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Dec. 12, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:50
Shutdown Showdown | Ep. 678
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President Trump faces off with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the Oval Office, Google goes to the hill, and another terror attack rocks France.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
A lot of fun to be had with today's news.
We will get to it in just one second.
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Okay, so, the big news yesterday, obviously, was that President Trump faced down Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the Oval Office.
Now, I'm not a fan of these sorts of meetings.
I don't know, for example, why President Trump, if he wanted to meet with the leadership of the incoming Congress, didn't meet with Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell.
Why he met with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer You know, Chuck Schumer doesn't have tons of power in the Senate, considering that he is still in the minority.
With that said, the president did something smart.
President Trump did something very smart.
He said, we are going to negotiate in front of these cameras.
Now, Nancy Pelosi did not want to negotiate in front of the cameras.
She was upset about this.
She said in front of Trump, I don't want to negotiate in front of the cameras.
It would just be terrible.
And Trump was like, I don't care.
We're doing this thing.
And then they just went at each other.
And that was good for President Trump, I think.
So President Trump did some good things and some bad things.
I mean, this was case study in good Trump, bad Trump.
President Trump did some good things and some bad things.
The good thing that he did was he forced the Democrats to defend their position that they would never fund a border wall, that they would not fund border security, and that, in fact, they'd be willing to shut down the government in order to prevent funding For border security, because it's pretty much the only thing Democrats don't want to spend money on.
They want to spend money on federal sponsorship for lesbian dance theory in college, but they don't want to spend money on supporting our southern border needs.
So President Trump making them say that in front of the cameras is a very good thing.
A not so good thing is when the president then says, well, you know what?
I'll be blamed for the shutdown.
Fine.
Do it.
The reason being, Not that Republicans should fear a shutdown.
I think that Republicans have always been far too afraid of a shutdown.
I don't like it when Republican politicians say things like, oh, a government shutdown, it would just be so terrible.
Why?
We've had several of them.
Has anyone died?
Have people been keeling over in the streets?
Was there a zombie apocalypse?
Was it like Shaun of the Dead?
None of that happened.
It wasn't 21 days later.
It wasn't people just wandering the streets in bloodlust, cannibalizing one another.
It wasn't the Purge when there was a government shutdown.
All that happened is that a few non-essential government employees didn't go to work that day.
By the way, if you're a non-essential government employee, I would suggest that perhaps you shouldn't be working in the government.
All the employees at The Daily Wire are essential.
Congratulations, guys, you're all essential.
But if you are not, if you were a non-essential employee of The Daily Wire, you would not be working here.
I don't understand why we have non-essential employees of the federal government in the first place.
And whenever there's a government shutdown, we are told by the press, by the Democrats, end of the world.
People will die.
Not true.
Mandatory government spending continues.
Essential government employees in the Social Security office and Medicaid office, all those folks continue to work.
It just curbs some of the activities around the fringes.
So Republicans should not be so fearful of a government shutdown.
And I've always been skeptical of Republicans who say, well, no, we really have to avoid the government shutdown.
Now, with that said, your preferred strategy is this, if you're a Republican, if there's an issue that you really care about, like border security.
It is, I want my budget to have border security funding in it.
And I'm not signing a budget.
This does not have border security funding in it.
And if you are willing to shut down the government by not sending me a budget with what I want in it, well, then that's your fault.
Because you're now responsible for people not being able to go to work today because you wouldn't give me the funding necessary in order to secure our southern border.
So the shutdown is your fault.
But if it has to shut down because you're not going to fund me, well, then I guess that's your choice.
That's the way you play this.
President Trump gets part of it and he doesn't get part of it.
So President Trump gets the part where he says, listen, I'm willing to not sign a budget if he doesn't have what I want.
But then he goes further.
He says, and you know what?
I'll own the shutdown.
I'll say it's my fault.
Why would you do this?
What is the logic behind doing this?
I told you, the good Trump is him facing down Pelosi and Schumer.
We'll show you that in a second.
But he starts off by saying, no, I'll own it.
Fine.
You want to say that it's my fault the government's shutting down?
OK.
Why?
Why would you do that?
It's not, in fact, his fault if the government shuts down.
It's the Democrats' fault for not passing a budget that he wants.
Chuck's problem is that, you know, when we last closed down, that was his idea.
And honestly, he got killed.
And so he doesn't want to own it.
And I said, you know what?
Rather than us debating who's owning it, I'll take it.
I'll take it.
If we close down the country, I will take it, because we're closing it down for border security.
And I think I win that every single time.
OK, so I'm not sure that he wins it every single time, but I mean, his own logic, President Trump's own logic suggests that, you know, it'd be great if Chuck Schumer got blamed for the government shutdown.
He just says Chuck Schumer tried to shut down the government in order to get funding for his priorities, and then he got blamed for it.
And it was a real bad move by Chuck Schumer.
Why would you not just repeat this?
Why not just make Chuck Schumer do it again?
Instead, President Trump, because he feels the necessity to jump on every grenade, says, no, I'll own it.
I want it.
I'll put a big Trump Tower sign insignia on it.
I'll plate it in gold next to my toilet.
It'll be unbelievable.
Again.
President Trump is correct to say, I'm not going to sign a budget without border funding.
He is not correct to say, I'm going to own the shutdown.
That would be the fault of the Democrats.
Well, Chuck Schumer then responded, and he got very upset because President Trump and Schumer really went at it in the Oval Office.
And at a certain point during the conversation, President Trump went to his go-to, which is, I won, deal with it.
And Chuck Schumer responded by saying, well, when you're in trouble, you just brag.
Nancy, we've gained in the Senate.
Excuse me, did we win the Senate?
We won the Senate.
When the president brags that he won North Dakota and Indiana, he's in real trouble.
I did.
We did win North Dakota and India.
So they got very contentious.
By the way, Trump isn't wrong there.
Chuck Schumer did a poor enough job in the Senate that his side lost seats in an election, a wave election in which they won the House vote by 8.6%.
So, you know, President Trump says, and this is where he's good.
He says, "I won't take a deal without border security." Like, if you're gonna give me a deal and it doesn't have border security, guess what, not happening. - We have a proposal that Democrats and Republicans will support to do a CR that will not shut down the government.
We urge you to take it.
And if it's not good border security, I won't take it.
It is very good border security.
And if it's not good border security, I won't take it.
OK, well, Trump is exactly right on this.
So again, I think that Trump negotiating in front of the cameras is very often his best stuff because he looks strong.
It makes him look tough.
And he was being tough with Chuck Schumer.
A lot of the back and forth had to do with Nancy Pelosi saying, well, if you you guys run the House, you guys run the Senate, why don't you just pass a budget that you guys want?
And Trump saying, well, I don't have 60 votes in the Senate.
