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April 30, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:28
The White House Correspondents’ Dog’s Breakfast | Ep. 528
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The White House Correspondents Dinner goes off the rails, Joy Reid apologizes, sort of, and Kanye meets with Candace Owen, Charlie Kirk, and issues a new rap about Trump.
Wow, a lot going on.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Okay, so, the big story over the weekend was, of course, the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
I hate the White House Correspondents Center.
I think it's stupid.
I think that it is self-aggrandizing.
Every year I complain about it.
It has been for probably 10 years running.
I say that it's just ridiculous to have all of these journalists sitting there in tuxes, feeding each other and talking about how wonderful they are, and then patting each other on the back.
And they have this roast.
There's one event every year that is made to order to make Americans feel as though they are out of the loop and scorned by the media elite.
It is the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
We were actually invited to the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
I did not go.
I really am not particularly interested in going.
It doesn't look like a very fun event to be at, honestly.
It's just a place for people to hobnob with each other.
When they talk about Washington, D.C.
cocktail parties, this is exactly the sort of thing they are talking about.
Everything was going sort of as planned, as per the usual arrangement at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
A bunch of rich people, famous people, patting each other on the back and talking about how wonderful they are and making some sort of light jokes about one another.
And then Michelle Wolf got up.
Now, I don't—I'd never heard of this person, Michelle Wolf.
Had you guys heard of Michelle Wolf before this?
I'd never heard of Michelle Wolf before this.
I just figured that she was some sort of Debbie Wasserman Schultz impersonator.
I had no clue who she was.
And she gets up.
Apparently, it turns out that she's a writer for Comedy Central.
Um, which demonstrates, presumably, why Trevor Noah is deeply unfunny.
I guess this explains a lot of things.
It explains Trevor Noah, it explains Samantha Bee's prior history.
I don't know if she wrote for either of those shows, but if not, then she has a lot of compatriots who are just as unfunny as she is.
So Michelle Wolf gets up.
And she has a 19-minute monologue.
And we're not going to play for you this 19-minute monologue, because I watched it, and it probably took four years off my life, just in terms of sheer boredom.
And I was just watching it, and I could feel my hair turning gray.
It was like the end of Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail.
It was like I'd drunk from the wrong cup.
By the end of the monologue, I'd added several gray hairs and several wrinkles to my forehead.
But Michelle Wolf did this monologue, and it's been much ballyhooed.
People on the left, many of them defending it, some people on the left, Not defending it.
People on the right, of course, very, very upset about it.
I want to talk about this because I want to talk about the value of humor in Trump-era America.
I want to talk about the media's response to all of this.
As a precursor, let it be noted, no one made a joke about Obama for eight years at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
It was forbidden.
You were allowed to make jokes about Paul Ryan, about Mitch McConnell, about Mitt Romney, about John McCain.
You were allowed to make jokes about a bunch of foreign leaders.
You were not allowed to make jokes that were serious about Barack Obama.
This is why Seth Meyers and crew were making these—it was great.
I mean, if you're a Republican president, you could be attacked when you were the president, like Bush, or you could be attacked when you were not the president, like Bush, when Obama was president.
So the White House Correspondence Center has always become a roast of the right, which of course has justified the right-wing's hatred of the media.
One of the great lies the media have put out over the past several years is that President Trump is the one who ginned up all of this dislike of the media.
That's utter nonsense.
As I said at CPAC, we hated you guys before.
We thought you guys sucked.
We thought that you were bad at your job.
We thought that you were not objective and you were pretending to be objective.
We thought that you were wildly left-wing.
So it's not a shock, really, that Michelle Wolf was up there ripping into President Trump.
But it was the level of vitriol that she used.
It was the crazy level of vitriol that she used that got people really upset, particularly her rip on Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Trump declined to go, but a bunch of members of the White House were there.
So Kellyanne Conway went.
I don't know why, if you're Kellyanne Conway, you would go.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders went.
I don't know why, if you're Sarah Huckabee Sanders, you would go.
You know you're going to go there.
You know you're going to get roasted.
And Michelle Wolf certainly roasted Sarah Huckabee Sanders, again, in quite unfunny fashion.
And, you know, there are a lot of folks out there who say that I have an annoying voice.
Folks, you have not heard annoying until you've heard this voice.
So here's Michelle Wolf going off on Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
I have to say, I'm a little starstruck.
I love you as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid's Tale.
Mike Pence, if you haven't seen it, you would love it.
I actually really like Sarah.
I think she's very resourceful.
Like, she burns facts, and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye.
Like, maybe she's born with it.
Maybe it's lies.
And I'm never really sure what to call Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
You know?
Is it Sarah Sanders?
Is it Sarah Huckabee Sanders?
Is it Cousin Huckabee?
Is it Auntie Huckabee Sanders?
Like, what's Uncle Tom but for white women who disappoint other white women?
Oh, I know!
Aunt Coulter!
Okay, so, number one, was any of that funny?
Like, if you're on the left, do you find that funny?
Maybe we just have wildly different senses of humor, but I didn't find any of that funny.
Like, I will laugh if there's a good anti-Trump joke, because a good joke is a good joke, but that's not a good joke.
Now, a lot of people were getting on Wolf for supposedly ripping on Huckabee Sanders' looks.
I'm not hearing her rip on Huckabee Sanders' looks right there, actually.
I didn't actually hear the evidence that she's ripping on Sarah Huckabee Sanders' looks.
She makes a reference about Smokey Eye.
She makes a reference about Aunt Lydia from The Handmaid's Tale, which I believe is more of a rip on Huckabee Sanders' character.
I mean, this is where we've come in American society.
You're allowed to say that a woman wants other women to be raped for purposes of impregnation, which is actually the role of Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid's Tale.
