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Feb. 20, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:09
Trump Derangement Syndrome Is Terminal | Ep. 721
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Time Text
Fresh face.
So fresh, so face.
AOC enters the swamp.
Bernie takes the lead and President Trump's enemies drive themselves fully insane.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
You know, a little behind the scenes for you.
Every night before I come in and do the show in the morning, I put together a preliminary schedule and sometimes the schedule just blows itself up in the morning and I have to rejigger the entire schedule so as to bring you the latest in news.
That happened this morning and there's a lot of news and it's pretty awesome.
We're going to get to all of it in just a second.
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Alrighty.
So, we begin today with some unfortunate news.
Some unfortunate news for AOC.
You remember her.
She's the fresh face of the Democratic Party.
Incredibly fresh as well as incredibly face.
Well, it turns out, according to Luke Thompson, a reporter over at Medium, he has a piece up today called, The Congresswoman Loves the Swamp.
Sad trombone sound, guys.
Here is what Luke Thompson writes.
Last Friday, my mentions died for your sins.
I posted a screen grab of Riley Roberts' House Microsoft Outlook card, including his official House.gov email address, office phone number, and his designation as staff.
Roberts is the boyfriend of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
The congresswoman was upset.
Throwing caution to the wind, she stormed into my mentions, asserting this was just a way to give Mr. Roberts access to her official calendar.
Her chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarty, soon followed, reiterating the calendar claim and accusing me of doxing Mr. Roberts by posting his publicly available LinkedIn profile, which he deleted, and his official government address and the office phone number.
By the way, putting up a government email address and phone number, that does not qualify as doxing.
Neither AOC nor Chakra Bharti said why Roberts needs access to her official calendar.
Regardless, hordes of her howling minions followed.
I was briefly suspended by Twitter for revealing personal information, only to be released with an apology when I pointed out that everything I posted is government property, and therefore public.
My brief stint as a digital political prisoner turned into something of a cause celeb on the right, inviting wave upon wave of MAGA enthusiasts to battle back on my behalf against the forces of digital socialism.
My timeline is still a wasteland, is what this reporter writes.
During my suspension, I talked to a congressional spouse, a few reporters, and some staffers from both parties.
AOC hasn't exactly been winning friends lately, which is how I got Roberts' Outlook screengrab in the first place.
A rumor on the Hill was circulating that Roberts had attended a congressional progressive caucus meeting.
A tipster looked to see if he'd been given staff credentials.
It appeared he had.
All agreed this was irregular if he was just a spouse.
Per the House Admin Office, a family member can, in special circumstances, get a House.gov email address.
But Roberts is not a family member, and although AOC referred to him as her partner in November of last year, she omitted him from her mandatory candidate financial disclosures for 2017 and 2018.
Perhaps they've gotten married since.
If so, if he's her spouse now, we should see his finances disclosed along with hers in her 2019 disclosure form due in May.
But to be clear, AOC did not disclose Roberts' finance as a spouse during her campaign.
Regardless, absent a waiver from House Ethics, family members have to be volunteers.
AOC's office apparently doesn't believe in having unpaid workers, as according to Chakrabarty, they have no volunteers in the office.
So Roberts is designated as staff.
But also isn't on AOC's staff, even though he showed up Friday morning in the house directory as processing into her personal office as a staffer.
In other words, his staff status, status like his spouse status, is akin to Schrodinger's cat.
This ought to have been enough to make it clear that AOC's story didn't add up.
More importantly, I'd clearly hit a nerve.
So Luke Thompson writes over at Medium.
Chakrabarty, who is, again, AOC's chief of staff, spent much of his day in my mentions insisting that everything was on the up and up with Roberts.
Instead of asking if Roberts had been supplied with the badge and pin appropriate to a congressional spouse, evidence of which her office should have been able to produce easily, AOC's worshipful stenographers in the press went into overdrive, witlessly repeating her talking points.
Jeff Stein over at the Washington Post even woke up Saturday to keep it going in my mentions, as did Chakra Bharti himself.
And of course, AOC had decided to get into it.
That's a lot of time and effort spent refuting a GOP consultant known to a tiny corner of the internet for posting cat pictures and bitching about the doctrine of co-equal branches.
So I went to the FCC, did a little searching, and discovered that lo and behold, there is more to the story.
Now, during the original kerfuffle, some folks noticed that AOC's campaign had paid Roberts $1,750.
That is not quite what transpired.
Roberts was paid only as a means of keeping accounting in order.
In the first half of 2018, Roberts did some free work for the campaign.
That work got put on the books as an in-kind contribution and then discharged as an expenditure for accounting purpose.
That is perfectly normal.
It's a way to keep people from circumventing federal contribution caps by providing discounts and or free services.
But that is not the only political work Roberts ostensibly did during the cycle.
Nor would it be the first time Chakrabarty had hired Roberts.
He's done so at least once before in 2017, although it's unlikely Roberts was hired to do any actual work in that case.
So here is where things get a little dicey for AOC.
At the beginning of 2017, Chakrabarty created Brand New Congress, an organization dedicated to shaking things up in Democratic primaries.
It's a rather ingenious organization, but one that dwells in a legal gray area as far as campaign finance law is concerned.
It facilitates campaigns on shoestring budgets by providing a single clearinghouse for campaign services generally filed under the banner of strategic consulting.
But as a result, it limits the meaningfulness of FEC closures, disclosures by these campaigns.
Additionally, it means that Brand New Congress, unlike most PACs, spends most of its budget on overhead and makes relatively few actual contributions to candidates.
Additionally, Brand New Congress is not one thing, but rather two.
It's a non-qualified political action committee, a PAC, that can raise and bundle campaign contributions for candidates.
Donations and expenditures from PACs, like those to and by candidates, are publicly disclosed.
However, Brand New Congress is also an LLC owned by Chakrabarty.
Remember, Chakrabarty is AOC's Chief of Staff.
That provides campaign services to candidates to help lower the barriers to entry.
LLCs do not have to disclose or itemize their spending.
This is a clever way to try to make running for office easier and to place a lot of small bets on a lot of insurgent candidates and hope for a few lucky wins.
And that pretty much seems to be what happened.
According to FEC records, the PAC was founded in mid-January of 2017.
