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May 8, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:50
Schneiderman On The Schneid | Ep. 534
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New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman resigns after horrific sexual abuse allegations, the Obamas are back in the news, and the Hunger Games crowd shows up for the Met Gala.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh man, I simply cannot wait to go through the Met Gala dresses, because let me tell you, people dress like freaks at the Met Gala, and I don't understand why.
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Okay, so the big story yesterday is that Ronan Farrow is apparently Thanos.
He snaps his fingers and half of the people in the United States go away.
The latest victim.
of Ronan Farrow was Eric Schneiderman.
So Eric Schneiderman is a guy you probably haven't heard of.
He's the New York Attorney General.
If you're in New York, you've heard of him because he's a publicity-seeking publicity hound.
He's been going after high-profile targets for a long time.
He hasn't really done any good.
His biggest win is that he shut down a bunch of fan drafts, the gaming sites, basically online gambling sites, in 2015 for like a couple of months.
But he was supposed to be one of the future governors of New York State.
He had sort of an Elliott Spitzer path that was laid out before him.
And worth noting, by the way, that this now makes the third out of five major elected officials in New York State to have to resign for sexual allegations in the last like seven years, right?
We've got Anthony Weiner, you've got Schneiderman, and you've got Elliott Spitzer.
Okay, in the last five years alone.
It's just an amazing thing.
Here's what Ronan Farrow reported over at the New Yorker.
Hal Ronan Farrow has all these sources, but now he does.
It's pretty amazing.
Schneiderman, New York's Attorney General, has long been a liberal democratic establishment of women's rights, and recently has become an outspoken figure in the Me Too movement against sexual harassment.
As New York State's highest ranking law enforcement officer, writes Farrow, Schneiderman, who is 63, has used his authority to take legal action against the disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein and to demand greater compensation for the victims of Weinstein's alleged crimes.
Last month, when the Times and this magazine were awarded a joint Pulitzer for coverage of sexual harassment, Schneiderman issued a congratulatory tweet praising, quote, the brave women and men who spoke up about the sexual harassment they had endured at the hands of powerful men.
Without these women, he noted, there would not be a national critical reckoning underway.
Well, now he's got a problem.
As his prominence as a voice against sexual misconduct has risen, so too has the distress of four women with whom he has had romantic relationships or encounters.
They accused Schneiderman of having subjected them to non-consensual physical violence.
All have been reluctant to speak out, fearing reprisal, but two of the women, Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvarantam, have talked to the New Yorker on the record because they feel that doing so could protect other women.
They allege that Schneiderman repeatedly hit them, often after drinking, frequently in bed, and never with their consent.
Manning Parish and Selva Ratnam categorized the abuse he inflicted on them as assault.
They did not report their allegations to the police at the time.
Both say they eventually sought medical attention after having been slapped hard across the ear and face and also choked.
Selva Ratnam says that Schneiderman warned her he could have her followed and her phones tapped, and both say he threatened to kill them if they broke up with him.
Schneiderman, of course, denies all of these allegations, but resigned literally three hours after the story broke.
So a couple of things worth noting here.
People in positions of power can do really horrible things, which is why it is deeply important that we have institutional checks on power.
And when you have people who have the capacity to ruin your life with a phone tap, when you have people like Schneiderman running the Attorney General's office and threatening people, It's really, really dangerous.
And this is why so many people ought to be more skeptical of power.
It's why more people ought to be libertarian when it comes to the use of government power and the restraints on government power.
A third romantic, former romantic partner of Schneiderman's told Manning, Barish, and Selva Ratnam he also repeatedly subjected her to non-consensual physical violence, but she told them that she is too frightened of him to come forward.
The New Yorker has independently vetted the accounts they give for allegations.
The fourth woman, an attorney who has held prominent positions in the New York legal community, says that Schneiderman made an advance toward her.
When she rebuffed him, he slapped her across the face with such force that it left a mark that lingered the next day.
She recalls screaming in surprise and pain and beginning to cry and says she felt frightened.
She's asked to remain unidentified but shared a photograph of the injury with the New Yorker.
So what did Schneiderman say?
He says, "In the privacy of intimate relationships, I have engaged in role-playing and other consensual activity." Oh, that's what they're calling it now.
"I have not assaulted anyone.
I have never engaged in non-consensual sex, which is a line I would not cross." So these stories are really, really wild.
So one of the stories here.
Is that there was one of these women who says that he called her his brown slave.
And when Schneiderman was violent, he often made sexual demands, according to one of the former girlfriends.
He was obsessed with having a threesome and said, it was my job to find a woman.
He says he'd have nothing to look forward to if I didn't and would hit me until I agreed.
She had no intention of doing this.
She recalls, quote, sometimes he told me to call him master and he'd slap me until I did.
Selva Ratnam, who was born in Sri Lanka, has dark skin and she recalls that he started calling me his brown slave and demanding that I repeat that I was his property.
So, um, yeah, sounds like a good liberal there.
Okay.
The abuse escalated.
Schneiderman not only slapped her across the face, often four or five times back and forth with his open hand, he also spat at her and choked her.
He was cutting off my ability to breathe, she says.
Eventually, she says, we could rarely have sex without him beating me.
In her view, Schneiderman is a misogynist and a sexual sadist.
She says she often asked him to stop hurting her and tried to push him away.
At other times, she gave in, rationalizing she could tolerate the violence if it only happened once or twice a week during sex.
But the emotional and verbal abuse started increasing.
The belittling and demeaning of me carried over into our non-sexual encounters.
He told her to get plastic surgery to remove scars on her torso that had resulted from an operation to remove cancerous tumors.
He criticized her hair and said she should get breast implants and buy different clothes.
He mocked some of her friends as ditzes.
And when these women attended a birthday celebration for her, he demanded that she leave just as cake was arriving.
I began to feel like I was in hell, she says.
Well, I mean, it seems like the hell would less be the criticism of your body and calling your friends ditzes and more the smacking the crap out of you and suggesting that you are his slave.
Apparently, Schneiderman routinely drank heavily, a bottle and a half of wine or more.
He also took sedatives.
Now, the thing that's hilarious about all of this is you'll recall that he, Schneiderman, was a hero to the left until five minutes ago.
Right now, listen, this is not the fault of everybody on the left who didn't know that Schneiderman was doing all of these things.