And Pelosi saying, well, you could at least vote in the House.
And Trump going, I don't have 60 votes in the Senate.
And Trump, of course, was right about all of this.
You could see who sort of won this showdown, at least in the public mind, or at least in the public eye, by how the Democrats reacted to this.
So Nancy Pelosi, after this whole hubbub, she went out to the press and she was basically whining that had gone poorly for her.
And she was doing her routine from Seinfeld, the jerk store routine, where she was insulted and then she thought of a comeback 30 minutes after the insult battle ended.
Here was Nancy Pelosi saying, Well, you know, I'm just so nice and kind, I didn't want to tell President Trump that he didn't know what he was talking about while there were cameras there.
So now I'll tell all the cameras, while he's not here, that he didn't know what he was talking about.
We don't want to contradict the president when he was putting forth figures that had no reality to them, no basis in fact.
We have to, if we're going to proceed in all of this, have evidence-based, factual, truthful information about what works and what doesn't.
I didn't want to, in front of those people, say, you don't know what you're talking about.
So I'll just say it in front of you, the press.
I mean, I love the casual dishonesty of the Democrats saying, well, no, I just didn't want to say it in front of Trump.
The reason she didn't want to say it in front of Trump is because Trump would have whomped her.
Because President Trump was not going to sit there and take it.
Again, President Trump, in confrontational situations, is at his best when those confrontations are about politics.
President Trump's aggression in situations like this is actually quite a good thing.
Now, does it necessarily feel good to a lot of establishment Republicans?
No.
But this is why a lot of President Trump's base likes President Trump, is because if Nancy Pelosi sits there and fibs about border security, or if Chuck Schumer sits there and says, I don't want to talk about this stuff publicly, and Trump says, we're going to talk about it publicly, You know, that's that's good for Trump.
I think it's good for Republicans.
Again, I don't think you should say you own the shutdown and give Democrats the headline.
But still, I don't think this went poorly for President Trump by any stretch.
Again, Nancy Pelosi looked very angry and very upset after this meeting.
She says that she told Trump to pray for biblical wisdom, always a great injunction from a woman who believes that children should be killed in the womb.
I myself thought we would open the meeting with a prayer.
And I told him about Solomon, King Solomon, when he became, when he was to become king of the Jews.
He prayed to God, he said, how can I ever follow King David?
King David, king of the Jews.
I need you to give me great understanding and wisdom, Lord.
And after he prayed and prayed and prayed, God came to him and said, Solomon, because you did not ask for longevity, great wealth, or vengeance against your enemies, I will give you more wisdom than anyone has ever had.
The wisdom of Solomon.
Okay, so I don't know how she's paraphrasing Bible here, but in any case, I'm sort of shocked that she didn't actually... I'm shocked she didn't actually quote the section of the Bible in which Solomon says that he might split a baby, because that seems actually more in line with...
Nancy Pelosi's general political viewpoint.
I love it when people who are super pro-abortion are quoting the Bible at people like President Trump.
It's just, it's delightful.
Pelosi and Schumer finish off by saying that President Trump threw a temper tantrum in the Oval Office and they called it the Trump shutdown.
And this is where Trump's mistake starts to take root, is you're going to hear from now till the end of whatever happens here from the press that this is the Trump shutdown.
Again, Trump didn't have to own it.
That was a mistake by President Trump.
This Trump shutdown This temper tantrum that he seems to throw will not get him his wall, and it'll hurt a lot of people because he will cause a shutdown.
He admitted he wanted a shutdown.
It's hard to believe that he would want that.
Should, unfortunately, that the president choose to shut down the government, that we have a Trump shutdown as a Christmas present, a holiday present to the American people.
Well, they're on branding.
They're on branding.
I mean, this is their routine.
So when it was Congress, it was Ted Cruz's fault when the government shut down in 2013 because he was in Congress.
Now it's President Trump's fault that the government is shutting down when he's not in Congress.
Weird how the media always try to spin it as a Republican shutdown of the government, even when Democrats are pretty obviously shutting down the government.
Again, President Trump did not help here particularly a lot.
We're going to get to Nancy Pelosi's final shots at President Trump in just one second.
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Nancy Pelosi concluded the negotiations with President Trump by going back to her Democratic caucus and then talking about President Trump's manhood.
These people are all civility and all class.
She said, it's like a manhood thing with him, as if manhood can be associated with him.
And then she said of the conversation with Trump, it goes to show you, you can get into a tinkle contest with a skunk.
You get tinkle all over you.
That's some weird verbiage.
A tinkle contest with a skunk.
You get tinkle all over you.
Well, I guess when you are 1,000 years old, this is the kind of language that you use to describe a political club fight in the Oval Office.
Again, here's the point.
Democrats don't want to fund President Trump's priorities on the border.
The question we should be asking ourselves is why do they not actually want to be funding these border priorities?
We're not talking about a lot of money.
We're not talking about a great deal of expenditure.
We're not talking about something impossible or crazy.
It is not impossible or crazy to ensure that our border is secure.
President Trump is talking about $5 billion.
I mean, the government spends that about every five seconds.
The fact that Democrats are trying to suddenly skimp on border security should be telling you something about their actual priorities.
And I think President Trump knows that, which is why President Trump is pushing on this particular subject and pushing very hard on this particular subject.
I don't think he's wrong to do it.
And I think that now that he's got Democrats in the majority in the House, at least incoming, he has the ability to at least cast aspersions at their willingness to protect Our southern border, which should be of serious concern.
It should be of serious concern who crosses that border.
Apparently, we've been arresting thousands of people every day crossing that border.
Securing the border seems like a no-brainer.
Trump knows it.
The American people are in favor of it.
And the fact that Democrats are willing to let people go unemployed for the holidays because they won't fund a border wall is pretty astonishing.
That said, President Trump, you know, should have done this when there was Republican Congress, and it is kind of devastating that he didn't.
OK, in just a second, I want to get to the latest developments in the Mueller investigation and in the Michael Flynn pleading.
So here's the latest with regard to all of the various Trump legal development.
So according to Hans van Spakowski, Hans von Spakowski, sorry, over at the Daily Signal Heritage Foundation, he talks about the possibility that President Trump will be indicted.
So this entire week, a lot of last week, thanks to Michael Cohen's plea agreement and thanks to the Southern District of New York's sentencing memo, There's been a lot of talk the President of the United States is going to be indicted for a campaign finance violation.
Hans von Spakovsky makes the case that President Trump cannot be indicted for a campaign finance violation because Michael Cohen didn't actually commit a campaign finance violation.
Here's what Spakovsky says.
He says, Indeed, the Southern District's aggressive stance on this issue might have violated the Justice Department's own policy.
the Federal Election Campaign Act, nor its former commissioners would likely agree with the over-aggressive view that the Southern District is taking.
