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April 17, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:02
Cohen’s Big Day | Ep. 519
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Michael Cohen goes to court, Starbucks faces down a boycott, and did Tom Brady threaten Stormy Daniels or what the heck?
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So the reality TV show simulation in which we have been living continues to pace today.
There's a lot of big news coming out from various and sundry areas of American life, including the Michael Cohen investigation, the Starbucks boycott.
We have a lot to get to.
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Okay, so the big story yesterday, of course, was that Michael Cohen's lawyers went to court to try and get access to the information that the FBI had seized from Michael Cohen last week.
So, as you recall, last week, the FBI raided Michael Cohen's office.
Michael Cohen, of course, is the personal lawyer to President Trump.
And they raided his office supposedly on the basis of some sort of violation of federal law by Michael Cohen that would have violated the attorney-client privilege.
So what allows them to raid an attorney's office?
Well, there is a crime fraud exception to attorney-client privilege.
So if I am your lawyer and we have privilege, that means that typically the FBI is not allowed to search those documents or look at those documents.
However, if we are combining to work in illegal fashion, if you and I have decided that we are going to commit conspiracy to defraud the government, for example, then attorney-client privilege does not hold.
You have to show good evidence.
You have to go in front of a magistrate judge.
You have to get that approved for a warrant by the DOJ.
That's exactly what happened.
So they seize all of this material from Michael Cohen's office.
And they don't just get a little bit of the material.
They take everything.
So now Michael Cohen's lawyers go to court and they say, we would like access to all of that information.
We want to know exactly what it was that was taken from the FBI.
From Michael Cohen's office so that we can go through and make an argument about what it is the FBI should see and what the FBI should not see.
They wanted a special master, appointed a special master as a person who is not related to the case, who can actually look through all the documents and determine what ought to remain privileged and what ought not to remain privileged.
And yesterday, the court ruled sort of in Cohen's favor, sort of not in Cohen's favor.
Again, I think that's kind of weak.
A judge considering how to handle records seized in an FBI raid on President Trump's personal attorney wrapped up a hearing into the matter Monday without making a final decision.
U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood, who has been linked to a bunch of sort of lefties, including George Soros.
But again, I think that's kind of weak.
I don't think that Kimba Wood is doing the satanic work of George Soros or anything stupid like that.
She says that she trusts prosecutors to review the materials but may allow a neutral third party to weigh in as well.
Lawyers for Trump attorney Michael Cohen, according to the AP, had asked for the appointment of a so-called special master to review the material and make sure nothing protected by attorney-client privilege winds up at the hands of investigators.
She was saying, well, normally there's what is called a taint team and then there's a clean team.
Of course, we're going to end up in a situation with Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump where a taint team was called.
What a taint team actually is.
It's not some sort of pornographic term, although it may very well be.
I don't know enough about pornography.
But a taint team, in legal parlance, is a group of people in the FBI whose job it is to look at the documents without actually turning over the main documents that are privileged to the prosecutors.
So they are sort of a separate team that looks through and says, here's what prosecutors are allowed to see legally.
And here's what they're not allowed to see legally.
As a first step, the judge told prosecutors to put all the C's documents into a searchable database and share it with Cohen's lawyers.
The hearing followed a raid last week on Cohen's home and office.
The search sought information on a variety of matters, including, of course, the $130,000 payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels, who alleges that she had sex with Trump in 2006.
This has been the least satisfying one night stand in Donald Trump's long history of one night stands, I think it is fair to say.
Okay, well, one of the other things that happened in court yesterday, and this is what made all the headlines, is that Michael Cohen has ten—he says he has ten clients.
So, Michael Cohen is not a very good lawyer.
I know he's not a very good lawyer because he went to one of the worst law schools in America.
And now, Michael Cohen has a very select group of clients.
He has seven people who he apparently represents legally, and then he has three people for whom he's a lawyer, but he doesn't really do legal work for them.
He sort of does other work for them.
One of those people was Donald Trump, and so Michael Cohen was presumably making payoffs on behalf of Donald Trump to people like Stormy Daniels.
And the second person that he was representing this way was Elliott Broidy.
Elliott Broidy, of course, was the former deputy finance director for the RNC.
He just had to resign last week after it came out that Michael Cohen had shelled out $1.7 million to some woman to pay her off to have an abortion.
A Playboy model who'd had sex with Broidy and then got pregnant, and he paid her to have an abortion and then cover it up.
And then the third client was a mystery.
This third client, who was not fully a legal client, but also was, you know, but was not necessarily engaged in the sort of hanky-panky that Trump or Broidy wore.
That third legal client's name had remained secret up until yesterday.
So in the courtroom, that third legal client's name was revealed, and that third client, it turns out, was Sean Hannity.
So the left went completely nuts over this.
They went nuts for a couple of reasons.
The first reason is they suggested that if Sean Hannity was a Michael Cohen client, it must have been for the same reason that Donald Trump or Elliot Broidy were Michael Cohen clients.
Maybe Sean Hannity is hiding a secret love child.
Ooh.
Okay.
There's no evidence of that whatsoever.
Of course, there's no evidence that Sean did anything wrong in any of this other than having Michael Cohen as a lawyer, which is not a particularly smart move for a guy like Sean who has tons of cash and tons of lawyers.
But this was revealed yesterday in a dramatic moment in court and all of the media were Oh my goodness, Sean Hannity being implicated here.
Okay, first of all, Sean Hannity's known Michael Cohen for a long time.
Sean Hannity's been close friends with Donald Trump for a long time.
They talk on the phone on a regular basis.
The idea that Hannity was not talking to Cohen in some sort of way is, I think, silly.