But it is worthwhile noting that those who are held up as heroes very rarely are.
Samantha Bee, of course, just a few weeks ago was talking about how Eric Schneiderman was going to save the country from Donald Trump.
But there is hope on the horizon.
A hero who stood up to democracy's nemesis before.
Look up in the sky!
It's a bird!
It's a plane!
It's... I'm Eric Schneiderman, and I'm the Attorney General of the State of New York.
And with great power comes great responsibility.
Oh my God!
He's... No.
It's not going to be one hero.
It's not going to be a quick fix for this.
And this white mamba might be the one to save us.
We're going to save ourselves together.
You're going to save us.
We're going to do it.
But that requires a lot of people other than State Attorneys General getting engaged.
Please be my hero.
Okay, that is Samantha Bee.
Okay, and this is what the left wants.
The left was looking for a hero.
Ah, they picked the wrong guy.
It turns out they sort of picked the wrong guy.
Oopsie daisy!
Now, what is hilarious about this is that a lot of people in New York have known that Schneiderman is a kook for a really long time.
One of those people...
is Donald Trump.
So here is Donald Trump tweeting about Eric Schneiderman from not all that long ago, right?
This is August 2013.
Do you ever sometimes wonder if President Trump is actually a hero from the future who's sent back to the past to warn us all of what's to come?
Because when you look at his Twitter feed, there's a tweet for literally everything.
It's like Terminator 2.
He's been sent from the future in order to protect us from Eric Schneiderman.
This is him in August 2013.
"Wow, I just found out that A.G. Schneiderman "met with President Obama in Syracuse on Thursday "and sued me on Saturday, same as IRS, et cetera." And then he said that Schneiderman was a freak.
Okay, but this is back in 2013.
Thug politics.
Lightweight hack meets—Schneiderman meets with Obama on Thursday, then brings frivolous suit on Saturday.
And there was more of this.
He continued to tweet about Schneiderman.
Governor Cuomo is right about one thing.
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman does wear eyeliner.
What the hell is up with him?
And finally—yeah, is there one more?
And then he says, Weiner is—this is the one that's amazing.
This is from September 2013.
Weiner is gone.
Spitzer is gone.
Next will be lightweight, agey Eric Schneiderman.
Is he a crook?
Wait and see.
Worse than Spitzer or Weiner.
Well, there he is.
There's the man from the future, warning you about what was to come.
And was Donald Trump ever right?
He was indeed.
It turns out that Eric Schneiderman is, in fact, the worst kind of human.
Now, there are a couple of things to note about his presence in the MeToo movement.
Harvey Weinstein tried to do the same thing.
Harvey Weinstein, when he was first accused of abusing women, immediately said, listen, I've been a great defender of women.
I supported Hillary Clinton for president.
One of the things that's really good about the MeToo movement is that the MeToo movement has essentially said, look, your politics do not matter nearly as much as the stuff that you do to women.
So in the past, Schneiderman probably would have been defended.
In the past, there would have been a move to say, listen, Schneiderman, Yeah, he claims that this is all consensual, and it's a he said, she said, and that it was S&M kind of stuff, and these women didn't leave, right?
They didn't file any police reports.
So, obviously, Schneiderman is still a good guy.
He's trying to go after Trump.
But what you're seeing is the MeToo movement is actually taking some scalps.
The MeToo movement is saying, listen, if you got four women accusing this guy of the same kind of stuff, Non-consensual physical abuse?
It doesn't matter that he could go after President Trump.
He still did the wrong thing.
That's a really good thing about the MeToo movement.
It is also worth noting that people on the left are going to continue to claim coverage by the MeToo movement, just as Schneiderman has.
You know, people like Schneiderman are going to continue to go out there and proclaim that they are allies of the MeToo movement, even if in the boudoir they are doing things that are at the very least untoward and at the very most abusive.
So, that is worth noting as well.
And what the left has immediately done, is they say, well now that we got rid of Schneiderman, I mean, this shows that we are clean and we are honest.
Unlike the right, which has retained President Trump, despite all the allegations against President Trump, you know, the left has dumped Schneiderman by the door.
Now, the left didn't dump Schneiderman, right?
Schneiderman dumped Schneiderman.
Schneiderman said, I can't stand this anymore, I'm out, because he knew what was coming, and it was more of these reports, and none of them were going to be good for him.
But President Trump has stood by and said, I'm denying all of this.
So denial still has a certain amount of power in the public mind.
Plus, people on the right do not trust people on the left to actually be consistent about this.
They figured that Schneiderman was going to go down anyway, and so Schneiderman went down.
But they are still happy to have the Kennedy Center, to have the Met Gala, even though the Kennedys were some of the worst people with regard to treatment of women in the history of modern American politics.
I want to talk a little bit more about the differences between Trump and Schneiderman in just a second and what the right should do about President Trump's pension for mistreatment of women or alleged pension for mistreatment of women in just a second.
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Okay, so the left is saying that the right are being hypocrites on Schneiderman.
That we're sitting around and we're cheering the downfall of Eric Schneiderman, but we have yet to call for the resignation of President Trump over all of the allegations.
Well, there are those of us who called for President Trump to actually drop out of the race when a lot of these allegations first hit in the middle of the campaign.
The difference, again, between Eric Schneiderman, I've said this about Trump and Franken, I've said this about Trump and Schneiderman now.
This is about Trump and Roy Moore.
The difference between Trump and Schneiderman is that the American public knew all of this about President Trump when they elected him.
So calling on him to resign is a little bit weird considering that the public knew about it.
Schneiderman's stuff just broke.
So we just found out about what was going on with Schneiderman, and that means that it's up to Schneiderman whether he wants to stick that out or not.
You see, like, Eric Reitens, right, the governor of Missouri, He's been under fire for sexual abuse allegations as well, but he has not quit.
And now there's a move to impeach him in the Missouri state legislature.
That may or may not be successful.
Schneiderman knew that he was not going to stand up to the scrutiny of his fellow New Yorkers, and so he stepped down.
Trump did stand up through the scrutiny of Americans, because Americans figured, okay, we'll take this guy, even though he's gross with women, we'll take him over Hillary Clinton.
Once you're greenlit by the American public, with the American public knowing all the facts, it's difficult to call for somebody's resignation.
