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Nov. 27, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:42
The Politics Of Crisis | Ep. 667
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Paul Manafort in hot water again.
The left ignores the situation on the border and they go full alarmist about global warming.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty, we have a lot to get to today.
And I'm so happy that you're here with us because it's a joyous time of the year.
But the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's, it's just it's just great.
Everybody seems to have relaxed a little bit, except everyone in politics who's losing their mind as per our usual arrangement.
We'll get to all of that in just one second.
First, Paul Manafort.
As you recall, Paul Manafort.
is the key player in the Mueller investigation.
And there are a couple of pieces of news that seem to have pretty significant impact on the Mueller investigation.
Piece of news number one came out earlier yesterday, courtesy of the Washington Post.
Paul Manafort, you'll remember, was the campaign manager for President Trump for about four months in the middle of the campaign, from like March to June.
And now, according to prosecutors, he has lied to them again.
You remember he came to a plea arrangement with them several months ago in which he was supposedly going to testify on behalf of the Mueller investigation in a variety of matters.
Well now, the Mueller investigation seems to have a problem.
Here is what the Washington Post reported.
Breached his plea agreement, accusing President Trump's former campaign chairman of lying repeatedly to them in their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Manafort denied doing so intentionally, but both sides agreed in a court filing that the U.S.
District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District should set sentencing immediately.
The apparent collapse of Manafort's cooperation agreement is the latest stunning turnaround in his case, exposing the longtime Republican consultant to at least a decade behind bars That was like an actual thing.
He wasn't charged over that, but he was wearing a jacket made of ostrich.
foreign lobbying laws and attempting to obstruct justice, as well as wearing suits made out of ostrich.
That was an actual thing.
He wasn't charged over that, but he was wearing a jacket made of ostrich.
Which, let's be frank, if you're going to be an international criminal and you don't have a suit made of ostrich, I don't know what you've been doing all your life.
The filing also indicated that Mueller's team may have lost its potentially most valuable witness in Manafort, a top campaign official present at discussions at the heart of the special counsel's mission to determine if any Americans conspired with Russia's efforts to sway the U.S.
election.
This posed a serious problem for Robert Mueller.
If your key witness is Paul Manafort, and you just accused your key witness of lying to you, and then you revoked his plea arrangement, then that would seem to kind of crush your case.
If this is the guy on whose credibility lies the entire Mueller investigation itself, and the key elements of the Mueller investigation, well, this is a pretty big problem for you.
If you've been building a case against Michael Corleone, and it turns out that your key witness You now have to withdraw because he's been lying to you.
It's going to be hard to convict Michael Corleone unless, as it turns out, there is a second story.
So here is the second story.
This one, not so good for Team Trump.
So according to The Guardian, which has been the leak source for a lot of Mueller investigation-related stuff that is damaging to the Trump administration, here is what The Guardian reports.
And this is a bombshell.
Donald Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London and visited around the time he joined the Trump campaign, The Guardian has been told.
Now, why is this important?
Well, because Julian Assange is the WikiLeaks guy.
WikiLeaks is a Russian front group.
Russia was hacking Hillary Clinton's email and hacking the DNC, and then taking all of that email and dumping it to WikiLeaks, who was dumping it in public.
And the accusation all along has been that the Trump campaign was coordinating in the release of the WikiLeaks emails and the WikiLeaks documents in order to sink Hillary Clinton's campaign.
So, until now, there was no open collaboration, or any collaboration of any sort, really, between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks.
The closest connection was Roger Stone, who was under investigation by the Mueller investigation, and that is because Roger Stone had been sort of bragging to various folks that he was talking with WikiLeaks.
He maintains that WikiLeaks did not Advance him any information before it was publicly released.
CNN had reported about a year ago, wrongly, that Donald Trump Jr.
had been coordinating with WikiLeaks.
They had no evidence of that.
Well now, maybe here's the bombshell that the Democrats and the media have been looking for.
Sources have said that Paul Manafort went to see Julian Assange in 2013, 2015, and in spring 2016.
During the period when he was made a key figure in Trump's push for the White House.
It is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed, but the last apparent meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller.
The special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
A well-placed source, and here's where things start to get dicey.
A well-placed source has told The Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016.
We don't know who the well-placed source is.
We don't know what that means.
We don't know whether the source is coming from the Russian camp, from the Assange camp, from the Mueller camp.
We do not know.
Months later, WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.
We also don't know, by the way, about the timing.
The reason we don't know about the timing is because he didn't only see Assange once.
Even according to these sources, Assange was met by Manafort in 2013 when he was working with the government of Ukraine, which was then sort of a puppet government for the Russians apparently, 2015, and in spring 2016.
So he visited three times.
Two of those times he was not in the pay of the Trump campaign.
So is it possible that he was still visiting with Assange about Russia-related stuff that was not campaign-related?
That is possible as well.
Manafort denies involvement in the hack.
He says the claim is 100% false.
His lawyers have declined to answer the Guardian's questions about the visits.
In a series of tweets, WikiLeaks said Assange and Manafort had not met.
Assange describes the story as a hoax.
Well, just because Assange says something doesn't mean that it's an actual thing, right?
It is not clear that Assange is a truth teller.
In fact, it's pretty clear that he is not.
Manafort was jailed this year and was thought to have become a star cooperator in the Mueller inquiry.
On Monday, Mueller said Manafort had repeatedly lied to the FBI despite agreeing to cooperate two months ago in a plea deal.
According to a court document, Manafort had committed crimes and lies on a variety of subject matters.
This was always the real question about story number one that we discussed earlier, Manafort lying to Muller.
Why would Muller go out of his way to revoke a plea arrangement that cast his star witness in a credibility problem, that created a credibility problem for his star witness?
