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Feb. 18, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:33
Why We Buy Hoaxes | Ep. 719
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The Jussie Smollett hoax reaches its natural termination, President Trump's wall is still divisive, and Democrats celebrate losing jobs in New York City.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, happy President's Day to all those people who are off work today.
We are not.
We are here with you each and every day through rain, through sleet, through snow, through hail.
We're here.
Okay, whatever.
So we'll get to all the news in just one second.
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Alrighty, so over the weekend, The Jussie Smollett hoax turned out to have been dun dun dun a hoax.
Everybody knew it was a hoax from the very beginning.
Everybody with half a brain was incredulous about the story, which again made no sense.
Jussie Smollett, an actor on Empire, claimed that he had received a bunch of threats and that then at two o'clock in the morning in Chicago, in the middle of a polar vortex, He went over to a subway to buy a sandwich, and on the way back, he was accosted by two gentlemen who were supposedly wearing MAGA hats.
Some of the reports said they were wearing MAGA hats.
And they wound a rope around his neck, poured bleach on him, and shouted, this is MAGA country.
Again, remember, at 2 a.m., in the middle of Chicago, in the middle of a polar vortex, And they also shouted at him the N-word and the F-word and recognized him from Empire because that's huge with the Trump folks.
Empire, they love that show.
It's like number one in that demo.
So, there were a few things that were suspicious about the story.
One, the entire story.
Two, the guy still had his Subway sandwich when he got up.
Again, he'd be the best Subway spokesman of all time.
You know how much I love this Subway sandwich?
Two guys come out of the shadows, kick the crap out of you, then he just keeps walking.
I held on to this.
He then walked into his apartment, right past the guard, and then spent 40 minutes doing nothing, then called the police.
When they showed up, he still had the rope around his neck and refused to turn over his phone to the police.
So, none of this held together.
From the very beginning, everyone was sort of suspicious, but you didn't want to be the guy to say, listen, seems like a hoax.
You said instead, I got some questions.
Right?
If you were a smart person, the first thing you did was say, you know, this sounds a little fishy.
Like, maybe it happened just the way he said it did, but it sounds a little fishy.
Well, now it turns out it was not just a little fishy, it was the entire Mediterranean Sea fishy.
According to CBS News, the two Nigerian brothers arrested in connection with the assault on Empire actor Jussie Smollett are no longer suspects in the attack.
They're now cooperating with police.
A source close to the investigation confirms to CBS News that the brothers told detectives that Smollett paid them to participate in the alleged attack on January 29th and that they purchased the rope, which was found around Smollett's neck, at a nearby hardware store.
The source said detectives have evidence to corroborate the sale, something the men's attorney alluded to on Friday night.
New evidence that was brought to their attention.
Obviously, I had it.
My clients had it, said Gloria Schmidt, the brother's attorney.
The Chicago Police Department released a statement on Saturday night saying information from the brothers had shifted the trajectory of the investigation.
Here's the truth.
The CPD has known for weeks that this was probably fake.
They've known for weeks that these brothers were probably being paid by Jussie Smollett.
They were not releasing it.
They were slow playing it.
That is the rumor and decent information from inside CPD.
Nonetheless, CPD finally coming forth and acknowledging what everybody else knew.
We can confirm that the information received from the individuals questioned by police earlier in the Empire case has in fact shifted the trajectory of the investigation.
We've reached out to the Empire cast member's attorney to request a follow-up interview.
Smollett's attorneys, Todd Pugh and Victor Henderson, issued a statement late Saturday saying Smollett was angered and devastated by reports that he knew the people associated with the alleged attack.
One of these purported suspects was Jussie's personal trainer, who he hired to ready him physically for a music video.
It is impossible to believe that this person could have played a role in the crime against Jussie or falsely claimed Jussie's complicity, the statement said.
Except that's exactly what CPD is saying.
The attorney said the actor would continue to cooperate with authorities as the investigation continues.
He may be cooperating from inside a jail cell because it is in fact a crime to lie to police.
They've wasted hundreds of man hours, hundreds of thousands, I'm sure, of taxpayer dollars in the city of Chicago over this nonsense.
The term in jail would be up to three years.
At the present time, Jussie and his attorneys have no inclination to respond to unnamed sources inside of the investigation, but will continue discussions through official channels, the statement said.
Police said that the two men, identified as Ola and Abel Asundero, were captured on surveillance video at the time that Smollett said he was attacked.
Ola Asundero is connected to Smollett through the hit show Empire, where he plays a prisoner in season two.
Both brothers apparently left Chicago the day of the alleged attack and were detained when they returned on Wednesday.
Chicago detectives tore through their apartment looking for clues, and an evidence log shows they found ropes, masks, and bleach.
Whoa.
They were released Friday night without charges because now they're working with the cops.
A Chicago Police Department spokesman said detectives have additional investigative work to complete.
The best part of this story is that apparently, some of the reports suggest that the two brothers, they went and they bought red hats.
But you can't find a MAGA hat anywhere in the city limits of Chicago.
So they went to a local beauty store, I kid you not, called the Crafty Beaver.
I'm not kidding you.
They went there and then they bought two red hats, just like generic red hats.
Because there's no MAGA hats in Chicago, even though it was MAGA country.
In a recent interview with Good Morning America, Smollett said he was sure that the men in the photo were his attackers.
He said, there's a guy who came up to him.
This is MAGA country, N-word.
Punches me right in the face.
So I punched his ass back.
I think what people need to hear is just the truth.
Well, yeah.
And then Jesse Smollett came forward and he said, on Good Morning America, again, this was Thursday morning.
All of this began to break Thursday afternoon.
So this story held up for approximately the length of a squirrel's attention span.
And Jussie Smollett on GMA said, you know, the reason people are angry at me, the reason people come hard at me, the reason for it?
Well, of course, it's because I don't like Trump.
And you know, in America, you can't you can't dislike Trump.
