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March 18, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:29
The Battle For Narrative Dominance | Ep. 739
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The media turned the New Zealand white supremacist terrorist attack into a referendum on President Trump, Kirsten Gillibrand experiences predictable failure to launch, and President Trump goes wild on Twitter.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh man, lot of news to get to today.
Beto O'Rourke blowing it out in the fundraising on his very first day.
We'll get to that.
Plus, more good news for Beto O'Rourke.
Apparently, all data from MySpace 2003 to 2015 has disappeared.
So apparently, Beto's hacker friends got to it.
I see no other explanation.
We'll get to all the news in just one second.
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All right.
So last Thursday night, obviously, West Coast time, there was this horrible, evil terrorist attack in New Zealand.
A white supremacist goes to two mosques and shoots and kills now 50 people.
The death toll has been raised to 50.
And the entire West mourns because this is an act of evil.
And this, as I said last week, should be a moment of unity because when there are tremendous acts of evil, then we should at least grant the credibility that the vast majority of human beings in the West are saddened by an act of evil and are not sympathetic to the killer.
How many people did you see who are sympathetic to the evil white supremacist murderer on Friday?
Did you see any?
They're really pretty much nobody, pretty much nobody.
Yet the media decided that this was an opportune moment to push a political narrative.
And this is one of the worst aspects about our polarized politics.
That is, whenever there is a flashpoint, whenever there's an incident, the media immediately jump to which narrative does it back?
And can we support that narrative with other pieces of evidence or non-evidence?
Can we draw a narrative from a flashpoint?
So, in Ferguson, Missouri, where a white police officer shoots a black guy, they immediately draw a narrative.
White police officers across America are racist.
The criminal justice system is racist.
In the United States, when there is a shooting on a congressional baseball field, however, and Bernie Sanders is the person whose name is in the killer's mouth, then it's not about Bernie Sanders.
It's not about Bernie Sanders' large-scale radical rhetoric.
Nothing of that comes up because that doesn't back the narrative.
Okay, so what are the narratives that the media wishes to draw from New Zealand?
We talked a little bit about this on Friday because it was pretty obvious that the media were attempting to draw a narrative.
Their original narrative was going to be about gun control.
Then they realized that New Zealand actually is relatively gun controlled and it's a bad, it's a bad example.
If you're going to choose a country that requires gun control, New Zealand is probably not that country.
They have 1.2 million guns and 35 murders a year in the entire country of New Zealand.
So it is not a perfect example of a country that desperately needs gun control.
Nonetheless, the country will look at gun control.
So that took the narrative off the table.
The secondary narrative was going to be a narrative about Islamophobia.
The idea that all across the West, there are people who deeply hate Muslims.
And because there are people who deeply hate Muslims all across the West, they led this white supremacist to go around shooting people.
Now, what the left labels as deep hate of Muslims is anyone who points out that radical Islam, not Islam itself, radical Islam is a problem.
Or points out that radical Islam is not just a tiny fringe phenomenon inside the Muslim community.
That if you look at the global Muslim community, if you look at places like Afghanistan, or places like Iraq, or places like Iran, or places like Egypt, or places like Saudi Arabia, or places like Qatar, or places like the UAE, or places like Jordan, or places like Oman, or places like Yemen, if you look at any of those places, What you will see is that radical Islamism is not actually a fringe phenomenon alone.
And if you look at Pew Global Research polls of how people believe, what you see is that a large number of people in a lot of these countries, Pakistan, Afghanistan, 99% of people in a poll of Afghanis from 2010, Pew Research poll, thought that honor killing was okay.
Okay, that is extreme.
By any definition, that is extreme.
Now, if you point that out, the idea is that pointing that out led to what happened in Christchurch.
That is an absolute slander and it is an absolute lie and it is disgusting.
It is disgusting.
Now it's very funny because the same exact people who five minutes ago were suggesting that you are not allowed to use anti-semitic language the way that Ilhan Omar uses it.
But people who point that out, the people who point out that Ilhan Omar uses anti-semitic language, are actually trying to shut down the debate over America's foreign policy with regard to Israel, are today trying to shut down any sort of talk about radical Islam generally.
Now today isn't necessarily the day to talk about radical Islam, although radical Islam had itself a weekend.
There was a terrorist attack in Israel, there's now a terrorist attack going on in the Netherlands.
Both of them have been linked to radical Islam at this point.
But it is true that in the wake of the murder of Muslims, that is not the time to talk about radical Islam.
But that's true on every side.
That's true on every side, meaning that if you are somebody who wants to question whether radical Islam is a dangerous phenomenon across the world, Tying that to a white supremacist murdering a bunch of innocent Muslims at a mosque in Christchurch is a pretty vile tactic.
And yet that is what you saw across the media.
That is what you saw across the media.
I'm going to start with some students confronting Chelsea Clinton.
So Chelsea Clinton made the mistake, this terrible, terrible mistake.
What was her terrible mistake?
Chelsea Clinton said that Ilhan Omar had been anti-Semitic.
Ilhan Omar is the Muslim congresswoman from Minnesota who is an anti-Semite.
She has three times in the last two months humiliated herself with open anti-Semitism.
And the last time she did it so obviously and so clearly that the Democratic Party was on the verge of condemning her.
And then the radicals in the Democratic Party stood up and they said, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We're not going to do that.
We're not going to condemn her.
We'll take her name out of the resolution and then we'll turn it into a resolution condemning every bad thing on planet Earth, including Islamophobia.
So Chelsea Clinton was one of the people who called out Ilhan Omar for using anti-semitic language.
