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Nov. 16, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
56:09
The Florida Project | Ep. 662
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Florida's recount continues to be fuddled.
Jim Acosta wins a great victory for Jim Acosta, and we check the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, Jim Acosta wins a big victory against the Trump administration, which means he is going to bust into that next press conference like the Kool-Aid man right through the wall.
He's going to be like, oh yeah!
So we will discuss Jim Acosta's big win in the courts against the Trump administration.
Truth is, truth is, He was kind of right, but I know, I know.
Stop yourself.
Don't hurl yourself from the nearest building.
I'll explain legally in just a second.
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All right.
So we begin today.
With the latest from Florida, where I think the plan is to just recount this election result forever.
And then Florida won't be a problem for us anymore.
We won't have any new elections.
We'll just keep recounting this sucker for like the next 25 years.
And by that point, all the candidates may have Now let's be straight about this.
Ron DeSantis will be the governor of Florida.
Florida will just be taken off the board as an actual electoral entity in the United States.
The current status is that Florida has now ordered the first ever statewide hand recount as the legal fights continue, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
Now, let's be straight about this.
Ron DeSantis will be the governor of Florida.
Rick Scott will be the senator from Florida.
The margins are too big to be made up in a recount.
Typically, the only time a recount has been reversed in a statewide race is when the margins are less than 500 votes.
In this particular case, Rick Scott is up by several thousand votes, and the same thing is true for Ron DeSantis.
That is not stopping Democrats, however, from claiming that the election has been stolen from them.
So you remember just a couple of days ago, we were hearing about President Trump.
That guy undermining electoral integrity.
Well, right now, Democrats know they've lost in Florida, and they still won't acknowledge they've lost in Florida because they want to pretend that voter suppression is happening.
According to TampaBay.com, an unprecedented statewide hand recount is now underway in the Sunshine State, further extending a high-stakes partisan battle over every last vote in Florida's crucial U.S.
Senate race.
Following a five-day machine recount of the more than 8.3 million votes cast in the November 6th elections, Secretary of State Ken Detzner ordered hand recounts Thursday afternoon in the race between U.S.
Senator Bill Nelson and Governor Rick Scott, and also the race for Agriculture Commissioner between Nicole Nicky Freed and Matt Caldwell.
The order gives canvassing boards in the state's 67 counties three days to pour over thousands of ballots that were rejected by machines because of overvotes, where a voter appears to have chosen more than one candidate in a race, or undervotes, in which a voter appears to have skipped a race altogether.
With the help of state guidelines, the canvassing boards, which are allowed to enlist the help of volunteers, will try to determine how those voters intend to vote.
Okay, I have a basic problem.
I really do.
I have a basic problem with this idea that we're gonna look at the ballots and then try to determine how you might have wanted to vote, or where you crossed out, where you filled in one, and then you crossed it out, and then you filled in another.
Right?
I just have a general problem with this.
Learn how to vote.
If you don't know how to vote, go get another ballot.
Like, seriously.
You don't get to do this on your Scantron, on your SAT, right?
Every one of us took the SAT or the ACT, or a lot of us did anyway, or will.
When you do that, you can't then go back to the SAT board and say, listen guys, I want a hand recount of my SAT score.
If you don't know how to fill out a bubble, this would be your problem, not the problem of the people of the United States.
According to TampaBay.com, it is not entirely clear how many such overvotes and undervotes exist in the U.S.
Senate race.
A Times Herald analysis of state and county data showed the number could be between 35,000 and 118,000.
Again, if you don't know how to vote, this is your problem.
But having a bunch of people sit there and look into their own heart to determine how you voted, and it turns out the people looking into their hearts are typically Democrats, this is a problem.
The determination on how those ballots were cast could go a long way toward deciding whether Nelson is re-elected or Scott ascends from governor to U.S.
Senator.
Florida law requires machine recount for any race decided by one half of one percentage point or less.
All three races, this would be the agricultural race, the gubernatorial race, and the Senate race, all three races were within the margins when election supervisors submitted their unofficial results Saturday to the state.
Am I suspicious of this process?
You damn well, yes.
I mean, of course I'm suspicious.
Why am I so suspicious of the process?
Because Democrats are, in fact, attempting to cheat.
They are, in fact, attempting to cheat.
Now, as you know, for the last week and a half, I've been very skeptical about claims of voter fraud, because the evidence of voter fraud is not particularly widespread in the United States.
The idea people are going and voting twice, illegal immigrants voting, right?
The numbers are just not there to support the idea that voter fraud is widespread in deciding elections.
However, Democrats are attempting now to engage in voter fraud when they extend the election beyond the election deadline.
What do I mean?
Listen to this story.
This is from NaplesNews.com, the Naples Daily News, quote.
A day after Florida's election left top state races too close to call, a Democratic Party leader directed staffers and volunteers to share altered election forms with voters to fix signature problems on absentee ballots after the state's deadline.
The altered forms surfaced in Broward, Santa Rosa, Citrus, and Okaloosa counties and were reported to federal prosecutors to review for possible election fraud as Florida counties completed a required recount in three top races.
But an email obtained by the USA Today Network Florida shows that Florida Democrats were organizing a broader statewide effort beyond those counties to give voters the altered forms to fix improper absentee ballots after the November 5th deadline.
In other words, they were voting after the vote was supposed to be in.
Democratic Party leaders provided staffers with copies of a form known as a cure affidavit that had been modified to include an inaccurate November 8th deadline.
So the idea was they were they were sending people forms saying, you want to cure your vote?
You want to make sure that your vote gets counted?
Well, you have now until November 8th to do that.
Well, when it comes to absentee ballots, the deadline is November 5th.
Otherwise, you are supposed to show up at the polls yourself.
You can only vote absentee by November 5th.
So now we are extending election deadlines beyond the actual election deadline.
This is what Democrats were trying to do.
They claim that all of this was sort of a provisional thing in case courts decided, you know what?
Maybe we do want to extend the election deadline, but you can't violate election law.
This way.
I mean, it's the equivalent of saying the election was held November 8th.
Now we're going to send out forums saying, if you really wanted to vote November 10th, that's cool.
You can do that.
