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March 26, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:55
Children, Scandals, and Tariffs, Oh My! | Ep. 503
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It's a busy weekend as high school students march, Stormy Daniels comes clean, and tariff talk dominates the economy.
We'll get to all of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, folks, I promise, not everything I say today will be a sexual pun with regard to a scandal about a porn star.
I will attempt to make only 73% of all the things I say some sort of double entendre or pun, because we have to be serious about the news cycle.
Sorry, I can't even make it through that.
We'll get to all this stuff.
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All right.
The news cycle began over the weekend with this big March for Our Lives that happened in Washington, D.C.
Now, approximately 200,000 people showed up in the March for Our Lives.
It's a good number.
It's a solid number.
The March for Life in 2012 had 650,000 people who showed up to it.
Was the media coverage blanket the way that it was on Saturday?
Now listen, I don't think that this is about the kids at Parkland.
Kids are kids.
Some of them say smart things, some of them say dumb things.
And just because some tragedy fell upon them doesn't mean that they suddenly have expertise on guns, for example.
But the main issue here is why the media have decided to highlight and spotlight these kids.
And the reason is because the kids can say things that the media can hide behind.
The high school kids who don't really know much about guns, don't know much about gun control, but can speak with passion and verve and are attractive on camera, They can say things that the media want to say, but know that they would be bashed about the ears for saying because they are supposed to be objective.
And so what the media do instead is they put all of these kids on camera for hours at a time, and then claim that if you criticize what these kids are saying, they're actually criticizing the experiences of these kids.
This is another form of identity politics.
So identity politics is this idiotic, concept from the left that suggests that we can identify the quality of your perspective simply by the color of your skin or your ethnicity or your age or some immutable characteristic about yourself.
Well, in this particular case, the suggestion is that the opinions of these kids are sacrosanct because these kids experience tragedy.
I'm not questioning whether these kids experienced tragedy.
They did.
But I am questioning whether their perspectives have any additional value because they experienced tragedy.
George Soros went through the Holocaust, right?
He was a guy who ended up having to help the Nazis in order to survive.
I can still say that.
I think all of his political perspectives are sheer garbage.
That doesn't mean that I'm criticizing George Soros' experiences in the Holocaust.
And the same thing is true for these kids.
And the stuff the kids were saying was just pretty egregious.
One of the things they were doing is they were carrying around these tags, these price tags that said $1.05 in order to criticize Senator Marco Rubio.
Now, Senator Rubio put himself out there in front of a town hall obeying bang angry people in order to try and make some sort of, come to some sort of agreement and solution with people in Florida over what to do to protect kids' safety.
And instead, he's been just clubbed around.
So these kids were wearing around tags that said $1.05.
Why?
Because if you take the receipts that Marco Rubio has had from the NRA and you average it over the number of students in the state of Florida, it comes out to $1.05 for each student.
Their suggestion is that Marco Rubio is being paid off $1.05 for every student in the state of Florida to be pro-gun.
That's disgusting.
It's not true.
It's a lie.
It's malicious.
Obviously, it's stupid.
If you think that Marco Rubio is pro-gun because the NRA gives him like $5,000, you're out of your mind.
The idea that Marco Rubio is sitting around waiting for the NRA to sign a check and then he decides to be pro-gun is insulting.
I find this whole line of argument really stupid.
I found it stupid when it was being pushed by John McEna's campaign finance reform.
I find it stupid now.
Politicians generally don't support causes because they're being bribed by constituents.
They support causes, and then the people who back those causes pay so those people can get into office.
It's not like, if you thought the NRA was just going around bribing people, why is it the Democrats aren't able to be bribed?
Why is it the NRA can't go to Democrats and bribe them?
Is it because Democrats are such upstanding characters?
Or is it because Democrats are pure gun control fanatics and the NRA doesn't want to see them elected?
But again, this is all part of the dog and pony show to suggest that people who disagree on gun control are actually bad human beings.
And so we're going to go through some of the arguments that were being made by a lot of the kids at this rally, because I think that it's important to look at the arguments, not just at the speakers.
But what the media want us to see are the still photos of David Hogg with his arm outstretched and Emma Gonzalez standing there silently, and then we're supposed to say, well, anything these people choose to say must be right.
Again, I have nothing but sympathy for what they went through.
I have sympathy for what Kyle Cashew, who's a conservative student, went through.
All these kids went through something.
It doesn't mean their experiences confer any sort of expertise upon them.
OK, so we start with David Hogg.
David Hogg has been the most ubiquitous member of the cadre of classmates.
He's been on virtually every TV show.
He's done Ellen.
He does CNN on a regular basis.
He does the Sunday shows.
He doesn't know anything about guns.
He doesn't know much about gun control.
But he certainly knows how to demagogue.
And so for four minutes, you'll hear him demagogue over and over and over in the most dramatic fashion.
It's irritating to watch, I understand.
Particularly for people who are pro-Second Amendment.
But it's important to know what the propagandists in the media are doing with this kid.
Because again, the kid can speak out.
It's his absolute right to speak out.
And obviously he can speak in front of any camera that he wants to speak in front of.
That's great.
But he can be criticized just like anyone else.
I know.
I was 17.
I wrote a syndicated column.
I got criticized just like everybody else.
That's the way free speech works in the country.
Okay, here is David Hogg.
We're going to go through his full speech or as much of it as possible.
First off, I'm going to start off by putting this price tag right here as a reminder for you guys to know how much Marco Rubio took for every student's life in Florida.
$1.05.
Okay, that is a lie.
Just pause it right there again.
That's a lie.
Okay?
The $1.05 thing is a slander against Marco Rubio.
It's disgusting.
And by the way, if you want to actually come to some sort of agreement about what we can do here, you might want to start by talking to the senator from Florida who's actually proposed legislation with Bill Nelson on protecting schools.
This is not designed to help anybody.
This is designed to virtue signal.
And it's designed in order so that Democrats can feel better about themselves.
Okay, Hogg continues.