You know, being being anti-Trump in America, that's very unpopular, except for how the entire media are anti-Trump and celebrate everything that any anti-Trump person says.
We'll get to that in just a second.
Here is Jussie Smollett lying on Good Morning America to the cheering throngs of Good Morning America's producers and anchors.
Why do you think you were targeted?
I can just assume.
I mean, I come really, really hard against 45.
I come really, really hard against his administration.
And I don't hold my tongue.
Oh, he's such a rebel.
He's a rebel.
So brave.
So much bravery.
My goodness, Jussie Smollett.
American hero!
Wow.
And the media treated him that way.
You'll remember that there was a man named Cory Booker.
Spartacus.
And you'll recall that he tweeted this out the day that the report broke.
The vicious attack on actor Jussie Smollett was an attempted modern-day lynching.
I'm glad he's safe.
Well, it turns out he sort of paid someone to lynch him, but there's that.
He said, to those in Congress who don't feel the urgency to pass our anti-lynching bill designating lynching as a federal hate crime, I urge you to pay attention.
It was a vicious, brutal attack staged by Jussie Smollett and his friends.
So that was awkward.
Then Cory Booker was asked over the weekend about, um, remember that time when you said that Jussie Smollett was lynched and you said it was a vicious, brutal hate crime and then it turned out that that guy paid his friends to do it because he knew that suckers like you would buy it?
And Cory Booker was like, you know what?
Facts don't matter.
The only thing that matters is the narrative.
The narrative matters.
Well, the information's still coming out, and I'm going to withhold until all the information actually comes out from on-the-record sources.
We know in America that bigoted and biased attacks are on the rise in a serious way.
What we're seeing is attacks on people because they're different, and we all need to join together and condemn those attacks.
Oh, so he's going to wait for all the information to come out, not like he did before when he just sort of declared that it was true And also, just because this was a hoax doesn't mean that there isn't a rise in hate crimes.
It's the narrative that's important.
See, you gotta love it when you have a completely Disprovable thesis.
Non-disprovable thesis.
We have a non-falsifiable thesis that is put out by the left.
So, if an actual crime occurs in which a black man is grabbed around the neck with a rope, poured bleach upon, and then people shout at him about Trump, then this is evidence that Trump's America is evil.
And if it turns out that was a hoax, that's also proof that Trump's America is evil, because where else would even such a story be believable?
Where else would even such a story be believable?
So you gotta love these folks who are now suggesting that, you know, we're gonna wait for all the facts.
Gotta be cautious.
Gotta be cautious now that CPD has said that it's true.
We're gonna be cautious.
Before, we jumped the gun and we were ready to go in whatever direction.
Back the narrative.
Here's the reason Jussie Smollett lied about this.
Here's the reason Jussie Smollett did this.
The reason he did it is because he knew there was a waiting and ready cadre of humans who are ready to parrot any story that suggested that Trump supporters were a bunch of racist rednecks roaming major cities in search of black people to hurt.
That is why this story went viral in the first place.
Jussie Smollett himself said it, by the way, on Good Morning America.
He said, if I were attacked by black people, nobody would cover this story.
That is correct.
That is absolutely correct.
You know why that is correct?
Because the media have no interest in black people victimizing other black people.
In fact, the media have no interest in people of any ethnicity other than white supremacists victimizing Jews.
In other words, they're a set of narratives that the media are invested in and that politicians are invested in.
And if a story fits neatly into that narrative, then it becomes a major front page issue.
And if it does not, then we don't pay any attention to it at all.
At all.
The media have a narrative that they want to promulgate, that they want to push.
And so, if there is a story perfectly tailored to that narrative, they're more likely to jump on it.
Now, a rational person would say, knowing their own bias, knowing that they want their narrative to be supported, a rational person who tries his best would say, if a story comes out that seems too good to be true, that's probably because it is.
If a story comes out that backs your narrative to the point where every single aspect of the story seems tailored to your narrative, probably it was tailored to your narrative.
If somebody comes to you, if somebody came to me and they said, I have a story, you know, as I run, I run a website, I have a story.
And the story is that Barack Obama was wandering around on the street when he suddenly saw a rich person grab that guy's wallet, ran the other way and started redistributing his cash to his cronies in Washington, D.C.
I'd be like, I don't believe that story because that story seems too metaphorical to be real.
Because if the story fits your narrative, obviously the metaphor being that Barack Obama was a redistributionist who wanted to grab other people's money.
If the story fits your narrative so well that it seems every detail is tailored for your narrative, well then it probably is not true.
It probably is not true.
Real life does not work that way.
Sometimes stories do fit that.
And when they do, then we ought to wait for those stories to be verified because the facts will out.
But the media didn't do that in this case.
And you'll see the media defend themselves in just a second.
It's really, really absurd.
The media jumped on this because the media have the same disposition as Cory Booker.
They have the same exact disposition.
Because Cory Booker, members of the media, they think exactly the same way.
Members of the media are Democrats.
Cory Booker is a Democrat.
Their story is that America is a terrible, horrible, racist place filled with evil, racist deplorables who are going around on the street beating up black people and throwing ropes around their neck.
None of that is true.
But, again, the Jussie Smollett story gave them a peg to put their narrative hat upon.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so the media come out and decide to defend their coverage of the Jussie Smollett case.
It's indefensible.
It is indefensible.
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OK, so the media come out and decide to defend their coverage of the Jussie Smollett case.
It's indefensible.
It is indefensible.
The Jussie Smollett case was covered by the media as fact from the first day it was reported.
There were a bunch of journalists who jumped the gun.
But that's not again.
None of that matters.
You remember when AOC said a few weeks back that people are too focused in on the facts?
They should really focus in on the moral truth.
It's the moral truth that matters.
Stop focusing in on things like whether things are true or not.
Focus in on the morality of things.
Don't bother with the facts.
Focus in on the morality.
Members of the media did this.
