President Trump rallies in El Paso, Beto responds, and the government shutdown deal is on the table.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Man, I knew that 2020 was going to be great.
I did not know that the circus was going to be this much fun.
All three rings of the circus have been filled and there are more rings to come.
More candidates thinking about entering and all of them making fools of themselves.
And it's just glorious.
We're going to get to all of that in just one second.
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All right.
So last night, President Trump held his first real campaign rally of 2020.
And his first campaign rally of 2020 was a blowout.
I mean, there were thousands and thousands of people who showed up.
Gigantic crowd there on the border in El Paso.
And it was Trump at his finest.
I mean, it was freewheeling Trump.
It was Trump doing what he does best, just going off on folks.
It was pretty solid stuff.
So he began by launching into an attack on the Green New Deal and Alexandro Ocasio-Cortez's stupid frequently asked questions and backgrounder checklist.
Here he is going after AOC, and it is pretty spectacular.
Last week, they introduced a massive government takeover that would destroy our incredible economic gains.
They introduced the so-called Green New Deal.
It sounds like a high school Term paper that got a low mark.
This is exactly right, of course.
I mean, it's as though he listens to the show, since that's exactly what I said when it came out.
I said that this was a paper that should never have gotten a C-plus in an English class from, like, eighth grade, which is exactly right.
The president has a real benefit in 2020 that people are ignoring, and that is he will be running against a Democrat.
Everybody in 2020 is looking forward to the fact that Trump has low approval ratings.
Okay, so he's around 40, 42, 44 percent.
And the going wisdom is that that's just not popular enough to get re-elected.
That obviously is not true.
He was at 40 percent when he got elected in 2016.
And again, Democrats, as we will get to, are interested in making fools of themselves over and over.
This primary fight, not only is a lot of dirty laundry going to be aired, but An enormous amount of leftism is going to be pushed out into the public square because Democrats have to outflank each other.
If somebody gets to the left of the rest of the crowd, suddenly they're distinguished from the rest of the crowd.
In a race with 1,000 people, all you have to do to stand out is be the one person wearing a different color.
And in the Democratic Party primaries, The only way to do that is to outflank everybody to the left.
You can't outflank everybody to the right.
You can't be the moderate in the race and somehow win this thing.
The progressive base just won't stand for it, as Joe Biden may be about to learn.
So that means that Trump is going to be able to run against the craziness of the Democrats.
As I have said for literally three years at this point, All the Democrats had to do was not be crazy, and they just can't do it.
It is pathologically impossible for Democrats not to be insane at this point, because Trump has driven their base totally insane.
Now, does that mean they're necessarily going to lose?
Should we get overconfident about this thing?
No.
It doesn't mean the Democrats are necessarily going to lose.
Remember, Democrats thought the same thing about Republicans in 2016.
They thought that Obama had driven the right so insane that they nominated a cartoon character TV show host And then he was going to lose because the right had been driven crazy and then Trump ended up winning.
So it is quite possible for the left to be both insane and also to win.
It's a risky situation in the sense that whoever is put up there for the Democrats is going to be incredibly radical and that person does have a 40, 50, 60 percent shot at winning depending on what the circumstances are.
But suffice it to say, Trump is going to have a lot to run against.
But it wasn't just Trump running against the Democrats.
He also went after the fact-checkers in the media.
Again, well-deserved.
You can keep your doctor.
Remember that?
28 times.
That didn't happen.
Turned out to be a lie.
Hey, where are the fact checkers?
You know, some of the most dishonest people in media are the so-called fact checkers.
28 times.
You can keep your doctor.
That didn't turn out to be what he said.
They're coming for your money, and they're coming for your freedom, and it'll never happen.
Okay, and that of course is exactly true.
When he goes after the fact-checkers, that is absolutely accurate.
We talked yesterday about the Washington Post covering for AOC.
So AOC lied about her own release of her Green New Deal backgrounder and frequently asked question, and the Washington Post refused to even give her a Pinocchio on the basis of what was an obvious lie.
The fact-checkers are in the Democrat camp, Trump has a lot to run on there.
Trump also stood by his El Paso border remarks.
There are a bunch of fact-checkers who are suggesting that he was not telling the truth about the building of the border wall in El Paso.
He stood by his comments anyway.
I've been hearing a lot of things.
Oh, the wall didn't make that much of a difference.
You know where it made a big difference?
Right here in El Paso.
I spoke to people that have been here a long time.
They said when that wall went up, it's a whole different ballgame.
Is that a correct statement?
I don't care whether a mayor is a Republican or a Democrat.
They're full of crap when they say it hasn't made a big difference.
I heard the same thing from the fake news.
They said, oh, crime actually stayed the same.
Didn't stay the same.
Went way down.
Okay, so, he is not wrong that crime continued to drop.
The crime was already dropping by the time the border fencing was put in place.
What did drop were illegal border crossings.
Dan Crenshaw tweeted out yesterday a statistical chart showing that illegal border crossings into El Paso dropped pretty dramatically after the implementation of fencing, so Trump isn't totally wrong about this.
Trump also had one of his famous moments.
Protesters showed up, and I don't know what they think they're getting done by doing this, except for giving Trump something to bounce off of.
What's amazing to me is how short-sighted a lot of protesters are.
You know, I've had my share of protesters at my college speeches.
They come and they try to disrupt.
I don't know what is going through their heads.
Do they actually think they are accomplishing something good?
I guess that because they are patted on the back by many members of the left, because they are seen as people speaking truth to power, that this gives them the impetus to go out there and act like fools.