The grasp of corruption shackles the District of Columbia.
The winter is over.
Change is here.
The sun shines on a new day, and the day is ours.
I don't know what that means.
For the first time, voters show up 18% of the time at midterm elections.
Not anymore.
Well, I mean, we don't know the stats yet, so there's that.
Now, who here is gonna vote in the 2018 election?
If you listen real close, you can hear the people in power shaking.
They've gotten used to being protective of their position, chewing safety, the safety of inaction.
Inaction is no longer safe.
And to that we say, no more.
OK, pause right there for one second.
OK, I just want to point something out.
The generic ballot over the weekend closed to about five points.
It had been up to 12, I believe.
One of the reasons it's closing is because the Republicans are looking at this kind of demagoguery and they're saying, fine, I'll go out and vote.
Before, the question was, would Republicans go out and vote in any significant numbers?
And there is no reason to think Republicans would.
It's an off-year election.
There's no real galvanizing issue.
You want to galvanize Republicans.
Tell them that you're going to take away their guns, that they're evil people who want to murder children if they don't let you take away their guns.
You want to know why that ballot gap is closing?
It's because every time the media decide to go on a crusade against Second Amendment rights, their bunch of Americans say, fine, I'll finally get off my duff and go vote.
Okay, so before David Hogg declared his victory, especially on the gun control issue, he should recognize a couple of things.
One, Democrats in power have not passed any gun control.
Barack Obama passed zero gun control between 2009 and 2011 when he had full control of Congress.
And two, Republicans are actually going to show up in broader numbers thanks to this sort of demagoguery than they would otherwise.
Okay, we can continue.
96 people.
96 people die every day from guns in our country, yet most representatives have no public stance on guns.
Okay, pause it for one second.
Okay, first of all, 96 people die in our country every day.
66 of those people die from suicide.
Okay, two-thirds of all the people who are lumped into the gun violence statistics are suicides.
Second of all, the vast majority of people who are killed with guns in the United States are killed with handguns.
The proposals that have been pushed by March for Our Lives students They have nothing to do with handguns.
They have to do with AR-15s and so-called assault rifles.
So none of this makes any sense on a policy level.
Continue.
And to that, we say, no more!
We are going to make this the voting issue.
We're going to take this to every election, to every state and every city.
We're going to make sure the best people get in our elections to run, not as politicians, but as Americans.
Because this, this is not cutting it.
When people try to suppress your vote, and there are people who stand against you because you're too young, we say no more.
When politicians say that your voice doesn't matter because the NRA owns them, we say no more!
Okay, so we can stop it there.
I don't need to listen to the rest of this.
Okay, so first of all, the yelling and the screaming, I know there are a lot of young kids who think that when they do this, that this is actually just showing passion on the podium.
It doesn't.
It's not convincing.
It doesn't make people like you.
It doesn't make people rally behind you.
In fact, calmness and reason actually make people rally behind you more than screaming from the podium.
Again, this whole thing that the NRA owns politicians, it's just not true, but I guess that that's not the point.
The point here is, of course, to demagogue the issue as much as humanly possible.
It wasn't just David Hogg who did this.
At the end of it, he gave sort of a revolution symbol.
The person who did this the best, actually, I will say Emma Gonzales is the most skilled politician of these kids.
Emma Gonzales went up there.
That was effective theatrics.
She's actually good at this.
David Hogg, not particularly good at this.
Cameron Kask is another one of the students from Parkland.
"I had a classmate's moment of silence, "and the moment of silence lasted for five minutes, "and then at six minutes, 20 seconds, "she said, 'That's how long the shooting "at our school lasted.'" That was effective theatrics.
She's actually good at this.
David Hogg, not particularly good at this.
Cameron Kask is another one of the students from Parkland.
Here's what he had to say.
Again, this sort of language is not going to endear you to people you have to make agreements with on the issue of gun control. - To the leaders, skeptics, and cynics who told us to sit down and stay silent, wait your turn.
Welcome to the revolution.
OK, if you want to scare gun owners into going out and vote, tell them it's a revolution to take their guns.
See how that's going to go.
See how it goes when you tell a bunch of gun owners that it's a revolution to take away their firearms, which is really what they're talking about here.
Again, all this stuff is great fodder for media members.
It's not great fodder for actually fostering any sort of victory on the issue of protecting schools.
By the way, the chances of being killed in a school shooting, I believe, in the United States are something like 1 in 614 million.
In any case.
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So, again, the reason I'm going through the litany of claims by these high school kids is because I want to show that they haven't even bothered to do the research.
And again, these kids can say whatever they want.
It's not their fault.
They're 17.
I get it.
Okay?
I was 17, too.
I was writing a syndicated column on politics.
I don't agree with everything I wrote when I was 17, because who does?
But the media is proclaiming that these are fully formed adults capable of leading the debate on gun control, when the vast majority of them obviously don't know anything about gun control.
Here's another one of these students, Alex Nguyen.
So Alex Nguyen says, you know, there are too many people here who want to arm teachers.
And then he makes what would be an incredibly dumb point.
If teachers start packing heat, are they going to arm our pastors, ministers, and rabbis?
I mean, I hope.
Are they going to arm the guys scanning tickets at the movie theater?
Are they going to arm the person wearing the Mickey Mouse costume at Disney?
This is what the National Rifle Association wants, and we will not stand for it!
I don't even know what this kid is talking about.
Arming Mickey Mouse?
I love all the cheering people.
What is he even saying?
First of all, how could Mickey Mouse even get that out of his costume?
Those pants aren't real on the Mickey Mouse costume.
He doesn't actually have pockets.
Does he have a shoulder holster, Mickey Mouse?
I've been to Disneyland recently.
Mickey Mouse has nowhere to hide that sucker.
Like, if you're going to have anybody at Disneyland packing heat, it's got to be, like, the characters from Mary Poppins.
At least they're wearing jackets or something.
But Mickey Mouse can't even get inside that costume, so there's no logic to this one.
