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March 28, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:23
The Economist's Big Alt-Right Lie | Ep. 747
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President Trump goes on offense after the Mueller report's findings come out, Cory Booker has his moments in the CNN spotlight, and Joe Biden humiliates himself.
Again, I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Prepare thyselves for a blast of anger coming at you very, very shortly, because I have something to say to the British newspaper, British magazine, The Economist.
I'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, so I will get to the big national news of the day.
But first, I need to discuss something.
The media.
The media are... so many of them are just bad at their jobs.
I mean, legitimately bad at their jobs.
So, this week, congratulations to you, the readers.
Congratulations to us.
We are number one on the New York Times bestseller list for this, The Right Side of History.
We actually knocked Michelle Obama's book down to number two for the first time in months because so many of you went out and bought a copy of The Right Side of History.
This book is all about how Western civilization was created, the fundamental ideological and philosophical grounding of Western civilization.
It is all about the eternal truths and immutable principles that our civilization is based upon.
And the book is...
Extraordinarily anti-racist.
Because if you listen to the show, you know the show is extraordinarily anti-racist.
Because if you've read my writing, you know that my writing is extraordinarily anti-racist.
You know also, if you've followed me for more than 30 seconds, that I am the Bette Noire of the so-called alt-right.
The alt-right movement is a white supremacist, white nationalist, white separatist movement in the United States that essentially attributes Western civilization to color.
They basically make the argument that Western civilization is great because it's white people.
It's not because of the immutable principles.
It's not because it actually has the capacity, Western civilization, to integrate people of various faiths and various ethnicities and various backgrounds.
No, it's not because of that.
It's because of color.
And that is the argument of the alt-right.
It is disgusting.
It is unbased in fact.
It is unbased in decency.
And it is unbased in philosophy.
And I have been ripping the alt-right for legitimately years at this point.
My record on this is not unclear.
Not only is it not unclear, I was the number one target of the disgusting alt-right in 2016, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
I received a grand total of 40% of all hatred directed at Jews online in 2016 by the alt-right was directed at me personally.
Because of the alt-right, I still have security.
Walk me to shul on Sabbath.
So, when people declare that I am somehow associated with the alt-right, you can tell that they are completely full of bleep.
Well, that's what The Economist did today.
So, The Economist, of course, is a major national weekly in Britain, and they did a podcast interview with me.
And the podcast interview is actually great.
If you go and listen to the podcast interview, it's actually well worth listening to.
There's a lot there.
The audio was released last week, and I tweeted it out because I thought that the interview was so good.
Well, today, in the aftermath of my book hitting number one on the New York Times bestseller list, The Economist decided it was time Well, they got all of this wrong.
All of this wrong, because in fact, not only am I not alt-right, now I'm rageful.
"Inside the mind of Ben Shapiro, "the alt-right sage without the rage." Well, they got all of this wrong, all of this wrong, because in fact, not only am I not alt-right, now I'm rageful, now I'm pissed off, because it's just a lie.
And here's the thing.
The interview is about the book.
If they had read the book, they would have realized that there are multiple references to the evil of the racist alt-right.
Multiple references to it.
I'm not hiding the ball here.
I hate the alt-right.
I think that what they stand for is disgusting and despicable.
The notion of ethnic solidarity, that ethnicity alone should be the basis of tribal affiliation, I find to be repulsive.
And when people say, well, yeah, but you're a Jew.
No, I care about religious Judaism.
I don't care about ethnic Judaism.
It makes no difference to me.
This alt-right nonsense is a blot on Western civilization.
And I say that in the book they interviewed me about.
I say that in The Right Side of History.
This is a quote from the introduction.
It's talking about Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ta-Nehisi Coates essentially suggesting that America is a deeply racist place, that we are divided on the basis of race.
Here's what I write.
The photo negative of Coates' perspective comes courtesy of the racist alt-right movement, which accepts Coates' characterization of American politics, but sees things in reverse, an America overrun by identity politics of racial minorities.
The alt-right loves Coates' characterization of white America as all-powerful.
As Richard Spencer told New York Times Magazine, contributing writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, this is why I'm actually very confident, because maybe those lefties will be the easiest ones to flip.
More than that, the alt-right also sees the world in terms of a race war, one they hope one day to finally win.
That is in the introduction.
A couple of pages later in the introduction, quote, During the election cycle, I was highly critical of both candidates.
As a conservative, I'd been a lifelong critic of Hillary Clinton, but I was also highly critical of Donald Trump.
Thanks to my criticisms of Trump, and thanks to my very public break with Breitbart News, an outlet I believed had become a propaganda tool for the Trump campaign, I quickly found myself targeted by a new breed of radical.
In late March, the exquirable Milo Yiannopoulos penned a story at Breitbart openly praising the alt-right, including odes to racist cretins like Richard Spencer.
Egging on his alt-right followers, cheering on their jolly trollery, Milo sent me a picture of a black baby on the day of my son's birth that May.
The point being, that I was a cuck.
Over the course of the 2016 campaign, I would become the top recipient of anti-Semitism among Jewish journalists on the internet.
By a huge margin.
According to the ADL, approximately 19,253 anti-Semitic tweets were directed at journalists during the August 2015 through July 2016 period.
I personally received 7,400 of those tweets, or 38% of the total.
Hey, this is just in the introduction.
In the introduction.
You don't have to read all that far.
And then if you skip forward in the book, you'll see that I talk at length about the alt-right again.