In The Handmaid's Tale, Aunt Lydia is the woman who oversees all of the women who are raped, forcibly consummated by men, and then are forced to bear their children.
And so that seems to me that would be more of an insult than that she's ugly.
But people didn't take it that way.
You're not allowed to attack Sarah Huckabee Sanders on these grounds because, presumably, there was some sort of covert joke there about Aunt Lydia being played by a not very attractive woman in the series, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders looks like that woman.
Again, I'm not hearing the evidence that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was ripped on account of her looks.
I am hearing a lot of very mean and stupid jokes about Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but I'm not sure that it's that much wildly beyond the pale of anything else Michelle Wolf said.
Like, for example, I think her rip on Mike Pence was just as bad as her rip on Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Here's what she said about Mike Pence.
A lot of people want Trump to be impeached.
I do not.
Because just when you think Trump is awful, you remember Mike Pence.
Mike Pence is what happens when Anderson Cooper isn't gay.
Mike Pence is the kind of guy that brushes his teeth and then drinks orange juice and thinks, mmm.
I don't even know what that means about the orange juice and the toothbrushing.
Like, does he have no taste buds?
What exactly is the idea there?
In any case, you know, again, making the Handmaid's Tale reference about Mike Pence, she would do that several times throughout the evening.
And it's just, you know, again, I think bad comedy.
I don't think this is wildly egregious.
Here's what I do think was wildly egregious.
So here is the point where she is demonstrative of what the left thinks, right?
You can hear the entire crowd laughing at all of this, laughing along.
Mike Pence is just terrible.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders burns facts.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
And everybody in the audience who's laughing, understand that you just undermined your credibility for the next 10 years with the entire right-wing audience.
You guys are trying to prove that Trump hates the media because he's disrespectful of the truth?
Well, you guys are disrespectful of a very basic truth.
You are biased.
You are left-wing.
You think these jokes are funny?
You have to be left-wing to think these jokes are funny, or brain damage.
Those are the only two possibilities.
Because the jokes are not funny, number one.
And number two, they're all very much left-wing jokes.
And it'll be funny because you'll hear, at the end, Michelle Wolf makes a couple of jokes.
She actually lectures the members of the media, and...
They do not take it well.
But here's the joke that got a laugh from some members of the media that just demonstrates full scale where the media's heads are at, the level of bias in the media.
It's pretty astonishing.
This is the one that should have shook the room.
This is the joke that people should have been upset about.
Not the stuff about Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Look, I understand.
We live in the Me Too moment.
We're supposed to have female solidarity.
And if there's any sort of implication that a woman is attacking another woman, that that's really terrible and all of this.
Here's the joke that I was offended by.
Okay, because it turns out I like babies.
Okay, I think babies are good.
Here is the joke that I was offended by.
Here's Michelle Wolf telling an abortion joke.
I guess that's what this is.
And it does demonstrate, I think, full scale what folks on the left think about abortion, which is pretty unfortunate.
Mike Pence is also very anti-choice.
He thinks abortion is murder.
Which, first of all, don't knock it till you try it.
And when you do try it, really knock it.
You know, you gotta get that baby out of there.
And yeah, sure, you can groan all you want.
I know a lot of you are very anti-abortion.
You know, unless it's the one you got for your secret mistress.
It's fun how values can waver.
And look at the expressions in the media there.
Oh, the smiles.
Oh, isn't she charming?
Oh.
Yeah, it's a baby.
It's not murder, but it's a baby.
You should really hit it hard until it comes out of there.
And also, you all bought abortions for your mistresses, so now it's moral.
The disrespect for human life there, I think, is a lot more deeply troubling from the left than the disrespect for Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Again, do I think Sarah Huckabee Sanders has a right to be mad?
Yeah.
I mean, this wasn't a roast.
Right?
If it were Rose, Sarah Huckabee Sanders would get to get up there and respond.
But Sarah Huckabee Sanders is sitting there, and I think stolidly taking it, and Kellyanne Conway doing the same thing.
But that joke is the one that I think is really amazing.
And again, you have to be not only on the left, but I think Relatively inhuman to think that that is a funny joke.
Don't knock abortion until you try it, and if you do try it, really knock it, because you've got to get that baby out of there.
Wow, just hilarious, hilarious stuff.
Now, there was one joke that did fall flat for Michelle Wolf among the people in the audience, and that was her rip on the media.
So in just a second, I'm going to play that for you, because this actually was the one point in her little monologue that I thought was worthwhile.
And then we'll get to all the reactions to this and the demonstration that the media, in all of their quote-unquote unbiased glory, or anything but unbiased, At first, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at 1-800-Flowers.
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Okay, so, finally, Michelle Wolf tells a joke that the media don't like.
So the media liked the jokes about Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
They liked a bunch of jokes about Mike Pence.
She did a really ridiculous routine where she just talked about how Trump is not all that wealthy, which I think is probably true.
I don't think Trump is as wealthy as he says he is.
She actually started telling a series of jokes saying, Donald Trump isn't as wealthy as he thinks he is.
He's so poor that, and then she'd have the audience say, how poor is he?
And then she'd give a little joke at the end.
In any case, here was the only thing the media did not laugh at, her rip at the media, which is the only true thing she said the entire night.
So here's Michelle Wolf again at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
We've got our friends at CNN here.
Welcome, guys.
It's great to have you.
You guys love breaking news.
And you did it.
You broke it.
Good work.
Fox News is here, so you know what that means, ladies.
Cover your drinks.
Seriously.
Okay, but then she went on to rip into the media.
She suggested that the media had made a bunch of money off of Trump and that they had promoted him for their own pocketbook, which I think is certainly true.
