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July 25, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

52:20

The Tale Of The Tape | Ep. 588

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	A new tape breaks from Michael Cohen, President Trump slams the media, and Elizabeth Warren makes her pitch.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro show.
	Well, a lot of breaking news today, but let's begin with this.
	I have some exciting news to announce.
	I know you've all been waiting with bated breath for this, particularly my college fans.
	Right now, we are about to announce where exactly I shall be going with YAF, Young America's Foundation.
	Last month, we announced the finalists for my fall campus tour.
	Those are the schools that just might be so lucky as to risk the ire of triggered leftist students when the hurricane that is me comes to campus.
	Well, today, I'm excited to announce the six colleges that make the cut.
	So, here we go.
	Drum roll, please.
	USC, okay, so we begin with University of Southern California on October 4th, and then we move on to University at Buffalo on October 8th, North Central College on October 10th, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on November 12th, Ohio State University on November 13th, and University of Pittsburgh on November 14th.
	So if you are looking for tickets at any of those lucky schools, then make sure you go over to yaf.org slash ShapiroTour, yaf.org slash ShapiroTour, and get this, We now have a shirt, a tour shirt.
	It's an official Ben Shapiro YAF Tour shirt.
	It will be available on Amazon at our new merch store.
	That's right.
	The Shapiro store is finally open at long last.
	You survived to see it.
	You can wear the shirt when you come to see me speak at your school, or you can frame it and treasure it.
	Hang it on the wall as you watch the live stream.
	Gaze at it every evening, knowing that you've made your life better and you've made the world a better place.
	If you'd like me to visit your campus in 2019, then definitely check out yaf.org slash Shapiro tour.
	And that's where you can learn how to apply to bring me to your school.
	I have to say these t-shirts Are pretty cool, although it would be kind of douchey for me to wear a t-shirt with my own face on it.
	But why would that stop me?
	I mean, come on, we've met, haven't we?
	Okay, before we go any further, I also want to mention your Second Amendment rights.
	So, you've heard all these stories in the news where a kid gets hold of a firearm and then something terrible happens.
	Well, you don't want that to happen to you, obviously, but you also want to make sure that you're exercising your Second Amendment rights, which is why you need to go talk with my friends at the USCCA.
	They want to give your entire family a 100% free guide and audiobook for complete Firearms Conference.
	As a person with two kids under the age of five, I want to make sure that I'm doing firearm safety correctly.
	You should too.
	Go to DefendMyFamilyNow.com right now for your brand new Kids and Guns Guide.
	That's DefendMyFamilyNow.com.
	You'll learn the most dangerous mistakes that put kids at risk.
	Proven strategies for teaching gun safety to kids the right way.
	Eight life-saving tips to responsibly own and store a gun and a whole lot more.
	It has never been easier to educate every single member of your family.
	The guide is life-saving and you'll get it 100% free when you go over to defendmyfamilynow.com.
	It's only available for a few days, so don't miss it.
	Go over to defendmyfamilynow.com.
	Get that free life-saving guide and the peace of mind that you deserve.
	That's defendmyfamilynow.com.
	Again, defendmyfamilynow.com.
	USCCA is a wonderful organization helping you exercise your Second Amendment rights properly.
	Go check it out.
	DefendMyFamilyNow.com.
	All right.
	So, last night, late in the evening, Chris Cuomo, the slightly lesser block of wood known as the Cuomo brothers, Chris Cuomo on CNN brought out his big reveal.
	What was his big reveal?
	His big reveal is that Michael Cohen, the president's former lawyer, his personal attorney, had revealed a tape Woo, a tape.
	Now, we know tape is always bad.
	Except if the tape doesn't tend to show a whole hell of a lot.
	So, here's what happened.
	Michael Cohen apparently was talking with the President of the United States.
	Before he was the president of the United States.
	This is during the 2016 campaign.
	And he decided to basically wear a wire into his conversations with Trump, or at least to carry a tape recorder in his pocket.
	Now, this is not illegal.
	And a lot of people saying today, isn't that illegal?
	Like the president of the United States was tweeting out that he thought that maybe this was illegal.
	This is his tweet.
	This is 19.
	So the president tweeted out, what kind of a lawyer would tape a client?
	So sad.
	Is this a first?
	Never heard of it before.
	Why was the tape so abruptly terminated?
	Cut.
	Well, I was presumably saying positive things.
	I hear there are other clients and many reporters that are taped.
	Can this be so?
	Too bad!
	Okay, well, it's not illegal for Cohen to tape Trump.
	It is weird.
	It's very weird to tape a conversation with your client because the only point of taping a conversation with your client, presumably, would be either blackmail or the possibility of violating attorney-client privilege.
	Or maybe you want to show your client later that he said something that he said he didn't say.
	But, like, I'm a lawyer.
	I've never taped a conversation with a client because that would be extraordinarily weird.
	It is indeed a weird thing to do.
	It is not illegal because the state of New York, oddly enough, is a one-party consent state.
	There are different laws in different states around the country as far as whether you can tape people.
	So California, where I live, is a two-party consent state.
	You cannot tape a conversation with anyone unless it's for news purposes.
	You're not allowed to tape a conversation with anybody without that person's consent, which is why you generally have to get release forms or you at least have to ask on the tape whether it's okay to tape.
	That's not the case in New York.
	In New York, so long as one of the members of the conversation is okay with the taping, in this case, Michael Cohen, the taping is in fact legal.
	So, they're taping.
	And what exactly are they talking about?
	Well, apparently, they're having a conversation about how to pay off Karen McDougal.
	Karen McDougal is another one of the bevy of porn stars that President Trump stooped during his great adventures in the Vietnam, that is, the STD-ridden world of pornography.
	So, Karen McDougal's former Playboy Playmate.
	The president has basically had sex with, I think, 10 out of every 12 Playboy Playmates at last count.
	Let's not be shy about this.
	The president is not exactly a sexual miser.
	He's been rather profligate with his services and with the services of others for several decades.
	And none of this is a shock, because as I say, all of this is priced in.
	We knew all of this about Trump for years.
