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March 20, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:21
Eat The Press | Ep. 741
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President Trump takes on the press, the 2020 Democrats compete for attention, and radical leftists decide the problem is guns and white people in New Zealand.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, we do have a lot to get to on today's show.
A lot of breaking news.
We'll get to all of it in just one second.
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All right, well, we have a lot to get to today.
First, I want to thank you all who went out and had a chance to purchase a copy of my book, The Right Side of History, which has soared up the bestseller charts.
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All right.
Meanwhile, when it comes to the news, Both Republicans and Democrats are sort of sitting around waiting for the Mueller report.
And what's shocking about that is that there are no real indicators that Mueller's got anything.
Mueller, so far, has filed a bunch of cases against people in Trump's orbit for ancillary crimes.
There's been no direct implication that President Trump was directly involved in any sort of collusion with Russia, which, as you will recall, was the original purpose of the Mueller hearings in the first place.
Well, now everyone is sort of sitting around waiting.
Democrats are waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Republicans are waiting for this thing to come out so they can move it to the back burner for 2020.
And Mueller is just taking his sweet time.
We still don't know when this is going to actually be released.
Actually, at Amazon, there's a placeholder date for the release of the Mueller report.
The Mueller report's already selling hot on Amazon.
The release date there lists March 26th, but it says that's a placeholder date.
We have no idea when this thing is going to drop.
The Associated Press says, with Robert Mueller's findings expected any day, the president has grown increasingly confident the report will produce what he insisted all along, no clear evidence of a conspiracy between Russia and his 2016 campaign.
Trump and his advisers are considering how to weaponize those possible findings for the 2020 race, according to current and former White House officials and presidential confidants who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Well, that's one of the things I love.
It's all about how Trump is going to weaponize the report.
So we've spent two and a half years investigating what may turn out to be a giant nothing.
And the question is, how is Trump going to weaponize it, according to members of the press?
How is Trump going to turn this to his advantage?
Republicans pounce.
Much pouncing.
A change is underway as well among congressional Democrats, says the AP, who have long believed the report would offer damning evidence against the president.
The Democrats are busy building new avenues for evidence to come out, opening a broad array of investigations of Trump's White House and businesses that go far beyond Mueller's focus on Russian interference to help Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton.
It is a striking role reversal.
No one knows exactly what Mueller will say, but Trump, his allies, and members of Congress are trying to map out post-probe political dynamics.
One scenario would have seemed downright implausible until recently, says the Associated Press.
The president will take the findings and run on them, rather than against them, by painting the special counsel as an example of failed government overreach and Trump himself as the victim who managed to prove his innocence.
Trump has been tweeting all of this stuff out.
He's been tweeting out that the Democrats' House investigative committees are, quote, stone-cold crazy.
You gotta love President Trump.
On Twitter, meanwhile, Adam Schiff, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, says there's a lot more to look into.
And the American people, I think, have basically made up their mind here, which is that President Trump is President Trump.
He's done what he's done, and nobody really cares.
I think virtually all of this is baked into the cake.
Most of the people who spend their time fulminating over President Trump's supposed crimes are people who really, really dislike President Trump in the first place.
Everybody else keeps saying, okay, where's the meat?
Where's the beef?
Yeah, he was surrounded by unsavory characters.
He spent his entire career surrounded by unsavory characters.
But unless you can actually show me some crimes he's committed, you're gonna have to take a backseat here.
Democrats, however, have made promises to their base that will largely go unfulfilled.
Now, all of this is good for Trump.
You would figure that Trump having the upper hand when it comes to the Mueller report is a big win for him.
It takes the issue off the table.
If it had gone the other way, then he would have had to run against the implication that he cheated the first time around.
But if the report comes out and basically says nothing incredibly damning about him, he's going to be able to say, and rightly so, that the media have spent two full years running chyrons about how he was a Russian tool.
I mean, that's every chyron over at CNN.
Unfortunately, the president has other agenda items that he is worried about, namely John McCain and George Conway.
That's funny, I spoke at the Reagan Library last night for the book launch, and it was great.
A thousand people showed up, more than a thousand people showed up, most of them young people, and people were asking me about President Trump's re-election prospects, and I said, well, the first thing he has to do is stop saying things.
Like, just stop your face from opening and sounds from coming out, dude, because none of this is helpful.
The truth is, when people think about Democrats, they don't want them in the White House.
And then when people think about Trump, they generally don't want him in the White House.
So, if you're Trump, you'd rather people think about Democrats.
Well, the only way they're going to do that is if you just suck the oxygen out of the room for the press.
Just don't give them any fodder.
But that's not what President Trump does.
So here's President Trump yesterday slamming John McCain.
Why?
I mean, John McCain has been dead for six months and somehow is still occupying President Trump's headspace for free.
It's pretty astonishing.
Here's President Trump going after John McCain.
I'm very unhappy that he didn't repeal and replace Obamacare, as you know.
He campaigned on repealing and replacing Obamacare for years, and then he got to a vote and he said, thumbs down, and our country would have saved a trillion dollars and we would have had great healthcare.