And everybody who knew Sean knew that he and Cohen were friendly.
So it's not exactly a huge shock to learn that Cohen was technically his attorney, or at least one of his attorneys.
Sean says he has eight attorneys, and Cohen is one of them.
You know, the question is what exactly they were talking about, whether it's privilege or whether there was any criminal activity going on.
If there's no evidence of criminal activity, then I fail to see exactly how anything is wrong here, other than Sean has a lawyer who happens to be an idiot.
Right, so this is what happened according to the AP.
So, the question here was whether attorney-client confidentiality extends to the fact that you are a client of an attorney.
So, if you are my client, am I allowed to say in open court that you are my client?
that they could not identify Hannity because he asked that his name not be disclosed in connection with an FBI seizure of Cohen's files.
Judge Kimball Wood made one of the lawyers identify him in open court.
So the question here was whether attorney-client confidentiality extends to the fact that you are a client of an attorney.
So if you are my client, am I allowed to say in open court that you are my client?
And typically speaking, attorney-client privilege and attorney-client confidentiality does not attach to the very fact that I am your lawyer.
If the judge asks me, then I pretty much have to say, the real question is, what does this have to do with anything?
Like, who cares?
Why is this a big deal in any way?
Again, there are two reasons why the left wants to make this a big deal.
One is that they hate Sean Hannity and they want Sean Hannity to go down in flames, and so therefore they are suggesting that Sean Hannity had something nefarious going on with Michael Cohen, that he's paying somebody off, that he's like Elliot Broidy or Donald Trump in his relationship with Cohen.
There's no evidence of that at all.
Sean has come out.
He said, listen, I didn't pay.
I didn't pay Cohen for any substantial legal work.
I didn't pay him in connection with any third parties, meaning I didn't pay.
I didn't tell him to pay anybody off.
I used to call Michael Cohen for sort of basic legal advice on real estate.
Now, maybe that's true.
Maybe that's not.
Maybe Sean calls Cohen for a variety of reasons, including just to talk politics.
And he wants that covered by attorney client privilege because he doesn't want his communications with Cohen coming out in the wash.
Maybe, for example, Sean talked with Cohen about something controversial, like when Sean was talking about Seth Rich, and he talked about Cohen with that or something.
That's possible.
That's possible.
But, again, if Cohen's his lawyer, that's not a big deal.
And also, attorney-client privilege does not attach to non-legal matters.
So, if I have a lawyer and I talk to my lawyer about golf, Attorney-client privilege is not attached to my actual conversations with my lawyer about golf.
It only attaches to the things that are actually matters at hand in which you need legal advice.
In any case, reason number one is the left wants to go after Sean.
Reason number two is that they are suggesting that Sean should have disclosed on air last week that Michael Cohen was his attorney.
That's true, okay?
I think it's true that Sean should have said that Michael Cohen was his attorney.
So I think it's the world's biggest deal.
Not particularly, because I think that it's pretty obvious that Sean is very, very deeply ensconced in Team Trump.
Again, he's been very friendly with Michael Cohen for a long time.
This has been widespread public knowledge.
He talks with President Trump all the time.
So it's not like Bret Baier was failing to disclose a relationship with Michael Cohen.
Sean Hannity was failing to disclose a relationship with somebody who was close to Team Trump.
Is that good?
No.
I mean, when I have situations on this show in which I know players who are being talked about, I will typically tell you as often as I possibly can.
I mean, I can't imagine a situation, which I haven't actually, where I know the players at issue or I have some sort of legal relationship with the players at issue.
The good news is I haven't been a lawyer for virtually anybody except for Steven Crowder.
So, that usually doesn't come up.
That said, I think the left's reaction to this has been over-the-top because the left is always over-the-top.
Every story is a bombshell story.
So, Juan Williams over on Fox News, he says, First of all, Do you really think that Sean would have changed his opinion on the raid of Michael Cohen if he hadn't been a client of Cohen's?
Do you really think that Sean would have been like, yeah, you know what?
Now the raid's great.
I wasn't a client of Cohen's.
I have no problem with the raid.
It's great.
Of course not.
Sean is a big Trump fan.
And Sean thinks that, I think with some evidence, that this targeted hit On President Trump extends to a targeted hit on Michael Cohen.
There are a lot of people who feel that way who are not clients of Michael Cohen.
So I just, again, should Trump have revealed it?
Sure.
Do I think that this is a world shattering, earth breaking thing?
Not particularly, but the left obviously disagrees.
Here's Juan Williams.
The question for me is why Sean didn't disclose this earlier.
Because in the previous two cases, Sean says there's no third party.
He's obviously referring to the idea that Cohen was setting up payments to women for Trump and for Elliot Brody, the guy who's the RNC donor.
And I don't think there's any evidence of anything like that with Sean Hannity.
But why, when Sean was on the air, strongly an advocate for President Trump, not saying, hey, I've got a relationship with the lawyer?
I think that's a question.
Okay, and I think that there's probably some truth to this.
Again, Sean should have just said, listen, I have a legal relationship with Michael Cohen, I know Michael Cohen, I think he's a good guy, or we talk a lot, whatever it is.
You know, the audience should probably know about it, but do I think that this is the end of the world?
No.
The media obviously disagree.
A CNN panel yesterday went nuts about Sean Hannity not disclosing his ties to Cohen on air.
Again, would I think that this were the end of the world if it were Rachel Maddow and Rachel Maddow had a relationship with, say, Hillary Clinton's lawyer?
Not particularly, because I assume that Rachel Maddow is a political hack on behalf of Hillary Clinton.