Well students confronted Chelsea Clinton and they are blaming Chelsea Clinton, these students, they are blaming Chelsea Clinton for the shooting in Christchurch.
This is how radical the radical fringe of the left is.
Chelsea Clinton is somehow to blame for a white supremacist shooting up a church in Christchurch because she called out anti-semitism from Ilhan Omar.
This went viral over the weekend.
Students confronting Chelsea Clinton.
I'm so sorry.
Well, certainly, it's never my intention.
I do believe words matter.
We do matter.
This right here is the result of a massacre stoked by people like you and the words you put out into the world.
And I want you to know that and I want you to feel that deep inside.
- You can hear people snapping in the background.
What does I'm sorry you feel that way mean?
What does that mean?
What is she supposed to apologize for?
She's supposed to apologize because she called out Ilhan Omar for being anti-semitic.
So if you call out a Muslim for being anti-semitic, then you're responsible for the murder of other unrelated Muslims who are not being anti-semitic in Christchurch.
And then these two people, the people who were going after Chelsea Clinton, for goodness sake.
I mean, how radical is left?
They're making me defend Chelsea Clinton now.
This is unbelievable.
These two people were given a platform in BuzzFeed News, a platform to explain why they called out Chelsea Clinton for the shooting in Christchurch.
BuzzFeed News posted a piece by these two radicals, whose names are Lynn Tweek and Rose Assaf, and it says why we confronted Chelsea Clinton at the Christchurch vigil.
Here's why.
Yesterday we posted a video of Leon confronting Chelsea Clinton at a vigil for the victims of the white supremacist New Zealand mosque massacre.
Today we woke up with over 100,000 people talking about it on Twitter.
Needless to say, this is not what we expected.
Well, it sort of was.
We went to the vigil for one reason, to grieve the loss of innocent lives that were stolen from this world by vile hatred.
We wanted to join our friends and colleagues in a time of heartbreak and agony to remember the 49 Muslims who were murdered for being Muslim.
We did a double take when we first noticed Chelsea Clinton was at the vigil.
Just weeks before this tragedy, we bore witness to a bigoted anti-Muslim mob coming after Representative Ilhan Omar for speaking the truth about the massive influence of the Israel lobby in this country.
We believe Ilhan Omar did nothing wrong except challenge the status quo, but the way many people chose to criticize Omar made her vulnerable to anti-Muslim hatred and death threats.
We were shocked when Clinton arrived at the vigil, given that she had not yet apologized to Representative Omar for the public vilification against her.
So Ilhan Omar was a wounded innocent in all this, Chelsea Clinton was the offender, and because Chelsea Clinton called out Ilhan Omar for being an anti-Semite, this supposedly led a white supremacist to murder people halfway around the world in New Zealand.
Many have said it was unfair to connect Chelsea's words to the massacre in Christchurch, these two dolts, right?
To them, we say that anti-Muslim bigotry must be addressed wherever it exists.
That includes Chelsea Clinton.
Okay, a couple of quick notes.
A couple of quick notes about the two people who were just given space in BuzzFeed to harass Chelsea Clinton some more.
Hey, it turns out that both of these people are deeply radical in every possible way.
And they got their defenders, of course, from the radical left and their friends, the folks over at The Intercept and such.
So a couple of things.
Dweek tweeted out, quote, you're only interested in demolishing Israel, not in finding a solution.
Demolishing Israel is a solution.
So the same people who are calling out Chelsea Clinton for supposedly being anti-Islam, for calling out Ilhan Omar, are themselves deeply anti-Semitic to the point where they are calling for the full demolition of Israel.
The full demolition of Israel.
It's unbelievable.
Okay, and the other woman who wrote this, repeatedly used the term, the F word, for gay people.
In the United States.
But those people were given a platform by BuzzFeed News.
It's just wonderful.
And this sort of dishonesty was endemic in the media.
Endemic.
Hey, Linda Sarsour did the same thing.
Linda Sarsour, radical anti-Semite and, by the way, friend to terrorists.
Right, legitimately has stood with terrorist Rasmia Odette on stage and hugged her and all the rest.
Linda Sarsour tweeted out, I am triggered by those who piled on representative Ilhan Omar and incited a hate mob against her until she got assassination threats, now giving condolences to our community.
What we need you to do is reflect on how you contribute to Islamophobia and stop doing that.
So, you see how this works?
The idea now is that if you criticized Ilhan Omar for being an anti-Semite, somehow you're responsible for the massacre in Christchurch.
That is the most extreme wing of this push.
But that is not the leading edge of the push.
That is not the mainstream of the push.
The mainstream of the push is that anybody who has criticized radical Islam in any way is somehow responsible for what happened in Christchurch.
I'll get to that in just one second.
First, let's talk about the fact that our federal government is simply out of control.
Out of control on every possible level.
Congress is filled with crazy people.
It's a nightmare, and people are tired of complaining about it, and that's why I'm a big believer in calling a convention of states where we the people can propose amendments.
Yes, amendments that could force Congress to stay within its boundaries, could force the executive branch to stay within its boundaries.
The fact is that the founding bargain, that there would be checks and balances between the various branches, that founding bargain has been eroded over the course of centuries, and it is time to restore that founding balance so that the legislative can check the executive, the executive can check the judiciary, and all the way around.
That's why we need a convention of states.
It's the only way to get a job done.
There are already 3.8 million people with us on this more every day, so join me and my friend Mark Meckler.
Go to conventionofstates.com slash ben and sign the petition today.
That is conventionofstates.com slash ben.