So he campaigned, he told us, Hours before that he was going to repeal and replace, and then for some reason, I think I understand the reason, he ended up going thumbs up.
And frankly, had we even known that, I think we would have gotten a vote because we could have gotten somebody else.
So I think that's disgraceful.
Plus, there are other things.
I was never a fan of John McCain, and I never will be.
Okay, so him going after John McCain again, this is just providing a headline.
Now, is his assessment of John McCain's behavior on Obamacare correct?
Yeah, it actually is.
John McCain's behavior on Obamacare was egregious.
He basically killed the Republican attempt to repeal the individual mandate, and he did so at least partially out of personal pique with President Trump, which is bad behavior.
But President Trump doesn't need to feed into this.
Unfortunately, he's feeding into a number of storylines that are not helpful to him.
He has decided to punch back, for example, at Kellyanne Conway's husband, because this is the real Housewives over here.
I mean, it's just, this is a reality TV show.
And listen, President Trump knows reality TV, so he should know that reality TV is not necessarily a way to gain popularity, unless you are the host and you can preside over the chaos.
President Trump raised the temperature on Wednesday on his feud with lawyer George Conway, according to the Daily Mail, calling him a, quote, husband from hell.
George Conway, often referred to as Mr. Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is very jealous of his wife's success and angry that I, with her help, didn't give him the job he so desperately wanted.
I barely know him, but just take a look.
A stone-cold loser and husband from hell.
Okay, so that is a thing.
So the president going after George Conway.
Now, who is George Conway?
He's just Kellyanne's loudmouth husband who feels the necessity to go on Twitter and sound off a lot.
So what?
Why is Trump punching down?
Because George Conway called him a crazy person.
Because George Conway has suggested that the president suffers from narcissistic personality disorder.
Now, here is the thing about narcissistic personality disorder.
There are very few politicians who run for high office who do not suffer from a mild form of this condition.
Narcissistic personality disorder is basically you are just obsessed with yourself and think you're very important.
I thought that it was true of Barack Obama.
People think that it's true of President Trump.
Who cares?
And mostly, why should Trump be punching down at Kellyanne's husband?
And if you're Kellyanne Conway, I mean, I don't even know how you make that marriage work, when you've got your boss calling your husband a husband from hell.
I can tell you that we have female employees here.
I have not insulted their husbands this way.
This is not the way to run an administration, no matter what their husbands do.
The Washington Post apparently has released a May 31st, 2017 letter from Kellyanne Conway's husband to the President, in which he turned down the position of Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division of the DOJ.
So Trump was claiming that Conway was trying to get a job with him, and that turned out not to be true.
It turns out that Conway actually turned down a job from the Trump administration.
He wrote at the time, "Kellian and I continue to support you and your administration.
I look forward to doing so in whatever way I can from outside the government." That did not obviously end up happening.
So this sort of drama continues to play out.
Is any of this stuff useful?
Is any of this stuff good for President Trump?
Of course not.
Of course not.
And now, Kellyanne Conway's husband, George Conway, is much more famous than he was even a week ago.
Conway has said that he withdrew his consideration after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.
He said, I'm thinking to myself, this guy's going to be at war with the Justice Department for the next two years.
I'm not doing this.
Conway had launched a barrage of insults at the president Monday evening, tweeting medical definitions of personality disorders, including deceitfulness and grandiosity as symptoms, and saying they apply to the 45th president.
And that, of course, follows on President Trump slamming John McCain and then Saturday Night Live.
Over the weekend, President Trump had some extra time and just decided to tweet from the Oval Office a bunch of stuff, a lot of it really dumb, including Some nonsense about how SNL should be federally regulated, or something.
And Kellyanne Conway's husband decided to jump into the fray, and now President Trump has decided to jump into the fray.
If you're a Republican, if you're a conservative, if you're an American, you do have to be wondering, what is the President of the United States thinking?
Like, you are the President, dude.
Like, this is an office that does have, I know, I know we're done with decorum, I know we've decided that we don't want that as the American people, that we want selfie-stick Presidents, and Presidents who tweet their innermost thoughts from the Oval Office, but, Is this really forwarding even your political goals?
I gotta wonder.
In just a second, we're going to get to a new study that shows that trigger warnings are effectively useless.
We will also get to the Trump The Trump attacks on the press and the press attacking President Trump, because while Trump's attacks on Kellyanne Conway's husband are worthless and his attacks on McCain are counterproductive, his attacks on the press are somewhat called for.
We'll talk about that in just one second.
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Alrighty, so President Trump Has been expending energy on George Conway.
He's been expending energy on John McCain.
He's also been expending energy on the press.
And here's where the president is correct.
There is no question that the press are stacked against the president.
The best case in point that I can name is this insane story.
This wild story.
In which CNN just won an award, the Walter Cronkite Award, from USC's Norman Lear Center, announced by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
They give an award to CNN for what?