So why exactly would I be upset that she's not disclosing information that would make her more of a hack for Hillary Clinton, for example?
I think some of the same things about Sean, you know, with regard to Trump.
He's obviously a big fan of Trump.
He's a partisan on behalf of Trump.
I don't think the math changes very much if Michael Cohen is his lawyer versus Michael Cohen not being his lawyer again.
That doesn't mean that Sean shouldn't have said anything.
It just means I don't think the impact of this is tremendous.
I'll show you how the media have responded to this, though, in a second.
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All right, so the media have decided that it is the end of the world that Sean Hannity did not disclose his relationship with Michael Cohen.
Again, I think Sean should have, so I think it's the end of the world.
I really don't.
But here's the CNN panel yesterday going nuts over all of this.
I think we're seeing how this really tight-knit universe works.
And if it is right that this wasn't ever about a third party, this was about Hannity calling up to seeking legal advice from Michael Cohen once in a while.
How can you be going on the air every night talking about Michael Cohen defending the president and have this relationship you're not telling your viewers about?
That is certainly sketchy at the very least.
Well, you're either someone's attorney or you're not.
And you either have attorney-client privilege or you don't.
That's what I don't understand here.
Does Fox News know, or did they know, that he had this relationship?
And if they didn't know, then he hung them out to dry as well, and exposed them to a challenge to their credibility, which is not a good thing for any news network.
Again, we're not talking about a straight reporter.
We're not talking about Brett Baier.
We're not talking about Chris Waltz.
We're talking about Sean Hannity, who's been maybe the most partisan host on behalf of President Trump since the election cycle.
Again, I don't think the impact here is tremendous, but the left uses any excuse in order to try and knock hosts off the air.
You saw a couple of weeks ago they tried to knock Laura Ingraham off the air because she said something untoward about David Hogg, the Parkland survivor.
And now they're trying to knock Sean off the air on the basis that he has conversations with Michael Cohen on an infrequent basis, apparently.
Representative Jerry Connolly, who's a Democrat, he says Sean Hannity should be fired over all of this.
Of course, he thinks Hannity should be fired every day of the week.
And now what we learn is, as he's defending the President's lawyer on television, he has a conflict of interest.
An ethical conflict of interest.
He is one of those clients.
He never revealed that.
And I think that's a big stain on certainly Mr. Hannity, but also Fox News.
So what do you think Fox News should do?
I think they ought to fire Sean Hannity.
We are so far down the rabbit hole at this point.
Does anyone remember where this started?
This whole thing?
This whole thing started with an accusation that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia.
What in the world does Sean Hannity, being a client of Michael Collins, have to do with Trump and Russia?
What does any of this have to do with Trump and Russia at this point?
This is how far afield we have gone.
And it gets even worse.
We're going to talk about Stormy Daniels in just a second.
She appeared on The View today and she just, I thought, made a fool of herself.
But again, what does any of this have to do with anything?
Not much.
Now, does it expose Trump to legal jeopardy?
Sure, because Trump is exposed to legal jeopardy in a variety of ways.
Again, I think that the reality TV show simulation in which we live has become too bizarre even for me, and I usually enjoy the bizarre nature of all of this.
OK, so meanwhile, Stormy Daniels, the porn star from such great flicks as The Witches of Brestwick, was appearing on The View.
Now, remember, Stormy Daniels is only on TV because she signed an agreement with Donald Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, to take $130,000 to shut up about that one time she had sex with Trump back in 2006.
And now, there's a claim that there was a campaign finance violation because Michael Cohen funneled money through an LLC, and it wasn't Trump's money, and it wasn't a campaign payoff, and so it's an in-kind contribution.
Okay, the case here, legally, is somewhat weak.
It's not the strongest case in the world.
But this is the only reason Stormy Daniels is relevant.
I recapitulate this because I think it's important to recognize that while we are stuck in the tawdry details of the president having sex with a porn star, and the media are trying to generate a narrative of Stormy Daniels as some sort of awesome victim of the system here, Stormy Daniels is not a victim of the system.
She had voluntary sex with President Trump, she signed a voluntary agreement with then-candidate Trump, and then she took the money until she decided not to take the money anymore.
And so Stormy Daniels is not a victim here.
She herself says she is not a victim here.
The only situation in which she said she was a victim is she suggests that back in 2011, a member of Donald Trump's entourage, somebody related to Trump, threatened her in a parking lot because she was going to talk about her sex with Trump in In Touch Weekly or some such nonsense.
So this was, so she was on with, she was on with the ladies of The View today.
And she was making some rather astonishing claims on The View, such as she says that, you know, she's really upset about all of this.
She says this isn't—she legitimately said, this isn't—she said, this is not what I want to be known for.
You are a porn star, lady.
Like, this is not what you want to be known for.
You don't want to be known for being part of a giant presidential scandal because you'd rather be known for the lesbian sex scenes that you did that are available on, like, Google Images.
Like, that's what you'd rather be known for?
Like, that's your thing?
Again, I don't think this—it's not like her other life accomplishments have been obscured by this.
She's getting paid more to strip now than she ever was before she admits this.
Okay, but it wasn't just that.
She then revealed a sketch of the guy she says threatened her in 2011.
Now, again, I found that whole story less than credible, that some guy came up to her in a parking lot and threatened her.
Do I think it's completely non-credible?
No, maybe it happened, maybe it didn't, but this is the sketch of the guy.
He looks exactly like Tom Brady.
Like, exactly.
She said this happened in 2011.
If I can show you a picture of Tom Brady from 2011, he had exactly that hair.
So Tom Brady, as we know, is very close with President Trump, obviously.