After this came out as a hoax, members of the media still defending their coverage by saying, well, you know, the overall narrative, which is that things suck in America, that narrative is still true.
It's the same thing they did with the Michael Brown shooting.
You remember Michael Brown shot in Ferguson, Missouri.
The lie went out that Michael Brown was approaching the police officers and raising his arms and saying, hands up, don't shoot.
And then it turned out all of that was a lie.
It didn't matter.
The entire media ran with it because it pushed the narrative that our police forces across America were racist, even though there was nothing racist about the shooting.
And in fact, Michael Brown was justifiably shot.
Liz Plank on CNN did exactly this.
She's an editor over at Vox.com or a writer over at Vox.com.
She said, listen, just because it's a hoax doesn't mean it's not real.
I think it's important to cover this story.
I also think it's important to cover the other several stories of hate crimes.
Not to say that this was a story of a hate crime, but that there are real hate crimes that happen in this country and there's an increase in them against black people, against LGBTQ people, against Muslims, and the fact that one robbery was fake does not mean that robbery is not a problem.
Okay, first of all, we're going to have to establish that there is in fact a trend of rise in hate crimes.
There's no rape.
We have to cover these issues as trends and as patterns and not fall into the trap that because one story is not real, that the problem is not real.
OK, first of all, we're going to have to establish that there is, in fact, a trend of rise in hate crimes.
For example, the ADL tried to release a report earlier this year saying there was a radical rise in anti-Jewish hate crimes.
It turned out that report was deeply flawed.
We were trying to establish the data.
What's funny is that on that same panel, there was a host for a podcast called The Fifth Column, Black Guy, and he was saying, we are still trying to establish whether these fact patterns exist.
But Liz Plank then turned back to him and said, what do you know about hate crimes?
I mean, it's unbelievable.
The media have a narrative.
America's filled with hate crimes because America's hateful.
I also love how she lists out the groups who have been victimized by hate crimes.
She says, you know, we have to worry about increase of hate crimes against blacks and against Muslims and against LGBT people.
I'll get to the actual stats on hate crimes in just a second because it turns out there is one group of people who have been increasingly victimized by hate crimes and it is none of those groups.
It is none of those.
I mean, those groups may have an increase.
The major increase is not occurring among those groups.
I'll explain where the major increase is occurring in just one second.
But again, this backs a media narrative.
The media narrative is that Jussie Smollett should have been covered exactly the way he was covered.
That we on the right exaggerate how bad the media was in this case.
First of all, The media were awful in this case.
Brian Stelter claims this wasn't about the media.
Brian Stelter on CNN, a reliable source, he says, this story was not about the media botching it.
The story was weaponized by the right.
So, of course, the left, having been shown to be completely terrible at their jobs, members of the media who are on the left, who jumped the gun on this one, like two weeks after they jumped the gun on Covington High School.
They say the real story here is Republicans pouncing, that the story was weaponized.
Here's Brian Stelter on Reliable Sources.
Remember, he's supposed to be sort of the journalistic ombudsman of CNN calling to account journalistic Journalistic crappiness.
Instead, he says, no, no, we all did a great job.
The real problem is weaponization.
Republicans pouncing.
It's always pouncing.
As I've pointed out over the last six weeks, whenever there's an increase in Republicans pounce stories, it means the media are not doing their jobs.
It means the left are terrible at their jobs.
That's why Republicans are reacting.
The reaction of Republicans is never a story.
It's never an actual story.
The actual story is the media screwing it up.
But here's Brian Stelter defending the media and then saying the real problem here are the folks on the right.
Strong, high-quality news organizations have tried to be very careful on this point.
But because TMZ said just a few hours after the alleged attack that this was a Trump supporter attack and it had political connotations, like I said, it became partisan from day one.
And when you're looking at those random websites all over the world spreading information, you can end up thinking this story was able to be weaponized in many different ways.
But at its heart, it is still a mystery.
Okay, it was weaponized in many different ways.
The right was weaponizing the story.
Okay, let's go through how the media actually covered this thing from the beginning, because now we are getting gaslit.
Now the media covered this thing uncritically, and now they want to tell us, no, no, no, we were very careful in our coverage.
Here is a montage of members of the media reporting this story.
Suffice it to say, they were not critical in their coverage of this story.
Empire star Jussie Smollett was the victim of a vicious, racist, and homophobic attack.
His attackers hurled racial and homophobic slurs.
Two people yelled racist and homophobic slurs.
That's HLN.
Racial and homophobic slurs.
MSNBC.
Not only homophobia, we're talking about racism.
We're talking about hate with steroids.
They are looking for two suspects who are apparently wearing Make America Great Again hats.
MSNBC.
The offenders uttered, this is MAGA country.
CNN.
Absolutely despicable.
This is horrible to report.
This is a horrible story.
This is a horrible story.
Yeah.
I mean, the circumstances are just horrific.
Horrendous and unacceptable.
And this is America in 2019.
Okay, it's courtesy of Grabien, and that would be Brooke Baldwin on CNN saying, this is America in 2019.
You know what America is in 2019?
The media uncritically reporting a completely implausible story, and then when caught in their own garbage coverage, immediately turning around and saying, no, no, we didn't do anything wrong.
It's that the white, the right people, the people on the right, they keep weaponizing this thing.
They keep pouncing.
Caleb Howe has a great piece over at Mediaite pointing out Newsweek writers, the senior reporter at the Daily Beast, Kevin Fallon.
We're talking about writer for Boing Boing, writer at Philadelphia Magazine, Vibe Magazine, producers for Nightline on ABC, contributors to Forbes and Slate, an editor at the LA Times, a Buzzfeed writer, a Reuters reporter, writers for Teen Vogue and Washington Post, freelance contributors for Cosmopolitan, senior writers at Rolling Stone, AP, NBC News writer and producer, HuffPost writer, editor at Washington Post, Vanity Fair, So we're supposed to believe that the media didn't jump on the story?
