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May 22, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:04
Three Cheers For Abortion! | Ep. 786
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The left moves to embrace abortion as a moral good, the culture wars heat up, and Democrats mull over impeachment.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
A lot to get to today here on the show, everyone.
Everything from abortion to impeachment to homelessness.
Just all sorts of wonderful, happy things to talk about.
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Well, as the battle over abortion law in Georgia heats up, it is amazing to watch as many on the left have shifted their perspective on abortion itself.
They've moved away from the 1990s formulation, safe, legal, and rare, toward a new formulation, good, plentiful, and happy.
And the idea here is that abortion is, in fact, a moral good.
In fact, there's an article in The New Yorker today that is titled, Abortion is Morally Good.
Which is a fairly amazing statement.
It's by a woman named Sarah Jones.
And the article, Abortion is Morally Good.
What is the argument for why abortion is morally good?
The argument is basically that it helps women.
That those who are interested in stopping abortion are interested in maximizing female pain.
Well, that's true, but why would that make abortion morally good?
Well, you might have had a say in it.
unborn quote, weigh the suffering of women against the prospective life of the fetus and favor the fetus in the end.
Well, that's true, but why would that make abortion morally good?
Well, writes this writer, I've never needed an abortion, but I've been in an abusive relationship and I think still of all the ways it could have been worse for me.
I could have gotten pregnant and I think that would have killed me.
Well, you might have had a say in it.
You weren't in the relationship, were you not?
And your creation of a new human life would not, the killing of that life would not be justified by the fact that you made a choice to be in a bad relationship.
This writer says, What's amazing is that this woman admits she was in an abusive relationship, but she's very angry at the Christian university that is trying to uphold the standard that says you should not be in abusive relationships.
It's just, I was suicidally depressed.
When I look back at myself across the valley of a decade, I'm still surprised to be alive.
I think of the people I knew then and how so many of them would have told me to carry a baby to term, even if it destroyed me.
Well, yes.
I mean, I think that a lot of people would have suggested that you should carry the baby to term because, again, the life of the baby Means something here.
And if you were going to commit suicide, right, if you were actually suicidal, then the vast majority of people who are pro-life would suggest that that is a case in which the mother's life is in danger.
Just pregnancy would have been a punishment, not a miracle.
Nothing I lived through will convince an Alabama Republican to change his mind.
To them, nothing I've done in my 31 years on earth, none of my accomplishments, none of my happiness, elevates my worth above that of an embryo.
Well, no.
Your worth As a human being, as if in your life were being endangered versus that of the embryo, your life would take precedence.
But your worth, your feelings, your accomplishments, your subjective feeling of happiness, yes, that does not take precedence over a human life.
Correct.
That is true.
But she says abortion is a moral good.
And unfortunately, this is a line that has been picked up by the left.
And if it's such a mistake by the left, honestly, like as a matter of politics, it's a mistake.
Safe, legal and rare was a formulation that at least most Americans could feel OK about.
I mean, pro-life Americans were going to oppose it anyway, but people who are on the fence could at least feel like, yeah, abortion, it's not great, but I still want it to be there.
It at least made them feel a little bit more sanguine about legalizing abortion because the suggestion was that no one would take abortion so frivolously as to simply have an abortion out of convenience.
And thus, because people were weighing abortion as a moral quandary, then their final decision shouldn't be left up to the state, it should be left up to them.
Now, I think that's wrong, obviously, but that argument has at least a little bit more moral tether to it than the argument that is being made now.
The argument being made now by the radical left is that abortion is fundamentally good.
That depriving people of abortion is depriving them not only of a right, but of something that benefits them and has no consequences, has no downside.
Now, the truth is that this is a line that's been pushed by radical feminists for a very long time.
Gloria Allred was speaking at a rally yesterday in New York City.
And she described pre-Roe America as women's Vietnam, which is an unbelievable statement.
I mean, it's an unbelievable statement.
Tens of thousands of Americans died in Vietnam.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans were wounded in Vietnam.
How in the world was saying that women should bear children in their body?
How is that exactly a Vietnam-like situation?
Here's Gloria Allred making that radical argument.