But all they're really doing is giving the president something to club into submission.
As I've been saying about President Trump for legitimately years at this point, the man is a hammer in search of a nail.
Sometimes he hits a nail, and it's incredibly satisfying.
Sometimes he hits a baby, and it's a lot less satisfying.
But when the protester shows up, they're giving him a nail that he can hit.
And President Trump takes out that sledgehammer and just wails away at it.
Rather than waiting online for five days, for nine days, for three weeks.
Where do these people come from?
Where do they come from?
They go back home to mommy.
They get punished when they get home.
That's great.
I mean, what can you say about that?
He's not wrong.
That's good stuff.
And this is where the president's best is off the cuff.
Honestly, he is very quick on his feet when it comes to rebutting people who don't like him.
And it comes off really well in crowd settings.
He also went after Ralph Northam in Virginia.
Again, Democrats providing him an endless font of material.
All Trump has to do in 2020 is just sit back, gather material, and then make fun of it.
Really, that's all he has to do.
He just has to play kind of low-rent Jon Stewart.
All he has to do is let the Democrats say things, and then he just comes out and he mocks them or repeats their comments.
Then the media go crazy.
How could Trump repeat his comments?
So Trump goes after Ralph Northam.
And it's just, I mean, this is solid stuff.
This is good material from the president of the United States.
Listen, is it Lincoln-esque?
No, but you know what you were getting when you elected President Trump?
The guy's been this way for years.
I'm still, I honestly, I find it rather hilarious and simultaneously off-putting when you see some of the folks who didn't vote for Trump in 2016.
And I didn't vote in the 2016 election for president.
When you see people who Are so anti-Trump on the right that they can't appreciate the humor of what President Trump does.
As though it's a brand new shock.
It's a brand new terrible thing every time he does something funny.
It's a brand new insult to the office.
Can you get off your high horse for just a second?
Barack Obama did an interview with a lady who once bathed in Cheerios.
Can you get off of it?
Like, the office of the presidency, it's been degraded for a little while now.
President Trump isn't anything new in this respect.
Can you just appreciate the humor for what it is?
Like, instead of sitting here and being the funny duddy, can you just appreciate that this is some funny stuff?
God!
It is!
It's funny!
Here's the president going after Ralph Northam, and it's pretty hilarious.
So in Virginia, the governor, he's gotten a little publicity lately.
I like him.
Keeps us out of the papers.
I like him.
I'd like to find a few more guys like this one.
He almost moonwalked.
His wife stopped him.
Darling, darling, it would be inappropriate.
I want to see somebody try and imitate Michael Jackson in the moonwalk.
This would not have been a good scene.
His wife saved him.
Come on!
That's great stuff!
It's just great!
I mean, look at— It's true!
It's true, and it's funny because it's true.
He also then repeated Ralph Northam's comments about abortion, and the media went crazy.
He suggested that Ralph Northam had said that a baby would be born alive during an abortion, they would keep the baby comfortable while the parents and the doctor decided whether to execute it or not, and people were like, How dare he?
Ralph Northam never said that.
He basically quoted Northam word for word.
So this was Trump at his finest last night.
If Trump does this, just this comedy routine all the way up till 2020, everyone will go home happy.
The economy, if it's still good, will be good.
Everybody will be in a good mood because this is some funny stuff.
But he saved his best repartee for Beto O'Rourke.
He saved his best stuff for Beto O'Rourke.
So here is the president of the United States.
Now, remember, This rally was being held at the El Paso County Coliseum and it was also broadcast outside the Coliseum on a giant screen because there was an overflow crowd of several thousand people because it was like 45 degrees out there.
But the President of the United States in El Paso?
You're gonna go, and you're gonna see it.
In just a second, I'm gonna explain to you what he did to Beto O'Rourke, who's holding a rally maybe 500, 1,000 feet away.
I'll explain in just one second.
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All right.
So.
Trump saved his finest mockery for Beto O'Rourke, who's holding a counter-rally.
Now remember, El Paso is in O'Rourke's district, so you figure O'Rourke would have drawn a huge crowd.
We'll get to Beto's counter-rally in just a second.
President Trump spared no mockery for Beto O'Rourke, went directly at him, and yeah, this, come on, like, we live in a WWE world now.
So you can either root for the Undertaker, or you can root against the Undertaker.
Okay, that's all that's going on here.
And here comes The Undertaker, from the top rope, with the flying elbow, go!
A young man who's got very little going for himself, except he's got a great first name.
He is... He challenged us.
So we have, let's say, 35,000 people tonight, and he has 200 people, 300 people, not too good.
In fact, what I do, what I would do is I would say that may be the end of his presidential bid.
But he did challenge me.
So great.
Come on.
It's such good stuff.
You just got President Trump.
He's a showman.
He's a showman.
And he's at the center of this three ring circus, just making Beto O'Rourke jump through rings lit on fire.
It's phenomenal.
It's such good stuff.
So.
Meanwhile, Beto O'Rourke was giving his own rally, and things were not going all that great for Beto O'Rourke.
So a few things were going poorly for Beto O'Rourke.
One, as you can actually see from the footage, in the background of Beto O'Rourke's speech is a giant screen of President Trump speaking.
And Beto O'Rourke, he's now become a parody of Beto O'Rourke.
So Beto O'Rourke has been trying to do his Obama impersonation for a couple of years now.
And it was a pretty good impersonation when it was subtle.
Now, he's got the whole arm-waving thing.
Big arm motions for 2020.
He's broken out the full-on marionette posture for 2020.