	This is a guy who used to openly brag about tripping other people's wives.
	All of this is priced in.
	Whether you like it, whether you don't, nothing's going to change.
	People who like Trump, like Trump.
	They don't care about this.
	People who don't like Trump, don't like Trump.
	They're going to pretend they care about this if they're on the left while they don't care about Bill Clinton.
	And there are a few people on the right who aren't fond of Trump's character and also don't like that this is the stuff that he does.
	That's a shrinking group of people.
	In any case, the president is speaking with Michael Cohen and Cohen is saying, we need to pay off Karen McDougal.
	And here is what it sounds like.
	I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David, you know, so that... I'm going to do that right away.
	And I spoke to Alan about it.
	When it comes time for the financing, which will be... Listen.
	What financing?
	We'll have to pay you, so... No, no, no, no, no, no.
	I got...
	OK, so he then said that the part of that conversation that actually matters is the very end.
	So what's happening here is that there is a guy who owns the National Enquirer.
	His name is David Pecker.
	He is not a joke.
	That's his actual name.
	And he and President Trump are apparently very close friends.
	And the way that this this The shtick would work is that David Pecker would go out and buy the life rights for all of these women who had stripped Trump, and then Trump would set up a shell corporation and then pay David Pecker to actually convey those rights to Donald Trump so these stories would never hit the press.
	And apparently this is a fairly regular thing according to various news reports.
	Well, as the election approached, Michael Cohen comes to Trump and he says, David Pecker has just bought the rights to Karen McDougal's story about schtuping you.
	And he says, we need to basically figure out a way to pay David Pecker for those rights.
	We need to give him some cash and then he'll give us the information and then the information will never go anywhere.
	And so we'll set up a shell corporation that nobody really knows about.
	And the key part of that is at the very end where Trump says something about cash and then Cohen says back to him, no, no, no, no.
	Okay.
	And what's unclear exactly is what Trump is saying.
	So is Trump saying that we need to pay off David Pecker in cash or is he saying we need to sign him a check instead?
	The reason this makes a difference is because none of this is particularly legally relevant.
	There's nothing illegal about me paying off somebody to keep silent, signing a settlement agreement, buying their life rights.
	If, God forbid, I were to have an affair or something and pay somebody off, that is actually not illegal because it's not blackmail.
	It's just me paying somebody off.
	It's a legal agreement for somebody to shut up.
	So Trump has done this apparently a lot.
	There's nothing illegal about that, so he's not in any legal trouble for that, as Alan Dershowitz has pointed out.
	Where there could theoretically be legal trouble is we are approaching the 2016 election, and Trump wants to keep Karen McDougal silent, and so this act is essentially a campaign expenditure.
	The reason he's paying off Karen McDougal is because he wants her to keep quiet in the run-up to the election.
	Same sort of accusations were made about Stormy Daniels, that the reason the president actually paid off Stormy Daniels is because he thought that if those stories broke right before the election, he wouldn't win the presidency, and he wanted to keep those people quiet, so he paid them a bunch of money.
	And then, more importantly, he didn't actually report that to the FEC.
	So if it's a campaign expenditure and he didn't report it to the Federal Elections Commissioner, then that could be a violation of campaign finance law.
	Now, is it really a violation of campaign finance law?
	Very difficult to say yes, considering that John Edwards did the same thing back in 2008.
	You remember John Edwards?
	That guy?
	Right?
	Breckhair girl?
	You remember that guy?
	He, in 2008, was one of the frontrunners for the Democratic presidential nomination, but he'd been knocking on one of the photographers on his campaign.
	He actually knocked her up.
	He actually got her pregnant.
	And then, he had a bunch of his campaign supporters pay her like a million dollars to shut up.
	And this came to light, and they tried to prosecute him for campaign finance violations, and that prosecution fell through.
	There was a hung jury, and then they never retried him.
	So, it's difficult to say that Trump did anything wildly different than anything that John Edwards did back in 2008.
	That said, the media think they finally have President Trump.
	They think this will be the porn star that finally takes down the president.
	It's like Lucy with the football.
	Basically, there's a story that comes out with Trump shtupping a porn star and then paying her off.
	And the media says, ah, now we have him, now we have him.
	And Trump kind of nods slowly, like Jack Nicholson in that GIF.
	He kind of just nods slowly.
	And then the Democrats approach the football, Trump pulls away the football, and the Democrats in the media go flying through the air.
	Now, the reason the Democrats are really excited is because they think Michael Cohen has even worse material on Trump.
	That is unclear at best.
	We know that there are something like 12 tapes between Trump and Cohen, supposedly, or 12 tapes that Cohen has.
	We don't know what's on those tapes.
	We know eventually they will leak.
	Cohen's lawyer is suggesting that this tape itself is evidence of illegal activity by the President of the United States.
	So this is, this is Lanny Davis.
	So Lanny Davis was last seen in 1998 defending President Clinton.
	And now here he is on the other side going after President Trump.
	Basically, history repeats itself.
	The first time is tragedy.
	The second time is farce.
	This is the farce.
	Here's Lanny Davis, Michael Cohen's lawyer, on what these tapes supposedly show.
	We know that Trump has lied, even during the campaign when his campaign spokesman denied, two months after this tape, that he knew anything about Karen McDougal.
	Ladies and gentlemen, if you voted for Donald Trump, listen to the tape and ask yourself, is Donald Trump lying when he said he didn't use the word cash and accuses Michael Cohen of using the word cash?
	Okay, so there is that.
	Are we really in a situation where President Trump is lying about cash or checks?
	It doesn't matter, honestly.
	Legally speaking, it doesn't matter if he paid cash, it doesn't matter if he paid for a check.
	The only real question is whether he reported it to the FEC or whether he even had to.
	If it turns out that Trump regularly paid off women to keep silent, this probably is not an election violation.
	But Lanny Davis is going to make this look as bad as humanly possible.
	Why?
	Why is Michael Cohen doing this?
	Because Michael Cohen thinks that he's going to be prosecuted, and if he flips on the president, that his prosecution will basically be kicked to the second priority position.
