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March 15, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:17
The Big School Walkout | Ep. 496
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Students walk out of their schools for gun control to the delight of the media, Stormy Daniels gets the red carpet treatment, and President Trump talks trade in the weirdest possible way.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So we have a lot to get to today.
As I predicted yesterday, all of the walkouts turned out to be just a media propaganda campaign on behalf of gun control.
It was not about solidarity with the slain students.
It was not really about mourning over the slain students.
It was not about America coming together around the cause of stopping violence in schools.
It was a gun control program.
That's all that was happening yesterday all across the country.
It was not a unifying moment.
It was a divisive one.
It needn't have been.
We'll get to all of that in just a second.
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OK, so.
Yesterday, wall-to-wall coverage of all of the students walking out of their schools.
So first, we need to ask, how does such a thing get planned?
Is such a thing spontaneous?
Do you have a situation here where thousands, hundreds of thousands of students are just getting up and walking out of school at the same time because they heard online they were supposed to do so?
Or are they being told by their teachers and the teachers' unions and all of the leftist administrators at school that it's a good thing for them to get up and leave class?
Because I guarantee you that if I had gotten up and ditched class in high school, there would have been some sort of Some sort of excuse note needed, right?
You don't just get to leave class in the middle of class when you're in junior high or high school.
You actually have to have an excuse for doing so, otherwise you are a truant, right?
So here, the schools themselves are writing the excuse notes.
Now let me just ask a question that's been asked by a lot of folks down the right.
Let's say there were a pro-life walkout tomorrow.
How many of these teachers do you think would be okay with the students leaving?
If all the students just got up and walked outside to protest for 10 minutes, The one million abortions plus in the United States per year.
If every student in America did that, how many of those teachers do you think would excuse the students?
And how many of them do you think would actually punish the students?
How many do you think would dock the students in some way?
In other words, one of the problems here is that you have these leftist propaganda centers called our public schools that are taught by teachers who are members of teachers unions, who are Democratic Party cronies, and then They use that position in order to promulgate a certain agenda.
So all these students get up and they walk out.
Of course, this thing really was organized in AstroTurf by the Women's March, and they used the same organizational structures in order to push it.
The Women's March, of course, run by some of the worst people on planet Earth, members of the Louis Farrakhan contingent.
And so they organized this whole thing as a gun control push.
Now, what was so annoying about this, and I discussed it yesterday, I read a bunch of letters from students And I have a thousand more today.
I mean, really, I must have received at least 250 emails yesterday from students around the country who are upset about how they were treated yesterday during these walkouts.
I was hearing from tons of people yesterday that this was going to happen, and then it did.
That this turned into a propaganda effort that this was never about solidarity with the students.
That if you said, listen, I am in favor of gun rights, and I also feel terrible for what happened for the students, that you were treated like garbage.
And the most obvious example of this is clip 13.
So yesterday, there was a clip that was going around the internet, pretty amazing.
One of the students walked out of class and did what I suggested, right?
Brought a sign that was a pro-Second Amendment sign that Also expressed sympathy for the children who were killed, and he was escorted from the protest, right?
He was told he couldn't be at the protest, and they actually tried to push him into a police car.
Here's what it looked like yesterday.
- Where you going?
- Yeah, we do. - On the Supreme Court. - 505. - So he was told to lead him to the police.
- I don't know what you're doing.
- Why?
- What?
- I don't know what you're doing.
- I'm gonna go stand outside then.
- And I'll ask that.
- He has to look back.
So he was told to leave.
He was told he couldn't stand with all of the students because, for some reason or other, that was just unacceptable.
Now, if he'd been holding a sign that said, Stop Guns Now, do you think that would have happened to him?
The answer, of course, is no.
The video was posted to Facebook by Kenny McDonald, who's a student at New Prague High School in New Prague, Minnesota.
The short video does not show what took place before or after the principal singled out the student.
Here's what McDonald said.
He says, Kids at our school today walked out in honor of the 17 students killed in Florida.
Students held signs that said, arm our teachers.
They had two signs.
A student walked out without saying a word, peacefully put up a sign which said, guns don't kill people, people kill people.
And he was escorted off the property by our principal and threatened to be put in a police car.
This violates the First Amendment and makes me sick that they can do whatever they want.
Please make this go viral.
It's not been verified that the student's story is the entire truth.
We'll have to hear from the school exactly what happened.
But is there a question that if the student had been holding a sign that said, gun control now, that everything would have been fine for him?
I have very little doubt that's the case.
It was obvious what the networks were trying to do here.
It's obvious what the media were trying to do here.
Again, these are the same media who every year ignore the March for Life, which draws hundreds of thousands of people to Washington, D.C., and the coverage is always scant and minimal, even though it's a huge number of young people who are going to that particular march.
of this big school walkout that is sponsored by the left yesterday, and it's widely covered by the media.
And of course, they're always, you know, I don't want to slander all the students who walked out as people who are just taking advantage.
Although I will say that, you know, if I were a student in high school and I had the choice between sitting in class and walking out and ditching, I would ditch, right?
That's true for the vast majority of students.
So playing it as though all of these students are pro-gun control, I think is silly.
Most students just go along to get along, just like most people go along to get along, particularly when they are told that it makes them morally superior to walk out of class for some sort of cause or another.
But there were some students who decided to go wild.
In Tennessee, there were some students who tore down an American flag and jumped on a cop car during the walkout, which is just delightful.
So you can see them.
Here they are.
They're walking around.
They go over to the flagpole, and they are taking down the American flag during the walkout, which is just glorious.
And here they are rushing cop cars.
This is at Antioch High School, I guess, in Tennessee.
Kids making trouble.
Not a grave shock there.
You know, we saw this before.
I mean, last week there was a walkout as well, and it was in California, and there were a bunch of students who essentially went wild.
