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March 12, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:01
The Revolution Eats Its Parents | Ep. 735
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Nancy Pelosi battles her radical flank.
President Trump comes under attack from his own base.
And the battle for the tech world continues.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Now, I know if you're watching us right now, you are thinking, from where are you broadcasting?
And the answer is from Ann Arbor, Michigan, because I'm speaking at University of Michigan tonight.
It should be fun.
There are a bunch of counter protests that are planned, including apparently a musical about me, which sounds more interesting, frankly, than my speech.
Like I would actually attend that thing because number one, I'm deeply narcissistic.
And number two, I like musicals, so I'm totally into it.
We'll get to more on what's going to happen to University of Michigan tonight, a little bit later on in the show.
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Okay, so, I want to get to some serious news in a second, but first, I have to apprise you of a couple of very important news items, just off the wires.
So, The President of the United States has issued an official proclamation.
His official proclamation concerns airplanes.
So as you know, there's a terrible airplane crash from Ethiopia Airlines, killed like 150 people.
It was the second Boeing model to go down, it's a new model, second Boeing model to go down in a matter of the last six months.
President Trump has some thoughts.
Because President Trump, you may not have known this, President Trump is secretly an aerospace engineer.
And so the president tweeted this out today in all of his wisdom, quote, airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly.
Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT.
I see it all the time in many products.
Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler, is far better.
Split-second decisions are needed, and the complexity creates danger.
All of this for great cost, yet very little gain, I think.
I don't know about you, but I don't want Albert Einstein to be my pilot.
I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane.
Thank you, Mr. President, for that announcement on the engineering of airplanes.
You know, not unprecedented, the fact is that Abraham Lincoln had some really deep thoughts about the mechanics of trains, actually, back in like 1862, so I guess it's not unusual for the President of the United States to tweet out about airplanes.
It is worth noting that last year he did tweet out that thanks to him there had been no commercial airline fatalities that year, so...
I'm not sure what that means for the president.
Again, like, is this important?
No, it's not important.
It's silly, but that's the point.
He's the president of the United States.
Should he stop tweeting about why biplanes are better than fixed wing aircraft?
Probably.
Should he stop tweeting about Albert Einstein being the pilot of his plane?
Like somewhere Elon Musk is sitting there nodding and smoking a joint.
So solid stuff from President Trump right there.
Meanwhile, in other stupid news, you know, because, you know, the news is too serious lately.
And honestly, I would rather just cover stupid news for a moment.
So in other stupid news, Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin are among actresses, CEOs charged in alleged college admissions scam.
So this is a madlib headline from an alternative reality.
Felicity Huffman, who you'll remember from Desperate Housewives and Lori Loughlin from Full House, have now been charged for utilizing a service that basically bribed people to get you into college.
According to ABC News, actresses and chief executives are among 50 people arrested in the nationwide college admissions cheating scam authorities announced on Tuesday.
According to charging documents, actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin are among those involved facing charges.
The suspects allegedly paid bribes of up to $6 million to get their kids into elite colleges, including Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, and USC.
One of those things is not like the others.
So in any case, listen, my sister went to USC.
I'm just a UCLA Homer.
Okay.
In most cases, the students did not know their admission was contingent on a bribe.
University athletic coaches and administrators of college entrance exams were also among those arrested.
First of all, Worth noting, if you paid like $6,000,000 to get your kid into college, your kid didn't need to pay $6,000,000 to get your kid into college.
First of all, you could just give some sort of donation to the school and they'd let your kid in.
Second of all, you have $6,000,000.
Couldn't you just put your money in a trust fund and let your kid be a ne'er-do-well?
Like all other rich parents?
ABC News says the alleged scam centered around a man in California who ran a business helping students get into the college of their choice.
Authorities say parents would pay him a predetermined amount with full knowledge of what they were doing.
He would then steer the money to one of two places, either an SAT or ACT administrator or a college athletic coach.
The coaches would allegedly arrange a fake profile that listed the prospective student as an athlete, and exam administrators would either hire proctors to take the test or correct the answers of a student.
The bribes range from a few thousand dollars up to six million dollars, according to officials.
And the charging documents unsealed in Boston Federal Court are more than 200 pages long.
I would like to find out how these kids actually did at these colleges.
Seriously, because if your kid got like an 1100 on the SATs, and then you bribed people to get them into Yale, did they fail out?
If they did not fail out, Yale isn't doing its job.
According to the authorities, Felicity Huffman and her husband made a purported charitable contribution of 15 grand to participate in the college entrance exam cheating scheme on behalf of her eldest daughter.
Huffman later made arrangements to pursue a scheme for a second time for her younger daughter before deciding not to do so.
Federal agents say they have recorded telephone calls with Huffman and a cooperating witness.
The documents say that Laughlin and her husband agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team.
Despite the fact they did not participate in crew, thereby facilitating their admission to USC.
Officials say they have emails from Laughlin.
Okay, first of all, if you are paying like $15,000 to get into Yale, at least I understand that.
If you're paying half a million dollars to get into USC, again, not to rip on USC, but come on, gang.
$500,000 to pay to get into USC?
$1,000 to pay to get into USC.
I mean, that's like paying $200 for a Big Mac.
Listen, USC is great.
I have a lot of friends at USC.
There's a person in the room from USC who right now is on the verge of coming over and strangling me.
I'll just say that that is not getting your money's worth right there.
You're going to spend half a million dollars.
You at least want an Ivy League, right?
I mean, at least you want to get into like lower Ivy League, like Brown or something.
Come on, that's absurd.
Okay, fine.
So in real news, I know, I know.
In real news, Nancy Pelosi is now at war with her own base.
Now, this has been a long time in coming, Nancy Pelosi being at war with her base.
You knew this was coming because ever since the election of 2018, there have been some fresh faces.
Very fresh, as well as incredibly face.
