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April 3, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
56:20
The Roadmap To 2020 | Ep. 751
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Two state elections last night give some 2020 clues.
President Trump goes after Joe Biden and the media take off the mask.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh man, we have a ton to get to on today's show.
But first, let me remind you that tonight, the latest stop on my Young America's Foundation Speaking Tour brings me to Loyola Marymount University, where some of the professors are pretty ticked that I'm coming.
This speech begins at 7 p.m., so get there early, bring a friend, and as always, bring some great questions.
It may be sold out.
If you can't make it tonight, no problem.
You can also watch the speech online at yaf.org slash live.
It is all new material.
For more information on my tour schedule, head on over to yaf.org slash Shapiro Tour.
That's yaf.org slash Shapiro Tour.
Hope to see you there.
OK, we're going to get to the news in just one second.
First, let's talk about safety and security in your community.
You've heard me talk about how Ring is reinventing home security with doorbells and cameras, even an alarm you can install yourself.
Well, they've now reinvented the Neighborhood Watch with a new app they created called Neighbors by Ring.
You remember the Neighborhood Watch.
It's been around for a while.
I remember it.
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Well, the Neighbors app is like the new Neighborhood Watch.
On your phone, people taking stuff off porches, trying doorknobs late at night, missing dogs.
The Neighbors app sends real-time notifications to your phone whenever one of your neighbors posts a heads-up about something that's going on.
It does keep you informed.
The Neighbors app by Ring, it's completely free.
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I put in my address and set the area around my home for a couple of miles because I really only care what's happening within those two miles.
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You gotta check out the Neighbors app yourself.
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OK, so.
Last night, there were a couple of local elections.
Now, as you know, this is a national show.
We don't tend to put too much stock in local elections or focus too much on local elections.
But in the lead up to 2020, everybody is looking for early indicators for how things are going to split.
And it's funny, when we talk about presidential elections, we tend to talk in national terms, obviously.
We tend to say that President Trump is going to win X percent of the popular vote, or Kamala Harris, if she were the nominee, would win X percent of the popular vote.
The reality is that this election is going to come down to about three states.
It's going to come down to Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan.
That's pretty much it.
The assumption is that President Trump is going to walk away with Ohio.
That assumption seems to hold pretty true.
Florida is more competitive.
If he loses Florida, the election is over.
So, assuming that Trump wins Florida, and that he wins Ohio, then he still has to win two out of the three, Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, in order for him to retain the presidency.
And the kind of conventional wisdom had been that Trump was going to continue to be competitive in Michigan, and that in Pennsylvania he was still somewhat competitive, but that in Wisconsin he was starting to fall off.
And the evidence for this is that the 2018 elections moved Wisconsin into more blue territory.
Well, last night there was a special election in Wisconsin for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Now, the Wisconsin Supreme Court is not an overtly partisan seat.
It's not like somebody runs as a Republican or a Democrat for the actual Wisconsin Supreme Court.
But those candidates are backed by conservative groups or liberal groups.
And last night, the conservative won in Wisconsin, ensuring that the Wisconsin Supreme Court would remain majority conservative for the foreseeable future.
Because now, instead of things being 4-3 on that Supreme Court and ready to shift at a moment's notice in 2020, now conservatives have a 5-2 majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
And not only that, turnout was high.
And what the election showed is that while there were certain districts where Trump has fallen off a little bit, particularly in suburbia, in rural areas, he continues to dominate.
According to According to Madison.com, they report that the conservative is winning by a very small margin.
It may go to an automatic recount, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court race the liberals needed to win to have a shot at taking majority control of the court next year appeared headed for a recount with the conservative candidate declaring victory while holding a narrow lead following Tuesday's election.
The conservative candidate is up over 5,000 votes.
A conservative win would increase their majority to 5-2 and ensure their control over the court, which they've held since 2008 for years to come.
It would be a particularly stinging defeat for liberals who were confident in riding a wave of wins in 2018, including picking up a Supreme Court seat and ousting Republican Governor Scott Walker.
Conservative Brian Hagedorn, who was Walker's chief legal counsel for five years, led liberal-backed Lisa Neubauer by 5,900 votes out of 1.2 million cast based on the unofficial results.
That difference of about 0.49 percentage points is close enough for Neubauer to request a recount But she would actually have to pay for it, so maybe it happens, maybe it doesn't.
Minutes after he declared victory, the Neubauer campaign sent out a fundraising plea saying that with the vote total neck and neck, it looks like we're headed to a potential recount.
Counties will canvass the vote starting next week to determine the official margin of victory.
The last time there was a recount in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race was in 2011.
This was the only statewide election of the year.
So this is the only bellwether that we have this year.
And turnout was really strong.
In fact, it was a lot stronger than it was in 2018.
Republicans showed up in 2018.
They showed up in bigger numbers.
In 2019, 27% turnout for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat.
The tight outcome provides more evidence, says Madison.com, of how evenly divided Wisconsin is.
President Trump, you'll remember, carried the state by less than one percentage point.
Walker lost it by just over one percentage point.
So this state is basically dead even.
Pagodorn's victory in Battleground America sends a, quote, message to all of America that we're ready to keep Wisconsin red as we turn our attention to mobilizing for 2020 and re-electing President Trump, said Mark Jefferson, the executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party.
So, this is, it's a pretty astonishing result.
I mean, she was heavily favored, the liberal in this race was heavily favored to take the seat.
Eric Holder had an outside group that was spending almost a third of a million dollars, more than a third of a million dollars actually, to help Neubauer win.
There were a bunch of conservative groups, including Americans for Prosperity, that matched Democratic outside spending.
Hagedorn spent much of his race defending his conservative beliefs.
Neubauer, by contrast, was appointed to the appeals court in 2007 by a former Democratic governor.