For that awful, terrible, 15 minutes hate, Parkland Town Hall shooting, in which Dana Lash was booed and called a murderer, in which Marco Rubio was compared to a school shooter.
CNN just won an award from USC for journalism for that.
Unbelievably, the Norman Lear Center titled its press release announcing the award, Cronkite Award Proves That Facts Matter, it stated, CNN Parkland Town Hall, a two-hour special aired for only seven days after 17 students and teachers were murdered by a gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
In this compelling and powerful forum, moderator Jake Tapper deftly gave generous space to speak to gun control advocates, politicians, Parkland students, parents, and a representative from the NRA.
The program helped, quote, advance the national conversation on gun control and violence, the jury said.
I watched that thing.
It was a monstrosity.
Everybody who watched it was made dumber for having watched it.
It was a terrible media event.
That media event was specifically designed to allow the targeting of pro-gun people and allow really deplorable human beings like Sheriff Scott Israel of the Broward County Police Department, Sheriff's Department, to allow him to shirk his responsibility and blame others for his own failures.
It was an egregious, egregious event.
And yet CNN was championing itself, winning an award for that sort of thing because the press are indeed incredibly biased.
When President Trump smacks the press around, Sometimes it is justified.
Now, does that mean President Trump should call the press enemies of the people?
No, that is Stalinist language.
You should never call people enemies of the people unless they are actively engaged in terrorism, for example.
But, is President Trump right to hit the press?
Absolutely.
So, here's the example.
President Trump, yesterday at the White House, he was railing against the discrimination against conservatives between social media censorship and fake news.
He is not wrong about any of this stuff.
When you get the back scene, back office statements made by executives of the various companies, and you see the level of, in many cases, hatred they have for a certain group of people that happened to be in power, that happened to have won the election.
You say that's really unfair.
So something's happening with those groups of folks that are running Facebook and Google and Twitter.
And I do think we have to get to the bottom of it.
It's very fair.
You know, the incredible thing is that we can win an election and we have such a stacked deck.
Okay, well, there is truth to this.
He is correct that the media have been attacking him, that the media are in fact stacked to the left.
There is no question that the heads of the social media companies are to the left.
Now, their algorithms may not always spit out results that are to the left, because maybe it turns out that conservatives are kind of good at business, and that we spend a lot of time and effort trying to figure out how we can best reach audiences on these platforms.
Maybe it turns out that our content is good and people want to engage with it.
But it is true that the social media companies have never had a discussion about how to downplay the traffic to Huffington Post.
They certainly have had discussions about how to do so to Fox News or to Daily Wire.
There's no... When was somebody last asked... When did someone last ask the head of YouTube whether they ought to be censoring material from the Young Turks?
The answer is never.
When did somebody who is in a prominent position last ask whether YouTube might think about how to change the algorithms to censor me?
Last week.
Kara Swisher did it to the head of YouTube.
So President Trump is not wrong about the bias in the media.
And it's always astonishing to me that people on the left find this controversial.
Why is it controversial that the media are generally biased to the left?
Now the media are not monolithic, of course.
There are many media outlets.
We are a successful one here at Daily Wire.
There are plenty of successful right-wing media outlets.
If you agglomerate all of them, and you stack them up against CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, virtually every major newspaper in the country, does that even play a minute role?
I mean, it's hard to suggest that right-wing media are on even par with everybody else in the left-wing media.
It simply is not true.
Even Ted Koppel acknowledges as much.
Ted Koppel is no raving right-winger.
He was speaking at the Carnegie Endowment, and he said, listen, when President Trump says the press are out to get him, they kind of are.
His perception that the establishment press is out to get him doesn't mean that great journalism is not being done.
It is.
But the notion that most of us look upon Donald Trump as being an absolute fiasco, he's not mistaken in that perception.
And he's not mistaken when so many of the liberal media, for example, describe themselves as belonging to the resistance.
Okay, so Koppel is acknowledging a basic truth.
Good for him for at least being honest enough to acknowledge it.
This is one of the reasons people don't trust CNN.
They trust MSNBC more than they trust CNN.
They are not the most trusted name in news, and that is because CNN has always hidden its opinions behind the facade of objective journalism.
They are not objective journalists over there.
And by the way, neither are the members of the Washington Post editorial board.
The folks over at the Washington Post, these are not objective journalists either.
The same people at the Washington Post who changed the slogan of their paper to Democracy Dies in Darkness and slapped it on their masthead as soon as President Trump became president because the press was so much under attack.
Yesterday, they ran an op-ed from the dictator of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is an Islamist who has jailed legitimately tens of thousands of dissenters, including vast numbers of members of the press.
These are the same members of the press who will claim that President Trump is participating in a grave crackdown on freedom.
That doesn't mean that President Trump's language with regard to the press is good.
It isn't.
It's not tempered.
It's not accurate.
When the President Trump says fake news is the enemy of the people, that would make a little more sense if, number one, he didn't use the phrase enemy of the people, and number two, if he defined fake news as made-up stories or faux objectivity.