I talk at length about how the alt-right's belief system is disgusting.
In a section titled, I kid you not, The End of Progress, I write this.
I write this.
Racial solidarity among members of the intersectional coalition has also driven reverse racial solidarity from the so-called alt-right, a group of racists who have sought to promote white pride.
Leaders in this movement include the execrable Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, and Vox Day, all of whom use IQ data to explain racial disparities while claiming that the roots of Western civilization lie not in ideas, but in race.
The alt-right remains a fringe movement, but their arguments have penetrated into more visible circles thanks to a reactionary tendency by some on the right to embrace anyone who supposedly opposes political correctness.
I'm not hiding the ball here, guys.
I hate the alt-right.
They're disgusting.
But here is what the fools in the mainstream media have done.
It's jackassery of the highest order.
They've lumped in people like Dave Rubin, a gay Jewish man, and Jordan Peterson, an active opponent of the alt-right, with the alt-right.
They've lumped in me with the alt-right.
They've taken mainstream conservatives and non-conservatives, anyone with heterodox views, and they've said, these people are the real problem.
These people are the alt-right.
Because they don't know what alt-right means.
To them, alt-right just means right.
Well, I'll give you a hint.
Alt-right has the prefix alt in it, and it stands for alternative.
It was originally coined by actual white supremacists because it was supposed to be an alternative right that rejected the tenets of conservatism.
This is why it didn't even make sense when people were quoting the manifesto of the disgusting Christchurch shooter.
To suggest that conservatives were somehow responsible.
The manifesto itself says conservatism has conserved nothing.
Conservatism has bought into basic ideas of individual liberty and individual rights.
Conservatism hasn't conserved white civilization.
The alt-right makes an argument that conservatism, classical liberalism, that these things are very bad.
That is the argument of the alt-right.
To lump me in with those pseudo-intellectual jackasses is the height of ridiculousness.
That that's what The Economist did.
And that's what they've been doing with Jordan Peterson.
And that's what they've been doing with everybody ranging from Sam Harris to Bill Maher, depending on the day.
This is insanity.
I have no respect for any purportedly journalistic outfit.
I mean, so much journalism.
Journalism everywhere by The Economist.
I have no respect for anybody who purports to even pretend to be journalistic, who writes garbage like that.
And neither should you.
Neither should you.
All this would take is a rudimentary Google search.
Instead, they decided to go for the clickbait, they decided to go for the slander, all because they were just ticked off, presumably, that the book sold so well.
All because they were just ticked off that we were number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
Because again, they tweeted out the audio last week, without any of this slanderous crap.
But now they tweet it out with the slander, and of course that's what's getting the clicks, because you come after me and you call me a racist, you're more likely to get clicks than if you come after me and suggest that I'm defending Western civilization.
Okay, well, I do think that this does have a linkage to the more general left view of Western civilization as inherently linked to race.
As I say in the book, one of the big problems we have right now is that all of the ties that bind us, the ties that tie us together, the things that make us a civilization together, the principles, the immutable principles of the innate value of the individual, The belief that we have free will, that we are responsible for our own actions, that the universe is an orderly, understandable place, and that we have the capacity to sit and discuss with one another.
These concepts, which are rooted in both Judeo-Christian morality and in Greek teleology, That these very concepts have fallen under attack.
And there's a whole group of people in the West who do see Western civilization as racial.
On the right, those come in the form of alt-right racists.
And on the left, this comes in the form of people who label Western civilization itself inherently bad, and the institutions of Western civilization themselves inherently racist.
The idea is that Western civilization, in reality, is merely a pretext.
When we talk about Western civilization, what we really mean is race.
This is how the left gets to the point where they can lump me in with people who want to kill me.
The left gets there through a quick trick of logic, and I'll explain the quick trick of logic to you in just one second.
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Okay, so how does the left commit this trick where suddenly the conservatives are all alt-right?
It's because what they say is that when people use the term Western civilization, they're inherently reinforcing a racist hierarchy.
So when I speak about generalized principles, when I write a 250-page book about the principles of Western civilization going all the way back 3,000 years to Sinai and then through ancient Greece, When I do that, what I'm really doing is reinforcing the racial power hierarchy in the United States and in the West.
So anyone who stands up for Western civilization is in fact, in sophisticated fashion, standing up for this racial power hierarchy.
Now that's a bunch of crap, but you can see that this mindset has infused a certain element of the left, and that element of the left is unfortunately gaining strength.
It really is a threat to the civilization upon which we stand.
A great indicator of this is Joe Biden.
So Joe Biden was vice president of the United States.
And yes, he's a dolt.
And yes, he's a dullard.
But Joe Biden said yesterday that English jurisprudential culture, you know, the culture that brought you equal rights under law, that brought you limited government, that brought you the idea of constitutional monarchy, that brought you the idea of tort law, you know, that culture, that culture that basically built the Anglosphere, That culture is bad.
It's very bad.
In fact, it's racist.
It's white culture.
He's saying the same thing in his way as the alt-right.
The alt-right just says English jurisprudential culture is great, and it's great because white people created it.
And now Joe Biden is saying English jurisprudential culture is bad, and it's bad because white people created it.
I realize they get a little too passionate about this sometimes, but we all have an obligation to do nothing less than change the culture in this country.
That's just the laws.
We change the laws.
Change the culture.
But culture, this is English jurisprudential culture.
A white man's culture.
It's got to change.
Why does English jurisprudential culture have to change?