A lot of folks talk about how exactly this would work.
It is a fully constitutional provision under Article 5 of the Constitution.
It was designed to work this way.
It hasn't been taken advantage of, but now is the time for us to stand together and restore some of those constitutional balances and checks.
Conventionofstates.com slash Ben to sign the petition today.
Conventionofstates.com.
So as I say, the most radical wing of the left is suggesting that people like Chelsea Clinton are responsible for Christchurch.
The mainstream of the left is suggesting that people like Sam Harris and I are responsible for Christchurch.
And so there's a piece over at the New York Times In which a guy named Omar Aziz writes a piece called Our Brother, Our Executioner.
And he suggests that anybody who criticizes Islam as having an internal problem is responsible for the situation in Christchurch.
He says, Islamophobia is not a fringe problem.
It is embedded in much of Western society.
For over two decades now, the span of an entire generation, the whole Muslim community has been forced to accept collective guilt and punishment for every act of terror or violence committed by one of its members.
Never would or should this standard be applied to white people who seem to have kept the privilege of individual differentiation for themselves.
I don't know where he's getting this.
This is a lie.
Muslims are safer in the West than they are in the Muslim world.
And the fact is that in 2017, in 2017, Islamic extremism caused 84,000 deaths worldwide.
84,000 deaths.
Islamic extremism cost 84,000 deaths worldwide.
84,000 deaths.
Nearly all of them were not in the West.
That's according to CBS News, a new report from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Global Extremist Monitor, produced by Tony Blair's Institute for Global Change.
you And the fact is that Muslims in the West are not only overwhelmingly treated well, just as Jews in the West are overwhelmingly treated well even if there are anti-Semitic attacks from white supremacists on occasion.
This notion that widespread Islamophobia is dominant in the West because there are people like Sam Harris who ask about the nature of Islam or Bill Maher who ask about the nature of radical Islam or people like me who point out that polling data show that radical Islam is not a tiny, tiny, tiny phenomenon.
That attempt to expand the argument is really in bad faith.
And not only in bad faith, counterproductive.
Because the fact is that if we refuse to call out radical Islam, then radical Islam does grow in the same way that if you refuse to call out white supremacy, white supremacism grows.
You have to call it out.
It's important to call out this stuff.
That's what provides protection for actual non-radical Muslims.
And at the same time, you can call out an ideology and also say that innocent people should not be killed under any circumstances.
It's astonishing that folks in the media refuse to acknowledge this fact.
In a second, I'm going to show you how the media are contributing to this narrative.
So, for example, going back to Ilhan Omar for a second.
Ilhan Omar is radical on Israel.
She's not just radical on Israel, she's an anti-Semite.
She's an anti-Semite.
And the push from the left is that if you criticized Ilhan Omar, this meant that you were actually anti-Islam.
That a criticism of Ilhan Omar made you an Islamophobe.
Now again, this is hilarious because the same people who defended Ilhan Omar will say that being openly anti-Semitic does not make you anti-Semitic, but certainly if you're anti-Israel, that is not anti-Semitism.
Or if you say anti-Israel things, that doesn't make you anti-Semitic.
That's a proposition with which I generally agree.
But those same people will say that if you criticize Ilhan Omar, then you're anti-Islam.
The Washington Post just gave a full op-ed space to Ilhan Omar to talk about her foreign policy.
I don't remember them doing the same thing to Steve King.
I don't remember that at all.
And yet, that is something the Washington Post is pushing because the generalized narrative the media wish to draw is that what happened in New Zealand is the predictable result of Islamophobia in the West.
The same folks will say that radical Islamic terror attacks are not the predictable result of the growth of radical Islamist ideology, but they will suggest that radical white supremacist terrorist attacks are the growth of white supremacist ideology in the West.
Now, here's my view.
The growth of radical ideology has consequences no matter which ideology we are talking about.
I've worried about the growth of white supremacism for years.
I've been talking about it openly since 2015-2016.
It's been four years I've been talking openly about the growth of white supremacy and white supremacism online.
I'm glad that some people are finally arriving to the party, but the fact is That the media narrative here is not truly directed at stopping white supremacism.
It's directed at two things.
Linking President Trump and the right generally with white supremacism and linking anybody who has critiques of radical Islam with violence against Muslims.
And that is not only inappropriate, it's disgusting.
It's disgusting.
Calling out radical Islam is not the same thing as suggesting that ordinary Every day, non-radical Muslims, innocent people ought to be killed.
That's absurdity at its highest level.
And when people point out, I did a video a while back in which I just, all the video was, was me citing polls of Muslims from around the globe in different countries and talking about the level of radicalism in those various countries.
And people say, well, this is Islamophobic.
No, those are poll numbers.
I talked about all of this at University of Pittsburgh not four months ago.
And I talked about the various anti-semitic threats around the globe.
And I talked about Muslim anti-semitism.
I talked about radical Islam.
And I pointed out that westernized Muslims are significantly less radical and nearly non-radical in orientation as opposed to Muslims who are living in, for example, Afghanistan.
Okay, so this is not a matter of you criticize radical Islam and therefore you're okay with the murder of Muslims in Christchurch.
What kind of insanity is this?
And again, we only apply this logic on the level of the media when it is convenient to a narrative that the West is radically anti-Islamic.
Which again, if you've seen the response of the West to this terrorist attack, I'm failing to see it.
Honestly, I'm failing to see it.
Where are the people who are out there defending it?
Where are the people who are saying we should ignore the actual terrorist attack?
Where is that happening?