And we're just going to send that out there and put out an affidavit that says that you voted November 8th when you really voted November 10th.
We're going to put that out there and maybe courts will say it's OK.
No, you don't get to do this.
One Palm Beach Democrat activist said in an interview the idea was to have voters fix and submit as many absentee ballots as possible with the altered forms in hopes of later including them in vote totals if a judge ruled such ballots were allowed.
U.S.
Chief Judge Mark Walker ruled Thursday voters should have until Saturday to correct signatures on ballots, a move that could open the door for these ballots returned with altered forms to be counted.
Okay, just because there's a judge who's okaying election fraud does not mean it is not election fraud.
And election fraud does not necessarily mean that you are casting a vote in fraudulent fashion in the sense that you are voting for another person or voting for a dead person like in Chicago or something.
If I vote on November 11th for a November 8th election, I am now committing election fraud.
If I punch a ballot and it's my vote, I didn't vote, and then I go over to the ballot box and just sort of slip it in there, Even after the election is over.
That would be election fraud.
And this sort of stuff is not too uncommon in Florida.
I mean, look at this.
This is just crazy talk, okay?
This is from The Hill.
Why?
Remember, we just said a few minutes ago that Broward County had a mandatory machine recount under state election law.
And after that happened, they went to a hand recount.
Why won't Florida use results from Broward County's machinery count?
Because the office submitted its results two minutes, two minutes past the 3 p.m.
deadline on Thursday.
We uploaded to the state two minutes late, so the state has chosen not to use our machine recount results.
They're going to use our first unofficial results as our second unofficial results, said Joe D'Alessandro, an electing official.
Well, why did that happen?
Because there was a difference in the vote count.
What happened when they machine recounted?
It turned out that Rick Scott gained votes in machine recounts.
Does anyone really believe that if Rick Scott had lost votes in machine recounts in Broward County, that this somehow would not have been counted?
That they would have submitted it two minutes late?
Does anyone really believe that?
All of this really does raise serious questions about the veracity of election results.
And not only that, over in Georgia, Democrats continue to claim over and over without any evidence that Stacey Abrams should be given now a new election.
I am not kidding you.
They are now arguing Abrams, who is losing by 50,000 votes in that state.
Not a joke.
She's losing by 50,000 votes in the state.
Stacey Abrams now refuses to accept the election results.
According to the AP, Stacey Abrams' campaign is preparing an unprecedented legal challenge in the unresolved Georgia governor's race that could leave the state's Supreme Court deciding whether to force another round of voting, so they want a new election now.
The Democrats' long-shot strategy relies on a statute that has never been used Well, who's making those charges of electoral malfeasance?
Democrats.
And yet we keep hearing that it's Republicans, like President Trump, undermining electoral integrity.
certifying Republican Brian Kemp as the winner of a bitterly fought campaign that's been marred by charges of electoral malfeasance.
Well, who's making those charges of electoral malfeasance?
Democrats.
And yet we keep hearing that it's Republicans like President Trump undermining electoral integrity.
Oh, those evil Republicans pointing out election irregularities that actually exist in Florida.
But when Democrats complain about election irregularities that actually don't exist in Georgia, then it's totally fine.
We're not hearing anything about it.
Now, I do have to give some credit to Jake Tapper here.
So Jake Tapper, you know, I get a lot of letters saying, why are you so easy on Jake Tapper?
The reason that I am easy on Jake Tapper is because I think I'm trying to be objective about Jake Tapper.
When he does stuff I don't like, I note it.
But when he does stuff that's right, he deserves praise.
Here was Jake Tapper yesterday on CNN doing what he's supposed to do.
Going after Hillary Clinton and Sherrod Brown for implying that the Georgia state governor race was rigged.
And, you know, good for Jake Tapper.
Well, take a listen.
Republicans are not actually the only ones trashing the other party and sowing doubts about the integrity of the process.
Take a look at what is being said about the Georgia governor's race, which is also not over yet.
Democrat Stacey Abrams still trails Republican Brian Kemp.
The race has not been called.
Take a listen to what some Democrats have said.
If Stacey Abrams doesn't win in Georgia, they stole it.
It's clear.
It's clear.
If she'd had a fair election, she already would have won.
Is that really any different from what the Matt Gaetz's and Donald Trump's of the world are doing?
Okay, and this is exactly right.
Okay, this is exactly right.
The only difference is that Trump has more evidence of Florida election malfeasance than Stacey Abrams does.
That's not stopping the Democrats from calling for new elections.
That's why it was always a lie when they were claiming, you know, Trump is going to protest the election.
It'll ruin the legitimacy.
We're now two years into Democrats claiming that the entire election was swung by Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange.
Spare me all of your hysterics about Republicans violating electoral integrity.
In just a second, I want to talk a little bit more about what's going to happen in Georgia.
Plus, I need to get to the big ruling today on Jim Acosta, who loves him some Jim Acosta.
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So, Allegra Lawrence Hardy is Stacey Abrams' campaign chairwoman.
She's overseeing a team of almost three dozen lawyers who in the coming days will draft the petition along with a ream of affidavits from voters and would-be voters who say they were disenfranchised.
You know what's easy to do?
Coming up with affidavits from people who say they were disenfranchised after they know their candidate lost.
Kind of easy to do that.
Lots of people are going to say, you know what, I was really meaning to vote, but then the machines all broke down.
Kinda voter fraud?
Sorta?
Not great.
Abrams would then decide whether to go to court under a provision of Georgia election law that allows losing candidates to challenge results based on misconduct, fraud, or irregularities sufficient to change or place in doubt the results.
The legal team is considering all the options.
The state challenge would be the most drastic.
Some Democrat legal observers note that she would actually have to pass a pretty high bar in order for her to depend on that statute.
Kemp's campaign has already shifted into transition mode and they are right to do so.
Unofficial returns show Kemp with about 50.2% of more than 3.9 million votes, which puts him about 18,000 votes above the threshold required to win by a majority.
And he's some 53,000 votes ahead of Stacey Abrams.
There's no way she can make that up in any sort of legitimate way.
But Democrats are not shy about doing this in an illegitimate way, apparently.
So, again, if we're going to talk about lack of faith in public institutions, Democrats have been heavily involved in this lack of faith in public institutions.