Of course they jumped on the story!
Of course they did, it supported their narrative.
Not only did they jump on the story, so did the entire left, because the media and the left wanted this story to be true.
They desperately wanted the story to be true.
And so funny, folks on the left will say things like, you know, the entire right bought into Pizzagate, or the entire right bought into the Barack Obama birtherism hoax.
First of all, that is not true.
But the entire left, or at least huge swaths of the left, bought fully into not only the Jussie Smollett story, but into the narrative that it was President Trump's fault.
So Ellen Page went on TV with Stephen Colbert, and she suggested it was Mike Pence's fault that a crime that never happened actually happened?
Is she going to walk this back?
This thing has 20 million views.
20 million views.
Ellen Page, last relevant when she was playing the dull person in Inception, now she is coming forth and saying that it was Mike Pence.
This thing has 20 million views.
When did she walk this back?
When is she held accountable for this lie?
Never.
The vice president of America wishes I didn't have the love with my wife.
He has hurt LGBTQ people so badly as the government of Indiana, and I think the thing we need to know, and I hope my show Gaycation did this in terms of connecting the dots, in terms of what happened the other day to Josiah.
I don't know him personally.
I sent all of my love.
If you are in a position of power, and you hate people, And you wanna cause suffering to them.
You go through the trouble, you spend your career trying to cause suffering.
What do you think is gonna happen?
Kids are gonna be abused, and they're gonna kill themselves.
And people are gonna be beaten on the street.
Okay.
She's just, it's, I'm sorry, this is disgusting.
You're taking a fake crime, and you're pinning it on Mike Pence, and then you're blaming Mike Pence for problems across the country for which Mike Pence has no responsibility, and people are uncritically cheering you.
Because this is the world in which fake information can travel quickly.
You hear about fake news all the time from the media.
Oh, the scourge of fake news, the scourge of false narrative.
And President Trump complains the media are complicit in fake news and false narrative.
You know why this is the case?
The reason this is the case is because human beings have a natural tendency to believe stories that back their play.
And right now, people have narratives about America that are not true on a lot of different sides, and they're willing to believe stories that back those narratives, no matter how untrue they are.
There's a fascinating piece in the Washington Post today by a person named Nana Efua Mumford, who's executive assistant to the Washington Post editorial board.
The title of the piece is, I doubted Jussie Smollett.
It breaks my heart that I might be right.
Why would it break your heart when it turns out that a hate crime is false?
That should make you happy.
It means that a hate crime did not occur.
Why does it break your heart when it turns out that accusations that America is deeply racist and homophobic are not backed by an implausible story?
Shouldn't that make you happy?
Like, if it turned out that somebody accused somebody of an anti-Jewish hate crime and it turned out not to be true, I'd be like, great, because America is not an anti-Semitic country.
But for folks on the left, if the story backs their play and it turns out the story is false, that's really bad because then it doesn't back their play.
I'll tell you what this columnist has to say in just one second.
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All right, so this columnist at the Washington Post suggests that it is actually, she's actually very sad that the Jussie Smollett story turned out not to be true.
Why exactly is she sad?
She's sad because maybe it means that Americans won't be as sensitive to hoax stories.
The fact that the entire country took this stupid story seriously in the first place demonstrates how sensitive we are, by the way, to stories like this.
But here's what this columnist writes, quote, Perhaps I don't want to believe Smollett because this is a stark and scary reminder of the poor condition of the country that I call home.
Maybe this story makes the boogeyman of my nightmares all too real, too close, and too calculating.
Maybe it's because while I consider myself an ally to the LGBTQ community, I still don't understand and appreciate the daily harassment that they endure.
Or maybe, even though I'm a black woman, I still don't know what it's like to be a black man in America.
If Smollett's story is found to be untrue, it will cause irreparable damage to the communities most affected.
Oh, as opposed to if it were true, then we would be able to slander the entire white community in America and the Trump-supporting community in America as a bunch of racist bigots.
Then that would be good, because they are racist bigots, but since it turns out to be false, we can't slander a bunch of people anymore, so that's really bad.
She says Smollett would be the first example skeptic site when they say we should be dubious of victims who step forward to share their experience of racist hate crimes or sexual violence.
The incident would be touted as proof that there is a leftist conspiracy to cast Trump supporters as violent, murderous racists.
It would be the very embodiment of fake news.
Well, there is, in fact, a widespread tendency on the left to cast Trump supporters as violent, murderous racists.
That tendency does exist.
At the very least, the tendency to call Trump supporters bigots, that's a mainstream tendency.
If not violent and murderous, certainly bigots.
And she says that reason more than any other is why I need this story to be true.
Despite its ugliness and despite what it would say about the danger of the world I live in, the damage done would be too deep and long lasting.
So in other words, in order for one of two things has to happen.
Either she has to recognize that the story is false and maybe her preconceptions about America as an evil country are false, or the story can be true and that can reinforce her narrative beliefs.
And she would prefer that a black man was beaten on the streets of Chicago by two MAGA-hatted racists so that she can think America is a bad place than that that turn out to not to be true.
If your belief in the world relies on people being beaten in the streets, let me suggest, and you feel better when people are beaten in the streets because it backs your worldview, let me suggest you need to change your view of the world.
If you are happy when a story of federal hate crime turns out to be true, Something is deeply wrong.
Something is deeply wrong.
Especially because what that suggests is that people on the other side of the aisle are somehow going to shy away from actual hate crimes.
We all took hate crime seriously.
Everybody, even people who were skeptical of Jussie Smollett, kept saying, if this turns out to be true.
They said, we have questions, but if this turns out to be true.
Again, what the left wants you to believe is that there are a lot of people on the right who don't take hate crime seriously, and now they definitely won't take hate crime seriously because of Jussie Smollett.
No, no rational human being should treat outlandish claims as seriously as they would treat serious claims in the first place.