Jeff Zucker has essentially said as much, Les Moonves at CBS said as much.
It's not a great shock.
Okay, so after all of this happened, people started to go nuts.
So the White House got very upset at Michelle Wolff.
They said, how could Michelle Wolff say all of these things?
So let it be known, number one, Michelle Wolff's a comedian.
She can say any of these things.
Should the White House Correspondents' Dinner have had her?
No.
It obviously did not fit with the tenor of the actual dinner.
It did not do what they wanted it to do.
It did not forward their agenda in any real way.
In fact, it was pretty counterproductive to their agenda.
So the real blame here I don't think even lies with Michelle Wolf, who is, I will admit, I think a really galling piece of work.
But it's the White House Correspondents' Dinner that decided to have her.
So it's on the journalists who organized this thing, not on Michelle Wolf.
Michelle Wolf was just being Michelle Wolf.
At the White House Correspondents' Dinner, they're the people who invited her.
Well, White House officials were slamming Michelle Wolf.
They said that she was incredibly disrespectful.
Again, I think she was gross.
I think she was disrespectful.
I think that there is something weird about the White House complaining about people being gross and disrespectful when President Trump spent the entire 2016 campaign ripping into every one of his opponents as ugly and stupid.
But in any case, here is Ed Henry talking about it.
What happened to Sarah Sanders last night was disgusting, and I say that as a former president of the White House Correspondent Association.
By the briefing tomorrow, I hope that the White House Correspondent Association, which I am a card-carrying paid member of still, you guys should put out at least a statement, an apology to Sarah Sanders, who you work with professionally to go after her physical appearance, to say some of the things that happened.
It obviously is so far beyond the line that I hope and pray the association apologizes to Sarah Sanders.
So, again, I'm going to try and be fair-minded about this.
I don't think that Sarah Huckabee Sanders' physical appearance was clearly attacked.
I think that everyone took all of the lines as an attack on her physical appearance, but I'm not sure that that's actually what happened.
I think there are a lot of awful things Michelle Wolf said that are just as bad and worse about other people.
But we're going to talk about the media's response to all of this in just a second.
Because, as I say, the White House responding by claiming offense, I think, is a little bit snowflakey.
But I think that the media's response, by the same token, is just as snowflakey in a different way.
So, here's what I mean.
So, the way that the left responded to the White House criticizing Michelle Wolfe was by saying Michelle Wolfe was some sort of great hero.
There's a whole article over at Vulture.com talking about how Michelle Wolfe spoke truth to power.
Michelle Wolfe did not speak truth to power.
Michelle Wolfe just made herself a quick buck.
Michelle Wolfe knows.
Stephen Colbert made his name at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2005 when he went out of his way to bash President Bush, and now the dude has David Letterman's show.
And so she knows that 10 years from now, she's going to be sitting pretty on some late night show because she had this speak-truth-to-power moment.
So the person who took the least risk in the room, actually, was Michelle Wolf, because we're all talking about Michelle Wolf on Monday.
So she did just fine.
But speaking of hypocrites, again, I think it's hypocrisy for the White House to complain about people being mean to Trump and his associates.
Trump himself has been quite mean about an enormous number of people.
He called Ted Cruz's wife ugly in the middle of the campaign.
He said that Megyn Kelly was bleeding from her whatever.
We don't have to go through the entire campaign again, but the thing about President Trump that I think is interesting is that the guy can give it, but he can also take it, right?
When Trump gets hit with a lot of these insults, he sort of smiles and he takes it.
Well, I think the White House should probably do the same here, but here's what the media can't do.
The media demonstrates hypocrisy of its own when they don't condemn Michelle Wolf.
Because they say it's terrible what Trump says.
Okay, well, if it's terrible what Trump says, you don't get to do it back to him, do you?
Right?
There's no whataboutism here.
You don't get to say Trump is awful for saying all of these things, but Michelle Wolf is so brave for saying all of these same sorts of things about members of the Trump administration.
Well, Donna Brazile, the former head of the DNC, that's exactly what she does.
She defends Michelle Wolf, and she says, well, listen, it's okay for Michelle Wolf to do it, because obviously Trump says gross things, too.
But remember, we have no norms now.
This is a president who has criticized women, who has called reporters some disgusting things.
I don't know if there are any more lines anymore.
That being said, look, come on, this president has said some raunchy things.
We're talking about the comedian, not the president.
Frank, the president at times says things and then he says, well, I'm just joking.
Look, I'm not defending her.
I would use fresh material.
Okay.
Okay.
But here's the problem is that you are defending her because you're saying Trump is so awful for doing X. Why don't we do X also?
I hate this I hate this kind of logic when it comes from the right.
I hate this kind of logic when it comes from the left.
Right now, it's coming from the left.
Kathy Griffin, of course, who traffics in exactly this sort of nonsense, she said the same thing.
She tweeted out, quote, I have some thoughts on Michelle Wolf's act and the reaction to it from members of the press and other DC insiders.
For the record, I was in the room last night.
Michelle Wolf's set was great.
She was hilarious and confident.
I like how confident is now like a descriptor for a comedian.
Why is it a... I don't understand why that's some sort of laudatory thing, that you're confident.
Yeah, a lot of people are confident.
The question is whether they're good at their job.
Anyway, Kathy Griffin continues, you know, a woman famous for holding up a severed head model of President Trump.
The calls for the White House Correspondents Association, Michelle Wolf, to apologize are absurd.
They're coming from reporters and many Trumpers.
Trump himself has famously never apologized because he thinks it makes him look weak.
And then she concludes by saying, so journalists are willing to demand that a comic hired to roast people apologize, but they aren't willing to demand that Trump or his staff apologize to people?