Because again, the resignation would be in expectation of the idea that the American public would throw you out if they had the opportunity, but they haven't had the opportunity yet.
So there's a big difference between a sex scandal hitting you after an election and a sex scandal hitting you before the election.
Now, does that mean there's a moral differentiation between Trump's alleged treatment of women and Schneiderman's?
I don't think there is.
I don't think there is.
I think that the allegations against Trump are very serious.
I think they have been serious for a very long time.
I think that Trump has a long history of being extraordinarily degrading toward women.
I think all of that is true.
I also think we knew all of that.
Which is why when Stormy Daniels is on national TV and the left thinks that Stormy Daniels is somehow going to damage Trump, the answer is no, it's not going to damage Donald Trump, not in the slightest, because everyone knows who President Trump is.
Everyone knows what President Trump has done.
Everybody knows, you know, the kind of person that President Trump is.
And none of this is any sort of grand shock with regard to Trump.
Does that make Republicans hypocrites?
You're not a hypocrite unless you say that what Trump did with women is okay.
And again, it's not hypocrisy to say that Trump isn't obligated to resign if the public greenlit him after they already knew about all this stuff.
If a lot of new stuff broke about President Trump, then there would be talk of resignation.
But right now, it's premature because again, not much has changed.
Speaking of one of the reasons that President Trump was elected in the first place, the Obamas are back on the scene.
One of the great ironies of American politics is that Barack Obama really felt that he was the savior of American politics.
He was this genteel, wonderful dude.
A guy who spoke in glowing tones, super articulate, brilliant, bright, smart.
Had all the grasp of politics at his fingers.
And then it turns out the guy who replaces him is a reality TV show boob, according to Barack Obama.
The reality, of course, is that Barack Obama was the reality TV show boob.
He started off as this faux intellectual, and then he quickly morphed into a guy who was appearing with GloZell and showing up on every sporting event ever.
And making a mockery of his office, not in the same way that Trump has done, but making a mockery of his office.
By essentially turning it into a paparazzi special.
Inviting everyone from Hollywood out there on a constant basis.
Making overtures to the TV-watching public by appearing on television shows regularly that had nothing to do with politics.
He was a reality TV show president, and he knew it.
And Trump replaced him.
Well, now he's going back to, I am above all of this.
I am high and mighty.
And now he's back, and he's talking about how he worries about our values are not upheld.
Our values are not upheld.
Important to note, all the talk about values that have, you know, Donald Trump undermining our values, Listen, I don't think that Trump has done a great job of restoring a lot of America's values when it comes to conciliation and decent discussion and treatment of other people on a decent level.
I don't think that's something that matters to Trump very much.
But we would be fools if we did not acknowledge that Trump is more of a symptom than a cause of all of this.
Donald Trump was the apotheosis of a movement that was already happening.
The left had decided that discussion was not worth having.
The left had decided that based on your race, we could evaluate whether or not your view was worth hearing.
Barack Obama was very instrumental in undermining core American values regarding unity, regarding the idea that we are all brothers and sisters, not enemies with one another.
You can look at the polls.
People believe that racial animus in the United States began to rise again, coincident with Barack Obama's move to racially polarize during the 2012 election.
In 2008, people were really optimistic about race in this country.
Now, people are really not optimistic about race in this country.
That did not start because of President Trump.
That started under President Obama.
But Obama is going around now and pretending that he is some sort of moral halcyon.
Here he is explaining that our values are not being upheld.
It is important for us to make sure, regardless of our political proclivities, that the values underlying this great country don't get eroded because, situationally, In this particular circumstance, it's convenient for us to abandon our values to get what we want.
OK, so I always wonder what he means when he says, our values are not being abandoned.
He already abandoned a crap load of our values.
Again, it was that undermining of values that helped lead to President Trump.
Trump did not arise in a vacuum.
Donald Trump is just a mirror held to American society.
Donald Trump just says, listen, I'm going to strip away all the pretense.
I'm going to strip away all of the pretty words that Barack Obama speaks.
And what I am is what Barack Obama was, except flip side.
I'm more than happy to strip away that pretense.
And I think that's why people resonated to President Trump.
Because while Barack Obama is talking about our values not being upheld, his wife, Michelle, is out there lamenting about little girls who want to get pregnant and have babies.
I still think that our girls are taught to be perfect.
And I think that they still dream of weddings and the security of the Prince Charming coming to say, I still think we do.
I think we're working on it.
I think, you know, I'm proud of what I hear from young girls, but I think something happens when they get to that stage where you're supposed to be married and have kids.
Missed it.
Our fundamental values are being undermined, says Barack Obama, and then his wife goes on stage and talks about undermining traditional family values.
Women should dream.
Girls should dream about getting married and having babies, because that's good.
It's a good thing for women to get married and have babies.
It is a good thing for men to get married and protect their families.
There are lots of good things.
But this idea from the left that they're not undermining American values, they're upholding American values, when they say things like Michelle Obama just said, that little girls who dream of weddings and getting married and having babies, that this is some sort of terrible evil thing, and that what they really should be dreaming about is a career.
Okay, this is what the polls show.
What the polls show is that women are happier when they get married and have babies.
Not every woman, right?
You can choose what you want to do.
It's a free country.
Do what you want.
As I've said 1,000 times, this makes it 1,001, my wife is a career woman.
My mom was a career woman.
My mom worked and my dad was basically at home helping to raise the kids.
You can choose to do what you want to do, but to obviate that choice and to pretend that the vast majority of women are not happier getting married and having babies is not only anti-social science, it's anti-nature.
But then it's people on the right who are undermining values.
It's Barack Obama who's bragging about how he is the great upholder of American values.
How silly.
Just very, very silly all the way through.
Okay, meanwhile, Barack Obama's not the only one who's back.
Hillary Clinton is back as well, and she's got something to say.
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OK, so speaking of people who made sure that Donald Trump became president, Hillary Clinton is back.
And now she's saying it's amazing that this woman was ever considered a leading contender for the presidency by the Democrats.
It really is impressive.
Hillary Clinton admits that she thought about leaving the United States after President Trump won.
I want to thank some of you for sending good wishes a very long way during my campaign and the months that followed.
I received a number of invitations from Kiwis to permanently relocate here.
And I must say, I really did appreciate the offers.
Gave them some thought.
