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Jan. 31, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:00
Whoops, They Said It Out Loud | Ep. 707
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Democrats embrace infanticide, the attack on wealth creation continues, and we examine the risks and rewards of American third parties.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Man, a lot of news to get to today.
President Trump finally hitting on his 2020 strategy, which is exactly what I had suggested it should be.
I'll explain in just one second.
And for those who are wondering, thank you.
I am doing a little bit better today, and my daughter is doing better as well.
So I got a lot of emails on that.
Just wanted to make that clear.
And my wife is a trooper.
She's doing better as well.
So thanks for all of the notes.
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All right, so the Democrats are now realizing that they have gone too far.
This is the pattern of this week's news.
Democrats say crazy things because they're trying to appeal to their base and also because they have made a crucial category error.
The category error they have made is that if people don't like President Trump, that means that people don't like anything President Trump agrees with.
So they're making a category error.
There's a category error that people make about bad people.
Where they think, okay, well this bad person did X, therefore X is bad.
Well, that's not always true, right?
Hitler owned a dog, doesn't mean owning a dog is bad.
It means Hitler is bad, but owning a dog, not bad.
Donald Trump...
A lot of people may not like him, but that does not mean that the American people take the opposite position on all of the issues he espouses.
In fact, there's a good case to be made that Trump's positions are significantly more popular than he is, which is why his approval ratings are generally higher than his personal approval ratings.
Well, the fact is that Democrats seem not to be able to grasp this simple concept.
And so they continue to maintain that anything that Trump is in favor of must be by nature terrible, and they go all the way to the other logical extreme.
That is how they end up saying that we should get rid of all private health insurance in the company, as Senator Kamala Harris said earlier this week.
That is why you are seeing states like New York and Virginia and Rhode Island now considering the full legalization of Termination of pregnancy, killing of the unborn, up to point of birth.
Now, what's funny is that it does show the differential priorities of the two parties.
The differential priorities of people in the United States.
If you listen to folks on the left, they think that the grave threat to humanity lies in things like global warming.
So Seth Meyers, last night, he was talking about President Trump and suggesting that President Trump, global warming, this is what was going to get all of us killed, Seth Meyers.
Ahead of the expected polar vortex this week, President Trump tweeted last night, quote, what the hell is going on with global warming?
Please come back fast.
We need you.
Once again, you're confusing weather with climate.
How can I explain this to you?
OK, let's watch a clip of you being a decent person.
I will say this about Hillary.
She doesn't quit.
She doesn't give up.
I respect that.
See, that was weather, a quick one time thing.
Now this is climate.
I moved on her like a bitch.
I don't know what I said.
You know what?
You've really had enough.
They're rapists.
Get him out of here.
Don't give him his coat.
Keep his coat.
And that's what's going to get us all killed.
Okay, so the suggestion is that global warming is going to get us all killed.
By the way, I should side note, make clear that the media are terrible when it comes to this distinction between weather and climate.
So every time Republicans point out that there's been a real cold snap across the entire Midwest, and they say, ah, global warming, then people on the left correctly say, no, no, no, that's just weather.
That's a weather event.
If you want to look at trend lines, then we can talk about climate.
Every time it gets really hot outside or there's a hurricane, then people on the left go, ah, look at this.
This is evidence of global warming.
And then we on the right go, no, no, no, that's weather.
If you want to look at climate, look at climate.
They don't apply this rule consistently.
But the main point here is that for Seth Meyers, what's going to get all of us killed, the grave moral crisis of our age, is that it is going to be a little warmer outside over the course of the next hundred years.
And that that may shift sea levels over the course, again, of the next hundred years.
The way the left talks about global warming is the same way that President Trump talks about the so-called border crisis, right?
It's a slow-rolling problem that we're going to have to deal with.
Folks on the left suggest, in the same way that President Trump says it's a national emergency, mobilize the military, folks on the left seem to think about global warming that it is going to be like the day after tomorrow, that suddenly the earth is going to heat up radically, 20 degrees, and there will be mass tsunamis swamping all of New York City, and Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal will be running through the wreckage.
It's just silliness.
But in any case, the crisis that Democrats really see is a crisis of the weather, of the climate, a crisis that requires a complete destruction of the systems of human freedom, right?
Those systems of human freedom of free trade and free markets and free enterprise.
All that stuff has to stop because if we don't stop that stuff, then we are going to be destroyed by the weather.
What folks on the left refuse to recognize is that the real crisis for humans typically has been made by people who do evil things.
It is not evil to turn on your air conditioner.
It is evil, however, to kill the unborn.
Okay, that's an evil thing.
Killing the unborn, not a good thing.
Crises of the human heart are significantly more dangerous to other human beings than weather events that human beings have had trouble controlling for literally the entire history of humanity.
So the left will put inordinate focus on climate change, but they will put no focus on the willful attempts to legalize the killing of babies fully formed in the womb who just have not gone through the birth canal.
It's truly an amazing thing.
The same folks who will say, you know, people aren't undocumented.
They're just people.
And on one side of the border, there are people.
On the other side of the border, there are people.
If there is a border called the birth canal, there are people on one side and not people on the other, according to the left.