The victims are the women and the girls who have to get a back alley abortion and who are going to be left to die.
It was our women's Vietnam.
More women died or were maimed before Roe v. Wade by illegal abortions than men ever died in Vietnam.
We thank our brave men for their sacrifices.
We can never thank them enough.
But we also were hurt by these laws which forced us into no-win situations.
Okay, that is just a lie.
The lie that tens of thousands of women were dying in back alley abortions, it is in fact a lie.
There are CDC statistics that exist from that time period, and they were suggesting the number of women who were dying in illegal abortions, it was in the hundreds at most, not the tens of thousands.
And even so, the fact is that any law is going to have consequences for people who break the law, and attempting to violate that law is going to be more difficult and more dangerous than if the law did not exist in the first place.
I also want to point out here that an argument that is constantly made by feminists is that abortion, legalizing abortion, is what allowed women to live productive, healthy lives and be part of the workforce in all of this.
This is a chart from the government, it's from the Department of Labor, and it shows the civilian labor force in the United States by sex.
The second half of the chart, if you can see it, shows the share of the civilian labor force by sex.
And what you see here is that that green line on the bottom chart is the share of the female workforce.
Okay, so what percentage of the workforce is female?
And what you see is that in 1960, there's about 25% and then it rises continuously and steadily.
That's actually 1950, rather.
It rises continuously and steadily until about 1980, and then it ceases to grow, and women represent slightly, slightly under 50% of the workforce as of right now.
Basically, women have achieved near parity with men in terms of the workforce.
By the way, the male share of the workforce has been declining steadily since 1950.
What you do not see here is a massive escalation in females in the workforce circa 1973, 1975, with the legalization of abortion.
In fact, you see that the rate of women in the workforce begins to slow after that point.
So the notion that it was abortion that allowed women to get out of the house and go get a job, it's just not true.
It's just not true.
Now, abortion may mean that some women are able to not have to support a baby while going to work.
But that does not change the overall impact of abortion law, which has not been to stymie women from getting into the workforce.
Obviously, this chart demonstrates that full scale.
Nonetheless, the argument again is being made by the left that abortion is not just something that is an unfortunate part of life, which is an argument that the left used to make, now it is an affirmative good.
It is something that is affirmatively good, and we can judge you morally based on how you feel about abortion.
If you are willing to say that a woman should be able to kill a baby in her womb at any time, this means that you are properly woke and properly feminist.
Eric Swalwell, who's running a bizarre campaign for the presidency, In which, I guess he needs to keep the support of his immediate family in this race.
Maybe his wife, I believe, is his only voter.
Eric Swalwell, he was speaking at a pro-abortion rally outside the Supreme Court.
And I'm not going to say it's pro-choice, because this is legitimately pro-abortion.
I mean, these are people who are saying that abortion is a moral good.
Abortion is a positive.
It is not just a decision that somebody has to make.
It is a moral good.
Here's Eric Swalwell saying that, sure, he has kids, but if his wife had decided to kill his kids in the womb, well, he would have had no say about that.
I am a proud male feminist, and I am proud to be here with you tomorrow's day.
My wife, Brittany, also wants you to know we've got two beautiful children, Nelson and Cricket.
But the decision to have children was her choice.
So here's what we're going to do.
We're going to walk with our brothers and sisters down in the south.
That's an amazing statement, right?
That he has two beautiful children with his wife, but if she had decided to kill those babies in the womb, well then, that would have been fine with him because he is a male feminist.
Can you imagine him telling that to his kids?
He has a daughter, I think, and he mentions her there.
Does he think that that is going to make her proud to be a feminist?
He's like, yeah, you know, honey, I hope that you have beautiful dreams.
Also, if your mother had murdered you in the womb, that would have been her choice.
And whoa, dad, what the hell?
And then it got even worse.
Jackie Spier, who's a Congresswoman from California, Democrat, she got up at that exact same rally and she bragged about having an abortion and the crowd cheered her.
This was a sign of moral development.
This is like when Lena Dunham, the actress from Girls, when she came out and she said she wished she had had an abortion.
It's a rite of passage in American life at this point.