Well, the answer could be that maybe the credibility problem for his star witness is actually not a problem for the Mueller investigation, if it turns out that he's basically traded Manafort's credibility for evidence of Manafort actively colluding with the Russians.
So he doesn't need Manafort anymore, is the idea.
Now he no longer needs Manafort's testimony.
Instead, he's got Assange.
Rumor that has been going around has been reported upon that Assange is going to be indicted by the U.S.
government on some matter.
It is not clear what that matter is.
He's not emerging from the Ecuadorian embassy anytime soon to tell us exactly.
But all of this makes things a lot dicier for Team Trump than things were yesterday at this time.
Now, does this mean anything is going to materialize?
No, you still have to connect all the dots.
Let's say that Manafort met with Assange.
So we have several questions.
One, did Manafort meet with Assange?
Guardian says yes.
We don't know.
2.
What exactly did they meet about?
Guardian suggests that it was about the campaign.
But again, Manafort had met with Assange several times before.
Not clear that it was about the campaign.
3.
Did Trump know that his own guy was meeting with Assange?
That is not clear either. 4.
Did Manafort actively collaborate with Assange in the release of the WikiLeaks emails, especially since most of the key WikiLeaks emails came out long after Manafort left the campaign?
So there's still a bunch of questions here, and the media are jumping to the conclusion that all the dots have now been connected, and therefore Trump is guilty of something.
But Trump had to know stuff.
People in his campaign had to know stuff.
In order for anything to be brought against Trump himself.
Apparently, according to The Guardian, Manafort's 2016 visit to Assange lasted about 40 minutes.
One source said, adding, Visitors normally register with embassy security guards and show their passports.
Sources in Ecuador, however, say Manafort was not logged, which is really weird.
Why exactly would Manafort not be logged by the Ecuadorian embassy?
Embassy staff were aware only later of the potential significance So, again, we still have a lot of questions that have to be answered about all of this.
Again, we still have a lot of questions that have to be answered about all of this.
According to sources, Manafort's acquaintance with Assange goes back at least five years to late 2012 or 2013 when the American was working in Ukraine and advising its Moscow friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych.
Why Manafort might have sought out Assange in 2013 is unclear.
So a lot of this is not clear at this point, but that's not going to stop people from immediately connecting all the dots.
So we will see how all of this plays out in real time.
Meanwhile, the chaos on the border continues to bewilder folks on the left, and they're trying to now spin the story that President Trump is cruel and inhumane to the people on the border in a way that no one has been historically.
This seems unlikely.
And when I say unlikely, I mean it seems untrue, because as it turns out, Using tear gas against people who are attempting to break through the border has been an extraordinarily common occurrence.
It happened during Obama's presidency many, many, many times.
According to the Washington Times, the same tear gas agent the Trump administration is taking heat for deploying against a border mob this weekend is actually used fairly frequently, including more than once a month during the later years of President Barack Obama's administration, according to Homeland Security data.
U.S.
Customs and Border Protection has used two chlorobenzidiline melaninitrile, or CS, since 2010 and deployed it 26 times in fiscal year 2012 and 27 times in 2013.
The use dropped after that but was still deployed three times in 2016.
Border authorities also use another agent, pepper spray, frequently, including a decade-high record of 151 times in 2013, also under President Obama.
So, as usual, when it comes to the unprecedented nature of President Trump's activity, there's precedent.
As it turns out, the Obama administration did this kind of stuff all the time, but that didn't stop Democrats from claiming that Trump had done something wild and unprecedented here.
Sheer panic about the border.
Sheer panic.
It's so funny.
All the folks on the left who accuse Republicans of climate change denialism, which we'll get to in just a few minutes, all those folks are engaged in border denialism on a routine basis.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, the Democrats continue to claim that President Trump's use of tear gas on the border, his administration's use of tear gas, is just the worst thing ever.
And they're making up stories now.
They're trying to come up with a reason why it's just terrible what happened on the border.
But the reason can't be people trying to storm the border and throw rocks at border agents.
That can't be.
It's not those people's fault.
It's Trump's fault.
Always remember, it is Trump's fault.
Orange man bad, as they say on the interwebs.
So, President Trump was asked about this, and in typical Trumpian fashion, he said the tear gas is extremely safe, and then he talked about a lighter version of tear gas that doesn't exist.
So here is the President of the United States.
First of all, the tear gas is a very minor form of the tear gas itself.
It's very safe.
The ones that were suffering to a certain extent were the people that were putting it out there.
But it's very safe.
But you really say, why is a parent running up into an area where they know the tear gas is forming and it's going to be formed and they're running up with a child?
And in some cases, you know, they're not the parents.
These are people, they call them grabbers.
They grab a child because they think they're going to have a certain, uh, they're going to have a certain status by having a child.
You know, you have certain advantages in terms of our crazy laws that frankly, Congress should be changing.
You know, if you change the laws, you wouldn't be having this problem.
And I think the funding of the wall right now is, uh, never looked better.
Okay, so I think a lot of what President Trump has to say here is basically correct.
Although, I don't know about a lighter form of tear gas.
I've never heard of such a thing.
And I don't know that they actually call people grabbers.
I'd never heard that one before either.
Maybe I'm mistaken.
Whenever President Trump talks about grabbing, I think of something else.
In any case, President Trump is not wrong on the policy merits here.
When people throw rocks at you, then you are allowed to defend yourself.
And you are defending yourself not by shooting people, not by even using rubber bullets, but instead by using tear gas.
Border Patrol chief was asked about all of this on CNN.
This is Kevin McAleenan, who's the commissioner of U.S.
Customs and Border Protection, and Chris Cuomo, who's a block of wood.
And Chris Cuomo asked Kevin McAleenan about the use of tear gas, and Kevin McAleenan's like, dude, because people throw rocks at us.
What do you want from me?