Now, I want to talk for a second about hate crimes themselves, because there was a real hate crime that took place over the weekend in New York, and no one gives a crap.
The reason no one gives a crap is because it's against a Jew and it wasn't done by a white supremacist.
According to NBC New York, a window of a Brooklyn synagogue was smashed on the Sabbath while the rabbi and his family, including young children, were inside.
A large plate glass window was shattered in front of Chabad of Bushwick, On Flushing Avenue, Rabbi Menachem Heller said.
Heller said his family, including nine children, stays at the center on Shabbat.
They saw two people walking away from the scene.
Heller said they walked across the street.
They asked people to call 911.
They flagged down police officers.
The city has seen a sharp increase in reported hate crimes so far in 2019.
Police had investigated 42 of the hate crimes through February 4th, compared with 19 at the same point last year.
Most of those were anti-Semitic.
But you haven't heard about those on the national news, have you?
Because the only time you hear about anti-Semitic crime is when it's a Trump-supporting white supremacist or somebody you can pin on President Trump.
That's when the media care about it.
Again, let me give you the narrative in this country.
The narrative in this country right now from the media and the left is exactly the narrative put out by Liz Plank that the people who ought to be most worried in America about hate crime are Muslims and black folks and LGBTQ folks.
Now listen, everybody should be upset about any hate crime against any group, but statistically speaking, the group most likely, per capita, to be targeted are Jews.
And no one talks about that unless it's a white supremacist.
Because it turns out that Jews are targeted by a wide variety of groups, including members of the intersectional pyramid, who stack higher on that pyramid than Jews do.
This is not according to me.
This is according to the FBI.
And by the way, the New York Times has admitted as much.
The New York Times has admitted, we don't cover hate crimes against Jews in New York City because it doesn't fit our narrative preconceptions.
A couple of months ago, they ran a piece about the uptick in hate crimes in New York City against Jews, and they said, we don't cover this on the front page because there's no pattern to it.
What they mean by that is there's no way we can pin it on Trump, so we're not going to cover it.
Here are the FBI statistics from 2017 on federally reported hate crimes.
Racial, ethnicity, and ancestry bias.
48.6% were victims of crimes motivated by offenders anti-black or African-American bias.
This is according to race, ethnicity, and ancestry.
17.1% were victims of anti-white bias.
First of all, we actually have to determine how hate crimes are categorized because is it a racial motivation?
Is it not a racial motivation?
It's never... Well, sometimes it's super easy, sometimes it's not super easy to tell.
In any case, blacks are targeted in outside fashion for hate crimes.
But you know who are really targeted in outside fashion for hate crimes?
Religious bias.
Of the 1,749 victims of anti-religious hate crimes, 58.1% were victims of crimes motivated by their offender's anti-Jewish bias.
18.6% were victims of anti-Islamic Muslim bias.
were victims of anti-Islamic Muslim bias.
4.3% were victims of anti-Catholic bias.
So if you're going to look at actual hate crime statistics, what you would find is that Jews are disproportionately targeted more than any other group per capita.
More than any other group per capita, except for perhaps gay people.
It's very close between the two groups.
The point that I'm making here is that America is a wildly philo-semitic country.
Thank God there are not that many hate crimes per capita in the United States.
And yet we are supposed to be told that America is a deeply hateful, terrible place and Jussie Smollett shows it.
So when Jussie Smollett turns out to be false, everybody is sad on the left.
And Jews are targeted in this country at about the same per capita rate that gay people are targeted in this country.
Maybe higher.
And you know what?
This is not an anti-Semitic country.
It's not an anti-gay country.
This is a magnificent country.
It's a really tolerant, non-bigoted country.
That doesn't mean there aren't scumbags out there.
Doesn't mean there aren't evil human beings out there.
Of course they are.
But if you are super eager to buy into a narrative that promotes your group as a victim group in the United States, or that promotes the Trump supporters as a group of bigots and vile racists, maybe the problem is with you.
Maybe the problem with the narrative is chiefly with you.
In a second, we're going to get to President Trump's wall.
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Alrighty, in a second, I'm going to get to the continuing controversy over President Trump's wall.
We'll get to more evidence that the media are wildly biased.
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And meanwhile, controversy continues over President Trump's border wall.
Democrats continue to fringe themselves by claiming that all walls are bad.
All they have to claim here is that President Trump's border wall is not the best expenditure of money.
All they have to do is say, like, let's put up fencing in certain areas.
We don't need a 2,000 mile border wall.
Let's strengthen security at different points of entry.
Let's let's work on a variety of other ways to shut down illegal immigration.
Instead, Democrats have decided that They think because people don't like Trump generally, because Trump is not super popular, that that means that Americans are in favor of the most radical version of the open borders argument.
This argument was presented by the venerable fresh face, so fresh, so face AOC on Instagram over the weekend.
She says that our border wall and the wall Trump wants to build, it's just like the Berlin Wall, which makes perfect sense if you smacked your head on a stoop when you were three.
No matter how you feel about the wall, you know, I think it's a moral abomination.
I think it's like the Berlin Wall.
Okay, if you think that a wall to keep people out is the same as a wall to keep people in, then that's just dumb.
That is a dumb thing.
It is a very dumb thing.
This is like saying that the wall of your house is exactly like the wall of the local penitentiary.
Except it isn't.
The wall of a local jail is precisely created to keep criminals out of general society.
The wall around your house is created to keep criminals out of your home.
One wall is created to keep people in, the other is created to keep people out.
Out.
Like, why is this difficult in any way?
I don't understand.
If we were building a wall that were forcing people to stay in America, yeah, that's like the Berlin Wall.
It turns out that people were not trying to get through the Berlin Wall from West to East Germany.
They were trying to get through the Berlin Wall from East to West Germany.
The Soviets were shooting people trying to leave East Germany.
So, when we start shooting people trying to leave America... By the way, that seems more in line with socialist thinking, right?
