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Nov. 2, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:31
The Final Countdown | Ep. 652
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Four days until Election Day, we assess the state of the race, President Trump goes off on an illegal immigration, and we check the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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We're going to get to all the news in just one second.
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Alrighty, so...
We are now four days from the election.
It approacheth.
And suffice it to say that nobody knows what exactly is going on.
The data suggests that Republicans could lose anywhere from 30 to 40 seats in the House, and they could pick up anywhere from zero to five seats in the Senate.
But all of the modeling is is sketchy at best.
The sort of 538 modeling suggests an 85 percent chance that Republicans Lose the House and an 85% chance they retain the Senate, but we've seen those sorts of odds bucked before.
We simply don't know how turnout is going to be reflected, especially because there is high voter enthusiasm from both parties going into the election.
Now, I would say that my feeling, my general feeling, is that Republican enthusiasm was higher three weeks ago during the Kavanaugh hearings because I've literally never seen Republican enthusiasm higher than it was during that period.
With that said, Republican enthusiasm remains high because the country is simply so polarized.
With that in mind, it's time to take a look at exactly what this election is going to be like.
Well, there's very good news for Republicans going into the election.
That news is the economic news that broke today.
Job growth blew past expectations in October, and year-over-year wage gains jumped past 3% for the first time since the Great Recession, according to the Labor Department.
So this is just a stunningly good jobs report.
Non-farm payrolls Powered up by 250,000 jobs for the month, well ahead of refinitive estimates of 190,000.
The unemployment rate stayed at 3.7%, the lowest since December 1969.
Jim Baird, Partner and Chief Investment Officer for Plant Moran Financial Advisors, talking to CNBC.
He said the job market is doing remarkably well, particularly this late in the expansion.
This report adds yet another data point to a narrative that has been positive for the labor market this year.
Little seems to stand in the way of the economy finishing 2018 out on solid footing.
Which would seem to cut in favor of Republicans, because obviously when the economy is good, the economy is good.
We, however, are in the middle of an extraordinarily polarized political environment.
To just finish out the news on the economy, the ranks of the unemployed rose to a fresh record.
Sorry, the ranks of the employed rose to a fresh record of 156.6 million, and the employment-to-population ratio increased to 60.6 percent.
That's the highest level since December 2008, so prior to the recession.
That headline jobless number stayed level, even amid a two-tenths of a percentage point rise in the labor participation rate of 62.9 percent.
This is unmitigated good news.
People counted outside the labor force tumbled by $487,000 to $95.9 million.
But wage growth is the biggest story.
Average hourly earnings increased by $0.05 an hour for the month, $0.83 year over year.
That's a 3.1% gain.
The annual increase in wages was the best since 2009.
It outstripped inflation, so that means a real wage growth.
That number is being watched closely by the Federal Reserve, which has been increasing its benchmark interest rate.
They did it three times this year.
They're on track to do it again in December.
There's a lot of talk about whether the Fed is actually tamping down growth by essentially curtailing the ability to lend.
But suffice it to say that if the economy is this strong with a tighter Fed, that means that the economy is really busting loose.
It's doing some pretty amazing things.
And that is largely thanks to consumer confidence being extraordinarily high.
It's due to the fact that a lot of voters and citizens feel that Their money is not going to be taken away from them with a Republican Congress and a Republican president.
All of this should cut very much in favor of the Republicans.
And indeed, the Republicans do have a serious shot at keeping the House, even though the odds are stacked against it.
So Sean Trent, who's an elections analyst over at RealClearPolitics, has a really good piece over there talking about what it would take for Republicans to retain the House.
Here's what he says.
He says, as we move toward the close of this election cycle, impending control of the House of Representatives remains up in the air.
The general consensus among analysts is that Democrats are the favorites, perhaps by a substantial margin, but that Republicans remain in the game.
Which raises a question.
What do we mean by Republicans staying in the game?
Regardless of what the math might indicate, are there plausible scenarios that result in the GOP keeping the House?
He says, yes.
He says there really are believable scenarios that don't require Republicans to win districts they've written off.
Republicans have to catch some breaks, but they don't have to catch breaks in ways that shock and surprise us.
We can still assume that suburban districts move against them, which they almost certainly will.
We can even include some surprising Democratic wins.
He says, in Arizona, Republicans could lose Arizona District 2.
This open Romney-Clinton district is too much for Republicans to hold on to.
In California, low Hispanic turnout enables Republicans to hold the 10th in the Central Valley.
Steve Knight squeaks out a win in the northern reaches of L.A.
Dana Rohrabacher keeps his seat.
There's a poll today showing that Dana Rohrabacher is likely He basically goes through state by state and he says that there is indeed a significant possibility in which Republicans retain the House even as they lose 22 districts to the Democrats.
So he says that basically this could be Democrats win 22 seats, two Democrats win 40 seats.
We just don't know.
And that is why, you know, how the president acts right now and how the Democrats act does have an impact on the election.
So let's talk about the president's closing, his closing argument.
A lot of folks, as I said yesterday, are saying, why is it that Republicans don't focus on all the good economic news and just make their message, the economy is great?
And the answer is, saying the economy is good doesn't necessarily save you from voter ire.
If voters are pissed off about a secondary issue, then the economy being excellent doesn't actually help you.
Remember, the economic recovery of the early 1990s began under George H.W.
Bush.
It was not enough to save him, as Bill Clinton went around railing against George H.W.
Bush's economy.