Unfortunately, the migrants pushed through them, overwhelmed them, went around them, and down through the Tijuana River Channel, and then tried to enter the U.S.
unlawfully through the southbound lanes of the port of entry.
We responded and prevented that access at the border line.
They then went back around San Ysidro and then started to look for a weak spot in the international border fence on the east side of San Ysidro.
At several points, they tried to tear down parts of the wall and make a large group entry.
And it was in those engagements where people started throwing rocks, assaulting our agents.
We had four agents hit with rocks.
Thankfully, they were wearing protective gear.
We don't have any serious injuries.
But they did have to respond to resolve those assaultive engagements as safely as possible with less lethal pepper ball spray, as well as CS gas.
Tear gas.
Yes, tear gas.
Chris Cuomo.
Yes, that's what tear gas is.
Block of wood.
Human.
So, in any case, this obviously is not a misuse of resources.
This obviously is what has to be done to quell the border situation.
But this does not stop Democrats from issuing a bunch of idiotic statements about the situation at the border.
I mean, fully idiotic.
Again, folks on the left want to talk about climate change.
Nihilism.
We'll get to that issue because there's a climate report the left is going crazy over.
When we're talking about denialism on an issue, border denialism is a form of denialism.
Denying that there is a problem when people rush the border, throw rocks at agents, and try to break through the southbound lanes of the port of entry.
I don't understand why you would do that other than you have a political agenda.
So here's what the Democrats had to say about this.
Joaquin Castro, who's a representative in Texas, who for some odd reason thinks he should run for president, he told Chris Hayes, who is not in fact Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, he told... by the way, that's not a rip on what these people look like.
It's just there's one pair of glasses at MSNBC.
It's a black framed pair of glasses, like black rimmed glasses.
And every single person puts them on and looks the same on MSNBC.
This is the rule on MSNBC.
You actually can't sit behind the anchor's desk unless you wear the same pair of glasses.
In any case, Joaquin Castro talking to Chris Hayes, and Joaquin Castro says, all this stuff that's happening at the border, it's Trump's fault.
Why?
Well, explain it, Joaquin.
Well, like a lot of Americans, I was horrified to see women and children, these are folk, babies in diapers, barefoot, being gassed.
And I think Americans were horrified at the idea of agents of the United States government making a decision to use tear gas on on kids that are two or three years old.
And as you mentioned, this was a self-created, chaotic situation by the president.
He has used migrants from day one, even before he became president, during the campaign, as the number one political boogeyman for him.
He has weaponized resentment and fear of migrants, basically to his political benefit.
And that's why you see him do a lot of things that he does with respect to migration and immigration. - Okay, I love this on MSNBC, The Chiron's has a spectacle of cruelty, a spectacle of cruelty.
And then Joaquin Castro saying, they're firing tear gas at babies.
Well, no, they're firing tear gas at people who are throwing rocks at them and trying to cross the border illegally.
And if those people are carrying babies, that seems to me the fault of the people who carry babies into what seems to be a quasi war zone.
Right.
I mean, if you if I have a two and a half year old child, I would not bring my two-and-a-half-year-old child to a border to try and break through illegally, knowing that people on the other side were going to fire tear gas, which has, again, happened dozens and dozens and dozens of times per year, including under President Obama.
So this is idiocy.
My favorite idiotic comment of the day on the border situation came courtesy of Andrea Mitchell, again, of MSNBC.
This is pretty spectacular stuff.
You say nothing of the demonizing of all of this by calling them a caravan and describing them based on no observable facts.
Unknown Middle Easterners without any evidence of that.
500 murderers in the midst, etc.
Yeah.
OK, this is so unbelievably stupid.
So here is why this is so stupid.
All you have to do, it's amazing.
People don't know how to use Google.
I'm serious.
People on the left, I don't know, in the media, like Google, in the words of our friend, Cenk Uygur, Google it.
It's really not difficult to actually Google things.
Okay, so for example, watch as I Google this.
See my fingers here?
My fingers are currently typing migrant caravan.
Okay?
Migrant caravan.
And now I'm going to use the tools here on Google, and I'm going to change the date range to 1-1-2014.
And let's see if before that anyone had ever used the language of a migrant caravan.
Why, look!
The first result from the Daily Beast.
The Department of Homeland Security is reportedly tracking a new migrant caravan that is set to leave El Salvador next week, 2011.
How about this one from June 13, 2013 from 850 WFTL?
The migrant caravan reformed after Mexican authorities denied entry to large groups on this bridge at the border.
How about this one from NBC Philadelphia?
February 1st, 2001.
Large crowds on both sides of the border near San Ysidro and Tijuana marched in support of the migrant caravan.
Why, it seems that the language of migrants... This one's from the New York Times, 2006.
New migrant caravans trek north.
Wow.
It's almost as though President Trump did not actually come up with the term migrant caravan.
And you're stupid if you think he did.
Almost as though that is the case, and that you should have used your Google skills if you have them.
Okay, I have to admit, that one is pretty bad.
Wait until you hear Bernie Sanders and Maxine Waters' take on this thing.
You want to know why people are alienated by the left when it comes to national security?
This would be the reason why people are alienated by the left when it comes to national security.
The dumbest statements of the day with regard to the border caravan were reserved for Bernie Sanders and Maxine Waters.
Yes, even stupider than Andrea Mitchell saying that President Trump using the word caravan is demonizing immigrants.
Well, I don't know.
Now it's a running three-way gun battle on the dumbest comment.
Alison Camerata had one on CNN, Bernie Sanders had one, and Maxine Waters had one.
So let's spin the wheel of dumb.
Here we go.
Okay, now let's start with Alison Camerata.
So Alison Camerata made the suggestion on CNN that because people stormed the border, this is why we don't need a wall.
See if you can follow that logic.
That makes sense.
Because someone broke into your house, you don't need a front door, obviously.
