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Feb. 19, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

51:09

Backing Away Slowly | Ep. 720

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	Bernie McFace McSanders joins the 2020 race, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker get stuck in the Jussie Smollett trap, and a CBS reporter blows the lid off of bias in the media.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Oh, man, so much news, Ben.
	Bernie's jumping back in the race and all the septuagenarian Marxists are up in arms.
	Well, actually, they can't actually walk, so they're mostly just wheeling around.
	They're very excited, though, and they would be shouting if they had vocal cords left, but they're kind of old.
	We'll get to all of that in just one second.
	First, let's talk about the fact that not only are a lot of old Bernie Sanders voters nearing their doom, so are you.
	Everybody is.
	We're all approaching death.
	I mean, an uplifting message today here on The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	All right, so the big breaking news this morning.
	Bernie is in!
	That means it's time for Bernie's theme song.
	According to Politico, Bernie Sanders is jumping into the race.
	And this is very exciting stuff.
	The New York Times says Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent and 2016 Democratic primary runner-up, whose populist policy agenda has helped push the party to the left, announced on Tuesday that he was running for president again, embarking on a bid that would test whether he could retain the anti-establishment appeal he enjoyed with many liberal voters three years ago.
	A self-styled Democratic socialist whose calls for Medicare for all A $15 minimum wage and tuition-free public colleges have become pillars of the party's left wing, Mr. Sanders is among the best-known politicians to join an already crowded Democratic field, and one of the most outspoken against President Trump, whom he has repeatedly called a pathological liar and a racist.
	Three years ago, during our 2016 campaign, when we brought forth our progressive agenda, we were told that our ideas were radical and extreme.
	He said on Tuesday in an early morning email to supporters citing health, economic, and education policies, well, three years have come and gone, and I am merely a little older, and I have a little less hair.
	And as a result of millions of Americans now standing up and fighting back, all of these policies and more are now supported by a majority of Americans.
	By the way, that is a lie.
	If you look at the actual polling with regard to Medicare for all, and then people are told that their taxes will increase...
	Medicare and private insurance will be abolished.
	The support for Medicare for all drops to 27%.
	As far as the idea that people are for free college tuition, depends on if you tell them the cost.
	As far as his beliefs that we should completely regulate and tax the economy out of existence, most people not super interested in that.
	The good news for Bernie Sanders is that, of course, he is very prominent because of 2016, and now he's going to crowd out Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
	Elizabeth Warren was hoping that she could pick up sort of the Bernie mantle.
	She missed her shot.
	That was 2016.
	She could have competed with him.
	She could have out-competed.
	I think if Elizabeth Warren had run in 2016, there's a good shot she might be president right now.
	I think now her time has passed.
	They left her behind on the plains where she will roam around looking for Buffalo.
	Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
	The progressive wing of the party is going to swing behind Bernie Sanders, who really does have an amazing 2020 slogan.
	If you want the guy who actually knew Karl Marx, That's going to be Bernie's slogan.
	All these other people, they're just imitating.
	Bernie Sanders is the real deal.
	He used to sit around in British pubs and talk with Karl Marx.
	Karl Marx would be like, you know, what would be great is if we leveled the playing field.
	And Bernie would be like, I love that idea.
	That is a terrific idea.
	Would you like another share of this pudding?
	And Karl Marx is like, pudding hasn't been invented yet.
	But that's how, in any case, Bernie Sanders did put out a 2020 commercial And it's just as terrible as you would think it would be.
	Here's Bernie Sanders' initial 2020 commercial.
	Real change never takes place from the top on down, but always from the bottom on up.
	Can we stop it there for a second?
	Question.
	He says real change takes place from the top.
	It doesn't take place from the top down.
	It comes from the bottom up.
	He is for a centralized economy.
	His entire platform is centralization of everything in top-down authority.
	What in the world is he even talking about?
	So what he's saying is, lots of people want this, therefore it is ground-up change, not top-down change, but here's the way it works.
	Things grow from the ground up, and then we dictate them from the top down, and then the people on the ground up, if they don't agree with us, we kill them like the Kulaks.
	Anyway, his silly commercial continues.
	Bernie Sanders' healthcare for all idea is gaining steam.
	Free tuition.
	Free college tuition.
	Free tuition champion, Senator Bernie Sanders.
	Bernie Sanders added, the greatest threat to national security is climate change.
	The future of our planet is at stake.
	Sanders taking on Amazon.
	Bernie Sanders has been consistent hammering about income inequality.
	Nobody in America works 40 hours a week, should be living in poverty.
	Our economy is rigged.
	We have a campaign finance system which is corrupt.
	Brothers and sisters, we have a lot of work in front of us.
	Alrighty, so one of the things I love about Bernie Sanders is that basically he just sits there and complains about the state of things as they are.
	Bernie Sanders was so lazy when he was in a commune in the 1970s that they threw him out of the commune.
	He was spending his days basically sitting around writing weird, erotic columns about women who wish they had been raped.
	I'm not kidding about this.
	And then they threw him out of the commune because they're like, dude, you're not productive enough to be in a commune.
	He has spent his entire career in the Senate doing nothing.
	No things.
	And there he is talking about the most prosperous economy in the history of the world, the most powerful economy in the history of the world.