At the end of February, it affiliated with Justice Democrats, a collaboration between Chakrabarty and Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks.
The two organizations are inextricably linked.
Chakrabarty lists himself as a co-founder of both Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats on his LinkedIn page.
Over the course of the cycle, Justice Democrats would pay Brand New Congress LLC $605,849.
They would also share an address.
In May, Brand New Congress changed the address for its custodian of records to Tennessee.
In August, it switched addresses again, but in December of 2017, Justice Democrats registered at the same address.
AOC also used that Tennessee address in her first candidate filing, which incorrectly registered her to run in New York's 15th congressional district.
Five days later, she switched to the 14th, and two months after that, the campaign committee's address was changed to the Bronx as well.
A quick tour through AOC's campaign expenditures reveals the extent to which brand new Congress midwifed her campaign into existence, precisely as the frequently asked questions described would have had it.
But AOC's campaign was different from others backed by brand new Congress PAC, and not simply because she won.
Like other candidates, AOC paid Brand New Congress LLC for strategic consulting, in her case totaling $18,880.
Unlike in the other cases, Brand New Congress PAC turned around and paid her boyfriend as a marketing consultant.
Indeed, while Brand New Congress PAC's 10 largest expenditures were paid to Brand New Congress LLC for strategic consulting, a sum that totaled $261,000 over the course of her campaign, its 11th and 12th largest expenditures were paid to Riley Roberts.
Brand New Congress PAC paid Roberts $3,000 on August 9th.
18 days later, AOC's campaign paid Brand New Congress $6,191.
A month later, Brand New Congress then turned around and paid Riley another $3,000.
So why would Chakrabarty, a founding engineer at Stripe and wealthy veteran of Silicon Valley, be hiring a no-name, UX-experienced guy with little discernible marketing experience to serve as Brand New Congress PAC's sole marketing consultant?
The answer seems to be that Chakrabarty was funneling money paid to him by AOC's campaign back to Roberts and by extension to AOC.
In other words, AOC's campaign, she raised a bunch of money, she paid her chief of staff, who had a consulting firm, and he, in turn, paid the money directly to her boyfriend.
This is the allegation by Luke Thompson, which is pretty swampy.
At the beginning of October, more than four months into her campaign, AOC's fundraising had been anemic.
Excluding an in-kind contribution from Chakrabarti, she raised only $3,000, but had already spent $27,000, more than half of which she had paid to Chakrabarti's brand new Congress LLC.
By the end of 2017, she'd spent $37,000 but raised only $8,000.
That's a lot of money to stick on a credit card.
Since no loans are recorded on her campaign books, presumably either AOC or Roberts was fronting the necessary cash.
It looks to me like Chakrabarty was effectively reimbursing AOC for a third of her expenses with brand new Congress LLC, perhaps so that she would stay in the race despite her mounting debt.
The shadiness of the whole business may also explain why Roberts, who is AOC's boyfriend, lists his residence as Arizona for the expenditure, rather than New York.
Roberts is from Arizona, but was living in New York with AOC.
His other contributions to her campaign, both cash and in kind, list New York as his residence.
Regardless of whether or not Roberts was officially AOC's spouse at that time, it seems probable Chakrabarty was reimbursing her for her campaign expenses off books.
Brand new Congress PAC simply served as a pass-through to do so.
When AOC won, she then hired Chakrabarty as her chief of staff, taking money from a rich guy, trying to hide it by passing it through a PAC, and then giving her benefactor a government job.
That is definitely unethical and potentially illegal.
So in other words, she was raising money, but it wasn't clear that she was actually raising enough money to pay her boyfriend.
So she just went to Chakrabarty and said, why don't you float my boyfriend the money?
Is the suggestion here.
That's the allegation.
And then she went and hired the guy who gave her boyfriend a loan on congressional staff dollars.
Chakrabarty may have made an illegal campaign contribution in excess of federal limits.
Regardless, it raises questions about Chakrabarty's hiring as AOC's chief of staff after her election.
All of the above is based on public information, says the reporter.
It took me a couple of hours to pull it all together and write it up.
Reporters are just lazy.
So that is not a great story for AOC, who is, remember, she is the fresh new face, so fresh, so face of the Democratic Party, very much against the swamp, against corruption and corruption.
And now it turns out that she may in fact have been violating campaign law.
At the very least, she was working with a firm that was apparently funneling money back to her via her boyfriend, which is really corrupt.
And it turns out that then she hires the head of that firm as her chief of staff.
Now, I'm old enough to remember when Dinesh D'Souza went to jail for illegal campaign contributions.
I'm old enough to remember that.
So, don't give me the, everybody breaks the rules if you're on the left.
I don't believe in campaign finance rules, by the way.
Like, if it were up to me, I don't really care what happens with all this stuff.
Chakrabarty wants to give AOC's boyfriend some money, and then he wants to join her office, whatever.
I don't really care because money in politics is endemic to politics, that's just the way things work, doesn't bother me all that much.
I will say, however, that the massive hypocrisy of members of Congress doing this kind of stuff and then claiming that they are standing for truth and justice in the Soviet way is pretty astonishing.
And Congress, indeed, is getting crazier pretty much all the time.
I mean, AOC, you'll recall, is radical, of high order, and so are a lot of her fellow members of Congress.
That's why they're talking tax rates of 90%, eliminating private health care, abortion to the point of birth, a Green New Deal that would cost $50 trillion.
This is all insane.
Congress isn't changing anytime soon, and neither is either party.
But we can stop the abuse of federal power right now.
We can call a convention of states.
The states can get together to propose amendments to the Constitution, to impose term limits, a balanced budget, and put limits on the power of the federal government.
Congress has no power to stop us.
Thirteen states have already passed it.
We are working on the remaining states right now.
To fix the broken system in Washington, you should add your voice to the call for a Convention of States, of which I am a fan.
So join me and my friend Mark Meckler and sign the petition at conventionofstates.com slash ben.
To get involved, go to conventionofstates.com slash ben.
That is indeed conventionofstates.com slash ben.
There are a lot of folks who will say, well, at a Convention of States, will you have a runaway convention?