The left has the same perspective about human babies that slave owners used to have about black folks in the United States.
If those black folks were in Georgia, then they were property.
And if those black folks were in Massachusetts, then they were people.
Well, borders don't define whether a person is a person or not.
That's absurd.
In the same way, and it's disgusting morally, in the same way, the vaginal canal does not define whether a person is a person or not.
And yet, in Virginia, without any controversy, Democrats were attempting to push a bill that would have legalized abortion all the way to point of birth.
And they were saying this openly.
Now, what's amazing about this is we're going to play a bunch of clips of Democrats talking about why it's good to be able to kill a baby Fully formed, during dilation.
I've watched my wife in labor with both of our children.
That is a baby.
You know how I know it's a baby?
Because I watched the baby come out of her.
This is not difficult.
But for folks on the left, they believe that during dilation... And this is the position of the Democratic National Committee.
This is in the DNC platform.
It has been for years.
I have been bewildered for legitimately years.
Go back and listen to all of my old material for...
Well, in close to two decades now, I've been bewildered why Republicans don't simply hold up a picture of a baby minutes before birth and say, this is what Democrats think it is OK to kill, because it is obvious that this has been and is the standing Democratic position these days, which is sick.
It's insane.
And Kathy Tran, who's a state senator in in a state assembly person, In the House of Representatives in Virginia, she full-scale defended that, as we talked about yesterday.
To refresh your memory, here is what she said when she was specifically asked whether for mental health reasons, not to save the life of the mother, but for any health reason whatsoever, for a temporary convenience issue, a mother should be allowed to ask a doctor to lethally inject a fully formed child as it enters the birth canal.
Late in the third trimester, could a physician perform an abortion if he indicated it would impair the mental health of the woman?
Or physical health.
Okay.
Okay.
I'm talking about the mental health.
So, I mean, through the third trimester.
The third trimester goes all the way up to 40 weeks.
Okay.
But to the end of the third trimester?
Yep.
I don't think we have a limit in the bill.
So, where it's obvious that a woman is about to give birth.
She has physical signs that she is about to give a birth.
Would that still be a point at which she could request an abortion if she was so certified?
She's dilating.
My bill would allow that, yes.
Okay, so she says it straight out.
Now Kathy Tran is backtracking.
She's suggesting she's being taken out of context.
We played you a full clip.
She answers a specific question.
She answers it with yes.
That is not my fault.
That is not your fault.
That is Kathy Tran's fault.
And that is the fault of the Democratic Party that embraces this position.
Not just in Virginia, in New York, in Rhode Island, across the country.
This is in the DNC platform.
Again, the Democratic National Committee platform has no limits on abortion at any time.
At any time.
Now, it's funny.
There was a commentator named Damon Linker, and he was saying, why is the Right picking on this?
You know, if the Right really believes that an abortion is morally as evil at eight weeks as it is at birth, then why are they picking on this?
The reason that we're picking on this, the reason we're pointing this out, is that we do agree on the Right that an abortion at eight weeks, at ten weeks, is just as morally problematic, as morally evil, as an abortion at point of birth.
But what the left is acknowledging is that they believe the same thing in reverse.
They believe that it is just as morally unproblematic to kill a baby that is fully formed as it is to kill a baby at eight weeks.
Which blows their entire argument to smithereens, because their argument has been, a baby is not a baby, that's why you can kill it.
But now, they're looking at a full-grown baby in the womb, and they're going, no, no, no, that's okay, we can kill that too, because it's the same as an eight-week-old baby in the womb.
And so the argument is not an argument that we're making.
We are demonstrating by pointing out the partial birth abortion insanity of the left.
We're pointing out that there are a lot of folks on the left who full-scale acknowledge that an eight-week-old fetus in the womb has the same moral value as a fully grown baby, namely none.
Folks on the right say an eight-week-old baby in the womb, an eight-week-old fetus in the womb has the same moral value as a fully grown baby, therefore you shouldn't kill it.
Folks on the left are now saying, a fully grown baby has the same moral value as an eight week old fetus in the womb, therefore you should kill it.
It's fully crazy.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a big controversy on this show because I suggested that pro-life people, that pro-life people are not for killing babies, even in circumstances where killing the baby theoretically would prevent a future harm.
And I used the oft-cited internet example of killing baby Hitler, right?
By the way, an example so commonly used on the internet that Tom Hanks commented on it in like 2015.
There was an article in the New York Times about it in 2015.
I said pro-life people would not kill baby Hitler because we don't kill babies.
According to the left, every baby is potentially baby Hitler, so kill it.
I mean, it's... Which one of these is morally more reprehensible?
It's wild.
Okay, and then it gets even worse.
We're gonna play for you the clip of Ralph Northam again, because I think it is important to analyze what he says and whether he is lying or not about what he said in just a second.
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All right, so meanwhile, so you've got the Kathy Tran clip where she fully explains, baby, coming out the birth canal, Fine.
And yesterday, we went through the actual legislation.
The actual legislation dramatically weakens the restrictions on late-term abortion in the state of Virginia.
There's proposed language in that piece of legislation that said that there would have to be substantial and irremediable harm to a woman in order to justify a late-term abortion, they stripped that language out.