	It's rigged!
	It's a rigged economy.
	You know what's rigged?
	The fact that you do nothing your entire life, and now you're going to run for president, and in the first three and a half hours of your campaign you raise a million dollars.
	That seems kind of rigged to me, I'll be honest with you.
	It seems to me like if you get to live off the fat of the land as Bernie Sanders has without producing a thing for your entire life, and that guy is as old as my grandparents, that's a pretty amazing life right there.
	So you don't get to whine about how terrible America is when you have done zero things your entire life of use to a human.
	And yet here you are as a frontrunner in a presidential race.
	He also made a public announcement of his run for the presidency in 2020 in front of the press.
	Here's what he had to say.
	Hi, I'm Bernie Sanders.
	I'm running for president.
	Our campaign is not only about defeating Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history.
	Our campaign is about redoubling our efforts to end racism, sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry, and all forms of discrimination.
	I have a question.
	How?
	Just how?
	That's my real question.
	They're a bunch of questionable statements that he makes.
	First of all, I'm not sure that he can actually run for president at this point.
	He's more like hobbling for president.
	But in any case, I am toddling for president.
	But I mean, the guy's 80.
	I love the fact that he thinks that nobody in the Democratic Party is capable of picking up his mantle.
	He says he's for the people.
	He says he's for his ideas.
	He's 80 years old.
	There are people who are legitimately half his age.
	Beto O'Rourke is like half his age.
	And he's like, nope, you know what?
	They can't handle it.
	It's got to be me.
	Only I have the vision to see that only three types of deodorant are necessary on the shelves of America's supermarkets.
	Also, bread lines are great because it's a line for bread.
	We like bread.
	We like lines.
	So why would we not like bread lines?
	He actually said in the 1980s that he likes bread lines, by the way.
	That's not just me making that up.
	When he says that he's going to run to end racism, sexism, bigotry, and homophobia, really?
	How?
	How's that gonna work?
	Because it seems to me that Bernie Sanders and a lot of the Democratic Party are spending an awful lot of time actually ratcheting up racism, sexism, bigotry, anti-religious sentiment.
	It seems like they are the ones who are interested in separating Americans from Americans.
	Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign has already been maligned by the left as racist.
	No joke.
	People on the left think that Bernie Sanders' campaign is not intersexual enough.
	The rip on him, there was an article in the New York Times two days ago.
	About how Bernie Sanders was too white to win.
	About how Bernie Sanders had alienated too many minority people to win.
	And he's gonna run to end racism, sexism, bigotry, and homophobia?
	That's Bernie Sanders' platform?
	Sure.
	And he continues along these lines.
	A fraud, a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, and someone who is undermining American democracy as he leads us in an authoritarian direction.
	I am running for president because now more than ever, We need leadership that brings us together, not divides us up.
	Nothing brings us together quite like a communist dictatorship.
	Nothing brings you together quite like the regimes that Bernie Sanders has expressed admiration for.
	Cuba brings people together.
	The USSR brings people together.
	Venezuela brings people together.
	So many wonderful places that bring people together.
	Now listen.
	I'm only half joking because the reality is Bernie did express a lot of support for these sorts of regimes.
	Only in the last 10 years or so has he decided that actually he doesn't like Cuba and the USSR as much as he used to.
	Now he likes Denmark and Norway and the Scandinavian democratic socialist countries.
	Now he's a democratic socialist.
	He's not an actual socialist.
	But when he makes his entire campaign about, I'm going to unify everyone.
	Also, the current president in the White House is the worst person to have ever lived.
	And I hope he steps on a landmine.
	If that's your campaign, and your campaign is that America is rife with racism, sexism, bigotry, and homophobia, you're not a unifier.
	Now, what is Bernie Sanders' path to the nomination?
	His path to the nomination is basically everybody splits the vote and he runs up the left.
	That's basically his path to the nomination.
	He hopes that Beto and Kamala And Cory Booker club each other to death like baby seals, and then he just sort of hobbles his way across the finish line.
	His pollsters are basically suggesting this already at Politico.
	Politico says, when Bernie Sanders was mulling a 2020 campaign last year, he said he would likely pull the trigger if he thought he was the best candidate to defeat President Trump.
	Now that he's officially in the race for the White House, a key element of his argument is that he is, in a way that flies in the face of conventional wisdom.
	His campaign is gearing up to take aim at one of the central cases made against him, that the 77-year-old Democratic Socialist, far from being unable to win a general election, could blaze a non-traditional path to victory on the electoral map unlike any other Democratic candidate.
	This month, Ben Tolchin, who is Sanders' pollster, circulated a memo about an online survey he conducted in late 2017 for progressives who are hoping to flip state legislative seats in West Virginia.
	The poll found that Sanders would beat Trump by two percentage points in the state, despite the fact that Trump won West Virginia 69 to 27, and that no Democratic presidential candidate has carried the state since 1996.
	In a second, I'm going to discuss some more of the polling for Bernie Sanders and why he is a different sort of candidate than Kamala Harris or even Beto O'Rourke.
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	All right, so...
	The pollsters are basically saying that Sanders could defeat Trump in a variety of largely white, non-college educated states.