We have now heard them rail against the Electoral College, which apparently is illegitimate because Hillary Clinton lost.
We've heard them rail against the Senate itself because the Senate is somehow illegitimate because Democrats don't run it.
We've heard them rail against the Supreme Court and talk about packing the Supreme Court because they don't control the Supreme Court in the same way that they once did.
We have heard them rail about pretty much every aspect of the American electoral system over the last two years, and then meanwhile complain that President Trump is undermining the integrity of America's constitutional system.
Well, Case 1 in their exhibit is, of course, his treatment of the press, and the latest evidence that they have is a judge who just sided against the White House with regard to Jim Acosta.
So here is the latest on Case Acosta.
Very, very important stuff.
So, as you will recall, Jim Acosta got into a spat with President Trump the day after the midterm elections, in which he basically got up and started railing against President Trump, basically doing an op-ed that Trump was supposed to rebut.
Trump didn't want to rebut it.
At a certain point, a White House intern went over, tried to grab the microphone from Acosta.
Acosta sort of pulled away.
And then he continued to talk, and then finally Trump walked away from the microphone, which is what he probably should have done before that, and then Acosta handed over the microphone.
And as I said at the time, if you want to revoke Jim Acosta's press pass on the basis that he was essentially violating the rules of the press corps, then I think that's perfectly appropriate.
Jim Acosta is a grandstander.
Jim Acosta loves him some Jim Acosta.
He's a terrible reporter.
I know a lot of people who work at CNN.
Virtually all of them think Jim Acosta is a schmuck.
Par excellence that the guy is just a self-aggrandizing idiot who spends all of his time not reporting but patting himself on the back and then quaffing his hair.
Nobody even at CNN really likes Jim Acosta very much, but because Trump then revoked his press pass and claimed in the process that he had put his hands on an intern, which is controversial to say the least.
It looks more to me like there's incidental contact when she goes for the microphone.
In any case, The Acosta team basically claimed, and CNN claimed, and Fox News backed them in their lawsuit, claimed that this was viewpoint discrimination, that the real reason that Jim Acosta had had his press pass revoked was because Jim Acosta had been engaging in anti-Trump activities by yelling at the president or whatever.
Now, as I said, I thought that case was kind of weak from Jim Acosta, simply because there are a bunch of other members of the press corps who are similarly anti-Trump, and their press pass has not been revoked.
April Ryan comes to mind, who's been extraordinarily anti-Trump throughout, but There's a ruling today that came down from Federal Judge Timothy Kelly, who was a Trump appointee, and he was appointed by a 94-2 vote.
Federal Judge Kelly sided with CNN on Friday morning.
He ordered the White House to reinstate Jim Acosta's press pass immediately.
The ruling was an initial victory for CNN in its lawsuit against President Trump and several top aides.
The suit alleges CNN and Acosta's First and Fifth Amendment rights were being violated by suspension of his press pass.
Here was Jim Acosta's response, and then I want to get into the actual legalities of this ruling.
Hi everybody, thanks for coming.
I just want to say something very briefly and that is I want to thank all of my colleagues in the press who supported us this week and I want to thank the judge for the decision he made today and let's go back to work.
Thank you.
What?
Oh my goodness, such journalism.
Such heroism.
Wow, look at that man.
I mean, that man, he's basically, I mean, it's like Gideon's trumpet right here.
I mean, this guy is just defending First Amendment rights.
The guy just has an incredible sense of the Constitution and value of a free press.
That's what's going on here.
It's not just an ego play by Jim Acosta, this entire thing.
Again, where he's going to bust into that press room and it's going to be like that scene from Anchorman where all the press corps are fighting each other with pitchforks and he's throwing torches at Sarah Huckabee Sanders or anything.
He is just, he is the classiest of us.
He really is.
Okay, so what exactly did the judge rule?
What the press are saying that the judge ruled is not actually what the judge ruled.
So, the implication from CNN is this is a vindication of Jim Acosta's First Amendment rights.
Well, actually, the First Amendment issue was not actually touched by the judge, Timothy Kelly, in this case.
He granted a temporary restraining order, which is not a final, actual, it's not actually a final resolution of the issue.
A government lawyer, James Burnham, had argued in a hearing before Kelly on Wednesday the president was within his rights to ban any reporter from the White House at any time, just as he excludes reporters from interviews in the Oval Office.
He said Acosta could report on the president just as effectively by watching the president on TV or by calling sources There are two issues at play here.
Well, there are two issues at play here.
Issue number one was, is it viewpoint discrimination to ban Jim Acosta?
That is question number one.
And question number two was, was this a violation of due process?
Meaning, does there have to be some process, some explanation of the rule that was violated in order to remove Jim Acosta's press pass?
The judge in this particular case said the due process was violated, but he did not actually get to the First Amendment issue.
He said the White House's decision-making was so shrouded in mystery that the government could not tell me who made the decision.
So, there are people saying today, the White House doesn't need to have a due process for removing his press pass.
I think that that's misstated.
Once you give somebody a press pass, there has to be some sort of process for removing it that has to be fulfilled.
It can't just be, we're pulling this guy's press pass for no reason, just because we feel like it.
That's not something that really But Phil's sort of constitutional muster.
I sort of agree with the ruling.
I even agree with the idea that this could have been construed, as I say, as a viewpoint discrimination issue.
But that is not a case that the court actually reached.
There's a temporary restraining order.
The judge didn't reach the First Amendment question.
But CNN is saying a major precedent was set for the future of a free press.
It was not.
Okay, no major precedent was set.
And then let me explain that in just one second.
So, no major precedent was set here because in order for a precedent to have been set here, there would have had to have been a ruling saying that you can't ban anyone from the White House press corps for any reason having to do with any sort of behavior.
That would have been a major precedent.
But that's not what it said.
What they said is, we need to know how you came to this decision.
Since we don't know how you came to this decision, it looks arbitrary and capricious, and therefore a violation of due process.
Again, I don't think it's the world's strongest ruling.
I don't think it's the world's weakest ruling.
But I don't think that, again, it's completely unjustified.
