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April 11, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:25
Assange Is Singed | Ep. 757
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Julian Assange is arrested, Attorney General William Barr goes on offense against the so-called Deep State, and Ilhan Omar complains about Islamophobia after tape emerges of her talking in a weird way about 9-11.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Wow, it is news overload today.
I mean, just too much news happening in a very short period of time.
Michael Avenatti, new indictments released against him.
Apparently he was stealing money from a paraplegic person.
Hero of the resistance over there.
I mean, just breaking news all the time.
It's all insane.
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OK, well, the big breaking news this morning that has upended our entire show schedule is that Julian Assange has now been arrested.
And this, of course, is a very big deal because Julian Assange was hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy for seven years, for seven years.
And finally, he was pulled out of the embassy.
His Ecuadorian His immunity was removed from him and they dragged him out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Now, the reality is that he had been a tool of the Russians for a very long time according to the best intelligence sources.
According to the UK Daily Mail, Julian Assange is facing up to 12 months in a British prison after he was found guilty of skipping bail to avoid being extradited to Sweden in 2012 to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.
He finally appeared in court today after he was sensationally expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been claiming political refuge for the past seven years.
He is not a victim in any way.
The guy was legitimately under indictment, and then he skipped bail, and now he has been arrested.
He's no more a victim than Roman Polanski would be a victim if he were arrested for having skipped out on bail.
A judge described Julian Assange's defense as laughable, and his behavior is that of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interests.
As the court heard, he tried to fight off arresting officers.
That didn't go great for him.
Ecuador's decision to revoke his political asylum this morning saw a diplomatic falling of dominoes, with British police then dragging him away in handcuffs to face charges related to the bail conditions he defied in 2012.
In a sensational turn of events, he was then also charged by the United States government with conspiring with American whistleblower Chelsea Manning, it would have been Bradley Manning at the time, to break a password to a classified government computer in 2010.
So they are charging Assange in the United States not for the publication of material, which could theoretically be a First Amendment issue, but instead they are charging him for the violation of hacking statutes.
So he hasn't violated the Espionage Act, according to the DOJ.
He has violated hacking statutes.
According to documents unsealed today, the charge relates to Assange's role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in US history.
He faces a maximum jail term of five years.
He also faces a court hearing on May 2nd relating to his possible extradition to the United States to contest the computer hacking charges.
The court heard today How Assange resisted arrest and tried to barge past officers in an attempt to return to his private room within the embassy when they introduced themselves at about 10 a.m., telling them this is unlawful.
Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno dramatically withdrew Assange's asylum status this morning, blaming his discourteous and aggressive behavior in continuing to work with WikiLeaks while housed at the embassy.
It's amazing how everybody's position on WikiLeaks absolutely reversed over the past six years, seven years, nine years.
Originally, it was the right looking at WikiLeaks as an evil Russian front organization dedicated to spilling American military secrets and putting American lives in danger.
That assessment, I think, was correct.
And then, after WikiLeaks started dumping out DNC material, started dumping out John Podesta email, then you heard people on the right, some people, we won't name names, suggesting that WikiLeaks was suddenly good.
That WikiLeaks was suddenly somebody, people who were worth listening to.
They had valuable information to provide.
Well, a couple things can be true at once.
One, some of the information that you provide in document dumps is probably valuable information.
Two, you can also be a tool of the Russians and one of the world's worst humans, and that apparently is Julian Assange.
The arrest came 24 hours after WikiLeaks accused Ecuador of an extensive spying operation, adding that it assumed intel had been handed over to the administration of Donald Trump.
So Ecuador, Assange basically bit the hand that fed him, and Ecuador was like, well, guess what?
You have diplomatic immunity because you're in our embassy?
Well, here's what we can do.
They just removed his diplomatic immunity.
President Moreno accused Assange of violating the terms of his asylum by interfering in internal affairs of other states, as well as blocking security cameras and mistreating guards.
The actual indictment that came down from the DOJ alleges that in March of 2010, Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S.
Army, to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S.
Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network, a U.S.
government network used for classified documents and communications.
Apparently, Manning, who had access to the computers in connection with her duties as an intelligence analyst, Manning was a man at the time, they should really say his duties as an intelligence analyst since we are speaking Historically, and if we're speaking biologically, is still a man, in any case, Manning was using the computers to download classified records to transmit to WikiLeaks.
Cracking the password would have allowed Manning to log on to the computers under a username that did not belong to her, says the DOJ.
Such a deceptive measure would have made it more difficult for investigators to determine the source of the illegal disclosures.
That is not a journalistic tactic, that is a hacking tactic.
A journalistic tactic is somebody comes with you comes to you with material and then you print it.
A hacking tactic is somebody says, if you help me hack the US Department of Defense, then you can have the resulting material.
That's a crime.
During the conspiracy, Manning and Assange engaged in real-time discussions regarding Manning's transmission of classified records to Assange.
The discussions also reflect Assange actively encouraging Manning to provide more information During an exchange, Manning told Assange that, quote, Assange is now being charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.
He's presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, says the DOJ.
If convicted, he faces a max of five years in prison.
Now this comes shortly after Chelsea Manning was arrested after refusing to testify in a WikiLeaks case just last month.
According to Business Insider, Manning was arrested, this would have been March 9th, after she reportedly refused to testify in front of a Virginia grand jury about her interactions with WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.