Now, that was not representative of these rallies.
The only reason I'm pointing this out is to point out that young people, who are supposed to be our leaders, sometimes are very stupid.
Okay, just like old people are sometimes very stupid.
And so granting them, conferring upon them some sort of grand intellectual legitimacy because they're young seems to me really, really foolish.
This was, in fact, as I say, a left propaganda effort, if you don't believe me.
Here's what it looked like when Bernie Sanders showed up at the walkout.
So no Republicans were invited to the walkout.
No Republicans were invited to speak at the walkout.
None of them were invited to the steps of the Capitol for the walkout.
But Bernie Sanders walked out to join the students in the gun protest, and he was treated like a hero.
This is clip 15, actually.
Here's what it looked like when he was walking through the crowd.
Right, all the kids are going, Oh my god, it's Bernie Sanders, yeah!
But this isn't a political rally.
Right, they're all smiling and laughing and taking pictures.
Oh my god, it's the old man, the old Ku Klux Pudding.
What are we gonna do?
But don't worry, this had nothing to do with politics, folks.
This was beyond politics.
This had nothing to do with the political agenda.
This was just about solidarity with the victims in Parkland.
It was not political in any way.
This is the way the media were playing it last night.
Of course, Bernie Sanders speaking and shouting for gun control is an amazing thing, considering that Bernie Sanders comes from Vermont, a state with very little gun control, even though it is a very left state.
Here's Bernie Sanders speaking yesterday.
You, you the young people of this country, are leading the nation and the country.
If you can't hear crazy, I'll bring it.
You, the young people of this country, are leading the nation.
Please give me money, please, for my next campaign.
The time is now for me to pretend to be relevant as though I had done anything except run for president in my entire career.
So Bernie Sanders stepping out, and of course, you're not seeing any actual discussion here.
Now, a guy who I've become friendly with, Kyle Kashuv, a student over at Parkland High School, he actually went around on Capitol Hill, did more than Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders has refused to meet with him.
Apparently, there are a bunch of other legislators, right and left, who have met with him.
And Kashuv has done a lot of the work that the other kids at his high school won't.
He's actually going around trying to speak with various members of the legislature.
He spoke with Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson.
He spoke with Chuck Schumer.
And he spoke with Paul Ryan.
So he's met with a bunch of legislators he's met with President Trump.
The idea here, trying to come to some sort of consensus about things that can be done.
The kids at Marjory Stoneman High School, though, the ones who are being shown on the media, are not the ones who are meeting with legislators on Capitol Hill.
They are the ones instead appearing on Ellen and then shouting about how America's a terrible, horrible, very bad place, where the old people suck, right?
They're the ones who go on Bill Maher and say, F my parents.
Which is just a great way of getting things done, which, again, shows there's a lot about moral posturing and not very much about getting anything done.
You can see the media's bias here.
So Viacom Networks decided to go silent for 17 minutes in order to—this is Nickelodeon and MTV—they went silent for 17 minutes in order to pay tribute to the Parkland students.
They would say, oh, this isn't political at all, except that I don't remember them doing this after the Boston Marathon bombing.
I don't remember them doing this after the Orlando shooting.
I don't remember them doing this after any terror attack.
They only do this after a particular shooting that is driving a particular narrative on a particular day at a particular time when everyone else is walking out.
So here's what it looked like on Viacom networks yesterday morning.
They printed on their screen, Viacom stands with all students as they participate in the national school walkout against gun violence.
So that's VH1, it's TV Land, it's Paramount, it's Nick Jr.
So if you just want to put your kid down for a second and have him watch Nick Jr., you couldn't do that because Viacom was busy protesting with all the kids.
Listen, their cooperation with this corporate virtue signaling is really amazing.
And it's obvious that all the people in Hollywood who proclaim they have no political agenda have a pretty obvious political agenda.
Again, they would not do this.
If there were a school walkout against the violence of the murder of the unborn, and there are many, many, many more children who are killed in the womb every year than are killed in schools every year.
No question Viacom does nothing.
And not only does nothing, it probably puts on Linda Ellerbe to talk about why it is that abortion should be legal.
And so there is a political agenda on the part of the media.
And this is the part that really is galling.
It's the part that kind of makes you sick to your stomach a little bit, is the lie that this is apolitical.
I'm fine with you politicking.
You want to politic?
Go ahead.
You want to be pro-gun control?
Fine with me.
But don't pretend that it's news coverage.
When CNN puts on a town hall that is essentially a show trial on behalf of gun control, don't pretend that that's you being a neutral arbiter of the facts.
It is not.
If you're the media and you proclaim all you care about is ratings on the one hand and just pleasing people on the other, entertaining people on the other, Then don't claim that this is apolitical, because this is not apolitical.
It obviously is incredibly political.
We're going to get to some of the stuff that students had to say yesterday, again, proving that 17-year-olds don't know everything, despite their own maybe beliefs to the contrary.
We'll get to all of that in just a second.
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Okay, so here are some of the things that the students had to say at this rally.
Again, the rally was happening all over the country, so there was a set of disparate rallies happening everywhere.
Here is USA Today covering this as though it is one of the great moments in human history, when in reality it's just an AstroTurf leftist thing.
Again, when teachers are telling students to walk out, this is teachers using students to push their political agenda.
End of story.
This is not a bunch of students who are voluntarily deciding that they want to get together and walk out.
It's not grassroots.
This is being done from top down.
When teachers tell students that it's time to walk out, when teachers inform students it's time to walk out, As students walk out, that's really on the teachers, not on the students.
I'm not blaming the students, but I'm also not going to pretend that this was led by students.
It wasn't.
It was led by a bunch of adults who decided they were going to work with a couple of students and use those students as a prop in order to push a particular agenda.