But very often, fake news to President Trump just means something that he doesn't like.
That is an overreach.
With that said, does President Trump have a right to complain about media bias in this environment?
He absolutely does.
Because the media bias is absolutely 100% obvious.
It is absolutely obvious.
And you can see how obvious it is.
When you look at when you look at, for example, the coverage and the narratives that are driven by the Christchurch massacre.
So the narratives driven by the Christchurch massacre on the left and pushed by the media have been that white supremacy is driven by President Trump, despite the fact that the number of white supremacist attacks In the West, over the past 10 years, has fluctuated up and down, and there's no real solid evidence that it has fluctuated up in any permanent direction in the last two years.
It was actually quite high in 2015.
They've suggested President Trump is at fault for everything.
They've suggested that guns are at fault for everything.
I mean, these narratives are narratives that the media are driving.
You can always tell where the media stand by whatever the topic of the news is today.
There's two types of bias in the media.
I think it's important to point this out.
Two types of bias that are worth pointing out.
Point of bias number one is how you actually cover a story.
So there's a shooting in New Zealand, a white supremacist terrorist attack at a mosque in New Zealand.
How is that covered?
What are the topics that we talk about?
Do we talk about the rise of tribalism in the West?
Do we talk about the rise of white supremacy on its own?
Do we talk about, for example, the role of social media as the first order?
Or do we immediately jump to this is President Trump's fault on cable news?
So we immediately jump to this is everybody on the right's fault, and anybody like Sam Harris or Bill Maher or me, who has discussed radical Islam, that those people are somehow to fault for a white supremacist shooting up a mosque, even though that white supremacist presumably likes none of the people that I just mentioned.
That's one type of bias.
The other type of bias is selection bias.
What the media choose to cover.
The media do not choose to cover certain shootings.
They do choose to cover other shootings.
They'll choose to cover a mass shooting at a school in Parkland.
They will not choose to cover the shootings in Chicago.
There's an obvious agenda that is attached to that.
Calling out media bias is important.
I know people think that it's just a way for President Trump to deflect from the issues, but if people can't see how the narrative is being driven by motivated people, they are more likely to believe the narrative than if they see the motivations that undergird the narrative that is being driven.
Okay, in just a second, I want to get to a fascinating study that suggests that trigger warnings are a giant fail on college campuses.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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Alright, so there's this fascinating new study out today that I think is actually more important than is being led on.
It's a study that suggests As we all suspected, that trigger warnings are generally useless.
So what exactly is a trigger warning?
If you do not have a son or daughter in college, or if you're not a college student yourself, you probably don't know what a trigger warning is.
Because you live in the real world, where people say things that offend you sometimes, and then you get over it.
But on college campuses, trigger warnings have become a thing.
This is where you're about to discuss a controversial topic, and you're afraid that by doing so, you're going to trigger someone's emotions.
And so you are expected to issue a trigger warning.
So, if you are going to talk about the issue of rape, for example, then you are expected to say, here's a trigger warning to anyone who has been victimized by rape, or anybody who knows anybody who's been victimized by rape.
And if you don't issue that trigger warning, you are considered insensitive and gauche, and as though you are doing psychological damage to somebody.
And this is taken to the logical extreme at university campuses, where any controversial topic must be accompanied by a trigger warning, lest you offend somebody, lest you micro-aggress them.
And if you micro-aggress them, right, if you say these things without a trigger warning, then you participate in a micro-aggression, and that micro-aggression is a real damage.
It is the equivalent of violence, is how many on the radical left and in mainstream academia see it.
Now, all of that is crap.
It is not true.
A microaggression is not actually damaging in the same way physical aggression is.
And trigger warnings are absolutely ineffective.
There's a new study.
It recently appeared in Clinical Psychological Science, and it pushes back against the findings of Harvard University researchers who suggested that trigger warnings might actually be a net negative.
It could make some people less resilient to trauma.
Trigger warnings don't really leave anyone worse off, according to a newer research conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Waikato and the City University of New York, but they don't help matters either.
Study participants who received a trigger warning were just as bothered by traumatic words and images as participants who saw words and images without any forewarning.
These results suggest a trigger warning is neither meaningfully helpful nor harmful.
So we now have a study from Harvard that says the trigger warnings are effectively harmful because they essentially raise your radar.
For stuff that is going to offend you.
And now we have a new study that says they're useless.
So trigger warnings fall somewhere between harmful and useless on the scale of things, and yet they are the expected mode of communication at university campuses.
This study involves six experiments and exposure to both disturbing written materials and video clips.
Researchers also asked participants about their previous experiences with traumatic episodes, but determined that trigger warnings were effectively useless even for people with a history of trauma.
So, this stuff is not only useless, in many cases it's counterproductive.
Why?
Because if you are ready to be offended, you're more likely to be offended.
Unfortunately, this sort of nonsense is now being written not just into campus politics, it is being written into law.
It's being written into law.
Here is the case from the Spectator in the UK.
Quote, here we go again.