Socialist thinking is that if you make a lot of money in the United States, then we should grab your money, force you to stay here, and then tax the living crap out of you, and if you try to leave, we should punish you.
It's much more in line with left thinking to build walls that keep people in than with right thinking.
Walls on the right, for better or for worse, tend to be built to keep people out.
Sometimes that's really bad, sometimes it's not.
Walls on the left tend to be built to keep people in.
That is always really bad.
Invariably really bad.
In any case, the wall continues to be a hot-button issue.
The Trump administration is not making the world's strongest case for the national emergency declaration that President Trump announced last Friday.
Again, I don't think the president had to make that national emergency declaration.
I think he had the capacity under 10 U.S.C.
284 to declare that there were drug corridors existing along the U.S.-Mexico border that required the building of additional fencing.
He doesn't need to declare a national emergency to do that.
Instead, he declared a national emergency And that created a real problem for the administration because they now have to explain why this is not a wild violation of precedent.
That anytime you can't get a congressional deal on the table, you just declare a national emergency and then get the funding however you want.
This is very much akin to Barack Obama not being able to get an immigration deal and then unilaterally declaring that he was not going to enforce immigration law.
Chris Wallace made this very clear when he was interviewing Stephen Miller.
He said, like, I'm gonna need an instance of a president who declared a national emergency to redirect funding after failing to negotiate a deal with Congress.
Can you name one case where a president has asked Congress for money, Congress has refused, and the president has then invoked national powers to get the money anyway?
Well, this current situation... Yes or no, sir?
The current situation pertains specifically to the Military Construction Authority.
I'm just asking, has there been a single case where Congress asked for money for military construction, Congress said no, and he then... The meaning of the statute, Chris, is clear on its own terms.
If you don't like the statute, or members of Congress don't like the statute... Would you agree the answer is no?
There hasn't been a single case like this.
Okay, so what Miller is saying is not wrong.
I mean, there is an arguable case that you can declare a national emergency and use these various methodologies in order to spend money on the border.
That's arguable, at least.
What Wallace is saying is not arguable.
What Wallace is saying is that there is not a history of presidents failing at congressional negotiation and then simply declaring a national emergency to get the money that they want.
So this is going to continue to be a hot-button political issue.
It'll be held up in court for sure.
The chances that President Trump builds any substantial portion of the wall before his reelect effort in 2020 is extraordinarily low, especially because, as I mentioned last week, the budget that he signed itself, on its own terms, prohibits the spending of money outside of border wall in the Rio Grande Valley.
So it's a real legal conundrum for the Trump administration.
With that said, is it a political victory for the Trump administration?
Certainly it is with Trump's base.
And again, if Democrats continue to double down on all border walls or bad, that's going to be a problem for them.
And Democrats are going to continue to double down on that because Democrats running in 2020 have to run to the left.
This is why even Sherrod Brown, who's considered more moderate 2020 possible Democratic candidate, he was asked about tearing down existing wall.
And the reason he was asked about this is because Beto O'Rourke From El Paso, dude.
He was asked last week, if you don't like walls so much, why not tear down the wall between the United States and Mexico in El Paso, where you're from?
And he said, well, maybe I will.
You never know.
And then he smoked out of a really large bong.
Well, Sherrod Brown, the senator from Ohio, he was asked about this.
He says, well, I don't know.
Maybe I will.
Maybe I will.
And maybe I won't.
I don't really know.
Let's talk about it.
Do you think the existing walls and fencing along the border should come down?
I take a back seat to nobody in border security and it's clear we've learned over time that we have the technology, helicopters, border agents to make our country safe and to keep illegal crossings at a minimum without building a long wall.
That's a decision that should be made in the whole context.
You don't say, well this congressman says take it down here, this congressman says build it up there.
You really want to look Okay, that's what we call avoiding the question because he doesn't want to get on the wrong side of the AOC base.
It's not just Sherrod Brown doing this routine.
It's Kirsten Gillibrand, she of the thousand positions.
She has never taken a position on any issue and this issue is no exception.
She was asked if she could support removing barriers and here's what she had to say.
proposal from Beto O'Rourke to actually remove some of the existing wall.
He was talking about El Paso, but the idea of dismantling some of the wall, good idea, bad idea?
Well, I'd have to ask folks in that part of the country to see whether the fencing that exists today is helpful or unhelpful.
But, you know, Democrats are not afraid of national security or border security.
Democrats have funded border security for decades, so I could look at it and see which part he means and why, and if it makes sense, I could support it.
Okay, she took three positions in the space of 30 seconds right there.
It's unbelievable.
She's gifted.
I mean, I'll give her this.
It's like... Have you ever seen one of those films where there's a strobe light in the film and suddenly people are sort of flashing from one place to another?
That's basically her on positions.
She just kind of moves from position to position.
In the space of that 30 seconds, she said, we can ask the locals.
Also, we're great on border security.
Also, maybe we should take down the wall.
Kirsten Gillibrand, man.
You got to admire the absolute confidence with which she says three conflicting things in the space of 30 seconds.
But again, all Democrats are afraid of being outflanked on their left, and that is why they are embracing the Beto position that maybe, maybe we should consider tearing down existing border walls, which is just insane.
Meanwhile, On the campaign trail, every Democrat has decided to run directly to the left.
Joe Biden went to Europe over the weekend, and there he explained that America is actually an embarrassment.
Which is weird, because weren't you VP like five minutes ago, dude?
America, I see, values basic human decency.
Not snatching children from their parents, or turning our back on refugees at our border.
Americas know that's not right.
The American people understand, please, because it makes us embarrassing.
The American people know.
Overwhelmingly, that that's not right.
That's not who we are.
OK, that's not who we are is the most overused phrase in American politics, and it's really dumb.
You know who we are, who we say we are and what we do.
That's what we are.
This idea that it's not who we are.