They would have broken in if you even didn't have a front door.
So why do you have a front door?
What's the point of the front door, you idiot?
Why are you doing that?
You're the kind of person where somebody broke into your house and you got four more locks on your door.
Well, didn't you have a lock on your door in the first place?
What are four more locks going to do?
If this does not seem to follow, that's because it's dumb.
So here's Alison Camerado on CNN saying something that is not particularly intelligent.
As unfortunate as this incident is, I'm not sure that it proves that we need a border wall.
In fact, it's the opposite.
The border worked.
Border security here worked.
So however many people rushed the border, 39 were arrested.
They're going to be deported.
No one breached the border.
So, shutting down the border worked, and it also proves that we don't need, I think, a border wall, because the migrants went out of their way to go to the Tijuana entrance, because the rest of the border was considered too hazardous, too dangerous to cross, so they went an extra hundreds of miles to the port of entry of Tijuana, because they considered that the easiest.
So, in other words, the system is actually working.
Hmm.
Interesting.
Interesting take, Allison Camarata.
So we don't need a border wall because people tried to break through the border wall and went to Tijuana because it was easier.
Well, actually, no, they went to Tijuana because they wanted the publicity.
And a huge number of people do cross the unguarded portions of the U.S.-Mexico border.
And as you may have noticed, Scaling the wall was significantly less successful than them trying to actually break through just the southern lanes of traffic.
So, walls tend to make people go around the walls.
That's why they're there.
Okay, so that was, that was dumb take number one.
Dumb take number two.
Bernie Sanders.
He has a take.
A very interesting take.
And his take is that President Trump only wants to enforce the border because of fascism.
Now- Look at the nature of this president.
Yeah, it's okay, we can play him.
Who I think has strong authoritarian tendencies, who seems to love people like Mr. Putin and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and the leader of North Korea.
I worry very much about for the first time using the military in that way in this country.
So I think that is a very legitimate concern.
Okay, so he's worried that if we send troops to our border to defend our border, that's fascism, because it's a crackdown on people who are not citizens trying to get into the country, as opposed to countries that Bernie Sanders has been fond of in the past, like Venezuela and Cuba and the USSR.
Those were not fascist, because there, they had walls to keep people in.
But that wasn't fascist.
Bernie Sanders doing his best to say a dumb thing.
Also, Maxine Waters, who is going to be the head of the House Financial Services Committee, maybe, which is...
Just horrifying in every way.
Last time she was deeply involved in the House Financial Services Committee, she proceeded to attempt to drive cash to her husband's bank.
Here is Maxine Waters, a woman who knows a lot about failure to abide by the law, both herself and with regard to the L.A.
riots, which she called an L.A.
uprising, explaining that the border chaos is a political ploy by Trump.
This is what he does.
I mean, Trump's a magical, magical man.
President Trump went down to that border.
And what he did is he just, he's very stealthy.
This is one thing we know about President Trump.
The dude doesn't draw any attention.
I mean, he is just, he's a master of disguise.
President Trump took off his hair and he put on a beard and Groucho Marx glasses.
And then he strode into the middle of the migrant caravan.
He said, guys, I need you to do something for me.
Please try to break through the border, por favor.
That's exactly how it went.
Here's Maxine Waters explaining how that went.
I am very saddened to see this situation with desperate people and all of this being the political ploy of the President of the United States of America.
He made this the central part of his platform.
Uh, that he was going to do something about these migrants who are coming here.
He called them killers and rapists and, uh, he certainly did stoke a lot of fear about, uh, these migrants who are trying to get in.
And so he promised the American people that he was going to make Mexico pay for it all, that we would not have to pay a dime for it.
And now we have this chaos.
That's what he wants.
Oh, as opposed to when there was chaos on the border when Obama was president, which I recall, and you recall, and everybody recalls.
So, running gun battle for dumbest thing to be said about the border situation.
Just wonderful stuff.
My favorite part of all of this is that awkward time an MSNBC reporter actually revealed that the caravan was not full of suffering women and children, that it was a bunch of young men who were looking for economic opportunity.
That's when all this got real awkward.
So you had MSNBC and CNN filled to the brim with commentators and congresspeople saying, this is all Trump's fault.
And then it got real awkward because a reporter at MSNBC down there was like, um, guys, Trump's kind of not wrong about all this stuff.
The truth is, the majority of the people that are part of this caravan, especially outside, if we can make our way all the way over there, we'll show you, the majority of them are men.
So, when this becomes a polarized political issue in the United States, you have people on one side that point and say, there are women and children here, and that is true, and then there are others who point and say, these are men that are trying to cross the border, and that's true too.
From what we've seen, the majority are actually men.
OK, oops, whoopsie-doo.
Yeah, he said the unsayable.
But again, when it comes to the border, it's the Democrats who are the denialists.
Now, in a second, we're going to talk about climate change denialism, because this is the new charge the left has been throwing at everybody on the right.
The idea is that you are a climate change denier if you disagree with their prospective solutions, which involve massive damage to the world economy and particularly the United States economy in service to something.
It is not clear by any stretch of the imagination, even from the proponents of the measures that are now being promoted by a lot of these folks, that these measures will actually succeed in curbing global warming in any serious way.
So while the left is completely focused on denying what's happening at the border and blaming Trump for stuff that's been going on for, you know, our entire life, now they are also claiming that everybody on the right is a climate change denier.
Ooh, a denier.
Now, I hate the language that is used with regard to climate change deniers because Obviously, it's supposed to be reminiscent of Holocaust denialism, like you're denying an established fact that millions of people died in the Holocaust.
You're just like those people.
And with the same grave consequences.
Okay, we're gonna need to be clear about what you mean by denial of climate change.
Are we denying the climate changes at all?
No one denies the climate changes at all.
Are we denying that the world has gotten on average warmer over time, over the last 150 years or so?