So, a good economy is not necessarily a savior, and a bad economy is definitely a killer.
That's the rule about economics in elections.
So, what that means is that both sides have to get their base ramped up to ignore the economy.
And the Democrats are doing this by essentially suggesting that President Trump is a very, very mean man, right?
This is the way that they are doing this.
And President Trump is doing this by suggesting that there are real, present threats to the United States that Democrats are willing to ignore.
So Democrats claim that Trump is an alarmist.
Trump claims that Democrats are sanguine about bad things happening to the United States.
Both are sort of half right and half wrong.
But the Democrats have decided also that Trump is Satan and Trump has decided that the Democrats are completely apathetic about bad things happening to the country.
Now, I think that Trump is closer to right than the Democrats are, but here is the Democrat closing argument.
The Democrat closing argument is put by Paul Krugman, who has been on this this terror recently about how Republicans are legitimately evil.
There's a piece today in the New York Times, it's called A Party Defined by its Lies.
At this point, good people can't be good Republicans.
Well, that's a pretty strong statement.
I think that good people can be good Democrats, so I'm concerned why he would think that good people can't be good Republicans.
Why?
Well, you know the answer.
It's because of Trump, right?
He says, During my first year as an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, I wasn't allowed to use the word lie.
That first year coincided with the 2000 election, and George W. Bush was, in fact, being systemically dishonest about his economic proposals, saying false things about who would benefit from his tax cut and the implications of Social Security privatization.
But the notion that a major party's presidential candidate would go beyond spin to outright lies seemed dangerous and saying it was considered beyond the pale.
Obviously that prohibition no longer holds on this opinion page.
Suffice it to say that the opinion pages of the New York Times were better when Democrats like Paul Krugman couldn't overuse the word lie to label anything that they think is a misinterpretation.
He says, at this point, the GOP's campaign message consists of nothing but lies.
Yeah, that's not an overstatement.
It's hard to think of a single true thing Republicans are running on.
Really?
Is it that hard to think of a single true thing?
How about the economy?
How about the fact that Obamacare has been a failure?
How about the fact that we do, in fact, need to secure our borders?
How about the fact that we do need to build up our military?
There are a lot of things Republicans run on that are not, in fact, lies.
But what are the big lies?
Well, here's what Krugman says.
He says, It's a Republican problem, and it's not just Donald Trump.
What he really means is it's just Donald Trump and his Republicans.
Democrats aren't saints, but they campaign mostly on real issues.
Really?
They've been campaigning on transgender bathrooms.
They've been campaigning on, we should let everybody through the border because Donald Trump is mean.
They've been campaigning on Russia collusion.
Those are all real issues?
All right.
Says, Democrats aren't saints, but they campaign mostly on real issues and generally do, in fact, stand for more or less what they claim to stand for.
As we'll see, this is not, in fact, true.
He says, Republicans don't.
And the total dishonesty of Republican electioneering should itself be a decisive political issue, because at this point, it defines the party's character.
What are Republicans lying about?
As I said, almost everything.
Thanks, Paul.
Says, but there are two big themes.
They lie about their agenda, pretending their policies would help the middle and working classes when they would, in fact, do the opposite.
Um, did he see the economic report today?
In which job growth was massive and wage growth was massive?
Like, that helps the poor and working class, actually, when the economy is good.
And he says, and they lie about the problems America faces, hyping an imaginary threat from scary dark-skinned people and increasingly attributing that threat to Jewish conspirators.
Okay, that last part is just a lie.
Republicans are not going around attributing the threat to the United States to quote-unquote Jewish conspirators.
They're saying that George Soros funds bad people.
That is absolutely true.
That does not mean it's an anti-Semitic riff.
Any more than it's anti-Semitic for the Democrats to claim that Sheldon Adelson funds a lot of Republican causes, which is also true.
See, this is what I was saying yesterday.
The Democrats have fallen right into Trump's trap, because Trump says, we've got a crisis on the southern border.
Democrats, instead of saying, we do have a problem with our southern border and we need to solve that, but it's not a crisis, instead of saying that, they go to, There's no crisis at all.
Everything's hunky-dory.
And you're just saying that because you're racist.
To which the Republican response is, go F yourself.
I say that there's a threat, and you say that I'm a racist for saying there's a threat?
And we'll go through the rest of Paul Krugman's column, because this is basically the Democratic closing argument, and then we'll get to how President Trump is fighting back against that.
I also want to make a couple of comments about his statement that Democrats are telling the truth about their agenda.
As we will see, this is eminently untrue.
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Okay, so Paul Krugman of the New York Times continues.
Well, no, that is not what the CBO report actually said.
stand for and have for decades is cutting taxes on the rich and slashing social programs.
Sure enough, last year they succeeded in ramming through a huge tax cut, mainly at corporations and the wealthy, and came within one vote of passing a health reform that according to the CBO would have caused 32 million Americans to lose health coverage.
Well, no, that is not what the CBO report actually said.
What the CBO report actually said is that a bunch of people who had individual plans before and now have to be covered by Obamacare would no longer have Obamacare and presumably go back to individual plans.
So that is not actually what the CBO said.
He says, selling racial fear was easier in the early 1980s and 1990s when America really was suffering from high levels of inner city crime.
Since then, violent crime has plunged.
What's a fearmonger to do?
The answer is lie.
And here's where Krugman gets to the center of his contention that only bad people can vote Republican.
The lies have come nonstop since Trump's inauguration address, which conveyed a false vision of American carnage.