Well, again, when you when you're ripping Vice President Biden on removal of children from their parents, let's recall under whom that started.
The president under whom you served.
But one of the nice things about being a Democrat is the media will always cover for you.
How in bed with the Democrats are the media?
They are so in bed that a CNN reporter, who's dedicated to covering Kamala Harris, was helping her try on sequined jackets at a recent campaign stop.
This was tweeted out by CBS News.
Here's what it looked like.
Oh, yeah.
That's it.
Oh, my God.
That's so weird.
Okay, so there is Kamala Harris laughing with a CNN reporter named Maeve Reston.
And Maeve Reston then tweeted out, Dear America, I will never apologize for encouraging a presidential candidate to try on a vintage rainbow sequined jacket.
And then she put in a bunch of emojis, an American flag, a woman raising her hand, a rainbow, peace, hashtag 2020.
You're not a campaign advisor or comms person for the candidate, lady!
You're a reporter for CNN!
Can you imagine any of the reporters for CNN doing something like this with Ted Cruz or Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2016?
Mr. Cruz, would you like to try holding this AR-15 so we can get a great picture of you?
Can you imagine any of that happening?
Of course not.
Of course not.
Democrats are so in bed with the Democrats that they are openly doing this stuff.
Is Maeve Reston going to be removed from that job?
Of course not.
Of course she will not be.
She's an objective news reporter.
So much journalism-ing happening.
Unreal.
But we're supposed to take the media very seriously.
They have no agenda.
Facts.
That's all.
Apples, not bananas.
Facts over at CNN.
You want to know why people chant CNN sucks?
That's why people chant CNN sucks.
Meanwhile, in other media hilarity, the media are cheering on Democrats like AOC as they threw Amazon out of New York City.
A full MSNBC panel over the weekend cheering All of these 25,000 lost jobs from Amazon because look at the strength of Democrats.
They are so strong that they are actively alienating major businesses.
People are learning from, well, Amazon has come and tech has come to my hometown, the Bay Area.
It's been a great boon.
Oh, look, income inequality, right?
Oh, look, upper middle class people can't even afford houses in the Bay Area with a six figure salary.
So what's going to happen to our slick neck of the woods here in Queens where we have we need the jobs?
Yes, fine.
Twenty five thousand jobs.
What type of jobs?
Right.
And is this going to phase out Different communities, communities of color.
And I think these are the conversations, right, that people are now having.
And let's say the sheen of an Amazon or a Facebook or a Twitter.
Five, ten years ago, people were like, yes, come save us, our tech overlords from Silicon Valley.
But now people are like, wait a second, we've seen what's happened in other places.
And you have to talk to us because our interests are at stake.
Except for the fact that a vast majority of people in New York City were very much in favor of Amazon coming.
It was just a bunch of left politicians who were upset about it.
I love when they say it's really bad that tech companies are coming here because it creates income inequality.
You know what it creates?
More income.
More income.
And just because some people are not going to be working for Amazon, Does not mean that it's bad for the community when a giant job creator that generates enormous sums in taxpayer dollars and jobs and income enters your community.
But Bill de Blasio has a column over at the New York Times.
He also wants to run for president.
He has an opinion column today called, The Path Amazon Rejected, over at the New York Times.
Now, recall that Bill de Blasio was one of the people who constructed the Amazon deal in the first place.
Then when it turns out it was unpopular with his own communist face, then he was like, me?
Nope.
And then he just sort of disappeared into the bushes, backed slowly away into the bushes like Homer Simpson.
He has a piece in the New York Times today in which he says that it turns out that New York did the right thing by alienating Amazon and rejecting his deal.
He says, The first word I had that Amazon was about to scrap an agreement to bring 25,000 new jobs to New York City came an hour before it broke in the news on Thursday.
The call was brief, and there was little explanation for the company's reversal.
Just days before, I had counseled a senior Amazon executive about how they could win over some of their critics.
Meet with organized labor.
Start hiring public housing residents.
Invest in infrastructure and other community needs.
Show you care about fairness and creating opportunity for the working people of Long Island City.
There is a clear path forward.
Put simply, if you don't like a small but vocal group of New Yorkers questioning your company's intentions or integrity, prove them wrong.
Instead, Amazon proved them right.
Just two hours after a meeting with residents and community leaders to move this project forward, the company abruptly canceled it all.
So in other words, de Blasio had offered them a bevy of benefits to come to New York, And then when they came to New York, he said, I need you to also do these other things, like give away half your benefits.
I'm going to need you to build a bunch of public housing that we didn't negotiate for.
We're going to need you also to negotiate with organized labor, which Amazon will not and has not done.
We're going to need you to make all these concessions we never talked about before.
Basically, New York City thought that they were Darth Vader talking to Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back.
If the deal has changed, pray I do not change it further.
Except the difference is that in this particular scenario, the only ones with the power of the dark side are the folks at Amazon.
They get to walk away.
They don't care.
They're not going to negotiate with Bill de Blasio.
Come on!
But Bill de Blasio, he says, we did the right thing by alienating jobs.
We stood for our principles.
Well, that and five bucks will buy you an overpriced cup of coffee in New York City where people don't have jobs now because you decided to pressure a company that was attempting to move in.
Bill de Blasio says the lesson here is that corporations can't ignore rising anger over economic inequality anymore.
No, the real lesson is that if you use that anger over economic inequality to target all the job and tax producers, the tax producers and job creators are going to leave, and they're not going to locate in your place.
That's the real lesson of New York City.
But New York doesn't want to recognize that because it would undercut Bill de Blasio's entire political modus operandi.
All righty, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So today is President's Day.
And a little bit later today, I'm going to be doing a full hour on the history of George Washington, utter badass.
I'm going to tell you something about George Washington.
George Washington was a stud.
And I'm going to tell you a little bit later today, you should subscribe and check it out, because I'm going to do a full hour on the history of George Washington, who, like, people...