And so he starts talking about standing for America and against walls.
He's saying this next to a fence that separates his rally.
We stand for America, and we stand against walls.
Also about a thousand feet from the actual border of El Paso, which, as it turns out, is covered with a lot of fencing.
So here is Beta O'Rourke railing against walls and fences.
Honestly, if Democrats want to make this their run, go for it, man.
Go for it.
We stand for America and we stand against walls.
We know that there is no bargain in which we can sacrifice some of our humanity to gain a little more security.
We know that we deserve and will lose both of them if we do.
Okay, no one knows what he's talking about, but he's making big arm motions really awkwardly.
So, it is amazing how so many of these Democratic candidates seem somewhat attractive and interesting on first glance, and then when they give a big campaign rally, suddenly they look like parodies of themselves.
We will show you the most hilarious moment of Beto's rally in just one second.
So, the funniest thing that happened at Beto's rally is that Again, he staged it too close to Trump's rally.
There were like a few hundred people at Beto's rally.
We still haven't seen a complete far shot of Beto's rally to see how many people showed up at his rally as opposed to Trump's.
So, Beto is giving his speech, and in the background, in the background, President Trump's walk-on music is drowning out Beto O'Rourke.
So it literally is WWE.
It's some guy in the center of the ring going, I'm gonna take The Undertaker, and then it's like, whose music is that?
It's the Undertaker's music.
Oh, my God.
Here in one of the safest cities in the United States of America.
And the cheers for the cheers are not at his rally.
The cheers are from the other rally for President Trump.
Now, I don't know who worked out the stagecraft for Beto O'Rourke.
My goodness, guys, I recommended that Beto O'Rourke do a rally at the same time as President Trump, but not like right there with 20 of his friends.
That looks not great.
That turns out to be a terrible, terrible idea.
Also, it's not real great when some of the people who show up to your rally are actually carrying Mexican flags.
That's not particularly wonderful.
People were hawking Beto 2020 buttons and holding signs, and they were selling Beto shirts.
And then there were a few folks who showed up with actual Mexican flags at the Beto counter rally, which, when you're trying to make the case that you're standing up for Texas, is not actually a wonderful, wonderful idea.
So, A bad night for for Beto O'Rourke.
But that's not a great shock.
The Democrats in 2020 are all struggling a little bit.
So there are a couple of stories about Kamala Harris that have come out today.
Both of them are just glorious.
Story number one about Kamala Harris, the Democratic frontrunner for 2020.
We call her the Democratic frontrunner not only because she's polling pretty well at this point, but because she fulfills the intersectional checkboxes.
She's black and she is a woman.
That's all you need in the Democratic primary to mean that you're going to win 15 to 20 percent of the vote pretty much automatically, according to the new math.
And I'm not saying this.
FiveThirtyEight is saying this.
Nate Silver is saying that there are actual segments of the Democratic Party that can be labeled black and Hispanic.
You can just label them by race.
So if you don't like me saying it, talk to lefty Nate Silver, the pollster.
OK, so here's a story that's not going to be great for Kamala Harris.
It turns out that Kamala Harris, her big threat is going to come not from her right because she's too radical.
It's going to come from her left.
Because it turns out that she was a prosecutor for a long time in the state of California.
Now, I think she was a garbage prosecutor.
The crime rates went up while Kamala Harris was Attorney General of the state.
She was actively involved in changing the language on some of the referenda in the state of California to loosen crime regulations so that people would be released from prison early and so that certain felonies would then be prosecuted as misdemeanors.
She was a very, very bad Attorney General, but Even being in the law enforcement system, according to the left, makes you a career narc.
You are now a person who is stamped with the badge of infamy.
You once worked for law enforcement.
So Kamala Harris is trying to live that down by suggesting that she was a subversive narc.
She was really a cool person.
She was super cool.
So she was asked on a show called The Breakfast Club whether indeed she has ever smoked pot.
And here was her supremely awkward answer.
Have you ever smoked?
I have.
Okay.
And I inhaled.
I did inhale.
It was a long time ago.
I know you have to go.
They say you have to go.
I just broke loose.
I mean, was it in college?
See, I like stuff like that.
That's a real honest answer.
Was it a blunt or joint?
It was a joint.
hey hey okay so she's cool because she's mug pot everybody's fun everybody's enjoying the fact that kamala harris smoked pot and also has a really awkward hillary-esque laugh it is a weird yeah people have weird quirks not unique to kamala harris everybody has sort of a weird quirk when when things get awkward how do you respond and for kamala harris she goes to her awkward laugh which is very much like the hillary clinton awkward laugh it's like nobody said anything really funny here senator but you're kind of laughing weird you're
That interview went on, and then things got a little dicey, because it turns out, she was an undercover cop.
So they asked her what was playing in the background when young Kamala was hitting a joint.
She said, oh yeah, definitely Snoop.
Tupac for sure.
So basically the only time she smoked pot was back in college and she was listening to Snoop or Tupac.
There is only one problem.
Tupac's first album came out in 1991.
Snoop's first album came out in 1993.
How do I know all this?
Because as you know, I'm a rap connoisseur.
Obviously.
No, I mean somebody else tweeted this.
Okay, Tupac's first album came out in 1991.
Snoop's first album came out in 1993.
Kamala Harris graduated college in?
1986.
So unless she got hold of the audition tapes for Tupac and Snoop some five to seven years before they actually premiered their work, This is bull.
So one of two things is true.
Either Kamala Harris smoked pot in college and also smoked pot a lot later in college, as in when she was a DA, because by this time she was a DA.