No, you won't have a runway convention because the Convention of States is going to be called largely by conservative states and conservative delegates are going to be the ones writing up the proposed constitutional amendments that would help shore up a lot of the holes that have been poked into the Constitution by the left over the last century and a half.
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Well, all of this is bad news for AOC, obviously, because she poses herself as above the fray, purer than the driven snow, an ideologue of ideologues.
And I mean, she's doing so like today, like she's calling out CNN for corruption.
The same day that it turns out that she may have actually been funneling money via her chief of staff to her boyfriend.
It turns out that she is calling out CNN.
Why is she calling out CNN?
Because the left is very angry at CNN today.
I know, I know.
It's like the Iran-Iraq War.
Who do you root for, exactly?
But the left is very upset with CNN.
Why?
Well, they're upset because they hired Sarah Isker Flores, who's a former spokeswoman for Jeff Sessions.
They hired her as one of their political editors to help oversee coverage of the 2020 presidential campaign.
And this prompted AOC, so fresh, so face to say in a tweet, sorry, didn't get the latest memo after a thousand experienced and qualified journalists of all stripes were let go without warning a few weeks ago and still looking for work.
Are we still pretending that hires like these are evidence of a meritocracy?
I remember when AOC was just this upset about George Stephanopoulos being the chief political correspondent for NBC or ABC rather after being Hillary Clinton's chief of staff.
I I recall her being super upset when the brother of Ben Rhodes, who was the national security advisor under Barack Obama, was the head of CBS News.
I remember her being super upset about Chris Cuomo, who was Andrew Cuomo's brother, being a news anchor on CNN.
I mean, I remember her being upset about all these things.
It's very upsetting.
It's very upsetting.
The amount of hatred for anyone who has served in the Trump administration going back into the press is pretty astonishing.
I'm going to get to more of that in just one second.
There's a story from the Daily Beast pointing out how terrible this is.
By the way, full disclosure, I know Sarah Isker Flores.
She and I went to Harvard Law School at the same time.
Very nice gal, highly qualified, extremely intelligent.
And being a political editor at CNN just means you sort of help choose which stories to cover.
CNN having one person who voted for Trump on staff is not the end of the world, guys.
It's totally okay.
It's totally okay.
I love the people in the press who have been passing back and forth out of Democratic administrations as long as I have been alive.
Remember, Jay Carney, the Obama spokesperson, used to work for Time magazine.
They've been passing in and out of this for a very long time.
Now, all of a sudden, it's shock, shock, that somebody who worked for Jeff Sessions, who, by the way, President Trump was not particularly fond of, is now going to be working over at CNN.
According to the Daily Beast, CNN staffers are upset and confused about the network's decision to hire a partisan political operative to oversee its 2020 campaign reporting.
Again, this has never happened before.
Partisan political operatives at major news networks?
Say it ain't so!
That might be un-possible.
On Tuesday, a CNN spokesperson confirmed to Daily Beast that the network had hired Republican political advisor Sarah Isker as the politics editor helming CNN's 2020 coverage.
The move was first reported by Politico.
Isker served as an advisor to Ted Cruz and Mitt Romney.
She was Carly Fiorina's deputy campaign manager for the 2016 Republican primary, and then she worked for Jeff Sessions.
A CNN spokesperson said Isker will not be involved in the network's DOJ coverage, but will guide TV and digital coverage of the 2020 election, occasionally offering on-screen analysis as well.
One network editorial staffer said it's extremely demoralizing for everyone here, because if there's a Republican in here, man, how are we even going to talk to people?
People are generally confused, said another editorial employee, adding the decision to hire a partisan operative for an editorial position comes off as very bizarre.
CNN's Reliable Sources anchor, Brian Stelter, reported on the network's perspective, tweeting, Love it or hate it, political insiders have been joining newsrooms for decades.
The more viewpoints represented in newsrooms, the better.
As for the critiques, CNN PR declined to comment.
That is 100% true.
It is 100% true.
There are so many members of political campaigns in newsrooms that the false, objective, journalismic nonsense that you hear from these newsrooms, it has been alive for a very, very long time.
Nonetheless, people are very upset on the left because Isker should never be allowed in a newsroom.
Just terrible.
Just awful.
CNN's Jeff Zucker has said before he wanted to bring a little more balance to the newsroom, so it really shouldn't be that big a shock, but anytime any Republican is hired by any major outlet, it becomes an issue for that outlet.
Not a particular surprise.
Not a particular surprise at all.
Okay, meanwhile, Trump derangement syndrome has gone completely off the rails.
Completely off the rails.
The latest indicator is not just the Jussie Smollett case, but President Trump He put out a policy yesterday.
He was going to launch a global campaign to decriminalize homosexuality in dozens of nations where anti-gay laws are still on the books.
Now this seems like a policy that pretty much everybody can get behind.
Right, left, center.
No one really believes that it should be criminal activity for gay people to have sex with each other.
That is not a thing that anyone really believes in Western civilization anymore.
Whether you believe that this activity is a sin or not, the idea of a government busting into somebody's bedroom and prosecuting them for their private activity is something that no person who believes in a free society should really be in favor of.
Consenting adults participating in an activity of which you do not approve does not give you the license as a government to go in and stop them from doing what they want to do.
And President Trump, who by the way has been very LGBTQ friendly, particularly LGB friendly, he's been very gay friendly, This is not a surprise coming from him.
His ambassador to Germany is Rich Grinnell, who is an openly gay man.
President Trump held up a gay pride flag in the middle of his campaign in 2016.
How weird is Trump Derangement Syndrome?
Trump Derangement Syndrome is so strong that gay magazines are now angry at President Trump for attempting to decriminalize homosexuality in a variety of nations around the world.
Out Magazine has an article today.
Here's what it is called.
Trump's plan to decriminalize homosexuality is an old racist tactic.
What now?
So Iran hangs gay people, Trump says don't do that, and that's because he's a racist.
When you are so woke, when your brain is so woke, that you are actually brain dead, that's where we are right now.
I do not understand this.
Legitimately, it's impossible to understand this sort of logic because it's completely illogical.
So Iran hangs gay people, and you're like, that's multiculturalism.
He's cracking down on multiculturalism by telling them to stop hanging gay people from cranes.
So Out Magazine has a piece by Matthew Rodriguez.