Very few people deny that.
Are we denying that man-made emissions have something to do with that?
Very few people deny that.
Are we denying that the majority of those changes are coming because of man-related activities?
A minority would probably, a strong minority might deny that, but I would say a strong majority probably supports that, even among people who happen to be on the right.
But, you can acknowledge all those things, and then if you say, but I don't want a massive carbon tax, nor do I think this is a crisis necessitating the death of the world economy, then it's like, oh, you're a denier.
Because what I'm really denying, what I'm really denying, is that your solution is the proper solution.
Folks on the left, I don't think that your solution is the right solution.
In fact, I think that you are alarmist.
I think that you are creating alarm around a problem that is not, in fact, as extraordinarily dire as you make it out to be.
Are there costs to global warming?
Sure.
Are those costs being wildly exaggerated for political purposes by folks on the left?
You bet your ass they are.
So there's a new study out, and this new study suggests millions will die thanks to climate change.
And this leads all the people in the Democratic caucus to tweet out, you don't care if millions of people die.
Okay, let me just tell you.
You already said we're going to die because of net neutrality.
You already said the tax cuts were going to kill us.
You already said that revoking parts of Obamacare, that was going to kill millions.
And we're already dead like three times over.
How many times do we need to die?
Like we're all going to die.
So I've died like four times.
Am I a cat here?
Like I can't actually die that many times it turns out.
And now they're citing this new federal study that has come out that supposedly shows that we are all going to die.
Why?
Well because there is a brand new report from the CDC And it confirms that climate change is going to kill thousands of people.
Thousands of humans will die.
OK, so how do we know that lots of people are going to die?
Let me give you the ridiculous math behind some of these things.
So they say, for example, that the consensus is that over the next century, the water level could rise.
Not will, could.
All the modeling so far has been wrong.
That it could rise by five feet in certain areas of the United States, like three feet in Los Angeles.
The general water levels could rise.
Well, number one, the water level rises that have been forecast so far have not actually been accurate.
Number two, if that happens over the course of a century, you think people might move their houses?
You think maybe people might move inland?
You know, like they have over the course of time?
That people might adapt to their climate because human beings are adaptable creatures?
I'm always bewildered by this idea that humans can't move.
I mean, how do you think people got to America?
How do you think people got to different parts of the globe?
In any case, this is my favorite part.
The people on the left are taking the most extraordinary claims of this study, and then they are claiming that this is evidence that the National Climate Assessment means that we're all going to die.
So, CNN put out this statistic.
You've seen it in all the headlines.
It's on the front page of the New York Times.
There is a possibility of a 10% loss in GDP due to climate change by 2100.
Ooh, 10% loss in GDP in climate change by 2100.
Now, that 10% loss does not actually envision a 10% loss from our current global GDP.
It is a 10% lower GDP than would otherwise be the case without global warming in 100 years.
In 100 years, our GDP is going to be pretty freaking amazing, right?
Just by global trends, our GDP is going to be extraordinary.
But Here's what's even weirder.
It turns out that the 10% GDP number is not consistent with the physical science part of the report.
It is a political conclusion buried in Chapter 29 of the report, according to Roger Pilkey, who is author of The Edge, The Honest Broker and The Climate Fix.
So here is what he says.
He says that it is it represents a temperature change two times the already implausible RCP 8.5 scenario.
So all of these climate change reports rely on a variety of scenarios.
What they say is we don't know where this is going.
And so they present a bunch of scenarios.
They present the observed scenario, which basically has mirrored the lowest scenario thus far.
And then they present the The lower scenario, which is RCP 4.5, and the higher scenario, which is RCP 8.5.
But the RCP 8.5 is associated with only a 4 degree Celsius temperature change over the course of the next century.
So how exactly are they coming to this 10% figure?
They are doubling that figure.
They're doubling it.
They're coming up with a number that is double what their own report says.
It's really astonishing.
I mean, astonishing stuff.
So, according to Pilkey, if the experts are going to demand they be trusted, their numbers should add up right here.
They don't.
One way to ensure robust assessments is to invite critical voices rather than exclude them.
This error was easily preventable.
But that idea that 10% is going to be knocked off the GDP is just not true.
It's not even true according to the report itself.
It was promoted by people.
But again, this was a complete misread of the scientific part of the report.
That's not the only misread.
They say thousands will die.
Why?
Because they say that thanks to climate change, 26,000 more people will commit suicide by 2050.
This is in the report.
How do they know that you're going to kill yourself because it's hot outside?
According to Robinson Mayer over at The Atlantic, unusually hot days have profound effects on mental health and human physiology.
Suicide is one of the least understood phenomena in social science.
It's very difficult to link social forces to suicide.
It's difficult to link bullying to suicide.
It's difficult to link poverty to suicide.
It's difficult to link race to suicide.
It is very difficult to find out where suicide is.
But this report says that 26,000 more people will kill themselves by 2050 because it's hot outside.
Forgive me if I go, no, not so much.
Now, there's a difference between acknowledging the reality of climate change and trying to figure out what are the best measures and when would those measures kick in and denying climate change itself.
And I think the simple-minded version here is to say climate change isn't happening or it's not man-caused.
I'm not suggesting any of that.
So I am not, in fact, a climate denier.
But if you are going to make claims, those claims should be backed by science and the measures that you are projecting out should have some bearing on what exactly you are seeking to prevent.
I'll get to all that in just one second.
But first, so let me start by showing you what President Trump had to say.
Here's what President Trump had to say about the climate change report released by his own scientists.
Again, these scientists are drawing political conclusions.
The same thing happened with the IPCC report, the International Panel on Social Science.
All that happened on climate change.
All of that happened months ago.
And we went through that report like in full on the show then.
They're doing the same thing now.
And Trump's like, listen, a lot of this stuff is political.