They think of him as the guy with the wooden teeth, and he looks kind of like your grandma on the dollar bill.
George Washington was an utter and complete badass.
I mean, really.
So we'll get to that a little bit later today.
This is why you ought to subscribe.
Go check that out.
But over the weekend, I was also sitting around thinking about favorite TV scenes in history, just apropos of nothing.
And one scene popped in my head.
This is the funniest scene in the history of television.
This is from the Mary Tyler Moore show.
So the setup for this scene is that Chuckles the Clown Chuckles the Clown brought pleasure to millions.
The characters he created will be remembered by children and adults alike.
throughout the episode is making jokes about the death of Chuckles the Clown.
And Mary Tyler Moore keeps saying that it's not funny, that they should stop making jokes about the death of Chuckles the Clown.
And then she goes to Chuckles the Clown's funeral.
And here is what happens.
Chuckles the Clown brought pleasure to millions.
The characters he created will be remembered by children and adults alike.
Peter Peanut.
Mr. Fee-Five-Fo.
Present.
Billy Banana.
And my particular favorite, Aunt Yoo-Hoo.
And not just... Not just for the laughter that they provided.
There was always some deeper meaning to whatever Chuckles did.
Do you remember Mr. Fee-Five-Foe's little catchphrase?
Remember how, when his arch-rival, Señor Kaboom, hit him with a giant cucumber and knocked him down?
Mr. Fee-Fee-Fee-Fee would always pick himself up.
Dust himself off and say, "I hurt my foo-foo." So, Mary Tyler Moore was a great show, and this was the best scene from Mary Tyler Moore.
The whole scene is hysterically funny.
Also, this happened to my actual dad.
So, one time my dad went to a funeral, and, you know, will he like me telling this story?
I'll tell it anyway.
In any case, my dad went to a funeral.
This must have been 25 years ago, and it was for a relative, and it turns out that this, it was an old lady, and her son had been stealing her social security checks.
He'd been taking her social security checks from her mailbox and going and cashing them.
So she and her son, needless to say, did not have a good relationship.
Well, the person, as so often happens with funerals, who was giving the peroration over the body of the deceased, was a person who had not known the person who died.
This happens at a lot of funerals.
You'll have the rabbi or the priest get up, the pastor, And they just got a little bit of background from the family before they got up and they gave a speech, which I never understand.
It makes no sense to me.
You should only have family do these things.
Anyway, the person who got up and was making the speech was talking about the relationship between the mother and her son, who had been stealing her social security checks.
And everything that the person giving the eulogy said Was just vague enough that it could be taken in a couple of ways.
He would say something like, you know, Fanny and her son, their relationship was indescribable.
It was unbelievable.
If someone told you about it, you simply wouldn't understand it.
And my dad, about halfway through the funeral, just started losing it.
He just started cracking up.
And then his brother-in-law, who was there, they both started cracking up.
And so my dad put his head down in his hands while he was laughing so hard he was crying, and my mom put her arm around his shoulder as though my dad was actually crying over the whole thing.
So, if you've ever been to a funeral, I mean, That scene is great because there are a number of funerals you will go to in your life where the urge, it's so awkward and it's so horrible, the urge to laugh at a funeral is a very real thing.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So over the weekend, President Trump got mad at SNL again.
Like, I don't know why he bothers to get mad at SNL.
SNL has not been funny for legitimately years.
The last time it was funny, I was in my teens.
And yet, President Trump, it seems like every Saturday night, he gets mad at Saturday Night Live.
I don't know the purpose of this.
So he tweeted out, Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on fake news NBC.
Question is, how do the networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution?
Likewise for many other shows.
Very unfair and should be looked into.
This is the real Collusion.
Capital C. Mr. President.
No, just don't.
Just don't.
Like, what is the point of this?
Now everybody's going to claim that you're trying to say that there should be retribution against SNL and that the media should be targeted.
Listen, people despise the media enough as it is.
They understand how bad the media are at their jobs.
I spent this entire episode basically ripping on the insanity and gaslighting of the national news media.
You don't have to do it, Mr. President.
Like, if you're going to target them over something, make it not SNL.
Like, honestly, it's just, it's a silly thing to do, and there's no purpose to it.
Now, other things that I hate over the weekend.
Bill Maher, who on occasion is right, but when it comes to a great many issues, is wildly wrong.
On his show, he was talking about Ilhan Omar, another one of the fresh faces of the Democratic Party.
So fresh, so face.
He says, I don't see any reason why we should see Ilhan Omar as anti-Semitic.
I mean, like, aside from her giant history of being an anti-Semite.
A new Congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, she is Muslim, one of the first two I think we have in Congress, and she's apologizing, she's under a lot of fire because she was talking about the Jewish lobby, AIPAC, and she said it's all about the Benjamins.
Now, I probably don't agree with her a lot about what she feels about Israel and Palestine, but I don't know why this has to be seen as anti-Semitic.
Now, she may be anti-Semitic, but if I criticize Saudi Arabia, that doesn't mean I'm Islamophobe.
Okay, nobody suggests that just because she criticizes Israel, she's anti-semitic.
She stands against its existence.
She stands against its existence, and she suggested openly that Jewish money is behind the American support for Israel.
We went through this last week at length.
Listen, I think Bill Maher is quite good on a great many issues.
There are a lot of issues on which we disagree, and I've been on his show, and it was quite cordial, it was quite nice.
But the lengths to which people seem to be willing to go to pretend that Ilhan Omar is not a longtime anti-Semite, are in stark contrast to the same people, the same exact people suggesting that Trump supporters broad writ are a bunch of racists.
The evidence that Trump supporters are racist is significantly less than the evidence that Ilhan Omar is a raging anti-Semite, and that is obvious to anyone with half of a brain.
Alrighty, well we will be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours, including my full breakdown on George Washington.
We're gonna tell the story of George Washington a little bit later today, so be there or be square.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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