So she was toking while she was prosecuting people for toking, presumably.
Either that is the case, or she's just lying about having smoked pot, whatever it is, as was a comfortably smug or David Burge.
Basically, she's a character from 21 Jump Street.
That's what she is now.
She's... I'm so cool.
I'm one of the kids.
Also, I'm 50,000 years old.
Also, I don't remember what was playing on the radio.
It was probably... She's like, when I was in college, what were you playing?
It was Lady Gaga.
Lady Gaga wasn't born yet, Senator.
it doesn't matter.
Good times with Senator Harris.
Also, it turns out that Narke Harris, she apparently tried to stop the reduction of California's overcrowded prisons.
Now, how does this mesh with my contention that she was soft on crime and tried to let people out of prison?
Well, the answer is that she didn't want to prosecute additional people and put them in jail.
She just wanted to keep the people in jail who were there, there, so that they could fight wildfires.
I am not kidding you.
Article from the Daily Beast.
Apparently, lawyers for Harris wrote in a filing with the court, extending two-for-one credits to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation, a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.
What does that mean?
Well, the lawyers say that California, they said that California met benchmarks and argued that if certain political parolees were given a faster track out of prison, it would negatively affect the prison's labor programs, where certain inmates were fighting California wildfires for two bucks a day, which is significantly below minimum wage in the state of California.
They also noted that draining the prisons of minimum custody inmates would deplete the labor force both internally and in local communities, Where low-level nonviolent offenders worked for pennies on the dollar collecting trash and tending to city parks.
So Narc Harris out there talking about how cool she was when she was smoking pot while listening to people who had not yet released albums.
She also was arguing, and her office was arguing, that we should keep prisoners in prison so that they could work for low wages, so slave labor for the state of California.
Yeah, things are gonna go great for Kamala Harris.
And it's not just Kamala Harris.
It gets even better.
So wait until you hear what Cory Booker is now proclaiming on the campaign trail.
Oh, these candidates.
Where do they come up with these folks?
As President Trump, where do they come up with them?
I don't even know.
Go back home to Miami.
We can get this in just a second.
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Alright, so here's what we have learned in the past 24 hours.
Beto O'Rourke is a marionette who can't draw a crowd in his hometown.
Kamala Harris is an ARC.
Again, that's WIN to 87222.
WIN to 87222.
All right, so here's what we have learned in the past 24 hours.
Beto O'Rourke is a marionette who can't draw a crowd in his hometown.
Kamala Harris is a narc.
And Cory Booker is Cory Booker.
Because, man, Cory Booker.
So, this is according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Senator Cory Booker said the planet can't sustain people eating meat, as the 2020 hopeful aims to become the first vegan president.
Booker told the vegan magazine VegNews, which I'm sure is just riveting stuff.
Like, do you open up the mailbox every Saturday to read the vegan magazine VegNews?
Where you're just like, oh man, look at that cucumber.
Man, the centerfold of a salad?
Unbelievable.
Booker, earlier this month, told VegNews that he became vegan after coming to the realization that eating eggs didn't align with my spirit.
Weird realization.
While claiming he does not want to lecture Americans on their diets, Booker said Americans need to be nudged into fake cheese because the planet cannot sustain the environmental impact of the food industry.
You see, the planet Earth moving towards what is standard American diet, Booker said.
We've seen this massive increase in consumption of meat produced by the industrial animal agriculture industry.
The tragic reality is this planet simply can't sustain billions of people consuming industrially produced animal agriculture because of environmental impact, he said.
It's just not possible.
Weird, because the planet...
A century ago had like 2 billion, 3 billion people.
Now we have some 8 billion people.
Most of those people are subsisting on a lot more meat than people were a century ago.
Things are okay.
Things are kind of okay.
It turns out, you know what we're really good at doing?
Growing cows, killing them, and eating them.
And also they taste delicious.
Now, this is coming from somebody who actually has a little bit of moral sympathy for the vegan position, or at least the vegetarian position.
The position that animals have a certain level of sentience, and killing them may be a morally questionable behavior in a hundred years.
People may look back on us and say, wow, you were killing animals to eat them?
That seems kind of barbaric.
I actually have a little bit of sympathy for that position.
Not enough sympathy to make me stop eating chicken or steak, but Some sympathy, at the very least.
But Booker is doing this in the worst and stupidest possible way.
He's saying the reason that you shouldn't eat meat is not for moral reasons, because you have objections.
You shouldn't eat meat because the planet can't help, the planet can't sustain you eating meat.
Except for, again, the population skyrocketing over the past 50 to 100 years, and people eating more meat, not less.
Booker says the devastating impact of greenhouse gases produced by the meat industry is just not practical.
So he too, like AOC, is deeply worried about farting cows.
He says the numbers just don't add up.
We will destroy our planet unless we start figuring out a better way forward when it comes to our climate change and our environment.
Booker said his vegan journey began in 1992 after reading Gandhi's biography.
He said he wants to make the existing model of the food industry obsolete.
He's going to have to come up with a better way of feeding billions of people, because you know what it turns out is very, very protein intense?
Meat.
People need protein.
If he can find a better way to generate these products, I'm all ears, man.
But if you are going to talk about starving people who need cheap meat to survive because you have moral objections to cow farts, Not as much sympathy.
He says, you never change things by fighting what exists in reality.
To change something, you gotta build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
That's the deal here.
American consumers should not be told what to eat, but if you provide viable alternatives in some cases that taste even better, and if people have more information, if we consumers are informed about whatever it is, the dangers of the overuse of plastics all the way to the conditions in which animals that we are consuming are being treated.