Is that where we're at now?
Can someone explain the difference to me?
Well, I mean, I can explain that journalists actually did call for Trump to apologize over and over and over.
He didn't do it.
So your excuse is that now the left gets to do it as well?
This is why I don't like the whataboutitism tack on this sort of thing.
Because eventually, you just end up in the pit.
Eventually, everybody's just slapping each other in the mud.
And then if you say, well, that's gross, they say, well, yeah, but you do it too.
Well, the media, what's funny about this is the media has finally picked up on the fact that they actually have to be above the fray here.
And so five years ago, they probably would have been okay with this sort of thing.
But because Trump has been so harsh on the media, because he's gone after them for all of their fake news nonsense, even the media was forced to disassociate from Michelle Wolf's routine, even the ones who were laughing at it in the room.
So NBC's Andrea Mitchell She said, listen, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was grossly insulted and deserves an apology.
She says, apology is owed to press secretary and others grossly insulted New York Michelle Wolf at White House Correspondents Association dinner, which started with uplifting heartfelt speech by Margaret Taleb, comedian who was worse since Imus insulted Clinton.
Okay, and then Mika Brzezinski did the same thing.
She also defended Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
She says, So, folks on the left are obviously aware of the double standard that they have set up for themselves if they were to greenlight what Michelle Wolf is doing.
Same thing with President Trump.
All women have a duty to unite when these attacks happen, and the White House Correspondents Association owes Sarah an apology.
So folks on the left are obviously aware of the double standard that they have set up for themselves if they were to greenlight what Michelle Wolf is doing.
Same thing with President Trump.
So here's my bottom line here.
Michelle Wolf's a gross person.
The White House should probably not complain too much about this sort of stuff, because President Trump does it on a regular basis.
And the media should not complain about Trump if they're not going to complain about Michelle Wolf.
End of story.
But the idea that this is some sort of big national story, the only person who makes off like a bandit in this whole situation is the grossest person in the room, Michelle Wolf.
And again, the grossest thing she said was not about a politician.
It was about human babies in the womb, whom she said ought to be killed anytime you feel like it, because some men's mistresses have paid for abortions.
Just yuck.
OK, so in the second, I'm going to show you some incredible proof of media bias.
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Okay, so speaking of media bias.
As if the media hadn't reacted badly enough at the White House Correspondents Association dinner, then there are some pretty great examples of media bias over the weekend that are just astonishing.
And once again, I repeat, we hated the media before Trump.
Let's not pretend this is about Trump.
It is not about Trump.
Trump rightly sums up the state of the media according to many in the conservative movement.
They're garbage.
They're dumpster fire.
One of the reasons we think they're a dumpster fire is stuff like this.
So Joy Reid over at MSNBC, she's a commentator over there, and Joy Reid, it came out in the last couple of weeks, had a bunch of old posts on her blog that were quote-unquote homophobic or Islamophobic.
The ones that I saw, maybe there's some other ones I haven't seen, seemed relatively mild.
In any case, she had apologized for them in the past, but because Joy Reid is kind of a crazy person, Joy Reid came out and instead of saying, oopsies, sorry I did that, I've changed my view since then, she suggested that instead someone had hacked her website retroactively to put incriminating posts up about her.
And then she came out on MSNBC and she finally apologized.
And here is what her apology sounded like.
But here's what I know.
I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me.
But I can definitely understand, based on things I have tweeted and have written in the past, why some people don't believe me.
I've not been exempt from being dumb or cruel or hurtful to the very people I want to advocate for.
I own that.
I get it.
And for that, I am truly, truly sorry.
Okay, I am so confused by this.
What is she sorry for exactly?
So she says that she doesn't believe, that she genuinely does not believe that she said those hateful things.
It's like when Ted Kennedy, after he dumped a woman in a river, said that his actions were a mystery even to himself.
Well, what?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
OK, so that's not a real apology, right?
When you apologize for something, you say, what I did was wrong.
It never should have happened.
End of story, right?
It never should have happened.
I made the wrong decision.
Somebody who worked for me made the wrong decision.
I should have done something about it at the time, right?
All of that is acceptable.
I've had to issue apologies just like that in the past.
Because I've done things that are wrong, and I've apologized for them, which is what good people do.
What I didn't say was, I genuinely never belie- It was a magic fairy that came down from the sky, like in Pinocchio, and wrote that stuff on my blog about how I don't like watching two dudes kiss in Brokeback Mountain, which is what she had on her blog.
The entire left said that this was a great apology.
The entire left said, OK, done here.
Nothing more to see here.
We're done.
We're done.
Now, do you recall, like, a month ago, one month ago, when Laura Ingraham apologized publicly for making fun of David Hogg, saying that he was whiny about his college admissions?
Do you remember that?
And the entire left said, that's insincere!
It's an insincere apology!
Laura Ingraham doesn't mean that.
She's only saying that because people are coming after her advertisers.
Hey, the only reason Joy Reid said this is because people were coming after her advertisers and because she was going to lose her job.
Hey, the reason that she said this is because she got in hot water.
And even in her apology, she doesn't even do what Laura did, which is, I shouldn't have said that.
Instead, she says, I don't even believe I did it.
It was just in my crazy mind.
I don't know how that happened.
And everybody goes, oh, well, I guess we're done here.
I mean, look at Joy Reid.
What a sincere human being.
There's no media bias, though.
None.
None at all.
No media bias.
Speaking of no media bias, so Tom Brokaw has now been accused of sexual harassment.
OK, so according to the U.K.
Guardian, Brokaw was accused by a former colleague of unwanted sexual advances.
So what happened?
What happened?
60 women in the industry signed a letter trying to defend Tom Brokaw.