	Some of the Sanders camp, according to Politico, envisioned possibly making a play for Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana, as well as Kansas, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Montana, six states that together have voted for the Democratic nominee just twice in the past half century.
	His pollster says it could radically change the map.
	As Bernie has shown, as Trump has shown, I don't think we are in a binary, two-dimensional, left-right paradigm anymore.
	Now, there is some truth to this.
	The truth is that a full 12% of Bernie Sanders' primary voters said they voted for Donald Trump in the general election because they wanted somebody who's anti-establishment, who had that populist feel, and who Actually believe that a lot of these guys who are non-college educated white folks in Ohio and Iowa and variety of these other states, Michigan, Wisconsin, that those people actually had dignity.
	I had a conversation with Arthur Brooks over at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, and in his book that is coming out very soon, you should go check it out, it's called Love Your Enemies, not out for a couple of weeks, but in his book he talks about how he believes the reason that President Trump won the presidency is because Trump granted the feeling of dignity to a lot of non-college educated white folks who had been ignored by the prevailing sentiments in academia and on the coasts that basically these guys were going to be left behind.
	Well, Bernie Sanders does cater to that crowd in a way that no other Democrat does.
	Elizabeth Warren is still an elitist.
	For all of the populist talk, she's a professor at Harvard.
	This is a woman who is very elite.
	And Kamala Harris is pursuing a completely different electoral strategy.
	Her electoral strategy is to mimic the Barack Obama coalition, the intersectional coalition, get heavy black turnout, bring along a lot of Hispanics and young people and women.
	That's going to be the coalition.
	Bernie Sanders is more of a throwback.
	The only two candidates in the Democratic field so far who have any appeal really in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, the only two Democrats are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, both old white guys who have sort of a blue collar feel.
	So it is not out of the realm of possibility that Bernie Sanders is dangerous in a general election.
	That's not out of the realm of possibility at all.
	And in a primary, he does well with the progressive wing.
	He does surprisingly well with young people as well.
	Could he gain momentum again?
	Sure, why not?
	Or, theoretically, he could kind of fall off the table a little bit.
	You could see a Ron Paul effect where Ron Paul, the first time he runs, does decently.
	It tends to degrade over time.
	Pat Buchanan had the same thing in 1992.
	You saw the same thing with Ross Perot between 1992 and 1996.
	You could see a falling off in support for Bernie Sanders, but he's dangerous and he raises a lot of money.
	He raises a lot of money.
	I'm going to talk a little bit more about Bernie Sanders in just one second.
	According to an analysis of exit polling in 25 primaries, according to Politico, Bernie Sanders narrowly won black voters under 30 in 2016, but he lost older African Americans by large margins.
	They turned out at higher rates than their younger counterparts.
	To beat Trump, the Democratic nominee will need robust support from black voters, the most loyal part of the party's base.
	Well, that, or he needs to peel off a bunch of those blue-collar white voters again.
	And he does have a problem in these primaries.
	In 2016, he was running against an unlikable old white woman, Hillary Clinton.
	She was not drawing heavily.
	She didn't do well with the black community or as well as Barack Obama did in the party primaries.
	Again, it was Hillary Clinton's weakness with black primary voters in 2008 that led Barack Obama to steal the nomination from her.
	Sanders almost stole the nomination from her again because she was weak among black voters.
	This time you've got two black candidates in Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.
	Both of whom have robust appeal among black voters in the Democratic Party primaries.
	With that said, he is running from behind in those particular areas, but in several recent 2020 surveys, he's actually in first place among Latinos, faring better than even former Vice President Joe Biden.
	Yeah, we can dismiss Bernie Sanders as a has-been, or we can face the reality that the guy has a real shot at the nomination.
	He does have a shot at the nomination.
	And he has pushed the Democratic Party left.
	He can fairly say that he has helped push the Democratic Party far to the left.
	And some of his opponents are making boo-boos.
	It's really interesting.
	So, Kamala Harris.
	We're gonna do a bit of a 2020 roundup.
	So let's bring that Kamala Harris theme music into play.
	Kamala Harris, this is her problem.
	Bernie Sanders is outflanking her on the left.
	So she tried very early on to co-opt his Medicare for All spiel.
	And then she had to walk it back.
	She said, let's get rid of private insurance.
	And then within 48 hours, she said, no, I didn't really mean that.
	Bernie Sanders has no problem with that.
	He'll just say it straight out, which is very appealing for the party base.
	Well, yesterday she was asked specifically about Bernie Sanders.
	And her response was, well, I'm not really a democratic socialist.
	I am not a democratic socialist.
	I believe that what voters do want is they want to know that whoever is going to lead understands that in America today not everyone has an equal opportunity and access to a path to success and that that has been building up over decades and we've got a correct course.
	OK, I am not a Democratic Socialist is going to be a hard sell with the Democratic Party base.
	Remember, AOC, who's probably the most popular female in the Democratic Party right now, is a self-described Democratic Socialist.
	Bernie Sanders is a self-described Democratic Socialist.
	Hillary Clinton admitted after the 2016 election that it hurt her to say she was pro-capitalism in the Democratic primaries.
	And the Democratic Party has moved significantly to the left even since 2016.
	So if Kamala is going to campaign to the right of Bernie Sanders, that does open a pretty wide lane for Bernie Sanders.