He says that his non-vegan friends love vegan foods, like his favorites, vegan pancakes and vegan stuffed French toast.
He says, I've seen incredible vegan cheese shops popping up around the country, and my friends who are lovers of cheese just can't tell the difference.
Okay.
Again, as somebody who's... There's a pretty good vegan restaurant here in town that's kosher, and it's good.
Is it as good as you know the natural thing?
No.
It is not.
I'm just gonna break it to you.
Vegan cheese?
Not as good as regular cheese.
Okay, and I say this as a person who's constantly used to eating ersatz foods because, for example, I can't eat pork because I'm a Jew, so we have kind of soy products that substitute.
I guarantee that my friends who do eat pork here, I have a feeling they might not like the soy products quite as much.
So, Cory Booker talking about how we all need to become vegan.
So that's going to be just wonderful.
So the Democrats, really, are they sending their best?
Apparently they are.
Bill de Blasio, that crazy nutjob who throws groundhogs, is headed to New Hampshire as he contemplates his run for the presidency.
He's a communist, but I guess that's kind of rote at this point for Democratic candidates.
He is now talking about running for president, so he's going to outflank everybody on the far left.
He's actually going to launch his campaign from Cuba.
He's traveling to Nashua, New Hampshire.
There he's going to meet with Mayor Jim Donchess and make chat with locals at a diner.
I do love this stuff about presidential politics.
It's where we all pretend that this is what normal politicians do.
And what normal politicians do is they just go to random places and stop at diners.
When's the last time you stopped at a diner?
Just like a random diner in the middle of nowhere.
Probably not that often.
Probably you have like your local eateries that you go to.
But politicians apparently spend their days finding babies to pat on the head and diners to go to.
I promise you, by the way, when he walks into a diner in Nashua, New Hampshire, nobody's gonna know who he is.
He's gonna walk in, people are gonna be like, who's that big geeky guy?
And why is he carrying a groundhog?
And why is he wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt?
That's weird.
On Friday evening, de Blasio will drive to Concord, where he will meet with local organizers of the group Rights and Democracy New Hampshire, which describes itself as part of a movement across the region to counter the influence of money in politics.
Apparently, his people are telling His people are telling the press that he wants to make sure ideas like pre-K for all, paid personal time, and mental health are on the table as Democrats debate the party's vision for the future.
Everybody in the pool, every single person is going to run for president, and it's going to be delicious.
So that is pretty excellent stuff.
Okay, in just a minute, I want to get to the media defending the fresh faces of the Democratic Party.
So fresh!
So, face.
We're gonna get to that in just a second.
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Okay, so as all of this continues, it is wonderful to watch the media defend the fresh faces of the Democratic Party.
So much freshness.
So much faceness.
So, Ilhan Omar, you will recall, is an anti-Semite.
She has a long anti-Semitic record.
She says lots of anti-Semitic stuff, like all the time.
And then over the weekend, she was like, the Jews and their shekels are paying for Israel support.
And people are like, what do you mean, Congresswoman?
And she was like, AIPAC.
And then, the Democratic higher-ups are like, could you apologize for that, please?
And she's like, okay, I apologize, but also, the Jews!
And AIPAC!
And then the media responded to that by saying, look, she apologized, why can't you just leave this stuff alone?
It's enough, right?
I mean, come on!
Leave her alone!
She's a fresh!
She's a face!
She's a fresh face!
Come on!
Well, I'm going to show you some tape of Ilhan Omar, and we will determine if she sounds truly regretful at her anti-Semitism.
I'm going to go with no.
I don't want to prejudge this for you, but I'm going to go with no.
So here she was walking through Congress, and she was asked if she regrets her comments.
Her answer?
Not really.
Do you regret your comments, Congressman?
I'm pretty sure that was stated in my statement.
Were you surprised by the criticism?
Always surprised.
Are you worried about losing committee assignment?
Absolutely not.
Okay, so she is an angry, angry human, right?
She's very upset about all of this.
Does that seem like somebody who really has learned her lesson?
Or does that seem like somebody who's pissed that they were called out?
Does that seem like a teenager who's pissed that their mom caught the pot in the- found the pot in the top drawer?
Like Kamala Harris.
Are they- It doesn't matter.
Look, she is an anti-Semite.
She, three weeks ago, had to apologize for anti-Semitism.
Then, three weeks later, she had to apologize for anti-Semitism.
So start your clocks now.
It has been one day since accident.
Because in three weeks, they're going to have to reset that clock again.
Is she going to lose her committee assignments?
Of course she's not going to lose her committee assignments.
Steve King, the congressman from Iowa, said that white nationalism shouldn't be a term of castigation.
It shouldn't be a bad term.
He lost all of his committee assignments, as he should have.
Republicans punished him.
Ilhan Omar said the Jews are paying for support for Israel and everybody in the Democratic Party just shrugged.
Or even better, members of the left suggested that the real problem with her comments was not that she was anti-Semitic.
The real problem is that it gave credence to the right.
That it gave the right room to run.
Michelle Goldberg, who is, again, one of the repository of intellectuals over at the New York Times, by which I mean I love that angle.
intellectually swirls the drain in your toilet.
So she has a piece today in the New York Times.
It is called Ilhan Omar's very bad tweets.
Left-wing antisemitism is a gift to the right.
I love that angle.
So normally, when we say antisemitism is bad, usually we say it's bad because it's, you know, bad.
And so if I were to write a column about Steve King, I would say that white nationalism is bad.