And those fresh faces have made clear that they see themselves as in control of the direction of the future Congress.
And Nancy Pelosi has been playing the appeasement game.
She's basically been feeding pieces of the party to these people in the hopes that they will eat her last.
But they're not interested in eating her last.
They're interested in using her as their meat puppet.
They would prefer to use her as sort of the puppet.
They put their hand behind her head and they make her voice come out, but they are saying AOC words, which means a lot of likes and ums.
Well, now Speaker Pelosi has run afoul of this group of people.
Listen, she was willing to go so far as to let them off the hook for blatant anti-Semitism.
She was willing to water down a resolution to not include the name Ilhan Omar.
She was willing to water down the resolution to not only deal with anti-Semitism.
She was willing to go out of her way not to tap, even love tap, these young fresh faces so as to prove to them that she was actually in control.
And now they are coming for her.
They are coming for her because she has said the unsayable.
They're not going to impeach President Trump.
I know.
I know.
So, according to the New York Post, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Monday that she is against impeaching President Trump unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan.
Okay, well, it's that last statement, bipartisan, that got her in trouble because everybody knows the Republicans are not going to sign on to an attempt to impeach President Trump.
It's not going to happen.
There weren't any Democratic votes to impeach Bill Clinton back in the day.
The speaker is surely up to speed on what evidence Democrats actually have against Trump and has a fair sense of what special counsel Bob Mueller's report will say.
According to the Post Editorial Board, she recognizes it's nothing that will persuade anyone who hasn't wanted Trump ousted since Election Day 2016.
See, this is Nancy Pelosi being smart.
Because Nancy Pelosi recognizes that if in fact it looks like a witch hunt, if in fact it looks like she's trying to impeach Trump for non-crimes, That's going to tick off an awful lot of people.
A lot of people are going to say, well, this seems unfair.
Trump is going to loudly proclaim that he's being targeted for unfair reasons.
Moderates who are not interested in a prolonged impeachment spiel are going to get uptight with Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats.
She knows that because she is not a dum-dum.
Unfortunately, there are members of her base who in fact are dum-dums and they're very angry at her.
Very angry at her.
So that means that they are going to be attacking her.
Now, what's funny is that, again, the most militant people when it comes to the Mueller report, even they are looking forward to the Mueller report and saying, I don't think that what we've been saying is there is actually going to be there.
One of those people is Adam Schiff, the representative from my district in California, Adam Schiff, who literally has a pup tent.
Set up outside the green room at CNN so he can talk about Russia just any time of the day and call him at like one o'clock in the morning and boom, he's on a rerun of exploring the world with W. Kamel Bell.
He just sort of pops in to talk about Russia for no reason at any time of the morning.
It's like, oh, brief update on Russia.
Call Adam Schiff.
He's right outside.
Even Adam Schiff is saying, well, yeah, I'm not sure that we're going to be able to do this impeachment thing.
We don't have Senate support.
In the absence of very graphic evidence, it would be difficult to get the support in the Senate needed to make an impeachment successful.
So again, my feeling is, let's see what Bob Bullitt produces.
But the evidence will have to be pretty overwhelming.
Okay, so that is not actually going to happen, but this has ticked off the Democratic base.
The Democratic base is very angry at Nancy Pelosi.
The fresh faces of the Democratic base have come out and said that this is very bad.
We have to impeach Trump.
Don't you understand?
He's the most dangerous man alive.
So, they're not wrong.
Here's the thing.
They're not wrong, given the rhetoric of people like Nancy Pelosi.
If, in fact, Donald Trump is the most dangerous man alive, if, in fact, he's an incipient Hitler, then you have to get him out of office by any means necessary.
No matter what, you must get rid of him.
That's the idea from the Fresh Faces.
And the Fresh Faces, again, are not incorrect in their assessment of the situation.
And as we'll see, they are not shy about suggesting such.
They're not shy about saying that sort of thing.
We'll get to that in just a second.
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Alrighty, so.
The Democrats are upset, rightly so, with Nancy Pelosi.
It turns out that when you pitch your base on, we have to get rid of Hitler, they sort of want you to get rid of Hitler.
And this is why so many folks in the radical base are resonating to people like Ilhan Omar.
So Ilhan Omar, yesterday, was asked about the fact that she'd said some pretty nasty things about Barack Obama.
She made a boo-boo.
She talked to Politico, and in her interview with Politico, she said that Barack Obama was, I kid you not, a murderer with a pretty face.
She said that in her interview with Politico.
Then she tried to back off from that and say, no, no, I didn't mean that at all.
She said, I even have a recording to prove that I was misquoted.
Then she released the recording and it showed that she said exactly what she was quoted as saying.
So she doesn't understand how recordings work.
Also, the Jews must have gotten to that recording, obviously.
I mean, there's only one answer there.
So now she says, listen, When I said that Obama is inhuman, or that he's a murderer, that's not right.
He's not a murderer.
I'll tell you who's the REAL murderer.
I'll tell you who's the REAL inhuman person.
That, of course, is President Trump.
I just want to get to your side of the story.
Do you believe that Trump and Obama are the same, just different when it comes to their policies?
I understand that you refute this political story.
Could you just set the record straight so we get your side of it?
Do you think that President Obama is the same as President Trump?
Absolutely not.
That is silly to even think and equate the two.
One is human, the other is... Is it true that you just think that he's more polished than Trump?
She is such an angry person.
I mean, just forget about, you know, the suggestion is that if you say that Ilhan Omar is angry, that this is some sort of racial slur.
No, she's just an angry person.
There are lots of black folks who are not angry.
She is a Somali woman who happens to be a very angry person.
Every time you see her on tape, she's being an angry person.
Every single time.
There's a member of the media asking her a perfectly normal question about something that she says, and she starts sneering at them, and then she spits the answer at them as though she's angry at them.