Again, not ripping on the students.
Students can have their own beliefs.
That's fine.
I like that kids are politically active.
A lot of people who listen to my program are people who are under the age of 18.
That's wonderful.
Be politically active.
Enjoy.
But we're going to analyze your arguments with the same seriousness we would analyze anyone else's arguments, and we also cannot pretend that this entire thing was just some spontaneous uprising of the people, and that everybody just decided all of a sudden—like, they're trying to portray this as like it's the Arab Spring, like there's this horrible superstructure run by the NRA and Dana Lash, and now all those people have to be brought low.
That's not what's happening here.
What's happening here is a bunch of Teachers Union members are telling their students we're all going to walk out at a particular time, a bunch of principals are green lighting it, and then a bunch of students are saying, well what the hell, if everybody else is walking out I may as well, at least I don't look like a jerk that way.
So here are some of the students who are speaking at the walkouts.
This is from USA Today.
My generation has grown up in a world where this is every day.
No.
We have been taught for containment drills, shut off the lights, lock the door, go into the closet.
That's not okay.
If every time someone dies from a shooting, we brush it off as, oh, it's just another casualty, that's not okay.
Pause it for one second.
Okay, first of all, like, no one is brushing this stuff off.
No one is brushing this stuff off.
Second, this is not happening every day.
Clearly, it's not happening every day.
The number of school shootings in America is on the decline.
Third, would you not want to—I mean, we teach kids stop, drop, and roll from the time that they are five years old, right?
We teach them what's happening in case of a fire.
We teach them—for generations in this country, we taught people, in case of nuclear attack, get under your desk for all the help that would do you, right?
So, you don't want to be taught what to do in an emergency situation?
There's never going to be a point where we don't teach kids what to do in an emergency situation.
We should teach kids what to do in an emergency situation.
Does this mean that we shouldn't try to stop the shootings?
No, it means we should, but we have different ways of doing that, and it doesn't all involve seizing 300 million guns.
And continue.
The school being scared.
It's a national issue.
We cannot just allow our legislators to say that our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, because that's not going to bring them back, and that's not going to prevent us from joining them.
Okay, stop it there for a second.
I want to point out a couple of things.
One, I want to point out that this is USA Today, a journalistic outlet.
Right?
USA Today is an objective journalistic outlet.
This is a produced video for Everytown.
For Everytown USA, the gun control group, right?
I mean, obviously.
They even have the meaningful music underneath, right?
They piped in the pianist underneath.
Has there ever been a piece of news coverage that is not a piece of propaganda that has that music piped in?
Has that ever happened?
Unless you're at a concert?
When you watch the news on CNN or Fox, and they're just quoting the president, do they pipe in a bunch of dramatic music underneath?
Of course not.
The whole point of this video is to get at your emotions, which is why they are using the music the way that they are using the music.
The whole point here is to push an agenda.
And I'm just pointing this out because, again, This agenda is being swathed in the cloth of we are just doing this because we care about the students.
And the converse of that is if you don't agree with the agenda being pushed, you don't care about the students.
And I hate that so much I can't even tell you.
This is why I'm receiving hundreds of letters from students today who are miffed about being forced out there and being told that they are somehow lesser if they disagree with the prevailing agenda.
Okay, so let's do a little bit more of this audio here because it really is astonishing.
17 kids who have a future and for 17 kids who don't have graduation or can't go on with their lives or can't do what they wanted to do is really sad.
We are the beginning of something that is long overdue and I cannot begin to express how proud I am to be involved.
Everyone is somehow connected to someone of gun violence and someone who suffered from a mass shooting and there's so many that it's just rocking the world right now.
OK, again, this dramatic video, the voiceovers, if you're not seeing this, you're just listening to this later, then what it's actually showing in the video is not just the faces of the students who are talking and crying.
It's actually showing videos of all the people walking out.
It's showing this dramatic video with the rising music, the swelling music from the end of the Truman Show.
You're supposed to feel something when you watch this.
That's the goal.
It's why the media is covering this the way that it is.
And the sort of propaganda being put out by the students is obviously not well-informed.
I'm not going to say that the students, you know, are—know exactly what they're saying.
I think, in many cases, they're just adopting talking points that they're being cheered for.
People respond to applause, and the media are cheering folks.
They're putting them on Bill Maher, and they're putting them on Ellen, and they're doing all of this in the aftermath of a shooting because they want to push—Kyle Kashuv There are a bunch of students like him, by the way.
He's not the only one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
There are a bunch of students who are writing me.
None of these kids are being put on TV.
They're not being put on TV because the media agree with certain of these kids, but do not agree with others of these kids.
Here's another one of these students talking about how—this is one of the rallies, I think this is the one in Washington, D.C.—talking about how getting shot at any moment is an American thought.
Through all their struggles, they never had to worry about someone barging into their classroom with an assault rifle and slaughtering everyone in their class.
That is an American tragedy!
They never had to think about getting shot at any moment.
That's an American thought.
And they never had to worry that their child would be the victim of a mass shooting.
That's an American worry.
OK, first of all, that's not true.
All over the world, there are people who are worried about being victims of terror attacks.
In the West, there are people who are worried about being victims of violence.
People worry about lots of stuff.
But again, one of the reasons that if you ask kids all over the world, all over the United States, what are the chances that you're going to be shot in a mass shooting?
The numbers, I'm sure people would wildly exaggerate, right?
People always think that they are likely to be shot in a crime, they're likely to be killed, they're likely to be murdered.
And the chances of that happening in the United States are extraordinarily low.
The chances of you being shot in a mass shooting in the United States are Extraordinarily low.
The lifetime risk of being killed in the United States by any firearm, according to the National Safety Council, is 1 in 358.
