United States, lots of women wear pants.
My wife wears pants.
My mom wears pants.
All my sisters wear pants, okay?
I understand that that may be mildly controversial in some Orthodox Jewish circles, but it is not rare in a free country.
Lots of women wear pants.
And if you're wearing a skirt, there are lots of women who wear skirts who know how to conceal carry.
Ooh, they might have to wear a jacket.
Ooh, jackets, because women never wear jackets.
What in the world?
This is being trotted out as a normal talking point.
By the way, women also have purses.
Many women carry their guns in their purses.
Unlike men, who actually have to conceal and carry on their person, women carrying around their purses is a thing.
Women carry guns in their purses.
This is how they defend themselves very often.
I mean, how sexist is that?
But that just goes right by the wayside because the media are attempting to portray all of this as foolishness.
Now, I do want to point out something that I think is worth pointing out.
Because there are so many people on the right who are willing to jump to conclusions about the media because the media are clearly biased in these situations, and they did jump to conclusions and we had a piece over at the Daily Wire, well actually it was more of a tweet from one of our writers over at the Daily Wire, who jumped to a conclusion about The notion that the town hall was rigged, that certain students were told that they couldn't come because they wanted to ask certain questions, and so CNN banned them from the proceedings.
It now turns out that one of the Parkland shooting survivors' father has admitted to altering his evidence that CNN scripted his town hall question.
I think it's important to point that out in the nature of intellectual honesty.
There's a big confirmation bias that's happening right now, a really strong confirmation bias.
If you like what Jimmy Kimmel is saying, you pretend that he knows what he's talking about.
And if you think that CNN sucks, Then you're willing to overlook false statements about CNN?
I'm going to go out of my way here to point out that that was a false report.
So it's not true that CNN rigged the town hall by scripting questions for the students.
It is true, obviously, that there is a selection bias in play in terms of the audience.
When you go to Broward County to a place where it's pro-gun control anyway, they voted for Hillary Clinton, and you talk to a bunch of students who are pro-gun control, you're going to end up with a gun control show trial, which is exactly what happened there.
So that doesn't justify the CNN show trial, but that was not prescripted.
The students were not told what to say by the producers over at CNN.
I just wanted to point that out in the interest of honesty.
Okay, in other breaking news, there's been a lot of talk over the last couple of days about Jared Kushner.
So yesterday, the White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, temporarily stripped all White House staffers with interim top-level security clearance of that clearance.
Instead, downgraded everyone to quote-unquote secret security clearance.
So this means that top-secret material can no longer be seen by Jared.
Jared had interim top-secret clearance so he could see all this material.
And so Jared has basically been downgraded for at least what they say is a short period of time.
Now he's 15 months in, and the FBI has still not fully cleared him.
One of the reasons the FBI has not fully cleared him is because he's involved in the Mueller investigation.
The Mueller investigation hasn't cleared anyone yet, so the FBI has not cleared anyone yet.
So anyone who's even tangentially being investigated in the Mueller investigation, anyone who's been called in for questioning, has not yet received full security clearance from the FBI.
So the longer that drags on, the longer the Mueller investigation suggesting Trump-Russia collusion or corruption drags on, the longer it's going to be before top security clearance is regranted to people, the longer interim security clearance was in play.
Does this mean that there was a new level of guilt found about Jared Kushner?
No, it doesn't mean anything of the sort.
Does it mean that there was a power play by John Kelly here?
Not really, because John Kelly did it to everyone, including Jared Kushner, who had an interim security clearance, mainly because of the blowback that he was receiving after Rob Porter, who had interim security clearance, was found to have not been granted security clearance by the FBI because of the allegations of wife beating.
So this was a response by Kelly to the Rob Porter thing, and Kushner got caught up in the center.
Does that mean that Jared is completely clean?
I have no idea.
I don't know whether Jared is completely clean.
The investigation hasn't taken its full course yet.
I assume that it will.
But the media are working overtime to suggest that the rejection of top-secret security clearance for Jared is an indication of his guilt or his corruption.
Now listen.
I've said over and over on the program, is it nepotism that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in the White House are having such large roles?
Of course that's nepotism.
I mean, you'd be foolish to not recognize that.
Nepotism exists, unfortunately, on both sides of the aisle.
I don't like it wherever I see it.
It was nepotistic when Chelsea Clinton was helping to be involved in the Bill and Hillary Foundation.
The Kennedys are a team replete with nepotism.
Nepotism exists in politics.
George W. Bush is a product of nepotism.
There's lots of nepotism in politics.
This is just another example of nepotism in politics.