I mean, this is barbarity.
This is paganistic barbarity.
Here is Jackie Spier talking about how she had an abortion and women clapping for her and cheering for her bravery.
Stunning bravery in killing a child in the womb.
Pro-choice advocates, men and women alike.
Today I'm here to say, you know me.
I am one of the one in four women in this country who have had an abortion.
We are not strangers.
We are wives.
We are mothers.
We are sisters.
And we will not be stigmatized.
Woo!
I had an abortion.
Woo!
I mean, huge crowds of people cheering for I had an abortion.
Can you imagine any other crime?
I hit a person and then ran.
It was great.
It was a hit and run.
Woo!
What in the world?
But if this is the moral conflict the Democrats choose, that it's not merely that abortion is an unfortunate choice some people have to make, but it's an affirmative good, I think the vast majority of Americans are not interested in this particular version of morality.
We'll get to more of this in just a second.
Again, these are mainstream Democratic figures, and I'll show you some more mainstream Democratic figures doing the same thing and saying that you should pay for abortion, by the way.
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All righty, so Mazie Hirono, the senator from Hawaii, very much following in Jackie Spire's footsteps.
She is speaking at the same insane rally outside the Supreme Court, and she's bragging about the fact that she told eighth graders, meaning 11-year-old girls, that their abortion rights were under attack.
Pre-pubescent girls, she is telling that it is deeply important that they be able to have an abortion if a child is conceived with someone that they are having sex with.
They should be able to kill that child.
Maisie Hirono is bragging about that to 8th grade girls.
I told them I was coming to a rally in front of the Supreme Court and they said, why?
And I told them I was coming to a rally in front of the Supreme Court.
And they said, why?
And I said, it's because we have to fight for abortion rights.
And they knew all about it.
And I asked the girls in that group of eight graders, how many of you - Do girls think the government should be telling us, women, when and if we want to have babies, not a single one of them raise their hand. - Okay, it's just, it's amazing.
It's amazing.
So Democrats are now promoting as an affirmative good the ability to get an abortion.
Not just that.
They want you to pay for it.
So this is the next step.
Now, Joe Biden is, as a guy running for president, trying to shake his non-woke credentials.
The fact is that Joe Biden has held a series of positions over the years that are not in line with the radical segments of his base, which for the money is the reason why he is a front runner in the Democratic nomination process right now.
It's amazing to watch.
Joe Biden is only a frontrunner right now because he appears moderate.
And people in the Democratic Party are looking at Biden.
They're saying, what if we just ran a moderate who doesn't look completely crazy against Donald Trump to win?
And that's a plurality of the Democratic base by leaps and bounds.
And yet Biden, in an effort to stave off opposition from his radical left compatriots, he is now shifting on positions that he has held for years.
So for years, Joe Biden said that he was against public funding for abortion.
He was in favor of the so-called Hyde Amendment that banned public funding for abortions.
If you want to have an abortion, that would be a you issue.
This is what Joe Biden used to say.
Then we'll show you Joe Biden reversing himself in the last 48 hours.
Are you still opposed to public funding for abortion?
I still am opposed to public funding for abortion, and the reason I am is, again, it goes to the question of whether or not you are going to impose a view to support something that is not a guaranteed right, but an affirmative action to promote.
OK, again, this is Joe Biden's old position.
Then he was asked specifically by the ACLU whether as president he would lift the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal insurance coverage of abortion.
And he said yes.
And then he came out with a video talking about how wonderful Roe versus Wade is and how it is imperative that Roe v. Wade be enshrined in law forever.
The law of the land is Roe v. Wade.
It lays out a constitutional guarantee that women can in fact make a choice between she and her doctor in circumstances laid out in Roe.
It's guaranteed constitutionally now.
And what this is all about is trying to get an appeal to the Supreme Court in the hope that the conservative justice the president has in fact put on the court, two of them, will vote to overrule the Roe v. Wade, the law of the land.
It's wrong.
It must be stopped.
This is a choice on the road between a woman and her doctor.
Well, between a woman and her doctor and taxpayers who have to pay for it, according to the new version of Joe Biden.
It's not just Joe Biden who is saying this.