Another woman is facing a police investigation and potentially a jail sentence because she wrote things online about sex, gender and a person who changed gender.
The woman is a journalist.
Her name is Carolyn Farrow, she's 44, and she's the subject of an investigation by Surrey Police over tweets she sent referring to the adult child of Susie Green, head of Mermaids, a charity concerned with transgender children.
Farrow said the investigation arises because she quote-unquote misgendered the child, who was born male, but now identifies as female.
Farrow is a columnist and occasional TV commentator.
She writes and speaks from a Catholic perspective, so she's Catholic, about a number of issues including education, Family policy, euthanasia, and gender.
Her political and religious stance makes her relatively unusual among women who question transgender orthodoxy.
And the columnist for the spectator says, I point this out here because some people are keen to suggest anyone who challenges the trans rights agenda is automatically a right wing culture warrior, possibly in league with U.S. Christian conservatives.
There will no doubt be those who cite Farrow's faith as proof of this thesis.
In fact, I'd suggest it proves the opposite.
It shows you can find women and men who worry about gender issues right across the political and social spectrum.
Farrow tweeted out, I'm being interviewed under caution for misgendering Susie Green's It's all rather Orwellian and rather scary.
The thing is, I can't even remember what I said.
My tweets automatically delete after two weeks, so they are investigating me for tweets which have been deleted, but which cause offense to Suzy Green.
She believes that she is being investigated by the police for potential malicious communications, which would be a breach of the Communications Act of 2003.
Section 127 of that act in Britain relates to the improper use of public electronic communications networks and says a person is guilty of an offense if he, quote, sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene, or menacing character, or B, causes any such message or matter or menacing character, or B, causes any such message or matter to be
A person can also offend if for purposes of causing annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety to another, he sends by means of a public electronic communication a message he knows to be false, causes such message to be sent, or persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.
You could theoretically be fined or jailed up to six months.
Up to six months.
This is absurdity.
The height of absurdity.
In a rational society, we should be able to point out that biological males are biological males.
But, apparently, this is no longer a thing.
And we say that we're making our society better because of this?
That taking offense at basic biological truths is making our society more tolerant, and more wonderful, and more accepting?
You're talking about jailing your political opponents, folks.
And this is really, really dangerous stuff.
And yet the left continues to push it and claim that they're making society better.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Okay, now let's check out what's going on on the Democratic side of the aisle.
So there's a brand new CNN poll out and it shows that there is serious movement in the poll for really one candidate and one candidate only.
That candidate?
Would be Kamala Harris, Senator Kamala Harris.
She has picked up an enormous amount of support.
She is now at 12% support among Democrats and Democratic-leading independents.
Beto O'Rourke is at 11%.
Harris's rise is across the board, according to CNN.
Her gains are more pronounced among Democrats.
She's gained 10 points among Democrats.
She's gained 10 points among liberals.
She's gained 9 points among women.
And she's gained 10 points among ethnic minorities.
And she's pushing hard to the left.
So, Kamala actually came out and said last night, Kamala Harris did, in her quest for the nomination, that she wants to jail President Trump, that she would try to prosecute President Trump.
So we are now back to lock him up.
Remember when it was really bad, that President Trump was saying, lock her up, and people were chanting, lock her up, about Hillary Clinton, because she committed a crime?
Well now, Kamala Harris is pledging that she will prosecute President Trump for crimes unspecified.
Which is a great thing to do.
It's always great when you have a former prosecutor pledging to use the full power of the executive branch to go after somebody for a crime that she can't even name.
Here's Kamala Harris pledging to do just that.
I also believe that what voters are going to want is they are going to want that there is someone who has the proven ability to prosecute the case against this administration.
Yeah.
And this president.
Yeah.
And that is going to be about having an ability and a proven ability to be able to articulate the evidence that makes the case for why we need new leadership in this country.
You're saying if you are president and Donald Trump is out of the White House, you will then continue to prosecute him and his various hench characters.
I am very supportive of Bob Mueller being able to finish his process and do his job.
Okay, so she won't rule that out.
She won't rule that out.
Now, I will say that she's obviously talking about prosecuting the case against the president.
She's not talking about prosecuting the president right now.
But it's funny that she won't just say, I'm not talking about prosecuting him once he's out of office.
We have to see what kind of lawbreaking happens.
Kind of fascinating.
Obviously, the Democrats are racing to the left at the speed of light.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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So with Senator Kamala Harris picking up steam, Cory Booker is very angry.
And when Cory Booker is angry, Cory Booker gets his angry face.
He was doing a town hall last night and he slammed Kamala Harris over her laughing over her use of pot because he was saying correctly that she was prosecuting people for use of pot back when she was using it herself or laughing about it.
Here's what he had to say.
We have presidential candidates and congresspeople and senators that now talk about their marijuana use almost as if it's funny.
But meanwhile, in 2017, we had more arrests for marijuana possession in this country than all the violent crime arrests combined.
Do not talk to me about legalizing marijuana unless in the same breath you talk to me about expunging the records of the millions of people that are suffering with not being able to find a job.