But if we are now going to suggest that anyone who was once rejected for FBI top secret security clearance, not just put on interim hold, as Jared is, but rejected for top secret security clearance is out of bounds and corrupt, then we ought to start with someone who actually was rejected by the FBI for top secret security clearance.
That, of course, would be Obama White House Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes.
Now, what's amazing is back in January, so not very long ago, in January 2017, the Washington Free Beacon reported that Ben Rhodes was openly rejected by the FBI for his clearance.
And then he was cleared by the Obama administration under vague circumstances.
They just went around the FBI and Obama granted him clearance.
Nobody said boo.
Nobody cared.
Ben Rhodes is one of the architects of the awful, horrible, terrible, immoral Iran deal, and nobody said a word about any of this.
Again, the media didn't seem to care very much about that.
But Kushner, end of the world.
It obviously means he's corrupted.
It obviously means he's terrible.
That seems ridiculous to me.
Also worth noting that when it comes to this other report, that there are four different countries that were looking to manipulate Jared, Mexico, Israel, China, and the UAE.
I'm sure that they were looking for ways to manipulate members of the Obama administration as well.
The question isn't, do foreign governments try to manipulate American government members?
The question is, are they successful in doing so, or do they actually have real leverage?
We don't know the answer to that yet.
So the media jumping to conclusion about Kushner and suggesting that this just demonstrates that there's infighting in the White House, there's chaos, and in the end of the... Okay, don't buy any of that.
Wait for more evidence.
As always, wait for more evidence.
Don't jump to the conclusion that the media would like for you to jump to.
Okay, so before I go any further, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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All right, so just to show you how biased the media have been on the Jared and Ivanka matter, let me show you a couple of clips from the media.
One, One of these particularly is really, really, really funny.
So Rachel Maddow, you know, she, over on MSNBC, she says that the Trump administration is a cautionary tale about nepotism.
So here's what Rachel Maddow had to say.
In the future.
The textbook explanation, the textbook case studies about nepotism, about a friends-and-family approach to governance, right?
In the future, when there are after-school specials about the Uzbekistanization of the American government, and what's wrong with that, and why it doesn't work, and what could possibly go wrong, those stories will all be crystal clear.
No ambiguity.
Because of what we're living through now.
And thereby, maybe future generations will figure out how to avoid this particular kind of mess.
We must avoid nepotism at all costs.
Also, Hillary Clinton was just the best.
Just amazing.
She deserved a Senate seat because she once had sex with Bill.
Just very, very important that we fight nepotism on every level.
Also, Joe Kennedy III will be giving the response to the State of the Union Address.
But that was not even the funny one.
I want to show you this one clip because it is so freaking funny.
Okay, so Mika Brzezinski over on MSNBC of Morning Joe fame.
Here she is talking about Ivanka and Jared and they're a joke and they've been given fake jobs and it's all nepotism.
Here's what she has to say.
She came in there to fight for women and she can't handle a question like that.
The whole thing clearly is a joke.
An utter joke, just like Melania's role on cyber, you know, bullying.
Which I think is an insult to women.
Completely.
And expect today John Kelly to be forced to put out a nice statement about Ivanka.
And how effective she is.
Well, I mean, Melania... Which will add to the joke.
Furthermore, insulting to women, these women have been given fake jobs.
Okay, so meanwhile, there's a lot of talk about DACA.
They've been giving fake things to do, Ivanka and Melania.
I would like to point out that Mika Brzezinski is the daughter of Zhbigniew Brzezinski, who is the national security advisor under Jimmy Carter.
So if we're going to talk about nepotism and people who have made it based on their names, Mika Brzezinski may have something to say about that.
But again, the hypocrisy is of no consequence to people who spend all day trafficking in it.
Okay, so meanwhile, there's a lot of talk about DACA.
So DACA is about to come up for renewal or killing on March 5th.
So next week, we're going to get a lot of headlines in the media about how the How the end of the world is nigh about how dreamers are going to be deported en masse.
About how now the pedal hits the metal and we better make some room for these dreamers or Trump is just an evil racist bigot pig.
Before you read any of those headlines, I would like to point out that Trump's proposal on DACA was significantly more generous than Barack Obama's proposal on DACA.
DACA only legalized 700,000 illegal immigrants.
President Trump's proposal would have legalized 1.8 million illegal immigrants and let another 4 million legal immigrants come in through chain migration over the next 15 years as the Center for Immigration Studies proposes.
In return, all he wanted was $25 billion to build that Trump wall and some additional funding for border security, as well as some curbs on chain migration.
But he did not get those.
The Democrats didn't give them to him.