	Plus, as it turns out, there are a lot of holes in Kamala Harris' record.
	So, for example, Kamala Harris, who I think right now has to be seen as the 2020 frontrunner until Joe Biden jumps into the race at least.
	Kamala Harris, she says she was doing a big rally last night in Portsmouth.
	I do love how the media cover these rallies.
	Oh my goodness, 1,500 people showed up for a Kamala Harris rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
	Yeah, like that.
	I mean, I'm sorry, I'm not impressed by 1500 people.
	Every speech I give at every college in the country is 1500 people.
	That is that is not a huge number of people.
	And if it is, then I should run for president.
	My goodness.
	Anyway, Kamala Harris says we haven't put resources into our education system again because of her past as a prosecutor in the state of California.
	It makes her difficult to make arguments like this.
	Let's agree that we have failed to put the resources into our public education system.
	And instead, we are putting tons of money into a system of mass incarceration.
	Because we are not being smart about investing in the future of our country.
	That's a hard sell.
	So NARC Kamala Harris, who spent a lot of time putting a lot of people behind bars in the state of California, and then had her own attorneys arguing that people should not be let out on two-for-one deals because we need to make sure that we have enough cheap labor to clean up wildfire areas.
	That lady is going to be arguing against mass incarceration?
	If you think Bernie ain't going to slap her on that, you are totally wrong.
	He's going to politically slap her around on that.
	And the far left of the party doesn't like Kamala Harris.
	Young people are not thrilled with Kamala Harris.
	So she's got a problem here.
	By the way, she happens to be completely wrong.
	Prison spending in the states is still a fraction of overall pre-K-12 education spending, according to that noted right-wing source, The Washington Post.
	States spend $71 billion on prisons and $534 billion on schools every year.
	So when she talks about us spending money on prisons and not on schools, that is simply not true.
	By the way, I've always wondered, when people talk about mass incarceration, which people are you going to let out of prison?
	And don't tell me the people who smoke pot and are in prison for smoking pot, because that's no one in prison.
	By percentage, the number of people who are in prison for smoking pot is extraordinarily low, and usually it was bargained down from dealing drugs.
	Now, if you want to end the war on drugs because you think that's bad policy, that's one thing.
	But if you want to suggest that people Haven't broken serious laws and are in prison for no reason?
	That obviously is untrue.
	If you want to talk about the lowered crime rates over the last 30 years, you're going to have to talk about the massive increase in the number of criminals who have actually been in prison.
	Here's the thing.
	If Kamala actually were to campaign as an open prosecutor, I'm not sure that that doesn't have more crossover appeal than this newfangled far-left shtick that she has been pushing.
	But again, there is a window open here for Bernie Sanders to run to her left.
	And the same is true with regard to Amy Klobuchar.
	So Amy Klobuchar, the senator from Minnesota who threw her hat into the ring in the middle of the snow in Minnesota.
	Do we have some Amy Klobuchar theme music?
	I think we do.
	Yeah, Fargo's Amy Klobuchar, who it turns out is not the cop in Fargo's She's the person throwing people into the wood chipper.
	She is running as a moderate as well, which opens the window again to Bernie Sanders and someone further to her left.
	Now, Klobuchar has been attempting to move further to her left.
	She suggested that she was in favor of banning semi-automatic weapons yesterday in a nationally televised interview.
	Here was Amy Klobuchar suggesting that her new gun policy was to ban a bunch of guns.
	Minnesota is a state that values the outdoors.
	We value hunting and fishing.
	And so I come at it from a little different place than some of my colleagues that are running for this office, in that I always look at every proposal and say, would this hurt my Uncle Dick in the deer stand?
	Um, and I would say that these common sense proposals in front of us do not.
	Um, I don't see banning assault weapons, right?
	I don't think that hurts in the deer stand.
	Okay, banning semi-automatic weapons does in fact hurt in the deer stand, because those are all the hunting weapons.
	Unless you can use a bolt-action rifle from World War II.
	If you're using a semi-automatic rifle in the United States for hunting, that is pretty much all the rifles in the United States, because all that means is every time you pull the trigger, a bullet fires.
	That's all a semi-automatic weapon is.
	Okay, in just a second, we're going to get why Amy Klobuchar is also becoming unpopular with her own base and some holes in her candidacy in just a second.
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	Alrighty, so Amy Klobuchar also got herself into some hot water yesterday because she was asked about her record of abusing employees.
	Allegedly abusing employees, as in like throwing binders at them.
	And what was hilarious about this is that she got angry while being asked about abusing her own employees.
	Am I a tough boss?
	Sometimes, yes.
	Have I pushed people too hard?
	Yes.
	But I have kept expectations for myself that are very high.
	I've asked my staff to meet those same expectations.
	And that, the big point for me, is I want the country to meet high expectations.
	Because we don't have that going now.
	Man, it's a good thing that guy is more than 20 feet away from her or she would have taken that chair and chucked it at him.
	It really would have gotten ugly.
	So in any case, what you see is that in the Democratic Party, a lot of the top candidates aren't far enough left to stop Bernie Sanders from racing around the outside.
	And it's driving members of the Democratic Party to be more and more radical, including on issues where they have made fools of themselves.