And so it's all beginning to come together.
This whole scandal is beginning to come together.
President Trump nailed Stormy Daniels in 2006 on a voluntary basis, consensual basis.
In 2011, he sent Tom Brady in his off hours to go and threaten Stormy Daniels in a parking lot with her child present.
And then Tom Brady went on to be participant and deflate it.
I mean, listen, we cannot trust Tom Brady.
This man right here?
Untrustworthy.
OK, Tom Brady is the reason that everything bad has happened in the United States for the last 15 years.
I think that is eminently clear from this sketch that we have now seen.
Pretty, pretty amazing.
Pretty amazing.
So Tom Brady.
I've also heard suggestions that this is young Willem Dafoe or that there are a lot of suspects that this is Michael C. Hall from Dexter.
And so Stormy Daniels is lucky to be alive.
I've heard I've heard a bunch of a bunch of Comparisons, as far as who this sketch is, but how crazy is our politics that we are now sitting around looking at sketches of a guy, a rando from 2011 who looks so generically white model that you could not pick anyone who looks like this out of a lineup?
There are legitimately 10 people you can name off the top of your head who look exactly like this guy.
Is it Timothy Oliphant?
No one knows, right?
It legitimately could be anyone.
It could be the doll from Team America.
Right.
It could be all these people are available.
So it's it's just it's just amazing.
It's just amazing.
So Megan McCain was it was grilling Stormy Daniels.
And again, this is also it's also just see me and ridiculous.
Apparently, Stormy said on The View that she did not come up with the name Make America Horny again, which is the name of her dance tour.
Yeah, she's not in it for the publicity at all.
No one's in it for the publicity.
Everybody is here for You know, really good, solid American reasons.
We're all doing this for good, solid American reasons.
It has nothing to do with publicity.
Nothing.
And she says that, yes, I am dancing more, I'm making more money, I'm spending more money.
She says she's pursuing her dream of directing a horror movie, but the people involved in the project have ghosted her.
That is absolute nonsense.
I mean, I'm sure maybe it happened, but if you think that Stormy Daniels can't get a film produced right now, Stormy Daniels could get 10 films produced right now, so long as she's in it and they have a Trump stand in.
No question.
I just—that sketch just gets me.
I just love the sketch.
It says, Thank you for that.
Now we are so much closer to discovering that Gary from Team America was the guy who really threatened Stormy Daniels.
Everything is stupid, people.
Everything is just stupid.
It's just too stupid.
Okay, so in a minute, I'm going to talk about more stupid stuff.
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Okay.
So, in other stupid news, apparently there's now a boycott being launched against Starbucks.
So why is this Starbucks boycott being launched?
Well, because there was a tape that came out.
In Philadelphia of two black men who were apparently arrested.
This is a clip eight two black men being arrested because they were because they supposedly asked to use the restroom and they were told that they could not or they were hanging around the I think it was that they were hanging around the Starbucks for like 15 minutes waiting for a friend to arrive and the manager called the cops on them.
them.
Here's the tape of it.
You can see the police show up and they're talking to some of the people in the establishment.
What did they get called for?
Because there were two black guys sitting here meeting me?
Yes, I didn't get black guys.
Well, what did they do?
What did they do?
Did someone tell me what they did?
They didn't do anything.
I saw the entire thing.
They didn't do anything.
What did they do?
So the cops were called, apparently, for trespass.
And they took these two guys away.
The guys were later released.
And Starbucks has apologized for the entire incident.
The boycott Starbucks hashtag has been trending on Twitter.
Apparently, there are a lot of people who are legitimately going in and just yelling at people at Starbucks.
They're just going into Starbucks and yelling at the baristas at Starbucks, completely useless.
The men were accused of trespassing.
They said they were simply waiting for a friend before ordering.
The video shot by customers is very hard to watch.
The actions in it are not representative of our Starbucks mission and values, said the CEO of Starbucks.
He said the basis for the call to the Philadelphia Police Department was wrong.
Philadelphia's police commissioner on Saturday defended the arrest, saying his officers had to act after Starbucks employees told them the pair were trespassing.
It's not the police's fault, right?
The police come and they're told somebody's trespassing on private property.
They have to make the arrest.
I mean, they can't sit around and quibble over who made the call, why the call was made.
They initially make the arrest of the people refuse to leave.
These guys apparently refuse to leave.
Philadelphia's police commissioner said, of course, that they were asked to leave and that they did not.
In a video statement, The police commissioner Richard Ross said store employees called 911 to report a disturbance and trespassing.
When officers arrived, Ross said, staff told them the two men had wanted to use the restroom, but were informed it was only for paying customers.
The pair reputedly refused to leave when politely asked to do so by employees and officers, he said.
If you think about it logically, that if a business calls and they say someone is here, that I no longer wish to be in my business, the officers now have a legal obligation to carry out their duties, and they did just that, said Ross.
They're professional in all their dealings with these gentlemen, and instead they got the opposite back.
And then Ross, who by the way is black, said he was acutely aware of implicit bias.
He said, we are committed to fair and unbiased policing.
Anything less than that will not be tolerated in this department.
The two men were released after Starbucks said they were no longer interested in prosecuting them.
Starbucks, of course, apologized for all this.
And now they are pledging that they are going to give all of their baristas sensitivity training.
Implicit bias training.
First of all, implicit bias training is completely useless.
The studies on implicit bias training demonstrate that implicit bias itself is not a good gauge.
Implicit bias, for those who don't know, if you've been in college recently, I'm sure you've taken this test.
An implicit bias test is you sit at a computer and they show you a series of faces.
Black faces and white faces.