	That it just won't matter as much.
	So Michael Cohen's lawyer continues.
	He says only drug dealers and mobsters use cash.
	The idea here is to make Trump look as bad as possible so that it looks like Cohen actually has material.
	Gotta say, Cohen is a pretty sleazy dude here.
	Now, this is not to excuse the president's sexual profligacy.
	It's not to excuse the fact that Donald Trump has a Really, really poor history with women is not to excuse any of those things.
	But when I see this situation, the first thing that occurs to me is Michael Cohen was happy to ride on Trump's coattails for years and take his money and play his protection man.
	And then the minute things go wrong, he's out there ratting on him.
	But it's not even ratting about anything that's necessarily illegal.
	It's just ratting on him in order to avoid culpability for other activities, perhaps.
	But Lanny Davis says that this is mobster type stuff, what Trump did here.
	There's no way that Mr. Giuliani, who knows from being U.S.
	Attorney, the only people who use cash are drug dealers and mobsters.
	Cash is not what you do.
	OK, so again, I think this is this is an exaggerated case being made by a lot of folks on the left.
	Do they think they're really going to get Trump this time?
	Apparently they do.
	Rudy Giuliani has been caught in a little bit of a pickle.
	This is the president's lawyer.
	He's been caught in a little bit of a pickle because he suggested that Trump only paid via check.
	He never would have paid via cash.
	Now it appears that he may have paid via cash.
	But again, I don't think that any of this is going to make a large difference.
	I'm going to explain that in just a second.
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	Okay, so Rudy Giuliani comes out in President Trump's defense.
	He says, listen, President Trump is not an idiot.
	He didn't do anything illegal here.
	There's no way the president is going to be talking about setting up a corporation.
	Okay, well, I honestly think that's sort of an irrelevant point.
	In the end, is this going to take down Trump?
	No, of course this isn't going to take down Trump.
	Now what we do have to discuss here is the way that the media has treated this particular issue.
	So when it was President Clinton, again, I don't mean to misdirect away from the supposedly central issue, which is how President Trump acted with regard to money.
	When it was John Edwards, when it was President Clinton, when it was Ted Kennedy, the media buried this stuff.
	The media were not interested in covering this stuff.
	When it comes to Barack Obama's college transcripts.
	We still don't have those.
	When it comes to tapes that are being released by Michael Cohen, then the media is eager to run all of those, right?
	This is the same media who decry all the people who are running all of the Hillary Clinton emails that were being put out there by WikiLeaks.
	The same media is now saying, well, you know, if we decide to run these tapes, it's totally fine to run these tapes.
	In the end, none of this is going to matter.
	The reason it's not going to matter is because everybody already has an opinion on President Trump.
	Everybody already knows that this is the sort of stuff that President Trump does.
	None of this is particularly telling, none of it is particularly revealing, and none of it is particularly troubling if you already like President Trump.
	So all of this talk about this is going to take down Trump seems to me wildly exaggerated.
	And it's a level of enthusiasm that I think is rather uncalled for, given the fact that everybody already assumed all this stuff was true.
	It's so funny.
	Every time the left thinks they catch President Trump in a lie, what they realize is that most Americans already thought he was fibbing.
	And this is the part that I think the media don't understand.
	Even people on the right who say that they believe President Trump at every turn, they understand when he's fibbing.
	Okay?
	Everybody on the right who says, yeah, no, we believe Trump when he says he never schtupped Stormy Daniels.
	Everybody on the right believes that he schtupped Stormy Daniels.
	And no one cares.
	Because they already figured that that was baked into the cake.
	The same thing is true of Karen McDougal.
	They figure Trump's gonna say what Trump's gonna say to get himself off the hook, but they're very understanding about that because they feel as though President Trump is being unfairly targeted.
	And to a certain extent, they're not wrong.
	President Trump is being unfairly targeted in the sense that if the same stuff had happened with regard to a Democrat, it is highly doubtful whether the media would be treating this with anything like the same sort of enthusiasm.
	So all the talk about why is it that Trump supporters don't just understand, why don't they get on the bandwagon that he's a bad guy who does bad things?
	Well, the answer is because they already priced that in.
	And what they decided is that they don't trust you more than they don't trust President Trump because they know where Trump is lying, but they don't know where you are lying.
	Trump's lies are predictable.
	Trump's fibs are predictable.
	We know exactly what he's going to say about Karen McDougal.
	When it comes to the media, we don't know when they're going to say something completely, wildly untrue.
	Now, here's a great example of that.
	So, yesterday, President Trump was speaking at a veterans group, and he started talking about the fake news, right?
	One of his favorite topics.
	And he suggested that we should not believe the fake news crap.
	And the media went nuts.
	Here's what President Trump had to say about this yesterday.
	Remember, they have the biggest, best, strongest lobbyists, and they're doing a number.
	Just stick with us.
	Don't believe the crap you see from these people.
	The fake news.
	Okay, so everybody on the left went nuts over this.
	How could he say that you shouldn't believe the stuff you read, the stuff that you see?
	It's Orwellian.
	He's saying, believe me, not the press.
	Right?
	As opposed to Barack Obama, who said, don't believe the propaganda over at Fox News.
	This is nothing new.
	This is nothing new.
	And why should we believe the press when they are constantly fibbing about things?
	Like really, there are a lot of times when the press undercuts its own credibility.
	I'll give you a perfect example.
	So, yesterday, Jeff Sessions, or the day before, he was speaking at Turning Point USA.
	It's a big high school event over in Washington, D.C.
	A lot of big names over there.
	My friend, Kyle Cashew, who I've mentored a little bit, he helped put together the speakers list while Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, spoke there.
	At a certain point, the students started chanting, lock her up.
	Now, I've been in a position like this.
	I was at CPAC and people started chanting, lock her up.
	And my immediate response was, there's no reason to lock her up because she's already living in a hell of her own making.
	She's wandering around the woods of upstate New York.
	Lock her up!
	kind of twortling over it.
	And he sort of then moves on with his speech.
	Here's what it sounded like.