There's nothing abnormal about asking her about something she said to Politico, to a reporter.
But here's the real key.
She says Trump isn't even a human being.
So she compared Obama to Trump.
She said basically they're the same, except Obama was prettier.
And now she's backtracking by saying Trump isn't even human.
Well, if you believe Trump isn't human, then why wouldn't you want to impeach him?
If you believe that he's a space alien sent to destroy the earth, presumably you'd be in favor of impeachment.
So Nancy Pelosi has now run afoul of her own base.
She's run a fa- And you're seeing it on Twitter.
You're seeing people on the left saying, Nancy Pelosi has been bought and paid for.
Something's happened to Nancy.
What happened to woke Nancy?
Here's the deal, Nancy Pelosi.
When you flirt with the radicals in your party, eventually they behead you.
That's what happens with every revolution.
Robespierre went to the guillotine.
You lead the revolution, you may not end up with your head outside the bucket.
That's the way this works.
Now, the Democrats are in fact struggling against this.
In a second, we'll get to that.
The Democrats are struggling Against this.
So, for example, you got Steini Hoyer.
Steini Hoyer is the House Minority Whip.
And he was specifically asked about the new faces, the Ilhan Omar's and the Rashida Tlaib's and the Ocasio-Cortez's.
And he says, listen, I got plenty of other people here who are represented by this party.
Why are we being dictated to by these particular ones?
He says, quote, we've got 62 new Democratic members, not three.
So he and Pelosi are trying to dismiss the power of these new members.
But the problem is those three new members are getting all the media.
And the reason they're getting all the media is because the media actually agree with these three new members.
The media would like to see President Trump impeached.
This is the problem.
If you live inside the Washington, D.C., New York beltway bubble, and I'm not just talking about people who are members of government.
I'm talking about members of the media.
If you live inside that bubble, then you and everyone you know believe that President Trump is an evil man and you believe that the Russians stole the election.
And this is why the coverage on CNN doesn't seem to reflect what the American people want to hear about very much.
It's why the ratings aren't very good.
Instead, it seems to reflect the sensibilities of people who spend all day ensconced in this stuff and deeply worried about the evils of President Trump.
Well, who mirrors those worries more than Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and AOC?
The answer is none of them.
None of these other 62 members mirror those worries better.
And so Nancy Pelosi has a problem.
Nancy Pelosi, believe it or not, understands the voter in Ohio better than the reporters on CNN.
Nancy Pelosi understands the voters in Ohio better than Rashida Tlaib, who is from Michigan, or Ilhan Omar, who is from Minnesota, or AOC.
These are all from extraordinarily blue districts.
In which all their supporters pat them on the back for saying incredibly radical things.
They are in bubbles.
Nancy Pelosi is in a bubble of her own in San Francisco, but Nancy Pelosi hasn't actually been the representative from San Francisco for a long time.
She's been at the head of the Democratic Party establishment in the House of Representatives.
She's been the head of it since 2006.
She's been in that position of power for 12 years.
That's a long time to hear from various Congress people all over America and what their constituents are looking for.
But what those people are looking for may in fact be at war with the radicals.
And this is a problem not only for Democrats in Congress, it's a problem for Democrats across the board.
For example, in the 2020 election.
It means that anybody who is perceived as even remotely moderate is immediately going to be cast out.
That's why I think that right now, Bernie Sanders is the leader coming around the turn in the Democratic primaries.
Now it's still very early.
Obviously a lot can happen, but there are a lot of folks who are trying to say that Joe Biden is the guy who's going to take the nomination.
I don't see that.
I don't see Joe Biden taking the nomination.
I think he'd be the one who, I think they'd be smart to nominate Joe Biden.
I think if you're talking about somebody who is most likely to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all three states, Democrats need to win.
If, if I think that that Biden is the guy who's most likely to win those states.
But the problem is that Biden is not the guy who's most likely to win these primaries.
His best day will be the first day he declares.
The day that Joe Biden declares, there'll be all sorts of media.
He'll see a little bump in the polls.
He'll go up from whatever it is, 28% to 33%, and then he'll start coming down again.
Why?
Because he's apt to be torn apart by both the progressive wing and the intersectional wing of the democratic party.
Leading the battle on the intersectional side is Jamel Bouie.
Jamel Bouie is a columnist formerly for Slate, now for the New York Times.
He has a column today called The Trouble with Biden.
And it is a good reminder of why it is that the Democrats are unlikely to nominate somebody like Joe Biden who is in any way moderate.
Here's what Jamal Bowie writes.
He says, As they begin their search for a nominee, most Democrats prize electability above all else.
They want a sure thing, someone who will beat President Trump.
But beating Trump isn't the same as beating Trumpism.
Unseating the president won't automatically undermine the white resentment and racial chauvinism that drive his movement.
That will depend on the nature of the campaign against him and whether it challenges the assumptions of his ideology or affirms them in the name of electoral pragmatism.
So this is Jamel Bui making the case against Joe Biden by basically saying that Biden is another Trump when it comes to issues of race.
Again, Biden is going to get savaged on all sides here, guys.
His association with President Obama will not save him and the chances that Obama endorses him in a primary are exceedingly low.
Jamel Bui says the possibility of defeating Trump without defeating Trumpism looms over Joe Biden's possible run for the 2020 Democratic nomination.
The former VP's not-yet-candidacy centers on his appeal to the white, blue-collar workers who rejected Hillary Clinton in favor of Donald Trump.
He believes he could have won them in 2016, and he thinks he can win them now.
This isn't just about Biden's working-class affect.
As a senator from Delaware, Biden understood himself as a staunch defender of middle American interests.
But those interests were racialized, which is how a younger Biden could at once be a committed liberal and an ardent opponent of busing to desegregate his state's public schools.