Kirsten Gillibrand, who again has more positions on the issues than the Kama Sutra has.
Kirsten Gillibrand, the senator from New York, she was asked, well, why exactly should we pay for your abortion, for example?
And she says, it's not your decision whether to fund abortion.
The government should fund abortion.
So this is the new Democratic Party position on this thing.
What would you say to taxpayers out there who say, look, I support everyone having their own freedoms, but that when it comes to my tax dollars, abortion isn't something that I want to support?
I do not believe that that is a valid argument.
I think that the Hyde Amendment should be repealed and that we actually need to make sure that women, regardless of their income level, have a basic right to reproductive care.
It's about our humanity and it's about our basic civil rights.
And so I will work I mean, this is an amazing move by the Democratic Party.
They used to understand that the best solution for the Democratic Party was some level of moderation on this particular issue.
Not anymore.
Now it's such an affirmative good that you and I are supposed to fund abortions ourselves.
That it is a basic right in America.
Owning a gun, not a basic right.
Paying for somebody else's abortion is something that you must do.
They have a right to your money to pay for the killing of their unborn child.
I mean, it's an amazing statement.
Cory Booker is saying the same thing.
The senator from New Jersey running for president.
This is not nut picking, okay?
This is not us finding nuts in the Democratic Party saying crazy things.
These are all mainstream elected members of the Democratic Party saying this stuff.
But our generation now can't simply lay back and luxuriate in the blessings of their struggles.
Because freedom, liberty, and democracy must be re-earned in every generation.
And the only way to secure them is with sacrifice and struggle.
We have work to do so that we codify Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.
We have work to do until we get rid of the Hyde Amendment once and for all!
Yeah, public taxpayer funding of abortion!
I love that he describes the killing of the unborn, that he describes snuffing out human life as luxuriating in the blessings of other's struggle.
I'm glad you get to... I mean, that is the definition of abortion, is that you are luxuriating in the blessings of the struggle of the unborn.
That you are reaping the benefits, presumably, of killing something that is not you.
It's an amazing statement.
It's three cheers for abortion in the Democratic Party.
Maybe four cheers for abortion, if that's even possible.
And then you get the insane radical wing of the Democratic Party.
They go so far as to suggest This is Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood representative in New York City doing a rally yesterday suggesting that the people who pay the most when it comes to pro-life policy are transgender men.
You can't forget transgender men in this equation.
We have to make sure that women who believe they are men are included in all of the abortion talk.
Yeah, this is all a winning recipe, I think, for Democrats.
This is a coordinated attack in order to drive care underground, but also to force a national showdown in our Supreme Court about access to our constitutional and human rights.
And it's not just an attack on women, it's an attack on anyone who can or might get pregnant, including transgender men and gender non-conforming people!
Oh, it's an attack on all of those people too?
My goodness!
It seems to me abortion is a pretty obvious attack on, you know, the person who's getting killed.
That seems like probably the attack we might want to focus on here.
Now I want to talk about a couple of bad faith arguments that are being put out there naturally by the op-ed pages over at the New York Times and the Washington Post.
There's an article by a guy named Dr. Warren Hearn, who's a physician and epidemiologist who specializes in late-term abortion services.
Naturally, he's defending that by saying, this is the title of the article, again, abortion is affirmative good.
Pregnancy kills.
Abortion saves lives.
The idea here is that it is more dangerous to be pregnant than not to be pregnant.
That is true.
You know what's the most dangerous to the baby?
The killing of the baby.
And you know what also makes women safe, late term, would be giving birth to the baby and then they are also not pregnant anymore except that they have not killed the baby.
But according to this New York Times headline, pregnancy kills.
Abortion doesn't kill.
Pregnancy kills.
Also, I love this perspective from the Washington Post.
Men who impregnate women don't face any consequences in the new abortion laws.
I mean, now you're making a case that men should support women after they knock them up.
A case of which I fully agree.
This is sort of like the argument you see from the left.
Well, if you care so much about babies, then why aren't you in favor of adoption?
Quick note, Alabama, the state that just banned abortion across the board, They are number one.
They set their number one record this year as a record for adopting foster children, Alabama families.