OK, so there she is saying that she thought about moving after the election.
It's really funny.
How many Republicans have joked about moving after the election?
I haven't seen a lot of them.
If Hillary Clinton had been elected, how many top-level Republicans were saying, yeah, maybe I'll move?
And yet every time a Republican is elected, half of Hollywood says, yeah, we're thinking about moving.
If Donald Trump becomes president, I'm going to move.
None of them ever move, obviously.
But this is one of the things that the left is so fascinating.
The left's general tendency, when confronted by the fact that people think differently than they do, is to excise.
Either to excise themselves and run to the furthest outskirts of the world, or to excise people on the right.
And the latest indicator of the attempt to excise comes courtesy of the folks at Crooked Media and New York Magazine.
So yesterday there were two pieces in mainstream media outlets talking about why conservatives should no longer be allowed to write for outlets that are basically middle of the road or at least pretend to be open to a variety of viewpoints.
So Eric Levitt of New York Magazine writes, we no longer need any conservative voices in the public square because Trump has annihilated any such necessity.
He wrote a piece called the liberal media can have ideological diversity without conservatives.
He says, quote, Magazines like The Atlantic and op-ed pages like The New York Times have long aimed to host a dialogue that represents the major intellectual currents on both sides of the aisle while upholding fundamental principles of civility, good faith, and respect for the equal dignity of all human beings.
There was a tension in that mission before Trump.
For decades, many of the American right's most influential voices had rejected these supposedly shared values, and many of the conservative movement's animating ideas were manifestly irrational and racist.
Well, if you start from the premise that everybody on the right is irrational and racist, it sort of makes it difficult to have a conversation, you jerk.
But he continues, I'm not sure who before Trump thought David Brooks was a good representative of conservatism.
Party standard bearers still spoke in a language broadly similar to David Brooks's, it was possible to frame the latter as a faithful translator of Red America's thoughts and feelings.
I'm not sure who before Trump thought David Brooks was a good representative of conservatism.
I remember criticizing David Brooks heavily before Donald Trump was ever on the scene.
But according to this columnist over at New York Magazine, Brooks had proved useless, as did every conservative who had not voted for Trump, because Trump had overwhelmed all of them.
And thus, So basically, here's his framework.
His framework is, if you supported Trump, you're evil, and therefore we shouldn't listen to your opinion.
If you didn't support Trump, you're useless, and therefore we shouldn't listen to your opinion.
All of these magazines like The Atlantic should stop running voices like Kevin Williamson.
Instead, what they should do is they should go find voices like Jill Stein.
They should find folks that are even more to the left, because those are the important debates to be had.
So Levitt says the far left has ideas that can be argued civilly in good faith without violating core liberal values.
And those ideas are more responsible to the problems of our era than those of the never Trumpers.
Well, says who?
I mean, says somebody on the left who believes those ideas on the far left.
This wasn't the only piece yesterday to claim that conservatives ought to be thrown out of every hall of discussion.
That conservatives who, of any stripe, should not be allowed to have open conversations with people on the left.
At Crooked Media, Brian Butler, who was formerly the editor-in-chief of the New Republic before he was forced to resign in ignominy because he stunk at his job, He writes a piece saying that it is time to stop looking for conservative columnists.
He declares that all conservatives reflect a wellspring of right-wing contempt for modern culture and for sources of neutral authority—science, law, journalism—that get in the way of conservative objectives.
Did it ever occur to Brian Buechler that maybe the intolerant jackass here is Brian Buechler?
Because if the implication is that everyone on the right disrespects science, law, and journalism, you're out of your mind.
There's a really interesting, great piece today by Barry Weiss over at the New York Times.
Barry's a terrific columnist.
You should get a really in-depth look at what my friend Eric Weinstein has called the intellectual dark web.
The intellectual dark web is a group of people who have become very successful outside the auspices of mainstream media.
And they really range politically, right?
It's people like me, and Jordan Peterson, and Brett Weinstein, who is a socialist, who voted for Bernie Sanders, and Eric, and Sam Harris, who's a militant atheist who voted for Hillary Clinton, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Christina Hoff Sommers.
There's this whole group of us, right?
And Joe Rogan, who's really not super political, but asks questions.
And this whole group of people have become known as the intellectual dark web, specifically because we disagree with each other, but we're willing to have conversations with each other, and because we all do believe in science law and journalism.
Right?
We all believe in these things.
Like, I believe in science.
I believe in law.
I believe in journalism.
Now, I may disagree with you about the implications of a particular scientific study.
I may disagree with a particular scientific study and how it was conducted as opposed to other scientific studies, which is why when I'm arguing things like transgenderism, I cite certain studies, other people on the other side will cite other studies, and then we critique each other's studies.
Right?
That's normally how you go about having these discussions.
But on the left, the idea is there should be no intellectual dark web.
The reason it's called the Intellectual Dark Web, by the way, that's the term Eric coined, is because the Intellectual Dark Web, the idea is that it is sort of hidden from sight by the mainstream media, which is focused on these internecine wars between Trump and anti-Trump, but they're not focused on having deeper conversations on any real level, and they're interested in throwing their political opponents out of the house.
The people who want to stop the intellectual dark web are people like Ezra Klein over at Vox.com, who says that Sam Harris is an Islamophobe because Sam Harris says that Islam has a more threatening record in public over the last decades than does Christianity, which is eminently and obviously true.
It's people like Ezra Klein, it's people like Antifa, it's people who have decided that they don't want to allow people to have fulsome conversations.
It's people like Brian Butler.
Brian Butler is the threat to the intellectual dark web, and that's why he is kicking and screaming that people who are conservative should not be allowed to speak out on supposedly neutral pages.
But the reality is that the people who oppose science, law, and journalism, a lot of those people are on the left.
How can the left argue that they don't oppose science when they say that a baby is not a baby?
My son had his second birthday yesterday.
That means that two years and two days ago today, they would have been fine with my wife killing him.
How can they say that that is in any way a reflection of biology?
It clearly is not.
How can they say that it is a reflection of biology that Caitlyn Jenner is a woman?
Caitlyn Jenner is not a woman.
That's silly.
How can people on the left claim that they are universally in favor of law when they are fine with throwing out the law so long as it serves their public purposes?
And they only like journalism when that journalism covers the stories they want it to cover.