	The most obvious issue is in the Jussie Smollett case.
	So the Jussie Smollett case, to recap, was an obvious hoax from the very beginning.
	You weren't allowed to say that, but the reality was there were too many holes in the story for it not to have been at least questionable from the very beginning.
	Well, now we know why Empire actor Jussie Smollett, apparently, was trying to make a stink out of a story that never happened.
	He suggested that at 2 a.m.
	on Chicago streets in the middle of a polar vortex, a couple of MAGA fans were walking around, decided to attack him because they watched Empire, which makes perfect sense, and then throw a rope around his neck, throw bleach on him, shout the F and N words at him, and then shout, this is MAGA country, in Chicago, at 2 a.m., in the middle of a polar vortex.
	While he was holding a Subway sandwich, which he never relinquished.
	So there are a lot of questions about this.
	That did not stop both Cory Booker and Kamala Harris from calling it a modern-day lynching.
	And now we find out that he is basically suspected of paying two of his friends to attack him a week after a letter was sent to him.
	Now, this letter that was sent to him, supposedly, was mailed to Chicago's Cinespace Studios, where the show Empire is filmed.
	The letter prompted a hazmat response.
	Apparently, there was a white substance in the letter, which was determined to be aspirin.
	The note was crafted with letters apparently cut out from magazines to form words, and the pieced-together message contained racial and homophobic threats directed at Smollett.
	Apparently, they are now examining whether or not Smollett was behind the letter as well.
	That is the rumor today.
	So good times there.
	That did not stop all the Democrats from attempting to leap to the left on this particular issue to prove their bona fides on issues of race.
	So you'll remember that Spartacus, Cory Booker.
	Do we have some Spartacus music for Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey?
	We do.
	There he is.
	Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.
	You'll recall that he tweeted out that this was a modern day lynching, did Spartacus.
	And then he was asked about it yesterday and he said, well, maybe it wasn't true, but it sort of felt true.
	So whatever.
	We'll pretend it happened or not.
	Well, you know what?
	You know what?
	Let's wait for the facts to come out.
	So day it happens, modern day lynching.
	Day that it all falls apart.
	Gotta wait for the facts to come out, guys.
	Very Spartacus-like, you know?
	This is a guy who really is out front and honest.
	What a rebel he is.
	My goodness.
	Well, the information's still coming out, and I'm gonna 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.
	Okay, so yeah, his whole shtick is that while it may not be factually true, it is morally true.
	And then it's not just him, it is also Kamala Harris.
	So Kamala Harris, her awkwardness yesterday did not merely stop at her campaign's end.
	She tweeted out on the day that this happened that it was a modern-day lynching.
	This is an attempted modern-day lynching.
	Then yesterday she was asked about this tweet, and things went wildly wrong for the senator from California.
	Which tweet?
	What tweet?
	About saying that it is a modern-day lynching that... Sorry.
	Me?
	Who?
	What?
	Sorry.
	Me?
	Who?
	Jussie Smollett.
	Okay, so I will say this about that case.
	I think that the facts are still unfolding, and I'm very concerned.
	Oh, she's concerned, and the facts are unfolding.
	But they weren't unfolding when it first happened.
	Then we knew what the case was, but now they're unfolding again.
	It's a great clip, man.
	I love the fact that she first reacts like, I did what now?
	What?
	Who, me?
	Tweet?
	Are you talking to me?
	And she actually looks behind her.
	She actually looks behind her like, are you talking to the person behind me?
	No, Senator, we're talking to you.
	Then they ask her, what about your tweet?
	Senator's like, I said, what are you doing to me?
	That's not even English, Senator.
	Senator, you're going to need to speak English.
	What I mean to say, what I mean to say, says Kamala Harris, is that we are all part of a greater force, a greater life force that unites you and the rock and the tree.
	So do I exist?
	Do my tweets exist?
	Or is there a force that unifies us, flows through us, unifies everything?
	The attempted misdirection by Kamala Harris is just wonderful.
	It's just wonderful.
	But again, one of the beautiful things about Bernie Sanders joining the party is that everybody is now going to be forced to the dramatic left because they have to head him off at the past.
	Now the good news is that they have members of the media who are going to defend them at all costs.
	There's a news article, a news article, not a commentary article, a news article from the New York Times titled Republicans hope to sway voters with labels that demonize Democrats.
	So just to get this straight, you have running for the Democratic presidential nomination, an open democratic socialist who hopes to nationalize vast swaths of American industry in Bernie Sanders.
	You have a Democratic Party that embraces abortion to point of birth.
	And you have a Democratic Party that has embraced open anti-Semites inside its own ranks, but its Republicans are mislabeling.
	That's the real story.
	The media is worth 8 to 10 points for Democrats in every national election.
	There's just no way around this.
	This piece from Sheryl Gay Stolberg at the New York Times is insane.
	It's insane.
	Again, this is not a piece of commentary.
	It is reported news.
	Quote, in the 116th Congress, if you're a Democrat, you're either a socialist, a baby killer, or an anti-Semite.
	When I first read that line, I was like, oh good, finally the New York Times is covering the news objectively.