They said any harm at all, mental or physical, would justify a late-term abortion, even if it's temporary.
Okay, that removes all limitations.
Now, what the bill does say is the bill says that the conditions for late-term abortion, for legalization of late-term abortion, is that there must be life-saving measures that are available if the product of the abortion is born alive, and if there is evidence of viability of the fetus.
So, the idea there is that if you are in the process of an abortion of a baby, the baby comes out by accident while you're trying to kill the baby in the womb, and it comes out and it lives, if there's evidence of viability, then there shall be some sort of life-saving measures available to take care of the kids.
In other words, no infanticide.
You can't actually kill the kid.
That's in the actual bill.
Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia went even further yesterday.
He went even further.
So Governor Northam, we're going to play his clip and then we're going to talk about what he says he said and then we're going to talk about what he actually said and the distinction between the two.
So Ralph Northam is the supposedly moderate governor of Virginia.
Now let me remind folks that Ralph Northam ran against, I believe it was, was it Ed Gillespie in Virginia?
It was Ed Gillespie in Virginia.
And there were a lot of folks who were angry at Ed Gillespie because they felt that Ed Gillespie had been too loosey-goosey with the alt-right, and they said, well, vote for Ralph Northam.
There were a lot of folks who said, oh, he's a moderate.
He's a moderate.
I have long suggested that in cases where there are candidates who are morally unpraiseworthy in the Republican Party, I never made that case, by the way, there are a lot of folks who make the case that if there's a bad Republican, you should vote for the Democrat.
You can't, in good conscience, vote for people who do things like this.
Here is Ralph Northam yesterday, and we're going to play the full clip because he says he's being taken out of context.
He's asked specifically about Kathy Tran's comments that you should be able to kill a baby all the way up to point of birth.
And here is Ralph Northam's answer.
You'll hear the questioner from WTOP Radio in Virginia.
And she was pressed by a Republican delegate about whether her bill would permit an abortion, even as a woman is essentially dilating, ready to give birth.
And she answered that it would permit an abortion at that stage of labor.
Do you support her measure?
And explain her answer.
Yeah, you know, I wasn't there, Julie, and I certainly can't speak for Delegate Tran, but I will tell you, one, first thing I would say, this is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians, And the mothers and fathers that are involved.
There are, you know, when we talk about third trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of obviously the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician, by the way.
And it's done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that's non-viable.
So, in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen.
The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated, if that's what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.
So, I think this was really blown out of proportion.
Okay, stop it there, because the rest of it he just goes on to talk about why women should be the ones who make these decisions and no one else.
Okay, now, the way that Northam says this clip is being taken out of context.
He says, I'm talking about cases in which a baby is born with, for example, an encelopathy.
The baby's born with an open skull, for example.
The baby's not going to survive, and so the late-term abortion has been provided because the baby is going to die anyway, and so what we're really talking about here is end-of-life care.
The problem is that the bill doesn't talk about that.
The bill does not talk about what happens if you give birth to a baby that has a severe deformity.
That's not what the bill is about.
The bill was designed to broaden the scope of abortion.
Also, the way that Northam phrases that, he uses two independent clauses.
He says, in cases where there is a severe deformity, in cases where the baby is non-viable.
Now, you could read it as though he is saying that in cases where the baby is non-viable, then we have an end-of-life care discussion because, you know, do you have to use life-saving measures on a baby that is non-viable after it's born?
That's his case.
But that's not what it sounds like he's saying here, right?
He is talking about something different.
He is talking about, because the bill goes beyond that, the bill says you should be able to have a late-term abortion for any reason that you could possibly want, basically.
That's what the bill says.
As long as you can get a doctor to attest that there's a health issue at all, any health issue, then you should be able to abort for any reason whatsoever.
He is conflating that dishonestly with cases in which there is a severe abnormality to the point of non-viability.
He's conflating that.
That is simply not true.
The vast majority of late-term abortions in the United States are not performed for reasons of non-viability of the fetus or to save the life of the mother, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which is a pro-abortion group.
It's just not true.
It's a lie that's being told by Democrats.
Secondly, by conflating the two, he is making an excuse for people who have a baby accidentally during the process of an abortion.
So, what would he do with a baby that is born alive?
Would he treat it the same way that he is treating a baby with encephalopathy?
Sorry, the open skull syndrome?
Is he treating it the exact same way?
It's pretty unclear from that clip.
It's pretty unclear.
But here's the bottom line.
Even if you think that Ralph Northam is taking out of context, he's endorsing a bill that says that a fully formed healthy baby can be killed as long as it doesn't exit that birth canal.
It's pretty amazing stuff.
And when he says severe deformity, by the way, Is he talking about only severe deformity?
Like, he's actually going further than the bill.
The bill, as I mentioned, says that if the baby is born and is viable, then you have to provide life-saving care to the baby.
But, what if the baby is born, is viable, and has a severe deformity?
Right, he says severe deformity.
What if the baby is born without a leg, for example?
Or let's say that the baby is born with some syndrome that really affects the face.
Let's say there's a severe abnormality, the baby is born down syndrome.