I found you in contempt, Judge Cloud M. Hilton told Manning at a public ruling.
He said Manning will be jailed either until you purge yourself or the end of the life of the grand jury.
Manning said in a statement that she'd been summoned to appear before a secret grand jury on Wednesday.
In response to each question, she said she answered, Well, that is not a reason to not testify in front of a grand jury.
You have to plead the fifth.
But Chelsea Manning has already been released from prison after being found guilty on charges like these.
So there was no issue of being prosecuted.
There was double jeopardy forbids that.
So this was just Chelsea Manning refusing to testify.
All of the substantive questions pertaining to my disclosures of information to the public in 2010 answers I provided in extensive testimony during my court-martial in 2013.
Her statement continued.
In January, WikiLeaks said federal prosecutors were working to get witnesses to testify against Assange in secret criminal proceedings being conducted by the Trump administration.
Manning told reporters, I don't believe in the grand jury process.
I don't believe in the secrecy of this.
Manning now believes in jail because that's where Chelsea Manning currently is.
So just as a reminder, everybody has been wrong about WikiLeaks at least once.
And when I say everybody, I don't mean everybody.
Some of us were saying that WikiLeaks was a terrible organization consistently for years.
But in the middle of the 2016 election, suddenly Julian Assange began appearing on mainline conservative television shows talking about why it was important to release all the Hillary Clinton documentation.
Suddenly, Assange went from being a figure of scorn and disgrace to being a figure who ought to be lauded as a figure of truth-telling.
If your view of Julian Assange changed because of the nature of the material that he was revealing, as opposed to the methods used in gathering that material, or the lives put in danger because of the release of that material, then you are a hack.
Okay, you are a hack.
If you went from Julian Assange is a villain to Julian Assange is a hero and now back to Julian Assange is a villain, the whiplash must be just incredible for you.
And if you went from Julian Assange is a hero to Julian Assange is a villain, that whiplash must hurt pretty well too.
Because the fact is we've known what we've needed to know about Julian Assange on a root level since 2011.
Commentary magazine had a piece in at that time by Jonathan Foreman talking about what exactly Julian Assange had done and it's worth reading.
As late as 2008, WikiLeaks was insisting on its website that it was completely neutral, a conduit for information.
And that would crowdsource its analysis in the way that Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written entirely by unpaid volunteers, allows public contributions to its entries, says Commentary.
There is little reason to suspect that WikiLeaks had a special animus against the United States.
In the first three years of its existence, Wikipedia, WikiLeaks, received and published hitherto secret documents concerning a wide variety of entities around the world.
These included a confidential investigation by Kroll Associates of official corruption in Kenya, UN documents concerning sexual abuse by the organization's peacekeepers in the Congo, the tax returns of movie star-turned-tax-refuse Nick Wesley Snipes, and private emails stolen from Sarah Palin and Holocaust denier David Irving.
Bigger fish included the communications of a Swiss bank allegedly engaged in money laundering and secret materials from the Church of Scientology.
During those three years, WikiLeaks also published a manual of standard operating procedures of the Gitmo detention facility.
That release was intended to be embarrassing, but it had arguably been of benefit to the U.S.
military because it showed that our procedures were pretty good.
But that was before collateral murder.
In 2010, the focus of WikiLeaks turned directly and exclusively to the U.S.
government and its conduct since September 11th.
In the summer, it released the so-called war logs, nearly half a million Internal Defense Department documents concerning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That was followed in November by the publication of the State Department cables.
Indeed, so focused was WikiLeaks on these caches, it became all but impossible to access earlier postings on other subjects or even submit new ones.
This may well be because mega-leaks, as Assange calls them, naturally take precedence over smaller ones.
On the other hand, it is possible that America was Assange's target all along, and that his organization's earlier, more wide-ranging activities were designed to build its credibility and create a false impression of neutrality and objectivity before it went to war with the United States government.
The closer one examines Assange's various pronouncements, the more it looks like someone who might engage in dissimulation in order to mask a secret agenda.
The circumstantial evidence for this includes the disillusionment and departure of Key WikiLeaks team members in September of 2010.
So what exactly did Assange do?
Well, he ignored the Department of Defense's request, the U.S.
government's request, the State Department's request to redact material that could put Americans in direct path of harm.
I'll give you some more information about the entire Assange debacle in just one second.
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Alrighty, so, a little more information on Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
So Assange insisted on publishing the Afghan war logs without redacting names and other personal details to protect the lives of those mentioned in them, even after five major human rights organizations pled with him to do so in a joint email.
His response to this was to demand that the five organizations assist in the task of redaction.
He also said that WikiLeaks would need $700,000 to go through remaining unpublished documents.
By that point, 77,000 out of 92,000 documents had already been released, and despite Assange's initial claims that the names of Afghan informants had been redacted, newspapers like the New York Times found that this was often not the case.
When Amnesty International suggested a conference call to discuss collaboration, Assange said, I'm very busy.
I have no time to deal with people who prefer to do nothing but cover their asses.
Assange would not consider delaying publication.
The same was true of the subsequent much bigger release of Iraq war documents in the autumn.
It was that decision that prompted a major internal revolt at WikiLeaks.
According to Reports & Wired, the organization's German spokesman, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, confronted Assange about his autocratic and secretive behavior, and Assange responded by accusing Domscheit-Berg of leaking information within WikiLeaks to a columnist for Newsweek.