	And then they continued, that at least is what Republicans want voters to think as they seek to demonize Democrats well in advance of the 2020 elections by painting them as left-wing crazies who will destroy the American economy, murder newborn babies, and turn a blind eye to bigotry against Jews.
	Okay, like, that's what they say.
	That's not even what we say.
	That is what they themselves have said.
	This is what Democrats themselves have said.
	They've said they want to radically increase taxes.
	If they're honest, they mean on all tax brackets, including people who are middle class.
	They want to radically regulate the American economy.
	They want a Green New Deal that will supposedly end all use of carbon-based fuels.
	They say, they say, that they want to kill babies to point of birth.
	They want that to be legal.
	And the governor of Virginia said even after birth.
	And they obviously are turning a blind eye to bigotry against Jews.
	That's not a Republican painting.
	That's reality.
	But according to the New York Times, the real story is that Republicans are mean to Democrats because Republicans keep pouncing and seizing.
	Republicans amped it up.
	They seized on a Twitter post by a freshman representative, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, which even some Democrats condemned as anti-Semitic.
	Well, then Republicans didn't seize on it, did they?
	If Democrats also say something is anti-Semitic, and Republicans say something is anti-Semitic, the story is not Republicans seizing, it's the anti-Semitism.
	When they say that President Trump is radical, and when he calls for people to stop adopting socialism in our country, Bernie Sanders, a Democratic frontrunner, is an open Democratic Socialist.
	It's not our fault that the Democratic Party has decided to move radically to the left.
	House Republicans have identified 55 Democrats they regard as vulnerable, including many freshmen.
	Some flipped Republican seats last year.
	Some represent districts carried by Trump in 2016.
	Some are in districts held by Republicans until recently.
	Bruised by their losses last year, Republicans are determined to start earlier and be more aggressive on the offense in 2020 and are hoping to exploit the Democratic presidential candidate's courtship of the left.
	Again, it is wonderful to be a member of the media where every story about Democrats moving to the left is really about the evils of the Republican Party.
	Okay, in just a second, we're going to talk about media bias, writ large, because there are a couple of revelations yesterday that are quite stunning.
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	So the good news for Democrats, of course, is that the media will always defend everything that they do.
	And what's hilarious about the media is that so many members of the media refuse to acknowledge the bias that exists in their own space.
	Now, this is particularly weird because a lot of prevailing left-wing theory has always been About the notion that ideas are a stand-in for power.
	If you go and listen to any critical studies lecturer on college campuses, what they say is that any system of human interaction is structured based on power hierarchy.
	So for example, folks on the left will argue that the free market in which you and I exchange goods and services is not actually free.
	It's a system of exploitation pressed upon other people By people who happen to have the power in any given society.
	And we can just restructure that system at will.
	They make this argument about free speech.
	There's a philosopher, Marxist, Neo-Marxist philosopher named Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s and 1970s.
	He made the case that essentially free speech itself was a weaponized version of power because the people who are most loud and most likely to be heard were representatives of the power hierarchy.
	And therefore, what would be best for the dispossessed is to shut down certain types of speech in favor of other types of speech.
	So the left is constantly seeing things in terms of power relationships.
	This is why they see every disparity as an example of discrimination.
	This is why folks on the left constantly look at any sort of inequality and they see it as inequity.
	They see one group that is poorer than another group, and instead of them seeing that as maybe that's the outcome based on individual decision-making, maybe that's the result of historical discrimination but not current-day discrimination, instead they say, this must be the result of power hierarchies in place, preventing one group from rising to the level of the other group.
	Now, usually that's not true, but the point I'm making is that the left is constantly seeing human behavior as a reflection of the need to defend some sort of power hierarchy, except when it comes to the leftist media.
	When it comes to the leftist media, then it's just objectivity.
	Then it's just, we're just speaking the truth.
	It is not a reflection of a power hierarchy in which people at the top of the media happen to be Democrats and push a Democrat point of view.
	Their views that they push in the pages of the New York Times and on the airwaves of CNN or CBS or ABC, none of that is a reflection of a power dominance by folks who are on the left.
	Instead, that is just them telling the truth.
	Their opinion is not opinion, it's fact.
	Their power is not power, it's reality.
	And you can see this from folks on the left who ignore their own theories about power that apply everywhere except to them.
	It's really quite amazing.
	So for example, Jonathan Capehart, over at the, he's a columnist for the Washington Post, an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.
	He said that the reason a lot of people believe the story about Jussie Smollett is because it fit in with reality.
	Well, only if you are of a certain political view.
	But folks in the left media tend to substitute the idea that their opinions are actually fact.
	They believe that fact and their opinions are one and the same.
	So here is Jonathan Capehart saying something that is actually not particularly true, but saying it with the full confidence of fact behind it because, of course, the media is not left and their opinions are not reflections of opinions or reflections of their desire for power.
	Their opinions are reflections of reality.
	The circumstances and the way he told the story and what he said happened to him sort of fit in with not a narrative, but a reality for a lot of people in this country since President Trump was inaugurated.
	That there is an atmosphere of menace and an atmosphere of hate around the country that made it possible for people to either readily believe or want to believe Jussie Smollett.
	There is such a fascinating Freudian slip in the middle of that clip where Jonathan Capehart, this MSNBC contributor columnist for the Washington Post, where Capehart says that this story fit in with a narrative.