So they are, in fact, caring about children after they are born in Alabama, as far as things like foster care.
In a second, I want to get to Democratic governance and the real priorities here, because it really is somewhat telling.
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Okay, so.
If you are a median voter, let's say you're a moderate voter, living in, say, a suburban area, and you look at the Democratic Party right now, and the Democratic Party is focused intensely on taxpayer funding for abortion.
This is their thing.
Taxpayer funding for abortion, and also Trump is evil.
This is their two-pronged pitch.
I have to say, that is not a very strong pitch.
And that is the pitch right now.
The pitch is, abortion is an affirmative good, and Donald Trump is an affirmative evil.
And then they send out their cultural elites to appeal to us on this basis.
Late night television has basically become a psychiatrist's couch for Hollywood stars who can't sleep because of Trump, you know, on their beds of money.
In the Hollywood Hills, far away from all the problems of regular life.
Here's Julianna Margulies, who's the star of, what, she was on The Good Wife?
And here she is explaining that she has problems sleeping because of Trump, you know, in her giant mansion on top of her pile of money, overlooking a city that she doesn't even have to engage in.
Here is Julianna Margulies whining to Stephen Colbert about this, another extraordinarily wealthy Hollywood star who doesn't have to deal with any of the problems of everyday life, but Donald Trump keeps them awake at night.
One of the things I stopped doing was I do not read the news at night.
Because I was waking up in the middle of the night from nightmares of just screaming.
I had one dream.
You've read my dream diary.
Well, I was in a boardroom, there was a long board, there was a long table and it was just the guy who's in the Oval Office right now sitting there and I walked in and I was screaming, screaming, don't you care about the next show!
I mean, I was going crazy and screaming at him and yelling and that was 2016 and I woke up in a sweat and I went, oh my god, I've gone insane and I have to stop reading the news at night.
Okay, so this is the pitch.
The pitch is that Donald Trump wakes up Hollywood actresses in the middle of the night because he's a bad orange man with weird hair.
That's the pitch.
And also, abortion is a moral good.
That's a hell of a pitch.
That is one hell of a pitch.
Because let's be real about this.
I live in a democratic-governed state.
I live in a democratic-governed city.
And it has turned into a trash heap.
It has turned into a trash heap.
If you want to look at democratic governance right now, if you want to look at people who are living in the suburbs and worrying about what their life is going to look like, I guarantee you they care far less about Julianna Margulis's sleep patterns and far more about the fact that their cities have turned into hot garbage.
This is a clip from NBC Los Angeles today talking about the homeless problem in Los Angeles.
We've got 65,000 homeless people living on the streets of Los Angeles, which has been Democratic governed for nigh on two decades at this point in a state that has Democratic majorities in both houses and a Democratic governor.
And the city has turned into a garbage pit.
I've lived here my entire life.
I've lived here my entire life.
And I can tell you, from personal experience, that the problems of the cities turning into trash heaps is not a mild problem.
It started off in places like Skid Row, where at least it was relatively contained, and now it has spread out into suburban areas.
I live in a suburban area.
In the last four years, we have found several open needles on the street.
Maybe three weeks ago, there was an obvious heroin addict who was lying face down in the gutter in the middle of a residential area.
Thought the guy was Edgar Allan Poe.
I mean, he was lying face down in the gutter in a residential area.
And the city can do nothing about it.
Why?
Because Democrats who govern the city have refused to do anything about it in the name of the freedom of people to apparently pollute public areas.
But don't worry.
My taxpayer dollars aren't going to fund, you know, my neighborhood being livable and my children being able to walk outside without fear of stepping on an open needle.
They're going toward taxpayer funding of abortions.
That's where Democratic priorities are.
Here's a clip from NBC Los Angeles talking about the problem in L.A.
But of course, nobody in L.A.
will ever consider maybe it's the people in charge who are the problem.
We're getting a bird's eye view of L.A.' 's most notorious trash pile.
It's in downtown on Saris Avenue, right between the fashion and produce districts.
Day and night, this spot and countless others are magnets for rats that could carry fleas infected with typhus and other diseases.