Convinced that Domscheit-Berg was the source of the leaked newsweek, Assange says, quote, I am investigating a serious security breach.
Are you refusing to answer?
Domscheit-Berg replied that everyone in the organization was concerned about the news that Assange might be charged with rape in Sweden.
He also pressed Assange about the Iraq documents at one point, exclaiming you are not anyone's king or god.
Assange then forced him to resign, effectively speaking.
All of this is a disaster area and has been a disaster area for the United States for a very long time.
As this commentary magazine article points out, the idea that Assange is engaged in a campaign against the United States is supported by a 2008 leak that had little or no justification on the grounds of transparency in the interest of the public.
A classified 2004 report that included details of the workings of the U.S.
Army's warlock system for jamming the homemade bombs called IEDs set off by cell phone or radio transmitter.
The report concerned the problematic way that jammers interfered with regular military communications, but its publication ensured that anyone anywhere in the world who wanted to figure out how to defeat the warlock now had the means to do so.
WikiLeaks' defenders said there was no reason not to publish, but the State Department and the Defense Department said, why are you publishing all of this stuff?
It's a mistake and it's going to put people in danger.
His fans have suggested that Assange was, in fact, doing a world of good by releasing all of this material, but Assange, in fact, was doing tremendous damage to innocent people by releasing all of these documents.
He was allowing persecution of people who were coordinating with the United States government to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan.
That's some pretty bad stuff.
That's some pretty bad stuff.
I mean, even The Nation came out against him in 2016, talking about how he was undermining dissenters in foreign countries.
It's pretty terrible.
It's pretty terrible stuff.
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have engaged in really, really bad activity, so it is a good thing for the world that Assange was arrested today.
It's a good thing.
Boston University, there's a fellow named Paul Hare who teaches over at Boston University.
He's Britain's former ambassador to Cuba.
He says, when Edward Snowden thinks you have a big mouth, you may have a problem.
Former NSA whistleblower Snowden has criticized WikiLeaks for failing to redact sensitive information even in the hacked DNC emails, allowing credit card and social security numbers of party donors and guests to tumble into public view.
And this has been going on for years.
So, all the people who are out there today defending Julian Assange, who acted as essentially a front for the Russian government, Again, if you were wildly inconsistent on this issue, I think that you have some looking in the mirror to be done.
Meanwhile, major controversy has broken out on the Hill.
Attorney General William Barr has gone on offense against the so-called Deep State.
He didn't use that term, but that is the term that is being used in the press today.
He is suggesting that there needs to be a full investigation of the outset and conduct of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.
I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal.
It's a big deal.
I think it's important to look at that.
First of all, whether he thought spying against the Trump campaign had happened.
He said, yes, I do think spying against the Trump campaign happened.
This has been the quote that has driven a thousand think pieces right here.
I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal.
It's a big deal.
I think it's important to look at that.
And I'm not just I'm not talking about the FBI necessarily, but intelligence agencies more broadly.
So you're not you're not suggesting, though, that spying occurred.
I guess you could... I think there was... spying did occur.
Yes, I think spying did occur.
Well, obviously, he is correct about that.
Spying, in the generic sense, did occur.
I mean, there was surveillance against Carter Page, including retroactive surveillance of his emails, presumably.
There was also spying on George Papadopoulos via use of human informants.
The question, as Barr makes clear, is that the surveillance could have been proper or it could have been improper, and he doesn't know the answer to that.
So here's Barr explaining.
What I mean is we need to find out whether this was improper surveillance or whether this was proper surveillance.
I just want to make it clear, thinking back on all the different colloquies here, that I am not saying that improper surveillance occurred.
I'm saying that I am concerned about it and looking into it.
That's all.
That, of course, is true.
But that has driven people up a wall.
That has driven people absolutely up a wall, despite the fact there's an ongoing investigation into exactly these questions already.
As we mentioned yesterday on the radio show, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz is already investigating possible abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by the Justice Department and the FBI.
According to William Barr, during a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on the Justice Department's budget proposal, Barr explained that the Office of the Inspector General has a pending investigation of the FISA process in the Russia investigation.
He says that this will be complete by May or June.
And you can see the panic beginning to break out in Democratic circles.
Oh, no.
Is Michael Horowitz, the inspector general over at the DOJ, the guy who effectively found that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and other members of the intelligence community Is that guy now going to turn his eyes to the conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation?
Because that could have some dire effects, particularly for some people who are involved in that investigation.
agencies to justify criticism over their political bias?
Is that guy now going to turn his eyes to the conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation?
Because that could have some dire effects, particularly for some people who are involved in that investigation.
Because it's not just a question of how that investigation was begun.
Maybe it was begun under good auspices.
Maybe George Papadopoulos was suspicious, and thus they decided they needed to look into him.
Let's even assume that the FISA warrant against Carter Page was good, although that's a lot more doubtful, especially if the intelligence agencies knew that the SEAL dossier, which was used as a strong basis for that FISA warrant, was a bunch of nonsense.
But there's another side to that investigation, and that is all of the leaks that were coming out of the Obama administration about the progress of the Trump-Russia investigation.
Some of those leaks have been traced to people like James Clapper.
Clapper, of course, the former head of Obama's CIA.