The lifetime risk of dying in a mass shooting is 1 in 110,000, which is the same chance of dying from a dog attack or a legal execution in the United States.
And a school shooting, it's even lower than that.
A school shooting, it's like one in millions, I believe.
So, the notion that all of these kids are sitting around worried about being shot, maybe that's because of the media coverage, but it is certainly not true that your chances are very high of being shot in a classroom or that you should waste a lot of time worrying about it as a general rule.
It's just not true.
So, again, it's really foolish.
The Safe Schools Initiative says that, this is according to Campus Safety, The odds of a high school student getting into a fight at school are one in seven.
But that means that the chances that you will be killed in a school shooting are less than one in one million.
But we're being told that this is an American thought, this is something that kids are thinking, only because the media want you to think about these school shootings every day so that they can push the idea that we ought to remove guns from American society.
Here's another student who is saying that the kids should fight back and prevent And I believe that as students, we need to make a few things clear.
We shouldn't arm guards because schools shouldn't be prisons.
Again, the prison guards are there to keep you in school.
Armed guards at schools are not going to shoot students who walk out of school.
They're going to shoot people trying to get in to kill the students.
It's just ridiculous.
But again, this is propaganda nonsense.
And I believe that as students, we need to make a few things clear.
To start, we will not sit in classrooms with armed teachers.
We refuse to learn in fear.
We reject turning our schools into prisons!
No one is turning schools into prisons.
I mean, when I was in public school, it felt like I was in prison, but that's not the same thing.
First of all, all kids think school is prison.
But second of all, the notion that — this is so silly.
It's so silly.
You're saying you don't want an armed guard at school to protect you from a piece of crap who barges in with a gun to murder you because it feels like a prison?
There are kids all over the world who are actually going to school in situations where it is basically like a prison, right?
If you're in Afghanistan and you're going to school, it's going to be protected like a prison because otherwise terrorists are going to barge in.
But this is—it's just nonsense.
It's just nonsense.
And because it's nonsense, it's being pushed by the media.
The media know that if they had a 35-year-old on TV saying the stuff that these kids are saying, they'd be laughed off TV.
So instead, they put up a bunch of 17-year-olds to say it and pretend that it has some sort of added intellectual weight.
OK, before I go any further— And I want to talk about some Stormy Daniels news, because the media are fawning over Stormy Daniels in a pretty shocking way.
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All right, so meanwhile...
A lot of hubbub breaking out about Stormy Daniels.
So Stormy Daniels' lawyer is out there speaking to the press.
Stormy Daniels is supposed to do a 60 Minutes exclusive.
So I guess Stormy Daniels' lawyer, I guess, is doing an exclusive on 60 Minutes on Sunday.
So the lawyer's name is Michael Avenetti.
And Trump, of course, has essentially sued Stormy Daniels, trying to get Stormy Daniels not to talk about the fact that they were knocking boots back in 2007, the year, or 2006, the year after Barron Trump was born, and while Trump was already married to Melania.
Now, number one, no one in the United States cares about this because Trump is garbage with women.
Okay?
Just putting it out there.
Not with all women.
Okay, Trump is nice to many women, I'm sure.
But his sex life?
Garbage.
This has been true since the 70s.
There's a guy who said over and over and over that avoiding STDs in the 1970s was like the Vietnam War for him.
He really said that.
And there's a guy who said things like, nothing in life matters unless you have a young and beautiful piece of ass.
So this is not somebody who is somebody you want babysitting your 17-year-old daughter.
But President Trump Has a long and nefarious connection with various women of the, uh, tawdry women.
Women of the evening.
Uh, and, you know, he's been married three times, he's cheated on all three of his wives, he cheated on wife number one with wife number two, cheated on wife number two with wife number three, and cheated on wife number three with Stormy Daniels, among others.
So, this is not a guy who any of this stuff is going to cling to.
Nobody cares because we all know who he is.
There's no new information added to the system.
The new information the media are trying to add to the system is that Trump paid off Stormy Daniels to shut up right before the election.
Now, Trump has said, I didn't know anything about it.
It was just my lawyer.
My lawyer gave $130,000 to Stormy Daniels out of the goodness of his heart, which is one hell of a lawyer.
Like, let me find that lawyer.
The lawyer who just gives away money.
Sounds like an awesome lawyer to me.
Obviously Trump knew about it.
Let's not pretend.
Anyone who says differently is saying silly talk.
Anyway, so Avenetti debunked the notion that Trump's attorney, Michael Cohen, negotiated with Stormy Daniels on a nondisclosure agreement independently of the Trump Organization.
He says, That's what Anderson Cooper said in agreement with Avenetti.
acting in his own capacity, why he'd reach out to the general counsel of the Trump Organization to get involved in the arbitration.
And that's what Anderson Cooper said in agreement with Avenetti.
Here's what it looked like last night on CNN.
The focus of this filing in February was to gag my client, put a muzzle on her, and prevent her from speaking.
And that's why they filed the arbitration, to obtain what's called a temporary restraining order.
So this idea that there is a separation between EC-LLC and Donald Trump and the Trump Organization is a complete and utter fiction.
OK, so this is probably true.
I mean, again, I don't think that Trump's lawyer was walking around signing $130,000 checks just for the hell of it.
But does this make a big difference?
Well, not necessarily, because number one, it may not be a campaign finance violation.
John Edwards directly paid $900,000 to his mistress, who was then pregnant with his child, during the 2004 presidential election cycle.
And nothing happened, right?
It was totally fine.
Actually, it was during the 2008 presidential election cycle.
And nothing happened.
It was totally fine.
He was never prosecuted or anything like that.
So it's not necessarily illegal.
A lot of people on the left suggesting that this would somehow change the math on Trump.
Why would this change the math on Trump?
I'm just wondering.
I don't see anything here that changes what we knew about Trump.