And the term there is 10 years.
And the retiring justice is 85 years old and a liberal.
So this is a move in the direction of conservatism in Wisconsin.
Now, if you actually look at the Wisconsin polls for 2020 president, what you see is President Trump continuing to run Relatively, relatively even with all of the other Democrats.
So that is not true, particularly for Joe Biden.
I can give you some of the latest polls from Wisconsin, which again, if Trump were to win Wisconsin, the odds that he wins the election are very good.
If he loses Wisconsin, then the odds obviously decline dramatically.
Against Joe Biden, according to Emerson College poll from March 17th, 2019, so a couple of weeks ago, Joe Biden would beat President Trump 54 to 46.
According to a Firehouse Strategies poll from a little bit later, a couple days later, Biden would beat Trump pretty badly, 53 to 40.
But if you look at him versus the other candidates, it's pretty much dead even.
Trump versus Kamala Harris, according to Emerson College, that is a 50-50 vote.
Trump versus Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota, that is a 50-50 vote.
If you look at Trump and Beto O'Rourke, Beto has a slight advantage but not much.
According to Emerson, only 51-49, the margin of error is 3.5, so effectively that is a dead even race.
Trump versus Bernie Sanders, 52 Sanders, 48 Trump, but again, it's kind of far out and that is effectively a dead even race considering a margin of error of 3.5 points.
With Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren, Warren runs away with it, according to Zogby, but is only up 52 to 48, according to Emerson.
So, effectively, Trump is still running very competitively in Wisconsin right now, unless the Democrats get smart and run somebody who is perceived as moderate and has blue-collar appeal.
Now, that's what makes it so interesting that the Democrats have decided to go after Joe Biden, who, it's pretty obvious from all the polls, is the most electable Democrat for the 2020 race.
And that's not just in Wisconsin.
Last night, there was another local race in Pennsylvania, and it was won by a Democrat named Pam Iovino.
She won a Pennsylvania Senate seat.
Well, the reason that she won is because, like Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania, she is a veteran.
She is a more Blue Dog Democrat type.
According to the Post-Gazette, the last time Pam Iovino was subject to a high-stakes vote tally was 2004, and she was unanimously confirmed to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs' Congressional and Legislative Affairs offices.
On Tuesday, the Democrat and Navy veteran was elected to the Pennsylvania State Senate, besting Republican Dee Raja in a special election after a bruising two-month campaign that garnered national attention along the way.
During the race, Yovino, who's 62, told voters in the 37th District that her two decades-plus in the Navy and subsequent stint in the executive branch would make her the right fit for the legislature.
In the district spanning Allegheny County's western and southern suburbs and Peters Township, a majority of voters endorsed that message at the poll.
The election, which was expected to be close and possibly decided by a few hundred votes, was officially decided when Raja conceded to Ms.
Savino by phone at around 9.30 p.m.
She was about 4,000 votes ahead, with 94% of the precincts counted.
At the time.
So it's a big win for Democrats in the state of Pennsylvania.
But the point is that she is a lot more conservative than a lot of the Democrats that are being talked about for the 2020 election cycle.
So she has talked about greater focus on workforce training, for example.
She says that she's going to fight to alleviate the property tax burden by making corporations pay their fair share.
She says that she is going to focus in on taxing natural gas drilling.
These are sort of blue-dog Democrat positions.
She didn't focus in on social issues.
She didn't focus in on race.
Instead, she focused in on sort of bread-and-butter Democrat issues.
And she won.
What does this say?
What this says is that Democrats are gaining momentum in some of the suburbs that President Trump carried in 2016, but only, but only if Democrats are not stupid and run people who are perceived as moderate.
As I mentioned, Iovino is a veteran.
She was commissioned to Navy Ensign in 1980, she worked her way up to Lieutenant, and then she took over as the first female commander at Toledo's Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center.
She was nominated by George W. Bush to her post on Capitol Hill.
She ran against Conor Lamb for the Democratic nomination.
He went on to win that Congressional seat.
And both of the candidates went after each other hammer and tongs.
But Iovino did not run as a hardcore left Democrat.
She ran as a moderate Democrat, and that is why she won.
And this is the point.
The Democrats seem to have misread the map here.
They seem to believe that what is popular in San Francisco is popular in Allegheny County or in Wisconsin.
They seem to think that if they run somebody who is really extreme or who is intersectional on the merits, that that person is going to suddenly sweep through all of the areas that President Trump won in 2020.
This kind of indicates that you should shift 2020 back to toss-up lane.
Now, I've been saying for a while that I slightly favor Democrats in 2020.
Because President Trump lost the popular vote by two and a half million, and he ran the narrowest gauntlet in presidential history, winning three states by a combined total of 80,000 votes in an election against one of the most unpopular people in the history of American politics, a person who is expected widely to win.
I said you can't count on Democrats not showing up again.
That's true.
It is also true that if Democrats veer too far in the left direction, they could easily lose some of these purple states, especially these blue-collar purple states, who are looking at folks like Beto O'Rourke or Kamala Harris, and they're saying, really like this?
This is what you've decided to put up?
That's what makes it so entertaining that the Democrats seem to believe they have this... I'm not sure whether it's driven by a perception of invincibility or just pure anger, what they are doing in the Democratic primaries right now.
I'll explain in just one second.
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So as I say, I'm not sure whether Democrats right now are driven by hope or whether they are driven by fear.
So here's the argument for hope.
The argument for hope is that President Trump is so deeply unpopular that they can push as far left as they possibly want and win an election.
That they can reconstitute the Obama 2012 coalition, that intersectional coalition, and sweep to victory by ignoring all the people who voted for President Trump.
And then they can push on with their Medicare for all, high tax, high spend, slavery reparations agenda.