	And then he says something like, I heard that a lot during the campaign.
	The media immediately started running headlines about how Jeff Sessions had led chants of Lock Her Up.
	I'm not kidding.
	Katie Tour over at NBC said Jeff Sessions led chants of Lock Her Up over on MSNBC.
	He did not lead a chant.
	They started chanting, lock her up.
	He kind of chortled about it because it's a little bit funny.
	And then he moved on with his speech.
	But if you just read the media headlines, it sounds like the Attorney General of the United States is abusing his power by standing there and chanting, lock her up with a bunch of students.
	Okay, another great example of the media's malfeasance on these topics.
	So my friend Allie Stuckey.
	Okay, Allie's great.
	She's over at CRTV.
	She's a great outlet.
	You should check it out.
	And Allie, she does these sort of parodic videos.
	How do I know she does parodic videos?
	Because I did one with her.
	Okay, just a few weeks ago.
	It was actually at a Turning Point USA event.
	She was there to cover it.
	And we went in a room with her cameraman.
	And she did a basically ripoff of Between Two Ferns.
	She sat across from me and she asked me absurd questions, and I sort of laughed awkwardly at the absurdity of the questions.
	This is Ally Shtick, right?
	She generates an awful lot of satire content.
	So, she took an interview.
	We showed you and you listened to portions of this same interview with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
	We actually played this interview on the air.
	It was with Margaret Hoover on PBS.
	It's the same interview in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested that she didn't know anything about foreign policy, and she obviously didn't know anything about capitalism or economics, and she looked like an idiot.
	So what Allie did is she cobbled together a video of her questioning Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and it was very funny.
	And it was obviously not real.
	And the reason you know it's not real is because the background for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not even remotely the same as the background in the video for Allie Stuckey.
	It is obvious that it's not, that it's not, you know, that Cortez is not sitting down with Allie Stuckey.
	You can also tell because in some of the cutaway shots, you can see Margaret Hoover's dress, which is green.
	And then when they cut away to Allie Stuckey, she's wearing a blue dress.
	It's completely a different dress.
	Okay, here is what it sounded like.
	And then I'll tell you how the media reacted to this because it's completely insane.
	How do you respond to the people who say that socialism has never worked?
	Capitalism was the most efficient and best economy, perhaps.
	Abject poverty is at the lowest level it's ever been because of capitalism.
	Well, I think the numbers that you just talked about is part of the problem.
	I don't understand.
	So, what do you hope to accomplish when you're in Congress?
	This is a really good question.
	So, what is it?
	I just think that that's the wrong question.
	Okay.
	So, why should voters vote for you?
	You vote.
	It's democratic.
	Okay, and obviously it is Allie mocking the hell out of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which is fine.
	You know how I know it's fine?
	Because the left does this exact same tactic all the time.
	For instance, last week, Stephen Colbert.
	We'll get to Stephen Colbert in just a second, because I'm going to show you how the left uses this exact same tactic, and then I'll give you the punchline exactly how the left treated this Allie Stuckey video, because it's totally insane.
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	Okay, so.
	Allie Stuckey cuts this video with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
	And as I say, this this parodic video in which she sits across from the radical socialist, self-described democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez goes viral.
	It's like a million hits on Facebook.
	And there's nothing unusual about this tactic, right?
	It's a frequent comedic tactic.
	How do I know this?
	Because Stephen Colbert did it last week with President Trump.
	So President Trump did an interview with Bret Baier.
	Except Stephen Colbert has significantly better graphic artists than Ali does.
	Ali basically just cut back and forth one-camera shots of her face and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's face.
	Here, the producers over at Stephen Colbert's show are actually able to essentially superimpose Stephen Colbert over Bret Baier in this particular interview.
	And so, or with Sean Hannity, rather, in this particular interview, here's Colbert interviewing President Trump using exactly the same tactic as Ali Stuckey used with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
	Mr. President, right off the bat, I gotta say, wow, what a summit.
	You managed to bring both sides of the aisle together to agree that you historically sucked.
	How do you think your buddy Vlad came off?
	I thought that President Putin was very, very strong.
	What else can you tell us about the man?
	President Putin is very much into... Undermining our democratic process.
	Having the U.S.
	over a barrel.
	Don't tell me.
	I'll get this.
	Playing you like a fiddle.
	Wait, what am I doing?
	Why don't I just go to the source?
	Okay, and then he actually just trots over and he sits down with Vladimir Putin, right?
	So this is a frequent tactic that is used by folks on the left.
	I'm old enough to remember when you had Conan O'Brien doing a routine where somebody would play Bill Clinton's lips, right?
	Where there would actually be like a still photo and then just Bill Clinton's mouth would move and it would be as though he was interviewing Bill Clinton.
	All of this is normal comedy, right?
	This sort of stuff happens all the time.
	But how does the left respond to basic satire?
	Which, by the way, is much funnier than what Stephen Colbert did there.
	That is utterly unfunny.
	How did they respond?
	Well, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she tweets this.
	She tweets, Here's one bonafide truth.
	So scared of me that they're faking videos and presenting them as real on Facebook because they can't deal with reality anymore.
	Here's one bona fide truth.
	Election Day is November 6th.
	No one is faking the video.
	I mean, honestly, perhaps we ought to look into a governmental program of forced redistribution of senses of humor so she ends up with one.
	Because this is crazy.
	It is obviously a satire video.
	Again, Ali makes satire all the time.
	But what the left really can't deal with, the real truth they can't deal with, is that some people on the right actually have a sense of humor.
	The left wants to paint the right as completely humorless.
	This is one of their favorite things to do.
	What the right really is is we're all John Lithgow in Footloose.
	We sit around telling the kids not to dance.
	That's our thing.
	But if we're ever funny at all, then it turns out that it's because we're racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes, or because we're faking it.
	So, you could forgive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for having no sense of humor about herself.
	You know, as somebody who is parodied on a pretty frequent basis, I can tell you, I find most of the parodies about me pretty funny.
	But apparently, if you're a hardcore democratic socialist, humor was outlawed by Stalin a century ago, and so we ought to simply pretend that it doesn't exist.
