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April 11, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:27
Paul Ryan Exits | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 515
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In a shock move, Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan will be retiring, Mark Zuckerberg gets grilled on the Hill, and the Trump investigation continues to proceed.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So, this week is crazy.
Lots of stuff happening this week.
The FBI raids the President of the United States' personal lawyer's office two days ago.
And now, the Speaker of the House Paul Ryan announces that he will not be running for re-election and that he will in fact step down from his position as Speaker after the November elections and that he will not run for re-election, meaning he will leave office in January of 2019.
That is a major development.
Plus, Mark Zuckerberg goes to the hill and gets it grilled in historic fashion.
But before we get to any of those things, first I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Lending Club.
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All right, so.
The big breaking news on this Wednesday is that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has announced that he will indeed be stepping down from his position as Speaker of the House.
Now, he's not going to do that until after the election.
He also will not be running for re-election in his district.
He announced it this morning, and here is what it sounded like.
You realize something when you take this job.
It's a big job with a lot riding on you, and you feel it.
But you also know that this is a job that does not last forever.
You realize that you hold the office for just a small part of our history.
So you better make the most of it.
It's fleeting.
And that inspires you to do big things.
And on that score, I think we have achieved a heck of a lot.
So, you know, Paul Ryan is, of course, going to say that because he's leaving.
The truth is that Paul Ryan has achieved some things.
He has not achieved others.
His great dream was entitlement reform.
He thought that he was going to be able to save the country from the oncoming train that is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid collapse, which will be happening over the next 10 to 20 years.
That didn't happen.
He did get tax cuts passed.
That's a good move.
He was able to pass through revocation of the individual mandate, which is obviously a good thing.
He's been able to get rid of some of the regulations that the Obama administration put in place through the Congressional Review Act process.
He's gotten a lot of flack as well, and I have a lot of thoughts on why it is that Speaker Ryan is going.
But first, I think we ought to review exactly what Speaker Ryan was, because today you're going to hear a lot of people who are on the right celebrating Paul Ryan going, suggesting that Paul Ryan going is going to change the way that Congress does business.
He was a milquetoast.
He needs to go.
Now, listen, I don't think Paul Ryan ran everything as well as things could be run.
The man cut deals with Patty Murray when he was not Speaker of the House, and then he cut a deal with Democrats to pass a $1.3 trillion omnibus package that there is no excuse for passing.
But it is important to note that for all of the bad bills that Paul Ryan passed, he also passed a good bill that was rejected by Mitch McConnell.
So I think a lot of the ire that's been directed at Paul Ryan really ought to be directed at Mitch McConnell, because here's how the process works.
Paul Ryan would pass a very conservative bill through a conservative house, and then it would go to the Senate, and there it would die.
And then Mitch McConnell would pass a different version of a bill.
And now the question was on Paul Ryan.
Do you stand fast?
Do you tell Mitch McConnell that you're not going to pass anything the Senate passes?
Do you tell President Trump that you're not going to pass something that he wants to sign?
Or do you go along, do you get along, take the hit on behalf of Mitch McConnell, and now you're seen as somebody who believes the same things that Mitch McConnell believes on spending, and believes the same things in terms of fiscal priorities that President Trump does?
If Paul Ryan can be faulted for anything, It's that he didn't hold Mitch McConnell's and President Trump's feet to the fire.
But let's be real about this.
The same people who think that Paul Ryan is indeed a milquetoast and a weakling would have been fighting angry at him if President Trump had not gotten things on his desk.
They would have blamed Ryan anyway.
So in order of priority for people who have not gotten Trump's legislative agenda passed, it goes like this.
Trump, at the top of the list because he has not had a solid legislative agenda that has been pushed by the White House in any serious way.
The turnover at the White House has been too high.
The turnover on topics has been too high.
The president has not used his bully pulpit to actually stump for legislation in any real In a serious way, and he hasn't really been part of the negotiations, so the buck stops with Trump.
The second on the totem pole in terms of blame has to be Mitch McConnell, because Mitch McConnell is the one with 51 senators, and he's been unable to get seriously conservative legislation through the Senate.
A third on the list is Paul Ryan, and yet people seem to have reversed this polarity.
People seem to believe that Paul Ryan is the real problem here, when he really is not, and that Mitch McConnell is second on the list, and that Trump, of course, can never be blamed for anything, because we can't blame the President of the United States when his legislative agenda doesn't get passed.
How much of this is on Ryan?
I think some is.
I think a lot is not.
Second of all, it's important to note, who is going to take Paul Ryan's place?
So, maybe it'll be somebody from the Freedom Caucus.
Maybe it'll be somebody who is more overtly bloviating than Paul Ryan.
Paul Ryan is a pretty polite guy.
Maybe it'll be somebody who's more compelling.
And I would suggest that that's going to have to be the case, because the high likelihood is that the Republicans are going to lose the House in 2018, which means that it better be somebody who's a fighter.
It better be somebody who's going to try and obstruct Nancy Pelosi's agenda as much as humanly possible, considering the great likelihood is that Paul Ryan will be succeeded as Speaker, not by another Republican, but by Nancy Pelosi, which is a frightening thought in all of its various permutations.
But the person who replaces Paul Ryan, you have to wonder whether that person is really going to do a lot better than Paul Ryan, given the fact that Paul Ryan did not do worse than John Boehner.
He did not do worse than Denny Hastert.
He did not do worse than late-stage Newt Gingrich, to be frank.
So all of the talk about Paul Ryan being the world's crappiest speaker I think is untrue.
Do I think that he was the world's best speaker?
No.
I also don't think he was temperamentally cut out for the job.