But they've gotten ever more extreme, culminating in the portrayal of a small caravan of refugees still a thousand miles from the border as an imminent menacing invasion somehow full of diseased Middle Eastern terrorists.
Now, as I've said, do I think that the threat of the caravan is exaggerated?
I do, because last time there was a caravan, by the time it reached the United States border, it was like 200 people, and they showed up asking for asylum at a border patrol station, and then they were processed and most of them were sent back.
So is this an existential threat to the security of the United States?
No, I don't think the caravan is, but it is symbolic, and it is obviously symbolic, and the fact that Democrats refuse to acknowledge the symbolism of the caravan, the fact that Democrats refuse to acknowledge that it is a stand-in For the broader issue of people crossing the border illegally without permission of the U.S.
government, making themselves at home, sometimes having criminal backgrounds.
That's why Democrats are not resonating with the American people on this issue.
And Krugman then says, Well, no.
It turns out that demonizing George Soros is not anti-Semitic.
Demonizing George Soros may be bad, but there's a difference between bad and inflammatory and anti-Semitic.
He says, those who remain in the Republican Party are either fanatics willing to do anything in pursuit of power or cynics willing to go along with anything for a share of the spoils.
Or possibly a bunch of people who don't want anyone like Paul Krugman anywhere near the levers of power.
Because the Democrats have shown themselves to be utterly irresponsible.
People like Paul Krugman are completely wild.
They have not posited either anything remotely approaching a moderate policy or even a moderate rhetoric.
I mean, Paul Krugman is literally sitting there labeling 60 million Americans bad human beings because they're voting the way he doesn't want them to vote.
He says, what will this party do if it retains full control of Congress next week?
What we've seen over and over again is that for these people, there are no limits, no bottom.
If they pull this midterm election out, expect the worst.
What would the worst be, Paul Krugman?
Would the worst be like the Holocaust?
Like, well, you want to specify?
Of course, he's not going to because this is a scare tactic in and of itself.
So it's so funny to hear the Democrats saying Trump engages in the politics of fear.
As they suggest that half of Americans are evil human beings for voting the way they don't want, which is indeed engaging in the politics of fear.
Now, it is true that both sides are engaging in the politics of fear.
The question is, which fear is more justified?
So President Trump yesterday gave a speech in the White House in which he talked about the military response to the caravan.
Now, is it necessary to send 15,000 troops the size of the Afghanistan surge down to the border of Mexico?
No, I don't think that logistically speaking that is necessary to deal with a caravan that is dwindling by the day.
With that said, should we secure our border?
Of course we should secure our border.
And the president is using language being tough on immigration that is obviously directed toward the election.
Again, directed at reminding Americans that Democrats don't take this issue particularly seriously.
And he wins every time they declare that he's a white supremacist.
Because here's how the logic goes.
Trump says, listen, we got a crisis at the border.
And Democrats say, you're a racist for saying so.
And he says, OK, so you don't even want to acknowledge that there's a problem.
They say, you're a racist for exaggerating the problem.
If you just keep shouting racist over and over and over, while the American people look at a caravan of illegal immigrants coming through Mexico, in some cases you can see there are tapes of people in the caravan.
I'm sure a lot of people in the caravan are fine folks who just want a better economic life.
There are some people in the caravan.
There's video of it.
Benny Johnson has it up at Daily Caller.
There's video of some of the members of the caravan throwing rocks at members of police.
Those are not people we need in the United States.
But President Trump is obviously ginning up the base for the election.
Is it right?
I don't think it's right to exaggerate.
Is it politically effective?
Yeah, it probably is politically effective.
Here's President Trump yesterday talking about what he's told the military to do in the case of people who are throwing rocks.
But I will tell you this, anybody throwing stones, rocks, like they did to Mexico and the Mexican military, Mexican police, where they badly hurt police and soldiers of Mexico, we will consider that a firearm.
Because there's not much difference when you get hit in the face with a rock Which, as you know, it was very violent a few days ago.
Very, very violent.
OK, so people, of course, saying that Trump now says that if you throw a rock at the border police that they're going to shoot you to death.
OK, that's not what he's really saying there.
OK, and nobody in the military is going to obey that order.
He's saying if you feel that your life is in danger, you can you can use rules of engagement that allow you to defend yourself with a firearm.
Right.
Which is basically what every civilized country would do.
Trump just puts it in the most brutal way.
So people react in the most overwrought way.
And then Trump says, listen, migrants who want asylum can show up at a port of entry.
But if they show up between the borders, we are deporting them.
Instead, migrants seeking asylum will have to present themselves lawfully at a port of entry.
So they're going to have to lawfully present themselves at a port of entry.
Which presumably is what they're going to do.
I mean, that's exactly what the migrants did a couple of years ago.
The problem for the Democrats is that they react with outsized outrage at everything President Trump does.
And Trump is trolling them.
Just politically speaking, President Trump is obviously trolling them.
But the Democrats react by saying that anything Trump says about immigration is just due to racism.
Which, again, alienates a huge swath of the American public that is concerned about illegal immigration, may not even love President Trump's exaggerations, but if they have to choose between Trump's exaggerations and his sort of maligning of broader groups and a Democratic Party that assumes that any talk about this issue is endemically racist, they're going to choose Trump.
Trump understands it's binary.
The Democrats think it's binary, too.
But if they think they're going to win on the basis of calling people racist, they are wrong.
Here's Simone Sanders and CNN suggesting that, you know, President Trump's remarks are a defense of white supremacy.