	No, not a narrative, a reality.
	The conflation of a narrative with a reality, the conflation of a story you want to tell about America with the reality of the situation in America, It's really indicative of the fact that for a lot of folks on the left, they believe their opinions are fact, and they believe facts are merely somebody else's opinion.
	It truly is incredible.
	And then, they have the temerity to claim that they are the objective truth-tellers when it comes to media dominance.
	That it is not, in fact, that they dominate the power hierarchies in a lot of media companies, and that's why the opinions are what they are at a lot of media companies.
	Now, as it turns out, none of that is true.
	The reason that many mainstream media institutions are to the left is because the people on top of those institutions are to the left.
	CBS's Laura Logan, who's been a top-line reporter for a very long time at CBS, she basically let this slip.
	She was doing an interview, and it's a pretty scorched-earth interview, actually.
	She was doing the interview with retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland about a variety of topics for his Mic Drop podcast, and she said, listen, The media like to pretend they're objective.
	They are not objective in the slightest.
	Media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just in the US.
	But in this country, 85% of journalists are registered Democrats.
	So that's just a fact.
	Because although the media has always been, historically, always been left-leaning, We've abandoned our pretense, or at least the effort, to be objective today.
	That means we've become political activists, in a sense, and some could argue propagandists, right?
	And there's some merit to that.
	Okay, and she is exactly right about this, but she let this spill.
	Now, this is nothing new.
	Bernard Goldberg wrote a book, I think it was back in 2001, almost 20 years ago.
	He was also from CBS, a top-line reporter, saying exactly this, that there's massive media bias.
	And she, of course, is not the only one saying this.
	Jill Abramson, who's the New York Times former executive editor, she bashed the paper for its unmistakably anti-Trump editorial direction.
	Apparently, Abramson slammed her successor, Dean Baquet, saying he's endangered the Times' credibility by boosting their readership with constant catering to anti-Trump audiences, according to Mediaite.
	Abramson wrote, quote, The Baquet said publicly he didn't want the Times to be the opposition party.
	His news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump.
	Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.
	It is obvious that the media, in other words, are very much the left.
	Now, there are people like Brian Stelter, and they say, well, why are you using the term the media, broadly speaking?
	The answer is it's shorthand.
	People who listen to the show know what I am talking about when I say the media.
	They know that I'm not talking about the minority of media like Fox News or Daily Wire or Daily Caller.
	They know that I'm talking about ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune.
	They know that I'm talking about the vast majority of news organs in the United States.
	Who all share the same editorial slant.
	And they all shared the same editorial slant on Jussie Smollett.
	I mean, it's pretty amazing.
	And they share the same editorial slant when it comes to the coverage of the 2020 presidential race.
	So when Lara Logan breaks the front and she says, guys, like everyone knows what it is that you are.
	When she says that, it's treated by the media with shock and awe.
	Again, this runs directly counter to their own prevailing critical studies theories about literally everything in life.
	The left believes in the area of law that all judicial decisions are actually not based on judicial principles.
	They are based on what the judge's preferred political outcome should be.
	Now, what's amazing about all of this is that if you are going to accuse one side or the other of manipulating law for power purposes, it would have to be the political left that does this on a more frequent basis.
	If you're going to accuse one side of manipulating the facts on a political basis, it would have to be the left.
	In fact, I think there's a lot of projection that goes on on the political left.
	I'm not talking about specific individuals here.
	I'm talking about a generalized mindset that exists in a lot of places, in the legal infrastructure, in the media infrastructure, in the Hollywood infrastructure.
	There's a belief in a lot of these halls of power that it is fine to manipulate facts because, again, if everything is a power relationship, why would we not use our power in order to push views that are good and true and wonderful and convince ourselves in the process that we are doing something positive and good and objectively necessary?
	The reason that President Trump exists, one of the reasons President Trump exists, is because the right began to feel like the left was manipulating the institutions of our public life in order to use their power to cram down certain political opinions, and Trump was a giant middle finger to that.
	That Trump was essentially saying to all of these institutions, you've controlled the narrative for too long, and so I'm just going to ignore whatever narrative it is that you wish to choose.
	And then the left accuses President Trump of being a liar, and they accuse President Trump of manipulating the facts.
	And a lot of people on the right say, well, yeah, you guys have been participating in this too.
	The problem is when both sides tend to agree that there are no more neutral principles.
	But when the left, which has decided there are no neutral principles in law, in journalism, there are no neutral principles.
	There is just our opinion, which is fact.
	And then the right decides, well, look, the left believes that, so why shouldn't our opinion also be treated as fact?
	When there are no more neutral principles, this is how a country falls apart.
	Media bias is not dangerous merely because it's propaganda.
	Media bias is not merely dangerous because it pushes a particular political point of view.
	Media bias is dangerous because it undermines the fundamental neutral principles on which the country is based, and on which Western civilization is based.
	Western civilization, science, politics, they're all based on the idea that reason can separate out opinion from fact.
	That we can all agree on a set of facts, and then we can draw our opinions from that set of facts.
	The opinions may vary, but the facts are the same.
	When the left decided in the 1960s that all human interactions were based on power relationships and that even facts themselves were subject to the vagaries of these power dynamics, that you couldn't even say factual things because the factual things themselves were no longer factual.