I don't know anybody in the United States who thinks that Trump is the great bringer of male morality to the world.
So if this is the great hope for bringing down Trump, I think that this is silly.
Now, I will point something else out.
There has been a lot of questions about Monica Lewinsky versus Stormy Daniels.
Why is the media went after Monica Lewinsky?
Why is the media ripped apart Linda Tripp?
Why is it the media went after Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones while they did nothing of the sort with Stormy Daniels?
Stormy Daniels Who is not alleging sexual harassment or assault by the President of the United States, right?
Kathleen Willey alleged sexual assault by the President of the United States.
Paula Jones alleged sexual harassment and assault by the President before he was the President.
Juanita Broderick, alleged rape.
None of these women were treated with respect.
They were all treated like garbage by the media for legitimately decades.
Stormy Daniels, who's a porn star who had consensual sex with the president before he was the president, and then was paid off by the president in a contract that she signed, and she took the money, and now she wants to talk about it.
Now she's being treated as some sort of victim.
She's being treated as some sort of heroine for coming out and speaking, oh, the bravery of Stormy Daniels.
Now, I don't have to like Trump's sexual behavior in order to recognize that Stormy Daniels is not exactly the Virgin Mary.
I don't have to believe that Trump is great with women to recognize that Stormy Daniels is not exactly standing up out of a pure sense of righteous indignation and virtue.
That's not what's happening here.
But the media are treating her that way.
Why are the media treating her that way?
It's really funny.
If you look at lefty commentaries, what they're saying is, well, they're treating her this way because it's different.
We're now living in the Me Too moment, don't you see?
It's that that's changed.
If this had happened with a Democratic president and a porn star, we'd be treating this differently.
Um, mm-mm.
Wrong.
All that's changed is that there's a Republican in office, and the Republican in office should be slapped around as much as possible.
If this were a Democrat in office, and if this were Barack Obama, and he had sex with a porn star and paid her off to keep silent, people would have said, this is a sexual matter.
Everybody lies about sex.
We'd get exactly the same—they'd say it was consensual, because this was consensual.
We'd get exactly the same crap that we got when Bill Clinton was president, because the media are filled with Democrats.
If you didn't believe it from all the talk about gun control, the media are filled top to bottom with Democrats, and so they are treating Stormy Daniels as though she's anything but a porn star who wants to make a little extra money by telling lewd stories out of school about the president's junk, which is really what this is.
Okay, meanwhile, In other news, the president is bringing on board Larry Kudlow.
Larry Kudlow is a free trader.
I mentioned this yesterday.
He's going to head up the National Economic Council.
What's really funny about this, of course, is that Gary Cohn and Larry Kudlow have very similar economic policies.
Kudlow is a free trader.
He's a laissez-faire economist.
Gary Cohn is a free trader.
He may be more interventionist in some ways than Larry Kudlow is, actually.
And so, Kudlow is being brought on board to fill a slot that probably never should have been emptied in the first place.
Here is Kudlow describing how Trump buttered him up.
I've been around a while.
My head has not turned easily.
I've served in the White House, etc., etc.
But just to talk to him for 30, 40 minutes at a clip...
Three, four days in a row is a wonderful thing.
I just want to say that.
It's a wonderful thing.
And he and I have known each other many years.
I've interviewed him on radio and TV.
I was in the campaign helping out.
I know him, you know, reasonably well.
And it was just a terrific experience.
I don't want to sound sophomoric, but it was just a really good thing.
So I will say, I think that it is very funny that the president basically hired Kudlow because he thinks that Kudlow is on TV a lot.
And he's about to do the same thing with Pete Hegseth over at Fox News.
The rumor is that the current secretary of the VA, who stinks, Eric Shulkin, he's awful, that he's about to be ousted, which he should be.
In favor of Pete Hegseth, who Trump likes because he's on TV.
In fact, there was a report last week that Trump, during a meeting with his VA secretary, actually called up Hegseth on the phone and said he'd just seen him on Fox & Friends and wanted to get him in on the conversation.
So the president is governing by TV, which, listen, if he's got the right people from TV, I'm happy about that.
That's fine.
I mean, Obama said that he governed by TV because he never saw anything bad that happened in his administration until I saw it on the news.
I saw it on TV.
Right, so at least if we're going to govern by TV, hopefully Trump will pick some of the best commentators from TV and bring those people into his administration.
But it is funny that he's replacing a free trader with a free trader.
Okay, so, meanwhile, Trump had, there's a story in the Washington Post about how Trump talks about trade with foreign leaders.
It's pretty astonishing, it's pretty amazing.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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All righty.
So President Trump, apparently, it's going to be good to have him talk to Larry Kudlow.
Because when the president is talking not to Larry Kudlow, he says silly things.
This is an amazing story from the Washington Post.
President Trump boasted in a fundraising speech on Wednesday that he made up information in a meeting with the leader of a top U.S.
ally, saying he insisted to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the United States runs a trade deficit with its neighbor to the north without knowing whether this was true.
And here's what Trump said.
He said, Trudeau came to see me.
He's a good guy, Justin.
He said, no, no, we have no trade deficit with you.
We have none.
Donald, please.
Nice guy.
Good looking guy comes in.
Donald, we have no trade deficit.
He's very proud because everybody else, you know, we're getting killed.
So he's proud.
I said, wrong, Justin.
Wrong.
You do.
I didn't even know.
I had no idea.
I just said, you're wrong.
You know why?
Because we're so stupid.
And I thought they were smart.
I said, you're wrong, Justin.
He said, nope.
We have no trade deficit.
I said, well, in that case, I feel differently.
But I don't believe it.
I sent one of our four guys out, his guy, my guy, they went out.
I said, check, because I can't believe it.
Well, sir, you're actually right.
We have no deficit.