That this is the push that they can make because they've misread the room and they think that Trump is inherently so unpopular that they can legitimately throw crap against the wall and see what sticks.
That is possibility number one.
Possibility number two is that they've been driven so mad by President Trump that they are sort of like Republicans circa 2016.
We want to nominate the person who's going to get on a stage and club President Trump.
We want the person who's going to be the most aggressive on a stage with President Trump.
Now, if that were the case, then you would sort of assume that Elizabeth Warren would be doing better because she's probably the most aggressive Democrat in the field when it comes to yelling at President Trump.
Some of the other Democrats who are doing well right now, people like Joe Biden, that's really not his bag.
You've seen it from Bernie Sanders a little bit.
But it seems to me that if I had to put my money on it, I would think the Democrats have just misread the unpopularity of Trump.
They think because he's at 42% in the polls, when it comes to popularity rating, that this somehow means that he's only going to win 42% of the vote.
Come 2020.
And that, of course, is deeply inaccurate.
And as we are seeing in Wisconsin, as we are seeing in Pennsylvania, Republicans are still going to vote Republican.
The great lie of 2016 is that Donald Trump wildly outperformed Republican expectations.
That is not true.
He performed almost exactly in line with how George W. Bush performed in all of the swing states, almost exactly in line with how Mitt Romney performed in all of the swing states, including Wisconsin, where Romney won more absolute votes than Donald Trump did.
It's just nobody showed up to vote for Hillary Clinton.
In 2016.
So Trump is going to continue to perform like generic Republican.
The question is, does Democrat perform like generic Democrat?
Or does Democrat perform like Barack Obama, who was in fact a statistical outlier?
Democrats seem to believe that the world shifted on its axis when Obama was elected and that there was a permanent majority created for them forever.
Trump disabused them of that notion.
If they rely on that permanent majority, And simply swing to the left in the belief that they've got this thing locked up.
They're making an awful, awful mistake.
I think that's one of the things lying behind the attacks on Joe Biden.
So let's move on to Joe Biden.
So Joe Biden continues to fall under brutal attack from members of his own party.
Apparently two more women are now coming forward and talking about how Joe Biden is a bit of a creeper.
Again, it is amazing to me to watch as the Democrats suddenly discover something that has been in plain sight.
We were making fun of this for years.
The idea of handsy Joe Biden, Uncle Joe, creepy Uncle Joe.
This was a meme on the right for, I kid you not, at least, at least the last six to seven years.
There is nothing new here.
I mean, Joe Biden was famous for going into diners and putting women on his lap.
He was famous for, I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've seen that photo of him leaning over to kiss the little girl and the little girl shying away.
Well, now there are several women who are coming forward and saying he made them feel uncomfortable.
According to MSN.com, no prominent Democrat has suggested that Biden not run.
The women complaining about him have not claimed sexual harassment or assault.
Other women have stepped forward to say Mr. Biden's touches were welcome, but the accusations lodged against Biden have raised questions about when a tactile politician crosses the line into inappropriateness.
That's the Washington Post description.
I love that.
He's a tactile politician.
You mean he creepily touches people in a way that he should not if he were not a creepy person?
And overly physical with people?
Tactile politician.
Gotta love that.
Nancy Pelosi said that she didn't think it was disqualifying, but she also recommended that he use the straight arm system.
Gloria Steinem said politicians need to set the parameters.
The way out is simple.
Our bodies and our voices belong to us.
That should be the first step in democracy.
Just ask before hugging.
Which, by the way, I don't think is wrong, but I'm finding it funny that now Democrats are discovering all of this after ripping on Mike Pence for basically saying, I would like to remove myself from possibly fraught situations in general.
Now, President Trump went after Joe Biden because he understands there's vulnerability here.
So here is Trump last night at the NRCC, apparently speaking in front of the same bush in which Homer Simpson is hiding.
Here is President Trump going after Joe Biden.
I mean, Trump as stand-up comedian is pretty solid Trump.
I said, General, come here, give me a kiss.
I felt like Joe Biden.
Our former vice president, he's I was going to call him, I don't know him well.
I was going to say, welcome to the world, Joe.
You having a good time, Joe?
Are you having a good time?
Okay, well, that last line there by Trump is not unearned.
Joe Biden has been one of the chief pushers of the idea that an accusation is tantamount to a conviction.
Now, the fact is that Biden has been doing this sort of stuff with regard to harassment for a very long time.
According to Casey Johnson over at the New York Post, according to the standards of culpability that Biden has articulated in similarly conflicted situations, all of this is an open and shut case.
Perhaps no major American political figure has so consistently championed the erosion of due process for those accused of sexual misconduct.
He's championed this approach for accused college students, as the Obama administration used Title IX to impose guilt-tilting procedures on the nation's campuses.
Until 2016, high-ranking administration officials consistently refused to provide much, if any, explanation on why they imposed a preponderance-of-evidence standard, as opposed to a beyond-reasonable-doubt standard when it came to Convicting men of sexual harassment.
Biden has been the most outspoken senior Obama official to defend these policies.
In 2017, he framed campus sexual assault as a problem consisting solely of male attackers and female victims.
He used an interview with Teen Vogue to give a hypothetical address to fraternity members.
Quote, if you see a brother taking a drunk freshman co-ed up the stairs to his room and you do nothing, you're a coward.
You know that she's not able to give consent.
He responded with fury to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos's attempts to create fairer procedures for adjudicating campus sexual assault claims.
He called people like DeVos culturally Neanderthals.
So Joe Biden.
It is not uncalled for that Joe Biden is now being held to a standard that he has pervaded against others.
With that said, the Democrats coming out of the woodwork to attack Biden are generally not doing so, in my opinion, out of pure worry for the women.
Apparently there are a couple other women who now say that Biden made them feel uncomfortable.