Apparently, in this speech, he cited the so-called rule of thumb.
So this is a myth.
Christina Hoff Summers has busted this myth.
There's a myth that in English jurisprudential law, a key tenet is that a man could beat his wife with a stick so long as the stick was no wider in girth than his thumb.
This is a lie.
It is not true.
It can't be found anywhere in the English legal books.
There's one judge who one time wrote about it and was mercilessly mocked for the rest of his career as Judge Thumb in Britain sometime in the 19th century.
And yet, somehow, this has become a key tenet in the left's takedown of Western civilization.
If you see Western civilization as predominantly racial, then you are doing it wrong.
This is true if you are on the right, and it is true if you are on the left.
And the fact that the left agrees with the alt-right on the nature of Western civilization means that Western civilization is really in trouble.
Because if instead of arguing over principles, and the application of those principles, if instead of applying reason to Judeo-Christian principle, and coming up with an admixture that makes all of our lives better, you decide, let's just abandon the whole project and revert to tribalism, because hey, everything is power hierarchies of race anyway, things get really ugly really quickly.
And this is how the left can lump everybody in, because if they say everything is tribal, then you're tribal too, even if you don't know it.
It really is disgusting.
It really is disgusting.
Well, speaking of differences between right and left, I do want to point out that the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg.
Buttigieg?
I'm still working on the pronunciation.
I've said before that I think he is one of the smarter people in the Democratic race.
I think that is true.
He seems to be more soft-spoken than a lot of the other Democrats.
He seems to be more reasonable in a lot of ways.
For example, yesterday, he suggested that he wouldn't boycott Chick-fil-A because he likes their chicken, which seems like a perfectly rational We've allowed our conservative friends to get a monopoly on the idea of freedom.
left when it comes to key items of principle.
And what's fascinating is to watch as the Democratic left tries to hijack the term freedom to describe a program that is directly opposed to freedom in any traditional sense.
Here's Pete Buttigieg trying to explain why his giant government programs are in fact an element of freedom.
We've allowed our conservative friends to get a monopoly on the idea of freedom.
Now they care about freedom, but they care about a very specific Kind of freedom.
Freedom from.
Freedom from regulation.
You're not free if there is a veil of mistrust between you as a person of color and the officers who are sworn to keep you safe.
You're not free if your reproductive choices are being dictated by male politicians and Don't let anybody tell you that the other side is the side that's got a handle on freedom.
We are the party of freedom and we shouldn't be afraid to go out there and say it.
Now what's hilarious is that in that video, Buttigieg actually goes ahead and he talks about how the right's version of freedom is freedom from.
How what the right wants is freedom from government.
And then he says, well, but that's not real freedom.
You have to have freedom from your cable company.
Really?
From your cable company?
That's where you have to have freedom?
From your cable company?
He says, it's not freedom if you have job lock, if you have to work for a company because they provide you benefits.
That's not freedom?
Really?
Because it seems to me that you are making a voluntary dispensation of your labor in return for someone else's voluntary dispensation of benefits.
So, yeah, that would be freedom right there.
And then he cites a bunch of stuff, Buttigieg, that is actual government involvement.
So he's talking about how freedom is infringed upon when officers do racist things.
Right, because armed officers are the arms of the state.
So you agree with me on the definition of freedom, Mayor Buttigieg.
And then, Mayor Buttigieg suggests that it is a violation of freedom if a county clerk denies you some sort of marital license.
Well, it is a denial of freedom in a certain sense.
I mean, we can argue over whether that denial of freedom is quote-unquote justified or not.
We can argue over whether the state ought to be providing benefits to particular couples or not.
That seems like a rational conversation we can have.
But if he's talking about the state cracking down on voluntary sexual activity that is consensual in nature, then we agree and we're just both libertarian.
It's amazing.
One of the things that the left is fond of doing, as you see with the term alt-right, is they define the term, and then they proceed to expand the term dramatically to include stuff they want to include.
So alt-right starts off as an actual descriptor of an actual group of people, and then it quickly expands to include anybody with whom they disagree.
And it is the same thing with the word freedom.
Freedom starts off with a pretty exact definition, which is freedom from government intervention, freedom from the government cracking down on you.
And then they expand it to include freedom from anything that you don't want.
And then they expand it to include freedom to take stuff from other people.
By gradually expanding the definition of words, they change the way that people think, folks on the left.
That is the goal.
And you see this in many areas of American life.
You see this with regard to sex and gender, for example.
So the left starts off by arguing that gender is distinct from sex.
Your self-identification as a man or a woman is distinct from your biological sex.
That is, at best, an arguable biological proposition.
But as a logical proposition, I guess you can make the argument.
But then what the left quickly does is they expand the definition of gender to re-encompass biological sex.
So, in other words, you are a biological male, and you are a gendered female, according to the left.
This means that you are a female.
In a biological sense, you now have a female penis.
And now, that doesn't make any sense, but they've expanded the terminology so as to embrace all that they wish to embrace.
Playing with words is a very clever way of doing all of this.
And it's fascinating.
You can always watch by how the terms expand, how the terms expand and contract.
You can see where the left moves just by following the etymology of the terminology that they are using, following the history of the words that they like to use.
So to go back to that Biden example for a second, you have Joe Biden ripping on English jurisprudence, right?
It's white culture, English jurisprudence.
I'm old enough to remember when his former boss, Barack Obama, In that speech, I spoke about why I love this country.