So now Jamal Bui is making the case better to lose an election by ignoring those white blue collar folks than to pander to those white blue collar folks with anything approaching moderation.
And he uses as his example of Joe Biden being a racist Biden's opposition to forced busing.
Now, forced busing is a battle we haven't had in the United States for 50 years.
I mean, really, this goes back to the 1960s and 1970s.
In the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education and the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act, there were a series of pieces of legislation and court rulings that suggested that people would be bused from certain schools to other schools.
So you wouldn't actually go to the school in your school district.
If your school district was predominantly black, then maybe you would be bused out from that school district To a white school district, or if there was a white school district that seemed to be better than a black school district in terms of population, in terms of scores, for example, but I mean a black school district in terms of its population of black students, then you would have white students bust in from the suburbs to black public schools.
Now there's a strong case on libertarian grounds that forcing children to go to schools where they have no local connection is actually wrong.
There's also a good case on practical grounds that this actually caused white flight.
That what actually happened is that white folks didn't want their kids going to worse public schools because it turned out that a lot of these schools that were worse in terms of performance also happened to be heavily minority thanks to decades of underfunding and thanks to social problems and all the rest of this.
And so a lot of white folks picked up and they moved out even further to the suburbs.
That it caused urban sprawl.
That it caused people to leave.
That it didn't actually make the education system any better.
But Jamel Bui says that if you opposed forced busing then you're a racist and you were catering to white racists.
So he specifically points out the fact that Joe Biden in 1975 said, I do not buy the concept popular in the 60s, which said we have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers.
In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start or even hold the white man back to even the race.
I don't buy that.
And and Jamel Bowie says Biden made his argument using language that is still common to opponents of efforts to rectify racial inequality.
I don't feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather.
I feel responsible for the situation today for the sins of my own generation.
And I'll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.
Jamel Bowie says busing did its job, integrating schools and improving outcomes for black students.
But many whites viewed it as an encroachment on the privileges afforded them in a racially stratified society.
What W.E.B.
Dubois called a psychological wage given as compensation for racial solidarity.
These Americans thought they could keep black children out of their schools and neighborhoods.
Busing meant they couldn't and they were angry.
Well, no, sometimes busing actually happened in reverse.
Sometimes it was white kids being bused into schools where they didn't have any friends, where they didn't have any community.
The opposition to forced busing was, in part, opposition to force.
Now, I'm all in favor of greater racial integration.
I'm not in favor of forced integration.
There is a difference between desegregation and forced integration.
This was a legitimate argument.
It was had in the 60s and the 1970s.
There's a very good book on this by a legal scholar from the University of Texas named Lino Graglia.
Came out maybe 15, 20 years ago.
In essence, the notion that you oppose forced busing, therefore you are a racist, or therefore you are pandering to racial concerns, per se, it doesn't necessarily follow.
But the broader point for Joe Biden is this.
Dude's going to get savaged.
Joe Biden has a problem.
The base of the Democratic Party is more in line with the views of Jamal Bowie and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez than they are with Joe Biden.
In just a second, we're going to talk about how President Trump has some of these problems of his own.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Well, President Trump theoretically could have some problems from his own base.
The difference is that most people who voted for President Trump voted to stop Democrats in the first place.
Democrats right now are voting to forward leftist goals.
Republicans are voting to stand athwart the rails of history, shouting stop at radical Democrats.
And this is where President Trump has some benefit.
This is why Ann Coulter's opposition is not probably going to have any significant impact on President Trump.
So Ann Coulter is now ripping President Trump.
The author of In Trump We Trust is very angry at him because she says that he has not fulfilled his promises on immigration.
According to the Palm Beach Post, Ann Coulter said it's hard to find people she can talk to now that she's directed her scorching criticism on President Trump and his failure to build a US-Mexico border wall.
She said it's frustrating.
I can't talk to Trump detractors because, as the subtitle to my last book indicated, they're insane.
I can't talk to the Trump flatterers because they think, as soon as it comes out of his mouth, it has happened.
No, he's an excellent talker.
It's just when it comes to doing anything that he falls down on the job.
She said Trump may be a shallow, narcissistic conman, but that does not mean the enemy are not the enemy of the people.
Both things can be true.
So she's been very angry at President Trump.
He called her wacky this week.
He said, I don't know why he doesn't just ignore me.
He doesn't mind ignoring the rest of his base.
Coulter compared Trump to President George H.W.
Bush, who lost in 1992 after not building the wall.
She said the first George Bush, for example, read my lips, no new taxes.
He said at one time at the convention, Trump talked about building the wall at least once a day for 18 months.
If the wall supporting Trump base isn't energized in 2020, Coulter said, the nightmare scenario is the Democrats and they have gone mad.
They elect somebody completely crazy, just wild left wing.
Now, here's the thing about what Ann is saying.
Trump was always predicated, the rise of Trump was always predicated on the argument that Hillary would be worse.
And this is still the response you get, like if you make fun of Trump tweeting about airplanes, you get, what, you'd rather have Hillary?
It's like, no, I didn't say I'd rather have Hillary, I think it's funny that Trump is tweeting about airplane technology.
Get over it.
But there is a contingent of people, it's very large, and I would say it's most of the Republican base, that supports Trump not because they are deeply in love with everything that President Trump does, but because they wanted to stop Hillary Clinton and now they can't stand the cognitive dissonance of he's not giving them everything they want.
So a lot of folks have convinced themselves that President Trump has already built the wall, that America has already been made great again, and all of the rest.
Colters, please, in other words, are falling on deaf ears.
And this is one of the problems for actual conservatives.
One of the problems for actual conservatives is that if you are worried about the forwarding of conservatism, the forwarding of conservatism means more than simply stopping the left.
Stopping the left is a worthwhile goal.
The radicalism of the left should be stopped.
But if you actually want to save conservatism, if you want to promote conservatism, then you have to do more than simply not doing what the Democrats want.