Hey, Rachel Maddow, Andrea Mitchell, Maria Shriver, They're among a group of 65 women in the U.S.
television industry who circulated a letter in support of Tom Brokaw.
Kelly O'Donnell, Anne Thompson, Kristen Welker also put their names to the group letter, in which the women say Brokaw, 78, has treated all of them with fairness and respect, giving them opportunities for advancement and championing successes in their careers.
Brokaw, the letter says, is a man of tremendous decency and integrity.
The letter was first reported in The Hollywood Reporter and confirmed by the AP.
Brokaw said that Linda Vester failed in her pursuit of stardom and was given media space to vent her grievances.
Vester said that Brokaw groped her and tried to forcibly kiss her in the 1990s.
Brokaw wrote that he was angry, hurt, and unmoored from what I thought I would be the final passage of my life and career.
So here's my question.
I thought that we were supposed to be leave-all women.
I thought me too.
I thought female solidarity.
And yet here are all these female icons.
Rachel Maddow, Andrea Mitchell, Maria Shriver signing a letter saying Tom Brokaw's a good guy and we don't believe Linda Vester.
So, unless you have some evidence to disbelieve Linda Vester, why does this help?
Harvey Weinstein, you'll recall, actually tried to do this in the early days of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
He got a bunch of women who were friendly with Harvey Weinstein to come forward and say, well, Harvey's actually a good guy, right?
I mean, he's actually given me a lot of opportunities.
You saw the same thing with, there have been a bunch of media figures who have done the same thing.
Well, let's just point out that if Tom Brokaw were a right-wing media figure, and that right-wing media figure had a bunch of people sign a letter saying, no, no, no, this is all nonsense, everyone would say, wait a second, how does Maria Shriver know what happened to Linda Vester?
How does Andrea Mitchell know what happened to Linda Vester?
But, again, Tom Brokaw is going to get off because a bunch of people on the left say that it's okay for him to get off.
Speaking of media bias, This is an amazing NBC News hit job.
So, my friend Jordan Peterson, who has become something of a phenomenon, obviously, over the past several months, and who is now a best-selling author, has been for weeks and weeks and weeks.
Now, NBC News on 60 Minutes did an absolute hit job on Jordan Peterson.
They apparently did a 90-minute interview with Jordan.
Jordan is not only not alt-right, Jordan has forcibly condemned the alt-right in no uncertain terms over and over and over.
So, what happened?
NBC News labeled him an alt-right intellectual.
And here's what it looked like.
It's just an insane thing.
He takes direct aim at the far left and its effects on young men, whom he says have been hurt by a society that overvalues political correctness and pushes them away from traditional male roles.
His new self-help book, 12 Rules for Life, is already a bestseller.
Hundreds of thousands subscribe to his online lectures, his speeches regularly attract protests, and his new speaking tour is selling out.
It feels like a movement, and I'm excited to be a part of it.
I think he's dangerous because of the sorts of people that he enables.
Journalist John Semley has criticized Peterson.
Is there an ideological similarity between Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump and his followers?
I would say fundamentally, yes.
They both believe in this basic split of winners and losers, of hierarchies, of hierarchies being natural.
Peterson doesn't apologize for his mostly male audience and tells them not to apologize for their privilege, describing himself as a kind of father figure.
Get your bloody act together, but I'm on your side.
Using psychology, religion, and biology to justify the same inequality the left opposes.
What you're saying, it just sounds a bit grim, doesn't it?
No!
No?
No, it sounds a lot grim.
OK, that's just—what in the world?
So, I mean, we have a full hour interview coming out with Jordan in the very near future, OK?
I speak with Jordan on a regular basis.
This is the most ridiculous take on Jordan Peterson I have ever seen.
He's using religion to justify inequality?
In what world are—what are you even talking about?
What are you even talking about?
Have you read, like, anything by Jordan Peterson?
Have you ever listened to anything by Jordan Peterson?
Okay, what Jordan says is that before you declare that inequality is therefore inequitable, you have to determine whether there are natural hierarchies in achievement.
Okay, what he says is there are certain people who achieve more and certain people who achieve less.
The question is whether they violated someone else's rights in achieving more or less.
And if not, then inequality exists, but that doesn't mean some inequity has happened, right?
Which is obviously true.
But Jordan is apparently an alt-right intellectual, even though he, again, opposes the alt-right.
And then they wonder?
And then they wonder why we don't trust them?
And then they wonder why it is that we think that they are completely full of crap in the media?
Because they do 90-minute interviews with Jordan Peterson, and then they release 30 seconds of Jordan Peterson talking, and 90 seconds of one of his critics talking about how terrible he is, and how he's just like Donald Trump.
Jordan Peterson is just like Donald Trump.
The dude was an associate professor of psychology at Harvard University.
You're right.
He's just like Donald Trump.
He wrote a 500-page book on the deep maps of meaning undergirding philosophy and myth, not only in Western civilization, but in comparative religion across the world.
Yeah, that sounds just like Trump.
Just like Trump.
He's an intellectual.
What in the world?
And then again, the only reason that we hate the media, though, is apparently because we're all rubes, and Donald Trump suckered us into it.
What utter, absolute horse crap.
Well, in just a second, I'm going to show you the reaction to all of this, because the reaction to this is coming out in a very weird way.
It's coming out via Ye, via Kanye.
I'll explain in just a second.
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Okay, so I have a lot to say about yay.
I was informed last week that I had said that it was yee, which I mistakenly thought that when it was like Yay to come.
that it was like Yeezus, but apparently it's Yeh.
So I've been, I've been disabused of my mispronunciation of one of the most important nicknames in the history of mankind.
But for all of my discussions of Yeh, Yeh, my discussions of Yeh, you'll, Yeh to come.