Confirmation bias exists on all sides, but according to the left, it only exists on the right.
And that's why the right ought to be tossed out of the tent.
Buetler concludes it's conservatives who must be barred from the halls of discussions.
He says Bret Stephens is too much.
He says there is no Goldilocks conservative up for hire, and there never will be.
There's no such thing as a good conservative.
The only good conservative is a dead conservative.
Writers steeped in conservative movement politics are poor fits at institutions that embrace the professional standards of mainstream journalism.
Really?
How many good journalists came from National Review?
Eliana Johnson over at the Washington Post, very good journalist, came from National Review.
Tim Alberta over at the Washington Post, quite a good journalist, came from National Review.
Lachlan Markey at CNN came from, he's now at the Daily Beast, he believed came from Daily Caller.
They're a bunch of good conservative journalists who went into mainstream journalism because they're fine at their jobs, but according to the left, these people must be cut out.
The left's desire for separation from people on the other side is what is driving this whole upswing for this intellectual dark web.
So good.
Keep doing it, guys.
Keep doing it.
Keep driving people into discussions that involve people like me, because I love those discussions, and I think that we're able to actually have valuable, useful discussions.
You know, on my one-hour show, on the one-hour interview show that I'm doing, we're gonna be having people like Sam Harris.
We're gonna be having people like Jay Tapper.
Okay, the fact is, people on the left, who, like Brian Buetler, are not interested over a crooked media in having me on.
I've invited, by the way, people from Pod Save America on this show.
I've invited John Lovett from Pod Save America to come on the show.
I'd love to interview John Lovett.
I think it'd be really interesting.
I think we'd have an interesting discussion, at the very least.
I highly doubt he would do it, because I am a deplorable.
Everyone's a deplorable, according to the left.
It's that kind of scorn for the American public that led to the rise of Donald Trump in the first place.
Okay, before I go any further, President Trump— is expected to make his decision on Iran in one second.
I'll explain that in just a second.
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So, meanwhile, the breaking news is that President Trump is pulling out of the Iran deal.
At the very least, he wants to reinstall some of the sanctions, which will kill the Iran deal effectively anyway, according to the Angeles France Press.
President Trump is expected to deliver a hammer blow to the Iranian deal on Tuesday, removing key sanctions relief for Tehran and casting the accord's future into serious doubt.
Officials and diplomats expect the pugnacious U.S.
leader to ignore last-ditch European pleas and withdraw U.S.
support from what he has repeatedly slammed as a very badly negotiated agreement.
At 2 p.m., Trump was slated to make the most consequential foreign policy decision of his young presidency from the diplomatic reception room of the White House, and he has to decide by May 12th whether to continue to waive sanctions on Iran's central bank and its oil sector dealings, which was a key pillar of the 2015 agreement.
Now, the entire left is saying this is a disaster.
How could Donald Trump do this?
How could Donald Trump Seriously consider pulling out of the Iran deal.
It's the only thing standing between us and the end of the world.
It's the only thing standing between us and war.
No!
No!
Okay, well, here's the reality.
Good for President Trump.
The Iran deal was a garbage heap of flaming crap from the minute that it was signed and before.
Okay, it was a lie that was told to the American people by Ben Rhodes and the Obama administration that Iran was moderating.
And that if only we bribed them a little bit, and if we were nice to them, and if we petted them, and if we gave them a nice buttock massage, then everything would just be better.
If we just shipped pallets of cash to Tehran, everything would be fine.
And if we allowed them to build ballistic missiles, And allowed them to funnel all of that money to groups like Hezbollah, which has now fully taken over Lebanon.
There was an election a couple of days ago in Lebanon in which Hezbollah became an openly majority party in the Lebanese parliament, meaning a terrorist group now runs an entire state in the Middle East.
They run Tehran, already a terrorist group, and they run Lebanon, which is already a terrorist group.
They also run Hamas, which is the Gaza Strip's governing party.
And the Palestinian Authority is a terrorist group, too.
You have legitimate terrorist organizations that are in charge of full countries in the Middle East.
And President Obama was forwarding that with the Iran nuclear deal.
Why?
So he could get a promise.
A promise that they wouldn't develop nuclear weapons for 10 years.
Sure, they would use all that cash to maximize their regional power.
Sure, they'd use all that cash to funnel to terrorist groups.
Sure, they'd use all that cash to develop long-range ballistic missiles capable of harming the United States and her allies.
All of that was fine because then Barack Obama could walk around with a piece of paper declaring peace in our time.
Donald Trump is tearing up that piece of paper.
Good for him.
Good for him.
The unilateralism of Barack Obama, who did this without congressional approval, that is now being rejected by Donald Trump as well it should be.
Because it was a horrible, horrible deal.
Okay?
We should not be standing idly as Iran generates more and more power.
Now, does it mean that the alternative is to go to war?
That we're about to go to war with the Iranians?
No.
It doesn't mean we're about to go to war with the Iranians.
Barack Obama was so fond of false choices.
He was so fond of these dichotomous lies where he would say, we have a choice between the deal that I put before you on the table.
Here's your deal.
Here's the choice.
You can either get with this deal or we're going to full-scale nuclear war with Tehran.
That's how it'll be.
OK, that was never the choice.
The choice included allowing Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel to plan military operations to stop Iran's nuclear program.
The choice included further sanctions.
The choice included Newt Gingrich was encouraging this blockade of Iran's oil supplies.
There are plenty of ways to go about throttling the regime in Tehran.
By the way, there's been a consistent rolling rebellion going on under the surface in Iran for a long time.
And there are a lot of people who hate the Iranian regime and would like to see it fall.
And if we're not expending full resources to help make that happen, then we are being derelict in our duty.
If the Iranian regime were to fall to a moderate regime, it would be one of the great changes in modern world history.
But Barack Obama helped strengthen that regime, just as he helped strengthen the Syrian regime, just as he helped strengthen Vladimir Putin.
And now, Donald Trump is doing the right thing here.
Donald Trump is kicking harder against Russia by fighting Iran than anyone on the left has any right to expect, considering they think that he's supposedly in Vladimir Putin's pocket.
Remember, Iran is a client state of Russia, and Syria is a client state of Russia and Iran, and Lebanon is a client state of Iran and Russia as well.
Donald Trump is fighting that axis a lot harder than Barack Obama ever did.