	The part of it that's hilarious, though, is the way the media treat this stuff.
	So how do the media treat this?
	So a video producer at Vox tweets this out.
	He tweets out, wow, this is Ocasio-Cortez PBS interview with Margaret Hoover spliced together with a CRTV interviewer.
	Notice they never appear on camera together and the interviewer shot is lit different plus higher resolution.
	Took one minute on Google to sort out.
	Reprehensible.
	Did it ever occur to this guy that they weren't trying to make it look like an actual interview?
	That the whole thing is parodic?
	Like, yes, it's shot with different resolution because it was done on the cheap.
	Because it's not like she's spending, Ali is spending tons of money on a Stephen Colbert-style implant you in the video talking to President Trump.
	I love that the people on the left were so exercised over this.
	I mean, they were really exercised over this.
	The Washington Post ran a full piece about this.
	I am not kidding.
	It's a full piece from the Washington Post about the evils of this.
	And they tweeted this out after a fake interview.
	of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went viral, its maker said it was satire.
	Its maker said it was satire?
	It's obviously satire.
	It's clearly satire.
	I understand we live in an era where people are not allowed to make jokes or have a sense of humor, but you have to be out of your mind.
	You have to be so unbelievably stupid to think that this was meant as an actual, legit interview, that it amounts to dishonesty.
	Eli Rosenberg writes the piece.
	He says, the video traveled quickly after being shared Monday on Facebook, gathering more than 1.5 million views in less than a day.
	In it, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the congressional candidate from New York whose democratic socialist campaign has struck a lightning bolt into the world of democratic politics, appeared to give bizarre answers in a two-and-a-half-minute video that was staged as an interview with conservative commentator Ali Stuckey on the site TRTV.
	Ocasio-Cortez shook her head no when Stuckey asked if she had any knowledge about how the political system worked and seemed to imply that Venezuela was in the Middle East and was a model of socialism.
	But the video did not depict a real interview, despite its caption.
	Okay, and the grills is in scare quotes.
	It's in scare quotes.
	It's obviously satire.
	"Congressional hopeful and progressive it girl, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
	"Instead, it used heavily edited footage.
	"After an outcry, the Facebook page for Stucky's show "was updated to note that the video was satire "and included a reference to the original PBS show, But the fact the video traveled so widely has served as another example of how misleading information continues to thrive in the fast-paced flow of information online, despite Facebook's promise to better weed it out.
	So now the Washington Post is calling for regulation of Facebook because people cannot recognize a satire video.
	And then you wonder why when President Trump says, why are you listening to the media?
	So many people on the right nod along and go, yeah, that's right.
	You know, when I saw this video, this, this, this Allie Stuckey video for the first time, it was a couple of nights ago when it first went up and my father was online.
	He said, look at this hilarious video.
	Everyone realized that it was funny.
	Everyone realized it was satire, except the writers at the Washington Post.
	And then this writer says, No.
	this misinformation is not completely outlawed according to the company's community guidelines and neither of course is satire but the video appeared to fall into a confusing gap between the two before it was labeled no it says to many skeptical eyes the video was obviously fishy and staged but it appeared to be taken seriously after it was shared on some conservative leaning pages on facebook this is reminiscent of when i believe it was the washington post read a fact check on a B piece on Facebook.
	The Babylon B is like the onion of the right.
	It's just, it's just incredible.
	It's just incredible.
	Again, this is a frequently used tactic on the left, the fake interview.
	It's a very funny bit.
	For example, I'm old enough to remember when late night comedians did Bush versus Bush.
	Did anybody actually, Jon Stewart did this.
	Did he actually think that George W. Bush was debating George W. Bush?
	Like, did anyone think this was anything but satire?
	Here it is from, you know, 10 years ago.
	Mr. President, let me just get specific.
	Why are we in Iraq?
	We will be changing the regime of Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people.
	Thank you.
	Governor, then I'd like to hear your response on that.
	If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us.
	I think one way for us to end up being viewed as the ugly American is for us to go around the world saying, we do it this way, so should you.
	Okay, so, okay, this is a tactic that's frequently used, and this is the part that drives me up a wall.
	When you undercut your own credibility on a regular basis, members of the media, it's going to be very difficult for you to fight President Trump when he says that you've destroyed your own credibility.
	Okay, before we go any further, let's talk about your impending death.
	So, let's be real about this.
	You're going to plot.
	And when you do, if you don't have life insurance, your family is going to be a lot poorer than they were while you were alive and earning, son.
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	Alrighty, so...
	The media, obviously, stepping in it on a routine basis.
	And it would be hilarious if it weren't quite so sad.
	Now, in a second, I want to talk about some other agenda items on the left that involve things including plastic straws.
	I'm not kidding.
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	out.
	We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
	So when the left and the media aren't pretending that satire videos are real for the sake of attacking people, people on the left are also proposing some brand new ideas.
	There's only one problem.
	These brand new ideas, they're basically the same as the old ideas.
	So for example, Elizabeth Warren, she's presenting a brand new idea.
	It's brand new.
	What is her idea?
	She wants to run for president in 2020 as a Native American.
	And she says that she wants a 50% tax rate.
	That's what she's looking for, a 50% tax rate.
	Now, let it be said, That people in the top brackets in the United States are already paying the overwhelming majority of actual net tax dollars toward the federal government.
	It's not even close.
	People at the upper end of the tax spectrum between state and federal taxes are paying well in excess of 40%.
	If you're in the state of California, you're already paying closer to 50% of your money to taxes.
	But Elizabeth Warren says we need a 50% top tax rate.
	That's going to fix all of our problems.
	What's too high for the top personal rate?
	It's not about a number.
	That's what negotiations are all about.
	It's that... It's 50% obviously too high?
	Look, there was a time in a very prosperous America, an America that was growing the middle class, an America in which working families were doing better generation after generation after generation, where the top marginal rate was well above 50%.
	It's 90%!
	That's exactly right.
	The left never, ever, ever will actually give you a straight answer on this particular question.