I don't think Paul Ryan wanted the job, and having met Paul Ryan now, I don't think that Paul Ryan is somebody who was fit for the job, because to be a good Speaker of the House requires a couple of things.
One, you either have to be a very canny manipulator, you have to be a Tip O'Neill type, you know, the Democrat from the 1980s who manipulated his own members, manipulated Republicans in order to get his agenda passed.
You have to be very good at manipulating people and fitting pieces together.
You have to be more of a Mitch McConnell temperament, sort of a turtle who's able to slowly walk legislation through your House of Congress.
That was not Paul Ryan.
Or you have to be a great visionary leader, somebody who's charismatic and who has an agenda that is backed by your own caucus.
That was like Newt Gingrich in 1994 or Nancy Pelosi in 2006.
Somebody who came in with a whole list of agenda items that the caucus agreed on and you could pass those into law as fast as humanly possible.
Paul Ryan obviously did not have that sort of cohesion inside his own caucus and he is also not a particularly charismatic leader.
He's not somebody who stands up and people say, I want to follow that guy into battle.
Paul Ryan just was not suited for the job.
The reason that Paul Ryan is announcing that he's leaving right now, there are a couple of reasons.
One is because he wants to spend more time with his family, but he could have announced this after the election.
He could have waited until after the election, then announced, listen, I'm not going to be Speaker anymore, so I'm leaving, and I'm not interested in running for re-election.
I want to go home, or I want my family to move to Washington, D.C., and I'll work for American Enterprise Institute or something.
The reason that he announced this now is twofold.
One, Ryan knows that this blue wave is coming.
The indicators are very good that Democrats win the House, and it is quite possible they win the Senate as well, and that Chuck Schumer is the new Senate Majority Leader, and that Nancy Pelosi is the new House Majority Leader, that she's the new Speaker of the House, rather.
And that sets up a really bad cycle for going into 2020, which I'll talk about in just a minute.
But if you look at the list of Republicans who have left, Okay, it's a pretty lengthy list of Republicans who are retiring this term because they don't want to exist in the Nancy Pelosi Congress.
Okay, Trey Gowdy is out, Bob Goodlatte, Jeb Hensarling, Rodney Frelinghuysen, Daryl Issa, Lamar Smith, Ileana Ross-Lettinen, Charlie Dent, Dave Reichert, Pat Tiberi, Frank Labiando, Lynn Jenkins, Sam Johnson, John Duncan, Ted Poe, Dave Trott, Ryan Costello, Bill Schuster, Greg Harper, Tom Rooney.
Okay, that's a list of Republicans in the House who are retiring this term, and that doesn't even include the ones who are retiring because of various scandals.
There's a Republican in Pennsylvania who retired over a sex scandal.
There's a Republican in Texas, Blake Fahrenthold, who's retiring over a sex scandal.
Okay, there are a lot of Republicans stepping down because what they see is that the polls don't look good.
So if you're Paul Ryan, and you're figuring, okay, we're in serious trouble here, right?
We're probably gonna lose the House, and it's really not because of Paul Ryan that they're gonna lose the House, okay?
If they lose the House, the high likelihood is because the President of the United States has incredibly low approval ratings and because Democrats hate him with a passion equal to the fiery, burning, passionate hatred of a thousand suns.
Okay, they hate President Trump.
And that means that they're going to show up in November.
So if you're Paul Ryan, here's what you don't want.
You lose in November, and then everybody turns around and say, it's your fault, Paul.
It's your fault that you lost.
Why would you even take, why would you bother sticking around for that?
Why would you bother doing that?
Instead, Paul Ryan is saying, listen, I'll keep fundraising.
But this is not on me.
I'm not the one who has a 42% approval rating in a time of a booming economy and no serious foreign wars in the offing.
That's not me.
So I think that Ryan is making a political move and that's why he is making this statement.
Now also he says, and I think this is probably true, he doesn't want to lie to his constituents about who's going to serve out his term.
Because if he wins re-election in November in his district, which he likely would, and then retires in January, then he's been fibbing to his constituents all along.
He has to live with those people.
So, I think there's something there as well.
Now, the rumor that's going around is that Ryan is leaving because Trump sort of defeated Ryan.
I don't see this at all.
It's important to recognize here that Trump's signal achievements have largely been, outside of the move of the U.S.
Embassy to Jerusalem, they've been done because of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
Tax cuts were a Paul Ryan baby.
The revocation of the individual mandate, that was a Ted Cruz baby.
The Justice Gorsuch and the congressional approval.
That is Mitch McConnell.
So for all the talk about Paul Ryan standing in the way of Trump's agenda, there's really no evidence that Paul Ryan has been standing in the way of Trump's agenda.
In fact, it's been Paul Ryan trying to pass Trump's agenda, and he just can't get it through the Senate because he's not a senator.
He's not the Senate Majority Leader.
I will say, however, that it's pretty clear that Ryan leaving does represent a triumph of Trumpian attitude.
Now, people have been mistaking the gaps in policy between Trump and Ryan for the serious gap.
That is not the serious gap in the Republican Party right now.
The serious gap in the Republican Party is the gap between attitudes.
Now, people have seen this as a binary choice between Paul Ryan's sort of polite wonkishness and Donald Trump's punch-everything-including-the-baby.
Right?
These are the two choices.
You can either wheel around and you can tweet whatever you want, and you can be wild and crazy and bombastic, and that's the way you ought to approach politics, or you can be milquetoast and Jack Kemp-like in your approach to politics.
I don't think that's correct.
I think there is a middle ground where you are very aggressive when you need to be very aggressive, and you are polite when that possibility is available.
You know, it's something that I try to pursue in my own sort of political rhetoric.