So, good for President Trump for doing the right thing about all of this.
But, you know, you can always count on the left to do the wrong thing about all of this.
It's pretty impressive.
It's pretty impressive.
The left has now sided with Iran against Israel, and they've sided with North Korea against President Trump.
Because all credit must go to North Korea, not to President Trump.
It's amazing.
You can already see the articles being written about how Kim Jong-un is the new Gorbachev.
That if he were to give up his nuclear program, then it wouldn't be because he destroyed the nuclear mountain that he uses for testing.
It would be because he's really a Gorbachev-like figure.
Amazing how the left always has to rewrite history to take credit away from Republican presidents, whenever humanly possible.
Meanwhile, I have to tell you about a fake scandal at the University of Florida that is just astonishing.
The media are obsessed with every race scandal they can find, like every single race scandal they can find.
So, Good Morning America, the same people who brought you the Starbucks scandal, have decided that there is another scandal in the making over at University of Florida.
What is this scandal?
Well, at their commencement, The University of Florida, apparently they show on their big screen everybody who is graduating.
Well, a bunch of the students started dancing in the middle of their graduation.
So they would get up there and on the screen they would start doing moves.
They'd start dancing.
And this was holding up the processional.
So you will see, so what people on the screen saw was an attendant who would start grabbing people and pulling them off the stage.
According to Good Morning America, this was racist because some of the people being pulled off stage were black.
Commencement celebrations cut short for these University of Florida graduates.
This video shows black students enjoying their moment, dancing in their caps and gowns, until they're forcibly grabbed and shoved offstage.
In general, I don't think I've ever been handled and moved.
And I can show you that this is a lie.
Are you ready to see how this is a lie?
So, here is some actual tape from the university event.
I will tell you what is happening.
Okay, this is Jessica Maris Velasco Ike.
Okay, she's not black.
Okay, as far as I can tell.
of targeting only black students at the ceremony. - Okay, this is a lie, and I can show you that this is a lie.
Are you ready to see how this is a lie?
So, here is some actual tape from the university event.
I will tell you what is happening, okay?
This is Jessica Maris Valesco Ike, okay?
She's not black, okay, as far as I can tell.
And she starts dancing, right?
And she stands up.
There's a white girl, Stephanie Elizabeth Brohi, very white, okay?
And there she's being ushered off.
There's another white guy, another girl who looks Latina, Cecilia Cristina Vasquez, pushed off screen.
Samuel Thomas Hinkies, a white guy, pushed off screen.
G. Tucker Feltz, a white guy.
He starts dancing, immediately pulled off screen.
Joshua M. Montiel, not a black guy, pulled off screen.
Yeah, ushered off screen.
And then, finally, after like a thousand of these people, you get some people who start breaking into moves, and basically the bigger the moves are, the more you're actually going to have to physically restrain people in order to take them off the screen.
That guy Oliver Tlusma, who you heard on Good Morning America, that guy was resisting being pushed off the screen.
OK, it's amazing what the media will do in order to try and generate the narrative that everybody in the world in America is racist.
Everyone's racist.
So they'll just lie about it.
They'll cut.
The tape is all available.
OK, this was all publicly available.
All Good Morning America had to do here, legitimately all they had to do, is rewind the tape 45 seconds.
In order for you to see that this was not a race-based thing.
But they didn't want to do that.
Instead, they just wanted to call University of Florida racist.
Because this is the way everything works now.
Everything can be taken out of context and called racist.
And then you wonder why there's a backlash?
Then you wonder why there's a backlash?
Okay, speaking of backlash... The Hunger Games apparently happened in New York City last night.
It was the Met Gala.
And the Met Gala was honoring Catholic...
Something or other it was I guess that they have this costume party every year at the Mac gala and this one was I guess titled It was what was this was a stupid thing titled.
It was called Catholic bodies or something And and basically it's an excuse for celebrities to dress up like idiots Okay, the Metro Mountain Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is you know, although they have a lot of good stuff there But they also a lot of crap They have the heavenly bodies, fashion, and the Catholic imagination.
Now, how many Catholics are actually at this event?
The answer is probably zero.
The vast majority of people who are showing up are people who are probably not Catholic, don't go to church ever.
And it's hilarious that the same left that will complain about cultural appropriation is fine with appropriating actual Catholic symbols of purity and holiness and then using them in the sluttiest possible costumes.
So that's pretty amazing.
I just want to go through some of the costumes and show you what these people are dressing like.
So first of all, Solange Knowles looked like she was simultaneously attacked by a squid and a jellyfish.
That's exactly what she looks like.
I can't describe it any better than that.
She's wearing a black costume that looks inflatable, like she just jumped in the pool.
And then on her head, she's wearing an old-school halo and a do-rag, so there's that.
And then, And then there's Frances McDormand, who looks like she was attacked by a tree.
I don't know what this has to do with Catholicism, but her entire face is obscured by a bunch of blue leaves.
Apparently she faded back into nature.
So RIP to Frances McDormand and Solange Knowles, both of whom I guess are dead, thanks to their costumes eating them.
So that's pretty sad.
And then Katy Perry.
Of course, dressed up as a giant angel with enormous wings, because she is just an angelic creature.
Is Katy Perry sexually harassing the men who appear on American Idol?
So, it's a good thing that she was waiting in heaven for Solange McDormand, who are apparently dead.
And then, there's also Pope Rihanna, who is presiding.
She wore a full-on pope hat.
So, Pope Rihanna was presiding.
It was apparently very difficult work.
Work, work, work, work.
Presiding over the mass funeral there.
So that was a very, very rough night for Pope Rihanna having to preside over a funeral.
But the good news is that others attended the funeral.
So there was also Madonna, the Queen Mother, who attended the funeral wearing a completely black dress with a giant cross in front.
Madonna of course has been Using Catholic imagery for years in order to avoid the fact that she is an attention-seeking piece of human debris.
But now she's the Queen Mother.
And then the best I think was Cara Delevingne, who hid the fact that she can't act beneath a costume that can only be described as a series of stripes and fishnetting.
I think that what this actually looks like is that she was a steak that was seared for too long.
So R.I.P.
to Cara Delevingne, who apparently slipped onto a barbecue and died being seared beyond recognition.
So we have a lot of celebrities were killed last night, apparently, according to their costumes.