I wouldn't say it's a gift to the left.
I'd say it's bad.
It's just bad.
It turns out that hating Jews?
Bad thing.
According to the left, hating Jews is only bad when you say it out loud and it backfires on you.
That's when it gets kind of awkward.
So Michelle Goldberg has a full column about all of this.
She says, Last October, after a crude mail bomb was found in George Soros' mailbox, Representative Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican, who is now the House Minority Leader, tweeted, We cannot allow Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg to buy this election.
The tweet, since deleted, was referring to Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, both of them like Soros Jews who are often the object of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Speaking on CNN, Steyer, who had also been sent a mail bomb, described McCarthy's tweet as a straight-up anti-Semitic move.
By the way, it was not.
Tom Steyer is a very wealthy person who gives a lot of money to politics.
Michael Bloomberg does the same.
So does George Soros.
That is not the same thing as saying the Jews are buying support for other Jews on the basis of their Jew money, which is what Ilhan Omar said.
She was saying that Jewish money stands behind support for the Jewish state.
It is not anti-Semitism to say Michael Bloomberg gives a lot of money to anti-Second Amendment causes.
That is a fact.
It is not anti-Semitism to say that Tom Steyer spends a lot of money That is a fact.
And it is not a slander or an anti-Semitic libel to suggest that George Soros spends a lot of money on a lot of left-wing crazy causes.
That is absolutely true.
It is, however, a lie to suggest that Jewish money is behind American support for Israel.
That is not true in the slightest.
Nonetheless, Michelle Goldberg is very angry against Republicans, because after all, when Ilhan Omar, a Democrat, says something bad about Jews, you obviously have to talk about Kevin McCarthy.
She says, it would have been easy enough for either Omar or Rashida Tlaib to point out McCarthy's cynical hypocrisy.
Instead, Omar responded with a blithely incendiary tweet, quoting Puff Daddy's odes to the power of money.
It's all about the Benjamins, baby.
When an editor at The Forward, a Jewish publication, asked who Omar thinks is paying American politicians to be pro-Israel, she responded, AIPAC.
Consciously or not, Omar invoked a poisonous anti-semitic narrative about Jews using their money to manipulate global affairs.
I do enjoy the consciously or not addendums here.
It's funny how people on the left will immediately apply those adjectives and modifiers to situations that are clearly conscious.
Ilhan Omar knows exactly what she is saying.
As I mentioned on yesterday's radio show, Ilhan Omar is scheduled on February 23rd to speak alongside an actual terrorist supporter.
I mean, this is not a person who's a babe in the woods when it comes to these subjects.
In 2013, she gave an interview where she laughed about Hamas and Hezbollah alongside a host who calls Israel the Jewish ISIS.
So Michelle Goldberg says on Monday afternoon, Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the House Democratic leadership rebuked Omar and called on her to apologize for her use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel supporters.
It was a depressing fall from grace for someone who just a few weeks ago was feeded as a pathbreaker, a refugee from Somalia who, alongside Tlaib, rose to become one of America's first two Muslim congresswomen.
Omar herself has been subject to vicious Islamophobic smears.
Yes, she's the real victim here.
Then she says, the real problem here, the real problem is that because Ilhan Omar said something anti-Semitic, she has now undercut the anti-Israel case.
She says, in truth, while AIPAC's influence is extensive, no one needs to pay off conservatives to make them support Israel.
Evangelicals, a far bigger constituency than American Jews, tend to be pro-Israel for religious reasons.
Not long after Pelosi's statement, Omar released one of her own, apologizing unequivocally.
Personally, I'm happy to accept her apology.
Oh, are you?
There's a giant ass shock.
That is a huge shock that Michelle Goldberg is willing to accept a completely insincere apology from a member of her own political caucus.
Parsonship, hell of a drug.
She's very upset that Ilhan Omar exposed the rifts inside the intersectional coalition.
Our mutual future depends on deepening this country's embattled commitment to multi-ethnic democracy.
Prejudice helps bind the modern right together, but unchecked, it can rip the left apart.
So she's very upset that Ilhan Omar exposed the rift inside the intersectional coalition.
Instead, Ilhan Omar should be anti-Semitic, but quietly.
That'd be the best thing.
If she could, you know, take that anti-Semitism and shove it back into the anti-Zionism, anti-Israel box, then we can all pretend that they're not anti-Semitic.
They just don't like Israel.
But they like Jews!
They just don't like Israel.
Or the people who live in Israel.
Who happen to be Jews.
Because the Jewish state.
It shouldn't exist.
Because of the Jews.
So, very solid stuff there from the media.
That is not the only media defense of the fresh faces of the Democratic Party.
Best headline of the day.
Okay, so here's the best headline of the day.
This one comes courtesy of the New York Times.
I do love it.
So, Ocasio-Cortez team flubs a Green New Deal summary and Republicans pounce.
Yes!
I wish I could buy, honestly, I wish I could buy stock in particular words.
If I could buy stock in pounce, I would have bought stock in pounce like three years ago, and man, I would be a wealthy man today.
Because the Democrats have such supporters in the media.
Every time the Democrats make a mistake, the story is Republicans pouncing.
They're like young Simba in The Lion King.
Pounce!
Out of your pounce!
It's amazing.
All these evil, terrible Republicans pouncing on Democrats for their Support of infanticide and racism and blackface and antisemitism.
Why won't these Republicans stop pouncing on innocent Democrat infanticidal maniacs?
Why won't they just stop their pouncing?
The real problem here is the pouncing, obviously.