I think that a stronger rule, and listen, the reason that I'm defending the ruling a little bit here is because there will be a point at some point in the future, whether it is in four years or whether it is in eight years or whether it is in 12 years, when a Democrat is in the White House again.
And that Democrat will be using the precedent set here to ban reporters from the White House without due process.
Somebody gets up and asks Kamala Harris a question, God forbid, she's the president, and she says, I don't like that guy, get him out.
And so they ban him.
Now, I don't like that precedent.
So, would I rather have Jim Acosta making an ass of himself in the press room than have there be a precedent that the White House can ban whoever it pleases?
Yeah, I would.
Yeah, I really would.
Especially because it doesn't hurt President Trump to have Jim Acosta in there.
In fact, it probably helps him.
Every time Jim Acosta makes a fool of himself, President Trump looks better.
The press secretary put out a statement that said, Okay, so that's about the right outcome.
And undoubtedly, there'll be an opportunity to ban Jim Acosta again, because he's not going to abide by any rules of decency in any of this.
So, is this a huge deal?
No, it's not.
Will the press treat it as a huge deal?
We'll temporarily reinstate the reporter's hard pass.
We'll also further develop rules and processes to ensure fair and orderly press conferences in the future.
There must be decorum at the White House.
Okay, so that's about the right outcome.
And undoubtedly, there'll be an opportunity to ban Jim Acosta again, because he's not going to abide by any rules of decency in any of this.
So is this a huge deal?
No, it's not.
Will the press treat it as a huge deal?
Sure.
Is it good that the White House actually has to show some precedent, some actual process here for banning reporters?
I think in the long run, it probably is.
Okay, meanwhile, demonstrating once again that Democrats do not know how to run major cities, New York has been hit by some snow, and it left commuters stranded for up to 12 hours.
Well, my sister lives in the general New York, New Jersey area, and it was taking people six hours to move a couple of miles, thanks to some snow.
Which does go to city management and state management.
It really does, because it's not like they've never had snow in New York before.
It's not like it snowed in L.A.
or something, and then everybody's like, oh my god, it's snowing!
No, it's snowing in New York, which is something that has happened in the past, as in every single year.
According to weather.com, conditions were improving for most in the Northeast Friday after winter storm Avery left at least 11 dead in accidents blamed on the ice and snow and stranded commuters for up to 12 hours, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands and forcing some students to stay at school overnight.
Thursday evening's commute became an absolute nightmare for drivers, especially in parts of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Traffic sat still for hours on turnpikes and interstates and crawled at a snail's pace when it could move.
New York drivers reported being stranded for up to seven hours.
So, well done all local officials.
Obviously, the government doing a fantastic job over there.
The George Washington Bridge was basically in total lockdown because there was some snow.
The Holland Tunnel and the Lincoln Tunnel were both experiencing delays.
The GW was actually closed.
A disabled semi-trailer truck blocked all westbound lanes of the Gowanus Expressway at the Belt Parkway split in Brooklyn about 4.30 p.m.
Central Park received six inches of snow by Thursday evening.
The Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan was closed to any more passengers about 5.30 p.m.
because it was so overcrowded.
I know I'd heard from my sister who lives in the area that there's a wedding that was scheduled for last night and legitimately six people showed up to the wedding because of all of the weather.
This does raise some broader questions about whether the real threat in terms of weather is additional heat or whether it is actually additional cold.
According to CBS Local, despite the snow blitz of 2015, many baby boomers still insist that overall, we don't get the harsh bitter cold and deep snowy winters like we did in the good old days.
Weather records prove that just isn't the case.
And despite the ongoing claims that snows are becoming rare and hurting winter sports, this millennium has been a blessing to snow lovers and winter sports enthusiasts.
Just as the Saffir-Simpson and Fujita scales were devised to categorize hurricanes and tornadoes, the Northeast Snowfall Impact Scale was created by Paul Kosin of the National Weather Service to rank high-impact northeast storms.
The scale has five categories, and the highest category storm has been increasing rapidly.
This is why you've seen a lot of people, when they talk about climate change, instead of talking about global warming, per se, they start talking instead about climate radicalism, basically.
So maybe there's a new paradigm, right?
The Earth may be actually experiencing a major cooling occurrence.
I mean, we just don't know, right?
Arctic temperatures and Arctic ice extent varies in a predictable 60 to 70-year cycle.
The greatest warming has been happening in the Arctic region.
That can produce a weaker, less stable jet stream, allowing frigid air to dive further south to mix with the warmer oceans to trigger more potential snow events.
It's all cyclical.
This is according to Barry Burbank over at Boston CBS Local.
We simply don't know the effect of all of this.
But again, this is up to local governments to solve.
And obviously, they're not doing an appropriate job in doing so.
OK, meanwhile, there is a there is a An obvious attempt in the Republican caucus to ignore the results of what is now amounting to a blue wave in the House.
Overall, what we've watched unrolling in slow fashion since the 2018 election is more and more Democratic seats being piled up.
Orange County, which used to be a Republican stronghold as late as 2016, all of the congressional districts in Orange County, save one, went red in this last election cycle.
Every single congressional district in Orange County Went blue.
Some people are attributing that to the influx of Latino immigrants who are coming from areas south of the border.
And the idea is that because of President Reagan's amnesty and changing demographics in Orange County, that's why you've seen all this, that doesn't explain why Texas has stayed red, even though the demographics of Texas have shifted pretty radically.
Instead, you have to assume that blue turnout was really high and suburban Republicans are not very fond of President Trump.
And this is a serious problem for President Trump going forward.
It's an even more serious problem if Republicans refuse to acknowledge the issue here.
And I'm seeing a little bit of that.
Vice President Pence said yesterday that he didn't really see a blue wave in the House.
This is just incorrect.
We made history by expanding our majority in the Senate.
We won some great elections in the governor's offices around the country.
And we didn't really see that blue wave in the House of Representatives come our way.
Simply not true.
OK, it's going to be about 40 seats by the time all of this is done.
The fact is Republicans dramatically underperformed in this election cycle.
That is particularly true in suburbia.
What we are watching is that suburban areas across the country are voting very much alike.
A suburban area in Oklahoma is now voting like a suburban area in California.
Rural areas in California are voting like rural areas in Georgia.