Now, the fact is that inside the Islamic world, inside countries that are governed by Islam, there are Muslim terrorists who are killing thousands and thousands and thousands of people every single year to no generalized public outcry.
The reason there's outcry in the West is because this does not meet the West's values.
Everybody in the West knows this.
And when we look at people like this white supremacist piece of garbage, citing the West as a rationale for his actions, we look at him, we say, you are a disgusting human being and your ideology is disgusting.
The West is unified against this sort of stuff and attempting to draw lines in order to make political hay is really pretty vile stuff.
Now, the easy in for a lot of folks on the left is, of course, attacking President Trump.
And that's because President Trump is a is a clod who says cloddish things.
But if you are going to blame President Trump for the shooting in Christchurch, I don't know how you get there.
I really don't know how you get there.
Unless you are also going to blame Bernie Sanders for the congressional baseball shooting.
You're gonna have to explain how President Trump called for violence against people who go to mosque.
Because Bernie Sanders used radical language against everybody who doesn't agree with him on economics or climate change.
We don't blame him for the congressional baseball shooting.
Does that mean that his language is appropriate?
No.
Does it mean that President Trump's language is appropriate?
No, it doesn't.
But trying to link him to white supremacism?
And shooting attacks in New Zealand is really pretty gross.
And not only is it gross, it's exactly what the shooter wanted.
So I said last week that we shouldn't discuss the manifesto.
We shouldn't go out of our way to talk about the disgusting ideas in this killer's manifesto.
And I meant that because that's what he wanted.
What he wanted was for his ideas to get out there.
I was perfectly fine and more than fine.
I thought it was important to label this a white supremacist terror attack on Muslims.
I was very clear about this last week, but I didn't think that it was necessary to go into the details of his manifesto, specifically because he says in the manifesto that he wants to divide Americans from each other, he wants to divide people in the West against each other, and so he was using his manifesto to do this.
And the media were complicit in that.
They decided they were going to jump on this too, and they were going to cite a line in which he said that he admired President Trump, and they were going to use that as a way to suggest that everyone who supports President Trump, as well as President Trump himself, is somehow responsible for what just happened in Christchurch.
Here's an entire montage of people in the media racing to blame President Trump for an action he had nothing to do with.
The shooter, according to these reports, specifically invoked our president as an inspiration.
There's an intolerance that's being spread in this country, in this world, and it comes from the political dialogue.
Let's be clear, it comes from political leaders.
Words have consequences, like saying we have an invasion on our border.
The language he uses in this manifesto is all about invaders.
It's also language that President Trump used in a campaign ad before the midterm election.
You have a president who, when he was a candidate, talked about banning Muslims from entering this country.
So this is a president who has given plenty of rhetorical ammunition, I think, to terrorists like this.
Okay, a couple of things.
One, you'll notice that a bunch of these media figures and political figures like Bill de Blasio are out there citing President Trump's calling the southern border an invasion as a rationale for all of this.
This wasn't an attack on illegal immigrants, number one.
Number two, I can disagree with the president on his use of the word invasion.
I don't think this is an invasion.
I've forcefully spoken out against that sort of language.
But to link the president's border policy with the shooting of Muslims in New Zealand...
Forgive me if that seems like a bit of a stretch.
Now, in a second, we'll get to President Trump's rhetoric itself, the quote-unquote Muslim ban, and all the rest.
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So as you see, The media are attempting to broaden the narrative.
So it starts at the very outer edge with Chelsea Clinton is responsible for Christchurch because she said mean things about Ilhan Omar, who's an anti-Semite.
And then it was moved into everybody who has ever said anything about radical Islam is responsible for what happened in Christchurch.
And now it's President Trump is personally responsible for what happened in Christchurch because of his language about invaders.
Because of his language about the invasion of the country.
Don Lemon on CNN was trying to say this.
He was saying that the New Zealand terrorists looked up to Trump and therefore this is President Trump's fault.
A suspect in the murders of at least 49 people at two mosques in New Zealand posted a manifesto online before staging his rampage.
It's a white nationalist screed, filled with hateful messages against immigrants, minorities, and Muslims.
There's a reason why this shooter, in his manifesto, says that Donald Trump is a renewed symbol of white identity who shares a common purpose.
What could be the common purpose that the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, Who says, I think Islam hates us and calls Mexicans rapists and criminals, could have with a white nationalist shooter who shot and killed 49 people.
I think it's fairly obvious.
There's a couple of things that are, right, and there's Don Lemon.
It's totally obvious what the connection would be.
Okay, a couple of things.
One, is President Trump's language good on this stuff?
No.
Has it been good on this stuff?
No.
I condemned it when he said it.
Way back in 2015, when he was talking about a full-on Muslim ban, when he said it's time to ban Muslims from the country, I said that is stupid and wrong.
By the way, his actual practical ban is not a Muslim ban.
Only five of the seven countries on the travel ban are Muslim, and they are the same seven countries named by President Obama.
So the actual policy implemented is not reflective of the language.
Was the language good?
No, the language was never good.
Okay, but that's not the same thing as blaming him for the shooting in Christchurch.
I don't remember, again, anyone in the media saying, you know whose name was on the congressional baseball shooter's lips?
Bernie Sanders.
Why?
Because it didn't match the narrative.
We can condemn language, and we should condemn bad language, but trying to blame bad language for people shooting each other in Christchurch, shooting each other, a white supremacist shooting people in Christchurch, is a real attempt to tear apart our civilization.
It really is.
We should be condemning bad ideologies.
We should be actively fighting those bad ideologies.