All of this has also been traced back to a lot of the bias that was present at the top levels of the Intelligence Committee, people like John Brennan over at the CIA.
No wonder John Brennan seems to be running scared.
He was on MSNBC last night.
He says, well, Barr, you know, he just sounded like a personal lawyer for Trump.
Unfortunately, I think over the past several weeks, I've been very disappointed in Attorney General Barr.
I had higher expectations for him.
He shaped the narrative after the Mueller report.
He, in fact, then also had this testimony today that I think was very carefully nuanced as a way to try to support Donald Trump's positions.
So he acted more like a personal lawyer for Donald Trump today rather than the Attorney General.
Okay, he can say that, and he can believe that, and you can hear the media repeating this.
There is something deeply ironic about a media that was firmly convinced that Robert Mueller was going to find President Trump guilty of collusion.
A media that was hanging on every word from the intel community and from the DOJ and the Mueller investigation and the FBI when it came to the collusion report and suddenly they are really uncurious about exactly who started this investigation, how it got started, the conduct of the investigation.
Suddenly all that stuff is deeply boring to them.
I wonder why.
I wonder why.
Could it have something to do with the political agenda involved?
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Alright, so as I say, the media, wildly uncurious about the allegations by William Barr that spying that may have been improper may have occurred during the 2016 election cycle and beyond against Team Trump.
The media are united in their disdain for such statements, whereas they were perfectly happy to take all of the advice they could from politically motivated actors like James Comey, and John Brennan, and James Clapper, and all these people who suggested they had inside information and knowledge that collusion occurred.
They were perfectly happy to push that propaganda out there day after day, and it didn't turn out to be true.
And now they don't even want to ask the simple question.
They can't even handle 24 hours of being asked questions about how exactly the FISA warrants against Carter Page went down.
Or whether Lisa Page and Peter Strzok were instrumental in driving the Trump-Russia collusion investigation for political reasons.
Or whether the leaks that were coming from that investigation were in fact criminal in any way.
They're so uncurious.
Here's Chuck Todd being deeply uncurious.
It doesn't matter what the truth is, does it?
I mean, I hate to say this now, but that's the whole point.
It feels like that basically the Attorney General gaslit the country.
Amazing how he's happy to say that this Attorney General gaslit the country.
But Loretta Lynch, man, you know, that lady was just, she was wonderful.
Eric Holder, who called himself a wingman for President Obama and was held in contempt by Congress.
That guy was great.
But William Barr, he's gaslighting the country when he says these people were spied on.
They were spied on.
There's no question whether they were spied on.
They were.
The question is whether that spying was legitimate.
And that's what he is saying he is going to get to the bottom of.
Andrew McCarthy has a piece over at FoxNews.com today talking about this.
He says, in his testimony on Wednesday before a Senate Appropriations Committee subcommittee, Attorney General William Barr made statements that were so clearly correct, they should be no more controversial than asserting that the sky is blue.
The fact that they are causing consternation is what should alarm people.
Barr told senators, I think spying did occur.
The question, Barr elaborated, is whether it was adequately predicated, because spying on a political campaign is a big deal.
We should long ago have known what the rationale was.
You know, as surely as you're reading this, that if an incumbent Republican administration had greenlit a DOJ and FBI investigation of the Democratic Party's presidential campaign, we would already be fully informed about what triggered the investigation.
Democrats would have been unified in demanding it, the media would have echoed those demands in an endless loop, and, if there'd been an abuse of power, all the pertinent heads would by now have rolled.
Instead, we're dealing with the Obama administration directing an investigation of the campaign of Donald Trump.
Candidate Trump was regarded by many in the media and political establishment as the most unfit presidential candidate ever, a man who would certainly have been predisposed to engage in a corrupt plot with Russia to manipulate the electorate.
For more than two years, that has been the dominant narrative, says Andrew McCarthy.
As a result, many in the media, Democrats, even many Republicans, have ignored claims of political spying, even as the evidence that it took place mounted, indeed mounted to the point that whether spying occurred is no longer contestable.
The narrative has now shifted to the claim that the target of the spying was not Trump himself, but rather a few bad apples working in his campaign.
So here is what McCarthy says.
He says there is a presumption in this country against the exploitation of law enforcement and intelligence authorities for political purposes and in particular against political spying.
But a presumption is not an unbreakable rule.
If there were real evidence that the opposition party's presidential nominee was conspiring with a foreign power to commit crimes, especially espionage to influence the campaign, the incumbent administration would have an obligation to investigate and to take appropriate action.
What is appropriate is dictated by the circumstances.
This is a much misunderstood principle.
The fact that the opening of an investigation may be justifiable does not by itself justify all investigative tactics that might be used.
And this is correct.
It's quite possible that this, as I've said many times, that this investigation was initiated under solid auspices and then it moved beyond its boundaries because there were politically motivated actors in positions of high authority.
That's been my going theory here.
Because there's a norm against political spying, opening an investigation of the opposition political party is not like opening an investigation of a mafia family or a suspected drug conspiracy, says McCarthy.
An investigation of a political campaign should not be open unless there is significant evidence of wrongdoing.
Using informants to spy on a campaign or its operatives is extremely intrusive and has a high potential for abuse.
It should not be done based on a few disturbing connections between campaign surrogates and foreign powers.