	They were just a reflection of power.
	Once the left decided that, we lost all common ground.
	We can't even agree on a set of facts anymore.
	So you have one side arguing from one set of opinions, and one side arguing from another set of opinions, and there is no meeting of the minds.
	What's fascinating about all of this is that you see it really play out in the political sphere most.
	And when we actually get together in person, it tends to dissipate.
	It's really fascinating.
	You know, I was talking to a friend in the Senate who talks with Democrats in places like the Senate Judiciary Committee all the time.
	And what this person said is that if you actually talk with Democrats when they are not on mic, they actually act a lot more reasonable.
	They're willing to acknowledge that there is a middle ground.
	They're willing to acknowledge a common basis of principle and fact.
	But once they get on camera, then that splits immediately.
	Because when it comes time to exercise power, the exercise of power is seen as self-justifying.
	That's deeply dangerous stuff.
	And when the right responds by saying the exercise of power is self-justifying, that the left is doing it anyway, the left is just engaged in this cram-down, so we may as well engage in our cram-downs as well, then how are we supposed to have a conversation?
	If every conversation is just a competition in power dynamics, there is no conversation at all.
	We're just arm-wrestling for who gets to control the government and the levers of power in the United States.
	Alrighty, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
	So, things I like.
	President Trump has been saying some very good and useful things about the situation in Venezuela.
	Nicolas Maduro, who is the socialist dictator of Venezuela, still has not left.
	Thank God there's not been mass violence breaking out as of yet.
	But President Trump continues to put the pressure on Maduro to leave.
	Incredibly, there are members of the Venezuelan military still barely supporting This failed dictatorship.
	They are risking their future.
	They are risking their lives and Venezuela's future for a man controlled by the Cuban military and protected by a private army of Cuban soldiers.
	Maduro is not a Venezuelan patriot.
	He is a Cuban puppet.
	That's what he is.
	President Trump is of course right to push this.
	It just shows the polarity in our politics.
	This is controversial.
	Maduro's one of the worst dictators on planet Earth, and yet you see a lot of members of the left coming out to defend him.
	It's pretty astonishing.
	And the media will cover for those members.
	Ilhan Omar is still being covered for.
	She's out there full-scale defending Maduro.
	And we are supposed to pretend that she should sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and that's totally normal?
	Very, very, very odd.
	Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
	The thing I hate, number one, there is a new study out that shows that the vast majority of citizens in the United States could not pass a basic citizenship test.
	The only state in the United States where people passed a U.S.
	citizenship test, a majority passed a U.S.
	citizenship test, the only state in America is Vermont.
	Ironically, the home of Bernie Sanders, who Barely missed being a Soviet citizen, apparently.
	There's some highlights from the survey which was conducted for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation by Lincoln Park Strategies.
	People did relatively well on some basic questions.
	7 out of 10 knew Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and that FDR was president during World War II.
	But only 43% knew that Woodrow Wilson was president during World War I.
	Nearly one in four thought it was Roosevelt.
	Only 56% knew which countries we fought in World War II.
	Fewer than one third could correctly name three of the original states, which is kind of devastating.
	I mean, they're all along the eastern seaboard, guys.
	More than six out of ten incorrectly thought that the Constitution was written in 1776.
	Nearly four out of ten thought Benjamin Franklin invented the light bulb.
	So, I think, look, as Woodrow Wilson said, democracy is the worst system except for all of the others.
	It does show that we have a serious education problem in our country, and that education problem is not about the problems with our history.
	It's about, like, very, very basic things, like what our country is about, and who the people were who founded it, and what year things happened.
	We have a serious disconnect between what people ought to know about their own country and what they actually do know.
	Other things that I hate.
	You have to admire how all of the hubbub around Virginia just died out.
	Remember when two weeks ago the big story was that all three of the Virginia top officials were in trouble?
	That the governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, had tried to moonwalk his way out of trouble?
	Not for being caught with a picture in his yearbook of a guy in blackface and another person in a KKK outfit.
	And then Ralph Northam suggesting that he didn't do that, but he did dress as Michael Jackson for a dance-off in 1985.
	And then him trying to fib his way out of it.
	Remember that?
	And then you remember his lieutenant governor was credibly accused of two separate sexual assaults?
	Remember how that sort of disappeared from the news?
	There's an op-ed today in the Washington Post from Meredith Watson, who's one of the accusers.
	She says, I'm willing to testify in public.
	Justin Fairfax should too.
	Well, that's good.
	I mean, I'm glad that she's willing to come forward and testify in public.
	I just find it fascinating how, good for the Washington Post for running this, but let's just say that it would be on the front page of every newspaper in America every single day if a prominent Republican official had been twice accused, credibly, of sexual assault, and then Stayed in office without attempting to refute the allegations in any serious way.
	According to the Washington Post op-ed, by the way, Fairfax denied that he raped me, and he denied Tyson's account as well.
	And for many in the public, the media, and the Virginia General Assembly, that was that.
	In one week, they moved on.
	If Justin Fairfax were Republican, they would not have moved on in one week.
	That is for damn sure.
	OK, so a little bit later today, we will be back for two additional hours of The Ben Shapiro Show.
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