But that is not the same thing as blaming President Trump for an event he did not have anything to do with.
I think it's a horrible event.
It's a horrible thing.
I saw it early in the morning when I looked at what was happening in New Zealand.
I just spoke, as you know, through the Prime Minister.
Now, let's be clear about this.
President Trump has, of course, condemned what happened in Christchurch.
Here's what President Trump had to say about it when it happened.
I think it's a horrible event.
It's a horrible thing.
I saw it early in the morning when I looked at what was happening in New Zealand.
I just spoke, as you know, through the prime minister.
I think it's a horrible, disgraceful thing and a horrible act.
OK, obviously, President Trump is not big in favor of all of this.
But with that said, should the president give some sort of address on the nature of radical Islam versus regular Islam?
Should he give an address on why Muslims are full-fledged citizens of the West?
Sure, I don't see why not.
I mean, the guy's got time, obviously.
He's tweeting like crazy.
I think that that would be a good thing for the President of the United States to do.
But make no mistake, the media's goal here is not to actively tamp down the aspirations of the white supremacists.
They are parroting his claims so that they can use them for politically divisive purposes.
They're doing exactly what the white supremacists wanted them to do.
He says so in the manifesto itself.
It was enough to simply call out and say, listen, white supremacism is evil.
This person was evil, and white supremacism should be called out wherever it's seen.
But to try and turn it into a baton to wield against people who are critical of radical Islam, or Ilhan Omar, or people who support President Trump?
That's obviously done in bad faith.
Pretty terrible stuff.
It really is.
Okay, let's talk about 2020.
So, there's an amazing disconnect between what happens in the political commentariat and what happens in the real world.
Beto O'Rourke raised in his first day in the race, in his very first day in the race, Beto O'Rourke raised, I kid you not, 6.1 million dollars.
Yeah, I think that calls for some Beto music.
That's right.
All right.
So Beto O'Rourke raised $6.136 million in online donations from all 50 states on his very first day.
That is the number one total.
It tops the $5.9 million one-day haul for Senator Bernie Sanders.
The other closest 2020 Democratic candidate, Senator Kamala Harris, at $1.5 million.
Now, that gives the lie to the suggestion that he had not raised a lot of money.
This was the suggestion made last week when O'Rourke was asked specifically about it, and he sort of deferred.
He said, I'm not going to talk about that.
Now the media have turned on Beto.
Beto has issued about 37 apologies in his first 48 hours campaigning.
For example, Beto said in one of his appearances that his wife did most of the raising of their kids, which seems to me a compliment to his wife, not an attempt to degrade his wife.
Nonetheless, crazy people went nuts over this.
How dare Beto say that his wife did most of the raising of his children?
Just absurd.
So Beto apologized for that.
So here's Beto doing that.
It's absolutely valid criticism and it's constructive criticism.
It has already made me a better candidate.
Not only will I not say that again, but I'll be much more thoughtful going forward in the way that I talk about our marriage and in my ham-handed attempt to try to highlight the fact that Amy has Okay, so there's Beto apologizing.
If you can't get enough of Beto apologizing, I have some more for you.
So here's Beto apologizing for his failure to acknowledge his own white privilege.
should have also been a moment for me to acknowledge that that is far too often the case.
Okay, so there's Beto apologizing.
If you can't get enough of Beto apologizing, I have some more for you.
So here's Beto apologizing for his failure to acknowledge his own white privilege.
So this will be the Beto O'Rourke apology tour.
As I've shared with others and certainly became a topic of conversation in the Senate campaign, I have been arrested twice in my life.
One for attempted criminal trespass and another more braver offense of driving while intoxicated.
Those mistakes didn't end up defining me or narrowing my options in life.
And it's not because I'm a great person or I'm a genius or I figured anything out.
A lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm a white man.
That I had parents who had the cash to post bail at the time.
A lot of people don't have that.
Okay, so there's Beto apologizing for being a white male, so that's very exciting for him as well.
Now, the media have been jumping on this.
Wow, look at all of Beto's gaffes.
So many gaffes.
Here is the problem.
They already let Beto out of the cage.
Okay, Beto is out of the cage.
You spent two years building him up as a Senate candidate against Ted Cruz, and now you want to shove him back in the cage because you don't want him to be the nominee.
Too late, my friends.
You built it.
You bought it.
We'll get to more of that.
I will prove this to you in just one second.
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So there's an attempt to shove Beto O'Rourke back into the box because Beto O'Rourke is, of course, a privileged white male.
I pointed this out last week, that there were a couple of rich lines of attack on Beto O'Rourke.
Now, I underestimated his popularity because I thought, come on, really?
Like this guy?
Him?
I sort of feel like Michael Bluth in Arrested Development looking at his son's girlfriend.
Her?
Beto?
Really?
Him?
Okay, I guess.
But here's the funny thing about this.
The media, who are now attempting to paint Beto O'Rourke as a child of privilege, who doesn't actually have any positions on the issues, they made him.
So you'll recall all the way back to 2016.
I know, you're older than four years old.
So you'll remember all the way back to 2016, when the media did the exact same thing with President Trump, hilariously enough, against Ted Cruz.
They figured, okay, we'll build up President Trump.
We'll spend a billion dollars in free media coverage on Donald Trump, because dude's a joke, and people will figure it out.
And eventually, they'll decide that they're not interested in him, but first we can use him to get past some of the more serious Republican candidates.
And then, by the time they tried to push him back in the corner, they couldn't.
Well, nobody puts Beto in a corner.
Nobody puts Beto in a corner.
Hey, Reuters, this is the best evidence ever.