Now, I assume the editors at the New York Times must know what they're doing here.
I assume they know that they're just tweaking people on the right.
If so, it just demonstrates their insane bias even more.
If not, then their bias is bad enough.
But if they know what they're doing, it's even worse.
Ocasio-Cortez team flubs a Green New Deal summary and Republicans pounce.
Coral Davenport reporting for the New York Times.
Days after introducing her Green New Deal, a plan to combat climate change that has won the endorsement of several Democratic presidential candidates, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez found the proposal enmeshed in confusion when her staff published a summary that included provisions not endorsed by the candidates.
Okay, a couple of things to note here.
The FAQ and background check, the backgrounder and the frequently asked questions document was posted about two days, two days before the Green New Deal resolution hit the floor of the subcommittee in the House.
So that's not even accurate reporting.
It is not accurate that all of these Democrats endorsed the Green New Deal and then Ocasio-Cortez came out with the flub document.
She came out with the flub document and then, two days after that, she was forced to pull it down because the Green New Deal came out.
Over the weekend, her staff backed away from the document, saying it was incomplete and had been published by accident.
After Republicans pounced on the plan, citing a blog post of frequently asked questions.
It was not a blog post.
She put it up on her own campaign website.
She emailed it to various media outlets.
It's not a blog post.
This is what passes for reporting at the New York Times.
The post included language that called for economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work.
The plan, written by Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez, a freshman Democrat from New York and Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, was modeled on FDR's New Deal and embraced by several presidential candidates.
It was also welcomed by Senator Bernie Sanders.
The sweeping resolution, which calls for the United States to eliminate additional emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide by 2030, was also signed by more than 60 House and Senate Democrats.
The plan is a non-binding resolution and outlines goals in broad strokes rather than mapping out concrete legislation.
Spokeswomen and spokesmen for Senators Harris, Gillibrand, Booker, and Sanders did not return telephone calls or emails requesting comment on the error.
So shouldn't that be the headline?
Shouldn't that be the headline?
Shouldn't the headline be, every Democrat running for president who endorsed this plan refuses to answer questions about AOC's plan for the Green New Deal?
Shouldn't that be the headline?
How is the headline, Republicans pounce?
How in the world is the headline, Republicans react to thing Democrats did?
That's called every day in politics in this country.
Every single day, every single hour, every single minute.
Let's say that the sun rises this morning.
And let's also say that a famous person dies.
Is the headline sunrises in the morning or famous person dies?
You're adding no information.
News is about breaking new information, presumably.
You're adding no information by headlining that Republicans react to a thing Democrats did.
It would be significantly more important information, I would think, that Democrats will not answer simple questions about what exactly AOC posted online.
Because they are so afraid of her on the one hand, and they are afraid to endorse her idiocy on the other.
I mean, that's just unreal.
Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez has promoted the plan as a blueprint for the eventual Democratic presidential nominee, but Republicans have turned the episode, with the frequently asked questions, into a campaign moment, putting out a news release saying the document revealed the extreme left's startling priorities.
That's the real story, is that Republicans turned a Democrat gaffe into a Democrat gaffe, because that's never happened before in politics.
According to the New York Times, however, mistakes happen.
Mistakes happen.
This is the last paragraph.
Mistakes happen when coordinating multiple groups and collaborators, said AOC's campaign chief of staff.
What's in the resolution is the Green New Deal.
Oh, okay.
Well, I'm glad that we got all of that settled.
Well done, media.
Meanwhile, it looks like a budget deal is now on the table.
It's not a very good budget deal, but It's what President Trump may get after all of this hubbub.
According to the Associated Press, three people familiar with Congress's tentative border deal tell the Associated Press that the accord would provide $1.375 billion to build 55 miles of new border barriers.
That is well below the $5.7 billion President Trump demanded to build over 200 miles of wall along the Mexican boundary.
Apparently, the money will be for vertical steel slats called bollards, not a solid wall.
Democrats dropped their proposal to limit the number of detained immigrants caught inside the U.S.
to a daily average of 16,500.
Republicans opposed that demand.
There is currently no such limit.
Instead, bargainers agreed to fund 40,520 beds to detain immigrants entering or in the United States illegally.
That is the same number funded last year, but the actual figure held is around 49,000.
So, in other words, after all of this, President Trump is not going to get any more money than he would have gotten in the original budget that was presented to him by the Democrats, which included $1.3 billion to build whatever he wanted.
It was just funding for border security.
He refused that.
He wanted more money.
He didn't get more money.
But now he can claim that there's some money to build 55 miles of new border barriers?
I suppose.
Sean Hannity was livid about this yesterday on his Fox News program, as well he should be.
This deal is a garbage deal.
It doesn't give the president anything more than he would have had if he had never gone through this rigmarole in the first place.
And again, Democrats actually made it a negotiating point to have fewer beds available to house criminal illegal aliens so that they would be released into the general population.
That's a pretty amazing thing.
So do I think that Trump ends up going for the deal?
I think there's enough blowback from the right that Trump ends up declaring a national emergency or having his Department of Defense say that we need additional wall building and additional fencing to stop drug corridors along the southern border.
I think that's probably the direction that he is going to go politically.
It makes more sense than signing off on this deal.
But if the president just wants to get past it and move on to 2020 and he'll sign this deal, we will all move on.
He won't pay a serious price for this with his base.
Honestly, from a political point of view, I get it.
From a we-need-a-wall point of view, I don't get it at all.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
This is pretty hilarious.
A bunch of college students were asked about the Green New Deal.