And again, he's not wrong.
I don't believe it.
No, no, I don't believe it.
And here's the other thing.
You're going to have to have China and Japan and all of Asia and all of these other countries, you know, addresses our country.
Right now, we're at the cleanest we've ever been.
And that's very important to me.
But if we're clean, but every other place on Earth is dirty, that's not so good.
So I want clean air.
I want clean water.
Very important.
OK, well, he's not saying anything wrong here, and he is correct that if the United States were to cut emissions, which we have been, we were the single largest reducers of emissions last year.
If we were to cut emissions by ourselves, you know what happened to global warming?
Pretty much nothing, because China is still the leading emitter on planet Earth.
India is a leading emitter.
Russia is a leading emitter.
There are lots of developing countries that are leading emitters.
China, by the way, I love that everybody's like, well, China signed on to the Paris Accords and the United States didn't.
The United States reduced its emissions last year.
You know what China did?
They increased their emissions last year.
They've been increasing their emissions every year.
They are planning to increase their emissions all the way up till 2030 for another 12 years minimum.
But this doesn't stop Anderson Cooper from CNN saying, you know, maybe President Trump, I love the sneering here.
Maybe President Trump should check out climate change kids because he's like a child.
He doesn't understand climate change.
The President of the United States seems to be honestly believing that global warming means it never gets cold anywhere.
NASA has a good explanation of the difference between weather and climate on its website, its website for children.
So we're just suggesting, Mr. President, if you don't want to believe science or the 1,600-page report your team tried to slip past the American public on Friday, maybe just start with climatekids.nasa.gov.
OK, do you think that Anderson Cooper read that 1600 page report?
Do you think that Anderson Cooper holds by his rule of not reporting weather as climate?
Because it seems like every time there's a hurricane, we hear from the left that this is a this is a climate change issue, as opposed to, you know, a weather event.
Every time it is extraordinarily hot in California, like, ooh, climate change.
Right, so the media have been complicit in the conflation of weather and climate.
Weather is a trend or pattern over time.
Climate, I mean, that is climate.
Weather is individual climate events, right?
It's an individual event.
It's hot outside today.
This is not evidence of a trend over time.
It's a data point.
In any case, The left is in the habit of exaggerating these reports and picking out the most alarmist headlines, which then are never met.
What's fascinating about this is if folks on the left really wanted us to take climate change seriously, they'd be moderate in their assessments.
They would say, OK, here's the moderate case, and then here's what we should do to prevent the moderate case from happening.
Instead, they pick the most wild, outlying, alarmist predictions, like 10% loss of GDP by 2100.
They're like, that, that's what's going to happen.
Oh, well, 30,000 people are going to commit suicide because it's hot outside.
And this is where they go.
They pick the most alarmist prediction, and then when it doesn't materialize, and the right goes, hey, you know, you guys have been doing this crap for like 20 years.
Al Gore claimed that all the polar ice caps were going to be gone, like, five years ago.
They're not gone.
And then the left's like, well, that's because you don't take this stuff seriously.
How about if you just told us what your moderate prediction was that you can fulfill, and then I could take seriously the rest of your predictions?
Again, the IPCC has consistently revised downward its estimates of impending doom.
They had an AR5 report in 2014.
According to that report, the level of climate change observed was going to be higher than it was in their recent IPCC report.
And also, we have to actually determine how much damage is going to be done.
As I mentioned on the show before, there's a guy named William Nordhaus at Yale.
The political left celebrated him because he won the Nobel Prize in Economics this year.
It was supposed to be a slap in the face to the Trump administration, but Nordhaus' work suggests that the IPCC alarmism is just wrong.
He himself argues the optimal trajectory for climate would end with a 3.5 degree Celsius increase in degrees in global temperature by 2100, not 1.5 degrees or even 2 degrees.
He says that the international target for climate change with a limit of 2 degrees Celsius is infeasible.
He says the target of 2.5 degrees Celsius is technically feasible, but would require extreme and virtually universal global policy measures in the near future.
He said if we tried to hold to 2.5 degrees Celsius, it could avert $91 trillion of damage, but would cost $134 trillion in economic damage.
When the left says, well, if we just take a few minor economic fixes here, that'll fix... Nope.
Nope, it won't.
It won't.
If their most alarmist predictions are true, what they're really calling for is a complete breakdown of the world economy.
So forget about a 10% reduction in GDP by 2100, we're talking about a 50% reduction in GDP like now.
Right?
That's what they're actually talking about if they believe their own worst case assessments.
All this is, again, the alarmism is what's killing the case for climate change, and it's why people don't believe the worst.
Because the worst has not materialized.
Speaking of which, we keep hearing about carbon taxes from the left.
Well, what we really need here is carbon taxes.
Carbon taxes are definitely going to fix everything.
Well, Orrin Kass talked about climate taxes.
Orrin Kass, the Manhattan Institute, we've had him as a guest on the program.
He talked about carbon taxes back in 2015 in National Affairs.
Here's what he wrote.
An efficient tax on carbon emissions would require a valid estimate for the cost such emissions impose on society.
But any estimate of the social cost of carbon, which is the marginal cost of an additional ton of CO2, involves what economists call an integrated assessment model that stacks assumptions upon assumptions upon assumptions.
The result of such modeling is not much better than a guess.
Calling these models close to useless, says MIT economist Robert Pindick, is generous.
To model a relationship between carbon emissions and costs, IAMs, this would be the integrated assessment models, must first assume a climate sensitivity.
That is how quickly the climate will respond to a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The IPCC offers a range of assumptions, from 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius, and that range has actually grown wider in recent years.
So in order for us to assess the cost, we have to determine how sensitive is the climate, we have to determine how big the damage is going to be from a climate change, And that, in turn, actually depends on the level of damage to be done to existing structures.