But, again, do I want my rabbi packing heat?
You bet your ass I want my rabbi packing heat, okay?
My synagogue is one of the most likely places in America to be targeted.
Number one, because it's a synagogue.
And number two, because there are a lot of people who know I go to this synagogue.
So, you know, yes, I want everyone packing heat at my synagogue.
Yes.
Yes.
I wish my rabbi could pack heat.
I think ministers should pack heat.
Ask the minister in the Texas church shooting.
Ask the ministers in South Carolina, in Charleston during the church shooting, whether it would have been better if the minister were packing heat.
The answer is yes, that would have been much better if people were packing heat.
So I don't even understand this argument.
The argument is that fewer people should pack heat?
Okay, just to show you how dumb this is.
Do we have that video of the kids leaving the rally?
Okay, so here's some video of the kids leaving the rally.
These are the same kids who just said they don't want everybody packing heat.
A lot of these kids have said they don't want additional school security.
See if you can notice something weird about this video.
Okay, watch.
Okay, what we're watching right now is a bunch of kids who are walking by, right, these are all the high school kids, and they're being ushered out by a bunch of security members.
And, wow, look at that.
What are the security members carrying?
Why, it looks as though they are armed and carrying guns.
What?
The high school students at a gun control march are being protected by people carrying guns?
Why, that would seem ironic and crazy.
The same people claiming, how dare anyone say that we need more armed security in schools will say, we need armed security for this march.
Pretty, pretty amazing stuff.
So just brilliant to show a little more of the additional brilliance.
Here are some of the signs that were that were shown.
So let's go through these.
One is freedom more important than safety is something that legitimately one of these people was holding.
Is freedom more important than safety?
OK.
Did any of these kids have like a basic, in any sense, did these kids have any sort of basic American education?
Is freedom more important than safety?
Yes.
Yes, freedom is more important than safety.
In fact, Benjamin Franklin actually had a specific quote on this in which he said that any people who gives up safety, who gives up a little bit of freedom for safety, will end up with neither safety nor freedom.
A very, very famous quote by Benjamin Franklin.
In fact, the American Revolution was largely fought on the basis that freedom was more important than safety.
Resistance to any dictatorship is based on the idea that freedom is more important than safety.
So this sign is stupid.
Let's have another stupid sign.
Let's see.
This one is particularly great.
This one says, my uterus is more restricted than your gun.
It says something like, my uterus is more regulated than your guns, is what this entire thing says.
Okay, number one, this is untrue.
You can actually use your uterus to kill people.
You can't use your gun to kill people in the United States legally.
So there's that.
Also, I assume that most women do not actually do like a federal background check before they allow use of their uterus.
So there's that as well.
I don't think that some of these people are checking ID even before use of the uterus is allowed.
So that's a weird sign.
So well done, everybody there.
And here is a final one.
It says, F the NRA.
And so, here's a question.
Did any of the kids at this rally hold signs saying, F the shooter?
There's a point made by Cameron Gray on Twitter.
The answer, of course, is no.
The stupidity doesn't end there.
Here is Cameron Caskey again, this is one of the students you saw speaking a little bit earlier, saying that it's not shooters that make shootings happen, it's weapons that make shootings happen.
The fact that nobody is in the bill, they don't say the word gun once.
What causes all these shootings?
What's the one thing to tie everything together?
There's no specific mental health problem that makes all these shootings happen.
It's the weapon.
And the fact that they aren't taking any action towards it is proof that we need to keep on going.
Okay, when they say it's the weapon, the most deadly school shooting in the United States actually took place in Virginia Tech.
32 people were killed.
A handgun was used.
Those are not the guns that people are talking about.
And if we're going to talk about comorbidity between gun ownership and school shootings, it's actually really, really low.
100 million Americans own guns.
The number of school shootings in the United States is very low compared to the number of people who own guns, obviously.
The comorbidity is actually, I would assume, a lot higher between the number of shooters and the number of people who suffer from severe mental illness.
In any case, the statistics are really low just because the sample size is so small for school shootings.
But if we're going to use statistical analysis, and we're going to say that the common factor is the guns, I would say that more of the common factor when it comes to these issues is the mental illness, at least insofar as the percentage of the general population that owns guns or has mental illness performing these school shootings.
Well, so one of the things that's been happening is finally the media have started to pay attention to some of the other students.
Now, Kyle Kashuv, who's, I know, a listener to the program and I've advised him a little bit on the side.
Kyle?
There's a student over at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and Kyle was finally on Face the Nation.
Now, the media have been saying that, look, you guys claim that we're biased, but we're having on people like Kyle.
We're having on some people who are pro-Second Amendment.
Right, after we shamed you into it, after Twitter didn't verify Kyle for weeks, after I highlighted Kyle, after I personally started pushing for people to pay attention to Kyle, people started paying attention to Kyle.
That's great.
It's a little late.
Okay, Kyle finally has been verified, but the media have not had him on any of the shows.
He was supposed to be on CNN the other day, and CNN wouldn't have him on because he had said nasty things about one of the CNN hosts because that CNN host had been allowing bashing of Marco Rubio for no apparent reason.
And finally, Kyle was allowed on Face the Nation, and Kyle knows these issues a lot better than his peers.
He's challenged at least a couple of his peers to debate, but nobody's actually going to hold that.
CNN's not going to have a debate between Kyle Kashuv and Cameron Kasky or Kyle Kashuv and David Hogg.
It ain't going to happen.
Now here is Kyle talking on Face the Nation, making what I think is a much more intelligent case with regard to gun control.
I talked to senators and I looked at all the facts and they all point in the same direction that a ban on assault weapons will not solve this issue.
It's simply a... And restrictions on high-capacity magazines.
That won't solve the issue.
What we've seen is that there are certain things such as enforcing the regulation that's currently in law.
I mean, we've seen on so many different levels that the cowards of Broward failed, the FBI failed, Sheriff Scott Israel failed, so many different multi-layered levels failed Okay, and of course he's exactly right.