And urban areas in Georgia are voting like urban areas in New York.
So basically, we now have a split in the country that is not necessarily area-driven.
It's mainly driven by urban, suburban and rural.
The problem is that suburban folks tend to be a little bit more moderate.
Suburban folks tend to not just in terms of policy, but in terms of attitude.
And because they tend to be a little bit more moderate in terms of attitude, they are off put by a lot of the radical rhetoric coming from President Trump.
The statistics tend to show that a lot of suburban Republicans actually voted for Democrats in the last election cycle, which I think is unthinkable.
But that's what happened in Arizona, right?
Kristen Sinema is the new senator from Arizona because 14% of registered Republicans in the state voted for a woman who said in 2003 that she didn't mind if Americans joined the Taliban.
That is because Kyrsten Sinema actually ran a moderate campaign.
Kyrsten Sinema said that she would negotiate on the border wall.
She said that she would not back Chuck Schumer for Senate Majority Leader, although she now is going to do exactly that.
She flipped on that within 12 hours.
The fact is, suburban Republicans are being alienated by the Republican Party, and doubling down on what brought us here is not necessarily a recipe for future victory.
You have to shift and move as you learn more things.
And right now, the Republicans are not shifting and moving.
Now, the good news is Democrats aren't shifting or moving either.
What they should be learning is that moderation would actually be of benefit here.
But instead, it seems like they are going to continue to shift radically to the left.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
Plus, we'll get to an interesting study talking about why young people aren't having as much sex as they used to.
I have an answer for you.
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So if Republicans refuse to change course, Democrats are also refusing to change course.
And this is a mistake for them.
If they would change course, they'd actually have a serious shot at winning a broad majority in 2020.
But Nancy Pelosi says that she has overwhelming support to be Speaker.
This is one of the things that's so fascinating about our politics right now, is that both parties seem like they are radicalizing.
But the leadership is the same, which suggests that the base is indeed in charge of the leadership.
So Nancy Pelosi was the head of Congress in 2006, and then she was booted in 2010.
And now she's back in 2018, right?
She's been majority leader, minority leader, majority leader again in the House for Republicans.
Every time they boot somebody, it's just the next person in line who gets the job.
So the new House minority leader is going to be Kevin McCarthy, who was sort of next in line after Paul Ryan.
It didn't turn out to be, it didn't turn out to be Any of the other candidates who are up for it.
Jim Jordan was the one from Ohio who was sort of up for it.
He only won 43 votes.
So the parties tend to maintain their leadership, which suggests that party leadership is basically in the sway of the base.
So if they're radicalizing, it's more about the base than it is about the leadership.
In other words, it's the Democratic base driving Nancy Pelosi and not necessarily the other way around.
Here's Nancy Pelosi announcing she has overwhelming support to be Speaker.
I have overwhelming support in my caucus to be Speaker of the House, and certainly we have many, many people in our caucus who could serve in this capacity.
I happen to think that at this point I'm the best person for that.
Okay, so she's gonna stick around, and as I said yesterday, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who's going to be one of the kind of new leaders in the House, she is because she's turning out to be a pretty clever politician in her own right.
Part of that is helped by the fact that Republicans are attacking her in the dumbest possible way.
There was a tweet yesterday that, I mean, got ratioed in epic fashion.
For people who don't follow Twitter, a ratioing is when more people comment on your tweet than like your tweet.
Okay, in this particular case, this tweet received something like 20,000 comments and about a hundred likes.
Okay, it just got Destroyed in epic fashion.
Eddie Scarry, who works for the Washington Examiner, he tweeted out a picture of Ocasio-Cortez walking away in the hall.
He said, Hill staffer sent me this pic of Ocasio-Cortez they took just now.
I'll tell you something.
That jacket and coat don't look like a girl who struggles.
I mean, I'm not sure what she should be wearing exactly.
Like a barrel with suspenders?
She's wearing what looks like a fairly normal skirt suit.
I'm not sure why she's supposed to be dressed like a hobo or something.
And I know a lot of people who are lower middle income who still dress decently.
So that, of course, is an idiotic attack.
Like, just attack her ideas.
Her ideas are dumb enough.
You don't have to attack her wardrobe.
It's really silly.
You know, a few weeks ago, it was different when she was wearing, like, legitimate thousand dollar jackets while posing on a stoop in the Bronx.
I mean, that's just...
Kind of ridiculous.
But, you know, to attack, like, the fact that she's dressed okay while she's walking through Congress is really silly.
Nonetheless, Ocasio-Cortez is proving herself capable of posturing.
According to Politico, a fight broke out in a closed-door meeting of House Democrats over climate change as a powerful veteran lawmaker fought with Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members-elect over the creation of a special panel for climate change.
New Jersey Representative Frank Pallone, who's the incoming chairman of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, slammed the creation of a new climate panel He said that his committee and other existing panels within the House could take on the issue aggressively.
But a bunch of other progressive incoming lawmakers fought back.
They said they ran on the issue, and they needed to start a Green New Deal, and they said that they want a new climate panel.
But then she's smart enough to say that she never actually fought with him.
She said, I never had a direct interaction with him today.
And by direct interaction, I mean I didn't share a conversation.
I did say hello, and he was very kind.
So Ocasio-Cortez knows where her bread is buttered with the House leadership, and she continues to pander to that House leadership again.
She's proving herself to be adept at this.
So watch out, Republicans, because you need to actually be going after her policies, not her political acumen.
The only person who has successfully gone after her political acumen sits behind this desk when she suggested that I catcalled her after I said maybe we should have a discussion.
In any case, another big story out today.
The Atlantic has a new long piece about why these should be boom times for sex.
Because the number of Americans who morally disapprove of sex outside of marriage is at an all-time low.
New cases of HIV are at an all-time low.
Most women can get birth control for free and the morning after pill without a prescription.
And yet, and yet, American teenagers and young adults are having less sex.
To the relief of many parents, educators, and clergy members who care about the health and well-being of young people, teens are launching their sex lives later.
From 1991 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Survey found the percentage of high school students who'd had intercourse dropped from 54% to 40%, so sex has gone from something most high school students had experienced to something that most haven't.
And that's not because they're substituting other forms of sex.