Is he talking about a eugenics program?
A little clarity here would be useful because I don't know and you don't know.
You know why I don't know and you don't know?
Because it is very obvious that the Democratic Party across the country does not value the life of fully formed babies in the womb.
So why would we assume that they suddenly value the lives of fully formed babies one minute after birth?
I don't think that's a fair assumption.
Peter Singer, by the way, doesn't, right?
Peter Singer is a bioethicist, believe it or not, over at Princeton University, and he's made the case that there is no logical distinction between before birth and after birth, and therefore, you should be able to actually kill.
You should be able to engage in infanticide.
I think we're about five minutes away from the Democrats actually embracing that position.
When I say maybe five, ten years, they're going to start actually embracing that position because that's how radical the Democratic Party has become.
Bottom line is this.
Read their own words.
Watch the tape and decide for yourself.
But understand that one thing is obvious and that is their actual position on abortion.
It should be available on demand to point of birth at the very earliest.
Right?
That should be the restriction.
So all these other lies that they're telling you about how they are trying to save the lives of children, or they're trying to care for children, that's a kid.
And again, the reason that we are bringing this up is because the left recognizes no distinction between a nine-month-old baby in the womb and a two-day-old embryo.
They have the same moral values of the left.
That is the destruction of the value of human life at a root level.
Okay, in a second, I want to get to Howard Schultz, who is just being Hit with every club in the Democratic arsenal for the crime of not running as a Democrat and not paving the way for the SJW crowd to take over the Democratic Party in the country.
We'll get to that in just a second.
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Okay, meanwhile...
Howard Schultz being clocked up and down by the left, he cannot be tolerated.
And he can't be tolerated because it turns out that his story is actually a pretty inspiring one.
Howard Schultz grew up in the projects, and then he became captain of industry.
He was the founder and creator of Starbucks, an $84 billion corporation.
Well, Schultz has been ripped for being a billionaire, and it does demonstrate this communistic hatred on the left for anyone who makes it big and happens to be white.
So, a friend of mine who has been, she was on my show on Fox News during the last election cycle, Bridget Phetasy, who's not on the right.
She's a centrist, I think it's fair to say.
Bridget tweeted out, I don't understand why it is that on the left, people like Howard Schultz are despised and reviled for their wealth, called evil billionaires.
How about Oprah Winfrey?
Is she also an evil billionaire?
Like if she were running, wouldn't it be a rags to riches stories about how you can make it in America?
It's just they don't like Schultz, and so now they're gonna rip on his wealth.
Well, yesterday, Schultz cut a video defending his background and talking about how he was really the story of the American dream.
And we'll talk about why it is that so many on the left can't deal with this.
In Brooklyn, New York, in Canarsie, in federally subsidized housing, the projects.
When I was seven years old, my father, who was a laborer, came home and had a serious accident.
He was dismissed from his job.
We lost our health insurance.
I witnessed the fracturing of the American dream.
I started with nothing.
And I made it in America because of the aspiration, the magnetism, and the spirit of our country.
Okay, this is really bad, though.
He's not allowed to say this.
So if Oprah said the same words, we'd be talking— Oh, she's so inspiring.
She's so inspiring.
Look at that rags-to-riches story in America.
See, the story of America is about the ability to aspire to something greater.
The ability to be born into poverty, and then to make something of yourself.
And yes, of course, there are people along the way who give you a hand up.
There are people along the way who help you out.
There are communities that try to help you, but that doesn't change the fact that America is in fact a land of opportunity.
The problem is that Howard Schultz happens to be a white guy who's not running as a Democrat.
That's all this is.
He's a white guy who's not running as a Democrat.
End of story.
Because Howard Schultz is a white guy who is not running as a Democrat, this means that he is very bad and he has actually been a child of privilege.
This is where the intersectional ideology that suggests that all human experience can be reduced to group identity completely falls flat.
So for example, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez yesterday went after Howard Schultz and suggested, well, he's a billionaire.
How would he know what it's like to bring himself up from nothing?
Even though he legitimately brought himself up from nothing.
Despite that fact, Howard Schultz is not seen as that because he is not, he was privileged not to be a member of any of these other victim groups.
So if he's not a member of a victim group, it doesn't matter if he grew up as a victim of circumstance himself, he is not a member of a victim group that has historically been victimized in the United States.
And therefore, he has to be, he has to be othered.
Schultz was born... Schultz is Jewish, by the way.
But, again, according to the left, Jews are just other... It's another form of white people, according to people on the left.
According to people on the left, if you're a Jew, you're no longer a member of a minority group, because Jews are successful minorities.
And just like on the left, Asians increasingly are being seen as quote-unquote white, because they are too successful fiscally, economically, and educationally, and so they can be quarantined out at places like Harvard University.
So Schultz is being ripped up and down for his own background.
And it's it is pretty amazing to watch.
I mean, that is simply it's simply an element of how radical the Democratic Party has become.
How radical is the Democratic Party?
Everybody is supposed to acknowledge their privilege unless they are the most non-privileged group in the world.
Like, for example, I mentioned Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
So Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, she says that even she Alex from the Bronx.