Moreover, if spying is to be conducted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA must be followed.
To conduct FISA surveillance of an American citizen suspected of being an agent of a foreign power, there must be probable cause that the American citizen is knowingly, not unwittingly, engaged in clandestine activities on behalf of the foreign power.
So he continues along these lines, and this is correct.
I mean, he's making the case that the Attorney General is right to press for these answers, and that he has not said anything wrong.
But the media and the Democrats are going crazy over this.
How dare William Barr suggest that maybe something was wrong in this investigation, or that anything went wrong, even though we already know something went wrong?
Okay, we actually already know that something happened here.
The prioritization of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation over the Hillary Clinton investigation was already found by Michael Horowitz's IG report from the DOJ.
Michael Horowitz's report found that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page decided to prioritize, they decided to push forward the Trump-Russia investigation at the expense of the Hillary investigation.
It ended up hurting Hillary because the information that was on Anthony Weiner's server, they knew about that a month before they announced it, but they put it on the back burner because they didn't think it was important, whereas they thought the Trump-Russia stuff was deeply important.
Nonetheless, the Democrats are trying to draw a narrative that Barr is a political actor and that because Barr is a political actor, he's going to shield Trump from problems.
And the evidence that he is actually covering for Trump is the fact that he's even bringing up the possibility of corruption from high officials inside the intelligence community.
Here's Nancy Pelosi doing this routine.
The chief law enforcement officer of our country is going off the rails yesterday and today.
He is the Attorney General of the United States of America, not the Attorney General of Donald Trump.
Okay, well, that's hilarious because I don't remember her saying the same thing about any of Barack Obama's Attorney Generals, including Eric Holder, who is held in contempt by Congress.
It's pretty incredible.
Okay, in just a second, I'm going to get to controversy breaking out over Ilhan Omar, because there is a lot going on there.
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Overwhelmingly, millennials are in favor of socialism, or at least they have a very positive view of socialism.
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So some big controversy breaking out now over Ilhan Omar, who continues to just be a nightmare for Democrats.
She's a nightmare for Democrats because she says terrible things on a fairly regular basis.
Well, one of the terrible things that she has said in the last few weeks, she spoke at an event for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Now, it is important to note that the Council on American-Islamic Relations is not, in fact, a moderate or Reform Muslim group.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations was named as a co-conspirator, as an unindicted co-conspirator, in the Holy Land Foundation trial.
The Holy Land Foundation was a front group for raising money for Hamas.
CARA was founded in 1994.
It was not founded after 9-11.
It was founded specifically to beat back, supposedly, all of the Islamophobia that was so prevalent in the United States.
Well, Ilhan Omar, in the midst, it's a deeply anti-Israel group.
Obviously, they have many anti-Semitic connections.
They have connections To terror groups, at least in terms of the personnel who have shuttled between various groups.
In any case, Ilhan Omar spoke at an event for CARE just a few weeks back.
And when she spoke at this event, she was in the middle of allegations of anti-Semitism because she has repeatedly said brutally anti-Semitic things.
Well, in the middle of her speech, she was talking about how it was that all Muslims in the United States had been blamed for the actions of a few Muslims on 9-11, but the way she spoke about it raised some hackles, and for pretty good reason.
CARE was founded after 9-11.
Because they recognize that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.
Okay.
Some people did something.
Some people did something.
So that description has raised some hackles because 9-11 wasn't some people did something.
9-11 was a vicious terrorist attack, the worst terrorist attack in the history of the United States by a huge margin.
It was the worst.
It was the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor.
And it wasn't just some people did something.
Now, her defenders are saying, well, what she's trying to do there, she's trying to contrast.
Some people did something that all of us were blamed, except that what she said there was that some people did.
It wasn't a terrible, horrible terrorist attack occurred on American soil, and then they blamed us.
It was some people did something.
Is this dismissive language with regard to terrorism?
And unfortunately, that fits in with her record with regard to how she has treated terrorism in the past.
Representative Ilhan Omar, I mean, she recommended lightness in sentencing for ISIS recruits from Minnesota back in 2016.
Now, Omar has been suggesting over and over and over again that anyone who rips around this stuff is an Islamophobe.
But this has nothing to do, in my view, with mainstream Islam or Islam generally.
This has to do with her being a bad person who spends an awful lot of time defending terrorists on the grounds that their ideology may not be wrong.
It's just their action that is wrong.
Here's where I get that.
So she wrote this letter back in 2016.
To a judge on the basis of a sentencing that was taking place of nine defendants who had been convicted of trying to join ISIS.
And here is what she wrote to this judge in November of 2016.
She was already a state representative in Minnesota.
Quote, as you undoubtedly deliberate with great caution, the sentencing of nine recently convicted Somali American men, I bring to your attention the ramifications of sentencing young men who made a consequential mistake two decades in federal prison.
So it's a consequential mistake to join ISIS.
Weird mistake.
Weird.
I mean, this isn't somebody getting caught up in a drug bust.
You were trying to join ISIS.
She says, Society will have no expectations of the then-to-be-50-or-60-year-olds released prisoners if they serve a couple of decades in prison.
It will view them with distrust and revulsion.
Such punitive measures not only lack efficacy, they inevitably create an environment in which extremism can flourish.
Aligning with the presupposition of terrorist recruitment, Americans do not accept you and continue to trivialize your value.