U.S.
teen pregnancy has plummeted to a third of its modern high.
So why is all of this happening?
Why is all of this happening?
Well, the general answer, honestly, is that pornography has taken over.
OK, this is the real answer, is that people are staying home.
People are not getting involved in relationships.
They're figuring that if we have now disconnected sex from relationships, why bother even hanging out with a person of the opposite sex?
And the statistics bear this out without getting too graphic.
No, this is a serious, it's a serious issue because it does lead to later relationships.
And it's funny that the Atlantic is worried about less sex as opposed to later relationships, but they really should be worried about later relationships.
I want to explain that for just a second.
So let's talk about this.
It used to be that sex and relationships were deeply intertwined, right?
In my life, my sex life and my relationship with my wife were united, right?
I didn't have sex until I was married to my wife, which used to be at least the traditional standard of morality.
And that was good because it led people to get married younger and led people to have children younger and start becoming responsible citizens younger.
And then they were actually having a fair bit of sex because it turns out that married people on average do have more sex than non-married people.
And then the left said, you know what?
Let's disconnect sex from relationships.
Sex doesn't have to be about marriage.
It doesn't have to be about love.
It doesn't have to be about commitment.
And so the sex rates went up because in the immediate aftermath of that social move, everybody's like, OK, let's get our rocks off.
Let's do this thing.
And then it turned out a couple of things happened.
One, a lot of women decided that it actually isn't that fulfilling to have random sex with strangers.
And that they don't actually want just the physical pleasure of sex.
They actually want emotional connection with people.
And two, a bunch of young men decided, okay, well, if sex is no longer supposed to be connected with relationships, and if I can get pornography online from the time that I am a kid, then why would I bother with all of this relationship stuff?
It seems like kind of a hassle.
Sex and relationships have to be interconnected, and that was a good deal.
It was a good deal for men because it made them more responsible, and they got more sex out of it.
And it was a good deal for women because women got relationships and commitment out of it, and they also got more sex out of it.
Once you disconnected sex and relationships, there's a natural inclination by men toward promiscuity, but women don't necessarily want to engage in that same promiscuity.
And if men can simply fantasize, next to their computer every day then it turns out the rates of actual interaction between human beings is going to go down in other words social liberalism has not led to happiness social liberalism has has led to deep unhappiness and deep loneliness and you can see this and there's a great quote from this piece from uh a from a particular scholar saying uh saying basically we hook up because we have no social skills we
We have no social skills because we hook up.
This is exactly right.
People don't know how to get along with other people because the expectation is sex rather than relationships.
I noticed this in sitcoms maybe 20 years ago.
Where there's this weird reversal of the polarity when it came to relationships and sex.
So, if you watch old movies, the idea was that the culmination of the movie would be someone says, I love you, and then you slowly pan to the curtains, right?
That was always how it worked in the old movies, when you couldn't show sex on the screen.
Somebody would say, I love you, pan to the curtains.
Now, you show the full sex scene, and then the next morning, someone awkwardly says, I love you, and then somebody gets offended and leaves.
Well, that reversal has not been good for men or women, because particularly for women, sex is deeply connected with commitment and emotional intimacy.
And for men, if you disconnect those things, then it's just a question of how often they can get their rocks off.
And it turns out it's a lot easier to get your rocks off sitting in your basement, watching porn on your computer.
It's emptying people's lives.
It's destroying people's lives.
And to fail to note this is to fail to understand why it is that people are unhappy.
So the Atlantic is attributing that to lack of sex.
It's not lack of sex that's making people unhappy.
It's unhappiness that's leading to lack of sex.
Right?
It's lack of relationships and emotional intimacy and connection with other people that is leading to lack of sex.
Because it turns out that sex without all of those things is just another biological function.
This is like saying people are eating less than they used to.
Why is that so terrible?
Well, I mean, it's not inherently terrible, is the answer.
People having sex less than they used to is not inherently terrible.
What is inherently terrible is people being depressed, people being upset, people being lonely.
We are in a loneliness epidemic.
We have lost social connection with other human beings because social connection requires commitment.
It requires shared values.
It requires the idea that you're going to get together with people who you have an obligation to beyond merely your own pleasure.
And since we've thrown all of that out the window, Then why connect with other people at all?
Why not simply head to your basement?
And that's exactly what people have been doing.
You want to restore happiness?
You want to restore healthy sex lives to people?
Restore emotional intimacy.
Restore connection.
Restore commitment.
Restore all of these things and you'll make people happy.
And yes, the rates of sex will go back up as a byproduct.
And all of that will be good because then sex will be had within a healthy context and not an unhealthy context.
Okay.
Time for some mailbags.
So, let's do a few questions from the mailbag.
back.
John says, Hi, Ben.
What circumstances or events do you think would be severe enough to warrant an execution of the Second Amendment and its true intention as a revolt against government tyranny?
Well, I know that this is its purpose.
I've never thought of what would trigger its use in this form.
Any thoughts are appreciated.
Okay, well, I think that, for example, if the government came to confiscate all weapons, that would be a good time to stand up on your hind legs and say, we are not going to allow this to happen.
If the government were to revoke full-on religious freedom, I think that if you have no other place to run, you try to avoid violence at first blush always.
But if it turns out there's like a national policy, for example, then you do have to stand up and say, no, I'm not going to.
I mean, if somebody tried to take away my kid because I was teaching my kid my religious precepts, then I would stand up with my gun and I would say no.
Elliot says, Well, I think Trump is a unifying factor.
What you could see, and this is what really hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016, is that Hillary Clinton had a person running from her left who basically split the base.
left is going to unite with more traditional Democrats against the right in 2020 or whether will they succumb to infighting?
Well, I think Trump is a unifying factor.
What you could see, and this is what really hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016, is that Hillary Clinton had a person running from her left who basically split the base.
A lot of those Sanders voters did not show up for Hillary Clinton.
I think that is unlikely to happen this time.
I think it's more likely that the base captures the nomination than that some approved candidate from the top is selected by the Democrats.
What that means is that they may not run somebody so moderate, but they will run somebody who is more approved by the base.
They got rid of the superdelegates.