For example, you probably shouldn't be cheering on the president who just proposed a $4.75 trillion budget, the largest budget in American history, by a long shot.
President Trump sent Congress on Monday a record $4.75 trillion budget plan that calls for increased military spending and sharp cuts to domestic programs like education and environmental protection for the 2020 fiscal year.
Mr. Trump's budget, the largest in federal history, includes a nearly 5% increase in military spending, more than the Pentagon had asked for, and an additional $8.6 billion for construction of a wall along the border with Mexico.
This budget, like all budgets that have been submitted for the last decade or so, is dead on arrival.
Democratic Congress ain't gonna pass anything like it.
It contains what the White House officials called a total of $1.9 trillion in cost savings from mandatory safety net programs like Medicaid and Medicare, the federal health care programs for the elderly and the poor.
This has caused the left to cry that President Trump is trying to cut Medicaid and Medicare.
That is not true.
He is growing Medicare and Medicaid, but at slower rates than the left would have him do.
One of the tricker pieces of trickery that you will see from the mainstream media is they will say that if I was supposed to spend $200 next year and instead I spend $150 next year that I have somehow cut my spending.
No, because I haven't spent any of that money yet.
So I've actually increased my spending by $150 next year.
I have not saved $50.
Every time the media talk about savings, cost savings, by cutting future spending from expected spending, this is the same as when my wife goes to Costco, buys 8 million, 8 million paper plates.
Legitimate and like has a truck come and deliver them and dump them off and spends 1 million dollars on these 8 million paper plates and then tells me that she saved me a million dollars because if she had bought the paper plate somewhere else they would have been twice as expensive.
That's not how this works.
The budget is unlikely to have much effect on actual spending levels, which are controlled by Congress.
Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate pronounce the budget DOA, but the blueprint is a declaration of Trump's re-election campaign priorities and the starting skirmish in the race for 2020.
Frankly, I'm not even sure why President Trump bothered to try and cut future spending or make cost savings in Medicare and Medicaid.
I don't even know why he bothered to do that.
So long as we know the budgets aren't going to pass, he should just propose a $10 trillion budget, and then he can compete with Democrats.
Then he can say, listen, I want to do all the things that you want to do, Except I'm not crazy.
And he would look sane by contrast.
But the broader point is this.
Trump stopping the left, not the same thing as Trump forwarding good things.
And you're seeing that blowback from, for example, former Vice President Dick Cheney.
Dick Cheney is back on the road.
He did a discussion with Vice President Mike Pence and things started to go wildly wrong.
There's a closed-door retreat hosted by the American Enterprise Institute in Sea Island, Georgia and Cheney respectfully but repeatedly and firmly pressed Mike Pence on a number of the president's foreign policy moves over which Cheney expressed concerns from taking a harder line toward U.S.
allies in NATO to deciding to withdraw troops from Syria during what Cheney fretted was the middle of a telephone call.
Cheney worried aloud to Pence, we're getting into a situation where our friends and allies around the world that we depend on are going to lack confidence in us.
And then offered a blunt assessment of the current administration's response to foreign policy challenges.
Cheney said, I worry that the bottom line of that kind of an approach is we have an administration that looks a lot more like Barack Obama than Ronald Reagan.
Cheney's questions for Pence provided a revealing glimpse into the churning and often strained debates inside the Republican Party, where longtime GOP hawks such as Cheney have increasingly balked at Trump's engagement with autocrats and his non-interventionist approach But here is the reality.
The reality is that some of those criticisms are legitimate, just as some of Ann Coulter's criticisms are legit.
I know a lot of Trump supporters, because they feel like stopping the left is the top priority, are going to shrug at all of Cheney's criticisms.
But here is the reality.
The reality is that some of those criticisms are legitimate, just as some of Ann Coulter's criticisms are legit.
You can have it both ways.
You can have it both ways.
Way one, must oppose the left.
Maybe that means voting for President Trump.
Way two, President Trump needs to do a better job.
Less tweeting about airplanes, more wall building, for example.
Okay, in just a second, I'm gonna get to Tucker Carlson, who is battling back against media matters.
We'll get to that in just a second.
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OK, so Tucker Carlson has been attacked, of course, by Media Matters.
They came out with a second spate of bad things Tucker Carlson said back in 2007.
And when I say bad things, I don't mean to say that they are not bad things.
They are indeed bad things that Tucker Carlson said back in 2007.
He talked about how Iraqis were, he suggested that they were illiterate monkeys or something like that.
And he was, and he dropped an F-bomb, this F-bomb, not, not the, the curse word, but the, the F-word that is a slur for gay people.
He did all of this in these silly appearances on the Bubba the Love Sponge show.
And as I said yesterday, two things can be true at once.
One, Tucker Carlson said some stuff I don't like and I think is ugly back in 2006-2007.
Stuff that I find morally reprehensible.
Also, a world in which we are digging up old stuff that people said and then trying to ruin them for it is an ugly world.
And many of the people who are pretending to be outraged at Tucker Carlson's comments are not in fact outraged at Tucker Carlson's comments.
Many of them are actually quite excited by Tucker Carlson's comments being unearthed so they can go after his advertisers.
Today, here's what a good faith discussion of Tucker Carlson's old comments would look like.
Tucker Carlson, we came up with this old audio.
Do you still agree with this?
Do you regret having said this?
Tucker Carlson probably says something like, yeah, I probably shouldn't have said all that stuff.
I don't agree with any of that stuff.
I was on a shock jock radio show.
Get over the fact that it's a shock jock radio show.
Shock jock radio existed in the 2000s and the game of shock jock radio was to say the most shocking thing to the shock jock.
That was the game of shock jock radio.
That's just the reality of the situation.
That's how a good faith conversation would go.
But that's not how the conversation actually goes today.