Instead of being a nobody, be a martyr.
In other words, if we punish terrorists, then terrorists are going to crop up because they will rightfully be feeling that America has marginalized them.
And she makes this absolutely clear in the rest of the letter.
She says, "The best deterrent to fanaticism is a system of compassion.
We must alter our attitude and approach.
If we truly want to affect change, we should refocus our efforts on inclusion and rehabilitation." Here is the key sentence.
A long-term prison sentence for one who chose violence to combat direct marginalization is a statement that our justice system misunderstands the guilty.
So in other words, the big problem for terrorists is that they choose violence.
But really, they're victims.
Really, they're victims of direct marginalization in the United States.
And so they really shouldn't go to prison.
I mean, they made a bad choice about the whole violence and joining ISIS thing, but as far as their general perspective about being marginalized, not only are they right, they're even more right if you sentence them to prison.
So there's a catch-22.
If somebody tries to join ISIS, that's because they were marginalized.
But if you arrest them and send them to prison, you're marginalizing them, which makes them want to join ISIS.
The desire to commit violence is not inherent to people, says Ilhan Omar back in this 2016 letter.
It is the consequences of systematic alienation.
People seek violent solutions where the process established for enacting guilt is inaccessible to them.
So in other words, people are marginalized, people are cast out, and then they want to kill Americans.
Fueled by disaffection, turn to malice.
If the guilty were willing to kill and be killed fighting perceived injustice, imagine the consequence of them hearing, I believe you can be rehabilitated.
I want you to become part of my community and together we will thrive.
So release these people from prison so that you are treating them with kindness and then they will all be better off.
Now, this is why I say this has nothing to do with Ilhan Omar and Islam per se.
This has much more to do with Ilhan Omar being a radical leftist because Barack Obama says very much the same thing in the introduction to Dreams from My Father.
In Dreams for My Father, I pointed this out when the book came out, or when you ran for president, in Dreams for My Father, Barack Obama says that he has seen the despair on the faces of people ranging from the south side of Chicago to people in Jakarta, Indonesia, and it comes from the same source, namely marginalization.
If we stop marginalizing people, they'll stop being terrorists.
That's a perverse view of what drives terrorism.
Ideology drives terrorism.
There are a lot of dispossessed people in the United States.
They're not going and trying to join ISIS.
And there are a lot of people who are dispossessed in the United States.
They're not going and joining white supremacist groups.
The notion that marginalization is an excuse or justification for joining a terrorist group is pretty perverse.
And the way that she brushes off somebody trying to join ISIS should tell you something about her generalized attitude toward terrorism.
I still would love to hear her condemn Hamas.
Has she ever done that?
Has she ever actually condemned Hamas?
I don't know.
I'll have to check that out.
I suspect that neither she nor Rashida Tlaib would be completely comfortable with doing so, at least not without starting to bash Israel as the great oppressive force in the Middle East.
And as I mentioned, CARE has been, she was saying all this in front of CARE, which has been a serious problem for a very, very long time.
And CARE has actively defended Samiel Aryan, who is a Palestinian Islamic Jihad financier.
CARE was endorsed by the American Muslim Task Force for Civil Rights and Election for a worldwide rolling fast in support of Samiel Aryan, who is a terrorist.
Kerr advised the family of the suspected terrorist after the deadly 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack and held a press conference featuring the families of the killers and then offered legal assistance to the family.
Their national board president in 2008, a guy named Parved Ahmed, described terror organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah as part of the political processes in their societies, just like the Irish Republican Army was part of the political process in their society.
Obviously, CAIR's anti-Israel agenda dates back to its founding by leaders of the Islamic Association for Palestine, a Hamas-affiliated anti-Semitic propaganda organization.
That last quote is from the Anti-Defamation League.
The CAIR founder, Nihil Awad, said in 1994 he was in support of Hamas.
So, she was saying all of this in front of a group that has a long-standing ease of treatment with regard to terrorism.
Asking questions about whether she is also soft on terrorism as she sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee is not Islamophobic.
That is rational.
That is something that we should be doing.
And meanwhile, the Democratic presidential race continues to heat up with Bernie Sanders introducing Medicare for All.
His Medicare for All bill is the most extreme version of the Medicare for All bill.
That would eliminate private insurance.
And he announced his Medicare for All bill by basically suggesting that insurance companies would be relegated to doing nose jobs.
That would be their new job.
They would be relegated to doing elective surgeries, and instead the government would take care of you in every aspect.
Healthcare is a human right, not a privilege.
And together we are going to end the international embarrassment Of the United States of America, our great country, being the only major nation on earth not to guarantee healthcare to all as a right.
That is going to end.
All of that is going, and he's trying to force the other Democrats into either embracing his most extreme position or into running away from it.
Cory Booker hilariously has signed onto Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All and then openly admitted that the thing is going nowhere.
He is openly, he says, no, you know, I don't think it's going anywhere, but I don't want to be outflanked by Bernie.
So I'm just kind of going to jump on this bandwagon.
Bernie Sanders, still the ideological thought leader of the Democratic Party.
Very odd that so many of the Democrats are interested in moving into his lane as opposed to moving into Biden's lane.
The only Democrat who has even attempted to move into Joe Biden's lane thus far was Pete Buttigieg, and he's outperforming in the polls specifically because of it.