Why I love America.
And what I believe sets this country apart from so many other nations in so many eras.
is demeaning it.
Now Anglo-American culture encompasses racism.
Weird, because it didn't before when Barack Obama was talking about it.
In that speech, I spoke about why I love this country, why I love America, and what I believe sets this country apart from so many other nations in so many eras.
I said that the true genius of America is a faith in simple dreams, an insistence in small miracles, that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm, that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm, that we can say what we think, write Thank you.
Now, he talks about that as a legacy of Anglo-American law.
He said that habeas corpus was a perfect example of Anglo-American law.
Now the left has expanded Anglo-American law or English jurisprudence to mean racism because they've decided to shift the meaning of all of this stuff.
A term that once was good has now become bad because they've decided to expand the application of the term.
Remember that when Pete Buttigieg says that the Democrats are the party of freedom, he is talking about the same party as Bernie Sanders, who legitimately said just yesterday that we should get rid of all insurance companies in the United States and rob some 160 million people of their health insurance plans.
You are not going to be able, in the long run, to have cost-effective, universal healthcare unless you change the system, unless you get rid of the insurance companies, unless you stand up to the greed of the drug companies and lower prescription drug costs.
That's the only way.
That you could provide quality care to all people.
I look at healthcare, Chris, the same way as I look at public education, the same way I look at police protection, fire protection.
All people get it, regardless of their income.
It is publicly funded.
That is the most cost-effective way to provide healthcare to all.
So, freedom is now stealing people's health insurance away from them.
Taking it, like, voluntarily agreed to health insurance, taking it away from them.
And Anglo-American jurisprudence is now white culture.
And alt-right is now just conservative.
You keep expanding terms to fit what you want them to fit and language has no meaning.
We can't have discussions.
We can't be reasonable with each other because you keep shifting the ground upon which we are standing.
Okay, coming up, we're going to talk about the latest in the Jussie Smollett case because there's some breaking developments in that case.
Plus, President Trump going after his enemies, going after his nemeses over the release of the Mueller report.
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Alrighty, so the latest on the Jussie Smollett case.
That case continues to unfold and we are finding out more and more about the dramatic malfeasance.
I mean serious malfeasance Of the state's attorney's office in Cook County.
So Fox, the woman's name is Kim Fox.
She's the state's attorney's office.
Ten minutes ago, she confirmed that she did not actually recuse herself from the Smollett case, legally speaking.
Apparently her spokeswoman, Tandra Simonton, said, quote, the state's attorney did not formally recuse herself or the office based on any actual conflict of interest.
As a result, she did not have to seek the appointment of a special prosecutor under the law.
Instead, she simply took her first assistant, Joe Maggots, out front to take the beating that would come.
Quote, although we use the term recuse as it relates to state attorney's Fox involvement in the matter, it was a colloquial use of the term rather than in its legal sense.
Oh, is that what happened there?
You just colloquially recused yourself without recusing yourself, you know, like actually recusing yourself.
Yeah, that's that's a little corrupt.
In fact, the breaking breaking news.
I mean, the FBI is now telling local ABC News reporter Rob Elgas that they are reviewing the circumstances surrounding the dismissal of the criminal charges against Empire actor Jussie Smollett.
Remember the guy who was the victim of the fake hate crime?
It's hilarious.
The left is now out there defending him.
I mean, like, DeRay McKesson is out there defending him.
Why?
Because there's the headline that says that the police put up the two Nigerian brothers who allegedly beat him up in a hotel for a night.
Why?
Because they were witnesses.
They were cooperating witnesses, guys.
So it's probably that.
So they're buying Jussie Smollett's argument that, presumably, that he was actually beaten in a hate crime by two people he was friends with and called an hour before and signed a check to afterward.
It's a weird contention.
How bad is the case for Jussie Smollett?
His attorney came out and explained that maybe when Jussie Smollett described his attackers as white, it's because the Nigerian brothers were wearing whiteface.
I kid you not, this is a thing that was said by a human.
Why did he say that?
He could have said, I don't know.
He could have, but this, again, he's being truthful.
But if it's the Osindaro brothers, what are the chances that that's the case?
That he saw somebody with light skin?
Well, you know, I mean, I think there's Obviously, you can disguise that.
You could put makeup on.
There is actually, interestingly enough, a video.
You know, I think police did minimal investigation in this case.
It took me all of five minutes to Google.
You know, I was looking up the brothers, and one of the first videos that showed up, actually, was one of the brothers in white face doing a Joker monologue with white makeup on.
And so it's not implausible.
Really?
It's not implausible?
So they put on whiteface.
That's the suggestion.
And this is now being parroted around the internet by people on the left.
Oh, that's probably what happened.
These Nigerian brothers decided to commit a hate crime by putting on whiteface.
So they're the hoaxsters, not Jussie Smollett.
How bad was the handling of this entire case?
So bad that the National Association of District Attorneys torched Kim Foxx yesterday.
They put out a statement.
They said, quote, First, when a chief prosecutor accuses him or herself, the recusal must apply to the entire office, not just the elected or appointed prosecutor.
This is consistent with best practices for prosecutors' offices around the country.
Second, prosecutors should not take advice from politically connected friends of the accused.
Each case should be approached with the goal of justice for victims, while protecting the rights of the defendant.
Well, yeah, and what they're referring to there is that Tina Tchen, who is a former aide to Michelle Obama, called up the district attorney in this case, the state's attorney, and asked her to drop the case, basically.