But if the Republican Party had to choose one, it's pretty clear that the base chose Trumpian rhetoric over Paul Ryan's rhetoric because they are very angry, and they're very angry because they're very frustrated, and they're very frustrated because no matter how many Republicans they elect, it seems that their agenda is never passed.
And they can blame that on Paul Ryan, but the truth is that Paul Ryan is just the head of the caucus.
I promise you that if Paul Ryan were the head of a caucus that were all Freedom Caucus guys, Then the agenda would look very different.
Okay, more thoughts on Paul Ryan in just a second.
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A few more thoughts on Paul Ryan and his exit.
So, again, Ryan's priorities were never backed by Trump or his fellow legislators.
So, before judging Ryan on what he could pass and what he couldn't, you have to look at the caucus.
He is only the head of the caucus.
If you were the head of a caucus that looked like Mark Meadows, where everybody was Mark Meadows, or everybody were Jim Jordan, then they'd be passing different legislation.
But the job of the Speaker is to put all of those various components together.
And very often he was able to do that, it's just that the Senate never passed any of that stuff.
So all of this bodes very ill for Republicans, obviously, going into 2018 and beyond.
The polls show that there's going to be a historic youth wave coming in 2018.
According to Harvard University Institute of Politics, this wave of voters 18 to 29 is going to be very strong.
53% probably or definitely will be voting.
And of those most likely to vote, 55% lean Democratic, 21% favor Republicans at this point.
That is a massive imbalance.
Particularly among young voters who are going to show up in real big numbers coming up in November.
Plus, if you look at the generic ballots right now, the generic ballots do not look good.
The generic ballots for Republicans, the average, the RealClearPolitics polling average is 7 points, and it is growing again.
So it had shrunk down to 3 points in the Quinnipiac poll April 6th to April 9th.
And in the last couple of polls, one from Rasmussen and one from The Economist, it's backed up to 5 and 8 points, respectively.
Given all the news surrounding President Trump, I wouldn't be surprised if that blows up even bigger.
It's not going to be a good year for Republicans, just by data.
It really is not going to be a good year for Republicans.
And this raises a question about President Trump.
So what is President Trump going to do if he is faced with, let's say, Nancy Pelosi in the House?
So the good shot is that Nancy Pelosi will move for impeachment in the House, knowing that it won't pass through the Senate.
That is the best shot here.
There's going to be a bunch of investigations.
There'll be investigations from here till the end of time, and President Trump will be dragged through the mud.
So for all the hatred of the Republican Party that a lot of people are evidencing inside the conservative movement, recognize that if you like Trump and you're frustrated with the Republican Party, Then your worst move here, your worst move, is to allow Democrats to take over the House.
They'll do nothing but be a thorn in the side for President Trump, no question.
And if you don't like President Trump, and you're a conservative, then you should recognize that you need a conservative Congress, because the worst thing that could happen here is Nancy Pelosi takes over the House and Chuck Schumer takes over the Senate, and then both of them are negotiating with President Trump.
President Trump, who sees himself as a great dealmaker, you could easily see him walking through the front doors of the White House, arm-in-arm with Pelosi and Schumer, passing a bunch of leftist priorities because Trump wants to be seen as a guy who signs things.
We need a Republican Congress.
The fact that we are unlikely to get one is deeply disturbing and really, really troubling.
Okay, so.
I have a few more thoughts on this.
Also, I do want to talk about the continuation of the Trump investigation.
So let's jump into the Trump investigation, because there are some breaking pieces of news with regard to that.
So first of all, Alan Dershowitz has come out and he says that targeting Trump's lawyer should worry everybody.
So as you recall, back on Monday, If you recall, back on Monday, President Trump's personal lawyer's office was raided by the FBI.
And Alan Dershowitz has a piece over at The Hill about this.
He says, there's much speculation as to the significance of the search of the offices and hotel room of President Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen.
To obtain a search warrant, prosecutors must demonstrate to a judge they have probable cause to believe the premises to be searched contain evidence of crime.
They must also specify the area to be searched, the items to be seized, and in search of computers, the word searches to be used.
At least that's the constitutional requirement In theory, especially where the Sixth Amendment right to counsel is involved, in addition to the general Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches.
But he says that the firewalls and the so-called taint teams, which are supposed to prevent the FBI from looking at documents that they're not supposed to look at, that these have experienced troubles in the past.
He says it's an imperfect protection of important constitutional rights.
He says that's why Justice Department officials must be careful to limit the searching of lawyers' offices to compelling cases involving serious crimes.
We don't know at this point what the prosecutors are looking for, but if it relates to payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels, that would not seem to justify so potentially intrusive a search of Cohen's confidential lawyer client files.
So Dershowitz is defending President Trump.
He's been defending him on legal grounds for a while here, suggesting that President Trump has been unfairly targeted, which I think in large measure He has.
But all of this is leading to, you know, a serious crisis inside American government.
There's a lot of talk today about whether President Trump is actually going to go ahead and fire Robert Mueller or whether he's going to fire Rod Rosenstein.
Those are the two rumors that are on the table.
So firing Mueller, by the way, would not stop the investigation into Cohen's office.
Recognize that that was referred out to the U.S.
Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York.
So that's no longer under Robert Mueller's purview.
So, President Trump could fire Mueller.
It would have no impact on that.
It would just end the Russian collusion investigation, which, by most accounts at this point, is turning out to be sort of an empty bag, at least so far, as quote-unquote, getting Trump.
There's no evidence at this point that there was serious collusion between the Trump campaign and anyone in the Russian government.
The only people who have been indicted have been indicted for lying to the FBI, people like George Papadopoulos.