That was real sad.
And she wasn't the only one.
There are a few others as well.
Lana Del Rey, who apparently was stabbed repeatedly in the heart, but seems strangely at peace with her own murder.
I mean, she's got a bunch of knives that are pointed directly into her heart.
I guess this is some sort of Catholic heart imagery.
So that was exciting.
And for some reason, who is that?
Jared Leto, who's standing next to her, dressed apparently as a mashup of Jesus and Prince John from the Robin Hood cartoon made by Disney.
So that's really exciting.
And then there was Liberace who showed up.
Oh, sorry, that's not Liberace, that's Tom Brady wearing a black costume.
Apparently he left his tiger at home, Siegfried and Roy over here.
So that was pretty awesome as well.
And Greta Gerwig showed up dressed completely as a nun, which makes perfect sense because she directed also that movie about nunnery.
So now we understand, right?
She directed a movie about Catholics and then she decided to enter a nunnery, which is really exciting as well.
I'm glad that she could attend that mass funeral because that would have been sad if she couldn't.
And then finally, there was Susie Bick who showed up dressed as Scarlet Fever.
She is completely dressed in red.
She looks as though she, and the good news is that, I assume that's her husband, he looks like he's been afflicted by Scarlet Fever as well.
So that makes a lot of sense.
The Mask of the Red Death reenactment happening over at the Met Gala last night.
And I think we have a couple of more here.
Shailene Woodley showed up from the future to make sure that everything was okay.
She showed up directly from the set of Blade Runner 2059.
So she is here wearing—I don't even know what this has to do with Catholicism, except she's here to save us all from the future.
So Shailene Woodley is here as well.
But yeah, Lily Collins was a little sad.
She apparently was crying about it all.
She actually has like a makeup tear underneath her eye, but don't cry Lily Collins.
I'm just joking.
None of these people are actually dead.
It's okay.
But the good news is everything really will be okay because then Mitt Romney showed up dressed like a normal human.
So everybody else shows up dressed...
Mitt Romney and his wife show up.
Everybody else is dressed like a freak, and Mitt Romney shows up like his son's bar mitzvah.
It's just amazing.
Met Gala.
Yeah, I can't imagine why people hate the rich and famous.
I can't imagine why they hate that.
There are people in this country actually suffering who are poor, and you spend probably thousands of dollars to look like a tree ate you, Francis McDormand.
Or look like you were seared on a grill, Cara Delevingne.
Or look like you were attacked by a plastic jellyfish.
I can't imagine why everybody thinks you're a doof.
I can't imagine it at all.
Okay.
Is it time for things I like and things I hate?
Okay, let's do some things I like and some things I hate.
Sorry, that's so good.
Matt Gala.
It's so stupid!
I'm sorry.
High culture is really low culture.
It's really—okay, so, brief digression before I get to things I like.
It is worth noting here that in the 1950s and 1960s, there was an actual growth in culture in the United States.
There were more people who went to the symphony in 1955 than went to a major league baseball game.
35 million Americans in 1955 went to a concert from a symphony, 15 million Americans went to a baseball game.
Okay, culture was actually growing in the 1950s.
25,000 people bought subscriptions to the Great Books Club.
That's like Plato and Aristotle in that year alone.
Okay, so there was a real growth in culture.
And then came Susan Sontag, who said that the real way to look at culture was playfully, with irony.
And everybody who wanted to read Plato, everybody who wanted to...
Listen to Beethoven and better themselves.
All of these people were really just rubes.
They were rubes who were striving for something better, but they were rubes all the same.
And so what we really needed is to revel in the absurd.
We needed to know that art was absurd, knowledge was absurd, everything was absurd.
And therefore, the more absurd and the more ironic your costume, the more special you are.
And you can see that effect at the Met Gala.
None of these women dress like the beautiful people that they are.
These are all beautiful people.
None of them dress beautifully, like you would see at a 1950s gala, or a 1960s gala even.
Instead what you would see is people dressed like complete freak shows from a bad Halloween party at a frat down the street.
And that's considered high culture now, because absurdity, it's making fun of meaning.
So at an event supposedly honoring Catholic imagery, of course they revel in the absurdity of a God-free world.
That might be a bit of a deep read on the Met Gala, but there are some roots to that.
Stuff like this idiotic perception of art and fashion.
Okay, time for things I like and then things I hate.
So, things I like today.
There's an old movie, now it's old, from 1998, 20 years old, my goodness, called When Trumpets Fade.
It's from HBO.
It's made by, you can see, it's made by the same people who did Band of Brothers.
And it is quite good.
It's worth watching.
The score is not good.
It's very distracting, actually, how bad the score to this movie is.
But the acting is good, and what's kind of fun about it is when you watch it, you'll see a bunch of people who went on to be huge stars and really big parts.
So Timothy Olyphant has a really big part in this.
You'll see Bobby Cannavale, who shows up for five seconds, and he's in it as well.
There are a bunch of faces that you'll recognize in the movie.
It's about One of the pushes in World War II that was wildly unsuccessful, and that was a push against the Siegfried Line near the end of the war in an attempt to invade Germany.
24,000 Americans died in this forest battle that was basically useless, and this movie is about that.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
He was a reluctant soldier.
If I can help you in any way without endangering my own life, I won't hesitate.
But I'm not taking a bullet for anybody.
That's not good enough.
That's as good as it gets.
A reluctant leader.
Congratulations, private.
You're a sergeant now.
I am absolutely the wrong man.
You managed to stay alive for a week.
That's something the rest of your platoon couldn't do.
Call me crazy, but from where I'm standing, that makes you qualified for the job.
But in the heat of battle, He became a reluctant hero.
You're gonna make it!
You can do this.
This is suicide!
Okay, so the movie is actually pretty good and pretty effective.
It's sort of a precursor.
It was made about the same time, I believe, as Saving Private Ryan, so worth checking out.
Okay, time for a thing that I hate.
Okay, so the thing that I hate today comes courtesy of Whoopi Goldberg.
Whoopi Goldberg says that no one can point to anything that President Trump has done for black Americans.
President Trump's been awful for black Americans across the board.
Never mind the fact 57% of Americans now think the country is moving in the right direction.
Never mind the fact that black unemployment is at an all-time low.
No, Donald Trump has been horrible for black Americans because something or something or whatever something.