I think the possibility of a united Democratic Party that is more radical is better in 2020 than the possibility of a moderate Democratic Party that is split.
No, I don't think that that's immoral.
against euthanasia.
However, I've run into a bit of a hurdle when I take it to the logical conclusion.
In certain cases, when someone is near death, often even a small pain reliever will assist in the death of a patient.
Do you believe it would be immoral for a doctor to give a patient who is in a lot of pain and close to death a small pain reliever, knowing that it could kill the patient?
Thanks for everything, Drew.
No, I don't think that that's immoral.
I think that giving pain relievers to people who are right on the precipice of death in order to relieve pain is one thing.
I think deliberately killing the patient is another thing.
There is such a thing as sort of a dual byproduct.
When you're attempting to alleviate pain and a possible risk of that is death, that's not the same thing as I'm going to, you know, show up.
I'm going to, you know, show up.
You know, shoot chloroform into your veins or something.
Well, we are a democratic republic, and the reason that we shouldn't really use them interchangeably is because direct democracy would mean that we all vote on every issue.
Republic means that we have representatives who represent us and that there are checks and balances in the system.
Direct democracies tend to perish pretty quickly.
The founders in the Federalist Papers, as we've talked about nearly every week, I would say that every republic is a democracy, but not every democracy is a republic.
And you're right, we should not be conflating Republican democracy, but democracy can encompass republic in the sense that we are a system wherein the votes of people are counted and policy is based on the votes of those people via our elected representatives.
So I would say that every republic is a democracy, but not every democracy is a republic.
I think that's fair.
Kimberly says, hey Ben, do you think President Nixon was as bad as people make him out to be or is it just overblown outrage?
Well, I think that he was a worse president than a lot of Republicans think he was.
But, no, I mean, I think the idea that Watergate was some sort of horrific violation of American electoral norms is just silly.
I mean, there's good information that the Lyndon Johnson campaign was bugging Barry Goldwater's headquarters in 1964.
Was it bad?
Yes, it was bad.
Was it the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the American Republic?
No.
Was it anything remotely like that?
No.
What was worse was the cover-up.
And, again, you know, I disagree with Nixon a lot on policy.
The man implemented price and wage controls, and I'm still quite split over whether it was worthwhile opening China in the first place.
But, was Nixon, you know, the forerunner of tyrannical evil in the United States?
No, that's silliness.
Well, you know, I don't actually want to be a comedian because being a comedian means that your job is to be funny all the time.
I like what I do because it means that when I meet somebody on the street, their first thing isn't, tell me a joke, make me laugh, funny man, right?
There's less of an obligation for me to be funny.
The humor in my show sort of just comes out naturally.
And I think that this is the problem for a lot of comedians who want to be political.
Once you get political, you are now in my sphere.
And that means that you have to make good arguments.
It means you have to back those arguments with evidence.
If you're Jimmy Kimmel, then you can't just pretend to be a comedian every time it suits you and then be a political commentator at other times.
I don't pretend to be a comedian, meaning I'm not going to go up against Jimmy Kimmel in a funny contest.
He would beat me every time.
And that's true for most comedians.
I'm not going to try stand-up anytime.
My friend Dave Rubin has suggested I go try stand-up.
No, not particularly interested.
But I do think that people should basically stick to their own lanes, and there is such a thing as a funny political commentator.
As far as new impressions, I have to find somebody whose voice and mannerisms are kind of prominent enough that I can do them.
My impressions are quite broad, as you may have noticed.
Except for Obama.
My Obama's quite good.
Lee says, I was watching CBS Evening News the other night and they spoke about how Congress has warned that the U.S.
is unprepared against rising China and Russian military expansion, even though we spend more money than both combined.
Do you believe these fears are warranted?
Do you think boosting our military spending is the best option to curb them?
Well, we have been raising our military spending, but we need to be modernizing our military in a variety of ways.
Barack Obama slashed our military dramatically.
It's going to take us a while to rebuild.
All of that.
And it's not that we're unprepared for Russia.
I mean, we could take out Russia individually.
We could take out China individually.
The question is, can we fight two wars at once?
The Obama administration said it didn't want to.
The Obama administration basically said, we no longer need to be an army prepared to fight two wars and on two fronts at once.
I think that is completely wrongheaded.
Cat says, Ben, other than Trump toning down his style and rhetoric, what are steps the Republican Party can take to win back the suburban women vote?
Well, you know, I think that obviously President Trump is the chief factor in driving away the suburban women vote.
But I think that talking about safety and security, talking about security to suburban women is a good pitch, right?
It's how Rudy Giuliani became mayor in New York.
Suburban women, these are the security moms from 2004, they're still deeply concerned about safety, security, crime.
And these are issues, without being catastrophic about it, these are issues where Democrats are incredibly soft.
And Republicans simply are not.
And I think that would be a good way of reaching out to suburban women.
I think also that suburban women We want to know that their children are going to be protected from the predations of the radical social left.
And so reminding moms, soccer moms, that they should have autonomy in their own homes and that they will have support from their local community to do so.
I think that's worthwhile.
But again, I think that policy is largely secondary to voters because voters swing wildly on policy.
Voters are sometimes in favor of one thing.
Sometimes they're in favor of another.
Personality does matter a lot in presidential elections.
OK, here's the final question.
Nate says, you mentioned this week that there isn't, or at least you don't see evidence of a voter fraud on the left.
I ask with genuine curiosity, does the case with Brenda Snipes not count as full-fledged evidence in that regard?
Well, as I said earlier on the show, I'm coming closer to suggesting that voter fraud is a serious possibility in Florida when Democrats are sending out forms that are illegally marked in order to drive people to file forms on the on the off chance that a judge decides to rewrite election law.
So yeah, I'm a lot more skeptical that there's no such thing as quote unquote election fraud after watching all of that.
Okay, time for a thing that I like, and then we'll do a thing I hate, and then we'll take a weekend.
So things that I like.
And so I was watching the movie Tag on the Plane.
It's not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination.
It's based on a story in the Wall Street Journal a few years back about this group of friends who had basically been playing tag for 30 years.
And they spend a month every year playing tag, like trying to hide in different places to try and tag each other.
And the premise of the movie is that there's one guy who has never been tagged.