Kaitlyn Caruso is a former college student and sexual assault survivor.
She said Biden rested his hand on her thigh, even as she squirmed in her seat to show her discomfort and hugged her just a little bit too long at an event on sexual assault at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
She was 19.
Caruso, now 22, said she talked chalked up the encounter at the time to how men act and didn't say anything publicly.
She said it was particularly uncomfortable because she had just shared her own story of sexual assault and had expected Biden to understand the importance of physical boundaries.
It doesn't even really cross your mind that such a person would dare perpetuate harm like that, she said.
These are supposed to be people you can trust.
Another woman came forward, DJ Hill, 59, a writer who recalled meeting Biden in 2012 at a fundraising event in Minneapolis.
She said that when she and her husband, Robert, stepped up to take their photograph with the VP, he put his hand on her shoulder and then started dropping it down her back, which made her very uncomfortable.
Her husband, seeing the movement, put his hand on Mr. Biden's shoulder and interrupted with a joke.
Hill does not say anything at the time and acknowledged she did not know what Biden's intention was or whether he was aware of her discomfort.
Only he knows his intent, she said.
But norms are changing now, she said.
And if something makes you feel uncomfortable, you have to be able to say it.
Now, of course, other women have come out and defended Joe Biden.
That would include Stephanie Carter, the wife of Ash Carter.
Who is saying all of this.
But what is undergirding a lot of this is that the more radical members of the Democratic Party want Biden gone and the more moderate members want Biden to stay.
There's a lot of politics to this situation.
So Joe Manchin, who is one of the more moderate Democrats, presumably will be a Biden supporter if he declares.
The senator from West Virginia, he says, listen, I've never seen anyone actually offended by Biden.
I mean, come on.
I can tell you I've been around Joe Biden for many, many years.
I've been in many political events with Joe Biden.
I have never seen Joe Biden intentionally make anybody uncomfortable.
If anything, he goes out of his way trying to make people comfortable, he thinks, that might be in a difficult situation, that might have had some concerns, and has a lot on him.
I've seen that compassion in Joe.
Now, what Joe has said, and I accept that the same as I hope everyone does, if he's made anybody uncomfortable, he's extremely sorry for that.
I would hope they would accept that.
OK, so this this sort of gap, you can see it between the the older guard members of the Democratic Party who wish to preserve the candidacy of Joe Biden and the newer guard who are looking to get him out.
So this would include Representative Hakeem Jeffries, one of the younger members of Congress.
He came out and he said these are very serious allegations, even though, let's be real about this, the allegations are not Either unexpected or particularly serious.
Well, these are serious allegations.
They've been raised by serious individuals and they deserve a serious evaluation as to how Joe Biden should proceed.
But that's a decision that he needs to make on his own.
OK, so all of the younger members of the Democratic Party are trying to push Joe Biden out.
And it's fascinating how they're doing this.
It's fascinating how they're doing this again.
This is an overreach.
This is them over reading Overreading the results of 2012, rather than looking at the nature of politics on the ground.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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OK, so as I say, there's a gap between the old guard Democrats and the new guard Democrats.
The new guard Democrats want Biden out, and it is obvious that they want Biden out because they are using the same tactics that Democrats have been using on Republicans against Joe Biden.
The war on women meme has now been extended to Joe Biden.
The revolution eats its own.
And it is fascinating to watch.
Democrats have been trying since 2016, and even before in 2012, they tried it with Mitt Romney to suggest that Mitt Romney was fighting a war on women.
So when Mitt Romney said that he had binders full of women so that he could seek female employees to give them better job opportunities, the left jumped on that to proclaim that Mitt Romney, the most anodyne, milquetoast human being who has ever walked this earth, was actually a terrible, terrible sexist.
And then, of course, they had more material to go with with President Trump, so they went with that with President Trump, too.
It was a war on women.
This is a war on women meme, and it was pushed by the media over and over and over.
You can always tell who the enemy of the progressive left is by who they are using the war on women to target.
And this is what you are seeing now being used against Joe Biden.
Hilariously enough, after eight years of ignoring the fact that the guy gets handsy with pretty much everybody.
So there's a piece by a woman named Jennifer Senor in the New York Times, and it's called, What We're Not Talking About When We Talk About Joe Biden.
And you're seeing the Democrats and the left extend the definition of the war on women from actual harm to women to stuff that could be perceived as harm to women.
Because they're broadening the war on women specifically to take out political opponents.
Here's what Jennifer Senor says.
She says, This week it's Joe Biden's turn in the MeToo barrel, and like many Democrats, I'm torn about what to think.
The allegations by Lucy Flores that in 2014 when she was running for Lieutenant Governor of Nevada, the VP touched her shoulders and kissed the back of her head cannot exactly be dismissed as an outlier, given that another allegation of guerrilla nuzzling following just 72 hours later, and that multiple photo montages online suggest a similar pattern.
And so we have another debate about male decency and respect, trying to weigh creepiness against over-exuberant affection, handsiness against glad-handing, all the while remembering that this is Joe Biden we're talking about, a retail politics guy from another era known for arm grabs and bear hugs.
He is, by nature, a physically expressive fellow.
Hugs are not unfamiliar to him.
These gray zone allegations are, of course, still worth examining, but they are, because they are salacious, because they are embodied, Because we can see them.
I wonder if we spend more time discussing them than another gray zone problem that, in my view, is far more pervasive and often less easily solved with a sharp rebuke or a complaint to human resources, not being taken seriously.
And here's where we go.
That if you are a male, and you side with Joe Biden here, It's because you're not taking women seriously.
Or, if you are a male who has not participated in any form of sexual harassment, if you're Mike Pence, you are guilty of not taking women seriously.
So the war on women has now been extended outward to include not taking women seriously.
Now, what does she mean by not taking women seriously?