So Reuters is now coming out with this story about how Beto O'Rourke, when he was a teenager, was into hacking.
Well, there's a story from Reuters in which they reveal that they had all this information years ago.
Quote, Reuters reporter Joseph Menn exclusively revealed on Friday that Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke belonged to one of the best known groups of computer hackers as a teenager.
Within minutes.
His special report was the most popular story on Reuters.com here and was picked up by other news outlets.
But the origin of the story goes back more than two years.
Members of the group, which calls itself Cult of the Dead Cow, protected O'Rourke's secret for decades, reluctant to compromise the former Texas congressman's political career.
After more than a year of reporting, men persuaded O'Rourke to talk on the record.
In an interview in late 2017, O'Rourke acknowledged he was a member of the group on the understanding that the information would not be made public until after his Senate race against Ted Cruz in November 2018.
What in the actual... So, let me get this straight.
A Reuters reporter said, here is some newsworthy information.
I will bury it until after your election with Ted Cruz.
That's what the media were doing with Beto all along.
They were building him up.
Beto is indeed a lightweight.
One of President Trump's favorite terms.
Beto O'Rourke has no original thoughts.
Beto O'Rourke is not a shiny example of deep thought.
Honestly, if you want somebody who is capable of intelligent thought on the Democratic side of the aisle, it seems to me the most intelligent candidate on the Democratic side of the aisle is that mayor of South Bend, Pete Buttigieg.
That guy actually seems kind of smart, but Beto O'Rourke is not it, but it's too late.
The media built him up as a media phenomenon, and now all of the people like Jake Gyllenhaal, who were wearing Beto for Senate t-shirts back in 2018, are donating money to Beto again.
The media spent their attention building this guy up to fight Ted Cruz, and then it is too late now to shove him back in.
They can't do it.
There's no way to get him back in there.
Now, Beto can be a gaffe machine from here till Election Day, and that is what he is doing.
For example, Beto said yesterday, like, offending everyone on every side of the aisle, that if you have an AR-15, you should be able to keep your AR-15, but you shouldn't be able to buy a new AR-15, which makes no sense to anyone infiscated in either gun confiscation or protection of Second Amendment rights.
But here is Beto making that claim yesterday.
We allow people in this country to buy weapons that were designed, engineered, and sold to the United States military for the express purpose of killing people as effectively as possible, in as great a number as possible.
Now, if you own an AR-15, keep it.
Continue to use it responsibly and safely.
I just don't think that we need to sell any more weapons of war into this public.
Okay, so, you know, at the same time, so you can keep it.
It's a weapon of war, an evil, evil weapon of war, but also you should keep it.
This guy is the one you built up, and now you own it, guys.
Now, here's the truth.
Beto O'Rourke will do well among suburban women.
If you were actually going to select among the Democratic candidates most likely to be President Trump, Beto would probably be up high on that list.
Why?
Because he does appeal to suburban women.
He's got this kind of softer feel to him.
He's not quite as hard-edged as a Bernie Sanders.
He's not an open socialist the same way.
The Twitterverse is not reality.
Once again, Twitter, online world, not reality, and Beto proved that with his fundraising numbers for sure.
Now, the GOP, I don't know who's running the social media accounts over the GOP, but all I can say is that it is ridiculous.
Okay, like, what are you doing?
Why would you do such a thing?
So, in honor of St.
Patrick's Day, the GOP decided to indulge in a little bit of making fun of the Irish, which is just a genius tactic.
Very, very smart stuff.
So here is what the GOP tweeted.
They tweeted out a picture of drunk Beto from back when he had his DUI in the 90s.
And he's got an Irish leprechaun hat and a four-leaf clover on his head, or three-leaf clover on his head.
It says underneath, please drink responsibly.
And then they tweeted out, on this St.
Paddy's Day, a special message from noted Irishman Robert Francis O'Rourke.
What are you even doing?
What is wrong with you people?
Like, legitimately, this is stupid politics.
I know, there are a bunch of people who love memes, and so they're... I understand.
You think it's funny.
All right.
You know what else is not really funny?
The fact there are lots of Irish people in the United States who may not be pleased with the notion that they are all drunk louts, and that Beto O'Rourke is representative of them on St.
Patrick's Day.
Just just absurd.
Just absurd.
So everybody being incompetent at their jobs.
Well done all around.
OK, meanwhile, the other Democratic candidates are preparing their own runs.
Some successfully, some less successfully.
Joe Biden sort of let it slip over the weekend that he was that he was going to run.
And here's the problem with Joe Biden.
His best day will be his first day.
Let's get some Joe Biden music.
Oh yeah.
That's going to be Joe Biden's run, because he's going to be tripping over that ottoman every five seconds.
He's a giraffe on roller skates, is Joe Biden.
And so Joe Biden quasi-launched his campaign by accident.
He said that he had the most progressive record of anyone running, and then immediately switched, oh, I'm not running yet.
Yeah, we all know, dude, just do it already.
Just pull the trigger.
Enough.
You know, I get criticized.
I'm told I get criticized by the new left.
I have the most progressive record of anybody running for the United...
Anybody who would run.
I didn't mean...
With anybody who would run.
Okay, now, I will note here, he's obviously at a dinner, so you can't take into account the population of dinners as sort of the base of the people who are gonna vote for that guy.
But there's a shot of the crowd.
Everyone is between the age of 70 and death.
At the Joe Biden rally.
Beto, however, has a bunch of 20-somethings who are out there dancing, dancing in the moonlight.
So, not good news for Joe Biden.