Okay, so, you know, that is not a criticism that is ill-aimed.
He is correct.
You know, slamming Kamala Harris for laughing about pot use while she was in favor of jailing pot dealers is kind of a fascinating take.
Now, the truth is that Booker and Harris are trying to compete inside one lane of the Democratic Party.
They're trying to compete inside that intersectional lane of the Democratic Party.
And apparently they're doing so somewhat successfully, because it turns out that right now, inside the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are not actually gaining any sort of support among black populations.
This is according to the Washington Post.
Quote, The crowd packed into the gym of a century-old black church every time Senator Bernie Sanders attacked inequities that hit disadvantaged African-Americans especially hard, applauding his ideas to address the disparity within the disparity.
But the problem Sanders faces in appealing to black voters was staring at him as he spoke for an hour recently at the gym of the Royal Missionary Baptist Church.
Of the more than 1,600 people who came to see the candidate, fewer than 40 were black.
Last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren faced a similar dynamic in Greenville, South Carolina.
More than 800 people filled the community center of a politically active church to hear her speak.
But only about a dozen black faces were visible in a state where about 60% of the Democratic electorate is African American.
Sanders and Warren share a liberal philosophy focused on helping those who have been hurt by the prevailing system, a message both say should resonate in black households.
But both are older white candidates hailing from New England, and they often confront skepticism, if not ambivalence or indifference, from black voters who have been noticeably absent from their campaign events.
Their challenges provide a preview of hurdles likely to confront other white candidates, including former Congressman Beto O'Rourke and former Vice President Joe Biden should he join the race.
The Democratic field for the first time includes two well-known black U.S.
politicians, both of whom are attracting more diverse crowds and interest from the black community.
A month before Sanders spoke at Royal Missionary Baptist Church, Kamala Harris held a rally in the same room.
Her crowd was much more racially varied, including a group of black women who showed up in church hats.
The crowds showing up for Senator Cory Booker also have included far more voters of color.
If Sanders or Warren hope to extend their primary campaigns beyond Iowa and New Hampshire, they must find ways to forge stronger connections with black voters, strategists from both campaigns say privately.
And I wonder if that's going to be an actual option here.
This is the unspoken strength, perhaps, of Joe Biden.
If you look at that CNN poll, what it shows is Joe Biden up at 28%, Bernie Sanders at 20%, and then Kamala Harris at 12%.
In a Democratic party that is so divided by race, it is quite possible that somebody like Kamala Harris runs the table in a lot of the southern states where black voters provide a plurality or majority of the Democratic vote.
And if that's the case, then Kamala Harris has to be considered the frontrunner.
Betting markets right now, by the way, do have her as the frontrunner in this race, even though in the national polling, she's only at about 12%.
That's why Cory Booker is going after Kamala Harris.
And that's why maybe, maybe the focus on Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders is overlooking the actual frontrunner, Kamala Harris.
And you can see that a lot of the more woke liberals are quite upset with the fact that the generalized polls are showing Biden and Sanders and Beto atop the pack.
The Huffington Post headlined yesterday.
Their giant headline was the hot new thing in the Democratic Party.
White men.
They say last week in a profile of Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O'Rourke, Vanity Fair reporter Joe Hagan wrote that being a white man in a party longing for a woman or a person of color is perhaps O'Rourke's biggest vulnerability.
NBC's Chuck Todd also raised this possibility in an interview with O'Rourke last weekend.
But the former Texas congressman dismissed the idea and rightfully so.
It's white men who are getting an early boost in the Democratic campaigns.
O'Rourke announced Monday he had raised $6.1 million for his presidential bid in just 24 hours, the most of any of the candidates who have publicly disclosed their numbers.
He narrowly beat Bernie Sanders, who announced a $5.9 million haul in his first day.
And polls show that the most popular Democrat is Vice President Joe Biden, all white men at the top of the ticket.
But again, it is quite possible.
It is quite possible.
That all of this is overblown.
And that once the Democratic primaries start, if Kamala Harris shows any sort of serious strength in Iowa and New Hampshire, then maybe she surges out to the lead.
And that's particularly true if it turns out that, for example, Beta O'Rourke is an empty vessel.
If he's doing well at the beginning, but then he is exposed as the empty vessel he is, that's a problem for him.
Speaking of which, Beta O'Rourke continues to be hit with profiles that demonstrate that the dude is just weird.
That he's just a weird guy.
There's a story in the Washington Post called The Politics of Beto and Amy O'Rourke's Marriage.
Now, as I've said before, I don't really care about the marriages of candidates.
I don't think they're particularly important.
I don't see why that's relevant to a person's candidacy unless it speaks to moral character in some way.
But as far as how they divide up household duties or who works or who doesn't, that seems to me an internal matter for the married people to decide themselves.
But this Washington Post story does underscore the idea that Beto is kind of a weirdo.
And when I say kind of a weirdo, I mean he's really a giant weirdo.
Like, there's this.
Okay, quote.