It says, "While on its surface the move looks like an atypically benevolent decision by the Trump administration, the details of the campaign belie a different story.
Rather than actually being about helping queer people around the world, the campaign looks more like an instance of the right using queer people as pawns to amass power and enact its own agenda." They say the most telling detail of NBC News' report is that his plan centers homophobic violence in Iran, who NBC News calls the administration's top geopolitical foe.
So really, what they are saying is that it's very bad that Trump is anti-Iran on the basis of them hanging gay people from cranes, because we don't want to go to war with Iran because we like Iran even though they hang gay people from cranes.
Which is weird.
And it's not just this Out Magazine article.
Human Rights Campaign put out a tweet storm saying the Trump-Pence administration has consistently worked to undermine the fundamental equality of LGBTQ people and our families from day one.
And they have a long thread about how terrible it is that they made this decision.
They say, if this commitment is real, we have a lot of questions about their intentions and commitments and are eager to see what proof and action will follow.
So if your first reaction to the Trump administration doing something incredibly benevolent on behalf of gay people the world over is, we are deeply suspicious that this is another racist move by the Trump... Trump Derangement Syndrome, man, that is some strong, strong stuff these people are smoking.
I mean, that is... It's deadly.
Trump Derangement Syndrome has now reached deadly proportions.
It's fully crazy.
In a second, I'll give you the latest on the Jussie Smollett case, which demonstrates that Trump derangement syndrome can actually lead you directly to prison.
We'll get to that in just a second.
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So here's the latest on the Jussie Smollett case.
The latest on the Jussie Smollett case is that the two brothers involved in the Jussie Smollett attack told police that Smollett was not just behind the fake attack, he was also behind creating a fake racist letter that was sent to the actor on the set of his show Empire, according to two sources with first-hand knowledge of the investigation.
When the letter did not get a bigger reaction, Smollett then orchestrated the attack a week later with the two men, Ola and Abel Osundero, sources said.
Also on Tuesday, sources said the two brothers were seen on a rideshare video camera before being dropped off near the location of the attack.
Smollett received a letter containing a white powder on January 22nd.
The letter was mailed to Chicago's Cinespace Studios, where the show Empire is filmed.
The letter prompted a hazmat response.
CPD said the white substance was later determined to be aspirin.
The note was crafted with letters apparently cut out from magazines to form words.
The pieced-together message contains racial and homophobic threats directed at Smollett.
A magazine is one of the pieces of evidence retrieved from the brothers' home last week during a search conducted by CPD.
Investigators also recovered a book of stamps.
Geniuses.
So, I mean, it's gonna be kind of hilarious when it turns out that not only did they cut the letters from the magazine, they then kept the magazine.
How good is that magazine?
And you're committing a federal crime by sending in a threat through the mails, and you keep the magazine you cut the letters out from?
Like, all you had to do was toss it in the recycling, guys.
Really?
So Jussie Smollett is obviously a troubled human being.
He's obviously a seriously troubled human being who will end up in federal prison.
I mean, this is now a federal crime.
Once you start sending things through the mails, then you have a real problem.
But the reason that people believed him is because they believed in a narrative about President Trump the same way that Out Magazine believes a narrative about President Trump, that he's a brutal, terrible homophobe.
And therefore, Everything that people say that is bad about Trump is true and everything good they say must inevitably be false.
Geraldo Rivera basically admitted this yesterday.
He said, A charge like this was so incendiary, it caught on because it was, you know, kind of justifying and reaffirming the stereotype that people had.
I mean, it was so patently obvious, and yet, because it is so toxic, racism, and because we want justice in this country, we want people to have a fair shake, we bought this guy's unbelievable tale.
Why do we believe these stories?
Racism is real!
Look at what happened in Charleston.
Okay, and it is true that people jump to these conclusions because they are eager to continue showing that America is a deeply racist, terrible place.
And these hoaxes started long before President Trump.
This isn't Trump derangement syndrome.
This is America derangement syndrome for a lot of folks.
This is people think that America is a terrible, awful, no good, very bad place steeped in racism, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and therefore In the attempt to continue painting America this way, every story that can be used as a data point in defense of that narrative will be pushed out there, will be promoted, will be trumpeted, will be made more audible.
That is the goal of many members of the media.
And it's a really sad goal.
It's a really sad goal.
And what you see over and over when it comes to this sort of America Derangement Syndrome is that any piece of data in favor of a silly narrative that is not true, that America is an awful, awful place, gets pushed to the absolute limit.
America Derangement Syndrome is merely the broader version of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Trump is not America and America is not Trump, but The anger at Trump existed for Bush.
It exists for all conservatives.
This is why when people say that Trump is being disproportionately hit, people hate Trump more than they've ever hated anyone else.
That's true, but they also hated President Bush.
And if Ted Cruz were president, there would be a Cruz derangement syndrome.
The bottom line is that President Trump believes that America is not a terrible place.
And this in and of itself is enough of a sin to earn him a derangement syndrome.
Then on top of that, President Trump happens to be a very toxic, polarizing figure.
He's a guy who says a lot of things that piss people off.
But with all of that said, Trump derangement syndrome for the left is really a subset of a broader derangement syndrome.
And this is why the left is trying to oust President Trump.
It really has almost nothing to do with Trump.
I mean, this is the great lie about President Trump.
It really is fascinating.
The great lie about President Trump is that President Trump is seen as an outlier from American politics.
That is simply not true.
If you go back to 2016 and you look at the percentages that he won, the percentages that he won, state by state, were very similar to the percentages that Mitt Romney won.
The left paints every Republican with the same brush, which is one of the reasons Trump was nominated in the first place.
Because Republicans said, fine, you're going to paint us with this brush?
We'll just do this thing.
You want a piece of this?
Fine, come on.
Here's a giant pulsating middle finger to you.
His name is Donald Trump.
But, again, Trump derangement syndrome is just the latest iteration of an anti-American, anti-conservative derangement syndrome.
When I say anti-American, I don't mean that folks can't be patriots or that they are hating America.
What I am saying is that they paint a vision of America that's a lot darker in terms of its history and current presence than is warranted by the evidence.
Meanwhile, speaking of Trump derangement syndrome, The media continue to push the narrative that President Trump is in the pay of Russia, again, without any evidence.