The way the conversation actually goes is that people who want Tucker Carlson off the air go and spend a hundred hours unearthing bad stuff that Tucker Carlson said that nobody remembers and that no one cared about at the time.
And then they bring it back so that some people earnestly become outraged and then most people in the political space are not outraged but say that Tucker Carlson should have to pay the price for the stuff that he said 10 years ago, so his advertisers today on Fox News, who have nothing to do with those old comments, should be punished.
This is the move that is being made today, and it's ugly, and it's gross, and as I have said before, I think that it is bad whether it is applied to Sarah Jeong of the New York Times, or whether it is applied to Kevin Hart, the black comedian who was ousted from the Oscars, or whether this is applied to pretty much anybody.
I don't like the idea of ruining people's careers based on old stuff that they've said.
Now, if you want to ask them about it and then they re-up, then we can talk about whether there should be repercussions.
Or if, for example, they say something new today, like Roseanne Barr said something new.
That's a new thing she said, so we get to react in real time to what she said.
What we don't get to do is look for excuses to be upset about stuff that was said 20 years ago, Without considering the possibility that maybe it was said in a different context, in a society that didn't mind incendiary things being said quite as much, or the idea that perhaps this person doesn't agree with stuff that they said a while ago because people changed their minds on things.
Well.
One of the more amusing aspects of this is watching these so-called objective media simply rip their masks off and go full-scale Dracula on Tucker Carlson.
I mean, climb through his bedroom window and try to sink those fangs in.
Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon, very objective news journalism-ing over on CNN.
They say that, really, Tucker deserves this because, after all, Tucker doesn't tell the truth on a daily basis, so that means that Tucker deserves anything he gets.
If we make a mistake or if we say something that's controversial and we want to stand by it, we back it up with the facts behind it, right?
This is why we said it.
You may not like it.
You may think it's biased, whatever.
These are the facts.
As journalists, we have to give you the facts.
Here's my thing.
We're all on television live with no filter.
Many times there's nothing in that camera, no words, and we all screw up and we say dumb things.
But when you do, when something becomes a pattern and you don't tell the truth on a daily basis, That's a problem.
Okay, but that's not what we're talking about here.
We're not talking about Tucker said something in real time now and he screwed up and then he didn't apologize for it.
We're talking about Tucker said something back when George W. Bush was president and he's not apologizing for it now because he understands that an apology will be taken as a sign of weakness and then people will simply use it as a way to club him over the head.
Look, even Tucker realizes he said something very, very bad because the next step, as I've said repeatedly on this program, the next step is never, oh, he apologized for it, I guess we'll move on.
The next step from the left is typically, Oh, he said that he apologized for it.
That means he acknowledges it was bad.
He never should have made the mistake in the first place.
He never should have said that bad thing.
Let's punish him now since he wasn't punished then.
Being retroactively punishing people for stuff that they said 15 years ago that they disagree with now is pretty insane.
It really is pretty wild.
And again, what we have right now in our society is not a shortage of outrage.
We have a surplus of outrage.
So a lot of people who are saying things like, well, I'm outraged now about stuff that Tucker said.
Okay.
You can be outraged.
You can be outraged, but let's not pretend that this is not mostly manufactured outrage for a political end.
So I was asked today, you know, when it came to Ralph Northam, there was very little consideration of a friend of mine asked me this on the left.
And she asked, okay, well, Ralph Northam, governor of Virginia, who was... an old yearbook photo of him was unearthed, in which there was a guy in blackface and a guy in a KKK outfit.
It was unearthed by Big League Politics, which is a right-wing, sort of radical-right site.
So, why weren't people asking about their motivations in unearthing this stuff?
As opposed to this case, where we've gone hard after Media Matters.
Because Media Matters is, in fact, a 501c3 organization specifically dedicated to destroying anyone on the right.
There are a couple reasons why this is different.
Reason number one.
Reason number one.
Ralph Northam's an elected official.
Opposition research is regularly done on elected officials.
It is supposed to give more information to the voters.
So we don't tend to look at the motivations of the people uncovering that stuff.
We understand that oppo research is a regular part of politics.
Oppo research is not the same thing when it comes to the world of media.
This notion that you're going to uncover everything bad that George Stephanopoulos has ever done and then use it to destroy him is considered more of an attempt to invade a private person's business than it is anything else.
Secondly, Media Matters bills itself as an objective uncoverer of news, a media watchdog.
That's not what they do.
Instead, they cover for folks on the left.
They said that nobody should go after Joy Reid for exactly the same kind of stuff, and they try to ruin people on the right, and more importantly, they try to ruin the advertisers that are tangentially associated with people On whose shows they are advertising.
That wrecks the entire industry.
That has ramifications far beyond, here's a politician who did a bad thing, now what should the politician do?
So we're going to get to Tucker's response here in just one second.
First, I would note that Chris Cuomo, again, so much objective journalism.
He comes out and he says, Tucker Carlson is a coward.
He says Tucker is a coward.
Now what makes Tucker a coward?
It makes Tucker a coward that Tucker hasn't doubled down on his old statements.
Why would Tucker double down on his old statements?
He said them on a shock jock radio show.
I don't know that Tucker agrees with them.
We'll get to Tucker's response in just a second, but here is very objective journalism-ing block of wood, dumber Cuomo brother, Chris Cuomo on CNN, suggesting that Tucker Carlson is a coward because he wants to catch him in a Catch-22.
The Catch-22 is, if Tucker apologizes, it's because Tucker is evil, and if Tucker doesn't apologize, it's because Tucker is evil.
Here's Chris Cuomo making that case.
Now a lot of this stuff that's coming up, at least about Carlson, is from years ago, when he was desperate for attention.
Here's the test.
Would he say the same things today?
No, no.
He's too busy playing the victim.
He'd only say that he was naughty.
But he wouldn't repeat them tonight.