And as per the usual arrangement around the United States, when college students are asked about anything that sounds like a left-wing proposal, they love it until they're told what's in it.
This is true for every poll ever taken.
When people are asked whether they like socialism, people are like, yeah, socialism sounds great!
They're like, oh yeah, that'll be 60% taxes on you, and also we're gonna end your private health insurance.
And they're like, oh wait, hold up, that's not as great.
That's not particularly awesome.
Okay, so here was a person from Campus Reform going around asking college students about the Green New Deal.
Their responses are quite hilarious.
Based on what you've heard of the plan, would you say you view it favorably or unfavorably?
I view it favorably.
I think that we need to cut our reliance on fossil fuels.
It's definitely a great idea.
I like that it's progressive.
I like that it is going to push the world forward in the way we need to be.
So the plan says within 10 years, we're going to completely outlaw coal, natural gas, and oil.
So gasoline, anything like that, in 10 years.
I don't agree with that.
To be honest with you, I think we need those things to live.
I do not think it is feasible in 10 years.
If you're unwilling to work, we will still supply help for your salary and help for a living wage.
No, absolutely not.
If you're not willing to contribute to society, then I don't think that the people who are contributing should pay for you.
Eliminating almost all air travel with high-speed rails.
What's your thought on that?
Uh, I feel like it's kind of the same one.
It's like, I feel like 10 years is a little extreme for that.
I think that's drastic.
I haven't heard of that one yet.
Who's gonna pay for all of it?
Who's gonna offset the trillions of dollar cost it would be?
Right.
I don't know.
Nobody knows.
Based on what you've heard from these, does it change your perception of the planet at all?
Yeah.
A lot.
Sometimes you need to take extreme measures to save the environment, but I don't think that is like, I think it's a bit too extreme.
Okay, so even these college students are realizing that these proposals are insane, which is why all Trump has to do is just let Democrats make the proposals, and then he has to point out that these proposals are in fact fully insane.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so, thing I hate, number one.
There's a pair of shoes that were distributed by Walmart, and Katy Perry, I guess, was the branding name on it.
These shoes are just, they come in black, and they come in yellow, and they come in white, like, they come in various colors, and they have eyes, a nose, and a mouth on them.
The only question you should be asking about these shoes is why in the hell anyone would buy them because they're hideous.
I mean, I am not a fashion critic, but these are ugly, ugly shoes.
But that is not the question that people began asking.
The question people began asking were, were the shoes blackface?
Were the shoes blackface?
It's a shoe.
That comes in multiple colors.
With just eyes and nose and mouth on them.
Is it blackface?
Like making fun of black people.
These are what we call forced world problems.
If you really believe that Katy Perry designed a hideous shoe specifically to make fun of black people, and you are deeply insulted by a shoe, and you think that the people walking around in those shoes are attempting to insult black people, or that you should feel insulted by a shoe, let me suggest that you need to get your priorities in order.
These are not shoes with swastikas on them.
These are not shoes with confederative flags on them.
These are shoes with eyes, a nose, and a mouth on them.
And yet, they are now being... Seriously, these were now pulled from the shelves because they were blackface shoes.
We have lost our minds.
In similar news, hilariously, there is a shirt that was available at Bloomingdale's that said on it, fake news, and our journalistic firefighters rushing to the site of the fire to fight those fires every day.
They rushed to the site of the fire where they proceeded to say that those fake news shirts had to be taken off the shelves because if journalists stand for one thing, it's freedom of speech.
That's the thing they stand for.
The shirts were removed, lest anyone believe that fake news is fake news.
So, well done, again, journalists.
Not all heroes wear capes.
Okay, final thing that I hate.
So Bill Nye, who is a science guy by way of not knowing a lot of kind of basic things about science, shockingly enough, He did a video about abortion.
It is the worst video, the worst pro-abortion video I have ever seen.
It is just a giant straw man against the pro-life movement.
But again, we're supposed to pretend that he knows things because he wears a bow tie and he knew, like, basic scientific stuff when we were in third grade.
When it comes to women's rights with respect to their reproduction, I think you should leave it to women.
She has rights over this, especially if she doesn't like the guy that got her pregnant.
She doesn't want anything to do with your genes.
Get over it.
If you're going to say, when an egg is fertilized, it's therefore has the same rights as an individual, then whom are you going to sue?
Whom are you going to imprison?
Every woman who's had a fertilized egg pass through her?
It's just a reflection of a deep scientific lack of understanding.
Okay, he doesn't, honestly God, he's a mechanical engineer, okay, he got his career started as a mechanical engineer, and he doesn't know things.
First of all, he just equated miscarriage with abortion.
And when he says every woman who has a fertilized egg pass through her, if you had a miscarriage, That's not an abortion.
What we are talking about when we talk about abortion is the forcible ending of an incipient human life.
That is what we are talking about.
And when he says that you should be able to abort a kid because you don't like the father?
I mean, it's hard to imagine a more evil thing than that.
So if you get divorced, can you shoot your seven-year-old?
Really, this is the logic.
The logic is you don't like the person with whom you share genetic material, and thus that genetic material loses all right to exist.
That's a pretty astonishingly broad argument.
As you would say in law school, it's an argument that proves too much.
But again, we're supposed to pretend that Bill Nye knows things because we called him the science guy back when he wore a white coat.
And back, by the way, when he used to say that male and female were things that were determined by genetics.
So, that's good times for Bill Nye the science guy.
Alrighty, so.
Later today, we are on for two hours.
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Also tonight, speaking at University of Alabama.
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We'll see you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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