Yesterday, Andrew McCabe, the former fired interim FBI director, he came out and he said on CNN, well, maybe President Trump is being paid by Russia.
Maybe he's a Russian asset.
Again, Andrew McCabe worked for the FBI.
The FBI, I was led to believe over the course of my career and life, actually required evidence before making allegations like this.
But Andy McCabe, posing as the quintessential Fed, says, no, no, no, no, maybe Trump really is in the pay of the Russians.
Do you still believe the president could be a Russian asset?
I think it's possible.
I think that's why we started our investigation, and I'm really anxious to see where Director Mueller concludes that.
Okay, so he's got no evidence, he says it's possible, and we're supposed to just go along with that.
Then, a CNN national security analyst gets on TV and says Vladimir Putin could be controlling the White House.
This is Samantha Vinograd, who served on the National Security Council under Barack Obama.
McCabe has said that the president's moves to undercut Russia-related investigations, to believe Vladimir Putin over his intelligence community, to make personnel decisions based upon Russia-related matters, all led to this investigation.
McCabe would have laid that out before the Gang of Eight.
This investigation is continuing, and there is still a chance that Vladimir Putin is controlling the White House.
Yeah, I mean, these are astonishing allegations that are being made without any real evidence that the allegations are true.
But again, Trump derangement syndrome continues to be promoted across mainstream media.
Now in a second, we're going to jump into the 2020 race.
We'll give you all the updates.
Bernie Sanders is really shaking up the race and must be considered until Joe Biden jumps in, the frontrunner in this race.
We'll explain why in just a second.
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All righty, so time for your 2020 update.
Bernie Sanders jumped into the race yesterday, and he really shook things up.
On his very first day in the race, Bernie Sanders raised, I kid you not, $4 million.
Within 48 hours, he had raised more than $6 million.
I mean, it is astonishing stuff.
We'll get to that in just a second.
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All right, so back to the 2020 race.
Bernie Sanders has picked up an enormous amount of money.
Apparently, according to Nick Visser over at Huffington Post, Bernie raised $6 million in the first 24 hours after announcing his 2020 presidential bid.
Apparently, there are a lot of people who are willing to give their money to a guy who wants to steal everybody else's money.
More than 225,000 people have already donated to Bernie Sanders' campaign.
That number is way ahead of everybody else.
It is more than double the $1.5 million raised by Kamala Harris in her first 24 hours.
He is raising an average of $27 a person, so that means a lot of small donors.
The Democratic field is already crowded, but by polling data, Bernie is doing incredibly well in the polls.
Right now, there's a tracking poll that RealClearPolitics has been highlighting Showing exactly where everybody shows up here, and right now it looks like Biden at 28% is their RealClearPolitics poll averages, Biden at 28%, Sanders at 17%, Kamala Harris at 10%, Warren at 7, Roark at 6, and Booker at 5, and then everybody else is basically a corpse at this point.
Gillibrand, by the way, does not even show up in these polls.
Because nobody likes Kirsten Gillibrand, as we will illustrate for you in just a second.
So Joe Biden is the other shoe to drop.
Everybody is still waiting for Joe Biden to jump in the race.
But for the moment, Bernie is the frontrunner, which is pretty astonishing because the guy is not only an open, quote unquote, democratic socialist.
Back in the day, he was like an actual commie.
And now he's hiding the communism by saying that he likes Norway and he likes Sweden and all this.
But back in the 1980s, he really didn't hide it.
Bernie Sanders back in the flashback praising Fidel Castro and talking about how the word socialism doesn't frighten him.
As a socialist, the word socialism does not frighten me.
And I think it's probably fair to say that the Nicaraguan government is primarily a socialist government.
You may recall way back in, what was it, 1961, they invaded Cuba.
And everybody was totally convinced that Castro was the worst guy in the world.
All the Cuban people were going to rise up in rebellion against Fidel Castro.
They forgot that he educated their kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society.
But just because Ronald Reagan dislikes these people does not mean to say that the people in their own nations feel the same way.
Which is why they have a dictatorship where they haven't had a free election in 60 years.
So Bernie Sanders back in 1985 defending the Castro's who were legitimately throwing dissidents in prison for dozens of years, people in Cuba getting on Legitimately, old 1950s Cadillacs with the tires inflated trying to float their way to Miami, and Bernie Sanders is sitting there going, Cuba's great!
It's great!
And that guy is now the frontrunner for the Democratic Party.
Slow clap for the Democrats, guys.
I mean, really, really well done stuff.
Bernie Sanders, though, even Bernie has to lie about his own agenda.
This is the dirty little secret, is that Bernie, despite all of his vast honesty about American politics, he will not actually tell you The impact of his own program.
So, Bernie Sanders was talking about healthcare yesterday, and he was talking about his Medicare for All plan.
And he dropped a line that is so eminently false that even fact-checkers on the left are going, uh, Bernie, that's not true.
He was talking about Medicare for All, and he suggested that if you like your doctor, you're going to be able to keep your doctor and it will be cheaper under Medicare for All.
You're offering something that the polling shows people can get very spooked very quickly about.
No, well, but that's because we're going to be taking on the insurance companies and the drug companies who are going to spend a whole lot of money distorting what we believe in.
For example, They're going to say, people, you're going to lose your current health insurance and employment.
Yeah, but you're going to have the same exact doctor.
You're going to have more freedom of choice under our proposal than you have under the current proposals.
The average middle-class family will save money, will spend less money on health care, will have more choice and have broader coverage than is currently the case.
Bull bleep.
I mean, really.
Bull bleep.
The only thing you could possibly say is that if you nationalize the health system the way that Bernie Sanders wants to, that on a per capita taxing level, we might spend less than we do on a voluntaristic level.
Like, people forget.
A lot of what we spend on our health care system is us coming out of our own pocket because we want fast coverage.
America has a couple of massive advantages over other health care systems.
One, you want a surgery tomorrow?
You can get a surgery tomorrow.
You don't have to wait in line.
You don't have to wait for the government to ration it to you.
You're not going to have to wait for cancer.
Screenings?
You're not going to have to wait for any of that stuff.
The fact is the United States still has the world's best five-year survival rate for virtually all cancers.