Even she, a Hispanic woman, even she is a privileged woman.
Why?
Because she isn't a member of the least privileged group, which would be transgender minority little people or something.
Here is AOC trying to explain why she too is privileged because she is cisgender.
Every single person in this country can acknowledge some privilege of some type.
I'm a cisgendered woman.
I will never know the trauma of feeling like I'm not born in the right body.
And that is a privilege that I have no matter how poor my family was when I was born.
Okay, now what's beautiful about this excuse-making, because that's really what it is, this excuse-making is that what it allows is people to simply rip on anyone who is successful as actually a beneficiary of privilege, rather than a beneficiary of the ultimate privilege, which is living in a free and open America.
Howard Schultz was not a privileged kid.
He did have one privilege.
He grew up in a two-parent family, apparently.
Well, he had two privileges.
He grew up in a two-parent family.
And he grew up in the freest country in the history of the world.
Those would be the two major privileges.
The first privilege he can't control.
The second privilege we can all sort of control, and that is the system under which we live.
But the problem is for the left, they don't want to acknowledge the ultimate privilege, which is living in a free and open system like the United States' system.
So what they say is that your other privileges are the reason you're successful.
So the reason Howard Schultz is successful is because he had privileges being white slash Jewish.
Right?
And therefore, we can discount his story of rags to riches.
Whereas for Oprah Winfrey, we can't discount her story of rags to riches because she didn't have that privilege.
That's how they make the distinction between billionaires.
Intersectionality allows you to destroy the accomplishments of other people based on supposed privilege that they experienced, even if you have no evidence of them experiencing that privilege.
Which allows for you to draw a narrative line however you want to draw it.
So AOC can point to herself as an example of somebody who pulled herself up by her bootstraps, and then she can point at Howard Schultz, a guy who went from poorer than AOC to much more successful than AOC, and say, well that wasn't him pulling him up by his bootstraps, that was his privilege in operation.
This is how the left uses intersectionality and social justice warrior group identity in order to tear down individuals who succeed and avoid blame for individuals who make bad decisions.
You can, it's a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Intersectionality is too often used as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Now, is there an argument that people experience life differently based on the groups of which they are a part?
In the absence of other information, maybe.
But once we know about their individual life, you can't make that case.
So if you were to put in front of me a black woman and say, did this person have a different experience than a white man in life?
I would say, yeah, based on no other information, sure.
Of course, probably.
Okay, but once I know who the person is, once we know who the individual is, if you are still using the group identity instead of your knowledge about the individual in order to make a judgment about the individual, now you're operating off of racism and sexism.
So, if you just put Howard Schultz next to Oprah Winfrey and said, did these two people have different experiences, You'd say, yeah, I'm sure they did.
Every person has different experiences, but based on their group identities, he's a white male, she's a black female, probably they had different life experiences.
That's sort of the theory of intersectionality.
But once we know Howard Schultz's personal story, you can't keep claiming that he is a privilege beneficiary when his story does not reek of privilege.
And yet this is precisely what the left continues to do.
This is why Schultz should certainly not run inside the Democratic Party.
He'd be a nut to do so.
In a second, I'm going to talk about the continuing attack on Schultz, which I find fascinating.
Like, it's making me like Schultz more, frankly.
I'll talk about it in just a second.
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Okay, I have more to talk about with regard to Howard Schultz, plus some updates on the Jussie Smollett case.
We'll get to all of that in a second.
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So the problem that a lot of the folks have with Howard Schultz is that they want to pull the intersectional card.
And Howard Schultz, but it doesn't work unless you actually buy into the intersectional identity politics of the Democratic Party.
This is why Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, all at a severe disadvantage inside the Democratic Party.
They also understand that if they were to move outside the Democratic Party, they'd end up in the Green Party, Looney Tunes land of Joe Stein.
Well, Howard Schultz is, I think, I think he scares the daylights out of Democrats, frankly, and I think that he ought to scare the daylights out of Democrats.
You can see how afraid they are by the way the media are reacting to Howard Schultz.
Schultz is pointing out, guys, you know, the Democrats are moving towards socialism and it's not going to be pretty.
A lot of people aren't interested in this.
Here is Schultz saying this on CNN yesterday.
If the Democrats are proposing anything close to a 70% level of income tax, how many core Democrats are going to be supportive of a move towards socialism?
Not very many.
President Trump will get re-elected.
Okay, so that is a statement that scares the death out of the left, which wants to embrace, as I say, this full-scale, hardcore, far-left positioning.
And Shultz is reminding them, guys, just because you don't like Trump doesn't mean that everybody is going to resonate to your cause.
The left is going nuts over this, because they want to provide this stark dichotomy.
They want you to have to choose between President Trump and socialism.
And they hope that if you hate President Trump enough, you'll resonate to socialism.
And suddenly, here's Shultz saying, you don't have to choose Trump, and you don't have to choose socialism.
That sounds pretty good to a lot of Americans.
I know there are a lot of Trump supporters who listen to this show, but understand his popularity ratings are not all that high, right?
There are a lot of folks who are not going to vote for President Trump in the next election cycle.
The possibility that Shultz carves into that vote by saying, I don't like Trump and also I'm not a crazy person, Not an insignificant possibility.