He proposed on April Fool's Day, four months after they'd first met.
It seemed appropriate.
That's how Amy knew him then and even now.
Impulsive and puckish.
He told her on one of their first dates that he planned to name his first son Ulysses, which they did about a year after marrying, followed by a Molly and a Henry.
He dubbed their dog Roosevelt before realizing that the dog was a girl who now goes by Rosie.
And then there were the pranks.
The remote-controlled cockroach in the kitchen.
The psycho-style scares in the shower.
Nothing says romance quite like popping open that curtain and brandishing a knife at your spouse.
One time, according to a friend, Beto collected an especially verdant turd from one of their kid's diapers and put it in a bowl, telling Amy it was avocado.
Man, the millennials are not going to stand for this.
You can't treat avocado this way with the millennials.
They'll lose their minds.
That's not even the weirdest thing in this particular profile, by the way.
The weirdest thing in this particular profile is that apparently he ate dirt Like, really.
Quote, Whatever post-defeat sadness Amy felt, they're talking about Beto's Senate race against Ted Cruz, she was able to kick quickly.
She's always been the stable one.
Beto, on the other hand, more prone to higher highs and lower lows, was in a funk.
In January, Beto hit the road, much as his father had done before him, and drew energy from the people he met.
And on one stop in New Mexico, he didn't write about in his blog, by eating New Mexican dirt said to have regenerative powers.
He brought some home for the family to eat, too.
What in the actual?
What?
He's eating dirt?
I mean, I guess that could be his campaign slogan.
Beto 2020.
We love dirt.
All right, man.
So it is possible that when the rubber hits the road for Beto O'Rourke, that all of this falls apart.
This is the thing for Kamala Harris.
She does actually have a pretty impressive resume, even if I think that her politics really stink.
Even though I think her politics are completely wrong and are really bad, she does have a more impressive resume than somebody like Beto O'Rourke.
And Bernie Sanders, he is increasingly stuck in his own lane.
He can't expand that lane.
Now, Bernie is sort of running a Trump campaign circa 2016, which is, I've got my base, my base is solid, if everybody else divvies up to vote, I win the nomination.
Maybe that'll work.
But Kamala Harris may continue to grow her brand.
If she continues to grow, if she continues to take over not only the intersectional wing of the Democratic Party, but but starts to make inroads into the mainstream wing of the Democratic Party, then Bernie Sanders could be in some trouble because he's not changing his ways at all in any way.
I mean, he's a hardcore socialist who is not going to change any time down the line.
He thinks that's going to carry him to victory.
I got to wonder whether he's got enough there.
I think the answer is probably not.
I think the answer is probably he does not have enough there to actually get him over the finish line unless the field just shatters, unless it fragments.
Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, she continues to...
To throw out crazy solutions to America's problems in the hopes that she will gain attention.
Yesterday she suggested we should dump the Electoral College, which is the new Democratic hot thing, is undermining key American institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College.
Here was Warren yesterday saying that it was time for the Electoral College to go.
I believe we need a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to vote to every single citizen and to guarantee that that vote gets counted.
Nobody comes to Alabama in the general presidential election or to Massachusetts because they figure we're not in the game because of the Electoral College.
So my view on this is that we ought to get rid of the Electoral College.
A vote counts for everyone.
Okay, so first of all, she is just lying when she says that people will show up in Alabama to campaign if the Electoral College is no longer a thing.
Alabama is not populous enough.
People will just skip Alabama completely.
The entire campaign will take place in New York and Boston.
And Los Angeles and Chicago and Dallas, all wonderful cities.
But the reason for the Electoral College was because the founders specifically wanted there to be coalition building in American politics.
They were not big fans of the popular vote, which is why every single institution in America was militated by a bunch of checks and balances.
But Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, all the Democratic candidates now are coming out against the Electoral College.
Funny, they weren't against the Electoral College when they were winning massive electoral victories.
Only after they lose do they start whining about the Electoral College.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren's still having trouble shaking all the questions about her lies about her Native American heritage.
She was asked about this on a CNN town hall, and she basically just said, yeah, my family lied to me.
How do you respond to people who think that, regardless of the underlying facts, the way you handled the question of your Native American heritage was tone-deaf, offensive, and indicative of a lack of presidential tact?
I grew up in Oklahoma.
I learned about my family from my family.
That's just kind of who I am.
And I do the best I can with it.
You know, there was an investigation.
Nothing I ever did or my family played any role in any job I ever got.
So she was told about it, she was lied to by her family, and that's why you should ignore the fact that she was lying about her heritage in official U.S.
documents.
By the way, there's a brand new poll from Emerson Polling that is out, and it is very similar to that CNN poll, except that it shows Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden running exactly even.
It shows Bernie Sanders at 26 and Joe Biden at 26.
So that 8-point advantage in the CNN poll for Biden is gone.
It is at 26-26 according to the Emerson poll.
Now Biden hasn't announced yet.
Presumably he would get a small bump from doing so.