Third, when a prosecutor seeks to resolve a case through diversion or some other alternative to prosecution, it should be done with an acknowledgment of culpability on the part of the defendant.
A case with the consequential effects of Mr. Smollett's should not be resolved without a finding of guilt or innocence.
Yes, this is what we commented yesterday.
If Smollett were going to be let off the hook, at least you would have to apologize.
Now, fourth, expunging Mr. Smollett's record at this immediate stage is counter to transparency.
Law enforcement will now not be able to acknowledge that Mr. Smollett was indicted and charged with these horrible crimes, and the full record of what occurred will be forever hidden from public view.
Finally, we believe strongly that hate crimes should be prosecuted vigorously, but the burden of proof should not be artificially increased due to the misguided decisions of others.
So even the National Association of District Attorneys is looking at Kim Foxx and saying, uh, what the hell is wrong with you?
How bad was Kim Foxx's decision here?
So bad that the FBI is now reviewing all the circumstances and a leaked email from the prosecutor's office shows them scrambling, scrambling to find other cases where charges were suddenly dropped under conditions like Smollett's.
Here's an email that went out to the entire state attorney's office in the aftermath of their decision, quote, Hello everyone.
We are looking for examples of cases, felony preferable, where we, in exercising our discretion, have entered into verbal agreements with defense attorneys to dismiss charges against an offender if certain conditions were met, such as the payment of restitution, completion of community service, completion of class, etc., but the defendant was not placed in a formal diversion program.
In other words, yeah, we know we did something that was completely ridiculous here, but let's see if we can find a precedent for the completely ridiculous thing we actually did.
work with them to further further to figure out on what case it was done nobody's in trouble we're just looking for further examples of how we as prosecutors use our discretion in a way that restores the victim that causes minimal harm to the defendant in the long term in other words yeah we know we did something that was completely ridiculous here but let's see if we can find a precedent for the completely ridiculous thing we actually did kim fox is in so much trouble that she is now denying that she asked the court for the file to be sealed she says it was now done by accident
it was an accident to ask the file to be sealed oh is that what happened kim fox i see how convenient fox yesterday said that the charges were appropriate but of course she has no precedent she has no excuse do you think jesse smollett is innocent - Okay.
You know, I think that the charges that were filed, and again, I was recused at the time of the charges, were appropriate.
I believe that the outcome, him having to forfeit the $10,000, having to do community service based on the allegations, and again, the class 4 felony and no background, are an outcome that we could expect with this type of case.
Okay, just, just absurd.
So she was not recused.
Now she is saying that the charges were well done, but it was accidentally sealed.
This is all nonsense.
The FBI should look into it.
President Trump, by the way, immediately jumped into this thing on Twitter.
So President Trump has now sounded off, which, you know, in these sorts of circumstances, dude, just let your DOJ do the work.
But President Trump tweeted out about this this morning.
He said, quote, FBI and DOJ to review the outrageous Jesse Smollett case in Chicago.
It is an embarrassment to our nation.
Well, he's right about that.
Even if I'm arguing with the method in which he unleashes said comments, the comments are not wrong, obviously.
OK, in just a second, we're going to get to President Trump fighting back against his critics on the Mueller report.
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Okay, so President Trump is now going on the offense against the folks who suggested that he was involved in Russian collusion.
He appeared via phone with Sean Hannity last night, and there he suggested that he was going to release a bunch of files.
Now, I've been saying for years that he should.
I've been saying for years that he kept complaining that the files showed, for example, that the Carter Page FISA warrant was illicitly gotten and that the attempt to phone tap Carter Page, who was a low-level foreign policy aide on the campaign and was suspected of being sort of a Russian tool, that that warrant was gotten on the basis of bad intel.
And Trump kept complaining about that.
I kept saying, listen, dude, you can declassify anytime you want.
I think this would be good.
The more we see in public view, the better.
Here's President Trump explaining that he's going to release some files of his own.
I have plans to declassify and release.
I have plans to absolutely release.
But I have some very talented people working for me, lawyers.
And they really didn't want me to do it early on.
A lot of people wanted me to do it a long time ago.
I'm glad I didn't do it.
We got a great result without having to do it, but we will.
One of the reasons that my lawyers didn't want me to do it is they said if I do it, They'll call it a form of obstruction.
Frankly, I thought it would be better if we held it to the end.
No, but at the right time, we will be absolutely releasing.
And I did the right thing by not doing it so far.
Okay, so, you know, President Trump vowing that he will now release a lot in the public view.
I think that'd be good.
I mean, more in the public view is better.
Now, I do think that it is possible For President Trump to overreach here.
I think it is possible for the right to overreach with the suggestion that every element of this investigation was somehow corrupt from the outset.
Now, I think there were elements of this investigation that may have been corrupt.
If it turns out that James Clapper was using the Steele dossier, the unverified Steele dossier, as the basis for this entire investigation, If it turns out that the members of the Obama intelligence team were using shoddy intel that they did not bother to do one moment of work on as the basis for launching an investigation into an opponent's political campaign, then that's indeed dirty stuff.
But I'm not sure that we're all the way there yet.
The fact is, George Papadopoulos, who was a low-level person with the Trump campaign, did meet with a Russian cutout.
It is true that in June 2016, there was a Trump Tower meeting between a Russian lawyer who was connected to the Russian government and Donald Trump Jr.
and other members of the campaign.