The media have ignored all of the specific circumstances surrounding this shooting so they can talk about guns more broadly.
They do this all the time.
When JFK was shot, they suggested that the real issue was not that JFK was shot by a communist, but that it was race relations in the United States that were more broadly responsible for JFK's shooting.
The left will always swivel from the actual facts of any given scenario in order to reach out to what their agenda actually is.
And they'll ignore people who have something to say in the process.
Patrick Petty is the brother of one of the people who was shot In the in the shooting and and he tweeted out at Emma Gonzalez, who mentioned his sister, quote, Hey, Emma, please stop using my sister's name to push your agenda.
She did not and would not support it.
That did not get any nearly the amount of media coverage as Emma Gonzalez's speech did, of course, because this is more about media bias than it is about anything else.
Well, in just a second, I'm going to talk about Stormy Daniels.
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Okay, so in other big news over the weekend, Bigger news, probably, than this March, which was helped out by a bunch of organizing groups, which is fine.
Stormy Daniels, obviously, is the big news of the weekend.
So, her interview on 60 Minutes was put off for a little while by the Duke-Kansas game, which Duke lost.
And Stormy Daniels finally comes on, and then there's a 60-minute interview — a very long interview, it's not all 60 minutes — with Anderson Cooper on CBS's 60 Minutes.
And things got kind of crazy.
So there are a bunch of things that Stormy Daniels said that were pretty wild.
We knew most of this.
So to start off, we knew most of this, right?
Most of the stuff that we knew about Stormy Daniels, we already knew.
Stormy Daniels, for those who don't know, is the star of movies like The Witches of Breastwick, as well as Watching Samantha, Secrets of the Velvet Ring, What's a Girl Gotta Do, I Know What You Did Last Night, and Porking with Pride 2.
So she is just, you know, she's one of the great actresses of our time.
Ron Jeremy on the Loose Atlantic City is one of her classics.
Of course, Busty Beauties 2, Dripping Wet Sex 4.
And she's really...
She's class.
I mean, she's all class.
And one of the things about her that is worth noting is that, I will say, she has better script taste than half the stars in Hollywood, because the only two legit movies I can find her in are The 40-Year-Old Virgin and, let's see, what was the other one?
It's The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.
So she's in both of those.
She plays in one, a lap dancer, and in one, a porn star.
So I guess that's typecasting a little bit.
I guess you wouldn't expect her to play like the female rocket scientist.
But in any case, maybe Stormy Daniels is secretly brilliant.
I tend to think that Stormy Daniels is a porn star and that she does things that porn stars do, like she has sex with men for transactional reasons.
Now, listen, does this make Trump less scummy?
No, the president when it comes to women is gross.
I mean, this is unquestioned.
And people who do question it are being stupid.
Donald Trump, with women, is a pig.
He's been a pig all of his life.
This is a man who said, That avoiding STDs in the 1970s was his own personal Vietnam.
At a time when he could have been drafted and was claiming bones, burs, and his heels, he was, in fact, off of his heels for a variety of other reasons.
Donald Trump is a guy who said that nothing in life matters as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass on your arm.
This is a man who's had three wives and cheated on all of them, usually with a future wife.
I mean, I suppose that we should consider ourselves lucky that Stormy Daniels isn't the current First Lady of the United States, considering Donald Trump's actual record here.
Donald Trump is a guy who was caught on tape saying that he grabs women by the bleep.
Donald Trump is yucky with women.
This we know.
And criticizing Stormy Daniels for this public display is not exactly letting Donald Trump off the hook.
Other things that are worth noting about the situation.
So here's the situation.
Back in 2006, Stormy Daniels met Donald Trump at a golf course.
Donald Trump was doing some sort of event.
And she flirted with him, and then she went up to his room for dinner.
And then she had sex with him, I guess one time, in the hopes that he would put her on The Apprentice.
And then he did not, in fact, put her on The Apprentice, but he continued to flirt with her by phone.
I guess the second time that they met, she went up to his room and they watched Shark Week.
No joke.
Like, that's power play, Mr. President.
Bringing the woman back up to your room.
Bringing the stars of Forrest Bump up to your room.
And watching Shark Week, it's a move, I guess.
That move did not end up working.
But then, so Stormy Daniels claimed a couple of things in this interview.
She claims in 2011 that after she gave the news to InTouch magazine that she had had an affair with the president, why InTouch even thought that was newsworthy is beyond me.
Apparently they didn't think it was that newsworthy.
They offered her like 15 grand for it.
But in any case, She says that she was approached in a parking lot by a random dude and that the random dude said to her that she had her kid with her and he said, it would be a pity if something happened to that kid's mom.
Threatened her.
About the InTouch story.
She didn't provide any substantiation.
She didn't provide a description of the guy.
We'll find out maybe more about that.
Then she claims that in 2016, she was paid off by Michael Cohen, who's the president's lawyer, for $130,000 to keep her trap shut right before the election.
She signed, she took it, and then she lied about having an affair with the president.
She said, no, I didn't have an affair with the president.
Well, she had to explain all of that to Anderson Cooper.
Now she claims, of course, she's being threatened by the president in some sort of nefarious way.
What she's really being claimed—what she's really being threatened with is violation of the nondisclosure, which is perfectly legal.
Right?
The only part here—there are two things that are legally questionable.
Well, that would be illegal if they happened.
One is Stormy Daniels being actually physically threatened by someone.
That obviously is illegal.
And the second is if Michael Cohen was giving a quote-unquote in-kind contribution to Donald Trump's campaign by paying Stormy Daniels out of his own pocket to keep her silent.
So this is a very weird interview, because Stormy Daniels starts off by talking about why exactly it is that she was—why she's doing the interview in the first place.
So he turned around and pulled his pants down a little, and, you know, he had underwear on and stuff, and I just gave him a couple swats.
You, you are special.
You remind me of my daughter.
You know, he's like, you're smart, beautiful, and a woman to be reckoned with.