Carter Page still has not been indicted, despite the FISA warrant against him.
And so, you know, Trump's drive to fire Mueller, I think, would be misplaced.
I think that that's probably a waste of time.
Apparently, according to a New York Times piece, the president was so furious after seeing news about subpoenas issued by the special counsel a few months back that he told advisers in no uncertain terms that Mr. Mueller's investigation had to be shut down.
This is when Mueller was going after Deutsche Bank.
You know, so Trump has repeatedly been considering firing Mueller.
He said the other day that he was still considering firing Mueller.
Obviously, that is something that he is considering now.
Apparently, he's considering firing Rod Rosenstein.
Rod Rosenstein is, of course, the guy who oversees Mueller and oversees the rest of the Department of Justice with regard to some of these Trump-related investigations.
So, CNN was reporting that the President's interest in releasing the Deputy Attorney General was heightened after the office of his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was raided by the FBI.
The CNN report noted that such a move could limit Special Counsel Robert Mueller's quickly escalating investigation into Trump.
And Russia.
But that, of course, would not stop what's going on in the Southern District of New York.
Obviously, Trump has been very, very critical of Rod Rosenstein to this point.
The investigation, I think, is outside of Trump's capacity to contain it at this point through firings.
And I think, frankly, that it would be a mistake for him to issue these firings.
If it turns out that these officers come up with nothing, there'll be plenty of people who defend him, myself included.
I've been defending him on the Russian collusion stuff for well over a year now.
When it comes to the Michael Cohen issue, there are going to be two issues involved.
One is Was there any actual criminal activity?
And two, does it rise to the level of the impeachable?
These are two separate questions and they're not the same question.
Because it is quite possible that the President of the United States was involved in a campaign finance violation.
That's possible.
I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility by any stretch of the imagination.
But does that rise to the level of a high crime and misdemeanor subject to impeachment?
A little harder to make that case, simply because this was a $130,000 payment that violated campaign finance, and Barack Obama's 2008 election cycle contained $2 million in such campaign violations.
Nobody was impeached over that.
So, unless President Trump, as President of the United States, was actively involved in a conspiracy to cover up a campaign finance violation, then I think that it's going to be harder to claim impeachment, even if it turns out that Michael Cohen is guilty of violating campaign finance laws.
So that's the latest in that investigation.
I want to get to Mark Zuckerberg here in just a second.
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Okay, so the other big news.
On Capitol Hill, aside from the ouster of Paul Ryan, aside from the continuing investigation into the personal lawyer of the President of the United States, as if you didn't have enough news, Mark Zuckerberg was on the Hill yesterday.
So Mark Zuckerberg had been called onto the Hill yesterday because of all of the claims that privacy had been violated by Facebook.
That if you publicly post information and then that information was scraped by an outside company, meaning that they were using that data in order to market to you or in order to generate voter profiles, for example, by Cambridge Analytica, that this was some sort of terrible, evil crime.
Now, I think there are lots of problems with social media.
I really do.
I've been highly critical of social media many times, and I will be again in just a moment.
But if you really think that the big problem on Facebook is that you publicly post information and then companies look at it, you're stupid.
Okay, you're dumb.
And if you think the big problem on Facebook is that tons of people were being manipulated by fake news, if you really think, like Democrats think, that Hillary Clinton would have won except for the seven ads run by Russian bots in the 2016 election, you crazy.
Okay?
You're out of your mind.
People are so crazy now that there was a big story that came out, I think it was from NBC News yesterday, about a video that was viewed about 250,000 times that was a supposed sex tape including Hillary Clinton.
It was fake news, obviously, because number one, who would ever want to see any of that on camera?
But number two, was that shifting votes?
Because we're five minutes away from Dianne Feinstein calling the head of Pornhub up to the Hill to explain why Hillary Clinton lost since there was a distribution on Pornhub of a fake Hillary Clinton sex tape.
All of this is nonsense.
The real problem with social media is that social media are now playing a gatekeeper function they were not meant to play.
Social media were supposed to be like a phone line.
They were supposed to be a platform.
Okay, here's the way that this works.
When you pick up the phone and you call somebody, what is said over that phone line is not the responsibility of Verizon or AT&T or Sprint, okay?
It is the responsibility of the person on the phone.
Facebook was supposed to be more like the phone line.
It was just a platform.
You put your information up there.
You put your news stories up there.
People can engage.
They cannot engage.
It's their free choice.
Instead, Facebook has now interposed itself between its own users and information that people want to see.
There's been a pet peeve of mine for a long time.
They were doing it back in 2016 when they were talking about shifting their algorithms so that certain trending topics were not allowed to trend.
Conservative trending topics were not allowed to trend on Facebook.
And now, of course, they've shifted their algorithms to supposedly benefit local news and establish mainstream media outlets and against alternative news sources like Daily Wire.
This is why, if you're watching this show right now and you're wondering where your Daily Wire updates went, You need to go and check out your own settings right now and reset your settings because Facebook has tacitly, and without your permission, gone and changed the algorithm so that you are not seeing our updates anymore.
Because they say that our news site is somehow not as credible as CNN or the New York Times, which is just absurd.
Facebook right now is even burying which outlets it's punishing.
So Facebook is obviously penalizing certain outlets, but it's not explaining what exactly And now, Peter Hassan of the Daily Caller is reporting that Facebook does not intend to identify which media outlets it helps and which it hurts, according to a company spokesperson who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The spokesperson argued that if the company revealed that data, it would not give people a clear picture of Facebook, adding, We've made changes to News Feed to help people meaningfully connect with friends and family first.
This means public pages of all types are going to experience declines across Facebook.