It is true that Paul Manafort had deep, lasting ties to the Russian government.
So it is possible to say a couple of things, and we don't know yet.
I'm sure we will find out.
We will know, I think in short order, whether this investigation was started on the basis of illicit corruption or whether it was started, honestly, like a lot of investigations and just never came to fruition.
And then it turned bad because all the people who were involved in the investigation were personally invested in the investigation coming up with something.
That it started off as a non-witch hunt, in other words, and then it gradually turned into a witch hunt where everybody was suspected of every crime without any proper evidence.
To me that seems more likely, because I usually attribute to stupidity that which, I usually attribute to malice only that which I cannot attribute to stupidity.
I think that, as Hanlon's Razor suggests, people are generally dumb and not malicious, and so probably the most likely scenario here is that people were handed intel, they got suspicious, they started an investigation, and then they convinced themselves that Trump and his team were guilty of something, and then they started pushing the edge.
Then they started doing things like issuing the Carter Page FISA Warrant, if in fact it turns out that the Carter Page FISA Warrant was based solely on the Steele dossier, for example.
President Trump, however, is firmly convinced that dirty cops started this.
Those are his words.
Here is his explanation to Sean Hannity of how this whole entire investigation got started.
There was no collusion.
There was no obstruction.
It was such a ridiculous thing that happened.
On the other hand, you know, you look at how did this start?
How did it start?
You had dirty cops.
You had people that are bad FBI folks.
I know so many.
They're incredible people.
But at the top, they were not clean, to put it mildly.
And what they did to our country was a terrible, terrible thing.
Okay, so that I think could end up being an overreach.
But here's the thing.
People tend to have a binary view of subjects.
People don't tend to be able to hold two thoughts at once.
Cognitive dissonance isn't a thing.
So people don't tend to be able to hold the view that, one, the investigation came up with nothing.
And yes, there were corrupt actors involved in the investigation.
And two, the investigation may not have been illicitly started.
It was just hijacked or used by people with political preferences who decided to violate the oaths that they had taken because they were so convinced of their own moral rectitude, which seems more likely to me.
That looks a lot like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, for example.
With that said, President Trump knows that he's got room to run here.
He knows he's got momentum.
And so President Trump goes directly after James Comey.
And his description of James Comey?
Honestly, I don't think he's very far off here.
There was no crime.
As you know, you're only allowed to do this legally if there's a crime.
There was no crime.
They've all admitted it.
Comey, who's a terrible guy, Comey and McCabe and Strzok and Page, the lover, Page, and all of these people, they've admitted in testimony that there was no crime.
So they started an investigation based on no crime.
I mean, it's really, that part of it, the very end where he says it was an investigation based on no initial crime.
When you launch an investigation, I mean, I've worked in a DA's office.
When you launch an investigation, you typically do so on the basis of an allegation.
If it were proved, the person would already be in prison, presumably.
So, that's too far.
But when he talks about how Comey was a terrible guy, You know, Comey obviously believed what he wanted to believe.
Again, confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
So Comey appeared on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt last night, and he explained that he thought that his firing was obstruction of justice.
What was the basis for that belief?
He didn't really have one, but he said it anyway.
This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.
What did you think when you heard that?
I thought that's potentially obstruction of justice and I hope somebody is going to look at that.
What he appears to be saying is, I got rid of this guy to shut down an investigation that threatened me.
He said the Russia thing and you thought it was because of Russia?
Because he said so.
Yeah, so I did, yes.
And that, in your mind, would have been obstruction of justice?
No, potentially obstruction of justice.
And it's complicated when it's the President of the United States, given his authority over the executive branch, but you would certainly be irresponsible not to explore whether that is obstruction of justice.
Okay, would it be irresponsible not to explore it?
Because it sort of turns out that he had the right to fire anybody he wanted in the executive branch, so long as he was not actively impeding an ongoing investigation, which apparently he was not.
Because politics tends to break down into a battle of personalities, now that Trump has been largely vindicated on the collusion stuff, Comey is made to look a fool, and Trump has a lot of room to run here.
He really does.
Okay, coming up, I want to talk about Cory Booker, who appeared on CNN last night.
Again, what you learn more about the candidates these days is, I think, what you learn about the Democratic candidates Tells you more about where the Democratic base is than where the candidates are.
Because right now, what you see among the various Democratic candidates is a dramatic attempt to run where they think the base is.
This is what all politicians do during the primaries and the general.
They run to where they think the votes are.
When you watch people like Cory Booker, Who used to be a quote-unquote moderate, the senator from New Jersey.
He's a guy who used to work across the aisle, have conversations with people across the aisle.
He used to talk somewhat about school vouchers.
He used to talk about creative solutions to problems.
He wasn't a very good mayor of New York, but he used to talk about this stuff.
Now he is running as the craziest leftist you can imagine, which is, you know, pretty wild considering the rest of the Democratic Party at this point.
So Cory Booker appeared on CNN last night.
He had his big town hall event on CNN.
All the candidates have a town hall event on CNN.
And he was treated very warmly by Don Lemon.
It seems like they're personal friends.
Lemon started off by teasing Cory Booker about his veganism.
That's how this whole thing began.
This is a land of barbecue.
And you're a vegan.
I am.
What's that like?
What's that like?
How's that been for you?
It's been a great experience for me, great for well-being.
You know, when you come from a family that literally owned a soul food restaurant, my mom and dad, it may have caused some trouble, but now they understand that for health reasons, it's a good way to go.