The United States is still the repository of nearly all medical innovation on planet Earth.
On planet Earth, more than half of all new drugs are produced in the United States, and it would be higher if the FDA weren't so insane in its regulatory overreach.
It is true that the United States is more expensive than other nations, but if you remove the amount of money that we spend on healthcare on a per capita level from our GDP on a per capita level, we are still number one or number two in the world.
In other words, we spend a lot of money on healthcare because many of us want to spend a lot of money on healthcare.
Also, because we heavily subsidize, really heavily subsidize our medical system.
49% of all medical spending in the United States is done by the federal government.
It's done by the government, through Medicaid and through Medicare.
The idea that there isn't government healthcare provided in the United States is simply nonsense.
When he says, if you like your doctor, you're gonna get... Listen, even Obamacare wouldn't let you keep your doctor once they decided to rewrite all the regulations.
This is why when... Bernie Sanders has a choice.
If he wants his nationalized healthcare system, he must abolish private insurance.
If he does not abolish private insurance, then people are simply going to purchase supplemental insurance, and most doctors are going to start taking that insurance and not taking the government insurance, because reimbursement rates from private insurance are higher than reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid.
This is why many doctors now will not take Medicare or Medicaid patients.
The only way to guarantee that doctors will do that is to prohibit them from taking money from private insurers by abolishing private insurers.
I mean, there are other ways to do this, but that's not the way that Bernie Sanders wants to do it.
Avik Roy, who's supposed to be on our show a little bit later today, talking about healthcare systems, he recommends the Swiss model.
The Swiss model has an individual mandate where every person pays into a private health insurance system, and then you have choice among your health insurers, you have choice among your doctors.
That's not what Bernie is talking about.
That's not what Bernie is talking about.
Bernie is going way beyond Obamacare.
So, he botches that, but You know, no matter, what makes Bernie popular is the fact that he is a truth teller.
Now, I will say, there is one area in which Bernie Sanders is a lot better than the other Democrats, and it's one of the reasons why Bernie Sanders may, in fact, have a plurality run to the nomination.
It's kind of fascinating.
So, Bernie, in his opening interview, he talked about intersectionality.
Bernie's been trying to play both sides of this coin.
He's been trying to say, America's racist, sexist, bigoted, and homophobic.
But, he then will say we ought to have a meritocracy.
Now, the left agrees with the first part, but the hard left disagrees with the second part.
They don't believe a meritocracy is even possible.
They don't believe that we should judge people by their abilities.
They believe we should judge people by their group identity, because in the view of the radical left, All human relationships can be attributed to power hierarchies and imbalances of power.
So there's no such thing as a meritocracy.
There are just imbalances of power.
But Bernie Sanders doesn't actually believe that.
Deep down, Bernie Sanders is, while he's a communist, Well, he's an actual Marxist, Bernie Sanders.
He still has this gut-level belief, because he grew up in the United States, in a meritocracy.
And so he says some stuff that makes him kind of unpopular on the intersectional left.
There's a problem for him in one area, and kind of a win for him in another.
Here's Bernie Sanders saying something that violates the tenets of intersectionality.
We have got to look at candidates not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender, and not by their age.
I mean, I think we have got to try to move us toward a non-discriminatory society which looks at people based on their abilities, based on what they stand for.
This is a big boo-boo.
You're not allowed to say this inside the Democratic Party.
This is why, for my money, Bernie Sanders is less dangerous to America than Kamala Harris is.
Because I believe that Bernie Sanders' idiotic domestic agenda is not going to happen.
The American people aren't going to stand for it.
Congress is not going to pass it.
If they do pass it, they will immediately revoke it.
There will instead be a wave election for Repu... If Bernie Sanders were to be elected president, God forbid, in 2020, in 2022 there would be a wave congressional election for Republicans.
Not only because we do this every four years, but also because nobody actually wants Bernie's policy proposals.
But Bernie is a lot more like Trump when it comes to the idea that he is in favor of a non-racial meritocracy.
This is not what the Democratic Party wants.
And so, Stephen Colbert, who is a full-time pander bear, he comes out and he says, it's just terrible that Bernie Sanders would say something like this.
It's pretty amazing, actually.
The field is also way more diverse this time with multiple women, people of color, the first openly gay major party presidential candidate.
But Sanders...
For all that diversity, Bernie Sanders does not believe that hurts his chances.
Like Dr. King, I have a dream.
A dream where this diverse nation can come together and be led by an old white guy.
Where do I find the courage?
Also, where do I find the pudding?
I want pudding.
Wow, he's ripping off my pudding joke now.
Stephen Colbert.
That hurts a little bit.
I mean, at least attribute the joke.
If you're not going to have me on your stupid show.
In any case, Stephen Col...
The pudding thing is mine!
You can't just grab the pudding thing.
Come on!
In any case, Stephen Colbert going after Bernie Sanders for not being intersectional enough.
And this is going to be the battle inside the Democratic Party.
And if I have to root for one side of the Kamala Harris intersectional politics versus Bernie Sanders, non-intersectional socialism, I'll go with Bernie.
Honestly, because I think the greatest damage being done to the country right now is not even the battle between bigger government and smaller government.
It's the battle between tribalism and non-tribalism.
If Bernie is arguing in favor of non-tribalism, even by accident, that's a lot better to me than the intersectional politics being pushed by the hardcore left.
It's also why Bernie Sanders is going to do disproportionately well among non-college educated white people in primaries and maybe in the general election.
Kamala Harris is hoping that she can crowd Bernie out when it comes to the black lane, the African-American lane of the Democratic Party.
And maybe that's right.
But Bernie could strike back by doing incredibly well among white folks in such primaries.
Now, the question is whether those white folks are so woke that they have embraced the same intersectional politics that Kamala Harris is counting on.
If they look more like Stephen Colbert, if they're angry at Bernie for violating the tenets of intersectionality.
It really is kind of a fascinating thing when Bernie Sanders is more Pro-America in his vision of race than Kamala Harris.
Really, really a fascinating, fascinating thing considering that Bernie's like an actual Soviet.
And meanwhile, there are a couple of updates on other candidates.
So Kirsten Gillibrand.
Who takes every position under the sun, continues to flail about nonsensically.