And so all of his friends are trying to sort of ambush him and then tag him.
You may kiss the bride.
I won't say it's a spectacularly funny movie.
It's not.
There are a couple of sequences though that are really quite funny.
Basically everything with Jeremy Renner is really funny.
Jeremy Renner is one of my favorite actors.
And here's a little bit of the preview.
- You may kiss the bride. - I love you. - Please tell me what's going on here.
Our group of friends has been playing the same game of tag for 30 years.
What?
For the entire month of May, every year, we play tag.
You just head-punched me!
You never know when someone's gonna pop up.
Congratulations, buddy.
You're it.
Doing great, Hannah!
Our buddy Jerry is the best that ever played.
And now he wants to retire?
Never been tagged.
Just saying.
So who's it?
Jake touched it.
Let's see here we get Jerry.
Synchronize your watches.
I don't know how to do that.
I don't wear a watch.
Time is a construct.
The parts of the movie that are really funny, basically every sequence where Jeremy Renner is trying to avoid capture by these guys is really funny.
And you'll get a few laughs out of it.
Isla Fisher, she plays basically the same part in every movie, so she's the same person that she was in Wedding Crashers, except now she's married to Andy from The Office.
But the movie is kind of fun, so if you're looking for just a throwaway movie that you get a kick out of, this one goes on the list.
Okay, time for A Thing That I Hate.
So first off, William Goldman passed away today, which is too bad.
At 87 years old, he wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, and Misery.
He also was involved, he denied this, but he was definitely involved in writing Good Will Hunting, which Matt Damon and Ben Affleck got all the credit for.
He wrote a couple of great memoirs about Hollywood, and we'll recommend them specifically next week.
He also did The Princess Bride, which is everybody's favorite movie from the 1980s.
So William Goldman, again, one of the great— and really a good analyst of his own screenwriting.
So that is too bad.
He called himself a novelist to write screenplays, but his screenplays are better than his novels.
And so you could easily do it.
Next week, I think we'll recommend a bunch of William Goldman scripts so that you can get into sort of the William Goldman over.
But it's oeuvre.
But his stuff is well worth watching.
And we bid a fond farewell to William Goldman.
In other news that annoys me, there's a story from the New York Times about how Facebook has quote-unquote fought through crisis, and it talks about how evil Facebook is.
All of this is a precursor to the Democrats trying to pressure Facebook into mirroring Democratic propaganda.
I mean, this is really what all of this is about.
And you can spot it in the New York Times piece.
There's nothing in the piece that suggests that Facebook really did anything wrong during 2015, 2016, 2017.
And yet the piece is all about how they weren't receptive enough to Democratic complaints and therefore they're evil.
So, for example, Facebook decided not to censor President Trump in 2015 when he was making comments about Muslims and Mexicans, because they said that this is basically a free speech issue.
And the New York Times says, this is just terrible.
It's just terrible.
So, for example, here's the New York Times.
They say, Donald Trump ran for president.
He described Muslim immigrants and refugees as a danger to America in December 2015, posted a statement on Facebook calling for a total and complete shutdown on Muslims entering the United States.
Mr. Zuckerberg was appalled.
He asked Sheryl Sandberg and other executives if Mr. Trump had violated Facebook's terms of service.
But some at Facebook viewed Mr. Trump's 2015 attack on Muslims as an opportunity to finally take a stand against the hate speech coursing through its platform.
But Ms.
Sandberg, who was edging back to work after the death of her husband several months earlier, delegated the matter.
to one of her kind of underlings and Monica Bickert, a former prosecutor whom she had appointed.
And then they decided that Mr. Trump's account should not be actually violated.
Joel Kaplan, who works with Facebook as sort of a policy advisor, he said it could stoke conservative backlash.
He said, don't poke the bear.
And he was, of course, right.
But the New York Times says that was wrong, that Facebook probably should have shut down Trump.
Who's then running for president?
Yeah, right, because that wouldn't have alienated every person in political America.
Then, the New York Times suggests that Facebook treated Russia as a non-problem, that they sort of made light of the Russian intervention.
First of all, again, the evidence that Russia actually swung the election via Facebook is ridiculous.
I remember we reviewed this at the time when the Senate Intelligence Committee put out all the evidence that Russia had acted with malice on Facebook, and they were putting up posts that had like 115 shares.
Come on.
Come on.
Combined total of Russian propaganda that had an impact on the election is probably less than the amount of impact that my Facebook account has on people in maybe a week.
It's just ridiculous.
And here's how the New York Times reports it.
Ms.
Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg decided to create a group called Project P for propaganda to study false news on the site, according to people involved in the discussions.
By January 2017, the group knew that the original team had only scratched the surface of Russian activity on Facebook and pressured to issue a public paper about the findings.
But Mr. Kaplan and other Facebook executives objected.
Washington was already reeling from an official finding by American intelligence agencies that Putin had personally ordered an influence campaign aimed at helping elect Mr. Trump.
If Facebook implicated Russia further, Mr. Kaplan said, Republicans would accuse the company of siding with Democrats.
And if Facebook pulled down Russians' fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived.
His own mother-in-law, Mr. Kaplan said, had followed a Facebook page created by Russian trolls.
Ms.
Sandberg sided with Mr. Kaplan and did not participate in the conversations about the public paper.
When it was published in April, the word Russia never appeared.
As it really shouldn't have, because the fact is that Russia's impact on the election via Facebook was incredibly minimal.
Incredibly minimal, if at all.
But this entire piece is designed to be about how Facebook somehow favors Republicans, or is too nice to Republicans, which is an insane, insane contention.
I know because we view the Facebook metrics every day.
But when Facebook decided to change its metrics, Like a year ago, that every conservative website took a 20 to 30 percent hit in the amount of traffic it was receiving from Facebook, while a lot of left sites were basically left alone.
But this is all setting a precedent for Democrats to try and regulate Facebook or threaten Facebook with regulation in advance of the 2020 election.
So keep your eye on the ball.
The Democrats are going to try to crack down on Facebook and shift the entire social media platform in order to take advantage of 2020.
OK, well, we will be back here next week with much, much more.
And we'll see you then.
Have a great weekend.
We'll see you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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