Beto may have stolen his thunder.
Meanwhile, Cory Booker is attempting to go as radical as possible in an attempt to fend off Kamala Harris.
It's basically like watching the Hunger Games, this version of the Democratic primary.
There are one million candidates and only one will survive.
Let's get some Spartacus music.
There he is.
Ah, Spartacus, Cory Booker.
What a wonderful dude.
So, Cory Booker, he came out over the weekend and he was trying to prove his, again, progressive bona fides that he is a fighter.
And the thing about Cory Booker being a fighter is that Cory Booker is constantly, endlessly manipulative.
And so, whenever he says something, you can feel the gears turning.
Well, over the weekend, he explained that it was not just enough not to be a bigot.
You have to be an anti-bigot.
It's not just enough to say, I'm not racist.
You have to be an anti-racist.
What the hell does this mean?
I don't know.
Talk about it, Corey.
It's not enough to say I'm not a bigot.
You must be an anti-bigot.
You must be an anti-racist.
You must be a racist.
Now, I have no problem with the general idea that it's not enough to not be racist.
You actually have to fight racism.
I just have a feeling that what Cory Booker means by that is you have to reflect my policy preferences, or I will call you a bigot.
I will say that you might not be racist, but you forward the aspirations of racists.
That's where that is going in pretty short order.
Booker has no path.
I'm not sure even why he's running.
There's nothing happening for Cory Booker in this race.
Speaking of people for whom nothing is happening in this race, Amy Klobuchar also on the pandering train.
She's bought herself a pander bear.
So, Amy Klo- We have some Fargo music for Amy Klobuchar from the Frozen North.
So she too is attempting to now pander.
She understands there's an intersectional lane of the Democratic primaries and that she has no chance within it.
That's not going to stop her from talking about reparations.
So we have half the Democratic field now embracing slavery reparations.
In the year 2019, slavery was officially ended in the United States in 1865.
Not a single Democrat Who back slavery reparations can explain what the hell it is other than it's a bunch of big government programs I was already proposing just called slavery reparations.
Here Amy Klobuchar does the same thing before apparently beating one of her interns to death with a chair.
I believe we have to invest in those communities that have been so hurt by racism.
It doesn't have to be a direct pay for each person, but what we can do is invest in those communities, acknowledge what's happened, and that means better education.
That means looking at, for our whole economy, community college, one-year degrees, minimum wage, childcare, making sure that we have that shared dream of opportunity for all Americans.
Okay, so there she is pandering.
Is it going to do her any good?
No.
Amy Klobuchar is in the last year of Democratic candidates.
She's too moderate.
She's too sane.
And also, everything she does to pander just makes her look less authentic.
Speaking of which, the least authentic candidate of all time, Kirsten Gillibrand has launched her campaign to the great excitement of dozens, dozens of people across the United States, desperately awaiting Kirsten Gillibrand's run.
Let's get some Kirsten Gillibrand music.
No one knows.
She's all over the place.
She's taken every position on every issue.
And she is, again, utterly inauthentic.
So here was some of Kirsten Gillibrand's 2020 launch video, watched by, as I say, her immediate family plus her paid staff.
Our anthem calls America the home of the brave.
But we don't realize that the lyrics first pose it as a question.
Oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave?
It asks, will Brave win?
Well, it hasn't always, and it isn't right now.
We need a leader who makes big, bold choices.
Someone who isn't afraid of progress.
That's why I'm running for president.
And it's why I'm asking you for your support.
Will Brave win?
Oh my goodness.
Will Brave win?
Let's answer for ours.
What, what, okay, yeah, that's going nowhere.
That is, that is a, That is a rocket blowing up on launch, oh my goodness.
Yeah, first of all, if you are having to quote the lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner in your opening video, my favorite is these candidates who legitimately can't rock crowd.
Now, what you'll notice about Kamala Harris' launch video or Bernie Sanders' launch video is that they always have a big crowd, right?
People who actually cheer for them.
Kirsten Gillibrand, it's like her alone in a telephone booth.
This is my support base.
Sure, we started small, but soon, soon, a full hundred people might be with me at some point.
Kirsten Gillibrand, I mean, speaking of flip-flopping on positions, over the weekend, she was talking about the NRA.
Why?
Because of Christchurch, New Zealand, which, it turns out, New Zealand not in the United States.
Here's Kirsten Gillibrand, however, talking about how we need to call out the NRA in the United States.
It's just unbelievable that this president just continues to put fuel on the fire of hatred and bigotry.
It's not who we are in our best moments as a nation, and it's not who we should be in the future.
So I think it's outrageous.
And so my heart goes out to the victims.
It is a horrible shooting and another crisis in the world.
But we need to press it and who's actually going to do the right things and stand up to the NRA and stand up against hate.
I'm old enough to remember when Kirsten Gillibrand got an A rating from the NRA.
Wasn't that funny?
Yeah, Kirsten Gillibrand, that campaign going nowhere.
Okay, time for some stuff I like and then we'll do some stuff that I hate.
So...
A couple, so a thing that I like today.
There's a very good book about Israel's history.
I'm very often asked about what's a good book to read about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
That conflict, obviously, in the news again because there was another terrorist attack over the weekend in which a 47-year-old father of 12 was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist and the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, which has been summarily shooting its own citizens.
Decided that they would hand out candies upon the death of innocent Israelis.
We ignore that.
We're not supposed to pay attention to that.
That's very important to ignore.
There's a good book about all of this called Reclaiming Israel's History by David Bragg.
Roots, Rights and the Struggle for Peace.