Yeah, but you're not eating barbecue down here, right?
Maybe putting a little sauce on the vegetables.
So friendly.
This is the nice thing about being on CNN as a Democrat.
Things are so, so, so friendly.
I don't remember them being quite as friendly with, for example, Senator Ted Cruz.
But Cory Booker, the real point here is not—by the way, I just have to note, there was a point in this interview where Don Lemon, as they went to break, turned to Cory Booker, and he didn't realize his mic was still live, and he told Cory Booker that he had done a nice job on the answers.
Which, again, is pretty amazing.
We're going to be right back with more from CNN's Democratic Presidential Town Hall with Senator Cory Booker live from Orangeburg, South Carolina.
So make sure you stay with us.
Nice job.
Nice job.
No bias here.
Don Lemon is very, very objective in his journalism.
Anyway, Cory Booker is a great example of somebody who sort of speaks radicalism as a second language, in the same way that President Trump seemed to speak conservatism as a second language during the 2016 election.
Like, he would jump to conclusions he thought conservatives believed, even if they were wrong.
So famously, President Trump was asked whether women should be punished for abortions, and the pro-life position has generally been for decades at this point, no, that's not correct.
And Trump jumped right into it.
He was like, yeah, absolutely we should punish women for abortions because he thought that's what pro-life people thought because Trump didn't have a history with the pro-life movement.
Booker feels that way with the far left.
And so he says things that are just ridiculous on a regular basis.
So, for example, here was Cory Booker being asked about gun laws and just blowing it because he doesn't know what he's talking about.
If I am your president, we are going to bring the fight to the NRA who wants to represent corporate gun owners, corporate gun corporations, manufacturers more than they want to represent the people because this is what they're doing to Americans.
They are defending loopholes, like that loophole that if a man is convicted of beating his wife, he can find a loophole to go out and buy a gun and murder her.
They are defending not their membership but loopholes, like the loophole that says that someone on the terrorist no-fly list in our country can still go to a gun show and buy weapons, or that somebody that's convicted of a violent crime can still find a loophole to go and buy a weapon.
Okay, so there are so many flaws in what he is saying right there that, I mean, he's not even close to the truth.
It is not a loophole when someone violates a criminal law, number one.
Also, when he talks about the laws regarding guns, he's just not correct about them.
I mean, he just says things that are eminently untrue.
Dana Lash, who's a spokesperson for the National Rifle Association, went directly at him.
She said, first of all, the NRA is not an actual government organization.
The NRA represents everyday Americans.
Also, federal law bars domestic abusers from buying or possessing guns.
So what the hell are you talking about?
And Booker did this the whole interview, right?
Here is Booker explaining that he would rather hang out with a nice atheist than a mean religious person, as though religious people everywhere somehow would rather hang out with evil religious people than hang out with nice atheists.
I just want to say up front that I'm a person who often says that before you tell me about your religion, show it to me in how you treat other people.
I was raised in a church where my mom taught Sunday school, and I'll never forget learning that verse, that faith without works is dead.
And I'll tell you what, I feel like I'm in church right now.
And I'll tell you what, this is what often bothers me.
I would rather hang out with a nice atheist than a mean Christian any day of the week.
I love that that receives a giant round of applause.
You know who else would rather do that?
Every Christian I know.
You know why?
Because we don't like mean people.
Like, religious people generally.
I'm an Orthodox Jew, we're not big on the mean people.
Because mean people are unlikable, inherently.
This sort of pandering is so absurd.
The worst pandering, though, was Cory Booker on Jussie Smollett.
So he's asked about Jussie Smollett, and somehow, he manipulates this, does Spartacus, into an attack on the political right.
Which is a weird thing to do, since Jussie Smollett faked a hate crime.
I don't know all the details in the prosecutor's decision.
I know that's going to come out.
But what we've got to know is that this is happening in a larger context where hate crimes in this country are on the rise, where white supremacist violence is on the rise.
In fact, if you look at the majority of terrorist attacks since 9-11, the majority of them have been done by homegrown right-wing extremist groups, and the majority of those have been white supremacist groups.
What does that have to do with Jussie Smollett?
How do we get from the question, which was, was the decision to drop charges against Smollett a whitewash?
How do we get from that to the majority of terrorist attacks in the United States have been by white supremacist groups?
I mean, there's truth to that statement, although the majority of dead from terrorist attacks in the United States, particularly since 2001, if you include 2001, are in radical Islamic terror attacks.
But with that said, that's such a non-sequitur.
What does that have to do with anything?
So Jussie Smollett lied about a hate crime, and Cory Booker's response is to immediately launch into an attack on white supremacists.
Like, I'm fine with the attack on white supremacists.
Enjoy.
But I just want to know why that has anything to do with letting Jussie Smollett off the hook.
This is why Cory Booker is not a very good candidate, and this is why Cory Booker is inevitably going to fall apart, because it turns out that he, like too many other Democrats, is simply an empty vessel for what he thinks the base wants, rather than a representative of something actual and real.
It's one of the reasons, by the way, why Pete Buttigieg is actually picking up ground on Beto O'Rourke.
If you look at the Google searches, Buttigieg is suddenly picking up steam.
That's because he's more substantive than Beto O'Rourke.
At a certain point, even Democratic members of the base are going to want something a little more substantive than they've been offered so far.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
One of the fun things about the launch of my number one New York Times bestselling book, The Right Side of History.