I like you.
I like you.
You know, don't worry about that.
We don't even, we have separate rooms and stuff.
Did you two go out for dinner that night?
No.
You had dinner in the room?
Yes.
What happened next?
So I excused myself and I went to the restroom.
You know, I was in there for a little bit and came out and he was sitting, you know, on the edge of the bed when I walked out.
Perched.
And you had sex with him?
Yes.
I remember arriving and he was watching Shark Week.
He made me sit and watch an entire documentary about a shark attack.
It wasn't, at that point, a business meeting.
It was just watching Shark Week.
Yeah.
Did you have sex with him again?
No.
I was in a parking lot going to a fitness class with my infant daughter.
I was taking, you know, the seats facing backwards in the back seat, diaper bag, you know, getting all the stuff out.
And a guy walked up on me and said to me, leave Trump alone, forget the story.
And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, it's a beautiful little girl.
It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom.
And then he was gone.
OK, so let's go through some of this stuff.
OK, so first of all, the actual interview starts with Anderson Cooper asking, why are you doing this?
He says, I guess I'm not sure 100% of why you're doing this.
And she says, because it was very important for me to be able to defend myself.
And he's leading her.
The whole interview, Anderson was really giving her leading questions like, is part of wanting to set the record straight?
Why don't you just tell her that part of it is wanting to set the record straight?
And then she says, People are just saying that whatever they wanted to say about me, I was perfectly fine saying nothing at all, but I'm not okay with being made out to be a liar, or people thinking I did this for money.
And people are like, oh, you're an opportunist, you're taking advantage of this.
Yes, I'm getting more job offers now, but tell me one person who had turned down a job offer making more than they've been making, doing the same thing they've always done.
She's doing it for the money.
Sorry I put this out.
Again, this story is really not about Stormy Daniels.
It's about the President of the United States being disgusting.
I mean, he's the one who chose to act inappropriately with Stormy Daniels, shall we say, to put it mildly.
That's the President of the United States' fault.
He's an idiot, and he's disgusting when it comes to women.
Have I made that clear?
Have I said that enough times?
He's gross.
I don't find the President's activity here even mildly defensible.
But here's what I do object to.
The media are trying to make Stormy Daniels to be some sort of victim, unless she was actually physically threatened.
If she was physically threatened, she's a victim.
Other than that, there's no victimization story here.
She took $130,000 from a candidate for President of the United States to keep her mouth shut, and then she didn't shut up.
OK, and Stormy Daniels also said that she had consensual sex with Donald Trump.
So this is not a Me Too moment.
Now, what's really amazing is there are some people on the left who are trying to make it into a Me Too moment.
And again, I'm happy to discuss all the legal ramifications of this.
It may be a campaign finance violation.
I don't think it'll take down Trump because you really have to prove a lot to prove a campaign finance violation.
And I can talk about the legal standard and all that in just a second, but when Stormy Daniels says that when the media try to make her out to be some sort of heroic figure, it just doesn't wash.
It just doesn't wash.
Of course she came out after the election cycle, because her story was newly valuable, and it's worth more than $130,000.
So she figures, OK, fine, I'll give them back the $130,000, and I'll make $500,000 by talking about all of this stuff publicly.
But she probably isn't.
Again, she is transactional in this whole thing.
She said, in this interview, openly, that she saw her sex with Trump as a business deal.
She was asked, did you want to have sex with Trump?
She said, no.
They said, were you attracted to Trump?
She said, no.
They said, so why did you have sex with Trump?
And she said, well, I saw it as a business deal.
Meaning that it was like she wanted to get on The Apprentice, and she thought maybe this would give her the possibility of getting on The Apprentice, and sex isn't exactly something that she's stingy about.
So, all right.
But now, what's hilarious is the left is trying to make this into a Me Too moment.
I've seen a couple of articles about how Stormy Daniels was victimized by the power of Donald Trump.
No, she was not, up until the point where a threat was made.
Up until that point, she's a lady who knew that she was sleeping with a married man in order to get ahead in the business.
And this does raise some issues about the nature of the MeToo movement in Hollywood as well, because a lot of the talk in the MeToo movement in Hollywood has been about young actresses having sex with older directors in fully consensual manner, and then suggesting that the power imbalance is the real problem.
Well, is it possible that they saw the sex the same way that Stormy Daniels did?
That she didn't really want to have sex with Trump, but she also knew that if she wanted to get ahead that she would—like, Stormy Daniels herself said it was consensual.
She never accused the president of sexual assault or sexual—or sexual—or rape of any sort.
And so again, the attempt to make Stormy Daniels into the hero of this story doesn't work.
I think you can make Trump into the villain of the story.
I think that it's hard to make Stormy Daniels into the hero of a story where she's clearly not the hero.
I'll talk a little bit more about this in just a second, but first...
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So again, as I'm fond of saying, two things can be true at once in the Stormy Daniels interview.
Donald Trump can be disgusting.
Also, as I say, it is not on evidence that Donald Trump would have people threaten people.
In fact, there are a bunch of accounts that are put out there by BuzzFeed News.
BuzzFeed has a long story about how in the 1980s there were a bunch of threats surrounding Donald Trump.
They've tweeted out a series of these threats.
Including there is one that in which a guy who called him his name Carmine said, called up somebody who was going to, I guess, sue Trump over a real estate issue.
So my name is Carmine.
I don't know why you're effing with Mr. Trump, but if you keep effing with Mr. Trump, we know where you live and we're going to your house for your wife and kids.
That's according to one caller.
On April 20th, 1982, according to FBI records, One person called the New York Police Commission reporting that he received a call threatening his life over an abatement in rent by Trump.
The caller, the FBI records state, became very abusive and profane regarding Gleadman's inability to approve Mr. Trump's request for a tax abatement.
Donald Trump's security guards once shoved, threatened, and held a 12-year-old boy and his mother against their will.
This is the allegation after her husband promised to go public with damaging allegations against the Trump Organization.