	When you say to them, what is your preferred top tax rate?
	They'll never tell you that it's 100%, but it basically is 100%.
	Folks on the left will say, you know when the tax rate's really good?
	It's when the top marginal tax rate was 91% under JFK.
	Ignoring, of course, the fact that everybody basically avoided paying the 91% top tax rate with a variety of loopholes and deductions.
	But if you really believe that this is a winning campaign in the United States, a winning campaign is I want to raise everybody's taxes dramatically.
	Talk to Walter Mondale circa 1984.
	This is your program.
	Let's raise taxes incredibly high.
	Yeah, genius ideas from the left.
	Also, outrage is on the program as well.
	So Cory Booker also wants to run for president in 2020.
	This is why when people say that Donald Trump is running at a disadvantage in 2020, I just wonder who they think he's going to run against.
	If it's going to be Elizabeth Warren, who's sending smoke signals, or Cory Booker, wild-eyed Cory Booker, the advantage has to be with Trump.
	Cory Booker is the senator from New Jersey, one of the senators from New Jersey, along with the ex-global Bob Menendez.
	And Cory Booker has decided that he is going to play crazy-eyes Mr. Potato Head in his 2020 campaign.
	There is no neutral.
	In a moral moment, there is no bystanders.
	slap those things on, and then he's going to go out and campaign.
	Everything that he says is five times too crazy for actual moderate politics.
	Here he is yesterday suggesting that anyone who supports the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court is complicit and evil, and behind him is Elizabeth Warren.
	Even she looks awkward over this.
	There is no neutral.
	In a moral moment, there is no bystanders.
	You are either complicit and the evil.
	You are either contributing to the wrong or you are fighting against it.
	And it did.
	The outrage routine, every time Cory Booker speaks, he thinks that he is doing the McCarthy era, have you no decency, sir?
	And it grates really, really quickly.
	Moral outrage does not work against President Trump, and it doesn't work on the American people.
	When you're talking about the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the left is already attempting to mobilize against Kavanaugh's nomination, not by suggesting that there are holes in his legal resume, or by asking specific questions about his record, or how he will rule on future cases, but simply by stating over and over and over again that you are evil if you support Brett Kavanaugh.
	Well, this was exactly the thing that led to Trump's presidency in the first place.
	Everybody on the right got tired of hearing they were evil for disagreeing politically, and so the left is doubling down on all of that.
	So what have we learned from the left in the last 24 hours?
	We've learned that their program involves dishonestly suggesting that satire is actually real for the purposes of attacking people.
	We've learned from the left that they want tax rights radically elevated and we've learned from the left that you are evil if you support a judge who disagrees with Cory Booker on abortion.
	This is what we've learned from the left.
	The radicalization of the Democratic Party is happening in real time.
	And this is not me suggesting this from some subjective point of view.
	RealClearPolitics has these charts that show sort of the movement in the party politics over the past 20 years.
	And what you see is that the Republican Party moved to the right, leading all the way up until 2010.
	And since 2010, the Republican Party has basically been stagnant in its policies.
	And what you see is that the left, the Democratic Party, has moved radically to the left since 2010.
	And that's not a giant surprise, because just watching it in real time, you can see it happening.
	I'm old enough to remember when Barack Obama was running on behalf of traditional marriage and suggesting that he didn't want to raise taxes in 2008.
	And now you've got Elizabeth Warren, who's going to run on transgender bathrooms and 50% tax rights.
	That might be a little bit too radical for the American people.
	Now the other angle that folks on the left could take is that the Republicans in Congress aren't checking President Trump quite enough.
	That the Republicans in Congress are letting President Trump have his way.
	The problem is it's hard to come up with the evidence that on policy they're actually letting Trump have his way except perhaps on the issue of tariffs, where Congress really should seize back its power.
	It's a legislative power under Article 1 of the Constitution to handle tariff policy.
	But on other areas, for example, on Putin, the left has suggested that the Republicans are complicit in allowing President Trump to sell out the country to Vladimir Putin, except for the fact that the policy that has been promulgated by Congress is much harsher under President Trump than it ever was under President Obama.
	Yesterday, for example, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, cocaine Mitch, he came out and he said that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan The two of them would not be welcoming Putin to give some sort of joint address to the Houses of Congress, so they're not going to go along with the sort of warm feeling that President Trump has for Putin.
	Again, the policy that Trump has pursued via Putin is very different from the verbiage he has spoken via Putin with regard to Putin.
	Here is Mitch McConnell elucidating.
	Well I can only speak for the Congress.
	The Speaker and I have made it clear that Putin will not be welcome up here at the Capitol.
	OK, well, again, if the idea is you need to elect Democrats to check the president of the United States, I'm failing to see where Trump has really overridden his constitutional boundaries, except in the area of tariffs.
	And there is a case to be made that Republicans should stop him on that stuff for the sake of Trump's own presidency.
	But the case for a Democratic Congress has never been weaker, I think.
	And that's why I'm so bewildered by folks like George Will, who have suggested we need Democrats in Congress to check President Trump.
	You may not like President Trump, but the policy that is emerging from the Trump administration is not the same as President Trump's personality and what he believes personally.
	They're not quite the same thing at all.
	I'm not sure how you trust Democrats, especially considering this final plank of the Democratic platform that I'm going to talk about in just one second.
	So, final plank of the Democratic platform apparently for 2020 is going to be plastic straws suck.
	And no, I don't mean that in punny fashion.
	I mean that they're no longer going to allow you to slurp through plastic straws in cities like San Francisco.
	According to the San Francisco Chronicle, soon to be heard in San Francisco, the last slurp through a plastic straw.
	This morning, my kids wanted to drink some tea and they wanted to use plastic straws.
	So I guess I am now complicit in evil, according to Cory Booker.
	This board of supervisors passed an ordinance on Tuesday that will prohibit the city's restaurants, bars, and retailers from providing customers with plastic items such as straws, stirrers, or toothpicks beginning July 1st, 2019.
	If the ordinance passes the board on the second reading next week, it will then be presented to Mayor London Breed.