And Sarah Huckabee Sanders is exactly right when she says that Trump did go above and beyond on DACA.
He did a lot more than Obama ever did.
He's encouraging them to get something done.
That's why he laid out exactly what he expected to see in a proposal that would not only help solve the DACA problem, but also provide border security.
The president went above and beyond what previous administrations have done and offered on that program.
It's really sad that Democrats are not willing to come to the table, get something done, and actually fix problems and do their job.
And of course, that is 100% true, what Sarah Huckabee Sanders is saying there.
But Democrats are not coming to the table, and they're not coming to the table for one very specific reason.
And that is, they think that Republicans lose this issue no matter what.
They feel like either Trump reinstates DACA illegally and overthrows his own promise, gets blowback from his base, or he leaves DACA dead and he starts deporting people.
That's probably not what's going to happen here, by the way, because Lindsey Graham, who is really soft on immigration, He gives some political analysis here that is not completely wrong.
He says that if DACA ends, and if all these DACA recipients are deported, that it's going to be bad politically for Republicans.
This is probably correct, even if you disagree with him on the policy of it.
We did nothing, and just ended DACA, and did nothing else, and a lot of these young people start getting deported, then that would destroy the party.
So I don't think that's even a viable option.
Now, Trump knows that, which is why the chances that he is going to start deporting millions of people are really, really low.
It's the reason why Trump is not going to do this.
DACA is not going to be reinstated in all likelihood, but Trump is just not going to deport these folks.
And that means they won't be able to get work permits.
It means that, theoretically, they could be subject to future deportation.
But we all know that it's only a matter of time until somebody gives them amnesty.
It'll probably be Trump.
It could be somebody after Trump.
These folks will be given amnesty because no one has the political stones to actually say that people who are here illegally and came in as children should be deported.
Now, do I think they should actually be deported?
I think that we should analyze on a one-to-one basis whether people ought to be in the country.
If we have the ability as a country to decide who ought to be here and who ought not to be here, then we should determine which of these dreamers are actually people who are of benefit to the United States and which ones are not.
You don't have a right to be here just because you were brought here through no fault of your own.
If somebody illegally sneaked you into Disneyland, Disneyland would not have to then give you a day pass.
That's not the way that this works.
Disneyland would have to determine whether it's in their interest for you to stay.
Well, the United States, it's the same sort of deal.
That said, I think this all ends with basically nothing happening.
But it doesn't matter that Trump has offered the most The most generous immigration package that I've seen in 10 years, really since, in 12 years, since the Bush immigration package in 2006.
It's not enough for Democrats.
Trump is a white supremacist, so it does not matter that President Trump just offered to amnesty two million people right off the bat.
Luis Gutierrez came out and he says that Trump is an ethnocentric, pro-European, pro-white agenda.
The GOP is a racist party.
This is the way that Democrats are going to campaign.
The president set us on this course.
He pulled the legal rug from underneath the dreamers and then cloaked his position on immigration in an ethnocentric, pro-European, pro-white agenda that will hurt America.
But it must start with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle saying, yes, we want to solve the problem and we want to rise above the racism emanating from the White House.
Okay, so this is the attack Democrats are going to take.
Good luck with this, okay?
There was an attempt to paint Trump as a deep racist.
In the last campaign, it failed.
If they continue to push this line that Trump is a deep racist, it's not going to work.
Not because Trump hasn't said things that are racist before.
I think he probably has.
In fact, I know he has.
Because people do not perceive Trump as a racist.
They perceive him as, like, Grandpa from 1960 who says some stuff that you wouldn't want said outside your kitchen.
That's basically how people perceive Trump.
Is it right to perceive him that way?
Probably not.
Is that the way people do perceive him?
Yes.
Is his policy racist?
I mean, when we get down to the policy, is it racist?
Of course not.
The policy prescriptions that he's put forward are not racist.
They may not be things you agree with, but it's very difficult to label them racist.
It doesn't matter.
Democrats are going to continue to go radical on this.
Joy Behar says, Republicans have a penchant for Nazis, which comes as a shock to me since I've been a lifelong Republican and I freaking hate Nazis since they come after me all the time and they are evil.
But here's Joy Behar making that case on The View.
The CPAC group invited this woman from France named Marine Le Pen, whose father was a Holocaust denier and a total fascist and a Nazi.
And Marine Le Pen, the daughter, thinks her father was very good and right and everything else.
And they invited her.
There's this, like, penchant for Nazis now.
You know, with Charlottesville and the Neos, and they're good guys on both sides, and now Marine Le Pen.