Just patting myself on the back right there.
And you, because you bought it.
It's really because of you.
Is that I have to sign something like 15 to 20,000.
Copies of the book now.
And that means that every night I have to put on a movie and then just sign and sign and sign and sign.
Well, the other night I was looking for something to watch and I came across a movie on Amazon Prime called Trans Siberian, which I missed at the time.
It is Woody Harrelson and Ben Kingsley.
Ben Kingsley is one of my favorite actors.
The movie is basically a potboiler about a couple who are on a train with another couple, and the other couple turns out may or may not be criminals.
The movie is called Trans Siberian.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
Oh great, you're up, honey.
This is Carlos and Abby.
This is my wife, Jessie.
Next stop, Russia.
Come on!
Our new cabin mates.
Where'd they come from?
He said that they were teaching in Japan.
You think it's obvious that we're Americans?
This is Ilya Grinko.
He's a detective.
Who are the bad guys?
People who look innocent, but are really not.
They add special chemical to heroin, mold it into objects.
They pay much money for this.
What are these?
Did you buy them?
So, the movie is good.
Woody Harrelson is really good in it.
The whole movie is worth watching.
It's a really, kind of, tight little thriller.
So, worth picking up if you're looking for something to watch tonight.
Trans-Siberian on Amazon Prime.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So it turns out that ABC's The View is a complete crazy house.
There's a new book out called Ladies Who Punch, The Explosive Inside Story of The View.
It is written by Ramin Setudeh, the New York Bureau Chief of Variety, and it has a lot of details about the show.
They sat down for everyone except for Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Whoopi Goldberg.
There's a bunch of stuff in there that is not great for The View.
According to the Huffington Post review of the book, Barbara Walters, the founder of The View, is portrayed as a leader who understandably held a tight grip on the show, but was also deeply egomaniacal and threatened by women who are more popular, namely Joy Behar and Rosie O'Donnell.
The book also alleges she actively participated in undermining current and former co-hosts by leaking embarrassing information to the press.
Apparently, she did this specifically with Rosie O'Donnell.
She specifically went after Rosie O'Donnell and dictated that when Rosie O'Donnell's book came out, that there be a bunch of bad stuff that come out about Rosie O'Donnell in the press.
Apparently, there was a massive behind-the-scenes clash between Rosie O'Donnell and Mark Gentile, the show's director.
O'Donnell says she took issue with Gentile because of his incompetence.
Insiders at The View told Satuda that they believe O'Donnell targeted Gentile because he once rejected her offer to poach him from The View when she was trying to do her own daytime talk show.
In the book, O'Donnell shared a story of when she walked into a meeting at The View and asked a group of staffers, is this Mark Gentile's baby?
A woman producer at the show is holding a baby in her arms.
According to Citude, the producer, whom Citude has not named in the book, had been having an affair with Gentile who was married.
The affair was an open secret among the staff and Walters was aware of it.
The producer didn't directly report to Gentile, but at The View, this was not considered an issue.
So all sorts of details about The View.
It turns out, guys, that Hollywood is a terrible place filled with bad people who do bad things.
I know, hard to imagine.
In other Hollywood news, good news, Chris Evans, the guy who plays Captain America, and has... I'm in the battle of the Chrises, you know, Chris Pine, Chris Pratt.
They're a bunch of good Chris's.
I do not think that Chris Evans is one of them.
I do not think he's a very good actor.
And that is not merely because he said back in 2013 that he genuinely disliked me even though I have no idea if he's a nice guy or not.
I'm going to imagine he's not at this point.
He is founding a new political website because that's what we need.
It is called A Starting Point.
The mission to create informed, responsible, empathetic citizens.
Yeah, that's gonna be great.
That's what we need.
We need Chris Evans sounding off about politics.
He knows as much about politics as I know about memorizing scripts, which is to say, virtually nothing.
Also, Chris Evans, in his new role as ombudsman of an important journalistic outlet, suggested that he could no longer root for Tom Brady.
He said, quote, I really hope he's not a Trump supporter.
I'm just hoping he's one of those guys that maybe supported him and now regrets it.
Maybe he thought it was going to be different.
And even that bothers me.
But maybe there's a chance he now just thinks Trump's an absolute dumb bleep, which he is.
If he doesn't, if he's still on that Trump train, I might have to cut ties.
It's really tough.
So he's cutting ties with Tom Brady because Tom Brady supports a different political candidate.
He seems like a perfect candidate to run a journalistic outlet.
We need another outlet that is wildly left and inaccurate about their coverage.
I think that would be good.
That's probably the best.
All righty, so we will be back here later today with two additional hours.
Plus, we have an episode of Daily Wire backstage.
This is why you should subscribe.
Also, go pick up a copy of my number one New York Times bestselling book, The Right Side of History, labeled alt-right by The Economist.
By the way, breaking news, The Economist has now issued an apology.
Thank you.
It says, this article has been changed.
A previous version mistakenly described Mr. Shapiro as an alt-right sage and a pop idol of the alt-right.
In fact, he has been strongly critical of the alt-right movement.
We apologize.
Well, thanks.
Thanks.
Appreciate it.
All right.
We'll be back here later today with two more hours.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
It's going to take some time before we understand the full effects of the end of the Mueller investigation.
I think it showed not only the corruption of the mainstream media, but the corruption of the Obama administration.
And even more than that, it shows the failure of the elites in this country to hold up their self-imposed status.
I'm Andrew Klavan.
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