Basically, any time a woman feels like she's not being taken seriously, we're supposed to believe that this is based on sexism.
The subjective perception of the alleged victim is all that matters when you're not being taken seriously.
Now, as a human being, there are many times when I have been not taken seriously.
My employees, I'm sure, feel routinely not taken seriously.
Sorry, guys.
But the fact is that that does not mean they're not being taken seriously, or that that's a crime, or that that's sexism in some way.
But Jennifer Senor says, Here's the truth.
Some of the women I know have Me Too stories, but most of the women I know have stories about feeling dismissed, invisible, and less than.
Okay, but how were they mistreated?
She says, What are they talking about?
They're talking about seeing their ideas gain traction in a meeting only after a man has said them, or being told after they've asserted themselves in a meeting that they dominated it, or at the least talked too much.
Now, we don't know any of the context.
We don't know whether it's possible that a woman in a meeting just didn't express her ideas forcefully enough, or maybe she was too forceful.
It turns out, people don't like men too.
How many meetings have you been in where the guy is just a jerk?
Where the guy is obnoxious?
That's not sexism, but sometimes people are annoying.
And yet there's a full article in the New York Times now broadening the scope of the inquiry about Joe Biden from he's handsy and physically aggressive with people to sometimes women feel disrespected.
Personally, says this columnist, I've been mansplained about my own book.
Mansplained is one of the dumber phrases in human history.
Mansplained.
This, this, this pseudo term of art.
When is it just explaining something to a human, and when is it mansplaining?
Why do you have to assume bad motives on the part of somebody who's explaining something?
Like, legitimately, I spend a lot of my time explaining politics to people.
That is not mansplaining, that is me explaining.
I explain things to my kids.
Sometimes I explain things to my wife.
Oftentimes my wife explains things to me.
Like, why didn't you take out the garbage?
And also, get up out of bed and take out the garbage.
Like, people get explained to a lot.
But the attempt to broaden out victimhood from originally sexual assault, to now you're being nuzzled by a weirdo, to exuberant politician, to I feel mansplained into, is a pretty radical move that is intended to divide Americans.
And it's not just this silly column that suggests that women are constantly being victimized in soft ways around society.
As I mentioned on yesterday's show, there's a certain amount of ghost hunting that happens on the left, where if you feel something bad has happened, we're supposed to ascribe it to some ghost in the machine, some weird societal force that we can't peg down to particular actions, but that made you feel bad.
I'm a big evidence fan, so this is not one of my favorite things.
And you're seeing the left do this with regard to statistics as well, constantly shifting the statistics.
So yesterday, for example, there was an article, it was Equal Payday, which is a statistical lie It does not take until April 2nd of the following year for women to earn the same as men.
Women earn effectively the same as men because they make different decisions about their careers.
Equal payday is based on aggregate statistics without taking into account job choice, time out of the workforce, motherhood, Amount of time spent at the office.
How often you ask for a raise.
Like, there are a lot of factors when it comes to this stuff.
But women are effectively earning as much as men.
And according to some studies, in major cities particularly, women who are fresh out of college in the same degrees as men, who are single and don't have kids, are earning more than men.
According to one Time Magazine article from 2010, a lot more than men, actually.
So now the left is shifting the goalposts because in order to divide Americans from Americans, we have to shift the goalposts and suggest that discrimination is still a deeply active factor in every aspect of American life.
In a second, I'm going to show you how the goalposts are changing.
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Okay, so as I say...
The left in an attempt to move beyond the old left in an attempt to move beyond the Joe Biden's of the world.
They're now broadening out the definitions of discrimination because one of the fundamental signs of leftist theology and it really is a new religion at this point is dramatic and gratitude toward the state of things in the United States where even Joe Biden is not far left enough for you.
I'll get to more of that in just a second.
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So let's talk about the expansion of definitions so as to rule out the old school left.
I talked yesterday about the attempt by the left to move beyond the Obama era.
Obama is the old, and in with the new.
We need AOC.
We need Bernie Sanders.
We need extremism.
And earlier in the show, I talked a little bit about the fact that this is actually a large mistake by Democrats.
That if Democrats believe that they are going to win swing states by swinging wildly to the left, they're wrong.
But Democrats are trying to recapitulate Obama's 2012 win, not his 2008 win.
In 2008, Obama ran on the platform that we are all brothers and sisters, there's no red states, there's no blue states, there's the United States!
And that was attractive.
And then in 2012, Obama said, well, turns out I was wrong.
There are some red states and there are some blue states.
And mostly there are a lot of victim groups.
And if we can get those people together and they can vote for me, well, that's a durable coalition.
And that turned out to be the democratic model.
Well, now they're trying to rebuild that coalition along the lines of a victimhood that is certainly not in evidence, particularly with regard to sex.
So they've continued to push this war on women meme and suggest that suburban women should vote for them because they recognize the problems of women.
And so they're now looking at Joe Biden and saying, this guy's old school.
He's bad with women, bad with women.
He's been this way his entire career, guys.
And, um, It ain't that bad.
Let's just be frank about this.
His behavior is not all that terrible.
Is it something that I would do?
No.
I am not a physically forward person the way that Joe Biden is.
I have boundaries.
Joe Biden has none.
But, are we going to pretend that Democrats were unaware of all of this for years with Joe Biden?
And now they've expanded the definition out from, he's not actually, none of these women allege sexual harassment by the way.
So they're not saying he even sexually harassed them.
They're saying they felt uncomfortable because of something they did.
And now you have an article in the Washington Post suggesting it's not just that we felt uncomfortable, it's that we feel disrespected by a variety of issues.
And now you have the Washington Post Doing this on the economic front, suggesting that the problem is not equal pay because equal pay basically exists.
Now it is unequal wealth.