I hope when the White House sent out those statements today, the remarks of the President, they titled it, In Defense of White Supremacy, because that's exactly what I heard from the White House, which is unfortunate.
Look, if we want to have a conversation about fixing our broken immigration system, it's not dividing, he's calling out the facts.
The facts are, he's saying these brown people are coming to take your jobs, they're criminals, we can't trust them, we're going to shoot them at the border, and the Democrats just want them to come in, so you need to vote for the Republicans.
Okay, well, she's adding the brown people section of that.
He's saying there are people who are coming into the United States who may be criminals.
There are people coming into the United States we haven't vetted.
There are people coming into the United States who are going to undercut our labor base.
You know who used to say that sort of stuff?
Bernie Sanders.
You know who else used to say that sort of stuff?
Harry Reid.
It's not racist just because you are talking about a group of people coming up from a place where people have brown skin.
Presumably, if there were a bunch of people coming from Canada throwing rocks at police officers while carrying the Canadian flag and trying to cross the border, Trump would react similarly.
That's not going to happen because Canada is actually not a country where people are desperate to leave.
It is happening from Central and Latin America because those are countries where people are desperate to leave.
That's just a fact.
And now we're going to talk about the media's response.
And again, Paul Krugman suggests over the New York Times, the Democrats are telling the truth about their agenda.
We will show that is certainly not the case in just one second.
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So the media are so upset about Trump, they don't even want to play.
They don't even want to play his ads.
We talked yesterday about an ad that President Trump put out that showed a guy named Luis Bracamontes, who was an illegal immigrant who entered the United States a couple of different times, once under Clinton, once under Bush, remained under Obama, killed a couple of police officers.
And Trump linked that to the illegal immigrant migrant caravan that is coming up from the South.
And people immediately jumped to racist.
Here's Wolf Blitzer, an objective journalist, being objectively journalismic.
Right?
Suggesting that he doesn't even want to play the ad.
It's just so terrible, I can't even play it.
I just can't, I can't play it.
I mean, it's just that bad.
It's just, everything's terrible.
You look at the rest of the video, and I don't want to even play it and get free advertising to those out there.
But if you look at the rest of it, you see hordes of invaders coming into, threatening to come into the United States, tearing down walls and fences and threatening the American people.
It's really pretty awful.
It's totally, okay, except that.
The fact is that we don't know who the migrants are who are coming up.
And while I say that, I think that the ad is alarmist.
And I do think the ad is alarmist.
The suggestion it's so awful you can't even play it is just it's a bizarre contention.
Again, these are folks who are fully willing to play every ad coming from Democrats suggesting that Republicans were going to deprive millions of people of their health care and leave them to die.
That was totally okay.
But Trump's saying, we may have a problem with illegal immigration, and then exaggerating that case for political effect.
That's unplayable.
Valerie Jarrett says, this ad is sad.
Political fear-mongering.
It's just fear-mongering.
So this is the new Democratic bi-word these days.
The Republicans are engaged in fear-mongering.
Welcome to politics, gang.
It's just a sad page from an old playbook called Political Fearmongering 101.
We've seen it used time and time and time again.
It's designed to scare people and to motivate them to not focus on the issues that are really important, to distract them from issues that as I travel around the country I hear about from everyday Americans.
Okay, if you're actually hearing the issues that everyday Americans care about, they do care about illegal immigration.
They do care about the economy.
Again, Democrats suggesting they are on their high horse about fear-mongering, it's just astonishing.
There's a really good post by Noah Rothman over at Commentary Magazine in which he goes through this.
He says, The Washington Post declared that Trump and the GOP have settled on fear and falsehoods as a closing argument, with a little racially-tinged rhetoric as a topper.
He says, on health care and entitlements, the report noted the GOP has shown a willingness to instill fear in their electorate.
You see, Republican lawmakers are suddenly supportive of protections for pre-existing conditions, despite their oppositions to the ACA.
And then he goes on to talk about all of the supposed Republican fearmongering.
And he says, these articles have a point.
Donald Trump's attempts to suggest that radical Islamist terrorists from the Middle East had infiltrated a caravan of asylum seekers traveling north through Mexico from Honduras is fearmongering.
The Times is on solid ground when it impugns efforts by Republican candidates to cast Antonio Delgado, a Rhodes scholar who toyed with the career of music, as a big city rapper.
And just as all these articles note, election year efforts by the incumbent party to stoke baseless fears is a pretty standard tactic.
And yet you would be hard pressed to find such ubiquitous denunciations of Democratic efforts to instill in the minds of voters a near existential fear of the GOP.
And then he just lists off all of these fear tactics used by Democrats.
In 2010, Republicans were admonished for circulating RNC-approved documents that labeled President Obama a socialist.
The GOP's candidates were scolded for criticizing Barack Obama's support for the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan.
ABC News savaged Republican candidates who attacked Democrats for supporting programs that outsourced American jobs and exported American capital to China.
A party with its back against the wall routinely resorts to fear tactics.
For much of the last decade, that was the Democratic Party.
The Agenda Project accused the GOP of wanting to eliminate Medicare in 2011, and they illustrated that by showing Paul Ryan tossing an elderly woman off a cliff.
In 2002, in 2012, sorry, Vice President Joe Biden accused the GOP of seeking to reinstitute black slavery.
Senator Bernie Sanders, Senate Republican, sought the elimination of the Department of Veterans Affairs and Social Security in 2013.
DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz Summarize the Republican platform as let's kick women and immigrants out of the country in 2015.
Hillary Clinton followed suit, claiming that Ted Cruz had tried to ban contraception.
So all of the fear mongering, welcome to American politics, where this sort of stuff happens all the time.
And it does raise a severe question for the Democrats that they don't want to deal with.
And this is why they're going to simply shout racist.
What would you do with this caravan of migrants?
What would you do with folks who are seeking asylum and are coming here not because they actually are being targeted by any sort of political violence, but because they are looking for more economic opportunity and don't have any intention of assimilating?
What would you do with those people?
Well, the answer for Democrats is they won't answer the question or they'll lie about it.
So, just today, a group of caravan migrants from Honduras filed a class-action lawsuit against President Trump and various government agencies, including Homeland Security, for violating their Fifth Amendment due process rights if the government turns the caravan away, as Trump has signaled he intends to do.
The lawsuit was filed by 12 Honduran nationals, and it maintains that since the migrants are coming from three countries, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, suffering human rights crises, some migrants have grounds for admission as asylum seekers.
By turning them away without fully hearing their asylum claims, they contend the president and his administration are infringing upon their rights under the Administrative Procedures Act and the Declaratory Judgment Act, this according to James Barrett over at Daily Wire.
Though the Constitution applies to those living legally in the U.S., legal precedent has applied due process to aliens in deportation proceedings, so the lawsuit Democrats are going to have to answer.
Do they think that these folks should be able to sue their way into the United States?
Democrats are also going to have to answer questions about their own treatment of people who have sought asylum in the United States and crossed the border in order to do so.
James O'Keefe's Project Veritas released an undercover sting video on Thursday night, appearing to show campaign staffers for Beto O'Rourke, quote, illegally using campaign resources to buy supplies and help transport Honduran aliens.
Now, listen, you want to help folks who are already across the border in the United States and they are here pending an asylum claim?
That's legal.
There are folks who do it.
But misappropriating campaign resources in order to do that, that is illegal.
And apparently that was happening over at Beto O'Rourke's campaign.
And then they wonder why so many Americans are not resounding to the Democratic take on illegal immigration.
This is why when Paul Krugman says that Democrats are being honest about their agenda, no, they are not.
James O'Keefe has almost single-handedly unmasked the Democrats for just how dishonest they are, but just by speaking to members of their own campaign.
Here's a little bit of the tape when O'Keefe's folks over at Project Veritas went into the Beto O'Rourke headquarters and started asking around about whether the funds for Beto O'Rourke were being used to help out Honduran caravan folks.
So there's like a, you know, that migrant caravan.
They just, a few of them got here already and they're dropping them off, like, really close to Missouri.
Who?
Oh, that, the Hondurans?
Oh, the Hondurans, yeah.
Um, it's this holy thing, holy something church, but it's actually really closer to downtown, she said.
Okay.
Do you want to have a repeat?
I think this one's back, but like, if you just say we're buying food for a similar event, like the Halloween events, because there's block walks coming up for Halloween.
That's a horrible idea, but I didn't hear anything.
Um, let's see, we can wait until tomorrow for that, but like we could definitely say like, "Hey, this is all snack we got." So, you know, obviously Beto O'Rourke not exactly being forthcoming about his own politics.
And then there's Andrew Gillum.
So Andrew Gillum, over in Florida, who's being given the royal treatment by the media.
Andrew Gillum's own staffers are saying that he is the craziest of the craziest.
This is Omar Smith, a Gillum campaign staffer, saying that this guy is basically a radical.
So you have the extreme right-wingers.
Those are the Trump and the crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy Republicans.
The progressives are the crazy, crazy, crazy Democrats.
Oh, you're not a progressive?
Isn't Gillum a progressive?
Gillum is a progressive.
So Gillum is part of the crazy crazies?
He's part of the crazy, crazy, crazy.
Okay, and that is absolutely true.
Everybody knows that Andrew Gillum is part of the crazy, crazy.
He's been trying to label Ron DeSantis, who they're both running for governor of Florida right now.
He's been trying to label Ron DeSantis a racist.
That is such nonsense.
There is no evidence that Ron DeSantis is a racist.
He tried to label him an anti-Semite, which is absurd.
Ron DeSantis, I know Representative DeSantis, that is a bunch of crap.
It is just not true in any conceivable way.
And not only that, Andrew Gillum, like, that guy's going to call Ron DeSantis, you know, a racist and anti-Semite.
Andrew Gillum has been connected with a wide variety of groups that promote boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, OK, which would destroy the state of Israel if it were adopted.
Gillum has ignored growing calls to disavow this group with which he is associated, Dream Defenders, even as the largest Jewish weekly publication in the country, The Jewish Press, urged Florida's Jewish residents to vote for DeSantis.
Dream Defenders and Gillum have an extensive history.
He recently signed the group's freedom pledge, promising not to accept money from private persons.
By signing the pledge, he endorsed the group's radical freedom papers that decry police and prisons as racist.
That's the actual Democratic Party.
So Paul Krugman says Republicans are hiding their agenda?
No.
Democrats are hiding their agenda a lot more, and they're hiding their corruption, too.
Andrew Gillum is deeply corrupt by every available indicator.
Any Republican who had the kind of corruption record Andrew Gillum has would not survive an election cycle.
Really, it's at least not at the gubernatorial level.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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Okay, so let's talk about Andrew Gillum's campaign for just a second.