It's like a lot of the people in the Republican Party that I remember, Bill Buckley, who fought in World War II.
You know, Bill Kristol, those people who are so anti-Nazi are appalled by what's going on right now within this party.
So I don't think that Marian LePen should have been invited to CPAC.
I said so publicly.
That said, if we're going to talk about, you know, branding the entire Republican Party Nazi because Marian LePen showed up at CPAC invited, Then we're going to also have to talk about Louis Farrakhan being invited to all the top halls of power and the deputy chair of the DNC spending time with Louis Farrakhan and the entire Congressional Black Caucus spending time with Louis Farrakhan.
Louis Farrakhan is every bit the Nazi that Marion Le Pen is and much more openly.
Again, they're bad apples, and this is not a whataboutism thing.
Marian LePen should not have been invited to CPAC.
Republicans should not have been embracing Marian LePen.
Republicans should not have embraced the alt-right.
I was very loud and proud about this for years.
But to suggest that the Republicans are the sole repository of racism and anti-Semitism is just inaccurate.
OK, both parties have some problems with this, and both parties need to do something about it, but only one party has policies that reflect anti-Semitism, and that party is not the party of Donald Trump, unfortunately.
right now.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of folks in the Democratic Party whose policy prescriptions, particularly with regard to Israel, are much more aligned with Richard Spencer and with Louis Farrakhan than they are with some of the names that Joy Behar just stated.
Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then a quick thing that I hate.
So things that I like today, I just started at the recommendation of my sister watching the Frankenstein Chronicles with one of my favorite actors, Sean Bean.
Sean Bean is wonderful, and I've only watched the first episode and a half.
It is really creepy.
Okay, this is not for kids, and it's not for the faint of heart.
But basically, the premise is that he is a cop in early 19th century Britain, I believe, is the time period that this is taking place in.
And, like, Dickens is London, basically, and he is checking out a murder when he comes across a body that's been stitched together of a variety of different bodies.
of a variety of different bodies.
Here's a little bit of the preview. - This thing is a composite.
Parts of at least seven children reassembled.
Okay, so as you can see, it's a period piece...
I'm a sucker for period pieces.
I like them.
It's really creepy.
It's well acted.
It's well written so far.
Check it out on Netflix if this is the sort of thing that appeals to you.
Okay, a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so today's thing I hate comes courtesy of Chuck Schumer.
Chuck Schumer apparently does not know how either Netflix or sex work.
I don't—I really mean that.
Here's what Chuck Schumer tweeted.
He was tweeting about net neutrality.
The entire Democratic Party decided they were going to tweet about net neutrality yesterday.
They don't know anything about net neutrality.
And it's pretty obvious from their tweet.
So Chuck Schumer tweeted, without net neutrality, when a couple is streaming their favorite Netflix show but it keeps lagging and killing the mood, who will be to blame?
Um, no one uses Netflix for foreplay, dude.
That's weird.
In fact, Netflix, there are actually a fair number of studies that suggest that streaming television has actually lowered the number of times people have sex in a given month because too many people are watching Netflix and then it's too late and they're tired and they go to bed instead of having sex with one another.
I love that Chuck Schumer thinks that streaming is what makes sex happen.
This is not true.
Streaming may make Other things happen through pornography, but streaming does not make sex happen.
The people who are watching Netflix are the ones least likely to be having sex.
If you're busy watching the Frankenstein Chronicles, you're not using that as foreplay on Netflix.
But the Democrats were tweeting about this incessantly yesterday.
They were tweeting out that if net neutrality happens, then the Internet will be brought to you one word at a time.
I don't even know what the hell that means.
And then they double-spaced it to annoy everybody.
If you're going to make arguments, people in the Democratic Party, you're going to have to do better.
You're going to have to have some people who are younger to make these arguments on net neutrality, who know what the internet is, and what a computer is, and what bandwidth is, and what streaming looks like, who have ever watched a show on Netflix.
How about some people who don't actually get cable?
Most of the people my age at this point are not getting cable, they're getting Netflix or Amazon.
Or Hulu or something.
I wonder how many members of the Democratic Party have cut the cable yet.
My guess is very few.
The same is true in the Republican Party, by the way.
All of our political parties are out of touch with modern technology, and it definitely shows.
OK.
So tonight, I will be speaking in Omaha.
And as I say, I will be making a full defense of the Second Amendment.
I will talk about the history of it.
I will talk about the legality of it.
I will talk about which guns are protected and what types of folks are protected.
I will talk about all of those things.
I look forward to seeing you there.
And we'll be back here tomorrow, back from our haunts in Los Angeles.
I will see you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
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Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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