And then they show you on the other side of the screen a series of words.
Good, bad, angry, smart.
And then they see how fast you click the button To associate the words in the image.
So if you are slower to identify smart and black than you are for smart and white, this means you are implicitly biased.
The problem with IATs, implicit bias assessment tests, is that they're not statistically significant, meaning that they're not repeatable.
I can take the test twice and get two completely different scores.
You can train for the test.
And there is no evidence whatsoever that so-called implicit bias in this way actually factors into real-world decision-making.
So even the people who created the implicit bias test will acknowledge that there is no hard evidence that even if you fail an implicit bias test, this means that you are a racist in your behavior and your dealings.
And yet now we're going to do implicit bias retraining.
It's just stupid over at Starbucks.
Also, one of the problems that I have with some of the tapes that are being released, that wasn't the only tape that was released.
There was another tape that was also released, this one from today, in which a black man was at a Starbucks in Los Angeles and he claims that this is on Hawthorne.
OK, so let it be known that the area around Hawthorne is heavily minority.
OK, this this Starbucks is in a very heavily minority area.
So I really doubt that the manager at this particular Starbucks has never seen a black person in her establishment before.
What you're going to see in this tape is that the guy who's taping tapes a white guy coming out of the restroom and then he asks the white guy coming out of the restroom if the guy was asked to buy anything by the manager.
And then he goes to the manager and he says, well, I wasn't allowed to use the restroom if I hadn't bought anything.
And the lady says, I'm going to ask you to leave.
And the guy refuses to leave.
This guy posted the tape.
And then he suggests that the Starbucks manager, who, by the way, is Asian, is a racist.
So here's what that sounds like.
So, uh, I would like Starbucks right here on Redondo, on Artesia, and Hardcorn.
This man right here said he hasn't made, he said he hasn't made a purchase yet.
He's in line to make a purchase, and you guys haven't get, you guys, you guys had gave him the code, right?
Is that what you did?
No, this is not your business.
This is not your business.
This is not your business, though.
Okay, you may be a store manager, but you're not in charge.
I'm not allowed to be in here anymore.
You see, they're so mad.
Why are they upset with me, Weston?
What did I do?
I just tried to use the bathroom like you did, and they gave it to you.
Is it my skin color?
Is it my skin color?
I couldn't use the bathroom, but Weston could.
Amen.
I feel it may be my skin color.
Hey, but this is about to be on social media.
It's about to go in the shade room.
Okay, so Sean King posted this, the columnist for the New York Daily News, and he suggested, of course, that this is just demonstration of more implicit racism on the part of employees at places like Starbucks.
And here's my problem with tapes like this.
We don't have the whole tape.
OK, we don't know what happened in the 10 minutes prior to the tape.
All we know is this guy walks up to the manager and then he suggests that he's not being allowed to use the bathroom because she's a racist.
At one point, she starts to say, no, I'm actually asking you to leave because and then cuts her off.
So how are we supposed to know why the manager did this?
You know, we don't know what happened in this original store in Philadelphia.
There are a couple of witnesses, you see on that tape, that there's a white guy who says these black guys weren't doing anything, but we don't know when he came in.
We haven't heard from the manager.
We don't know what the manager had to say about the situation.
Again, Philadelphia is a very heavily black town, so I can't imagine that Starbucks has never had black patrons before.
I can't imagine that blacks are barred from the Starbucks over there.
All I'm asking is, I'm suggesting that we may not know the whole story here.
Maybe we do know the whole story.
If we do know the whole story, then the employees should be fired, right?
But if we don't know the whole story, then why are we jumping to the conclusion that Starbucks employees are essentially racist, especially in areas where they're dealing with black folks all the time?
Is it possible that the people in Philadelphia sat down at the table and asked to use the bathroom, and then when they were told they could not until they bought something, they just refused to leave?
And they just stayed there?
Is it possible that they're acting threatening toward the manager?
I don't know any of this, right?
It's all speculation.
It's possible that everything I'm saying right now is completely incorrect.
But you don't know either.
And neither does anybody else.
The media don't know.
Presumably the manager knows.
Presumably the people who were involved in the incident know.
But we haven't heard from the manager.
We still haven't heard a defense from the manager of exactly what happened inside that Starbucks.
And now we're gonna retrain thousands of employees across the country, including black employees across the country, in implicit bias without knowing the whole story?
This is one of the things that just drives me up a wall.
If you're going to suggest that there is implicit bias, that there's some sort of evil racism rampant throughout American society, at least give me the whole story.
At least I have to have the whole tape.
There are racists, okay?
And we've shown some of those racists over the past couple of years on this program doing overtly racist things, and we have called them out on it.
But if I don't know the whole story, am I going to jump to the conclusion that this guy's telling the truth?
That conveniently, the very day after a national controversy involving a black man not being able to go to the bathroom in a Starbucks, another manager across the country, on the other side of the country, did the exact same thing to a black man.
So I think that that's a little convenient for the narrative.
I think it's a little convenient for the narrative.
I don't think this is a massive widespread problem all across the country.
And by the way, when my kids have to go to the bathroom at Starbucks, I buy something at Starbucks.
And if they asked me to leave a restaurant, I would leave a restaurant.
But again, I think people are apt to jump to conclusions that please them most rather than waiting for all the facts.
As I say, if the testimony of these folks is true, then the person should be fired.
You called the cops on someone for no reason?
You should lose your job.
I want to know the entire story.
And this is, again, one of my pet peeves, is people using selective evidence to back the idea that America is systemically racist or systemically sexist.
So there's another story that I want to tell you about.