So Democrats keep following Bernie like lemmings over that cliff.
When the truth is that Biden is sort of standing over on the side waving at everybody and taking 40% of the vote.
It's pretty impressive.
Other Democratic candidates are jumping in as well or thinking about it and they're doing so in very odd ways.
Eric Swalwell is a Democratic congressperson from California and he has announced his campaign in the weirdest possible way.
So first he went on Stephen Colbert and announced his campaign.
This is the congressperson who suggested that gun ownership in the United States could not help defend against government encroachments because the government would just nuke you.
Well, yesterday he decided to get even weirder.
He tweeted this out, quote, Well, that's creepy.
That's very weird.
President of the United States of America, I see you.
I hear you.
I'm for you.
I am you.
Well, that's creepy.
That's very weird.
I'm not sure what he's going for with the I am you.
I thought actually the execrable Michael Knowles had a pretty solid take on this.
Maybe this is his plan for becoming president, because if Eric Swalwell is all of us, then he's also Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
So if they win, then he wins, I guess.
But I am you is about the... That's about the creepiest slogan I've ever heard.
I am you.
What is this, face-off with Nicolas Cage?
He's just sneering into the camera.
I am you.
Man, I gotta say, this is a weird crew.
I mean, the Democrats are a very, very strange crew.
They should all, I think, create slogans that are based on this simple premise.
So Eric Swalwell's slogan could be, I am you.
And then Kirsten Gillibrand's could be, I am who?
And then you could have Joe Biden's slogan, I'm behind you.
And maybe Cory Booker's slogan could be, I am Spartacus.
I feel like that would probably be good.
That wasn't actually the weirdest presidential move of the day, believe it or not.
Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia and Clintonista, he put out a tweet that makes no sense at all.
It is a picture of, I have been informed, a crab sitting atop the head of an alligator, and the crab is labeled Terry McAuliffe, and the alligator is labeled Donald Trump.
And I guess this is supposed to be an anti-Trump meme?
But all I'm getting from it is that Terry McAuliffe is going to team up with Donald Trump to create the most amazing biological transformer ever.
The Crab Gator.
Alexander Petri over at the Washington Post.
No right winger.
Tweet it out.
Tweet it out.
Donald Trump wears me as a hat.
It's a bold campaign slogan.
But I guess he can go there.
So that's exciting stuff.
I just gotta say, I think that their shocking lack of ability to capitalize on a rich political situation for them is pretty astounding.
It's pretty astounding.
The good news for them is they all know that the media is going to defend them no matter what.
I mean, they can be as bad at this as possible.
I mean, Eric Swalwell appeared on Stephen Colbert, who, by the way, is awful.
Quick note on Stephen Colbert.
He spent last night trying to rehabilitate Ilhan Omar for anti-Semitism.
I don't remember him trying to do this with Steve King on white nationalism, or for that matter, Donald Trump on the Mexican border, but here he was trying to rehabilitate an open anti-Semite.
I'm glad that our late-night television hosts have their priorities in order.
You were criticized for saying some things that some people, on the right specifically, but also some Democrats, saw as being possibly anti-Semitic.
You got some support from some people, I think Glenn Greenwald might have tweeted in support to you, and you tweeted back to him that the attacks on you were all about the Benjamins, meaning AIPAC and a lobbyist for the state of Israel.
By saying that, you were accused of anti-Semitism again.
Um, what does it, you then apologized at the insistence of Nancy Pelosi.
So it's not just Republicans who had problems with what you had said or done.
It was also some Democrats.
What was that process like?
What was that like to, um, be a cudgel like that being used as a political cudgel?
My God.
When you began your service.
Oh my God.
What was it like being used as a political cudgel?
You just told a story about an anti-Semite who kept doubling down on anti-Semitism, and your question is, what was it like being used as a cudgel like that?
How about, why did you say these anti-Semitic things, lady?
How about, you said a bunch of anti-Semitic stuff.
That's bad.
How about, why did you say some people did something about 9-11?
There seemed like some serious questions to be asked here between Newsweek magazine putting out a cover suggesting that she was changing the conversation about Israel and Stephen Colbert asking her how rough it was to be an anti-Semite.
My goodness, the media doing yeoman's work these days.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things...
That I hate.
So, things that I like today.
You know, every so often, you gotta take a break from the cares of the day and read some sports.
I'm big on sports books.
One of the best sports authors out there is Jeff Perlman.
He had a book that came out a few years ago about the Showtime Lakers.
Now, I'm a Celtics fan, and this book is just great.
It is an inside look at Magic and Kareem and Pat Riley.
So, if you're a Lakers fan, I'm from L.A., this is the only Lakers thing I will ever recommend.
Check out Showtime, a book by Jeff Perlman, who really is a terrific author.
You can go get that right now.
Other things that I like.
So breaking news.
Michael Avenatti is indicted on 36 criminal counts by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles.
The indictment is not just about the attempted extortion of Nike.
It is also about him apparently being the worst person in the world.
The LA Times reported today that the indictment accused Avenatti of hiding a $4 million legal settlement in favor of a mentally ill paraplegic client for years.
Hero of the resistance.
Also, of hiding a $2.75 million settlement for another client, Avenatti allegedly used the money to help pay for the purchase of a private jet.
The guy's a sociopath.