Political pages and partisan news pages, like other public pages, have experienced declines, but there are examples of declines across the political spectrum.
Except for the fact that that's not true.
Except for the fact that if you look at the mainstream media outlets, they have not lost engagement.
The only sites that are losing engagement are particularly conservative ones.
So, all of the senators yesterday were grilling Mark Zuckerberg until they're grilling him again today.
And, first of all, it is important to note, if you're going to have people grill Mark Zuckerberg, they have to have once used a computer.
A lot of these questions look like they were submitted by my 93-year-old grandmother.
And it was a bunch of people who were asking Mark Zuckerberg about the questions.
Basically, the exchange sounded something like this.
You know, Senator Orrin Hatch, who's 8,000 years old, either reading off a piece of paper written by a 23-year-old or asking questions that have nothing to do with Facebook.
Or Senator Dick Durbin, who's a complete idiot, who probably has never used Facebook, sitting there and saying, So, Mark Zuckerberg, you have a book full of faces.
And then Mark Zuckerberg looking at him in wonderment and bemusement.
This is what happens when the average age of the senators who are questioning Mark Zuckerberg is 57 years old.
That's not a rip on people who are 57.
It is to say that the chance that they are really fluent in social media is pretty low.
And that's why you see stupidities like Dick Durbin asking Mark Zuckerberg where he stayed at his hotel last night.
This is a thing that actually happened.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?
Um... Uh... No.
Okay, and this is one of the things that's so incredibly stupid.
So, one of the complaints by Democrats has been that if you publicly post information and people see that information, it's a violation of privacy.
Mark Zuckerberg would not have to, under Facebook's rule, reveal where he went to his hotel last night.
And so I'm not sure what Dick Durbin is even getting at, but Dick Durbin doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
There were a couple of people who actually went after Zuckerberg on matters that actually do matter.
Okay, so there are really a couple of matters that are really serious.
One is the amount of political bias at Facebook, the political bias of the people who are actually implementing and writing the algorithms.
And the other thing that's really important is whether Facebook is a platform or whether Facebook is a publisher.
And that matters because, getting back to our AT&T Sprint Verizon discussion, if the phone company starts acting like a censor, if they start buzzing out what you're saying to your friends, they become responsible for what you say to your friends.
They're acting like a publisher.
Like we at Daily Wire, we edit all of our pieces, we purchase all of our photos from a service called Getty Images, so that they're all licensed, because we're a publisher and we're responsible for the content we post.
If, however, if we use a particular internet service, that internet service is not responsible for the content we post.
It's just a platform.
Facebook has presented itself as a platform, which means they're not legally responsible for, for example, misuse of copyrighted content or slander.
But if they're responsible for what's being put up, if they're controlling what you see and what you hear, then suddenly they need to be treated like any other news outlet.
They need to be treated like NBC or MSNBC or CBS or CNN or the New York Times or the Daily Wire.
So those were two separate questions.
One was the political bias, and one was the fact that Facebook is playing censor, which would actually subject them to liability.
Both of these lines of questioning were engaged in by Republicans, and these were the only two lines of questioning that mattered.
So the first line of questioning about the political bias, about Facebook cracking down on conservatives, this was pushed by Senator Ted Cruz from Texas.
And full disclosure, when Senator Cruz visited our offices and I interviewed him, we had Pretty substantial discussion about exactly this topic.
So, good for Senator Cruz for going after Mark Zuckerberg on this.
Here is Senator Cruz illuminating the issue for Zuckerberg.
Well, Mr. Zuckerberg, I will say there are a great many Americans who I think are deeply concerned that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship.
There have been numerous instances with Facebook.
In May of 2016, Gizmodo reported that Facebook had purposely and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news, including stories about CPAC, including stories about Mitt Romney, including stories about the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, including stories about Glenn Beck.
In addition to that, Facebook has initially shut down the Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page, has blocked a post of a Fox News reporter, has blocked over two dozen Catholic pages, and most recently blocked Trump supporters Diamond and Silk's page with 1.2 million Facebook followers after determining their content and brand were, quote, unsafe to the community.
To a great many Americans, that appears to be a pervasive pattern of political bias.
Do you agree with that assessment?
Zuckerberg would go on to basically say that it is fair to say that Silicon Valley is far left-leaning, and that suspicions of political bias are not unwarranted.
So he basically admitted that.
So that's important.
Also, it is important to note, along the same lines, that Zuckerberg, who is now proclaiming that Facebook ought to be the arbiter of what constitutes good speech and bad speech, I can't define what good speech and bad speech are.
So he was questioned by Ben Sass about specifically this, and he was asked about defining hate speech, because he said, well, let's just get rid of all hate speech.
Let's get rid of all the bad speech.
And Sass said, OK, well, it's one thing if you're talking about violent speech, but if you're talking about nonviolent speech, do you even know how to define that?
If you claim that you're a platform, if you claim that you're not a publisher, you're a platform, then how can you define what speech is hateful and which speech is not, given the fact that you have no hard considerations as to what that constitutes?
So we'll show you, we'll play you that audio in just a second, show you that video in just a second.
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Okay, so.
We're going to get to more of Mark Zuckerberg being ripped up and down by the Republicans in the Senate Judiciary Committee in just a second.
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So Senator Cruz rips Zuckerberg up and down on his level of political bias at Facebook, which is well worthwhile.
And then Zuckerberg is questioned about how he's policing speech, because this is really And this is what Democrats want.
You have to understand, the entire Democratic crusade against the so-called privacy violations of Facebook is really an attempt by Democrats to grab control of the reins of Facebook and drive Facebook to please them politically.
The implicit promise here is that if Facebook starts mirroring all the Democratic talking points, then they will stop regulating them or threatening to do so.