There's a woman named Alyssa Nutting, appropriately named, who is complaining about sexism in American society for a very, very stupid reason.
I will tell you about that in just a second.
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All righty.
So as I promised, there is some, there's another story here from, there's several other stories today of people claiming that America is systemically awful because they have experienced something that is supposedly terrible.
So there's a woman named Alyssa Nutting, as I mentioned.
Alyssa Nutting is an essayist, a screenwriter, a creative writing professor, and author of the novels Tampa and Made for Love.
Okay, and she tweeted this out, and it has, as of right now, 186,000.
186,000 likes on Twitter, and 23,000 retweets.
Quote, my daughter started crying at the dentist's office because the dentist, quote, is a boy.
And the dentist said, sorry, there are no girl dentists at this office.
And my daughter looked at me and said, why did we come here?
This has 186,000 likes.
Okay, for that story.
86,000 likes.
Okay, for that story.
That's a stupid story.
Okay, because you know what you should tell your daughter?
Lady?
You should tell your daughter that 47.7% of all dental students in the United States are female.
And my sister-in-law is a dentist.
There are lots and lots of dentists who are ladies.
There are lots and lots of orthodontists who are ladies.
My sister-in-law is actually an orthodontist.
This is so ridiculous in every conceivable way.
And so I tweeted that out, right?
So I tweeted out, you know, maybe you should have told her that basically half of all dentists are women.
Maybe you should have told her that.
Or maybe you should have said, well, honey, you know, there's something statistically, I mean, I don't know how old she is, this might be a little bit over her head, but you might say if she's seven or eight, there's something called statistical significance and random sampling, okay?
And it's possible that this doctor's office, with a bunch of men in it, is mirrored by another doctor's office or dentist's office with a bunch of women in it.
Because factually speaking, half of all dental students in the United States are women.
And if you want to be a dentist, honey, you can be a dentist because it's a free country.
Women now outnumber men in law schools.
Women are achieving parity in medicine.
Women are achieving parity in a wide variety of fields.
This has nothing to do with sexism.
And my daughter asked me something similar fairly recently about the presidents.
And this is a harder question, right?
She asked me not about modern-day dentists, who are split 50-50 men-women in terms of the student body.
She asked me about the presidents, right?
We were talking about all the presidents, and I was showing her pictures of them, and she said, Fair.
And I said, because in the past, there were some people who were not nice to women.
But now, if you want to be president, you can be president.
You can be president now.
A woman can be president now.
When you grow up, do you want to be president?
And she said, no, it sounds boring.
And I said, fair.
Totally fair.
Okay, but this is...
So I tweeted out that perhaps you ought to inform your daughter about statistics and reality and the fact that America is not a sexist country and...
And some woman, some feminist named Katie Stoll, who I've never heard of, said, you've seen me on Cracked, co-host of even more news podcasts.
I've never heard of her.
But she is wearing a shirt in her profile photo that says, the past is male, which seems like misgendering the past.
How do you know how the past identifies, lady?
But she tweeted back, don't ever have kids.
To which I tweeted back, I actually have two kids, including a four-year-old daughter I will raise to believe that she's capable of anything rather than a victim in the least sexist society in the history of mankind.
Like really, it's just so stupid.
Okay, and then I love this.
She responded by saying, Okay, I promise you my followers are probably not all that interested in listening to her stupid show.
So she doesn't like the fact that I cited an actual statistic, and this makes me a callous, racist, offensive bully.
This is the way this works now.
You cite a fact, and this makes you callous, racist, and offensive.
Which is just absurd.
It's just absurd in every possible way.
But, you know, this is the way that our politics works now.
Speaking of absurd in every possible way, there's a piece today in the New York Times from a black professor of philosophy at Emory University all about how America is racist.
And again, This is using anecdotal evidence in order to suggest that the vast majority of Americans are racist.
So we've already had, in today's show, talk about using anecdotal evidence at a Starbucks that may not even be complete to suggest that all Starbucks baristas need implicit bias training.
We've had a woman claim that she walked into one dentist's office and there were no female dentists, and therefore all of American society is sexist.
And now we have a guy named George Yancey who's suggesting that because he got death threats in the mail from a bunch of white racists, this means all of America is racist.
So, there's an article in the New York Times, and it is literally titled, should I give up on white America?
Should I give up on white America?
Well, the answer is no, because if you were to title your piece, should I give up on black America, everybody would rightly see that as a slight against black Americans.
First of all, who are you to give up on anyone?
It's not your job to give up on anyone.
Are you the great arbiter of human worth and human value?
I mean, if you give up on white America, white America ain't gonna stop existing.
This is just such foolishness in every way.
But I want to tell you the whole story in just a second.
So here's what Yancey has actually said.
So Yancey says he faces a serious dilemma.
So here's the question.
Do I give up on white people, on white America, or do I continue to fight for a better white America despite the fact that my efforts continue to lead to unspeakable white racist backlash?
So here's the question.
Why is that a serious dilemma?
According to polls, America is not filled with racists.
It's one of the least racist places on planet Earth.
Less than 5% of Americans say that they would not live next door to somebody of a different race.
One of the lowest rates on planet Earth.
In order for Yates' complaints to be taken seriously, we have to believe the people who sent him death threats because he's a black professor are representative of white America at large.
Now, I can speak to this somewhat personally.
As someone who received a plethora of death threats in 2016, like a lot of death threats, right?
Death threats over the phone, death threats via email, one really crazy letter in the mail.
As somebody who's received death threats for years, probably from some of the same people who send death threats to this guy, right?
Some members of the alt-right, presumably.
I don't think that that's representative of America more broadly.