So the dude has an FBI problem and the mainstream media have been ignoring it, like really ignoring it in a major way.
Imagine that a Republican candidate had basically been implicated in an FBI sting scheme to give them a bunch of goodies.
They accepted a bunch of goodies from an FBI undercover agent.
Hey, that might be a front page story.
Well, that's pretty much what's happened with Andrew Gillum and the Tampa Bay Times has covered it, but it's not being widely covered in the mainstream kind of national media.
Here's what the Tampa Bay Times says.
Starting in 2015, FBI agents came to Tallahassee, he was the mayor of Tallahassee, posing as businessmen, considering investments in the city.
The three men, who reportedly identified themselves as Mike Sweets, Mike Miller, and Brian Butler, spent months cozying up to city officials and people close to them.
The FBI investigation, based in part on their undercover work, has yielded several rounds of subpoenas, but no charges as of yet.
A slew of Tallahassee officials and insiders have been named in those subpoenas over the past year.
In 2013, the Community Redevelopment Agency in Tallahassee voted to give $1.3 million in taxpayer money to help a particular lobbyist named Adam Corey, who's a longtime Gillum friend and ally, until Gillum cut ties with him when he became inconvenient.
Gillum voted with the rest of his fellow city commissioners to fund the project.
At the time, Gillum's vote raised eyebrows because of his close association with Corey.
One year later, Corey served as treasurer of Gillum's mayoral campaign.
It also turns out that the FBI was giving all sorts of goodies to Gillum and his friends.
Okay, so there's an ethics board that's been checking this out.
According to the newspapers, Cory became close with Miller, reportedly introducing Gillum to an undercover agent sometime in 2016.
One of the reported meetings between Cory, Gillum, and Miller, Miller being the FBI agent, at the Edison in May of that year, became a point of controversy when the Democrat, the Local newspaper, the Tallahassee Democrat, reported that Corey scheduled the meeting while on vacation with Gillum and other city lobbyists in Costa Rica.
So now they're checking out.
What's the deal with Costa Rica?
That's a violation of ethics.
Gillum says he did not discuss business in Costa Rica.
It was just a vacation with longtime friends.
But Corey's attorney has maintained Gillum never reimbursed the lobbyists for his portion of the trip.
Also under investigation, Gillum took a trip with his brothers, Marcus, Cory, and Miller, to New York in August 2016.
In an email inviting Gillup to meet up in New York, Cory noted that Miller had arranged hotel rooms, an outing to a Mets game, and a boat trip to the Statue of Liberty.
The group didn't go to the Mets game, but they did get free tickets to Hamilton.
Gillum says he didn't allow the FBI agent to pay for any part of his trip to New York, but the texts released by his chief lobbyist attorney showed the undercover agent paid for the Hamilton tickets.
So, bottom line is that, theoretically, this FBI agent solicited help from a lobbyist who proceeded to allow payoffs to go through to Gillum, who then helped vote for this project that helped the lobbyists, right?
That's the basic scheme here.
And the mainstream media are basically ignoring all that.
I have to ask why it is that Andrew Gillum is getting this sort of attention when John James, the Republican senatorial candidate in Michigan, who's a black former Air Force pilot, is getting very little attention running a very competitive race in a purple state in Michigan.
And the answer has to be that the media love Andrew Gillum because Andrew Gillum is a future Barack Obama in their view.
He is very radical in his politics.
So when Democrats tell you they're not lying about their own agenda, that is simply not true.
They are, in fact, lying about their agenda on a fairly regular basis.
And when they are honest about it, it doesn't go well for them.
So John Tester, who's a senator from Montana, he was asked about gun control.
He basically admits it doesn't even work and he wants it anyway.
This is how radical Democrats are.
Here's what he said.
He was asked in June about all this.
He said that gun control would not stop school shootings, but it's going to help.
OK, so this is the way that Democrats push.
They push their policies regardless as to whether those policies are actually effective or not.
OK, so let's do a little bit of mailbagging because it is indeed a Friday.
So.
Let's jump in.
I really like Representative Jordan.
I think that he was falsely maligned by the press.
I don't see any reason Jim Jordan wouldn't make an excellent Speaker of the House.
I'm not opposed to Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, even though there's been a lot of talk about him being too squishy.
The fact is that Kevin McCarthy is Less squishy, I think, on some of these issues than, for example, Paul Ryan has been.
He might be able to build more coalitions than Jim Jordan.
Jim Jordan will be harder to line.
If I had to choose between the two, I would choose Jim Jordan.
Lee says, "Dear Mr. Shapiro, "ever since reexamining my political beliefs, "I find it difficult to get myself into dating.
Well, it depends.
I mean, if you are dating for marriage, then you obviously need to put your values at the center of your dating life.
And that means discussing issues of deep concern to you and how you want to raise your kids.
I'm personally not that judgmental of people's views, unless they're extreme, but I feel it makes it difficult to be forthcoming with how I see things.
Do you have any advice on how to handle this concern?
Well, it depends.
I mean, if you are dating for marriage, then you obviously need to put your values at the center of your dating life.
And that means discussing issues of deep concern to you and how you wanna raise your kids.
If you're just dating for quote unquote fun, if you're doing that, then presumably you do what everybody else does when they're dating for fun, which is you hide your crazy until a little bit later in the relationship.
I don't think that you necessarily lead with your most extreme positions when you're talking with somebody you want to date, but you should make clear that you are of conservative political bent, that you have certain central values that you think are important to you.