Again, is thuggish behavior foreign to Trump's organization?
No.
And that's really what this is going to come down to.
When you boil all of this down, when you boil all of this down, what it's going to come down to in the end is whether Donald Trump had his people threaten Stormy Daniels.
That's the only added element here.
The reason people are watching this story as opposed to the thousand other stories about the Trump administration is because there's sex involved with a porn star.
Obviously, that's going to be kind of titillating for the American public, and that's why they are interested on any level at all.
But the only way that this story actually gained some sort of legs beyond just the general interest is if It turns out that Donald Trump actually sent somebody to physically threaten Stormy Daniels.
In that case, then you're talking about a real scandal.
If it just turns out that it's his lawyer paid somebody else to shut up, I'm not sure that's a big enough scandal to take out Trump.
Again, Trump abides by my strong market sufficiency theory.
Everybody already knows You seem to be saying that she has some sort of text message or video or photographs or you could just be bluffing.
going to stick to them.
Now, that's not going to stop a lot of people on the left from claiming that this is going to take down the president.
But look, even Anderson Cooper had to go after Stormy Daniels' lawyer and point out that Daniels' lawyer is a former Democratic operative.
You seem to be saying that she has some sort of text message or video or photographs, or you could just be bluffing.
You should ask some of the other people in my career when they've been on me bluffing.
In college, in law school, you did opposition research for Democratic political operative Rahm Emanuel.
Some people looking at that will say you're politically motivated.
I haven't done anything in politics in over 20 years.
But this is not the usual case you take on.
You are a former Democratic operative, and you're talking about deposing the president.
That sounds political.
No, it sounds righteous.
Okay, it doesn't necessarily sound righteous unless something righteous is actually going on here, and avoiding an agreement that you signed isn't exactly righteous activity.
Again, I keep coming back to this.
The only thing I think that matters in this entire Storm Daniels story is if Trump sent somebody to threaten her.
Or if there's an actual campaign finance violation.
Those are the only two things.
Those could be big stories.
But we don't have the evidence that those stories are true yet.
And Stormy Daniels hasn't identified even the person who threatened her with Trump himself.
So we're going to have to find out more about that.
Listen, is it gross for the country that we're at this point?
Of course it's gross for the country that we're at this point.
I do find the lack of memory irritating on the part of some of the media who don't seem to recall all the way back to the 1990s when Bill Clinton was lying repeatedly about sex.
And the same members of the media We're currently batting Trump around for lying about sex.
We're saying, well, everybody lies about sex, so it's no big deal.
Remember, all of the talk about perjury, all of the criminal charges that were brought against President Clinton in the impeachment hearing by the House, in which he was actually impeached, all of that was brushed off by the media as, he only lied about sex, so who cares?
Well, I guess here they're not going to argue he only threatened about sex or he only signed an NDA about sex, so who cares?
They're not going to do that because obviously it's Trump.
But is it a sad state of affairs that this is the character of our public officials?
Yes.
Is it sad that the American people accept this?
Yes.
Is it pathetic that the president of the United States engaged in this sort of behavior and may continue to engage in this sort of behavior?
Yes.
It makes you sad for the Republic.
It does.
I mean, the Oval Office was once occupied by people like Ronald Reagan.
It was once occupied by people like Calvin Coolidge.
It was once occupied by people like Abraham Lincoln.
And now, I guess it was built after Abraham Lincoln.
But in any case, the White House was occupied by Abraham Lincoln.
But, you know, bottom line is that the character of the country has declined rather markedly when it comes to these sorts of matters, and Trump is more a reflection of that than a catalyst toward it.
Okay.
Now, in other news, the Trump administration is still sticking with this whole tariff nonsense.
The stock market has been in serious trouble for a while.
If you look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average, it dropped 1,400 points last week.
It's up pretty significantly today.
It's up about 430 points today.
But it's been incredibly volatile.
One of the reasons for that is that the president keeps going back and forth on all this tariff talk.
Now, one of the things that's happened inside the Trump administration is that Trump seems to be gathering around him people he is more comfortable with.
So he wasn't quite as comfortable with some of the some of the people previously.
He wasn't super comfortable with H.R.
McMaster as the NSA.
He wasn't super comfortable with Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State.
Now he's surrounded himself with people who are going to try and Smooth off his round, his harsh edges by catering to his shtick.
And so, for example, John Bolton is the new NSA, or will be the new NSA, and John Bolton is now speaking on favor of China tariffs.
Now, I don't think that Bolton is in favor of tariffs, but Bolton is going to pitch the tariffs as a way of negotiation because he understands that if you go into Trump and you tell Trump no, Trump's first reaction is to immediately respond negatively to you.
Trump doesn't like no men.
Trump likes yes men.
He likes people around him who will tell him what he wants to hear.
And the key with manipulating Trump, it appears from the officials inside the administration, is to tell him yes, but.
Right?
Yes, and.
Yes, Mr. President, the tariffs are a great idea, and if you use them as leverage to get a better trade deal with China to get them to lower their trade barriers, then that would be great.
So yes and is a better strategy inside the administration than no?
No is a good strategy for all of us who have to call balls and strikes and who have to tell Trump when he's being stupid.
But if you're inside the administration and you're trying to get Trump to do the right thing, I'm not sure Bolton's tactic here is completely wrong.
So here's Bolton talking about China tariffs.
The United States lives by these agreements.
I can tell you we've got lawyers all over the government who spend a lot of time policing American conduct so that we uphold the obligations that we make when we enter into a treaty.
All we're asking for here is for the Chinese to do the same.
So I think this could be a little shock therapy, get their attention, and hopefully it'll have a good impact.
Okay, so Bolton here is trying to make the case to Trump that these tariffs should only be temporary.
And again, I'm not sure that this is the wrong strategy.
Again, yes and might be the right strategy.
Steve Mnuchin was doing the same thing over at the Treasury Department.
I assume Larry Kudlow will be doing the same thing in his new position as head of the National Economic Council, telling Trump, Yeah, your tariffs are a great idea, but you know it'd be even better.