Indeed, the Southern District's aggressive stance on this issue might have violated the Justice Department's own policy.
Why?
Well, the initial claim is that Michael Cohen used money from his pocket to pay off Stormy Daniels and was reimbursed by President Trump in order to avoid disclosure issues in campaign finance.
That basically this was an in-kind contribution to President Trump in the amount of $130,000 that was never reported to the FEC and surpassed all campaign finance limits.
But Robert Kusami, who's the acting U.S.
attorney standing in for Jeffrey Berman, who's recused himself from the Cohen case, says in the government sentencing memo, that Cohen committed a campaign finance violation by arranging payments from corporations to two women, women one and women two, that'd be Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, who claimed they had affairs with Trump in order to buy their silence.
Cohen eventually invoiced the Trump organization for the Daniels payment.
Kuzami asserts these were illegal corporate contributions to the Trump campaign because they were made with the intent to influence the 2016 presidential election.
But there are a lot of problems with this claim.
First, his theory that anything intended to influence an election is a campaign-related expense fails to take into account about the statutory limitation on this definition.
According to federal elections law, it specifically says that campaign-related expenses do not include any expenditures used to fulfill any commitment, obligation, or expense of a person that would exist irrespective of the candidate's election campaign.
These payments were relatively small given Trump's net worth, the kind of nuisance settlement celebrities often make to protect their reputations.
Given Trump's celebrity status, the potential liability to these women existed irrespective of the president's election campaign.
This is the case that I've made is that Trump has been paying off women for years.
This is just the latest example of a woman being paid off.
Unlike Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal in the John Edwards case, Riel Hunter, who is Edwards' mistress, was paid a million bucks while directly working for the campaign and John Edwards.
Her payments did not go through the Edwards campaign's account, but the government tried to claim they were campaign expenditures because they were intended to protect Edwards' reputation during his presidential run and thus influence the election.
But a jury acquitted Edwards on the charge of accepting an illegal campaign donation and failed to reach a verdict on the other charges.
The fact that a jury didn't convict Edwards wouldn't ordinarily mean the government didn't have a viable claim, but Edwards had two former chairmen of the FEC on retainer who were prepared to testify that such payments to a mistress are not actually campaign-related expenses.
So this is the affirmative case being made by Hans von Spakovsky as to why President Trump cannot actually be prosecuted in terms of violation of campaign finance.
Now, in other President Trump legal news, the incoming New York Attorney General has now said that she is interested in prosecuting any and all members of the Trump family.
I mean, this is pretty incredible stuff.
It's pretty obvious at this point that law enforcement mechanisms are being used to target specific people.
As Ari Fleischer pointed out on Twitter, and he's exactly correct, the former Bush press secretary, The way that law enforcement is supposed to work is you identify a crime, and then you identify the person responsible for the crime, and then you prosecute the person responsible for the crime.
But now it appears that the prosecutor, the attorney general-elect in New York, is saying that she's going to identify the person, and then identify the crime.
This would be the definition of selective prosecution.
New York Attorney General Elect Letitia James says she plans to launch sweeping investigations into President Donald Trump, his family, and anyone in his circle who may have violated the law once she settles into her new job next month.
She said we will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well.
She, of course, is a Democrat, and she told NBC News in her first extensive interview since she was elected last month that she intends on targeting Trump and his family.
This would include investigating any potential illegalities involving President Trump's real estate holdings in New York, the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian official, government subsidies received by President Trump, whether he's in violation of the emoluments clause in the U.S.
Constitution, continuing to probe the Trump Foundation and supposed illegalities in their handling of their 501c3.
James says we want to investigate anyone in his orbit who has, in fact, violated the law.
This is pretty astonishing stuff to openly say that you are taking on a specific human as opposed to a specific crime.
That is a basic violation of prosecutorial duty.
James said, taking on President Trump and looking at all the violations of law, I think, is no match to what I have seen in my lifetime.
And this is if you're wondering why so many Republicans feel that the justice system looks like it's being used as a tool against President Trump, statements like that certainly have something to do with it.
I'm going to explain more about the use of the justice system against certain Trump officials in just one second.
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OK, meanwhile, the FBI, there's a new memo out that shows that the FBI recommended that Michael Flynn, who you will recall was prosecuted by the Department of Justice, that he not have a lawyer present during his interview and did not warn him that his statement would have consequences.
So according to a memo from former FBI director, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, The interview that ultimately led to Michael Flynn's guilty plea on one count of making false statements, this is where Michael Flynn said he had not talked with the Russians during the transition, suggested that Flynn not have a lawyer present at the session according to newly filed court documents.
In addition, FBI officials, along with the two agents who interviewed Flynn, decided specifically not to warn him that there would be penalties for making false statements because the agents wanted to ensure that Flynn was relaxed during the session.
The new information was drawn from McCabe's account of events, plus FBI agents' write-ups of the interview.
The so-called 302 report is contained in a sentencing memo filed Tuesday by Flynn's defense team.
Citing McCabe's account, the sentencing memo says that shortly after noon on January 24th, the fourth day of the new Trump administration, McCabe called Flynn on a secure phone in Flynn's West Wing office.
The two men discussed business briefly, and then McCabe said he felt that we needed to have two of our agents sit down with Flynn to discuss Flynn's talks with Russian officials during the presidential transition.
McCabe, by his own account, urged Flynn to talk to the agents alone without a lawyer present.
I explained I thought the quickest way to get this done was to have a conversation between Flynn and the agents only, said McCabe.
I further stated that Lieutenant General Flynn wished to include anyone else in the meeting, like the White House counsel, for instance, that I would need to involve the Department of Justice.
Flynn stated this would not be necessary and agreed to meet with the agents without any additional participants.
Within two hours, the agents were in Flynn's office.
According to the 302 report quoted in Flynn's sentencing document, the agent said Flynn was relaxed and jocular and offered the agents a little tour of his part of the White House.
The agents did not provide General Flynn with a warning of the penalties for making false statements under 18 U.S.
Code 1001 before, during, or after the interview, according to the Flynn memo.
According to the 302, before the interview, McCabe and other FBI officials decided the agents would not warn Flynn it was a crime to lie during the FBI interview because they wanted Flynn to be relaxed and they were concerned that giving the warnings might adversely affect their rapport.
Now, is that bad behavior by the agents?
Unclear, right?
I mean, the fact is that when you are a police officer and you're interviewing a suspect, you have to inform them of their right to have an attorney present if you have arrested them.
But if you're just bringing a witness in for questioning, then you don't actually have to warn them of the possibility of lying to the police being a crime, right?
You just have to interview them.
So that's the basic rule is that if you're not in detention, then you don't have a right to an attorney under domestic United States law.
This is sort of the same case.