It goes 26 Sanders, 26 Biden, 12 Kamala Harris, 11 Beto O'Rourke, 8 Elizabeth Warren, and then everybody else below that.
Pete Buttigieg is at 3%.
Good for him.
Andrew Yang is at the same level as Julian Castro and Jay Inslee.
He's got 1%.
So it's...
You know, it's all up for grabs.
I think Kamala Harris is the one who is slowly but steadily building support.
Bernie Sanders is banking on the field fragmenting.
Joe Biden better jump in soon and he better start with some momentum or I think he's toast.
I really do not see a great path here for Joe Biden to win the nomination.
Alrighty, time for some things I like and then a thing that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
It was funny, yesterday I was speaking at the Reagan Library.
It was a wonderful event.
I mean, I love the Reagan Library.
It's a spectacular place.
Actually, when I turned, I believe, 17, my dad got me a jacket from the Reagan Library for my birthday.
So it's an amazing thing to be a fan of a place and a president your entire life and then get to speak at his presidential library for the launch of your book, which it was an amazing thing.
And I couldn't be more grateful to the folks over at the Reagan Library for organizing the event.
It was really fantastic.
Anyway, I Skyped with my daughter right before the event because I hadn't had a chance to see her much yesterday.
And she was walking around with a book.
I didn't know what this book was.
And then I saw what it was.
She was carrying around a history of political philosophy third edition from Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey.
I thought this might be a little heavy for her, like physically heavy as well as intellectually heavy.
It's about an 800-page book.
But if you enjoy my book, The Right Side of History, and you want a deeper dive into many of the great philosophers that I talk about in The Right Side of History, this is a great place to start.
A history of political philosophy.
It's edited by Strauss and Cropsey.
Not every essay is by Strauss or Cropsey.
It's by a bunch of different professors.
It really is fascinating, deep stuff.
It's a great resource.
I highly recommend it.
I'm a big fan of Leo Strauss.
I'm not as much a fan of his esoteric, exoteric distinctions as I am of his kind of generalized political philosophy.
He's one of the big believers in this sort of dichotomy between Jerusalem and Athens and the tension between them that I talk about in Right Side of History.
Go check it out if you have time and if you have the inclination.
History of Political Philosophy from Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey.
All right, time for a thing that I hate.
So yesterday, there's a big story in the New York Times about how only seven black students got into New York's most selective high school out of 895 spots.
It's a public school.
It's Stuyvesant High School.
There are 895 slots in the freshman class.
Only seven were offered to black students.
This is apparently a very, very terrible, no good, very bad thing.
Alexander Ocasio-Cortez came out and she tweeted about it.
She said this demonstrated the unfairness of our public school system.
Bill de Blasio has suggested that testing be dispensed with so that more black kids will get into the school.
Because here's the way the school works.
They have an entrance exam.
It's a specialized, high-performing school.
That entrance exam determines whether you get in or not.
Now, I guess that the argument here is not enough black students are getting in because of white privilege.
There's only one problem.
It ain't white privilege.
Stuyvesant High School is 66% Asian.
Bronx High School of Science is 58% Asian.
Brooklyn Technical High School is 48% Asian.
Virtually every selective public high school in New York City is plurality or majority Asian.
So unless you want to make the argument that the system is stacked in favor of Asian Americans in the United States, and that it has nothing to do with the fact that single motherhood in the Asian community is exorbitantly low, that Asian families place extraordinarily high value on education, If you want to say that the system is built for Asians by Asians or something, you're going to have to make that case a little bit more apparent.
The fact that folks in the New York City school system are discussing destroying these schools in the name of melanin levels, in the name of racial diversity, without recognizing that what makes these schools good in the first place is the fact that they have admission standards that require students to perform.
It's pretty astonishing.
And it's, again, another way for Democrats to escape responsibility for the fact that the non-elite schools in New York City suck, just as they do in Los Angeles and in Washington D.C.
When you make yourself When you make yourself subject to the whims of teachers' unions, your schools are not going to be all that great.
And you've seen this in the LAUSD system, where we keep signing bad deals with the teachers' unions and kowtowing to them so that they will pay off all of our politicians.
Here's how this corrupt deal works.
You have to be a member of a teachers' union to teach in the LAUSD system.
And then the state will actually collect the union dues out of your paycheck for the LAUSD, for the Teachers Federation, the Teachers Union out here.
And then the Teachers Union will take those dues and pay off politicians with them to make new deals with the politicians.
With the union.
It's really, it's a deeply corrupt system.
There's a good book called Shadow Bosses by Mallory Factor that's worth reading about, that's worth reading all about this.
Maybe I'll make it my thing I like tomorrow.
It is disturbing, beyond all measure, that Democrats in major cities would rather destroy the working public high schools than build up the ones that aren't working simply out of fealty to unions that are putting money in their pocket.
Alrighty, well we'll be back here later today with a couple more hours of programming, or we'll see you here tomorrow.
Make sure to pick up my book, The Right Side of History, which continues to do really well.
Thank you so much if you already have.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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