Nobody knows why Kirsten Gillibrand is even in the race, including Kirsten Gillibrand.
Kirsten Gillibrand had a very awkward moment.
She was in Iowa and she was speaking, and people just decided that they weren't interested in hearing her.
One lady is trying to get through and Kirsten Gillibrand's like, well, do you have a question?
And the lady's like, nope, just want some ranch dressing, lady.
I don't think you should back away from the bold ideas that the base and the grassroots care about so much.
Sorry, I'm just trying to get some ranch.
Go ahead.
And that is all of America.
That lady for president.
I'm just trying to get to the ranch dressing, Senator.
I have no interest in this at all.
Kirsten Gillibrand is the most forced candidate, which makes her hilarious.
She is so funny.
So, she did a cooking thing last night, because this is now a thing.
Everybody who runs for president has to cook.
Honestly, if I were to run for president, My video would be me just going to a restaurant and ordering something.
Because, number one, I do it more often than cooking, and so do all the rest of these candidates.
Okay, if you think Kirsten Gillibrand is at home cooking every night, or AOC is at home with her Instant Pot every night as opposed to just ordering out, you're insane.
Okay, it's not true.
But Kirsten Gillibrand tweets this out.
She's so forced.
She's so mechanical.
She tweets out, quote, Some might say that running unabashedly as a mom is risky.
Not to me.
Parents have skin in the game for the country we leave to our kids.
That's why I'm fighting for paid leave, health care, and climate action.
I'll fight for every kid like they're my own.
Well, first of all, my kid is certainly not your kid, lady.
You don't even know my kid's names.
I don't want you anywhere near my kids.
But secondly, I love the straw man, that running unabashedly as a mom is risky.
It's true, super risky.
People hate mothers.
Hate them.
If there's one group in America that is discriminated against, it's moms.
We frickin' hate those people.
Moms.
Gotta make sure— Wow, look at— She's so risk-seeking.
What a hero.
Not all heroes wear capes.
But apparently all heroes wear aprons, because everybody has to wear one in the kitchen now.
So that's exciting.
By the way, Kamala Harris's dad is also ripping into her, so that's kind of hilarious.
Apparently, he is very angry at her because in a recent interview, she suggested she had smoked pot because half of her family was from Jamaica.
And her dad called his daughter's remarks a travesty and accused her of stereotyping.
He said, My dear departed grandmother, as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family's name, reputation, and proud Jamaican identity being connected in any way, jokingly or not, with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy-seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics.
Harris is an economics professor at Stanford University, and this is reported by the Washington Times, and speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically disassociate ourselves from this travesty.
Boom!
Her campaign is getting smacked by her own dad.
Now, you think that might be like a little bit of news if she were a Republican?
She's a Democrat, so nobody's ever heard that story, nor will they.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
It's an unusual day.
I'm about to tell you about a thing that I like that comes courtesy of Barack Obama.
Now, one of the tragedies of Barack Obama's presidency, in my view, it truly is a tragedy.
Barack Obama could have been a transformational president.
He really could have.
When he was elected, he was elected with an overwhelming majority.
He had approval ratings in the high 80s when he took office.
And he immediately went into intersectional mode.
He immediately started doubling down on the idea that all attacks on him were attacks on his race.
He immediately started pushing the notion that far leftism was the way to unify the United States.
Barack Obama was not elected for that.
He was elected to unify.
Imagine if Barack Obama had called for a conciliatory America.
Imagine if Obama had come into office and the first time there was a racial incident, like, say, Henry Louis Gates.
You'll recall that Skip Gates, professor at Harvard, went to his house, tried to break into his own house because he didn't have his keys.
A neighbor saw him breaking into his house, didn't know he was a neighbor, called the cops.
The cops showed up.
Gates refused to show ID.
It became a national incident.
And Obama said that the Cambridge police had acted stupidly.
And then we had to have a beer summit.
He basically called them racist.
He talked about racist policing.
Imagine if he had said, listen, Misunderstandings happen in the United States on a regular basis.
That doesn't make Henry Louis Gates wrong to suspect that bad things have happened in the past, but it also doesn't make him right.
And it doesn't mean that the Cambridge police are racist.
Maybe if we saw each other with a little more grace, the country would be a better place.
Imagine if he had done that.
Imagine if there had been a situation where a Republican was caught, let's say, with a Ralph Northam type situation 30 years ago.
That person had a picture in their yearbook that was racist.
And Obama, as a black president, had said, listen, we ought to show people grace.
People change over time.
And America has changed over time, which is why I'm president.
Imagine the amount of the world of good that would have done for the United States.
Instead, Obama didn't do that.
But here's the saddest part.
Obama had the capacity to do that.
And now that he's not president, sometimes he actually says intelligent things like this.
Right?
You'll recall that during the 2016 race, he actually made some speeches in which he talked about why campuses should be open places for inquiry, and he shouldn't have speeches trying to be shut down.
That was really good.
Well, he gave a speech yesterday in Oakland, California, in which he talked about masculinity.
He said, all of us have to recognize that being a man is first and foremost being a good human.
That means being responsible, working hard, being kind, respectful, and compassionate.
The notion that somehow defining yourself as a man is dependent on are you able to put someone else down, able to dominate, that is an old view.
And then he says, if you're confident about your strength, you don't need to show me by putting somebody else down, show me by lifting somebody else up.
And then he got into some really good stuff, he really did.
He talked, he was talking for an initiative called My Brother's Keeper Initiative.
He talked about how racism historically sends a message that you are less than and we feel we have to compensate by exaggerating stereotypical ways men are supposed to act and that's a trap.
There's some truth to that.
There is some truth to that.
That racism historically has said to black men that you are, you are less than and so what that leads to is a chip on the shoulder and a feeling like you have to act out aggressively to prove your masculinity.
That's not completely false what Obama is saying here.
But the best thing that he said is he started talking about how It's a self-defeating model for being a man to act in these ways.
He talked about how hip-hop and rap are often built around talking about how I have more money than you, I can disrespect you.
He said, ironically, that shows the vulnerability you feel.
If you're confident about your sexuality, you don't have to have eight women around you twerking.
You seem stressed that you got to be acting that way.