Even when I wrote a piece in the Washington Post talking about the threat of the alt-right, I never suggested that it was a broad swath of Americans.
I always thought that this was a movement of less than 10,000 people probably.
But according to Yancey, this is representative of all of white America.
He says he is, quote, convinced that America suffers from a pervasively malignant and malicious systemic illness, white racism.
He offers no stats to support this contention.
He suggests that those who disagree with his contention are just doing so because they themselves are racists as well.
He says, there's also an appalling lack of courage, weakness of will, spinelessness, and indifference in our country that helps to sustain this racism.
So you may not be a racist, but if you say America is not really racist, then this makes you a racist.
Got it?
And you're a monster under almost any circumstances, because Yancey says white Americans are, quote, monsters, land takers, brutal dispossession, and then body snatchers in the selling and buying of black flesh.
No one alive in the United States today has held a black slave, unless they are currently in jail, because that's illegal.
No one alive in the United States today has been involved in the quote-unquote brutal dispossession of other people, because that is illegal as well.
So exactly how are white Americans supposed to be not racist, according to Yancey?
By agreeing with him.
And this is the end point.
The end point of all of this is that folks on the left insist that you agree with them.
That's the only way to escape their little trap.
So, if you are a person who says, let's see all the evidence on Starbucks, you're a racist now because you're covering for racism just by asking for evidence.
And the only way for you to be allowed out of your little racist box is if you say, you know what?
You're right.
Starbucks is systemically racist.
They have to retrain all of their employees because you had a bad experience at a Starbucks, or at least you say you had a bad experience at a Starbucks.
And if I don't respect your experience because I don't see evidence for it, or I don't see sufficient evidence for it, then it must be because I'm a racist as well.
Or sexism.
If I say, you know, I want to raise my daughter to believe she can succeed in American society because she can, then I'm obviously not in tune with the woke crowd when it comes to sexism.
The only way for me to be in tune with those people is by saying, yes, you walked into a dentist's office and there were no women because men are evil.
Right?
Then I'm on your side.
Then everything's cool.
And according to Yancey, if I say, listen, you got some bad death threats, I've gotten bad death threats too.
There are some really crappy people out there.
But that's not representative of Americans as a whole, and certainly not representative of a particular race as a whole.
If I say that, I'm a racist.
The only way that Yancey lets me off the hook is if I agree with him.
Apparently, he praised one of his white students who says, quote, the system is racist.
As a white woman, I'm responsible to dismantle that system as well as the attitudes in me that growing up in the system created.
I'm responsible for speaking out when I hear racist comments.
Well, I mean, of course, we are all responsible for speaking out when we hear racist comments.
That is not exactly a revelation, and that should not be dependent on race.
But I think that people should speak up when they hear racism on any side.
Racism does play a central role in American history, and of course, there are still racists.
But the idea here is that if you disagree with Yancey about politics, then this makes you an aider and abetter of racism.
And all of this is really nasty, and all of it's counterproductive.
I spoke at a high school last night, and it was really, I thought, fascinating.
A lot of the students disagreed with me on a lot of issues, which is just great.
I really enjoyed it.
I enjoyed the discussion.
And this exact topic came up, like how do you teach your kids?
And what I said is the first thing you have to teach your kids in a free country is that most responsibility devolves on you.
That if you are failing in life, look first to your own decision-making.
And if you want to succeed in life, look first to your own decision-making.
Telling kids that they are victims of an awful, evil, sexist, racist system, all that does is it cripples them for life.
It tells them no matter how hard they work, no matter how hard they try, they are never going to be able to succeed.
And that is a lie in the freest country in the history of mankind.
You can succeed.
Everyone can succeed if they apply themselves and make good decisions.
If we're telling people anything else, we're doing them a disservice.
A real disservice.
It doesn't mean ignoring problems, but it does mean recognizing that American freedom is the solution.
Okay, so in just a second, we'll get some things I like and then some things that I hate.
And maybe we'll deconstruct a little bit of culture if we have time.
So let's jump right in.
So let's do some things that I like.
I've been in the middle of reading a book by Mark Morris called The Norman Conquest.
This is a really great history book about the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the backdrop to the Norman Conquest of Great Britain.
And it's really well written.
This guy's a terrific writer.
I'd never heard of him before, but I want to do some reading up on this particular topic.
But this book is really worth reading, The Norman Conquest by Mark Morris.
And it is really one of the most fascinating sort of Battle sequences in the history of mankind really the king of Britain King Harold.
He was originally He originally was not part of the royal line, but he sort of was crowned king, and he was a Saxon, and he was attacked simultaneously by Vikings in the north, and by the, or rather, by Vikings, yes, in the north, and by William the Conqueror in the south, and he had to rush to one end of the country and then back down to the other end of the country in order to fight these battles.
It really is worth reading.
Check it out.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so the thing that I hate today is that the left has one playbook and they keep going back to this playbook, and it really is quite nasty.
Keith Ellison, who is one of the more degraded public figures in American public life, a guy with decades-long association with the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan, and yet was almost elected as the head of the DNC.
Keith Ellison is now making the claim that because Democrats have been losing elections, women are dying over all of this.
Women are dying because we are losing elections.
We don't have the right to lose a damn election.
OK, so women are dying because you're losing elections?
Name the women.
Name the women who are dying because you're losing elections.
I don't know who you're talking about.
But this is the idea.
The idea that Republicans want to kill people.
They've been saying this about people since Paul Ryan.
They had an ad back in the mid-2000s in which they talked about Paul Ryan pushing granny over a cliff.
You know, when I say that I'm in favor of reasonable discussion, that I like discussing issues, the reason that I say that is because I hate this kind of crap so much.