My discussions of Yeh, Yeh.
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Yay, time for yay.
Okay, so Kanye is now meeting with Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk, which is hilarious.
I know both Candace and Charlie, and it's really, really, really funny.
So everything is hilarious and funny.
And a quick clarification.
If I did not make clear last week, I think all of this is ridiculous and stupid.
I think that what Kanye is doing insofar as he is speaking up on behalf of individualism is a good thing, but I think that the worship of celebrity in general is hilarious and stupid.
I think the worship of Kanye in specific is really stupid, but Kanye is doing something that I think is deeply necessary because the closed-mindedness of the left is so crazy, they're calling Jordan Peterson an alt-right-nic, and they are suggesting that Joy Reid gave a good apology the other day.
They are so closed off.
They've closed the window of acceptable discourse so tightly that anyone who is even slightly outside that window of acceptable discourse now must be banned.
So Kanye West came out last week, of course, in The Greatest Story in Human History, and suggested that not all black folks have to vote Democrat.
Chance the Rapper, by the way, tweeted the same thing and then backed off of it.
Then Chance the Rapper said, I understand.
It's true that not all black people have to vote Democrat, but I shouldn't be saying that at this important time when Trump is president, which is like, what the hell?
And what is it?
I mean, real, real pansy move, dude.
I mean, real pansy move.
If you're going to say that black people don't have to vote Democrat, that is true.
No matter who is the president, you can say, I don't like Trump, but black people don't have to vote Democrat.
This is true, but in any case, Kanye made a big splash when he said that he's thinking for himself now, and then obviously meeting with Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk is just more evidence that he is thinking for himself.
It's pretty fascinating and hilarious.
Well, now President Trump is touting Kanye, so he did a speech on Saturday night combating the White House Correspondents Association dinner, and here is President Trump louting Kanye West.
And by the way, in all fairness, Kanye West gets it.
He gots it.
It's so good.
It's so good.
And he saw that.
When he sees that African American unemployment is the lowest in history, you know, people are watching.
That's a very important thing he's done for his legacy.
It's a very important thing.
But Hispanic unemployment, lowest level in history.
It's just incredible.
Okay, so Kanye comes out, and Trump, of course, is willing to go out there and talk about it.
And then Kanye did something else.
And this, I actually think, is kind of cool.
Okay, I will acknowledge when Kanye does something that's cool, right?
I think that it's cool that he's speaking about individualism.
Then he did something else.
He released a track called, uh, Ye versus the People.
I got it right this time.
It's not Ye, it's Ye versus the People, even though it's spelled Y-E.
All right.
And his rap song is with a rapper named T.I., which is, of course, his given name.
He came out of his mother's womb and they call him T.I.
And Kanye is rapping with T.I.
And the point of this rap song is that they are discussing exactly what Kanye has been doing and he lets T.I.
go at him.
He lets CIA say, dude, you're selling out black folks, and it's really terrible what you're doing.
And good for Kanye, right?
I mean, this is something that we've tried to do at The Daily Wire.
Like, we used to have John Nolte right over here.
John Nolte is a very, very pro-Trump guy.
And I disagreed with him about a lot of things.
But what I said is, listen, it's a point of view I think is worth clarifying.
And in our conflict, you can see the clarification.
So Kanye is actually hosting a debate here.
Kanye is saying, come on into my house, and we're going to have a rap battle with each other about an issue that matters, which is kind of a cool thing.
I will acknowledge this is kind of a neat thing.
Now, I think the song sucks, but I'm no connoisseur of rap.
I think all rap songs suck, basically.
But here is Kanye and T.I.
talking about Ye versus the people.
I never ever stopped fighting for the people.
Actually wearing the hat to show people that we equal.
You gotta see the better part of the people.
What makes you feel equal makes them feel evil.
See that's the problem with this damn nation.
All blacks gotta be Democrats.
Man, we ain't made it off the plantation.
This is just back and forth, back and forth.
And if you can't hear what he's actually saying, he says, I never, ever stopped fighting for the people, this Kanye.
Actually, wearing this hat will show people that we equal.
And then T.I. responds, you got to see the vantage point of the people.
What makes you feel equal makes them feel evil.
And then he says, see, that's the problem with this damn nation.
All blacks got to be Democrats, man.
We ain't made it off the plantation.
And then T.I. responds.
I responds, F who you choose as your political party.
You representing dudes who just seem crude and cold hearted with blatant disregard for the people who put you in position.
Don't you feel an obligation to them?
And then Kanye responds, I feel an obligation to show people new ideas.
And if you want to hear them, there go to right here.
Make America great again, had a negative perception.
I took it, wore it, rocked it, gave it a new direction, added empathy, care and love and affection.
And y'all simply questioning my methods.
And I can quibble with the with the rhyme scheme there.
But what he's attempting to do here is actually something kind of need.
What he's attempting to do here is actually host again, a debate about an issue inside the black community, which is something more than it's happened in popular culture anytime in the recent past.
And then at the very end, at the very end, At the very end, Kanye says, So this is actually really cool what he did there.
I can't believe this.
What Kanye West did is a cool thing.
What Kanye West did is something that I, Ben Shapiro, approve.
Okay?
I approve it.
It's a good thing.
Like, this is an actual good use of rap for opening up minds and opening up debate.
And again, it's not just about him saying that he likes Trump.
It's about actually opening up a debate, which is really kind of a neat thing.
So in just a second, I want to talk a little bit about a more serious topic.
But first, I need to finish up this Kanye stuff.
So Kanye, for people, I think you can, let's put it this way.
You can appreciate what Kanye did in that song and what he's been doing by saying to black folks, think for yourself, have individual ideas, stop thinking about identity, stop thinking about group identity.