I got one woman who I'm very happy with, he added.
Where was this guy?
Like every so often he showed up during his presidency and says stuff like this, but it was dominated by campaigning.
It was dominated by hardcore politics.
If this had been the leading edge of his presidency, you know how much better the country would have been?
You know how much better the country would have been?
I mean, really, this could have been such a great thing, and it's a tragedy for the country that Obama didn't do this more while he was president.
I'm glad that he is doing it now.
So, praise to Barack Obama for saying some true things about masculinity.
Being a man is about being a responsible man, taking care of your wife, taking care of your children, taking care of your neighbors, building your community.
That's what being a responsible man is all about.
If Barack Obama and I can agree on that, hopefully, you know, that'll be a starting point.
For the revision of masculinity in the country more generally.
By the way, the one thing I don't like about this is the idea that toxic masculinity is so prevalent.
The truth is traditional masculinity was all the things that I'm talking about.
Traditional masculinity was about taking care of your family, being responsible, building your community.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
Martina Navratilova, probably the greatest women's player of all time outside of Serena Williams in tennis, she's now been removed as an ambassador by Athlete Ally, an organization that supports LGBT athletes.
Why?
Martina Navratilova, one of the first open lesbians in major sport?
Really took a lot of risks to be that?
Why is she being ousted?
She's being ousted because she referred to trans women as men who decide to be female in a newspaper column this week, which is true, adding that allowing them to compete with women who are assigned female at birth is cheating and unfair.
Which, of course, is exactly true.
Her comments were heavily criticized and described as disturbing, upsetting, and deeply transphobic by the rights group Transactual and now Athlete Ally, a U.S.
nonprofit organization that campaigns for greater inclusion in sport.
In a statement, the organization said Athlete Ally unequivocally stands on the side of trans athletes and their right to access and compete in sport free from discrimination.
Martina Navratilova's recent comments on trans athletes are transphobic based on a false understanding of science and data.
And perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people.
No, this is not mythical.
It is not mythical to suggest that genetic men have a sports advantage over genetic women.
Of course this is true.
Of course this is true.
I saw a statistic yesterday that the fastest women in the world, there are 2,000.
For every fast woman in the world, like at the upper ranks, there are 2,000 men faster.
There's a study that was recently done that said the average woman, the fastest woman throwing a baseball, like the woman who throws fastest, or who throws a baseball the fastest in the United States, The vast majority of men can throw a baseball faster than that.
The fact is men have more upper body strength.
It's just evolutionary biology.
There's nothing new about this.
This is basic, basic science.
There's a reason that Rene Richards, who you'll recall is one of the first openly trans people in the United States, was a former ophthalmologist who was like an amateur tennis player.
Was an amateur tennis player.
And he, his name was Richard Raskin, a nice Jewish boy, She, he then had a sex change and was just like a mildly competitive tennis player.
Was ranked 6th out of 20 males over, out of the top 20 males over 35 in the United States.
And then began dressing as a woman, had a sex change, and suddenly was one of the top tennis players in the world as a woman.
Richards played professionally from 1977 to 1981 when he retired at age 47.
He was ranked as high as 20th overall.
He was legitimately like just a mediocre men's tennis player and suddenly he was ranked 20th overall as like a 40 year old.
That's because men are stronger than women on average.
Martina Navratilova is of course exactly correct about this.
Martina Navratilova, one of the great pioneers in the LGBT movement, has decided, has been ousted from her own movement now.
It really is astonishing.
Other articles along these lines.
This one is pretty spectacular.
I kind of love this one.
This is by Matthew Galt from vice.com.
Facial recognition software regularly misgenders trans people.
Right.
Correct.
Because you know what facial recognition software does?
It identifies what you look like.
And most trans people look like their genetic selves.
And what are they supposed to identify?
Your soul?
Your brain?
It's called facial recognition.
It's not called self-assigned gender recognition.
It says human-computer interfaces are almost never built with transgender people in mind and continue to reinforce existing biases.
What in the actual hell?
So, what is a technology designed to identify?
I'm so confused by this.
This is like saying, you know what regularly misgenders people?
Genetic testing.
Genetic testing regularly misgenders people.
Like when you do a genetic test and it turns out that you have zero Y chromosomes and so we label you a female, that is science misgendering you.
Man, the trans movement really undermines their own credibility when they get into this stuff.
If they want to make the case, the only logically consistent case for trans rights is that gender is entirely separate from biology.
Now that is not true, there's no evidence to support that, but the idea that gender is completely separate from biology, and therefore can be arbitrarily applied and self-applied, But that biology is biology, so in other words, a trans male is still a biological woman, but identifies as female.
That at least has some internal logic to it.
But if you are claiming now that trans women are genetic women, or biological women, or that facial recognition software using objective metrics are supposed to identify you as the gender to which you claim identity, what in the world are you even talking about?
This leads to some rather weird places.
There is a person, I've never heard of this person.
Apparently there's a show called Pose and there's an actress named India Moore.
And this trans star, who I guess is a genetic male, wrote on February 17th, quote, if a woman has a penis, her penis is a biologically female penis.
What?
No, okay.
So let me explain some basic science.
The entire history of humanity, the creation of new human beings, is reliant on the sexual dichotomy between male and female.
This is true in all mammalian species, by the way.
Not just true for humans.
We never ask what orangutans self-identify as, because we know.
Because then they have sex with each other and have new baby orangutans.
There is no such thing as a female penis.
That is absurd.
It's not a biologically female... What?
Are we insane?
The good news is that it's a self-refuting assessment.
So this person writes, if a woman has a penis, her penis is a biologically female penis.
A biologically female penis does not exist, therefore a woman does not have a penis.
Just if we're going to complete the syllogism.
This is how nonsensical we've become.
Honestly, if you want to make a case for trans rights, you cannot overwrite biology and pretend it doesn't exist.
It undermines your entire cause.
Totally insane.
All righty.
So we will be back here a little bit later today with two more hours of content.
I had so much I wanted to get to today that I didn't even have a chance to get to.
This is why you ought to subscribe over at dailywire.com.
Go do that for 99 bucks a year.
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I promise.
Or show up tomorrow.
We'll be here with you again to update you on the news.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villarreal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sajovic.
Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
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