It is a nuanced look at Israel's history, acknowledging where Israel has failed and pointing out where Israel has succeeded.
The book is quite good.
It's an easy read.
It's only about 250 pages, maybe.
So go check that out right now.
Reclaiming Israel's History by David Bragg.
Speaking of which, you know, this goes under things I hate, obviously, but it is amazing to watch as the Western media completely ignore Hamas shooting its own citizens in the streets in the Gaza Strip.
They're legitimately doing this.
People are finally, finally protesting in the Gaza Strip against the egregious misrule of Hamas.
Years ago, I tweeted about Israelis loving to build and Arabs loving to live in crap and bomb things.
And I was specifically talking, as I said, in that thread.
You can go read it.
I was specifically talking about the leadership of Hamas.
I was specifically talking about the leadership of the Palestinian Authority that would rather its own citizens live in sewage than actually pay to better the lives of those citizens.
I was specifically talking about that.
That remains true.
The leadership in Hamas, the leadership in the Palestinian Authority, would rather line their own pockets and build terror tunnels than take care of their citizens.
And now they're shooting their own citizens in the Gaza Strip.
Here's what that looked like.
Any media coverage of this, guys?
Any media coverage of Hamas shooting its own citizens in the Gaza Strip?
Nope.
None at all.
Nope, it's all Israel.
Israel's the problem.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
Okay, so, couple of quick things that I hate.
So, there is a senator in Australia, and this senator in Australia is indeed a basket of dung.
He's a bad guy.
Okay, so this Australian far-right senator named Fraser Anning put out an egregious statement in the aftermath of the Christchurch killing talking about how it was Muslim immigration to New Zealand that had caused it, which is just an absurdity and a moral blot and all the rest.
Here is this, so this guy was speaking to the media, and he's garbage, but A person behind him, a 17-year-old, hits him with an egg.
And here's what happens next.
Okay, and then his guys take down the kid.
Now, people have gone crazy on the politician for this.
Now, you should go crazy on the politician for his views.
His views are garbage.
If you're gonna go crazy on a guy for getting hit in the head with an egg and then turning around and slapping the guy who hit him with an egg, I'm not with you there.
I don't think you should punch Nazis.
I don't think you should slap eggs on the heads of people with whom you disagree.
I think that in a civilized society, we have discussions and debates about this stuff, and that violence in response to viewpoint is a terrible idea.
This is a bad idea.
So, you know, people who are all over the guy for- be all over the guy for his views.
Don't be all over the guy for turning around and slapping the kid who hit him in the head with an egg.
The kid got what he deserved for slapping the guy in the head with an egg.
Now, except for what happened afterward.
Apparently what happened afterward is that this guy's goons then beat the kid up.
That, of course, is inappropriate and absurd.
So many things can be true at once.
One, goons.
Once the guy is subdued, don't beat the crap out of him.
Two, don't slap your political opponents in the head with eggs.
Three, if you act in self-defense, even if you have bad views, that is still called self-defense.
All of these things can be true at once, but everything is gross.
Okay.
Final thing that I hate today.
So J.K.
Rowling has now decided it is time to make her books retroactively intersectional.
So that's exciting.
Nowhere in her books does she talk about Dumbledore being gay, but you remember a few years ago she suggested that Dumbledore was gay.
Now, this is not coming from a Harry Potter partisan.
I'm actually not a huge fan of the Harry Potter books.
I think that they are overwrought.
I think they are overlong.
They're just not... I'm just not a big fan.
But, she's now talking in her... She's now talking for the special features for the upcoming Fantastic Beats, The Crimes of Grindelwald Blu- Blu-Ray.
She reveals that there was a sexual dimension between Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald.
Like, this is a thing now.
So she's now going to... She didn't write it in the books, and it's not in the movies, but she is going to actively... We're now going to learn that Hermione was black, she just didn't know it.
Nobody knew it, that Hermione was black.
Because, obviously, it turns out that Hogwarts was not intersectional enough.
Dobby was transgender.
It's very exciting to learn all of these things retroactively.
The fact that the media allowed J.K.
Rowling to get away with this nonsense is really astonishing.
Doesn't it demonstrate how exploitative SJW nonsense is?
Meaning that all she has to do is throw out there that these characters, who she never characterized in this way, are actually all these things the SJW left wants them to be, and then they're cheering.
Shouldn't they have criticized her at the time for not making the characters openly that way?
I mean, if you want a transformative world, wouldn't you want J.K.
Rowling?
But she's getting off easy by simply not writing any of that stuff so that I can buy these books for my eight-year-old.
And then later she'll tell us that Dumbledore was gay.
And get all the SJW plot.
It's pretty, pretty astonishing.
I am looking forward to learning about the sexual peccadillos that were happening in Gerald Tolkien's Middle Earth.
I need to know about Sauron's sex life.
I think it's deeply important.
I need to know if Hobbiton Was a see-me bed of vile undertakings?
I need to know about all of these things.
It's very, very important.
So I look forward to hearing from the Tolkien Estate.
What an inane, stupid world we live in.
Okay, we will be back here a little bit later this afternoon with two more hours.
Also, make sure that you go pre-order my book because you don't want to be one of the unlucky people who wants to buy the book when it runs out of stock.
It's the right side of history.
Go check it out at any bookstore.
It comes out tomorrow, or you can buy an autographed copy at premierecollectibles.com slash Ben Shapiro.
That comes along with the benefit of maybe being able to ask me a question in tomorrow's live book signing, so go check that out right now.
We'll see you a little bit later today, or we'll be here tomorrow with you.
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