Why not?
Come on, big man.
Read the list of all the things that you said and do it again and show that you mean it.
Come on, you're not more about the money now than you are about the truth, are you?
He says apologizing to the mob costs people their jobs.
What a coward!
Okay, why is that cowardly?
That is true.
Apologizing to the mob very often does cost people their jobs.
Apologizing to people you've hurt is one thing.
Apologizing to a bunch of folks on Twitter who don't give a damn, that's another.
If they want to point to the person, like here's, for example, he made some comments about a guy named Warren Jeffs.
Warren Jeffs was convicted of facilitating rape.
And Tucker made some comments about how this guy was not actually guilty of facilitating rape.
Now, if victims of Warren Jeffs came forward and said, that's really offensive to me, and Tucker then came forward and apologized to them, that is a discreet victim to whom Tucker presumably owes an apology.
But if it's just some rando at Media Matters who hates Tucker Carlson and wants an apology from him on a daily basis, that's silly.
And that's basically what Tucker said.
Tucker gave a monologue last night.
He said, you know what, I'd offer an explanation or an apology, but I know that the people who are coming after me don't care about an explanation or apology.
And listen, I'm not in the business of questioning people's motives, but when it comes to media matters, I don't have to question their motives.
They've made them absolutely clear.
When it comes to people like Chris Cuomo, do you think Chris Cuomo is really angry that Tucker Carlson said this stuff in 2007?
Or is he gleeful that now this stuff has been uncovered?
Those two clips of Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo alone demonstrate the truth.
They think that Tucker Carlson's a bad guy and a liar, and so they are happy this stuff came up.
Do you think Tucker owes Chris Cuomo an apology?
Why?
If so, why?
Anyway, here was Tucker's response.
One of the only places left in the United States where independent thoughts are allowed is right here.
The opinion hours on this network.
Just a few hours in a sea of television programming.
It's not much, relatively speaking.
For the left, it's unacceptable.
They demand total conformity.
Fox News is behind us, as they have been since the very first day.
Toughness is a rare quality of the TV network, and we are grateful for that.
We've always apologized when we're wrong, and we'll continue to do that.
That's what decent people do.
They apologize.
But we will never bow to the mob.
Okay, and that seems like an appropriate response right there.
That last point is an appropriate response.
You apologize when you're wrong.
I have a running list on my website, Daily Wire, of all the dumb, bad things I've ever said.
I've issued apologies directly to people who I feel like I have offended, to who I have wronged, because it's not just about them being offended.
It's about me doing something wrong.
I've apologized to lots of people in my time.
But I'm not going to apologize to Media Matters for anything.
Those people can go take a long walk off a short pier, to use the clean version of what I would say.
And again, there is an agenda here.
There is, in fact, an agenda here.
And you can see the agenda.
And it's not just restricted to media matters.
There's an attempt by some folks on the left to still voices that they simply don't like.
I'll give you another example.
So, there's an interview on a podcast called The Recode Decode between Kara Swisher of Recode and Susan Wojcicki of YouTube.
She's the CEO of YouTube.
Now, I've invited Miss Washkiki on my Sunday special.
She has not responded.
I don't expect her to respond.
I'd be surprised if she does.
I'd be more than happy to have her.
We've asked on Jack Dorsey on our Sunday special ahead of Twitter.
He has said that he has not had time.
He's had time to go get mosquito bitten in a random cave in Malaysia, but showing up on one of the biggest podcasts in America, not so much to answer some tough questions.
In any case, this exchange is pretty telling.
So Kara Swisher, How's it going?
Hope everything's going well.
She's very angry, apparently, that her son likes to watch our videos.
Shout out to Kara Swisher's son.
How's it going?
Hope everything's going well.
Thanks for listening.
Kara Swisher, very, very angry that her son listens to the show, and in fact goes so far as to suggest that perhaps YouTube should change its algorithms so that her son shouldn't be able to find our videos, or perhaps we should even be kicked off of YouTube. - My son, who's 13 years old, started watching Ben Shapiro videos. who's 13 years old, started watching Ben Shapiro videos.
And he's like the gateway drug to the next group.
And then it goes right to Jordan Peterson, then it goes down, and in three clicks, he was at neo-Nazi stuff.
It was, like, astonishing.
And then I had to listen to it at dinner.
And then I've got, like, this kid who's like, well, Ben Shapiro's sort of smart.
I'm like, no, he's not.
No, he's not.
Not even slightly.
He's clever, but he's an idiot.
Anyway, it's exhausting.
But it has a huge effect on them.
There's a set of content that has to meet the community guidelines.
Ben Shapiro's going to meet the community guidelines.
So I don't think you're suggesting that we remove him from the platform.
Are you?
I would, but I can't.
I would, but I can't.
That tells you everything that you need to know about a lot of the folks on the left.
I would, but I can't.
And so, people try to find other ways of knocking people offline.
They try to find other ways of downgrading.
They try to find excuses to say that certain videos don't meet community guidelines on YouTube, or that Facebook ought to downgrade particular content, or that advertisers ought to pull off of programs.
The left isn't interested, at least many on the radical left are not interested in an exchange, a free and open exchange of ideas.
They are interested in shutting down those ideas.
I'll be at University of Michigan tonight.
The history department at the University of Michigan is putting on some sort of counter-event to my event at the University of Michigan.
Something about dilettantes in history and the power of the enwightenment.
I mean, this is the actual title of what they are talking about.
Let me find the exact title of the panel.
The panel is titled something like, When Provocateurs Dabble in History, Ben Shapiro and the Enwightenment.
Featuring speakers and panelists responding to my attacks on campuses and academia, along with my new history book, The Right Side of History.
How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great.
Go buy it right now.
It's surging up the charts as we speak.
I'm not sure how they're going to critique my book.
It's not out till next week.