You know, that's a great idea.
And what'll be great is when everybody decides to come to the table and we get rid of all the tariffs altogether.
Right?
Use it as leverage as opposed to, I just don't like these countries so we're going to tariff them.
This is a significant difference in policy.
I'll explain in a second.
Here's Mnuchin talking about how tariffs really won't impact the economy in any real way.
Now this is stupid, what he's about to say.
To press my point, are the markets wrong to be afraid of the president's tariffs and the impact it'll have on the economy?
I don't expect to see a big impact on the economy.
We've been very careful in how we're doing this and what we're doing.
But again, I think what we're doing is long-term very good for the economy, which it is pressing for free and fair trade.
OK, so again, he's trying to push for the idea that this is an aspect of leverage.
Now, these are two very different views of tariffs.
Trump is suggesting one view and his people are suggesting another.
And we'll see who wins out, whether they're able to convince him.
Trump thinks that tariffs are in and of themselves good.
He believes, because he's wrong, that if we just tariff Chinese goods, The goal is not to get them to lower their trade barriers to American goods.
The goal is to actually harm their economy, because the economy is a zero-sum game.
So if we tariff their goods and make the prices higher on their goods, this inevitably builds up an American industry that is important and valuable, and American industry will boom again, and it'll be just like the 1950s in terms of manufacturing and all this nonsense.
His people are saying something slightly different, and they're trying to kind of sneak the curve past Trump.
They're trying to move inside in that strike zone.
What they're claiming is, they're saying to Trump, look, those tariffs can be a really good way to push China around, to leverage China to lower their own trade barriers.
Then we can lower our trade barriers, China can lower their trade barriers, and then all the products will freely flow.
We're going to use this as a measure of your negotiating skill, Mr. President.
That is not the same outcome.
If Trump follows his heart, these tariffs stay.
If Trump follows his advisors, then the tariffs probably go.
And this is why it's sort of important who Trump has surrounded himself with and how cleverly they approach the issue.
Because if they're smart, they'll continue, I think, to massage the president's shoulders and suggest that this is all great genius, and then sort of push him a little bit toward the free trade side of the market.
Well, simultaneously telling them tariffs are really good ideas.
Trump wants to hear that he's a genius.
He doesn't want to hear that he's wrong.
And so I think all the people he surrounded himself with know that or at least know him well enough to know that that's how you survive inside the Trump administration.
OK, time for a couple of things I like and then some things that I hate.
So things that I like over the weekend, I've been reading David Mamet's new book, Chicago.
It is a fun book to read.
Mamet has a real, obviously, one of the great years for dialogue of all time.
There are some characters who read easier than others, but it is a gangster novel about gangs in Chicago in the 1920s.
There are a couple of historical errors in it that were pointed out by a reviewer over at the Wall Street Journal, but it's entertaining.
And again, he writes really snappy dialogue If you like The Untouchables, then you'll like Chicago, David Mamet's new book.
Check it out.
It's well worth reading.
By the way, David Mamet is a pretty outspoken conservative in Hollywood, which is a rarity.
So he's well worth supporting for that reason alone.
Hey, other things that I like.
So Killer Mike, who's a rapper who, I guess, voted for Bernie Sanders, he is now defending the pro-gun position.
He's actually making a pretty good case for it.
I have worked as a tireless advocate on the behalf of children, disenfranchised women in my community, and I've also worked with gun groups like Georgia's Against Gun Violence that are not, you know, the most pro-secondary.
But I say if there's a table to be sat at, the gun owner needs to be there.
So I kind of try to see a problem from the whole perspective.
Like I told my kids on the school walkout, I love you.
If you walk out that school, walk out my house.
I'm laughing, but it's so serious.
That's simple.
We are a gun-owning family.
We are a family where my sister farms.
We are a family where we'll fish, we'll hunt, but we are not a family that jumps on every single thing an ally of ours does because some stuff we just don't agree with.
You know, we are raising a generation of kids where everyone gets a trophy.
But in real life, everyone don't get a trophy.
No.
You know, in real life, the cops don't come on time.
Okay, Killer Mike, making a good argument there for gun rights.
And it is particularly true, and it has always been true, that gun control in the United States, at least up until the 1960s and 70s, was used largely as a way of keeping black people unarmed in the United States.
I think one of the things that the NRA needs to do better is speak out loudly and proudly in cases like Philando Castile.
Philando Castile had a concealed carry permit, apparently, to carry in the state of Minnesota.
He was shot by police.
And that was a case where the police were dead wrong, apparently.
So Philando Castile should never have been shot.
In cases where there are black folks who are being targeted because they have guns, that needs to be a major issue for the NRA, because owning guns is in fact one of our most basic civil rights, and that holds true for people across the color spectrum.
OK, time for a quick thing that I hate, and then we'll do a Federalist paper.
Okay, time for the thing I hate.
So, the thing that I hate today.
The New York Times has a long and stupid article about boys and girls at preschools in Sweden who are being coached in traits not associated with their gender.
This article is by a woman named Ellen Berry, and the article is all about how they are trying to achieve gender parity in Sweden.
The way they're going to do it is by teaching boys to massage each other's feet and teaching girls to walk around barefoot in the snow and scream out windows, no I am not kidding.
Something was wrong with the Penguins, the incoming class of toddlers at the Seafarers Preschool in a wooded suburb south of Stockholm.
The boys were clamorous and physical.
They shouted and hit.
The girls held up their arms and whimpered to be picked up.
The group of one and two-year-olds had, in other words, split among traditional gender lines.
And at this school, that is not OK.
OK, we can stop right there.
First of all, I have a four-year-old and a two-year-old.
They split along traditional gender lines.
This is what they do.
Not because people are forcing them to, but because girls are girls and boys are boys.
And because my girl, who when she was very little, loved to play with trucks and buses, now will only wear princess dresses.
No matter what.
Every day.
She will only wear particular headbands.