Don't think of yourself as black guy and therefore you have to have this opinion.
Think of yourself as your name here and now you have to have any opinion that you want to have.
And that's a really good thing that Kanye has just done.
It is also incumbent on people on the right to recognize that just because Kanye is doing a good thing doesn't mean he's right-wing.
Kanye is not a conservative and as pure demonstration of this, Kanye tweeted out this the other day.
He tweeted out that his hero is Emma Gonzalez.
And Emma Gonzalez is, of course, the Parkland survivor who has made a big issue of saying that everyone who disagrees with her is a bad person, just like a lot of the other Parkland survivors.
He says, So, don't worship celebrity.
Acknowledge when Kanye does something right.
And then recognize that this dude is not reading Edmund Burke.
Okay?
He's not a guy who is versed in the Federalist Papers.
Now, maybe he will be.
Maybe he'll learn.
That would be great.
And again, I'm glad that he's opening his mind up, and I'm glad he's encouraging other people to do this.
This is a direct result, by the way, of the left's incapacity to let people think for themselves.
What's happening right now is that the left is so intolerant that even people who were purportedly on the left before are saying, you know, I can't deal with these people.
These people are just awful.
Proof of that comes courtesy of a guy named Jeremy Lamb.
So Jeremy Lamb, is some dude who I've never heard of before, but he had 169,000 likes on this tweet.
So there's a girl named Dom Kazia.
She's a high school girl, a very pretty white high school girl.
And she has pictures of herself wearing what looks like a kimono, basically.
She's wearing a Chinese-looking dress to prom.
And she looks very pretty in all of this.
And she had something like 57,000 likes.
Jeremy Lamb, who's some leftist intellectual, he tweeted out, my culture is not your GD prom dress.
My culture is not your GD prom dress.
Now, I've never heard of this guy before.
He had like 1,400 followers on Twitter, but he now has 169,000 likes on that tweet.
So it's all about cultural appropriation.
So this girl in high school wears a prom dress based on Chinese culture, and now it's all cultural appropriation.
Just to demonstrate how stupid this is, Jeremy Lam also tweeted this.
Jeremy Lam also tweeted, I'm eating tamales with chopsticks.
This is why America was founded.
What happened to the cultural appropriation, Jeremy?
But the left is so insane that they're deeply worried about a white girl wearing a Chinese dress because it's beautiful, not meant in any way to disparage Chinese people.
There's a difference between somebody walking around in blackface, which is disparaging, inherently disparaging, and mocking black people, and somebody who is spending their day Walking around singing rap lyrics.
Rap is a form of art that sprang from the black community.
Just like jazz is a form of art that sprang from the black community.
I like jazz.
Is that cultural appropriation?
No.
What makes America wonderful is cultural appropriation.
It's taking awesome things from other cultures and then integrating them into your regular life.
But again, the left is so intolerant that everybody must be called out.
How intolerant to the left?
This is an insane story.
There's also a story today about, I'm not kidding you, a vegan who's ripping on another vegan because this vegan had given non-vegan ice cream to a child.
Not joking.
Okay, this is how intolerant and crazy the left is.
There's a woman named Avocado Ho, okay, pulled up to my driveway to find a little girl crying.
She didn't have money for the ice cream van like her friends did, so I gave her enough money to get herself a nice big ice cream with sauce, sprinkles, and a flake.
She was so happy and soon had ice cream around her mouth.
Intermilitant vegan Anthony Dagger.
Dagger read the tweet above and then decided to private message his fellow vegan to chastise her.
And when somebody said, lighten the f up, he posted the private messages to Twitter to call her out.
So Anthony Dagger wrote, I usually do not do this, but I feel like this is appropriate to post since this person is claiming to be a vegan, even though she admitted to buying non-vegan ice cream for someone else, defended what she did when I spoke with her privately, hoping that would make her less likely.
To be defensive, though I should have not had to worry about that, even though I was respectful and blocked me rather than admitting I was right and that she should not have bought the non-vegan ice cream for that child.
Okay, so I guess that it's cultural appropriation, some sort of evil, for a vegan to buy a non-vegan child ice cream.
By the way, I keep kosher.
If I saw a poor kid on the street, I would give that kid money to buy food, regardless of whether that kid bought kosher food, because I'm not an idiot.
Okay, but the left is so intolerant that even if you buy food for children, you buy food for a child, it has to be vegan.
It has to be SJW-approved food for the child, or you have somehow violated the compact of nations.
And then they wonder why people like Kanye are looking at scams and saying, uh, guys, I can't hang out with you anymore.
Sorry, you guys are the worst.
Okay, so.
Meanwhile, in major world news, North Korea continues to be in the news.
There's this peace summit that's been going on with Kim Jong-un arriving in South Korea, and they've been having peace talks, and the South Korean prime minister, or president, he's come out and he's said that they are in the midst of peace talks that are going to unify the Korean peninsula.
Now, there is a piece of information I'd like to add to this talk, and that is that while Kim Jong-un says that he is going to dismantle his nuclear sites, the reality is that North Korea's nuclear test site collapsed and may be out of action.
That was reported four days before the actual summit began.
So they're saying right now that they gave up the North Korean test site, but in reality, the North Korean test site collapsed on its own, which is a pretty good reason to say that you're going to give it up.
So according to The Guardian, North Korea's main nuclear test site has partially collapsed under the stress of multiple explosions, possibly rendering it unsafe for further testing and leaving it vulnerable to radiation leaks, a study by Chinese geologists has shown.
The findings could cast doubt on North Korea's sincerity in announcing last weekend it would stop nuclear weapons at the site ahead of Friday's summit between the country's leaders, Kim Jong-un and the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in.