I don't know that they have an advanced copy.
If they do, I'd wonder how and why they wanted one.
But it is demonstrative of the fact that they don't actually want to have a discussion.
They could just show up to my discussion and then they could ask questions.
We could have a respectful conversation.
In fact, some of the folks who are speaking at this thing sound like they've done interesting work.
So I frankly kind of want to hear from Dean Angela Diller, for example.
She wrote a book about multicultural conservatism.
I think it could be kind of interesting.
But instead, they've decided to directly counter-program my speech because they don't want people showing up to my speech.
Fortunately, nobody cares.
They have like 31 RSVPs and we have 4200 people on a waitlist for an event that already has 1200 people coming.
But the bottom line is this.
For too many folks on the left, this is true of Media Matters.
It's true of a lot of tech companies.
They're more interested in shutting down other sides of the debate than they are in actually having the discussion.
And if they can't do it by simply doing it directly, instead they will seek other excuses.
And that means digging up everything old that you've ever said and trying to destroy you with it.
These are people who are looking to hurt you.
These aren't people who are looking to purify the public debate.
Tucker made a point.
He said, listen, at least the old Puritans wanted to purify the public space.
The left doesn't want to purify the public space.
They just want to get rid of people with whom they disagree.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
There's a new version of Papillon, the movie that originally featured Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.
The new version is fine.
It's okay.
Charlie Hunnam stars in the title role, and Rami Malek stars as Louis Degas, who is sort of the forger.
For folks who don't remember the story of Papillon, there is supposedly, the story is probably mostly fiction, there is a guy who is convicted of murder and was sent to French Guiana and then to Devil's Island, and he escaped after a bunch of years and ended up writing a best-selling book about all of this.
That became a movie with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.
So I could recommend the one with Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek, but it's mostly just okay.
Instead, I'll recommend the original with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.
Here's a little bit of that trailer.
After five years as an international bestseller, it comes to the screen.
Unquestionably, the greatest adventure of escape ever filmed.
Steve McQueen.
Dustin Hoffman.
Papillon.
First of all, I'll point out that Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman is a better combo than Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek.
Rami Malek, is it mandated that he be in every movie now?
Apparently, it is mandatory that Rami Malek be cast in every single movie filmed.
So, I'm not sure what part he plays in the new Captain Marvel, but I assume we'll see him in there somewhere.
The movie is worth watching, the original, and again, the remake is not bad.
It's just not the original.
Okay, time for a thing that I hate.
So I made fun of USC a little bit earlier.
The truth is, USC is a wonderful university and there are a lot of great students who go to USC.
My sister went to USC.
There's a horrible story coming out of the area around USC.
This is from the San Francisco Chronicle reporting.
The son of Oakland City Councilwoman Lynette Gibson McElhaney Was fatally shot early Sunday in Los Angeles.
Victor McElhaney, an Oakland native, was a student at the University of Southern California.
The avid drummer and jazz musician had recently transferred to the university from Cal State East Bay.
McElhaney apparently was the victim of an attempted robbery off campus because the area around USC is extraordinarily unsafe.
L.A.
area media outlets reported that McElhaney was approached by several males at the corner of Maple Avenue and Adams Boulevard.
One of them shot McElhaney before the group fled in a vehicle.
A sergeant at the LAPD's Newton Station, which responded to the incident, declined to provide further details.
Lynette Gibson McElhaney called her son's death a senseless act of violence.
She said, Victor was a son of Oakland.
He was a musician who drew his inspiration from the beat, soul, and sound of the town.
He belonged in every nook and cranny of Oakland.
I miss my baby.
Please keep me, my family, and all of my son's friends in your thoughts and prayers.
Now, I know that Victor McElhaney was a delightful person because he was a delightful- I actually had the chance to meet him.
So, when I was at USC, I spoke there just a few months ago.
And Victor McElhaney, unlike a lot of the people who decided to stand outside and protest, actually came and asked a question.
And we had a really nice exchange.
He was really genial.
I thought he was generous of spirit.
The world needs more people like Victor McElhaney.
Here's a little bit of our exchange.
Hi.
So, you have given a number of speeches about the difference between opportunity and outcome, and you say that our country has no lack of opportunity, correct?
Equal access to rights, I think, would be a better way to state it, yeah.
Oh, okay.
So, equal... I'm saying... Okay.
Equal access to the exercise of rights.
So, you're correct that I've said opportunity before, and it's not exact enough, so I'm modifying it now.
Okay.
Because when I say, because obviously... Not to forecast where this conversation is going to go, but...
I have a feeling where you're going to go, and you can correct me if I'm wrong.
I'll give you plenty of time.
What you're going to say is that not everybody has equal opportunity, which of course is true.
Some people are rich, some people are poor, some people are smart, some people are stupid.
but everyone does have equal access to rights.
No, no, no, okay.
For sure.
And the exchange went on for several minutes.
Really nice guy.
You can see he's really good-natured and curious and questioning.
Real loss to the United States.
Real loss to the world.
The death of Victor McElhaney.
Again, crime ought to be policed.
Criminals ought to be tracked down.
I only hope that his murderers are caught and punished to the fullest extent of the law.
It's really heartbreaking.
We need more conversations.
We need more people who are open-minded and open-hearted.
And Victor McElhaney was apparently one of those people.
I was just informed that he was the person I spoke to at the speech last night by a fellow member of the USC community.
So my heart goes out to his family and really I'm Pretty upset about it, as I think everybody who's a good-hearted person should be.
Alrighty, well, we will be back here a little bit later, but if you want to access that, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and become a subscriber.
Also, today would be a good day to pre-order my book, The Right Side of History, before it is all sold out at your local bookstore or on Amazon.
Go check it out right now, searching up the bestseller charts.
It comes out next week.
I'm looking forward to talking about it then, and we'll see you here later this afternoon.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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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