	If the mayor signs the measures, retailers will be prohibited from selling single-use food service products made with fluorinated chemicals.
	So you're not going to be allowed to get like a Starbucks cup anymore.
	Instead, you're going to have to use biodegradable straws that taste like corn every time you use them.
	She says, this is about changing people's behavior.
	would only be allowed to provide products like condiment packets and napkins upon request or self-service stations.
	Supervisor Asha Safi, she says, this is about changing people's behavior.
	Do you really need to offer a straw with a glass of water?
	Well, yeah, I mean, I kind of want the straw, so a little bit.
	And by the way, all of the propaganda surrounding plastic straws is absolutely silly.
	When people say that plastic straws are actually contributing to the degradation of the environment in a serious way, it's just not true, okay?
	There's basically a survey that was done by an eighth grader suggesting that there are eight million plastic straws that are thrown into the ocean, but that's just not, it's not true.
	It's not true, okay?
	It's... This is your program now?
	Is to make life more... So, poop on the streets in San Francisco, fine.
	Straws on the streets in San Francisco, not okay.
	Open needles on the streets of San Francisco, fine.
	Straws on the streets of San Francisco, not okay.
	Classic straws are not the problem.
	If you want to talk about ocean pollution, by the way, what is really polluting oceans are nets.
	Okay, that's really what's happening.
	The anti-straw movement, according to Bloomberg, took off in 2015 after a video of a sea turtle with a straw stuck in its nose went viral.
	Campaigns soon followed, with activists often citing studies of the growing ocean plastics problem.
	But this well-intentioned campaign assumes that single-use plastics have much to do with ocean pollution.
	That assumption is based on some highly dubious data.
	Activists and news media often claim that Americans use 500 million plastic straws per day, which sounds awful.
	Because that's stupid.
	There are only 300 million Americans.
	Okay, in this room, guys, on average, how many plastic straws do you use a day?
	A day.
	Okay, that's right.
	Okay, I use zero.
	Senya uses zero.
	Mathis uses zero.
	Okay, the notion, that means that for all three of us using zero, in order for us to get to 500 million, there has to be some person out there who's using 10 plastic straws in a day.
	For that to average out to 500 million.
	Somebody has to be using 10 plastic straws.
	I don't know what they're doing.
	I don't know if they're like snorting cocaine with straws piled up the wazoo.
	But that's real weird.
	The source of the figure was actually a survey conducted by a nine-year-old.
	Two Australian scientists estimated there were 8.3 billion plastic straws scattered on global coastlines.
	But even if those straws were suddenly washed into the sea, they'd account for 0.03% of the 8 million metric tons of plastics estimated tend to the oceans in a given year.
	But don't worry.
	The city of Santa Barbara has also passed an ordinance that will allow restaurant employees to be punished with up to six months of jail time or a $1,000 fine for giving plastic straws to their customers.
	The bill was passed unanimously last Tuesday.
	A $1,000 fine.
	So if you go to a table and you just give four plastic straws to people, that's $4,000.
	Or you could do two and a half years in jail.
	You could do two years in jail for giving four customers plastic straws.
	Santa Barbara's ordinance is likely the most severe straw ban in the country, but of course it is not the only one.
	By the way, Santa Barbara didn't just ban plastic straws, they also ban compostable straws.
	So I guess there are no straws available at all.
	So I guess if you're a disabled person who actually needs to sip through a straw, you're basically screwed, right?
	I mean, I guess that you could probably have a lawsuit based on this.
	This is pretty nuts.
	This is pretty nuts stuff, but again, the left is not known for its moderation on issues of virtue signaling, and this is merely the latest example of all of that.
	So, again, I'm very glad that the leftists have decided the crucial threat to the planet is plastic straws.
	And that that must be ended immediately.
	But the spread of poop on sidewalks, that's cool.
	Homeless people occupying every square inch of Los Angeles, that's fine.
	Just make sure those homeless people don't have plastic straws while they're spreading disease at Skid Row in Los Angeles.
	A thing that is actually happening.
	Priorities, guys, priorities.
	OK, time for things I like, then some things I hate, and then we'll do a psalm, an uplifting psalm.
	I like Wednesdays because we do psalms.
	OK, so we are going to do a thing I like.
	The thing I like today, we're doing jazz all this week.
	Sarah Vaughan, one of the great voices of all time.
	This is from her Live in Japan album, and it is just spectacular.
	She is, again, a once in a century voice.
	Sarah Vaughan singing for you.
	So close.
	You know, jazz really is the great American musical form, and And it's obviously present in stuff like this, from the blues that we played yesterday to the kind of torch songs that you hear here from Sarah Vaughan.
	It's present in George Gershwin.
	Jazz is a truly great all-American form of music, largely begun by black folks in the United States.
	And that's why when I rip on rap, because this is actually music.
	Again, I don't have to do my spiel about how much I hate rap.
	Suffice it to say, I don't like rap.
	OK, time for a couple of things that I hate.
	So the thing that I hate today, this is really tragic.
	So Demi Lovato suffered a drug overdose.
	She's apparently awake and responsive at this point.
	She had a drug overdose.
	People are saying that she had a heroin overdose.
	She was found unconscious when they arrived at her home, according to media reports.
	She was treated with Narcan, which is an emergency treatment for narcotic overdoses, at her home.
	I'm not sure what the story is on how she actually became an addict.
	I think the story is that she's told that she became addicted to cocaine when she was actually on Disney Channel.
	And then...
	I guess you transferred over into heroin.
	So this wasn't the typical sort of story that you hear with regard to heroin addiction in sort of more prosperous communities where somebody goes to the doctor and then they are prescribed some sort of opioid and they can't get the high from the opioid that they used to and the prescription runs out so they start using heroin, black tar heroin instead.
	There's a great book called Dreamland by a guy named Sam Quinones that I've recommended on the show before about the problem of heroin trafficking in the United States.
	But there is something to be said about the idea that when you have A severe epidemic of drugs in upper class communities.
	I mean economically viable communities.
	It's not something you can blame on economics.
	It's something that you do have to blame at a certain point on lack of a moral framework for folks.