Listen to the panic from the media over this.
I mean, let's face this.
How bad are the Democrats at this?
Howard Schultz is a threat to them.
This guy is utterly charisma-free.
He is dull as dishwater.
I mean, he really is.
You watch him speak and you're like, wow.
This?
Really?
Okay, I guess.
Nobody's looking at Howard Chilton going, oh, he captures my imagination.
All he is is a return to normalcy.
He feels like Warren G. Harding in 1920.
That was the Warren G. Harding campaign slogan in 1920.
After the insanity of the Woodrow Wilson administration was return to normalcy.
Howard Schultz should make that his slogan, honestly, because he feels like return to normalcy for a lot of folks.
And this is scaring the death out of Democrats in the media who really want the AOC wing of the Democratic Party to be a Senate, the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.
So listen to MSNBC's Nicole Wallace freaking out, just losing her mind on Steve Schmidt, who's an advisor to Howard Schultz.
People are terrified.
And people are terrified that you, one of the most visible Trump critics, are now behind someone that they feel like could take away the Democrats' best chance of toppling Donald Trump.
Nobody is voting.
The election is two years away.
But why are you scared?
Okay, everybody, listen, she's so scared.
She's so scared.
Here's the solution.
Don't be crazy.
You had one job, Democrats.
One.
And you suck at it.
John Favreau, who is on the Obama team.
He says it's just a, it's an awful thing to do.
He's going to ruin the world.
Ruin the world.
The Pod Bros.
Explaining why Howard Schultz is the scariest person in the world.
These two people, Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg, on very different ends of the spectrum, are both thinking, yeah, we could both run in the Democratic primary and we'll just see if anyone likes our ideas.
Howard Schultz thinks that he doesn't have to do that, that he gets to just run on his own as an independent and do it that way, even if it means hurting the Democratic candidate and helping to re-elect Trump.
And that's just a f***ing awful thing to do.
It is.
I mean, people should be restricted to running inside the Democratic Party, where we, the pod bros, can determine whether they ought to even receive the votes of the general public.
I love that the people who suggest that Donald Trump is a force against democracy are suggesting that third-party candidates should now be banned.
Now, let's be real about this.
A third-party candidate is not a guarantee that Trump wins re-election.
It's not even a guarantee that all of the votes for Howard Schultz come from the Democratic Party.
It is quite possible that he draws away a bunch of suburban Republicans who would normally vote for Trump, and now they see Schultz as some sort of moderate.
Schultz is relying on, apparently, some interior polling data, is what Josh Crashour over at National Journal was tweeting yesterday.
He says, Schultz commissioned several ballot tests over the past few months.
...and found that centrist Indy polls between 25 low to low 30s.
Between 25 and low 30s, President Trump consistently at 29 to 30 percent, Elizabeth Warren between 26 and 30 percent.
In other words, the vote splits exactly three ways.
With Warren on the ballot, they found that about 24 percent of Democrats defected to the generic centrist independence alternative and 20 percent of Trump Republicans.
Polling found that Trump's support was strong with Republicans around 70 percent.
Now, let's be real about this.
A generic centrist indie option would lead to a higher percentage than if any other candidate were named.
Like, Schultz is not going to draw all of that.
The centrist in the option carried about 40% of independence on average in the surveys that Schultz conducted.
In reality, this probably, this probably, you know, he probably wins 10-15% of the vote.
But there's no guarantee that that 10-15% of the vote comes universally from folks on the left.
It is quite possible that folks in the Republican Party see somebody like Schultz as a return to normalcy also, which is presumably why President Trump was ripping on Schultz the other day.
What's amazing is that for a group of people who are fully convinced that their ideas are so wildly popular, why are they so scared of Howard Schultz?
I'm not scared of Howard Schultz.
I'm not.
I don't think Republicans should be scared of Howard Schultz, because I don't think that the Republican platform is loony.
I think the Democratic platform is loony.
I think the real hole for the Republicans has never been their platform with President Trump.
It's been President Trump's personal foibles, which is why I think it's very good that President Trump today started tweeting out what should be his 2020 campaign.
It's very simple.
It's very simple, his 2020 campaign.
His 2020 campaign is what he tweeted out this morning.
He tweeted out, and I want to find the exact quote because he should just keep saying this over and over.
Democrats are becoming the party of late-term abortion, high taxes, open borders, and crime.
Just say that over and over and over and over.
That's all.
Shut up.
Just say that over and over.
Make this election into generic Republican versus kooky Democrat.
Do that.
Maybe then Republicans will have a shot.
Meanwhile, Democrats are counting on the growth of this demographically diverse base.
It's really kind of fascinating.
So, as we mentioned, intersectionality, this philosophy that everybody is a beneficiary of certain types of group privilege, And we can discount their personal experience on the basis of their group privilege.
This has taken over the Democratic Party, and it's leading them to misread the nature of the electorate.
It's kind of fascinating.
So the demographics of America are clearly changing in interesting ways.
In 2020, there will be more Hispanic than black voters, and whites are declining to 66% of the vote.