That's what they're talking about.
That's really what all this is about.
And Zuckerberg already has leanings in that direction, right?
Zuckerberg's a lefty.
He's a Democrat.
And he's already talked about how he wants to stop hate speech on his platform.
But, as is obvious, he has no idea how to define hate speech because there is no way to define hate speech in any real way.
You may decide, or Facebook may decide, it needs to police a whole bunch of speech that I think America might be better off not having policed by one company that has a really big and powerful platform.
Can you define hate speech?
Senator, I think that this is a really hard question.
And I think it's one of the reasons why we struggle with it.
There are certain definitions that we have around Okay, so again, there's a difference between saying you're going to ban speech that calls for violence and saying you're going to ban hate speech.
Zuckerberg has no idea what he's talking about.
He says that AI is going to be able to identify hate speech as nonsense.
Yeah, what we're talking about here is social media platforms acting as censors.
And that's really the point.
Zuckerberg made a pretty shocking admission in the middle of this colloquy with the Republican senators.
He was asked specifically, are you a platform or are you a publisher?
And he basically admits we're a publisher.
You agree now that Facebook and other social media platforms are not neutral platforms but bear some responsibility for the content.
I agree that we're responsible for the content.
Okay, so as soon as he says that, his lawyers in Silicon Valley lose their minds.
Because he just acknowledged that Facebook now ought to be treated like Daily Wire or the New York Times, meaning that any unlicensed photo shared on Facebook makes Facebook suable.
It means that any piece of slander published on Facebook makes Facebook suable.
This is the choice Mark Zuckerberg has and he's going to have to make it.
Are you a platform or are you in fact a publisher?
Dan Sullivan, the senator from Alaska, he says to Zuckerberg, he asked Zuckerberg the same question.
You'll see Zuckerberg start to back off because there was a little break in the questioning.
I'm sure he got a call from his lawyer saying, Mark, you need to back off that one real quick.
So here's Dan Sullivan questioning Zuckerberg.
When you mentioned Senator Cornyn, you said you are responsible for your Content.
So, which are you?
Are you a tech company?
Are you the world's largest publisher?
Because I think that goes to a really important question on what form of regulation or government action, if any, you would take.
Senator, this is a really big question.
I view us as a tech company because the primary thing that we do is build technology and products.
But you said you're responsible for your content, which makes you kind of a publisher, right?
Well, I agree that we're responsible for the content, but we don't produce the content.
I think that when people ask us if we're a media company or a publisher, my understanding of the heart of what they're really getting at is, do we feel responsibility for the content on our platform?
The answer to that, I think, is clearly yes.
But I don't think that that's incompatible with fundamentally, at our core, being a technology company where the main thing that we do is have engineers and build products.
Man, his lawyers have got to just be twisting themselves in pretzels over all of this because he just opened up Facebook to millions of dollars in liability.
Here's the way it works now.
If you're a photographer and some idiot in Utah posts your photo without paying you, without licensing it, Normally, you'd have to sue the idiot in Utah.
You couldn't sue Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg just said, we feel responsibility for the content that's posted on Facebook.
Which means that you can now sue Facebook.
Hey, Facebook is a much deeper pocket.
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, there's an automatic statutory penalty for use, for unlicensed use of materials like that, that ranges from $750 per instance to $30,000 per instance.
How many unlicensed photos are posted on Facebook every minute?
My goodness, if his lawyers are not in a state of panic right now, then they really should be, because I promise you, the lawsuits are forthcoming, and they are forthcoming in pretty short order.
It's just, it's amazing.
But this is where the Democrats have driven Zuckerberg.
And when you decide to go full leftist and censor your own content, and censor content of other people, because you want to please your cocktail party friends, that has some pretty significant ramifications for your business as well.
OK, so in other silly news, OK, I just have to bring you a couple of really dumb stories because they are pretty amazing.
This one is from Boston.
The Boston Marathon has now declared they have finally publicly acknowledged their new policies regarding gender, according to Daily Wire.
James Barrett over the Daily Wire.
They say that men who identify as women can compete against biological women regardless of whether or not they've taken any steps to officially transition.
So according to Boston Athletic Association President Tom Grilk, quote, we take people at their word.
We register people as they specify themselves to be.
Those registering do not have to provide any sort of proof that they are, in fact, in any sort of transition state medically, as required by the Olympics and many professional sports.
Members of the LGBT community have had to deal with a lot over the years, and we'd rather not add to that burden, says Grilk.
That's an amazing statement.
They've had to deal with a lot over the years, and we don't want to add to the burden it's been.
It's not a burden to suggest that men should not be competing against women in the women's bracket.
If the NCAA applied the same logic to basketball, you know how, first of all, everybody would be able to dunk in the women's NCAA, but second of all, There'd be no way to prevent seven-foot dudes from saying that they were ladies and then just being in the, and just competing against women.
Or even if they were transgender, seven-foot dudes with twice the upper body mass of women competing against women.
I mean, this isn't fair to women.
It's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
And women should be insulted by this.
It's such a leftist trope that if you've dealt with a lot over the years, the rules no longer apply to you.
That members of the LGBT community have had to deal with a lot over the years.
Agree.
We'd rather not add to that burden.
Again, it's not a burden to say you need to play by the rules.
This is ridiculous.
So ABC features one man who identifies as a woman who admits to not having undergone any treatment to lower testosterone, which allows men to have a significant athletic advantage over women.
Stevie Roemer is a transgender woman from Woodstock, Illinois, and says she registered, this is according to ABC News, for Boston as a woman because that's what she is.