So the FBI doesn't have to warn Flynn that he can have an attorney president or that any statements he can, that he says can and will be used against him in a court of law, like you would on law and order.
Miranda warnings don't apply to this particular situation.
That said, does it sound a little bit dishonest for the FBI to have brought in Flynn under the auspices of we're having a friendly little conversation and then sandbag him with false charges?
Yeah, especially when you get him on something as minor as he talked with the Russians in the middle of the transition, which is not in and of itself criminal activity.
This is why a lot of folks are upset today.
Again, I think the upset is a little bit overwrought, but I understand why folks think that the same thing would not have been done to any Obama officials, for example.
Now, meanwhile, there was a terrorist attack in France, another one, and it did not make global headlines in the same way that terrorist attacks have in the past.
The reason being that we are getting used to this, unfortunately.
According to the Daily Mail, at least three people were killed, 13 others injured, when a gunman opened fire at a Christmas market in Strasbourg, northeastern France, on Tuesday evening.
Police identified the gunman as Sheriff Cheket, a Strasbourg-born 29-year-old who has a criminal record and is a designated threat to the state.
The carnage unfolded just after 8 p.m.
watch list.
A manhunt is now underway for Shekat, who managed to flee the scene in a hijacked taxi after being wounded in a shootout with soldiers.
And President Emmanuel Macron has raised France's terror level.
The carnage unfolded just after 8 p.m. local time outside the historic Christmas market in Strasbourg's central square, Place Kleber, one of the busiest areas in the city, which is also home to the European Parliament.
Four of the people injured were still fighting for their lives.
Six others seriously hurt.
Witnesses described one of the victims as a male Southeast Asian tourist who had been shot in the head.
The guy apparently was on the terror watch list.
So this person was known to police.
I don't know why the Europeans have this terror watch list where apparently you only appear after you've committed an act of terror and then we apparently worry about it.
He was on the terror watch list and apparently while he was shooting, he said the magic words.
He said Allahu Akbar while he was shooting.
Motive still unknown.
So that's always exciting is when you hear that somebody shouts Allahu Akbar while shooting people and we still have motive unknown.
So the source A police source said security forces had opened fire in an area of the city where the suspect was thought to be hiding.
The source did not give the address.
It was unclear if the shooter had been located.
Good stuff.
Yeah, again, another radical Islamist terrorist attack in the heart of Europe.
And yet you're considered Islamophobic if you wonder whether immigration to Europe ought to be vetted or curbed.
If you do that, then you have a problem.
Instead, we're all supposed to sort of plunge our heads into the sand and pretend that nothing threatening has ever happened because of mass Islamic immigration into Europe, which is, of course, silly.
And that's not to say the vast majority of people who are coming into Europe are criminals or terrorists.
They're not.
But if you're not vetting the folks coming into your country, then it should not be a surprise when some of those people turn out to be bad people, terrorists, threats to public security.
Now, meanwhile, Google showed up on the Hill for a hearing yesterday.
And whenever tech companies show up on the hill for hearings about how they run their business, it gets really awkward because nobody in Congress is below the age of 97, except for Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, who is 29 and knows nothing.
But everybody else in Congress, there's a huge age gap.
It's basically you're 97 or you're 29 and know nothing.
So there's no point at which people actually know things in Congress.
All these 97-year-olds were grilling the heads of Google on the biasing of Google results, and they clearly do not know what they are talking about.
Like, over and over and over, they were just saying silly things.
So, for example, Steve Cohen, who is a Democratic representative from Tennessee, here he was saying that he's angry at Google because when he Googles himself, mean things come up in the Google results.
Like, I put my name in here, Rep.
Steve Cohen.
I punch news.
This weekend, I was on MSNBC four times.
And yet the first thing that comes up is the Daily Caller, not exactly a liberal, but I guess well-known group.
Then there's Roll Call, then Breitbart News, then the Memphis Business Journal, then Breitbart News, then Breitbart.
So it looks like you are overly using conservative news organizations.
On your news.
And I'd like you to look into overuse of conservative news organizations to put on liberal people's news on Google.
Okay, maybe the only people who give a crap what Steve Cohen says are people on the right, because the left basically ignores them.
Now, Cohen was saying this because there were folks on the right who were claiming that Google was biased against conservatives in a lot of its search results.
We here at The Daily Wire know that Google is biased against conservatives in some of its search results.
There was a while there where Google had an app, basically, it had a section of its website where if you searched Daily Wire, then all the results from a left-wing fact-checking organization came up.
On the right side of the page.
It did the same thing for The Daily Caller.
It did the same thing for The Federalist.
It did not do the same thing for any left-wing website.
It did not fact check any of their stories and show how dishonest those websites were.
And by the way, over at Daily Wire, when we make mistakes, we make corrections to those mistakes, just as any other news organization would.
But nobody in Congress seems to understand exactly how All of this works.
And so the members of Congress simply suggest that Google is absolutely neutral.
Google has no bias whatsoever.
In a second, we're going to talk a little bit more about that and why that simply is not true.
First, let's talk about your Second Amendment rights.
So when the founders crafted the Constitution, the first thing they did was to make sacred the rights of the individual to share ideas without limitation by the government.
The second thing the founders did was make sure that you could protect those rights in armed fashion.
Bravo Company Manufacturing was started in a garage by a Marine vet.
More than two decades ago, to build a professional-grade product that meets combat standards.
BCM believes the same level of protection should be provided to every American, regardless of whether they are a private citizen or a professional.
BCM is not a sporting arms company.
They design, they engineer, and they manufacture life-saving equipment.
They assume that every rifle leaving their shop will have to be used in a life-or-death situation by a responsible citizen, or a law enforcement officer, or a soldier overseas.
I believe in the Second Amendment not because I'm a hunter.
I'm not.
I don't believe in the Second Amendment because I like sport shooting.
Because I don't really have time.
I believe in the Second Amendment because I want to be able to protect myself and my family and my values and my country.
And that's what BCM believes too.
Every component of a BCM rifle is hand-assembled and tested by Americans to a life-saving standard.
They feel a moral responsibility to provide tools They will not fail the user when it's not just a paper target, but God forbid somebody coming to do harm.
To learn more about Bravo Company Manufacturing, head on over to BravoCompanyMFG.com and you can discover more about their products, special offers, upcoming news.
That's BravoCompanyMFG.com.
If you need more convincing...
Go check them out over at YouTube.com slash Bravo Company USA.
When you do, then you can see all of the all of the great products and services they provide.
And also you can see the cool guys who founded the company.
It's really awesome.
Find out more about BCM again, YouTube.com slash Bravo Company USA, or check them out at Bravo Company MFG.com.
Really, they are spectacular.
Go check them out right now.
OK, well, I do want to talk more about Google's bias.