But that doesn't include energy and timber.
And when you do, we lose $17 billion a year.
OK, so Trump basically just made it up, right?
He goes into a meeting with Trudeau, and he wants to rip on him over the trade deficit because Trump is under the wildness impression that trade deficits inevitably mean American economic decline.
That's silly.
Sometimes trade deficits are bad.
Sometimes trade deficits are good.
What is more important is your trade policy.
A free trade policy makes your country richer.
A non-free trade policy makes your country poorer.
And there's a whole article in the Journal of American Greatness, which I'm writing a response to as soon as this show is over, about how I get free trade wrong, like me personally.
To which I would say, then you need to talk to every economist for the past 200 years, because The notion that you're going to make an economy better with tariffs by protecting certain industries is just silly.
And there's a more complex argument that is made over at Journal of American Greatness, so you'll have to go over later at Daily Wire.
Maybe I'll talk about it tomorrow a little bit on the show.
But again, Trump is under this impression that if we just tariff everybody to death, then this makes America stronger.
He believes in a policy of autarky.
Autarky is something that the Germans under the Reich, the Third Reich, used to want.
Your country was going to be able to supply you all of your internal needs.
They wouldn't need to trade anymore.
You'd be able to produce everything in-house.
It was like Wakanda.
Now, obviously, this has nothing to do with the Nazis' racial policies.
I'm just talking about economic policies.
The policy of autarky was really stupid, and it ended up destroying Germany and their manufacturing capacity, actually, up until World War II.
It really was not good for them.
Their economy was not booming.
It boomed for the first couple of years of Hitler, because it had been so weak before that, and then it fell apart pretty quickly.
Autarky is never a good policy.
Tariffs are not a good policy.
Places that have high tariffs generally have weaker economies.
That's the statistic that matters.
Trade deficits don't matter.
Trade deficits, I'm not saying they're good, I'm not saying they're bad.
Trade deficits are irrelevant.
What matters is trade policy.
What matters is whether your economy is growing or not.
And the correlation between the two, between trade deficits and economic growth, is not clear in the slightest.
There's a lot of noise and not a whole lot of sound that comes out of that.
Okay, so here's the reality.
Do we have a trade deficit with Canada?
No.
We have a trade surplus with Canada.
According to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, it reports that in 2016, the United States exported $12.5 billion more in goods and services than it imported from Canada, leading to a trade surplus, not a deficit.
So then Trump tweeted out that we do have a trade deficit.
He said, we do have a trade deficit with Canada, as we do with almost all countries.
PM Justin Trudeau of Canada, a very good guy, doesn't like saying Canada has a surplus VUS, but they do.
They almost all do.
And that's how I know.
That's not evidence, dude.
That's you just saying the same thing that you just said.
So that's kind of weird.
And then it got weirder.
Trump made a blistering attack against major U.S.
allies and global economies, according to the Washington Post, accusing the EU, China, Japan, and South Korea of ripping off the U.S.
for decades and pillaging the U.S.
workforce, which is weird since he keeps saying that our economic growth is stunning and that everything is going great.
So which is it?
Is it great or is it sucky?
He also described the NAFTA agreement as a disaster, and he'd blame on the WTO for allowing other countries to box in the U.S.
on trade.
If NAFTA is such a disaster, why did he just exempt Canada and Mexico from our steel tariffs?
He's the one who likes the steel tariffs.
Trump seemed to threaten to pull troops stationed in South Korea if he didn't get what he wanted on trade with Seoul.
This is actually a serious problem.
If Trump is going to meet with Kim Jong-un, and he's simultaneously threatening South Korea that he's going to pull out troops, then what happens if Kim Jong-un says, listen, I'll get rid of my nuclear program, and you just get rid of the troops in South Korea?
The answer is disaster, because if Trump actually wants to move the troops out of South Korea, suddenly South Korea falls into the orbit of the Chinese, as opposed to being an American satellite state to a certain extent.
Trump said, our allies care about themselves.
They don't care about us.
This perspective is so wrong, and it's so bad, and it's such a mistake.
We care about our allies because we think that it's in our interest to do so, not out of the goodness of our heart.
But I'm really hoping Larry Kudlow can drill some sense into the president, because this is not smart.
So again, this was just on Wednesday that he was saying all of this.
The best part of the speech is when he started talking specifically about Japan.
He said, Japan uses gimmicks to deny U.S.
auto companies access to its consumers.
So here's what he said.
He said, It's horrible the way we're treated.
Do you know what that is?
That's where they take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and they drop it on the hood of a car.
And if the hood duns, the car doesn't qualify.
Well, guess what?
The roof duns in a little bit.
And they say, nope, this car doesn't qualify.
It's horrible the way we're treated.
It's horrible.
No one knows what he's talking about.
There is no test where they take a bowling ball and drop it on top of a car in Japan to determine whether the car should be imported to Japan.
That doesn't exist.
That's, like, what?
Hmm?
There's not a car manufactured in existence that would not dent if you dropped a bowling ball on the hood.
from 20 feet up in the air.
Trump said he didn't even want Japan to pay tariffs, but to build more automobiles in the U.S., saying that he just wants Japan—well, if you want Japan to actually move more automobile manufacturing to the United States, they already build tons of autos in the United States.
Japan does.
So does South Korea.
If you want them to do that, So do German companies, by the way.
All you have to do is lower the tax burden in the United States, which is one of the things that Trump has done by lowering the corporate tax rates.
He said, the free trade globalists are against his trade moves because they're worldly people.
They have stuff on the other side.
Here he's accusing anyone who believes in free trade of wanting to impoverish the United States.
Again, this is so dumb.
If you actually believe that the United States is stronger by taxing its citizens at inordinately high rates, you're out of your mind.
This is what people forget about tariffs.