	And that's not to suggest that Demi Lovato is not a victim of her own addiction.
	I think that addiction can be treated as a disease.
	I think we have to treat it as a disease.
	It is also something that self-control helps with, which is why you have 12-step programs, as I've talked about a little bit earlier this week.
	But the idea that society as a whole is responsible for addictions like Demi Lovato, I have a bit of a problem with this.
	The reason that I say this is because the same day this happened with Demi Lovato, there was an article in a publication called NME by a guy named Barry Nicholson, and it says, And I just thought to myself, well, I'm not.
	I have an alibi.
	Amy Winehouse's death has nothing to do with me.
	And the article essentially suggests that we are all complicit.
	Why are we complicit in her death?
	At the film's core is a single deeply unsettling question.
	How did a happy, healthy, outrageously gifted 14-year-old, glimpsed in its opening moments, become a traumatized figure we all recognize from her final months?
	There are no easy answers.
	By the end, the coroner's verdict of death by misadventure doesn't seem to tell the whole story.
	This was death by a thousand cuts and agonizingly drawn out demise of cumulative influences, appetites, and mistakes.
	So the basic suggestion is that by humoring our most talented people in their excesses, that we are complicit in their fall.
	I think there is some truth to that to the people who immediately surround a star.
	I think there are a lot of people who, when you get famous, there are a lot of folks who surround you who are going to tell you yes to a lot of things, and people who want to be your friends who are going to tell you yes to anything that you want to hear because saying no means you're going to be unpopular with the famous cool kid.
	You know, we here at The Offices know a lot of very famous people.
	And this is a serious problem with famous people, is that they're often told yes by their hangers-on, and being told yes a lot means that you're going to start engaging in more and more outrageous excesses.
	That's why it's important to surround yourself with good people as a famous person.
	In the end, regardless of whether you are famous or whether you are not, if you believe in the idea that there is some level of personal responsibility for your own activity, I think blaming society for consuming your product is a little bit Over the top.
	I don't think that it's the people who watched Roseanne who are responsible for Roseanne having serious life problems.
	I don't think that it's the people who bought Amy Winehouse albums who are responsible for Amy Winehouse doing what she did.
	I don't think it's the people who were fans of Demi Lovato who are responsible for Demi Lovato doing what she did either.
	I'm not suggesting, by the way, that Demi Lovato suggests that it is their fault.
	But I think there's a tendency on the part of the media to suggest that personal problems are actually societal problems and societal problems are actually personal problems.
	And that is a serious problem.
	Yeah, I think the only way we're going to recover from this is with the belief that a more virtuous society in which we are all held to account and in which we protect each other from our excesses by not setting stumbling blocks in front of the blind, that's the kind of society that's going to protect people who do have a tendency toward addiction, who do have a tendency toward making mistakes in their personal life.
	Honestly, prayers for Demi Lovato, and I hope and pray, as I would for anyone, I hope that she gets over The issues that obviously plague her.
	She was sober, I guess, for some six years before she sort of fell off the wagon.
	And that's quite terrible.
	I hope that she gets back on the wagon.
	Thank God for Narcan.
	Thank God that she has the ability to hopefully recover and lead a fulfilled life.
	Okay, let's check out a psalm.
	So every Wednesday we do a psalm.
	We're making our way through the book.
	Today's psalm is Psalm 4.
	And what's really fascinating about the book of Psalms is there's a really good book that I've recommended on the show before called Poetic Diction.
	And the basic suggestion of that book is that when you read old poetry, when you read ancient poetry, that it feels more substantive.
	It feels like there is something more whole about that poetry than there is about modern poetry.
	And the reason for that is that the language of the time, particularly if you read Psalms in Hebrew, for example, It conveys more meaning than the language now.
	Like we in the West, in English, we have words for spirit and for wind, right?
	These are two separate words.
	The word in Hebrew is ruach, and it encompasses both senses of the word.
	So the language is richer because it has more embedded meanings in it.
	And I think that you see that when you read the Psalms.
	Psalm 4 is for the director of music with stringed instruments, a Psalm of David.
	Answer me when I call to you, my righteous God.
	Give me relief from my distress.
	Have mercy on me and hear my prayer.
	How long will you people turn my glory into shame?
	This is God saying to David.
	How long will you love delusions and seek false gods?
	Know that the Lord has set apart his faithful servant for himself.
	The Lord hears when I call to him.
	Tremble and do not sin when you are on your beds.
	Search your hearts and Judeo-Christianity goes back and forth on.
	of the righteous and trust in the Lord.
	The idea of silence in the face of cosmic injustice is something that Judaism kind of goes back and forth on.
	Judeo-Christianity goes back and forth on.
	If you read the Old Testament, there's a lot of protesting against perceived injustices on the part of God.
	So, for example, the book of Job is all about this, where Job experiences awful, awful cosmic injustice.
	And God's final answer is to be silent.
	What is it about silence that matters here?
	I don't think that it's just God saying, you ought to be silent because I know best for you.
	I think it's about the idea that when you sit in silence, it causes you to think and to listen.
	When you're talking, you're not listening.
	And talking to God is useful.
	Praying to God is useful.
	But listening and trying to figure out what it is that might make your life better on your own might be a better solution than constantly crying out to the heavens.
	Silence is a very effective tool.
	It's one of the reasons why I think Eastern forms of meditation, in many cases, are extraordinarily useful.
	The idea of actually just taking a break and shutting up for a second.
	In politics, if we did this a little more, if we shut up a little bit more and listened a little more and talked a little bit less, I think that we'd all be better off.
	I think it's certainly true when it comes to our personal interactions with the divine as well.
	And I'm not saying that God is going to speak to you because I don't think that most people have the ability of prophecy.
	But I do think that you just listening is going to allow you to maybe see beyond yourself.
	This is true for all of us.
	It's the hardest thing to do is to be silent in the face of perceived injustice from the cosmic.
	But Perhaps we can get beyond ourselves if we're if we're not talking quite so much.
	OK, well, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest and we'll talk about it.
	Well, then I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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