Also, a piece in The Washington Post suggesting that I should not actually speak at the March for Life in a Piece.
At Vox, suggesting that women have better sex under socialism, which is why women are prostituting themselves in Venezuela, I suppose.
We'll get to all of that in just a second.
First, you're going to have to go subscribe over at Daily Wire.
You get the rest of this show live, Clayton's show live, Michael Moulse's show live, and come January, two more hours of me every day behind the paywall.
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The very greatest in beverage vessels.
Look at this.
Look at this massive piece of vesselware.
It is just spectacular in every the best, the most beautiful, unbelievable, unreal.
Great.
Go check it out right now.
Also, please subscribe over YouTube and iTunes and you get access to our Sunday special.
Our latest Sunday special features Bishop Robert Barron.
We had a great conversation about theology and faith.
I know a lot of faith based Sunday specials this month?
Because, come on, it's Advent.
So, go check that out right now.
Here's a little bit of Bishop Robert Barron.
This is Bishop Robert Barron.
Tune in this Sunday to the Ben Shapiro Sunday special program.
We talk about lots of interesting things, from God and religion, society to morality.
I think you'll find the conversation really interesting.
It was a really interesting conversation.
You're going to want to check that out this Sunday.
It's really a lot of fun.
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So as I say, there is bias at Google, but very few people on the Hill actually know enough about Google to understand how the bias actually operates.
So for example, you have Democrat Ted Lieu from out here in California, and he says that the only reason there are bad search results for people like Steve Scalise is because Google is unbiased and because Steve Scalise is a jerk.
So basically, the Google results are reflective of the fact that they're a bunch of jerky Republicans.
So if everything is biased to the left, it's not because there's bias, it's because Republicans are terrible people.
If you want positive search results, do positive things.
If you don't want negative search results, don't do negative things.
And to some of my colleagues across the aisle, if you're getting bad press articles and bad search results, don't blame Google or Facebook or Twitter.
Consider blaming yourself.
Yeah, except for the fact that that's not exactly how Google and Facebook and Twitter work.
Now, there's no individual who's sitting behind the scenes and manipulating the algorithms over at Google.
That's not how any of this works.
Here is how it works.
So Eric Weinstein, who, a friend of mine, fellow member of the Intellectual Dark Web, probably, in all honesty, its founder, he's a guy who is the The business head of Peter Thiel's empire.
And Peter Thiel, of course, a major investor originally in Facebook.
He was the creator of PayPal.
Nobody knows the internet better than Eric does.
I mean, Eric really knows what he's talking about.
And here is what he says.
He says, Google literally tells you how they bias your view of the world.
Only they call it unbiasing.
And unbiasing is supposedly politically neutral.
It's just that in view of woke engineers, conservatives are typically biased by history, privilege, biological essentialism, et cetera.
And so he says of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, he says, these are questions he would ask.
We'd ask, do you unbiased searches you think are biased under an internal fairness initiative?
Did Google find that history can represent latency bias?
Findings in biology and psychology can lead to exclusion bias.
Economic theory can lead to inequality bias, et cetera.
So in other words, what he's saying is that Google biases through its unbiasing.
Because if they were just to allow the full stream of information to carry forth, then what would end up is maybe a bunch of right-wing stuff that people are interested in.
So instead, they unbiased the results to ensure that conservatives are downplayed.
He says, if you found conservatives were likely to believe in more traditional interpretations of gender, biology, markets, military power, ethnicity, religion, borders, psychology, wealth achievement, would they be more likely to be unbiased by Google?
That's how this works.
I hope someone took a shot at this line of questioning.
But I'm writing this as a non-conservative because this no-bias game is moronic.
We don't need fresh faces.
We need tough folks in Congress with technical backgrounds who can operate in all areas where Google operates.
In other words, somebody has to set the parameters.
Somebody has to set the parameters for all of this.
Somebody has to set the parameters for how these algorithms work in the first place and how the unbiasing operates And Google is doing so in biased fashion, as Eric says.
And the fact that folks in Congress don't really get it is pretty astonishing.
By the way, there is some pretty solid evidence of bias inside Google.
Representative Matt Katz of Florida, he slammed the bias at this hearing yesterday at Google.
I would strongly suggest that one of the crisis response tools that you use is in an investigation into the discourse of your employees on resisting the Trump presidency, resisting the Trump agenda, and then smothering some of the conservative outlets that seem to amplify that content.
Okay, and I think Matt Gaetz is not completely wrong about this.
Now, a piece of breaking news that I didn't get to earlier, breaking news is that Michael Cohen has now been sentenced to three years in prison for campaign finance violations.
The idea here is that he, again, was ordered to commit these campaign violations at the behest of President Trump.
As I said earlier, I think that that is a stretch, but Cohen is pleading guilty to crimes that are friendly for the prosecutors, specifically so that he can get off on Worst charges.
You know, the charges with regard to tax fraud and taxi medallions and all of the rest.
According to CNN, Michael Cohen has now been sentenced to three years in prison.
President Trump's former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen said he takes full responsibility for the actions he has previously pled guilty to during his appearance in a New York federal court on Wednesday.
Cohen is in court to be sentenced as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
He says, I take full responsibility for each act I pled guilty to, the personal ones to me and those involving the president of the United States.
of America.
In court Wednesday morning, Cohen's attorney offered a sweeping case for leniency, comparing the significance of Cohen's actions and the work of the special counsel to the Watergate investigation.
He said the cooperation here should be viewed against a non-standard framework.
The special counsel's office investigation is of utmost national significance, no less than seen 40 years ago in Watergate.
So therefore he should be let off because they're going after the president.
Now again, critics of the prosecution here are going to say that Cohen didn't actually commit a campaign finance crime.
Even if he did commit a campaign finance crime, it now has to be established that he did so at the behest of President Trump, and that Michael Cohen is basically pleading guilty because he was guilty of a bunch of other ancillary crimes, and that therefore he is pleading guilty to these ones specifically in order to get off on other ones.
Suffice it to say, this is not good news for the president of the United States.
During his remarks, Cohen addressed the president's comment, referring to him as weak, but said it was for a much different reason.
Cohen said, quote, Recently, the president tweeted a statement calling me weak, and it was correct, but for a much different reason than he was implying.
It was because time and time again, I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds.
He said his action stands in... This is the attorney for Cohen.
His action stands in profound contrast to the decision of some others not to cooperate and allegedly to double deal while pretending to cooperate.
In addition to the disclosures from the U.S.
Attorney's Office in Manhattan about Trump's participation in payments to silenced women, Mueller also supplied fresh revelations on the president on Friday, disclosing new information on a set of efforts to communicate between Trump, his associates, and the Russian government, according to CNN.
They try to quote Cohen as saying that he was meeting with Russian government officials, but again, none of that is necessarily illegal.