Now, I think that it is important to note this because everybody is so all fired, excited about everything having to do with the North Korean situation that suddenly Kim seems to be making all sorts of concessions.
If the concessions are not concessions, your excitement is unwarranted.
He actually has to concede something.
Otherwise, he's just faking you out.
We know this because we are now learning that tonight, Benjamin Netanyahu is going to give a major address from Israel in which he lists off from a bunch of declassified documents, a bunch of information showing that Iran has been cheating on its nuclear deal.
So while the Obama bros continue to go around talking about how the Iran nuclear deal was a great savior of Western civilization, it turns out the Iranians have been cheating and pursuing nuclear weapons.
There was great excitement in the press about the historic nature of the Obama-Iran deal.
It turns out that that was a complete disaster.
The same thing could easily happen with regard to North Korea.
OK, time for some things I like, some things I hate, and then we'll do a quick Federalist paper.
So things I like.
I'm going to have to do Avengers tomorrow, because I have a few words on Avengers, and I want to give people an extra day to see it before I spoil it.
But the thing I like today is a book called Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The book is a sequel to The Black Swan, which is all about sort of weird events that happen that you can't expect.
Skin in the Game is about the idea that if you're in the business of making predictions, Trust the people who actually are betting something of themselves on that prediction, right?
If you are trying to follow somebody's market advice and then you can actually have a clear view into their portfolio, it is better to look at their portfolio than follow their market advice because they're gonna put skin in the game.
They're gonna put their money where their mouth is.
Anybody who's willing to put their money where their mouth is is obviously more trustworthy in their predictions because they obviously believe their own predictions.
One of the big problems in the prediction business is that there are very few effects to making a wrong prediction.
Right?
Like, I actually put my money where my mouth was in 2016 to my everlasting regret, considering I lost a bunch of money on the 2016 election, but you knew at least it was genuine, right?
I wasn't BS-ing you about the data.
Right?
I at least put my money where my mouth was.
And the same thing is true in your life.
The people who you should trust are the people who are willing to sacrifice for their position, not the people who are not willing to sacrifice for their position.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so thing that I hate, number one, Pope Francis came out and tweeted something really, really dumb.
Somebody asked me in the mailbag a couple of weeks ago about Pope Francis and what I thought of him, and I said I thought that he was more of a liberation theologist than anything else.
I think that he's a far-left thinker.
Here's what he tweeted, quote, Do we really want peace?
Then let's ban all weapons so we don't have to live in fear of war.
Oh, I'm glad you thought of this.
If only someone had thought in history about banning all weapons.
Also, as Jonah Goldberg asks, how would you enforce this ban?
How would you make sure that no one can have weapons?
Might that require a weapon to ensure that no one has a weapon?
Also, before there were complex weapons, the death rate in society was actually significantly higher than it is now.
So all of this is deeply stupid, but pie-in-the-sky solutions seem to be something that Pope Francis is very fond of.
I am not a big fan of this particular pope.
I think that his predecessors were much better than he at his job.
So there is that.
OK, other things that I hate.
James Comey is still hanging around.
And my favorite thing about James Comey is that he's trying to pretend he's not cashing in when he is clearly cashing in.
So here is James Comey on Meet the Press trying to explain that he's not actually cashing in.
He is.
I cannot imagine why an FBI director would seek to essentially cash in on a book when the investigation is very much alive.
He should have waited to do his memoir.
Should you have waited?
I hope she'll read it and see that it's not about the investigation.
It's about, not even about Donald Trump, it's about something much broader that I thought it was important to talk about now.
Okay, no, that's, no, no, no, no, no.
You're here for the cash, okay?
We all understand you're here for the cash.
Just say you're here for the cash.
Say, listen, I was gonna tell this story one way or another.
I may as well, am I gonna pretend that I'm not making some money off this book?
Of course I'm not gonna pretend that, but I think it's important to get it out there.
But the whole, I am just so far above the fray routine, not effective.
Okay, time for a quick Federalist Paper.
So as I say, every week we do a Federalist Paper.
We are all the way up to Federalist 26, so making steady progress through the Federalist Papers.
Been doing it now for six months, obviously.
So, Alexander Hamilton wrote Federalist 26, and in this Federalist paper, he talks about the possibility that's being posed by a lot of the states that maybe the national legislature should not be able to exercise war-making authority.
Which raises the question, okay, who should be able to exercise war-making authority?
Should it be the executive?
Probably not, because then that would make him the king.
Should it be the legislature?
Well, if it's not the legislature, who else would it be?
So Alexander Hamilton says the legislature is the proper place for funding and maintaining a standing army, and that's been true in Britain since the Glorious Revolution.
And then he adds, the legislature of the United States will be obliged by this provision once at least in every two years to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot He's saying that the legislature has to remain in control so we can argue about whether to grow or shrink the military.
So he's saying that the legislature has to remain in control so that we can argue about whether to grow or shrink the military.
Obviously, in reality, the military has continuously grown since at least Bill Clinton's days.
Barack Obama tried to cut it back somewhat.
Bill Clinton tried to cut it back somewhat, but for different reasons.
Simply because they believe the United States should not be as muscular on the world stage.
The legislature has not, in fact, been a good check on the executive's war-making authority.
The founders believed that the legislature should be a check on that because they believed that the executive branch was always going to have an impetus toward growth of the military and growth of interventionism.
It's time for the legislature to take a lot of that authority back, which they have not done, and I hope that at some point they will.
Alrighty, so we'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more.
As I say, Benjamin Netanyahu from Israel is supposed to make a big statement tonight about the Iran deal, and we will cover all of it tomorrow.
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 Coromina.
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