So, for example, we've seen a lot of stories in the recent past.
Hurricanes are becoming more financially ruinous.
Hurricanes are doing more damage.
Well, maybe it's not that hurricanes are doing more damage.
Maybe it's there's more stuff in the way.
Really?
Like, if you're building more expensive stuff and then the hurricane tears down more expensive stuff, it turns out it's a more expensive storm.
And this is particularly true on the coast, where the hurricanes happen.
The rebuilding of New Orleans is a perfectly great example of what we should not be doing as a society in the aftermath of a massive natural disaster.
Like, you know what we should do?
Right where there was a giant levee breach, and thousands of people died, we should probably build that city right back up again.
Instead of saying, well, you know what?
Why don't we do what people have historically done, when their town gets washed out, and, you know, not build a town there again.
Instead, we decide to rebuild New Orleans, and then when the levees are breached again in 20 years, we'll talk about climate change again, instead of recognizing that certain eventualities are happening to the climate, and perhaps the best mitigation factor would be to take other measures.
And maybe the best innovation would actually be a better way of curbing carbon emissions.
So as I talked about yesterday on the program a little bit, when it comes to carbon emissions, it seems worthwhile to discuss the fact that our carbon emissions have dropped radically in the United States thanks to fracking, which the left hates.
Natural gas has taken over for coal, which the left hates.
Pick a solution.
If you actually care about this stuff, you have to be in favor of fracking.
If you care about this stuff, You have to be in favor of nuclear power.
Instead, what the left really wants is a bunch of redistribution of wealth and alarmism in order to push for redistribution of wealth.
Why do you think we don't trust you?
If you want to base this on moderate assessments you can fulfill, then we can discuss solutions and costs and benefits.
But if you just say, climate change is happening, and if you deny that we ought to have a massive global carbon tax that no one else will apply except the United States, then you are a denier.
Then you don't go after yourself, dude, because honestly, that has no relation to reality.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I like and then a couple of things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
We won't do a couple, do one.
So, there's a new movie from the Coen brothers on Netflix.
I do love that Netflix is actually now commissioning Full-scale films that are interesting.
So I am not the world's biggest Coen Brothers fan.
I like No Country for Old Men.
I like Fargo.
But I'm not the hugest Coen Brothers fan by any stretch of the imagination.
They have a new kind of compendium film out called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
And it's basically six short stories that have no relation to each other, except that they all happen in the Old West.
Some of the stories are good.
Some of them are bad.
Some of them are funny.
Some of them are kind of tragic.
All of them are basically the Coen brothers' nihilistic sensibility.
Life doesn't mean anything and then you die.
So that's kind of messed up, but there's some elements of it that are really great.
The opener, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a lot of people don't like it.
I thought it was really funny as a parody of Westerns.
Here's a little bit of the preview of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs People are so easily distracted.
So I'm the distractor with a little story.
People can't get enough of them.
Because, well, they connect the stories to themselves, I suppose.
And we all love hearing about ourselves.
So long as the people in the stories are us.
But not us.
This'll tell the tale.
So some of this is really good.
You know, it's frustrating because some of these are really not great, but there are elements of this that are pretty... I would say of the six stories that it tells, three of them are good and three of them are really mediocre.
But if you have a short attention span, it's really kind of fantastic.
And it's cool that Netflix is commissioning creative projects like this.
So that's kind of neat.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Thing that I hate, number one, you know, there are a bunch of people who say that when it comes to transgenderism and the debate about use of pronouns and the definition of gender and all this stuff, that it has no real world effects.
Yesterday, I told you the story of what happened in a local gym near me, where a bunch of Orthodox Jewish women go because they want gender segregation.
For Jewish law reasons and for modesty reasons, they don't want to exercise in front of men, nor do they want to see naked men or anything of the like.
A transgender woman came into the locker room, refused to go into the private area and basically threatened to sue if they did not allow this man to unclothe himself in front of these Orthodox women.
The Orthodox women started dropping their memberships.
The gym could do nothing about it because they were afraid of legal liability.
There are real world consequences to this kind of stuff.
And we talked yesterday about trying to force doctors to perform surgeries That have no actual bearing on health or not, right?
I mean, which is a violation of the Hippocratic Oath.
Well, now there's another story that is just a shocking story from Walt Heyer of The Federalist.
He reports about a Texas divorce case, which now pits a mother who dresses her six-year-old male child, James, as a girl, and calls him Luna, against James' father, whom she's accusing of child abuse for refusing to treat James as a girl.
So the kid's six years old, and mom wants James to be Luna.
James wants to be James when he's with dad.
But weirdly enough, he wants to be Luna when he's with mom, because mom wants him to be Luna.
Now mom is trying to sue dad and claim child abuse, because dad won't go along with this nonsense.
This stuff is going to become more and more common.
There are real-world consequences to all of these discussions.
It's so funny.
For the left, it's always like, well, what if we just change this fundamental social standard?
This won't hurt you in any way.
We heard this about gay marriage, right?
Gay marriage won't hurt you in any way.
You're married to a woman.
You're a man, you're married to a woman.
How does my gay marriage hurt you?
I said, well, it doesn't, but it does change the social standard of what marriage is and how we teach marriage to kids.
And that sort of teaching does have implications for the behavior of children.
If I don't want my kid to engage in a same sex relationship because I'm the parent and I think it is more healthy to engage in a heterosexual relationship with someone that they can have kids with.
Right, because I think that that is the ideal.
And now I'm supposed to teach my kids something?
That has a public policy ramification for me.
It has a public policy ramification for me if you now want me to invite a gay couple into my synagogue, violating my religious scruples, or into my religious school, violating my religious scruples, right?
There are public policy consequences to hot-button social issues.
Pretending otherwise is just foolishness.
Again, if you just wanted to say, gay people get married, there's no imposition on anybody else, if that's a rule you want to hold to, I am all with it, man.