A tariff is just a tax.
It is a tax on everyone to the benefit of a few.
So the only argument that's been made on behalf of tariffs is basically that these industries are so important, they are so vital, that everybody in the United States should be taxed in order to benefit that few people.
Remember, that's what a tariff does.
It's not punishing foreign companies nearly as much as it's punishing American consumers.
So even if China is quote-unquote cheating, right, like they're subsidizing their own programs, well, so are we.
So the idea is that they're taxing their citizens in order to subsidize a particular industry and generate a product for cheap.
Is that an argument that we should tax our own citizens to do the same?
Why is raising taxes on our citizens making anything better?
The question is, better for whom?
Better for the federal government?
Because now they get to pick and choose which industries they like?
Or better for the consumer?
The answer certainly is not better for the consumer.
It's not even better for job creation inside the United States.
So, again, Larry Kudlow, Godspeed, my friend.
Please, talk some sense into the president over all of this.
Okay, now meanwhile...
There is still hubbub occurring over Katy Perry.
So I discussed this briefly yesterday.
Now we actually have the clip.
So apparently on a new American Idol, which is on ABC, Katy Perry, who I don't know when she morphed into this bizarre looking like Hunger Games refugee.
She used to be a pretty girl, with the long hair.
This haircut is not flattering to Katy Perry.
And I don't know who did her makeup.
It looks as though she walked into a door covered with makeup, basically.
But enough ripping on Katy Perry's appearance.
She's a naturally beautiful person, obviously.
But Katy Perry was on American Idol.
She's one of the judges.
And this 19-year-old guy on American Idol comes in to audition, and here's what happens.
Come here, buddy.
No, wait, hold on.
Come here!
Come here right now!
You can't be... Come here right now!
Come here!
What, on the cheek?
He didn't even make the smush sound!
Okay, let me start over, let me start over.
Okay, okay.
Oh!
Oh, it went down!
Did you get it?
Okay, so it turns out that this guy actually was not particularly happy about the situation.
He said that he was trying to save his first kiss with somebody he actually gave a crap about, which seems like a nice thing to me, right?
I have the same policy myself.
You know, I think that this is—and he was humiliated for this.
Of course, everybody's laughing about this now.
Imagine the double standard here for just a second.
Imagine for a second that it was not, in fact, this guy and Katy Perry.
It was one of her male co-hosts and a 19-year-old girl.
And the 19-year-old girl said, I've never been kissed.
And the co-host said, come on over here.
Come on over here.
Give me a kiss on the cheek.
First of all, even that would be considered sexual harassment.
Just that much would be considered sexual harassment.
Then imagine that she came over and said, OK, fine, I'll give you a kiss on the cheek.
And he immediately swiveled and gave her a peck on the lips.
That guy would be fired.
His career would be over.
He would be done.
Right?
There's two reasons why people are not taking this seriously.
One good and one bad.
The bad reason why people are not taking this seriously is because there is this view in American culture that sex is an ultimate good.
Not that it's good within certain confines, but that sex and sexual activity and the kissing and all this stuff, that it's good under any circumstances, right?
The Pleasantville view of sex.
Have you ever seen the movie Pleasantville, which is an awful film?
The first 30 minutes of the film is really good, and then the rest of the movie is garbage.
So the basic concept of the film is that there's a bunch of people who are living in modern times, and Tobey Maguire loves watching this show called Pleasantville from the 1950s, where everything is really clean-cut and really everybody's very nice to each other, and then he somehow gets sucked back into that with his sister.
And his sister is basically, in the movie, promiscuous and sexually active, and she goes back there and she brings color to the lives of all the people of Pleasantville with her sexual liberation Because obviously modern morality is better than 1950s morality, despite the rates of STDs and single motherhood.
Everything is better now than it was then.
So the way that you liberate people is through sex, not through commitment, not through obligation.
The way that you make people free is through random sexual activity.
So this guy should just be happy because after all, Katy Perry just kissed him and Katy Perry's famous and Katy Perry is beautiful.
So therefore, he should be a happy camper.
His consent doesn't matter at all because any sort of sexual activity is fine.
But that obviously is not the whole story.
There's also the part of the story that he's a male and she's a female.
So when a woman is sexually forward, this is considered also an ultimate good.
When a man is sexually forward, this is considered usually an ultimate bad, right?
If a man had done this to a girl, then I think everybody would rightly say that's bad.
The reason they would say that's bad is because the male aggressive sexual instinct is considered rapey.
But the female aggressive sexual instinct, which does happen in some females, certainly not as common as among males, that is considered women's empowerment.
So Katy Perry's empowered so she can do whatever she wants, even if the guy doesn't want it.
Okay, so that is the bad reason why people are ignoring this.
The good reason why people are ignoring this to a certain extent is because there is, and it's not really a good reason, it's a mediocre reason, is because of course there's a double standard.
Of course there's a double standard.
No one sees the male sexual instinct in the way that they see the female sexual instinct.
No one sees Katy Perry as a sexual predator because she's a woman.
No one would see a man doing this as anything but a sexual predator because he's a man.
There's a good reason for that, because there are natural differences between men and women.
It may be a dramatic overrate of the situation, right, to extend it to what Katy Perry did here and say that's okay.
But, it is true that human beings see a natural difference between men and women, which is why we treat these situations differently, and yet we as a society deny that those differences exist, which is this really bizarre thing that we do, and really stupid.
Also, one of the things that bugs me about this particularly, is this guy was basically shamed, right?
Why would he be offended?
Because virginity until marriage is stupid, and kissing until love, waiting to kiss until love, that's stupid too.
As a proactive, as a real advocate for that position, that you should wait until marriage, that you should reserve physical intimacy for the person that you love and are committed to for life, I think that this is just another, just throw another branch on the fire in the conflagration that eats Western values from the inside.