Now, a lot of folks on the right have said, well, this is scary for Republicans because as the Hispanic vote percentage increases, as minority vote percentage increases in the United States, that's obviously bad for Republicans.
Not necessarily true.
Look at Texas, where Republicans continue to win somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the Hispanic vote in Texas.
In California, that number is like 10 to 20 percent, maybe.
So it really depends on how the party handles the demographic shift.
But the Democrats seem to have the same perspective, which is that as demographics shift, everybody will naturally move to the left.
This is not actually true.
So here is AOC making that case yesterday, suggesting that The real driving force in the Democratic Party right now is minorities inside the Democratic Party.
This is not actually the case.
Colors are usually much further to the left than white liberals because racism, colonialism are, we understand through lived experience in a way that many don't understand, that these are issues that are part of a hyper-capitalist framework.
Okay, that is just not true, okay?
When she suggests that minority groups in the United States are further left than white Democrats, by statistical data, this is false.
White Democrats are actually further left than black Democrats because the white members of the Democratic Party have changed, right?
They're now all college-educated hipsters who go to coffee shops in Seattle, right?
That's whose members... The SJW crowd is universally rich and universally white.
That is who the SJW crowd is.
A lot of the folks in minority communities who are on the left are actually not by nature particularly left when it comes to government policy.
A lot of them are left because they have a false perception of Republicans as racially insensitive.
And that's why Democrats run on the intersectionality stuff as opposed to running on the Bernie Sanders platform.
The problem is that Democrats are now assuming the support of those groups.
And that's a hell of an assumption to make.
Assuming that all blacks and all Hispanics are going to vote for you because you have sufficiently cast Republicans as racist That's only going to last so long.
This is why Bernie Sanders did not do well among minority groups in the Democratic primaries in 2016.
He didn't.
Hillary Clinton overperformed him.
Hillary Clinton was not popular among minority groups in 2008, because they actually had an intersectional candidate named Barack Obama on the ballot.
But in 2016, Hillary Clinton overperformed with minority groups when compared to Bernie Sanders.
What happened to the minority groups?
Why weren't they further left than the general electorate in the Democratic Party, as AOC suggests?
The answer is, they aren't.
The answer is a lot of Hispanics in this country are not, in fact, as left as mainstream white members of the Democratic Party who have skewed far to the left, which is why a centrist candidate who is not perceived in the way that Donald Trump is perceived could do some damage to the Democratic Party.
All of this is, of course, I think really, really interesting.
And frankly, I have always been a fan of the idea that there should be more than two parties in the country that are viable.
I know that the system tends toward two-party dominance.
It tends to, because it's first-past-the-post system, it's a majoritarian system, that means that, and there's no secondary voting, and there's no proportional representation, that tends toward well-organized two-party systems.
But frankly, I like the idea of there being a lot of options on the ballot.
I don't think that it's a problem.
I think it's a very good thing.
And I think the Democrats trying to shut it down demonstrates they know that their own agenda is too radical for the American people.
I mean, how radical is the agenda of the left?
They've gone so far left that the Rules Committee for the Rules for the Committee on Natural Resources in the U.S.
House of Representatives, Democrats were trying to propose that they actually remove from the oath of office, so help me God, that they should actually remove that.
Now, it is not mandatory that you say so help me God, but it's pro forma.
The reason being that Pretty much everyone in the United States, even people who are quasi-agnostic, believe in the existence of a higher power.
The United States is a far more religious country, generally, than folks in Europe are.
Democrats want to remove that.
This agenda, you think that agenda is in line with Catholics?
Catholic Hispanics, particularly?
You think that agenda is in line with a lot of black folks in the United States?
A lot of black church-going folks in the United States?
There is an actual disconnect that Republicans have yet to exploit between the radical left socialist policies of people like Bernie Sanders, anti-religion, anti-family policies of people like Bernie Sanders, pro-abortion policies of people like Bernie Sanders, and religious communities, particularly minority religious communities.
All those Catholics, all those Catholic Hispanics who are voting Democrat in the state of California because they have a perception of the Republican Party, they're still going to church where they're being preached to every week about the evils of abortion.
Why Republicans aren't focusing on that, why they haven't reached out to minority communities, is beyond me, especially in an era where secular white Democrats rule the roost inside the Democratic Party.
I mean, you're seeing the Democrats, like, the Democrats have to bank on minority candidates in order to demonstrate sympathy for minorities they hope will lead to electoral victory.
But I'm not sure that if Bernie Sanders is the candidate, or Elizabeth Warren is the candidate, they can count on the kind of minority support that they are counting on.
Hillary Clinton made that mistake in 2016, by the way.
She thought she was going to perform the same with minorities as Barack Obama did, and she didn't.
She didn't, which proves that it ain't the Democratic platform drawing minorities, really.
It is personality.
And that's why the Democrats have to use intersectional politics in order to excise people like Howard Schultz, in order to excise people like Bernie Sanders and even Elizabeth Warren.
It's why Kamala Harris has significant advantage in the primaries.
It's why if the Democratic Party superstructure is smart, They want somebody like Kamala Harris because if they can signal sympathy via the race of the candidate, then they don't actually have to determine what it is that a lot of minority voters might want in terms of policy.