So they are now shifting the standards to pretend that America is still systemically discriminating against women for purposes of suggesting that people like Joe Biden are too old school.
So you have people like Janice Trafflett and Robert Wright writing articles for the Washington Post called America doesn't just have a gender pay gap, it has a gender wealth gap.
They say April 2nd is equal pay day, which reminds employees everywhere how much progress remains to close the gender pay gap.
Okay, first of all, that is a lie.
That is simply a lie.
Women are not earning dramatically less than men.
But then they expand the definition because they understand secretly, a lot of members of the media, that equal pay day is a bunch of crap.
So instead, they expand the definition.
You've seen this happen also with regard to wealth differentials among communities, racial communities.
So instead of talking about income mobility and the possibility of income mobility if you make good decisions in your life, instead what the media will talk about is the wealth gap.
So this is what they're doing with women now.
They're saying it's not just the pay gap that should concern women, it is also the wealth gap.
On average, women in the United States own a mere 32 cents to every dollar owned by men.
Now, first of all, if women are married to men, they have precisely, in community property states, they own precisely the same amount of dollars as men do.
They have exactly the same wealth.
My wife and I have the same wealth.
My earning power is a lot higher than my wife's earning power.
It doesn't matter.
We have exactly the same amount of wealth.
It's a community property state.
We have a joint bank account.
We own our house jointly.
This is, this is silly.
This is silly.
But beyond that, what this is really an attempt to do is suggest that because women were historically discriminated against, therefore they are currently discriminated against.
That is not an argument.
That is a leap in logic.
Just because something bad was true 50 years ago does not mean that same bad thing is true today, even if the impact of the bad thing 50 years ago is still felt today.
And things like racial wealth gaps or sexual wealth gaps.
But there's an attempt to paint America as deeply unjust, as deeply unequal, that requires radical solutions.
This is the direction the Democratic Party wishes to move.
They're looking for soft ways that they can sense discrimination.
Soft ways that they can create victim classes.
I mean, all the way down to leggings.
There's an article in the New York Times, a full article in the style section of the New York Times about why are men, and some women, so upset about people wearing leggings in public.
It must be sexism.
Or alternatively, they're just not a huge fan of people wearing clothing that is effectively tight in public, because that doesn't seem either modest or prudent.
Like, are we supposed to pretend that if you just walked around naked in broad daylight, that that would be the same thing as if you wore a burqa in broad daylight?
Like, clothing does seem to matter a little bit in how we perceive people, which is why police officers and doctors wear uniforms.
But all of this is supposed to be a soft form of sexism.
The continued breaking down of Americans into victim groups is one of the chief core tenets of the modern Democratic Party, which is why, for example, I think that Pete Buttigieg is in trouble.
Pete Buttigieg, who is a gay man in America, does not make a point of him being a victim.
He doesn't try to say, I'm a victim in America.
His book, which is actually pretty interesting, he doesn't make a huge deal out of this idea that I'm gay, therefore I'm a massive victim of discrimination in the United States.
He's the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, right?
I mean, that's not exactly great evidence that people hate you.
The person who was just elected, the mayor of Chicago, is a black lesbian.
And this is not a country where discrimination is a wildly prevalent, everyday, deep-seated occurrence that is causing mass disparity.
It is possible that disparities are caused by other factors, but the Democratic Party is banking on a feeling of dispossession in order for them to regain power.
Now, listen, President Trump did this in reverse.
In 2016, he suggested there's a vast swath of people across the country feeling dispossessed with the current political system who have been effectively ignored and disparaged by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, been called deplorables, been told that they are somehow inferior or lesser or they are racist, bigot, sexist, homophobes and all the rest.
And those are the people I'm going to speak to.
Well, Democrats are doing the same thing and have been doing the same thing for years, trying to identify victim groups and then broadening the definition of victimhood in order to make excuses for why obviously non-victim groups are actually victim groups.
And then suggesting that candidates they don't like are the victimizers.
Joe Biden has found himself in the crosshairs because of this.
He does not mesh with the current priorities of the Democratic Party, and thus he is in the victimizer class.
And you're starting to see this from the left about Buttigieg.
About Buttigieg.
It's pretty amazing.
He's part of the victimizer class, too.
Now, the person who's been able to escape all of this, of course, is Bernie Sanders.
He's not part of the victimizer class.
Why?
Because despite the fact that the Bernie bros were not exactly great with the ladies, and despite the fact that Bernie Sanders It is pretty impressive to watch as the Democrats prepare to shoot themselves in the feet, providing the impetus for President Trump's 2020 campaign.
and widely perceived as an extreme leftist.
So that means that we can rule him in as opposed to ruling him out.
It is pretty impressive to watch as the Democrats prepare to shoot themselves in the feet, providing the impetus for President Trump's 2020 campaign.
This is all President Trump wants for his birthday, man, is for the Democrats to do exactly this.
So yesterday, President Trump spoke at the NRCC And you can see, this is going to be his angle in 2020 as well.
It should be.
Here is President Trump going after the Green New Deal and pointing out if he loses to this, he deserves to lose.
The Green New Deal, done by a young bartender, 29 years old.
A young bartender, wonderful young woman.
The Green New Deal!
You know, but it's crazy.
You know, the first time I heard it, I said, that's the craziest thing.
You have senators that are professionals, that you guys know, that have been there for a long time.
White hair, everything perfect.
And they're standing behind her and they're shaking, they're petrified of her.
We support the Green New Deal!
Okay, he is totally right about all of this, of course.
And, you know, he's gonna get flack for saying, oh my God, he's demeaning her as a bartender.
No, he's saying she doesn't have any expertise Don't underestimate the power of socialism to get a vote.
It's what happens over a 10-year period when the country is destroyed, but they don't care about that.
after socialism in the Democratic Party.