The net seems to be tightening around President Trump here, although, again, I think there's a pretty solid case to say that President Trump is not guilty of a criminal enterprise.
There's no question that within the next month, there's going to be serious talk in Democratic circles about whether to move forward with impeachment of President Trump.
And this is going to bring up a lot of questions about whether President Clinton should have been impeached.
He was impeached for obstruction of justice and perjury.
He was not convicted in the Senate on either of those charges, but he was impeached on that basis.
And If President Trump is to be gotten on any basis, it will be on very similar auspices to how President Clinton was impeached in 1999.
He was actually impeached in 98 and then he was acquitted by the Senate in 1999.
So in just a second...
I'm going to get to the dumbest stories of the day.
I also want to get to the new 2020 frontrunner.
So there was a poll out yesterday, and it suggests, this moveon.org poll, poll of progressive leftists.
And NBC News reported that the straw poll of moveon.org members on Scientific Poll, but still kind of relevant, They are now favoring these progressive leftists, Texas Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke over Joe Biden.
So their number one choice is Beto O'Rourke, Robert O'Rourke.
Some 29 percent of respondents said they didn't know who they wanted, but O'Rourke has seized a narrow lead with 15.6 percent of respondents followed by former Vice President Joe Biden at 14.9 percent and Senator Bernie Sanders at 13.1 percent.
Elizabeth Warren way down in the pack.
Warren looks like she has lived past her sell-by date.
And the same thing is true of Bernie Sanders.
It looks like Bernie Sanders has lost a lot of the enthusiasm that carried him forward In 2016, when the MoveOn.org crowd, they were all Bernie bros.
Now it looks like they're gonna be Beto bros.
Look, Beto is the most dangerous candidate in the Democratic field.
He's the person you have to look out for.
The press loves the guy.
And there are three basic And pillars of the Democratic Party at this point, the intersectional coalition, all of these various pandered to minority groups that are essentially being told by the Democratic politicians that they ought to be privileged in American society because of a past history of victimization.
Well, Rourke panders to those people.
He panders to those people by by suggesting I'm not when I say those people, I don't mean actual members, minority groups.
I mean that he is pandering to politically active, progressive leaders who consider themselves part of this intersectional coalition.
He is he's pandering to a lot of those folks specifically because by saying things like the criminal justice system is inherently biased and racist, this sort of stuff.
You have to say if you actually want to succeed with the intersectional coalition.
He also has to appeal to the mainline Democrats and he has to appeal to the progressive.
MoveOn.org is the Bernie Sanders wing of the party.
They like Beto.
The intersectional coalition likes Beto.
The mainstream Democratic Party likes Beto because O'Rourke is smart enough That he was never a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Instead, he joined the New Democrat Coalition, which was a centrist caucus with Clintonian views, according to social democratic columnist Elizabeth Bruning.
He's been rather mild on climate change issues, at least for the radical left.
Of course, he's being upheld by the media.
I think that at this point, O'Rourke would be a fool not to run for president.
He's still got bank from his last election cycle, and he's got a lot of momentum, and people are looking for a fresh face.
He is young, the media love him, and he is also combative.
You know, he's a dangerous candidate and pretending that he is going to simply fade away into the horizon, I don't think is accurate in any way.
Now, meanwhile, the stupidest stories of the day.
There is a piece in The Washington Post today about me headlining the March for Life.
There's a piece by a guy named Charles Camosy, who is the head of Democrats for Life, which means he's the only member of Democrats for Life because there are like three Democrats for Life.
Now, again, I think there are a lot of people who vote Democrat, who may be pro-life.
I can't imagine why.
Maybe they found the one representative who is somewhat pro-life in the Democratic Party.
But the Democratic Party as a whole is a pro-abortion party.
There's no question about this.
They're radically pro-abortion.
In every available case, they're radically pro-abortion.
But this guy Charles Camosy says I should not speak at the March for Life.
I'm keynoting the March for Life in early January.
Very much looking forward to it.
He says that in a few, he says, the biggest problem with the March for Life has to do with the near total lack of huge name promoters as the anti-abortion movement continues to be the third rail for American celebrities.
That's about to change.
In a few weeks, the march will be keynoted by a genuine superstar, Ben Shapiro.
Well, thank you.
The 34-year-old Orthodox Jew from Southern California hosts the most popular conservative podcast in the country.
A pre-election special he did this fall was one of the most-watched shows on cable TV the day it aired.
His DailyWire opinion news website boasts 140 million page views per month.
And this guy says that...
Many in the pro-life movement will consider this a huge get, not me.
Despite Shapiro's star power and stature, I consider his appearance a serious mistake for the march, one that will move us even further from being understood as a broad-based human rights movement we need to embody in order to go from fringe to mainstream.
The idea being that I am a partisan Republican or a conservative, an open conservative, and therefore it's bad for me to speak at the March for Life.
So this is what he says, Trump is a buffoon, but Shapiro is helping to form the imagination of many millions of young conservatives.
He also has deep relationships and regular exchanges with pro-choice members of the intellectual dark web and is one of the few pro-life public figures who is taken seriously outside the pro-life movement itself.
Though I disagree with Shapiro about 60 to 70 percent of the time, I listen to his entertaining show regularly and consider him a very important voice for vulnerable populations.
His commitment to argument and evidence represents the only chance those who lack power in our culture have to get their interests taken seriously.
So what's the problem?
The problem is that I'm going to be doing the podcast live, and that because the podcast is politically oriented, this is going to alienate Democrats.
Honestly, if you're more alienated by my Republican politics than you are by the pro-choice movement, or if you feel that I can't be a good promoter of pro-life beliefs, if you believe I can't be a good promoter of pro-life beliefs because I am a conservative, then I would suggest that you are making a very large mistake.
When folks on the left say something that is right, it is my job to give them credit for saying something that is right.
And when I say something that is pro-life and correct, it seems to me pro-life Democrats should be on my side, and it's not my job to pretend that the Democratic Party has played an innocuous role in the pro-choice versus pro-life debate.
OK, let's get to some things that I like and then some things that I hate.
So things that I like that I have to show you this.
This is so I will acknowledge I love magic.
I don't just mean I'm not talking about like Harry Potter.
I'm talking about the the kind of sleight of hand magic illusion, Michael, illusion.
I love this stuff.
So one of my favorite places on earth, for example, in Los Angeles is the Magic Castle.
The Magic Castle is just spectacular.
If you ever get a chance to go there, you get an invite.
It's just the best.
It's great.
I took my wife there the other night.
It's a great date place.
So Magic Castle gets a promotion.
Magic Castle is awesome.
And it's pretty exclusive and you have to dress real nice.
I remember one time I went to Magic Castle, the dress code at Magic Castle is that you have to wear Creasable pants.