Although she hasn't done anything to lower her testosterone levels, Roemer legally changed her gender, grew her hair out, and started living openly as a woman more than a year ago.
To be able to experience it as me was really, really important, she said.
I've been a runner since as long as I can remember.
I love running, but I just happen to be transgender.
Okay, so then, how about this?
How about we just get rid of both gender categories, right?
There won't be any sex categories for the marathon at all, and women will never win.
Biological women will never win a marathon.
Ever.
In history.
Because men are faster than women.
On average.
But apparently, I guess men will be winning the women's marathon anyways.
We may as well just obliterate the categories.
I mean, the failure to distinguish between sex and gender is clearly an incredible thing.
And the fact that so many in the scientific community have pretended to buy into this, and I say pretend because they do know better, there's not a doctor alive in the United States who does not know the difference between a man and a woman biologically.
And yet they act as though these distinctions mean nothing when it comes to real world consequences, as long as the man believes he is a woman or vice versa.
ABC quoted a doctor from a Boston-based LGBT health and advocacy center who insists there is, quote, no physiologic advantage to being assigned male at birth.
What in the world?
There's no physiologic advantage to being assigned?
First of all, you're not assigned male at birth.
Okay, it's not like you come out genderless.
It's not like you come out, you're just a ball of human flesh without a penis or a vagina and with no chromosomals, with no chromosomal Description.
It's absurd.
It's absurd.
You're not assigned your sex at birth.
What kind of stupidity is this?
Okay, but I guess now we have to subjectively just dismiss science outright.
It's an amazing, amazing thing.
Again, none of this is true.
Livestrong suggests that men outperform women by about 10% across all athletic events.
The gender gap in athletic performance is shown in records from Olympic competition.
Has remained stable since 1983.
The mean difference has been about 10% between men and women for all events.
The mean gap is 10.7% for running, 8.9% for swimming, and 17.5% for jumping.
That doesn't even take into account lifting where it's significantly greater.
When performances improve, the improvements are proportional for each gender.
David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene, discussed the biological realities of athletic differences between genders in a piece for the Washington Post in 2014.
And in it, he provided some background on women's inclusion in several sports, which led to a momentary explosion in their performance that ultimately plateaued.
In terms of top speed in a range of running events, women began leveling off by the 1980s, and the record stagnated after the crackdown on mega-doping of female athletes from some Eastern Bloc nations.
From the 100 meters to the 10,000 meters, the gap between elite male and female performers generally stands around 11 percent.
At the pro level, that is a chasm.
The women's 100 record would have been too slow by a quarter second to qualify for entry into the men's field at the 2012 Olympics.
Okay, so, again, the fact that we are now shifting objective standards to meet subjective realities is just insane.
Insane on every level.
Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things I hate, and then I have a little bit of Bible for you.
So, things that I like today.
So we've been doing musicals that you may not know.
There's a musical called Promises Promises.
It's based on the fantastic Billy Wilder film, The Apartment, from 1960.
I believe that was one of our very first recommendations on things I like here at the Ben Shapiro Show.
But this is based on that movie.
The plot of the movie is basically there's a guy who falls in love with a girl, He also has, he allows executives at his company to use his apartment as basically a love nest for their affairs.
And the girl that he falls in love with has been having an affair with one of the executives at the company.
That's the essential setup for the plot.
The musical is quite good.
All the musicals written by Burt Bacharach.
You'll remember Burt Bacharach from such things as the songs in Butch Cassidy, right?
Raindrops keep falling on my head.
That's Burt Bacharach.
But the music in Promises Promises is a little bit less elevator music-y than in some of Bachrach's other stuff.
The script, the book, was written by Neil Simon.
It's a very good musical.
It lost to 1776 at the Tonys, which is fitting, but it's a good musical.
Jerry Orbach, who you're going to hear here and see here.
Jerry Orbach, who is playing the main male lead here.
You'll remember him from Law & Order.
Right.
He's he's one of the guys.
He's I think Lenny in Law and Order.
And he is also he's also the voice of Lumiere in the original animated Beauty and the Beast.
So here he is singing the song She Likes Basketball from Promises Promises.
She likes basketball.
How about that?
We have something in common to talk about.
Basketball.
She likes basketball.
How about that?
I have some place to take her when we go out.
Basketball!
Whoever would have dreamed, never would have thought that my favorite girl liked my favorite sport.
Like any other kid, I would make believe with a ball in my hand.
I dribble right past all the others real fast And I be 6'8 and my job shot was really great She likes basketball in that wild It's an omen that put things on So they did a revival of this musical, I believe in 2017, starring Sean Hayes.
I've heard him do this number, it's not bad actually, which is kind of surprising because I didn't know he could sing.
It's amazing how many guys who are big stars now actually can sing.
Like J.K.
Simmons, you know the guy who just won an Oscar a couple of years ago for Whiplash?
J.K.
Simmons actually, not only can he sing, he was actually in the revival of Guys and Dolls.
He played one of the Tin Horn, one of the Tin Horn gamblers.
So it's interesting how many of these folks can actually sing.
Here's an odd one.
Go back and watch the animated Pocahontas.
Mel Gibson plays the role of John Smith in the animated Pocahontas.
Who sings for Mel Gibson in that?
Mel Gibson.
Mel Gibson can actually sing.
Really, it's kind of amazing how many of these stars actually can hold a tune.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So one of the things that I really dislike, as a general matter, is hypocrisy.
And one of the things that I find hilarious is how many Democrats are now suggesting that President Trump does not have the authority to attack Syria.
It's an amazing thing, because I sort of agree that it's Congress's job to determine when war has been declared, right?
That's how the powers are delegated under the Constitution.