They're making it easy for him, it's amazing.
I've never seen a party own itself so hard as the Democrats are doing currently. - Don't underestimate the power of socialism to get a vote.
It's what happens over a 10 year period when the country is destroyed, but they don't care about that.
When they say we're gonna give you free education, we're gonna give you free healthcare, we're gonna not have you pay your loans for college, We're going to give you free everything.
Everything is free!
It's very seductive to people.
It's not going to be so easy like you think.
Now, in 10 years, it's going to be easy when the country goes to hell.
So we have to work.
We can never take it for granted.
We have to explain how bad it really is.
Okay, and he is not wrong about any of this, and Democrats are providing him room to run because they are either delusional, delusionally hopeful, or delusionally angry.
Now, they do have one hope, and that is that the media will somehow save them, because the media have done yeoman's work on behalf of Democrats for legitimately years.
The best example of this came yesterday when CNN's Christine Amanpour, who for some reason is considered an objective journalist, she decides to journalism all over James Comey.
Here she is explaining that lock her up Of course, Lock Her Up was a feature of the 2016 Trump campaign.
Do you, in retrospect, wish that people like yourself, the head of the FBI, I mean, the people in charge of law and order, had shut down that language?
That it was dangerous, potentially?
That it could have created violence?
That it's kind of hate speech?
Should that have been allowed?
That's not a role for government to play.
The beauty of this country is people can say what they want, even if it's misleading and it's demagoguery.
The people who should have shut it down were Republicans.
Yeah, the point is not James Comey's response here, which is basically correct.
It is the fact that Christiane Amanpour is considered some sort of objective journalist.
Or how about the ladies of The View, who ripped on Meghan McCain yesterday.
Meghan McCain said, uh, yeah, Obama had some scandals, and all the ladies of The View were like, he never had a scandal!
He was the best!
Obama, he was so great!
He never had a scandal at all.
It must be great to be a Democrat, honestly.
None of this happened in the Obama administration.
People say if this was Obama, nothing like this, even remotely close, ever happened in that administration.
Completely scandal free.
I don't know about that.
Do you know a scandal?
Can you name a scandal?
Yes, but I don't want to do this with you this morning.
I think the problem is, when you put the Obama administration up as this pristine, scandal-free, perfect administration that never did anything wrong, for conservatives and Republicans, there were a lot of policies that were put into place.
But it was pretty scandal-free.
But I'm saying there was a lot of policies put into place that rational conservatives disagreed with.
And I think part of the problem is, he was very judgmental.
If you didn't like the Obama administration and you have a problem with the Iran deal, that's how you got Trump.
Okay, and she is right about this.
It is also true that they were not scandal-free.
What the living hell?
The IRS under Barack Obama targeted opposing 501c3 groups.
Eric Holder was held in contempt by Congress over Fast and Furious, and Barack Obama asserted executive privilege to protect him.
Barack Obama said openly on an open mic to the Russians that he would provide them flexibility after the election if they would lay off before the election.
Barack Obama scandal-free.
It is so highly irritating to hear that nonsense over and over from our great protectors, the firefighters who protect us.
How about Good Morning America?
They're doing the same thing.
They invited on Valerie Jarrett, who presided over the scandal-filled Obama administration, to talk about how terrible Trump was.
I mean, it was just an open invite to Valerie Jarrett to bash Trump.
I think the political landscape today, in some ways, is depressing.
I think tone does start at the top.
We look to the President of the United States to be the leader, to be a role model, particularly for young people, and I think some of the rhetoric has been profoundly disappointing and troubling to me.
He was very much a part of the birther controversy.
What was that meeting like?
The driving force behind the birther.
Controversy.
I think it's unconscionable, and I think it, um, you know, it incited hatred, and I think it put President Obama and his family in harm's way.
Okay, so, again, it is fun to watch the media simply play defense for every Democrat.
There's a reason all the top Democrats in Virginia are still holding their offices.
It's also amazing that the media continue to pretend they're objective when they're obviously not.
Dean Paquette.
Who's the publisher of the New York Times?
He said yesterday that we are happy to publish all sorts of perspectives, like they literally published a full on 12,000 word screed on why Israel should be boycotted by somebody who is paid in part by the government of Qatar, a terror supporting state.
That was fine, but they will never print apparently any opinion that questions the science behind global warming, despite the fact that a lot of the modeling has been incorrect so far.
And this is coming from somebody, by the way.
Who is not a global warming skeptic.
I think that anthropogenic global warming is a thing.
I think that human activity has an effect on the climate.
But I am happy to hear more about various sides of the debate.
But according to the New York Times, you're not allowed to even publish that stuff, but these are the objective journalists.
I'm not sure both-siderism is the right approach, and it's not the approach I believe in.
I think that's become sort of a stalking horse for fairness.
Fairness means fairness and open-mindedness.
And a sense of inquiry.
That, to me, is journalism.
That does not mean if you... we do not go out to make sure we quote 25 people that say there's no... man did not contribute to the changing climate.
That would be ridiculous.
That's not what most people believe.
There's a debate.
The only debate is what should be done about it.
I don't believe in that.
I believe in open-mindedness, open-minded inquiry.
Open-minded inquiry is what he believes in, not anyone who disagrees with him on fundamental issues.
That's your media right there.
I love that.
And if you say, well, maybe you should get another opinion, well, that's both-siderism.
Open-minded inquiry is where I interview people who agree with me, and we just disagree about how strongly to agree with me.
Uh, your media in a nutshell.
Dean Beckett over at the New York Times.
Okay, time for a thing that I like.
So, there is, as I say, I've been signing a lot of books lately.
And because I sign a lot of books, that means that I'm watching TV while I sign those books.
Well, there are some movies that have become available on Amazon for rent that kind of fell through the cracks and are pretty good.