I hate when Democrats suggest that folks on the other side of the aisle want people to die, that Republicans are evil, they're bad people, that Republicans are character-free human beings who don't care about human suffering.
None of that is true.
And none of it forwards anything that remotely approaches a useful political discussion.
So, Keith Ellison was doing this.
Joe Biden said the other day, he repeated again that Republicans want black people not to vote.
Again, all of this is just nonsense, and all of it is really nasty, but unfortunately it's become the Democrats' stock in trade.
Okay, so, do we have time to do a little deconstruction of the culture?
Okay, so let's deconstruct a little bit of culture.
So, there's a Top 40 song out today called Him and I by Halsey and G-Eazy.
I've never heard of either of these people.
So, deconstructing of the culture is when we take a look at a piece of culture and we determine How it's impacting you, how it's impacting your kids, what are the lyrics, what does the music sound like, because culture is, as my friend and mentor Andrew Breitbart once said, upstream of politics, and more people are impacted by culture than are impacted by politics, certainly.
So this song by Halsey and G-Eazy is called Him and I, and here is what it sounds like.
Cross my heart, hope to die, through my lover, I'd never lie.
It's every truth, I swear I'll try.
In the end, it's him and I.
He's got his head, I'm on my mind.
We got that love, the crazy kind.
I am his, and he is mine.
In the end, it's him and I.
I'm 65, speeding up the PCH, a hell of a ride.
They don't want to see us make it, they just want to divide.
2017, Bonnie and Clyde.
Wouldn't see the point of living on it, one of us die.
Got that kind of style, everybody try to rip off.
YSL dress under when she take the mink off.
Silk on her body, pull it down.
Okay, this is a fairly typical R&B song.
So, I will say that the grammar sucks.
It's not him and I, it's he and I. Him and I only applies in particular grammatical circumstances.
This is not that grammatical circumstance.
So, not to be pedantic, but I guess maybe it's too much to be asking rappers to use proper grammar.
But, oh well.
It is also worth noting that the lyrics here are not particularly sophisticated.
They're better than, at least they rhyme, I guess.
But here's the real point of this song.
One of the things that has really taken over music since the advent of rock and roll is this sort of adolescent view of what relationships are, this adolescent view of what love is.
And it's something that you can't really understand when you're an adolescent because you're an adolescent, you're in the midst of it.
But it turns out that this sort of obsessive, crazy love, that's really not the sort of love that relationships are built on.
Relationships are built, as I say very often, it's not sexy, but it's true.
They're built on common values.
They're built on trust.
They're built on respect.
This is what relationships are built on.
You never hear any of this sort of stuff from R&B, certainly.
It's all about the crazy infatuation that people have for one another.
And then you wonder why relationships don't work.
Well, the reason is because the longer you know someone, the less infatuated you are with them, and the more that you are interested in knowing them as a human being.
There's a fascinating chart in Jonathan Haidt's book, The Happiness Hypothesis, all about exactly how human relationships work.
What it basically shows is that for the first six months that you know somebody and you love somebody, you are infatuated with them.
And then there's what he calls committed love.
Committed love is you sharing values and you valuing the person as a human being and not just as a body that you want to have sex with.
And what it looks like is in inverse proportions.
What you see is that in the first six months, infatuate love is really, really high, and then it kind of craters over the next several years.
And what you see is that respectful love, committed love, starts off pretty low and skyrockets over a period of years.
And I will say that the relationship I have with my wife now is a lot more meaningful than the relationship that I had with my wife when I first met her.
It's very different.
It's a very, very different thing.
But this is one of the problems, is that when popular culture sets you up to believe that infatuate love is going to be like this the rest of your life, you're just going to be obsessed with your spouse the rest of your life, in the sense that you can't take your eyes off the person, you can't spend a moment out of that person's presence.
I love spending time with my wife, but my wife and I are there also to raise our kids and also to have a life together and to build things.
Marriage is the beginning of building something.
If the end goal of love is the sort of infatuated love that you have with somebody in the first five seconds, then there is no end goal.
You're not building toward anything.
Everything is a come down from that.
Everything is a let down from that.
And so when you have all of this sort of language, some of the lyrics here are, Silk on her body, pull it down and watch it slip off.
Ever catch me cheating, she would try to cut my bleep.
Crazy, but I love her.
I could never run from her.
Hit it, no rubber.
Never would no one touch her.
Swear we drive each other mad.
She'd be so stubborn.
But what the F is love with no pain, no suffer?
Intense, this bleep.
It gets dense." Okay, so again, embedded in this idea of infatuate love is that everything should be painful, and that if you're suffering in a relationship, that there's some sort of glory to it.
That the more you suffer, the more pain you go through in a relationship, the more it just shows that you're madly in love because you have to overcome obstacles.
This is from people who have watched too many movies.
And watch too many episodes of One Tree Hill.
If your relationship with your loved one is about pain and suffering, then it's a bad relationship.
The whole point is to pick somebody with whom you will be fighting against the chaos that rules the world, instead of finding that chaos in your relationship with the other person.
So I'm not picking on this particular song, but as a representative of an entire genre telling teenagers that their sort of love is the highest sort of love, And telling older people that this is what they should be aiming for in a relationship.
I think that that's a big mistake and it's not anything valuable worth shooting for.
What's worth shooting for is a relationship that includes infatuate love, but also is more than that.
Also is more than that.
Which is why I've always told people, date somebody for marriage who has your values.
You want a good relationship?
You want to make a good decision in life?
That's the way to do it.
Alrighty.
We'll be back here tomorrow with much more.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Blover.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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