Do whatever you want to do.
You want to go to your church, your liberal church, and get married to a member of the same sex?
Your problem.
It's a free country.
I don't really care.
I mean, I care on a religious level, but on a public policy level, certainly do not care.
But I am not going to stand by while you change full-scale social standards and then mandate that I teach my child something.
This is why I always say, when it comes to transgender folks, If I'm in a conversation with a transgender person, I'm not going out of my way to use their biological sex when I talk with them.
But if you're asking me about public policy, I'm not going to lie and pretend that biological sex does not exist.
And people take this as a lack of sympathy for folks who are transgender.
It's not a lack of sympathy for folks who are transgender.
These people are suffering.
These people have a serious, serious disorder.
But it is also not helpful to engage a country in a wide scale violation of biological standards in order to supposedly quash the feelings hurt that people are feeling because of the disorder.
You can't do that.
And I love the assumption that because I disagree with you about the forced feeding of gender terminology, because I disagree with you about the violation of basic freedoms for hundreds of millions of people in favor of a false perception of reality of a few, that because this is the case, I somehow lack sympathy for people who are suffering.
It's just that there is no evidence of that whatsoever.
Okay, so I'll tell the story in the least indicative way.
So I spoke at a university pretty recently, in the last few months.
And at this university, there was an exchange that took place where a transgender person came up and asked about transgenderism.
And we had this exchange, and the transgender person, who's a transgender woman, meaning a biological male who believes that he is a woman in a male body, and has had surgeries and hormone treatment and all the rest, this person got up and asked me about transgenderism.
We had a back and forth, the exchange did not go as the transgender person wanted, and the person became very emotional and rushed out of the room.
I personally reached out because this person was obviously suffering.
I personally reached out to this person.
I had the people who were filming the event cut that part out of the tape because I didn't feel like there would be anything in it for there's nothing good that can come from it.
I don't want anybody feel humiliated or bad when they go to my events.
That's not the goal of the events.
We cut it out of the tape.
I had coffee with the person the next day to make sure that this person was okay.
This isn't a lack of sympathy.
When you're discussing public policy and you mistake public policy discussions for lack of sympathy because we disagree, it gets really ugly really quickly.
And it's nasty politics at its worst.
Okay, one more thing that I hate.
So as I mentioned briefly earlier, It's really funny how certain biases in American society and global society get a lot of play.
Islamophobia.
Racism.
Antisemitism always sort of takes a back seat because it's old.
We don't want to talk about antisemitism.
Like, come on.
We've been doing that for like thousands of years.
It's boring at this point.
Only one problem.
When it comes to actual real-world bias and real-world hatred and real-world stereotyping, you don't need to scratch beneath the surface very far to find antisemitism.
It's so funny.
People in the U.S.
talking about racism, they're like, ooh, dog whistles.
That's where we see racism, really.
We can't point to specific behavior all that often.
When we do, everybody agrees it's bad.
We can't point to specific behavior all that often and say, you know, that was really racist.
Instead, it's, that's a dog whistle.
That's a dog whistle.
You know who doesn't dog whistle?
Anti-Semites, who come out, right out, and say anti-Semitic things.
There's a new poll from CNN.
There's a sweeping new survey in Europe.
More than a quarter of Europeans polled believe Jews have too much influence in business and finance.
That's not dog whistling, gang.
That's just anti-Semitism.
Nearly one in four said Jews have too much influence in conflict and wars across the world.
Europe, always great to the Jews.
One in five said they have too much influence in the media.
The same number believe they have too much influence in politics.
Meanwhile, a third of Europeans said they knew little or nothing about the Holocaust, which happened within the living memory of a lot of people.
The mass murder of some six million Jews in lands controlled by the Nazi regime.
Those are among the key findings of this new CNN report.
So while we talk about all different forms of bias, it turns out that the most durable form of bias continues to be anti-Semitism.
And I love all the people who say they're not anti-Semitic, but the Jews control everything.
A few people said they personally have an unfavorable attitude toward Jews.
Across seven countries in the survey, only one in ten people said they did, which is pretty shocking.
The figure rises to 15% in Poland and 19% in Hungary.
So that's 20% of people in Hungary saying, yeah, we don't like the Jews.
Like, right out, straight up.
Jews suck, right?
We're not going to worry about that.
In every country polled except Hungary, significantly more people said they had a favorable opinion of Jews versus an unfavorable opinion.
In Hungary, favorable to unfavorable was 29% to 19%.
So Hungary, if you're a Jew in Hungary, you might want to think about, you know, getting out of there.
The poll also put a spotlight on European attitudes toward other minorities.
And it's pretty obvious how open this stuff is.
I love this.
You know, one of the ways that you can tell if people are anti-Semitic, like a kind of trick question is, how many Jews do you think there are?
Because people who are deeply concerned about the Jews think that the Jews are like a huge percentage of the world population.
It turns out that the Jews are a tiny percentage.
There's like 13 million Jews worldwide.
As a percentage of the population, it's nothing, right?
As a percentage of the population, we're talking significantly under 1% of the population worldwide.
No.
They were off by a factor of about 100.
that the world is more than 20% Jewish.
No, they were off by a factor of about 100.
0.2% of the world's population is Jewish.
In fact, Israel is the only country on planet Earth where more than 2% of the population is Jewish.
So, anti-Semitism continues to be the more storable hatred and also the hatred people will ignore.
As we saw yesterday, when it turns out that over the weekend there was a guy whose name was Mohamed Mohamed, who shouted Allahu Akbar while trying to run down two Jews in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, which I know quite well, having All right.
Well, we will be back here tomorrow to talk about all the latest news.
Have a great rest of the day.
We'll see you here tomorrow.
Be here or you will miss your assigned listening.
Come on.
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.
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