Those minority voters may be more sympathetic to Democratic policies than Republican policies, that's certainly possible, but not to the extent that they embrace Bernie Sanders crazy at a higher rate than the normal white Democrat does.
Okay, in just a second I want to get to some things I like and then we'll get to some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So my wife and I have jumped into a new show on Netflix.
It is called Travelers and it's kind of a fun show.
The basic premise of the show is that sometime in the future, hundreds of years in the future, There's been some horrible environmental disaster caused by an asteroid hitting the earth.
And now they've discovered in the future a way for people from the future to basically inhabit the bodies of people in the present.
So what they do is they wait until somebody is about to die so that they're not actually killing anyone.
And then in the moment where they're about to die, because they know the history, they can inhabit the bodies of those people and try and prevent future catastrophe.
The show's fun and the show's interesting.
I'm really enjoying it with my wife.
Here's a little bit of the trailer.
Last and broken remnants.
Vow to undo the errors of our ascendance.
To make the earth whole.
The lost, unlost.
At peril of our own birth.
Thirty seconds.
In the future, we've developed a technology to project a conscious mind.
So, it's fun.
It's a fun show, and it's worth the watch.
And it's like PG-13, maybe?
So, there's not a lot there that's super violent or super terrible.
So, you can watch it with, I would say, mid-teenagers, would be fair.
So, the show is a kick.
So, check that out.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So thing number one, I'm supposed to speak at Loyola Marymount University in the next couple of months.
And Loyola had put out, I guess, a statement to Young America's Foundation.
They wanted a bunch of questions answered about my politics, whether my politics were acceptable.
It became a bit of a national scandal.
And then LMU said, listen, we're not trying to obstruct Ben from speaking.
We're going to let him speak.
Well, this led Dr. Nina M. Rosano, who I guess is a queer studies professor i believe that's her biography so she tweeted out ben shapiro espouses hate speech and is linked to numerous hate groups okay i'd challenge her name a hate group i am linked to like one not not numerous like one as an lmu professor i will be organizing protests and alerting the media of lmu's decision to support hate speech which is completely antithetical to our university mission i would note that i believe angela davis spoke there
She's like an actual former wanted terrorist by the FBI.
She says, you know, that's completely antithetical to our university mission, as opposed to, it's a Jesuit school, you know, as opposed to the radical left social agenda, which is apparently not antithetical to LMU's Jesuit mission, I guess.
Now, this is funny.
So she says, I'm going to come and promote hate speech.
So I tweeted back, well, see you there or not, because I don't really care.
And she said that she wanted to get the word out to the media.
Well, she has like a follower.
I have about two million followers.
So once I retweeted that, it seems like that would have drawn some media attention.
Well, then she blocked everybody.
She made her account private, which is so I guess she didn't want that much media attention.
Oh, so sad.
Amazing how people run for cover the minute that their radicalism is exposed.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So, this Jussie Smollett case just continues to develop in real time.
We still don't know what happened.
Last night, the Chicago PD put out a picture of two people who it says they were looking for.
And it's just...
Insane.
I mean, the picture is basically of two randos.
You can't see their faces.
They look like two shapes walking.
They're like, these people may be witnesses to something, and they're just humans.
Like, that's all you can tell from the picture.
Great.
What we do know is that Jussie Smollett, whose original story you'll recall, is that he was walking on the streets of Chicago At 2 a.m., and he was accosted by two white guys, is what his people told TMZ.
He was accosted by two white guys, who tossed a noose around his neck, poured bleach on him, and shouted, this is MAGA country, in the middle of Chicago, at 2 a.m., in 60 under windchill.
And then, they broke his ribs, supposedly, and for some reason, the police were not called to the scene.
He walked back into his lobby, past the doorman, still 40 minutes later, wearing the noose around his neck, apparently.
There's no tape of the incident.
There's tape of him at the subway, leaving the subway, and then there's tape of him entering the lobby, now with the noose around his neck that he was still wearing and was wearing when the police arrived.
His agent, I guess, said that they were on the phone together when this happened, so he heard all of this.
But then Jussie Smollett says he would not turn his phone over to the police so they could even verify that that is the reality.
So he refuses to allow Chicago detectives to access his phone in order to independently verify his manager's claim that he heard the MAGA country attack while they were talking.
So we will see whether any of this ends up, like, what exactly happened here, but suffice it to say, it is not ridiculous to have your doubts about this story.
The story itself is one of those stories where, for a certain segment of the population pushing a particular narrative about Trump supporters, it's too good to be true, so everybody jumps on it.
But we can wait for all the facts to come out and then we can talk about it, or we can do what the media seems to have done and forget about covering this thing.
All the way until it's debunked, at which point they go, oh, I guess we screwed that one up.
So they'll cover the initial accusation, nothing in between, and then if it is debunked eventually, if it turns out to be a hoax, then there'll be like a couple of stories about how, oh, I guess it was a hoax, oops.
That's the way all of this works.
Alrighty, so we will be back here a little bit later in the day, and we'll have much to speak about then.
We have two live hours later in the day, which is why you should subscribe.
Go subscribe now at Daily Wire.
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I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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