Most of the money for the paraplegic client, according to the indictment quoted by the Times, was funneled to a company that managed Avenatti's race car team, and to his coffee company, Global Baristas.
Which operated the Tully's chain.
In all, the newspaper reported, five clients were allegedly ripped off by Avenatti for millions of dollars, who also is accused of using shell companies and bank accounts to hide the purported thefts.
Wow, guys is a delight.
He was nearly president.
Isn't that fun?
Things are going great, guys.
Okay, other things that I like.
You know, there are no more things that I like.
It's time for some things that I hate.
OK, so things that I hate today.
So Neil deGrasse Tyson is an irritating human.
He is tendentious and he is sneering and he is annoying and he makes everything worse.
Neil deGrasse Tyson spends a lot of his time basically pretending to be the voice.
I mean, this is a guy who seriously proposed that there be a country called Rationalia Where we just use reason to govern ourselves.
And it never occurred to him that maybe people arrive at different conclusions by using reason depending on their premises.
He's that type of person.
He knows all the things.
All the things.
So yesterday he tweeted out regarding the first ever image of a supermassive black hole.
He tweeted out, scientists, we've produced the first ever image of a supermassive black hole 55 million light years away.
Response, ooh, scientists, we've concluded that humans are catastrophically warming Earth.
Response, that conflicts with what I want to be true, so it must be false.
Okay, a couple of notes on this.
One, different types of scientists.
Theoretical physics, not quite the same thing as climatology, which has a lot of intervening factors.
There's broad disagreement among scientists about just how much global warming is being caused by human activity, and how sensitive the climate is to human activity.
And third, one of the reasons that we are amazed by the actual production of the image of the black hole is one, because the capacity of science to do that is pretty incredible, and two, because it actually fulfilled the prediction.
One of the problems a lot of critics of the global warming literature have is that the computer modeling on global warming has not, in fact, produced the picture of the black hole, if we're using the analogy.
It has produced models that have been well off.
For example, John Kerry, in 2009, Parroting the consensus view, talked about how the Arctic would be ice-free within five years.
Is the Arctic ice-free today?
It is not.
You have sea ice, which is melting at a rate that the Arctic Ocean now increasingly is exposed.
In five years, scientists predict we will have the first ice-free Arctic summer.
That exposes more ocean to sunlight.
Ocean is dark.
It consumes more of the heat from the sunlight, which then accelerates the rate of There is truth to the fact that the Arctic ice is in fact melting.
That's true.
But it was not gone by 2014.
They keep pushing the estimates out.
So that's not to say that global warming data is all false, or that global warming isn't taking place, or that global warming isn't human-caused.
It is to say there's a lot more uncertainty about how much of that is preventable, what has to be done, how much of it is happening.
There's a pretty broad range.
I mean, read the IPCC report.
They have three separate estimates as to the change in climate that's going to happen over the next century.
They have an extreme estimate, and they have a moderate estimate, and they have a mild estimate.
We don't know what's going to show up yet, and we have to predicate policy based on that.
So that stuff is pretty obnoxious.
Okay, other things that I hate today.
So Chrissy Teigen was at some sort of conference, and she was asked about what women should say more.
What is the phrase that women should say more?
And here was her comeback.
If there was one word you would help, particularly women, use more frequently, what would that one word be?
- B. - you. - We'll go take two.
- Okay, so here's the deal.
That is a phrase that pretty much everybody should use less frequently.
They should use it less frequently.
How about, thank you?
How about that's a phrase people should use more?
Chrissy Teigen has a pretty awesome life.
She has a pretty great life.
Now...
There are times when women should say that to men, when they are sexually harassed or abused, when men do bad things to them, when people generally do bad things to you.
Then telling them to F off is a time-honored tradition.
But the notion that women are so victimized that what they need to be saying more often is F you as opposed to thank you is absurd.
Men, the same thing.
We should all be saying thank you to each other.
Look at the world we live in.
Look at the ease of life.
Chrissy Teigen flies around a private jet with John Legend, protected by security, living high on the hog, and she's asked, what is something women should say more?
And the answer isn't thank you, it's F you.
There's this tremendous attitude of ingratitude that has spanned the nation, and it's reflecting itself in both policy and politics.
We despise each other because we can't say thank you to each other.
We despise our politics because we think that politics is supposed to take care of all of our problems, and we despise our own civilization because we failed to say thank you to the people who came before us and built that civilization.
I really think that that one small statement is a real indicator of why Western civilization is crumbling at the root.
In gratitude.
In gratitude.
Pretty insane stuff.
Okay, so we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours.
Go check that out right now.
If you have not picked up a copy of my book, The Right Side of History, you certainly should.
It was number four on the New York Times bestseller list again this week.
That's its third week on the New York Times bestseller list.
We've sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
Please keep going out there buying for your friends.
I think it's an important book.
It speaks about some of the themes that we talk about on the show every day.
Go check that out.
We'll see you here later today for two additional hours.
If you subscribe, if not, we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sajovic.
Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright, Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, Pope Benedict has emerged.
from seclusion to discuss the sex abuse crisis.
And he has some insights that are true, but also pretty startling.
And we'll talk about that.
Also, according to a recent report, Google has a running blacklist and you'll never guess who's on it.
We'll discuss.
Also, we'll talk about black holes and the Lion King and biblical end times prophecies.
There's a lot to cover on the show today.
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