She picks out her clothes and her brother's clothes every morning.
And my boy runs around beating the crap out of everything in a way that his sister never did, because boys and girls are biologically different.
But here's what they do in Sweden to try and fix what goth hath wrought.
Their teachers cleared the rooms of cars and dolls.
They put the boys in charge of the play kitchen.
They made the girls practice shouting no.
Then they decided to open a proper investigation, erecting video cameras in the classroom.
Science may still be divided over whether gender differences are rooted in biology or culture.
Science is not divided on this, okay?
Okay, this is so stupid.
Science is absolutely unanimous.
Gender differences are, in fact, rooted in both biology and culture.
Pretending that gender has nothing to do with biology is insane, okay?
No one believes this except for radical transgender advocates.
Obviously, testosterone in the brain has an impact on how men act.
Obviously, estrogen in development has an impact on how girls act.
This is so incredibly ascientific.
It is pagan crap.
It's anti-factual.
But the New York Times obviously has to obfuscate the issue.
So they say, state curriculum urges teachers and principals to embrace their role as social engineers, requiring them to counteract traditional gender roles and gender patterns.
In other words, we're going to indoctrinate kids into feeling uncomfortable about their own gender because we're pieces of crap human beings.
It's so funny, the same people who say empowerment, self-esteem, will say, I will train my little boy to act like a little girl, even if it makes him feel uncomfortable.
So we can't make 18-year-old snowflakes feel uncomfortable for me to come speak there, but you can make my two-year-old boy feel uncomfortable by forcing him to wear a dress, you stupid idiots.
It is normal in many Swedish preschools for teachers to avoid referring to their students' gender.
Instead of boys and girls, they say friends or call children by name.
Play is organized to prevent children from sorting themselves by gender because we have to force kids to do stuff they don't want to do.
Amazing.
A gender-neutral pronoun, hen, was introduced in 2012 and was swiftly absorbed into mainstream Swedish culture, something that linguists say has never happened in other countries.
It has never happened in any other culture or any other country because no one was stupid enough until now to try this.
Because boys are boys and girls are girls.
I love this line.
Exactly how this teaching method affects children is still unclear.
Shouldn't that be the only question that matters?
Shouldn't the only question that matters be how this affects the kids?
Well, we don't care about that.
We care about the social engineering.
And then there are a bunch of beautiful pictures of all these things happening in Sweden.
I love this.
They show a bunch of drawings by students at the preschool.
When a teacher noticed that girls were drawing eyelashes only on girls, she asked them, don't boys have eyelashes?
Yes, they do, but boys don't curl their eyelashes or put mascara in them.
As one of the few peer-reviewed efforts to examine the methods of facts published last year in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology concluded that some behaviors do go away when children attend what the study called gender-neutral preschools.
For instance, the children at these schools do not show a strong preference for playmates of the same gender and are less likely to make assumptions based on stereotypes.
Yet, the scientists found no difference at all in the children's tendency to notice gender, suggesting that may be under a genetic influence.
Ya think?
You think?
Okay, all of this makes no sense.
The transgender advocates say that kids know from the time they're two that they're transgender, but then they will also say that gender is completely a social construct.
So what the hell?
Kids at two know what a social construct is?
None of this makes any sense at all.
And then I love that they are actually gender stereotyping.
They're suggesting that boys like to walk around barefoot in the snow.
So give your kid frostbite.
Give your little girl frostbite to prove that she's just as much of a manly man as the boys.
And make the boys massage each other's feet.
First of all, foot massages should be illegal in all 50 states.
Feet are gross, objectively speaking.
And making children massage each other's feet is unsanitary and yucky.
But apparently they've been doing this for years and years and years and years.
None of this is designed to make children healthier or better or develop better.
All of it is designed to foster the virtuous feelings of leftists who don't give a damn about actual biology or science.
What stupidity.
I hate this stuff because, again, manipulating children is not my thing.
Do not manipulate children.
They are innocent.
Innocent is a code word for having no moral responsibility.
No moral responsibility is why children are innocent, right?
What makes you innocent as a person is that you are free of sin.
What makes children innocent as a person is that they are free of sin.
But children are free of sin because they have no capacity to sin because they can't make choices.
Which means that you really shouldn't be encouraging them to make choices they are not qualified to make or fostering situations where they are uncomfortable for no reason at all other than your own self-glorification, you morons.
Yuck.
Okay.
Time for a quick Federalist paper.
Back to the world of reason.
Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 21.
We are all the way up through Federalist 21, so we're making steady progress through the Federalist papers.
This, again, is a paper about more defects in the current Articles of Confederation, and he points out three specific defects in the Articles of Confederation that need to be fixed by the Constitution.
First, there's no mechanism for the feds to compel the states to do anything.
So if you're in the middle of a civil war, for example, you can't actually compel the states to do anything under the Articles of Confederation.
That's a problem if, for example, you're in the middle of a foreign war and you need the states to help out.
Two, there's no mutual guarantee between the states.
So what that means is that if the states go to war with one another, they can go to war with one another without the federal government actually stepping in, which means effectively that the continent breaks down into war.
And third, There's inequality of taxation between the states.
If the states pay into the system directly, rather than a system of duties is placing on articles of consumption, a sales tax or a tariff.
One of the things that's interesting here is that a lot of the early Republic was founded, was funded by tariffs because they had no other option.
That's not what they actually would have preferred.
In fact, Hamilton says that he'd prefer land taxes, but still they used tariffs.
One of the things that Hamilton says in this paper advocating for tariffs is that one of the problems with tariffs is if you make them too high, people will just smuggle.
Which is a pretty honest assessment of the situation.
It's also an assessment the left refuses to make about taxation.
They raise tax rates incredibly high, and then they're shocked when people avoid those taxes.
Okay, the same is true of tariffs.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more.
I want to do—remind me, Mathis—I want to do a breakdown of Cardi B's rant on taxes tomorrow, because it's pretty spectacular.
We'll do all that tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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