And then you have conversations about those values.
Like when I started dating my wife, our very first date was a three-hour date in which we discussed free will and determinism and talked about sort of central values.
We didn't talk a lot of politics, per se.
We were talking sort of deeper levels than that.
But I also knew that my wife was Orthodox.
I knew my wife was an Orthodox Jew.
So we already had certain central values in common, which is why I think that dating folks within your religious tradition is a very good idea as a general rule.
When it came to politics, my wife used to be, I think, a lot more moderate on politics.
So I remember one of our first dates, we talked about the death penalty and gun control.
She was more pro-gun control at that time.
She was also more skeptical of the death penalty than I was.
But we were able to discuss those things, and she didn't think it was crazy that I was anti-gun control, and she didn't think it was crazy that I was in favor of the death penalty.
We were able to talk all of those things through.
So the real question is, can you talk those things through, or are you dealing with somebody who is going to throw you out because you disagree on these issues and is non-malleable on these issues?
Maybe you'll be changed by her opinions, but you should at least be able to have the conversation.
If you can't, it's no good.
Edward says, Hey Ben, this week, one of my poli-sci professors taught extensively about Republicans and their disgraceful Southern strategy as if it were established fact.
It seems like this line of thinking has been taught for so long, it just seems to pass as accepted wisdom.
How do you rebut these claims?
What really happened in the South to flip it from blue to red?
And why exactly do folks on the left still insinuate the South is full of racist white men who would immediately turn back to slavery if given the chance?
Thanks, love the show.
Well, the last part is really the question, because the truth is that as the constituency in the South got younger, it got more Republican.
So, as the South got less racist, it also got more Republican.
There are regional polls from Pew showing that all of the kind of malign talk about people from the South being more racist than people from other parts of the country is just not true.
Racism is fairly equivalent all the way across the country.
Not only that, if you look historically, the Republicans didn't actually take the South in terms of the House of Representatives until basically 1994.
So if it was the 1968 Southern strategy that shifted everything, then why did it take until 1994 for Republicans to take the House?
The trends are just not strong enough to suggest that race alone is what shifted all of this.
Now, was there a Southern strategy that was used by the Nixon campaign?
Well, some members of that campaign have suggested that there was, and they've basically admitted that.
Were there racial strategies used by Democrats at the same time?
Sure, George Wallace was a Democrat, and the vast majority of people who voted racist continued to vote Democrat.
OK, so this notion that the Southern strategy is what completely changed the facts on the ground is similar.
It's just not true.
It's just not.
It does not happen to be true.
So there is a great piece by Dan McLaughlin from about 2012 called The Southern Strategy Myth and the Lost Majority.
And it basically suggests that This stuff is exaggerated.
So it was, you know, we can go through this a little bit.
So let me go through a little bit of this.
First, according to professors Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Schaffer of the University of Wisconsin, the shift in the South from Democratic to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of race, but of economic growth.
The movement toward Republicanism in the South began in the 1950s.
Well, the Eisenhower administration was forcibly desegregating schools.
As the South industrialized, working-class whites and blacks remained Democrats until the 1990s.
Here's the New York Times reporting on this, quote, To give one example, in the 50s, among Southerners in low-income tercile, 43% voted for Republican presidential candidates.
In the high-income tercile, 53% voted Republican.
By the 1980s, those figures were 51% and 77%.
Wealthy Southerners shifted rightward in droves.
Poorer ones did not.
Sean Trent of RealClearPolitics agrees.
He says the GOP gradually increased its support in the South from 1928 to 2010.
And Dan McLaughlin says, as late as 2010, there were still states like Alabama and North Carolina that were voting in their first Republican legislative majority since Reconstruction, something that would have happened overnight in the late 60s if the partisan realignment had been driven by lockstep white voting loyalties along racial lines.
So the data just are not there to support the idea that the entire South shifted Republican because of the race issue.
Was it one of many issues?
Yes.
Was it the key issue or even a key issue?
Probably not.
Probably not.
Okay.
A couple more of these.
Let's see.
Jesse, what are your thoughts on conservative think tanks?
The left obviously is willing to distort science to fit whatever their ideology is at the moment.
And I think it's important to have institutions that are somewhat protected from their assault.
Personally, I love crunching numbers and analyzing data, so I also wonder how one goes about working at a think tank.
Thanks for all you do.
Well, you can get an internship at places like Heritage Foundation or AEI.
I have friends, I have relatives who have done that.
I think that it is important for these institutions to be there.
I get a lot of my data from think tanks on both left and right.
The fact that there are people who spend their day actually diving into the numbers and the data is deeply helpful.
I'm a big fan.
Santino says, hi, Ben.
I have a debate coming up against my university's Democrat club, and I've been dealt the topic of health care.
"What prominent figure on the left, in your opinion, "holds the most substantial, solid perspective "on healthcare, essentially, "who Shapiro on the left I can listen to "in regards to healthcare to better prepare myself?
"Thanks." Well, I believe that there's a guy named Matt Brunig, who is a big advocate of sort of Nordic socialism, or Nordic democratic socialism, because democratic socialism has a capitalist root.
And he talks about healthcare fairly regularly.
The truth is that the spectrum of healthcare thought is not quite broken down along left-right.
Like, Avik Roy is a really good healthcare analyst, and he tends to be more right-leaning on some things and more left-leaning on others.
He's kind of moderate.
Ezekiel Emanuel, who was one of the creators of Obamacare, has written extensively about these topics.