You have to wear, like, nice suit pants and a jacket.
I was wearing a nice pair of khakis and a jacket, but my khakis were not creasable.
They made me borrow a pair of pants from the back room.
So I spent the night walking around in somebody else's pants, which was real awkward.
But in any case, that's beside the point.
I have to show you this magic trick.
Okay, so this magic routine is the best magic routine I have ever seen.
It's by a guy named Eric Chen.
He just won a international magic competition for close-up magic.
This is my favorite kind of magic.
So I'm not big into the Sawing a woman in half, making an airplane disappear, that kind of stuff.
Because once you learn how the trick is done, you know how the trick is done.
But with sleight of hand, you know exactly how they're doing the trick, and you still can't catch them.
It's really amazing.
So here is this guy, Eric Chen.
He's a Chinese citizen, I believe.
And this is legitimately the best magic I have ever seen in my entire life.
So for folks who can't see what he's doing, he is turning cards into coins.
It's truly incredible.
So now he's scooping coins into a box.
And then he is going to close the box, open the box again.
He's just making things disappear right and left.
He just turned his vest from blue and red back to black.
I mean, it's just amazing.
Go and watch the whole routine.
You can find it on YouTube.
It has several million hits.
But it is just spectacular.
Did you guys watch it backstage?
I mean, if you haven't, then it's unbelievable.
OK, other things that I like.
So a sad end for a woman who was married to a 300-year-old ghost pirate.
A very sad end.
This is the original announcement, the beautiful, I think, announcement that she was going to marry a 300-year-old ghost pirate a few years ago, but now she has apparently left the marriage.
Here is her original statement announcing her engagement to the ghost pirate.
Amanda is a pirate impersonator married to a 300-year-old ghost pirate.
I'm the first person in the UK and Ireland to marry post-human sleep.
She says when deceased pirate John Teague contacted her spiritually, she had some doubts, but he proved himself by telling her historic facts she later Googled and found to be true.
Amanda says she's seen John in astro travel and in meditation.
The two were married on international waters, surrounded by a small group of friends and family.
Everyone in high spirit.
Love is love, guys.
Love is love.
Hashtag.
I mean, I don't know why you would think this is stupid or anything.
First of all, if she believes that the ghost pirate speaks to her and that she can marry the ghost pirate, I don't see why you would think that is delusional.
There's nothing delusional about that.
It doesn't impede her capacity to function in normal society.
Seems totally fine to me.
And as far as her choice of partner, how dare you discriminate against a woman marrying a ghost?
How dare you?
I mean, maybe Casper's on our list too, but this was very sad because she broke up with the ghost pirate.
He must have ghosted her.
At a certain point, he just decided she was no longer his boo.
And as Matt Walsh correctly stated, it was sad because they really thought they were soul mateys.
So, very, very sad stuff.
Amanda Sparrow Teague wrote on social media, she changed her name to a dead pirate's name.
Yeah, this is a healthy person.
She wrote, I guess that she found it unsatisfying for some reason.
Well, I guess, you know, when you mess around with ghosts, then your aura when you mess around with ghosts, then your aura ends up slimed.
Very, very weird stuff.
So, good stuff.
Teague said, growing up in Ireland, in my era, you were taught that if a man bedded you, he should wed you.
I knew from my research that spiritual marriage was a thing.
So it was more than, it was more me that wanted to get married than him.
He would have been happy, like most men, with just sex.
Because she says that apparently she was having sex with her ghost partner.
The apparition began on a happier note in 2014 when she said she suddenly felt the spirit's energy with her in bed.
She told the Daily Star the spirit sat with her while she watched TV and drove her car and that she started developing strong feelings toward it.
Alright, it's worth noting that in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, by the way, the character of Edward Deag was played by Keith Richards and is the father of Jack Sparrow.
So, presumably, His actual full name, Jack Sparrow, would be Jack Teague.
So she just has a... I guess that she just really likes Johnny Depp a lot, like Faye Johnny Depp.
So, a sad end to a meaningful relationship.
And I guess that we should all mourn.
I mean, let's be real about this.
When someone's heart breaks over marrying a 300-year-old fake ghost, And they have to break up.
And then when all of your hopes and dreams just sort of disappear for no reason, then you have to you have to wonder whether whether life can go on as it did before.
You know, what happens under the bedsheet stays under the bedsheet.
OK, meanwhile, other things that so let's do a couple of things that I hate.
Thing number one that I hate, Sean Illing, who is actually a nice guy.
He writes over at Vox.com, which, as I say very often, is a repository of extreme stupidity.
Sean Illing has an interview with a woman named Kristen Godsey, and it is titled, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, According to an Anthropologist.
Yes, I am sure.
Women had better sex.
Is it the tyrannical domination that they really like, or is it the forced redistribution of income?
According to a new book by Kristin Godsey, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, she argues that women have better sex under socialism.
If that sounds strange to you, consider this.
A survey of East and West Germans after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women, the socialist side of Germany during the Cold War, has twice as many orgasms as Western women.
What in the world accounts for such a wide gap?
According to Godsey, it's about social safety nets.
If, she argues, you build a society that supports women and doesn't punish them for having children or devalue their labor, it turns out they'll be happier and have better sex.
Except for how that is a lie.
Except for how all the people in the West, in Europe, at the time this was happening, were living in democratic socialist states with extraordinarily strong safety nets and a serious focus on gender inequity.
Maybe, maybe it's because marital rates were actually higher in places like the Soviet Union than they were outside places like the Soviet Union.
Because it turns out that inside the Soviet Union, marriage out of wedlock was actually not something that these empires really liked a whole hell of a lot.
The line between social safety nets and better sex is blurrier than the title of the book implies.
Says Sean Elling, meaning it doesn't exist.
But there are some interesting ideas here, and to her credit, Gatsi doesn't reduce everything to a simplistic choice between capitalism and socialism, nor does she call for a return to Soviet-style communism.
Her book is really about using socialist principles to offset the gender inequities in capitalist societies.
Again, I think that if you really believe that women in the Soviet Union were having better sex because they were in the Soviet Union, it's worked out great in Venezuela.
Obviously, working out everywhere.
I mean, using the Soviet Union as the example, you would figure that if you were going to write this book, you'd at least say, oh, women in Norway are having better sex, right?
Isn't Norway the new hot socialist country, even though it's not really socialist?
But using the Soviet Union means I get to use Venezuela and Cuba as examples.
So, if you're now using the Soviet Union as a place for great sex, how's Commie China working out?
How about Venezuela?
You think women are happier in these places?
I think not.
In Venezuela, unless they're eating stray dogs and then getting down, I'm having a feeling not so great over there.
Also, these are all self-reporting surveys.
It turns out that self-reporting surveys in the Soviet Union may not reflect reality.