But Democrats don't have a lot of ground to stand on, considering that Barack Obama declared about 33 wars without any sort of congressional involvement at all.
Senator Jeff Flake and I have had a bipartisan authorization focusing upon all of the military action we're currently taking against non-state actors.
The president currently does not have any legal authority to wage war against nation states, missile strikes against Syria, for example, without coming to Congress.
Okay, all of that is true.
Where were you, Tim Kaine, when Barack Obama was bombing Libya?
Like, where were you?
Where was the express authorization to bomb Libya and kill Muammar Gaddafi?
There wasn't any, obviously.
Okay, other things that I hate.
One of the things that's been so amazing is watching as the left turns Barack Obama into this highfalutin figure who doesn't... who really...
You know, was above the fray.
Really above the fray.
He was just a beautiful man who never really had the capacity to deign to talk to the public on their own level.
Just a man who elevated the public discourse.
Well, it's now coming out, according to the Daily Mail, that an Obama aide has revealed how he was a groupie president who fawned over celebs and was steamed when a high school coach called his wife Fat Butt Michelle and also favored extra tight sweatpants and white socks with sandals.
So the last part I don't care about, I don't care about how he felt about people who insult his wife.
I'm fine with that.
You should be angry at people who insult your wife as a general rule.
But it is true that the Obamas were obsessed with celebrity, right?
Bruce Springsteen, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio were among a bunch of the stars who came to the White House to hang out with the cool president.
Now, you know, one of the things that's fun for me is I've had a chance to meet a lot of celebrities in my job and The celebrities who are actually interesting to me are the ones who you don't actually know about.
They're the ones who are the writers and directors of films, but you've never heard of them.
Actors tend to be really uninteresting as a general rule.
People who are musicians, who are stars, they tend to be really uninteresting as a general rule.
But Obama was in fact obsessed with celebrities, and Obama was a celebrity to the Hollywood crowd.
One of the reasons you got a reality TV president in President Trump is because he was not actually the first reality TV president.
The first reality TV president was in fact Barack Obama, who spent enormous sums of time talking to all of his Hollywood buddies and occupying a central place on our television screens Just the way a reality star would.
This is why he was doing interviews with Pimp with a Limp and GloZell.
The president before Donald Trump certainly was not averse to the little red light on the camera.
Okay.
So, time for a quick Bible review.
So, I wanted to talk a little bit about this section from the book of Samuel.
So, this is 1 Samuel, chapter 15, 19 through 32.
And this is the section in which Samuel deprives Saul of the kingship.
So, Saul is one of the great tragic figures in all of world literature.
When you look at Saul as the king, he didn't want to be the king in the first place.
He's appointed the king, and he's a pretty good king.
But he's not self-confident, and he's constantly going to the people for approval.
And so there's this really fascinating section where he is ordered by God to slay all the Amalekites and he doesn't.
He keeps some of them alive, he keeps some of their animals alive.
And Samuel, who's a prophet, approaches him and he says, why did you not obey the Lord?
Why did you pounce on the plunder and do evil in the eyes of the Lord?
And Saul says, but I did obey the Lord.
I went on the mission the Lord assigned me.
He's saying the Lord your God, right?
It's not the Lord my God at Gilgal.
It's the Lord your God.
The soldiers took sheep and cattle from the plunder, the best of what was devoted to God, in order to sacrifice them to the Lord your God at Gilgal.
So first of all, you can see you've got a problem already.
He's saying the Lord your God, right?
It's not the Lord my God at Gilgal.
It's the Lord your God.
So already Saul is separating himself off from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that he is supposed to be subject to.
Samuel replies, Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord?
To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.
Rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance is like the evil of idolatry.
Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you as king.
And Saul says to Samuel, I've sinned.
I violated the Lord's command and your instructions.
I was afraid of the men, and so I gave in to them.
Now I beg you, forgive my sin and come back with me so I may worship the Lord.
And Samuel says to him, I'm not going to go back to you.
You have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you as king over Israel.
Eventually, Saul ends up bringing Agog in front of Samuel, and Samuel ends up slaying Agog instead of Saul.
So what's interesting about this is that if you look at King David, King David maintains the kingship after he is threatened with its removal by Nathan the prophet.
And what David did is a lot worse than what Saul did in any objective sense of morality.
King David impregnated another man's wife and then sent that guy to die at the battlefield.
That's pretty horrifying.
And Nathan approaches him and says, you just violated God's law.
And David repents, right?
This is why when people compare Trump to David, you have to take into account the fact that David repents.
David gets to keep his job.
Why?
Because his sin was out of passion.
It was not out of willful disobedience to God on behalf of the people.
So, this is, I think, a really fascinating thing to remember when it comes to our daily politics.
Virtue is about adherence to some sort of higher principles, some sort of higher morality.
Believe in God or not believe in God.
Being a good person is about being subject to higher principles and higher virtue, not just the will of the people.
The way that Saul governed, and the reason that he couldn't be the king, is because Saul spent a lot of his time with one eye on the people.
What do the people want me to do?
What do the people say I should do?
The people want to keep the animals?
Well, I guess I'll disobey God and I'll keep the animals.
This is why he is deprived of the kingship and David is not.
David sins, for sure, and David does some really awful things.
But, at no point does he say, you know what, the will of the people trumps what I know to be right and virtuous, or what God has instructed me to do.
At no point does he say that, and that's the real defining feature.
And this is something we should all remember.
Because it's easy enough to say, yeah, most people suck.
Most people are okay with this or that.
Most people want me to do X. But that does not justify the doing of X. You have to make an explicit argument as to why it is right to do X, Y, or Z. You can't just rely on populism to justify your own malfeasance.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with whatever crazy news breaks then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
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