If it's true, I just, the premise is somehow that Trump has done so much for the African American community, and I just don't see it.
I don't think anybody in their right mind can point to anything.
Okay, he can't point to anything.
Well no, it's just that you disagree with Donald Trump's agenda.
Listen, do I think that Trump has been good on racial issues?
No, I was the first person to criticize the living crap out of him after Charlottesville.
I did a full episode on how terrible it was.
I ripped Trump over and over during the campaign for being soft on the alt-right.
Right, so I'm not somebody who's going to defend President Trump's statements on race over and over because I don't think that they're defensible.
But, to say that he's done nothing for black Americans?
Well, a booming economy is a pretty good thing for black Americans.
By the way, worth noting, one of the things that the Trump administration is actively pushing right now is criminal justice reform.
They're trying to reach out to people like Colin Kaepernick in order to talk about criminal justice reform.
And Whoopi Goldberg saying he's doing nothing for the black community?
Yeah, not quite.
Not quite, Whoopi.
Okay.
Time to deconstruct a little bit of culture.
So...
So there's something that's been going around online.
It's now got millions and millions of views Childish Gambino whose real name is Donald Glover He he is you've seen my community.
He does a show called Atlanta.
He's a really super talented guy He started off as a writer on 30 rock.
I believe on SNL and 30 rock and Glover is he went to New York NYU Tisch School of Film He's he's a really really Smart guy and really creative guy.
He has a new song called This is America and it's getting all sorts of plaudits for the music video.
The music video is worth breaking down a little bit because it's kind of confusing as to what it's saying and what it's trying to say.
I think the left has one take on it that I'm not sure is completely correct.
It's a little bit To one-sided, I think, the left's take on this music video.
He calls himself Childish Gambino when he is rapping.
It is worth noting that Childish Gambino was literally—that name was literally created off a meme generator.
It was created off a name generator, and he fully admits that.
Donald Glover says that, right?
That's where he says he got it.
He typed in Donald Glover into a name generator, and it came up with Childish Gambino, and he made that his nom de plume.
In any case, here is This Is America with Childish Gambino slash Donald Glover.
We just wanna party.
We just want to party.
I'm just going to go.
We just want to party.
I'm just going to go.
I don't want to party.
I'm just going to go.
We got to dance.
Dance and shake the braids.
We just want to party.
We just want to party.
Party. Party. Party. Party. Party. Party. Party.
Okay.
And if you can't see this, then Donald Glover then shoots a guy in the head.
Okay, the guy who is playing music.
And then he goes into more of a hard rap.
Okay, and everybody is standing behind him dancing.
You can see people in the background driving.
You can see people rioting in the background.
But he's dancing, and he's doing all these kind of happy dances, and a bunch of people come in behind him, dancing with him.
The whole point of the video is that all the stuff happening in the background is the real stuff and all the stuff happening in the foreground is the fake stuff.
that him dancing and him entertaining, all of that is sort of the fake stuff.
But the rioting that's happening in the background, there's one part of this video where there's a guy who obviously represents death, riding a white horse and police cars in the background chasing him.
This is supposed to be a reference to the Book of Revelations with the death and hell following with him, hell being, of course, the police.
And then it flashes to, this is the most controversial part of the song, it flashes to a bunch of people who are singing in what is obviously a historically black choir at a black church.
And Donald Glover coming in and dancing, he's shirtless throughout this video, and someone hands him a gun and he shoots everybody who is in the choir, and then he hands off the gun and he keeps walking past a police car.
And someone hands him a gun and he shoots everybody who is in the choir.
And then he hands off the gun and he keeps walking past a police car.
So the whole point here, this is getting all sorts of plaudits, this video.
So the whole point here, this is getting all sorts of plaudits, this video.
The reason it's getting all sorts of plaudits is because the left is supposing that what this video really is about is how American society wants to focus on the entertaining black man at the expense of the stuff that is happening to black people all across the United States.
That in the background, while we're watching Donald Glover, while we're watching rap, while we're watching songs, while we're watching Beyonce, in the background, there's a bunch of terrible stuff happening.
People getting shot and the police being racist and too many people sitting up there holding their cell phones and taping the whole thing.
I think that's actually not complex enough.
I think that's actually not complex enough.
So I think that here's the part that I was talking about with the horse riding through, the horse of death riding through.
I think that one of the things that this video is also pointing out is that, and maybe I'm misinterpreting, Glover will have to tell me, if it's a more complex video than this, and it's not just there's stuff happening in the foreground but the real stuff's happening in the background, then what's interesting about this is that Glover is in fact a black man and he is the one who's committing the shooting so it's not a white man in the background committing the shootings glover shoots a guy and then he shoots the historically black choir that's supposed to be that historically black choir by the way
uh a reference presumably to the to the church shooting in charleston south carolina um i think the point here is that there are a lot of he it's still the same point that there are a lot of problems that are being obscured by the obsession with pop culture and by the obsession with entertainment i I think that that is still the point.
But I think it's a little too simplistic to just use the Black Lives Matter logic here, that all problems in the United States are due to white people, and that it's the popo and it's the police who are the real problem, because this thing ends with Donald Glover running away from the police down a hallway, right?
It ends with him sprinting down a hallway and the police chasing him.
This is what you see right here.
And people are saying, well, this is obviously Donald Glover running away from the specter of the police.
Except that in this video, he's shot a bunch of people, right?
So why wouldn't the police be chasing him?
He shot a bunch of people in this video.
So it shows him terrified, running away from everybody.
But in the video, he's a murderer.
So maybe the point here is that there's a lot more complexity to these issues than anybody is willing to look into or cares about because everybody is too distracted by the narrative that's being put out there.
By the way, I do think it's really well directed.
I think it's really well put together.
I like the ambiguity of the video.
I think it's good.
I'm not a fan of the song because it's not my type of music.
But the simplistic sort of leftist view of this, that it is merely a rip on white America, I think that that is...
I don't think that that's totally correct.
I don't think that's totally correct.
Okay.
So, we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest news.
There are a bunch—I believe the West Virginia primary is supposed to take place today, so we'll know whether that kook Blankenship ended up winning the Republican nomination.
For entertainment's sake, I hope so.
But for the sake of the country, I hope not.
But we'll be back here to discuss it tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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