Who would have thought?
There's that.
Meanwhile, another thing that I hate today, there's a guy whose name is Chad Felix Green.
He's a conservative.
And he wrote a piece for The Federalist talking about being gay.
He says, the stigma against my conservative politics is worse than the stigma of being gay, meaning that he is treated worse online for being conservative than for being homosexual.
Well, there's a piece today by a woman named Lauren Thiessen called Conservative Gays Need to Shut the F Up.
So proving Chad Felix Green's thesis that it is worse to be a conserver than to be gay in social media, she says, That's good news, right?
I mean, in a utopian society, nobody would much care whether people prefer to F or fall in love with, but everyone would care deeply about the laws and policies that would actually impact the world.
So our hypothetical utopian folks wouldn't bat an eye at two men sharing a kiss, but would likely get pretty pissed if someone came around advocating the use of tear gas against people in need, or death for sick people who don't have the money to pay for treatment, Or killing machines for everybody.
So in other words, it's good.
It's good that Chad Felix Green feels more discriminated against for his conservatism than for his homosexuality.
It's a good thing.
So at least they're owning it.
At least folks on the left are now owning the fact that they're discriminatory and terrible.
So, that's exciting stuff.
OK.
And the final thing that I hate today, we're going to do a piece of deconstructing the culture.
So we haven't deconstructed the culture in a while.
When we deconstruct the culture, we take a piece of popular culture and we look at the messaging in that piece of popular culture that you may not have been listening to.
Because very often when they play a song on the radio, you may not catch the lyrics.
You may not be seeing the music video.
Well, our intrepid producer, Senya, sent me a piece that she got from the Googles about the 10 hottest music videos of 2018.
Suffice it to say, replete with stupidity.
And I had to stop when I saw Janelle Monae's pink spelled P Y N K because we can't spell things correctly anymore because that's uncool.
Janelle Monae is the feminist of the day.
She is a feminist nouveau.
She is bisexual.
And she says that feminism is all about the female genitalia.
Now, I have to acknowledge that it used to be.
I love that we live in a society where the subtlety of baby, it's cold outside, which is Basically, how a lot of wooing goes on, right?
I mean, every woman and every man who is honest about this knows that when you are wooing a person of the opposite sex, particularly a man wooing a woman, very often it is the woman who is saying, I need to leave now.
And the guy is saying, why don't you just stick around a little bit longer?
That's not rapey.
OK, rapey is when you actually rape somebody.
It is not rapey to say, why don't you stick around?
The girl is divided on whether she wants to go home or whether she wants to stay.
And then she decides, you know what?
I'm going to stay.
Right.
That's that's not rapey.
That is her making a free will decision.
But that's really bad.
We got a band, baby.
It's cold outside.
But real feminism, real feminism is not a woman making a decision to stay with a man.
Real feminism is talking about the actual biology of the vagina.
That's real feminism.
Real feminism is dressing up in costumes that mimic the labia.
That's real feminism.
So here's Janelle Monáe in pink.
I will describe this as best I can without going blue here.
And I will tell you the lyrics to this really, I think, fulfilling and emboldening and empowering piece of art from Janelle Monae.
Okay.
Okay, so, um, um, to explain how terrible this video is, oh my goodness.
Okay, so this video is so insanely obscene.
So basically, Janelle Monáe, we can pause it.
Janelle Monáe is dressed in a pair of pants that look like labia.
I mean, that's what it is designed to look like.
So she's obviously describing the vagina and the clitoris at a certain point here.
And the idea is that it is empowering to talk about your genitalia ad nauseam.
The actual lyrics are pink like the inside of your blank, and we're supposed to know that means genitalia, baby.
Pink behind all of the doors, crazy.
Pink like the tongue that goes down, obviously a reference to oral sex.
Maybe pink like the paradise found.
This stuff is rated X, right?
I mean, these are rated X lyrics.
But this thing, by the way, earned a Grammy nomination on Friday.
For best music video for this song, because True Art is dressing up on a beach wearing weird pants that look like the female anatomy.
And this is from her Dirty Computer album.
Just wonderful stuff.
Now, do women really feel empowered by talking about their vajayjays?
Just a question.
Like, I've always found it really off-putting when guys talk about their junk.
I find it not empowering at all.
It's not gentlemanly.
It's not good.
It's a piece of your anatomy.
Do you spend all your day talking about your thumb?
It's something that is just there.
So the fact that you're talking about it ad nauseum is really ridiculous.
And the idea that women think, oh, well, you know what?
It makes me more empowered when society accepts that I have a vagina.
Right.
But number one, I've learned that the vagina can be very male.
That's what I have learned from the left, is that just because you have a vagina doesn't make you a female, obviously.
So I don't know why it's empowering to females to talk about the female anatomy.
It's not female anatomy.
It's just anatomy.
And it's sometimes associated with the social construction That is femininity.
That's what I've learned from folks on the left.
So this shouldn't be empowering to women at all.
In fact, it's cisgender to assume that this is empowering to women.
It's empowering to all people, whether they identify as women or men.
Many men have vaginas.
I have been reliably informed by the scientific community.
So there's that.
Then, even if you assume, you know, put aside that idiocy, and assume that there is in fact a correlation between the female anatomy and being female, I don't understand why that would be the thing that you choose to take pride in.
It seems to me that females have been making the case for a while that they are more than their anatomy, that femininity involves more than just your genitalia, and that men, if they think of you as just your genitalia, that's a bad thing.
That would be objectifying you.
Which I agree with.
And if you want to treat a woman as a full-fledged human being, you probably should not be thinking quite so much about her genitalia and start thinking about the folds of her brain inside.
You should start thinking about the things she thinks, and feels, and the actions she takes in her life.
If I were to talk about all the wonderful things that make my wife my wife, Genitalia, like this is a component part, but this is not what makes my wife my wife.
Like, every woman on planet Earth has female anatomy.
Okay, all of them.
But what makes my wife my wife, what makes her special, and what makes her unique as a woman is not that.
What makes her unique as a woman is the fact that she's a wonderful wife, the fact she's a wonderful mother, the fact that she is a doctor.
The fact that she does all of these wonderful things every day.
That's what makes her a unique person.
That's why I respect my wife as a human.
But you can't have it both ways.
If you're on the feminist left and you want to reduce females to their genitalia, but then say also that genitalia don't mean that you are female and also men should stop objectifying your genitalia.
And also if you talk about female genitalia, then this makes you a sexist.
None of these things can hold true at the same time.
But if this is the empowerment, if this is the new empowerment, we got to ban baby cold.
Baby, it's cold outside.
But talking in graphic terms about the appearance of female genitalia, that's empowerment.
Man, what a world you have created, you morons.
Okay, we will be back here tomorrow to talk more about our moronic world.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Caramina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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