There's a movie called Prospect.
With Pedro Pascal, who has become one of my favorite actors.
He's really terrific.
He's in Triple Frontier.
You'll also remember him from Game of Thrones.
He is quite versatile.
And a girl named Sophie Thatcher.
And it essentially is a space western.
I believe that this, I'm pretty certain that the people who wrote the movie Prospect were basing it on Treasure Island because it pretty much follows all the beats of Treasure Island.
But the movie is a good, tight, like hour and thirty, hour and forty minute movie.
And it's about a little girl who lands with her father on this planet where there's a natural resource that people are seeking to extract.
And she's confronted by, effectively, a pirate named... who's played by Pedro Pascal.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
requesting release I'm here to harvest.
I'm here to harvest.
I have the location of a massive deposit of warlock.
The Queen's Lair.
By my estimation, it's the largest anyone's ever seen.
Someone is approaching.
Where are you from?
Nowhere.
Capoeira.
The Queen's lair.
Okay, so the movie is good.
And again, it's a very tight movie.
It's only 97 minutes, which I said yesterday that I'm a big fan of shorter movies.
It's not a special effects-based sci-fi movie.
It's a space western, kind of.
And the movie is worth watching.
So you can go check that out.
I believe it's available at Amazon for rent right now.
The movie is called Prospect.
Okay, some things that I hate.
Okay, thing that I hate, number one, why is it that online is where we find all of the weird quasi-solutions to people's problems?
And when I say solutions, I mean no one in their right mind would do these things, but we are supposed to pretend that, like, they're a thing?
Well, Vocative is apparently one of the places you go for this sort of stuff, and they have a story today about adults who want to be swaddled In a fake womb to be comforted.
I have nothing for you here.
If you can't see the video, it's legitimately people who are being tied.
It says this Japanese therapy is supposed to beat stress by taking you back to the womb.
They legitimately wrap people like Frodo is wrapped in spiderweb at the end of Return of the King.
It's supposed to recreate safety of the womb.
Babies feel when they're being swaddled.
Okay, quick note.
Never swaddle a baby by putting the blanket over the baby's head, you dolts.
I mean, the swaddle is supposed to go, apparently, over the entire adult.
I remember, wasn't this tried, by the way?
In the United States, there was this theory that this would be tried in psychiatrists' offices.
A couple people have died because of it, if I'm not mistaken.
And they tried this.
It was like a weird therapy thing.
And people would actually, like, suffocate in the blanket and all of this.
Man, people are dumb.
Does humanity deserve to survive?
Open question.
Other things that I hate today.
So there's an amazing story today from the BBC.
It just broke a couple of hours ago.
And it talks about a quote-unquote magic bullet carbon solution to climate change.
Here's the article.
A technology that removes carbon dioxide from the air has received significant backing from major fossil fuel companies.
British Columbia-based Carbon Engineering has shown it can extract CO2 in a cost-effective way.
It has now been boosted by $68 million in new investment from Chevron, Occidental, and coal giant BHP.
Climate campaigners are worried that the technology will be used to extract even more oil.
Why?
Because if we can suck the carbon emissions out of the air, then we might continue to use oil.
But then why are you whining about us using the oil if there are no carbon emissions because we're sucking it out of the air?
I'm confused.
The quest for technology for carbon dioxide removal from the air received significant science endorsement last year with the publication of the IPCC report on keeping the rising global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century.
In their summary for policymakers, the scientists said all pathways that limit global warming should be pursued effectively.
Carbon engineering says that its direct air capture process is now able to capture gas for under $100 a ton.
With its new funding, the company plans to build its first commercial facilities.
These industrial scale plants could capture up to 1 million tons of CO2 from the air each year.
So how is it that this works?
Well, apparently, The comparatively low concentrations of CO2 in the air make it difficult to design efficient machines to remove the gas, but carbon engineering has a process that sucks in the air and then exposes it to a chemical solution that concentrates the CO2.
Further refinements mean that the gas can be purified in a form that can be stored or utilized as liquid fuel.
It's basically complicated chemistry.
And they're talking about making a liquid fuel directly from CO2.
So instead of having these massive emissions, you are instead using the carbon dioxide to make new fuel.
So they take the carbon emissions in the air, they suck it out of the air, and then they are recycling the carbon emissions, effectively speaking.
They're investing in this process because they don't want to be regulated, presumably, because this is called a market solution, and the left is opposed to it.
Environmentalists are angry.
Why?
Well, they think that it's—some are worried that they think that it's good, but Sipora Berman, international program director for Stand.Earth, told BBC News it's a huge concern, because they're worried that it will prolong the fossil fuel era.
But again, why are you upset about the fossil fuel era if it's not actually going to wreck the Earth anymore?
So, it suggests that there is an ulterior motive.
That is the thing I hate.
Not the technology, which is great.
The thing I hate is the ulterior motive.
If I give you technology that will help you solve the climate change issue, say nuclear technology, or sucking the carbon out of the air, then why exactly would you oppose it unless you have some sort of ulterior motive?
Which does suggest that there is something else going on for a lot of climate change Forward thinking politicians that has more to do with economic redistributionism than it has to do with actually solving a problem.
Alrighty, well, we will be back here a little bit later today for two additional hours.
Also, I'm on Joe Rogan's show today, so you might want to go check that out because that's a lot of fun.
And in the meantime, go buy my book, The Right Side of History, which charted number three on Amazon in nonfiction this week and number three at Barnes & Noble as well this week.
Continues to sell like hotcakes.
You can be part of the movement.
Check it out, The Right Side of History.
We will see you here either later today if you subscribe, or tomorrow if not.
See you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Russian collusion hoax has collapsed, the economy's doing well, but Donald Trump's approval ratings are stuck.
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