Okay, that's a pretty deep read on a pretty minor incident, but let's get to some things that I like and then some things that I hate.
Today, things that I like.
So, we've been doing books about socialism.
So, of course, the classic on this topic is Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
This is about the prison system in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956.
This book was largely responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or at least the moral legitimacy of the Soviet Union in the West.
That for a lot of Western leftists, the Soviet Union was a place that was good.
It was a place that was to be worth emulating.
It provided a new vision of the future.
Lincoln Steffens, the journalist, went over to the Soviet Union and said, I've seen the future, and it works.
And Walter Durant, he went over there during the Ukrainian famine in 1932, and he said, everything's fine there.
All this talk about starvation, it's nonsense.
People thought the Soviet Union was the wave of the future until this book came out.
This book was banned in the Soviet Union, and it was smuggled to the West.
It is a masterwork.
I mean, it's very long, but it is worth the read.
Solzhenitsyn was a communist.
He started off as a communist.
Then he ended up in the Gulag, and he talks about what the dehumanization of socialism and communism do to people.
Well worth the read.
Obviously, one of the great books, really, in the history of the world.
The Gulag Archipelago.
Archipelago is a series of islands by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So, Senator Rand Paul, obviously a civil libertarian, and he's been very much opposed to, for example, the Bush administration policy of treating prisoners of war as terrorists captured abroad, not as prisoners of war, but as detainees, as unlawful combatants, and the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on them.
Now, it is true that enhanced interrogation techniques allowed us to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the organizers of 9-11, we wouldn't have otherwise been able to get, but Rand Paul has been adamantly and steadfastly opposed to that.
What's not fine is him slandering Gina Haspel.
So, Gina Haspel is Trump's pick to lead the CIA, and she oversaw a secret prison in Thailand, which was used for rendition, and she's been bashed for that, because the idea here is that we should never have used rendition.
The rendition program is that terrorists would be captured abroad.
Instead of bringing them back home, we would hand them over to a U.S.
ally, and those people would be able to use methods that we would not approve here in the United States, according to the New York Times.
She ran a prison code named Cat's Eye, and that began her deep involvement in the agency's counterterrorism operation, showed her willingness to take part in the agency's Rendition Detention and Interrogation program, which shaped her career.
This is when she was younger and she was rising in the organization.
She's the first woman who would become the head of the CIA if she were appointed.
There's no evidence that she enjoys torture.
But Rand Paul decides that this is where he's going to go.
Well, there was a book written about the torture treatment, the waterboarding, and some of her comments were basically gleeful.
The man can't breathe and he's choking on saliva and water.
And she's saying, oh, you're a good actor.
And it's, you know, I can't believe a grown man's crying because of this treatment.
And it almost seemed to be a little bit of glee in her voice that she actually enjoyed the torture.
And I think that's not who we need to lead the CIA.
There are many career officials of the CIA who would be perfectly competent to do this, but we should not reward somebody who actually participated in torture treatment.
Okay, there's a particular problem with this is that he's completely misquoting the book, okay?
The book does not even mention Haspel.
So here's a U.S.
intelligence official.
Quote, Senator Paul's claims today about Gina Haspel are not only inaccurate, but contradicted by the very source materials he relied on.
The senator quotes liberally from page 263 of James Mitchell's book Enhanced Interrogation in describing the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.
By the way, Abu Zubaydah, one of the worst terrorists in modern history, in claiming that Ms. Haspel was the CIA chief of base who was present and expressing joy at this interrogation.
A reading of the same page demonstrates the chief of base present and quoted during this event was a man, not Gina Haspel.
This is one of many false claims about Ms. Haspel being peddled by the uninformed.
And the author was on Fox Business saying this is just not true.
He said he's referring to a section from my book where the chief of base was confronting because he was faking confusion.
That chief of base was not Gina.
That's the way they're going to attack her and take things out of context and distort them.
I don't think he's deliberately distorting them.
I do think someone told him something that's not true.
I did not refer to her.
That does not refer to her.
So.
Clearly, Rand Paul owns Gina Haspel.
An apology on that score, even if you don't like Gina Haspel's background.
Ron Wyden, who is a complete nutjob from, I think he's from Washington.
He's from Oregon, I think.
A Democrat from Oregon.
He says that Republicans hid Haspel's background when they decided to nominate her.
The Trump administration is engaged in an out-and-out cover-up to keep the American people from knowing about her professional background.
As you know, there have been many public stories linking her to torture.
I'm a John McCain guy on these issues.
John McCain says it's not right morally, and he points out it's not effective.
AND THE REALITY IS THE CIA HAS ACTUALLY LIED TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND TO THE CONGRESS.
THEY HAVE CLAIMED THAT TORTURE STOP TERRORIST PLOTS.
THERE'S NO EVIDENCE OF THAT.
SO I AND SENATOR MARTIN HINRICH HAVE LED THE EFFORT TO GET THIS NOMINEE'S BACKGROUND DECLASSIFIED.
I CAN TELL YOU THERE IS -- OKAY, NOBODY IS TRYING TO People know that Gina Haspel was involved in the waterboard program and in the rendition program.
The question is, was it legal at the time?
Number one.
Number two, was it immoral?
I think it's still questionable as to whether it was immoral.
I think that waterboarding terrorists for information that could prevent future terrorist attacks, I am not going to pretend that I think that that's a terrible thing.
I don't think that's a terrible thing.
At all.
OK, so we'll be here tomorrow.
We'll be back to discuss all the news, plus the mailbag.
So if you're going to subscribe, today's a good day to do it, because that makes sure that you can get your questions in.
You can email us, and you can also come watch the show live and ask me questions live, get your answers live on air.
So check that out, please.
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We appreciate it.
You're listening to The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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