There are a bunch of studies out there that are worth noting, by the way, on healthcare, and American healthcare in particular, some fibs that have been put out there.
The fib that the U.S.
spends grossly more per capita GDP on healthcare than any other country, we also make grossly more money.
If you actually were to chart a line among industrialized countries as to income versus healthcare spending, what you see is basically a straight arithmetic relationship, meaning that as GDP increases per capita, so does healthcare spending, and the United States is basically right along that line.
We're not wildly overspending on healthcare.
The other point to be made is that when people talk about life expectancy in the United States is low for spending this much money.
Well, not when you remove car accidents and murders, both of which we have disproportionately here in the United States, and neither of which reflects on the U.S.
health care system.
All of that just reflects on people dying prematurely for reasons having nothing to do with health care.
So those are a couple of facts that you should have in your back pocket.
I would recommend there's a good book called Mortal Peril.
By Richard Epstein, all about the quote unquote right to health care that's worth reading.
And there are a bunch of good sources on health care that are worth checking out.
Mitchell says, Ben.
I recently decided to go back to school for a degree in engineering, being 30 and back in college.
I have a different look on things than my peers, needing to take a college writing course.
We were presented with our final project this week.
We had to choose a topic pertaining to the workforce and create a persuasive research paper regarding our topic.
I informed my instructor I intend to research why the gender pay gap is a myth.
This did not go over well.
A few of the students and the instructor became very unhappy that I could even think such a thing.
I was then told that in the spirit of the project, I would not be allowed to continue with the topic because it is considered too offensive.
So my question is, if this is supposed to be a persuasive paper, wouldn't this fit the criteria and what makes this offensive?
Also, the only thing I can think of is they believe I'm attacking their victimhood.
Any advice on another topic I could do?
Well, I mean, dude, you knew when you said that that you were slapping them right in the face.
I mean, obviously, if you had just said, listen, I want to research the pay gap and then come to the conclusion the pay gap may be a myth, then maybe they'd let you get away with it.
Yeah, obviously there's nothing sexist or offensive about the idea the pay gap is a myth.
The pay gap is a myth by all available data.
So that is just, again, this is people taking offense at facts.
I just did a speech in British Columbia at the University of British Columbia in which I began the speech by saying facts are not offensive.
And then I just read basically a list of facts and people got offended because that's what happens when you say things that are factual that people do not like, unfortunately.
So as far as other topics that you could do, You know, I think there are a lot of topics that you could do, but if you want one that's not going to offend people all that much, then you're going to have to pick something that is outside the realm of the quote-unquote offensive.
You might do one on where you think that it is necessary for the government to start thinking about global warming, for example, because that's more of a nuanced topic.
The current Nobel Prize winners have some great papers on that particular topic.
It cuts against a lot of leftist preconceptions.
You can go back and listen to our show.
A couple of weeks ago, we talked about it.
OK, time for some things I like and some things that I hate.
So this entire week, because of the Pittsburgh shooting, we've been doing Jewish Negunim, meaning kind of Jewish tunes that are used in prayer a lot.
This one is a very famous one.
It's actually an old Hebrew lullaby, and it comes from the Book of Genesis in the portion when Jacob is giving a blessing to Menachem and Ephraim.
The Sons of Joseph.
And the text of it talks about the angel that protects me.
That angel should protect you and allow you to prosper in the land of Israel.
Here is a little bit of that tune.
I use it pretty frequently.
I tend to, I do chazanas for the minions.
So very often I'm asked to kind of pray for the group on Sabbath, particularly.
This is a tune I really like using.
So here's a little bit of that tune.
Thank you.
I don't think I'm going to die.
It's a very nice tune.
With all of the Negunim that I've been playing this week, the tunes are adaptable to various kind of biblical texts.
This one, as I say, is from Genesis 48, 16.
It says, So that's the basic translation.
"May the angel who hath redeemed me from all evil "bless the lads and let my name be named in them "and in the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac "and let them grow into a multitude "in the midst of the earth." So that's the basic translation.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so this is pretty spectacular.
Apparently, an actor who has appeared on the television shows Better Call Saul and Longmire admitted to a local news outlet on Monday he severed his arm and lied about how it happened by posing as a war veteran.
So Todd LeTourette is an Albuquerque, New Mexico based actor.
He said he'd been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and that he sawed off his arm during a psychotic episode 17 years ago.
First of all, I don't know if he was mentally disordered.
Maybe he just felt that he was a a one-armed person in a two-armed person's body.
He says that he sawed off his arm during a psychotic episode 17 years ago and had been off his medication at the time of the episode.
He said, "I severed my hand with a skill saw.
The state of my mind was a psychotic episode." To which I say, "Dude, it's called acting." Like, whoa, that seems like a really extreme way to get a job.
But I mean, I guess I'm burdens on you, Daniel Day-Lewis.
Your move, Daniel Day-Lewis.
My goodness.
Wow.
He said that he apologized for He apologized for his stolen valor because he then claimed that he was a military vet.
But that's that's not good stuff.
Guys, you know, treat it treating mental illness as though it is nothing.
It's not a big problem.
Is a large, large mistake in virtually every in virtually every circumstance.
OK, so we will be back here on Monday in preparation for the election because it is coming.
It is nearly here.
We are in the final countdown.
OK, so we'll be back here on Monday with all that.
Have a good weekend.
Try to enjoy yourself.
Try to stay off Twitter.
And I will see you back here with all the latest news.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
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