This national survey now ranks LA as the second most rat-infested city in the nation.
One reason, experts say, heaps of uncollected trash at hundreds of homeless encampments, where people are literally living in piles of garbage.
They're literally living in piles of garbage.
This is NBC, okay?
NBC is not a right-wing source.
People are living in piles of garbage.
You know why they're living in piles of garbage?
Because I have a lot of friends on the police force in LAPD.
And when they get a call that somebody is loitering, they are basically told by the higher-ups that they need to ignore this.
They're not allowed to rouse people.
They're not allowed to move people.
They're not allowed to arrest people.
They're not even, because of an ACLU lawsuit, they're not even allowed to remove shopping carts full of garbage that attract fleas and rats.
They're not allowed to remove those.
Those are considered the personal property of homeless people.
Who are living on public property, right this very instant.
This is not a lack of sympathy for homeless folks.
This is a lack of sympathy for politicians who refuse to do anything to make their cities livable.
I have a right to the sidewalk that I pay for.
You do not have a right to sleep on the sidewalk outside of my front door.
Two years ago, I recall this vividly.
I used to do a morning show here in Los Angeles.
And me and Ty had to get up, you know, inordinately early in order to do so.
It's like 5.15 in the morning.
I have to get up and I have to go do the morning show.
And I look outside, and right outside of our front door, there is a homeless person who is riding a bicycle, and he has two shopping carts full of trash behind him.
And the front wheel has come off of his bicycle.
And so he's right outside our front door.
And so I am concerned.
I have a wife.
I have a couple of little kids.
I'm concerned about leaving my house with this person right outside.
I don't know who the guy is.
This is one of the big issues.
With a lot of homeless folks, a lot of them are drug addicts and a lot of them are mentally ill.
A heavy percentage.
According to Eve Fuller-Torrey, who's written extensively about mental illness, at least a plurality, maybe a majority of the homeless people in major cities are suffering from some form of severe mental illness.
So, I call the police, and the police take 35-40 minutes to respond.
This is not a priority call.
And the reason it's not a priority call is because they have been told, basically, that they are not to do anything about these problems.
So, I sit there, waiting inside my door for this homeless person to move on, because I don't want to get into a confrontation with the person.
And this person then gets angry, proceeds to take a crowbar out of one of the shopping carts, and starts beating the hell out of his bike in front of our front door.
Eventually, the police arrive and move him along.
But this is what major cities are becoming, okay?
And I'm living in a fairly nice residential area.
Skid Row in Los Angeles is actually a breeding ground for actual disease.
It's a breeding ground for disease.
We are seeing third world diseases return to the United States in major cities because politicians have made it a priority not to do anything about these problems.
And it is not just in Los Angeles.
It is in San Francisco.
It is in Washington, D.C.
It's in New York City.
It's in Seattle.
I used to do a show up in Seattle, local show up in Seattle.
Seattle is a beautiful city, except it has been made into a homeless encampment by a series of Democratic mayors who have decided that they can do nothing about people living out in the open.
I'll talk in a second about what some actual solutions would look like to this problem.
But if Democrats are going to make the case that they ought to run things, then how about we look at where they run things and see how things are going?
Because it turns out they've turned my city into a rat-infested craphole.
They've turned Los Angeles into... I mean, the quality of life in Los Angeles for taxpayers has declined markedly, and that is due to Mayor Garcetti and Mayor Villaraigosa.
It is due to Governor Gavin Newsom and Governor Jerry Brown.
It is due to Democratic governance in this city and in this state.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
First, let's talk about that suit that you're wearing.
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Okay, we're gonna get to more of democratic governance and why, for people, quality of life made Trump, Julianna Margulises, and Robert De Niro's hatred for President Trump.
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Okay, so as I'm talking about, democratic governance has been a disaster area, a full-on disaster area in America's major cities.
From Detroit to New York to Washington, D.C.
to Los Angeles.
And what's their solution?
What's the solution to making life unlivable for taxpayers?
Raising taxes, but making the streets less safe?
Raising taxes, but not fixing the potholes, and then stumping to pay for abortions?
What has been the response by Governor Gavin Newsom, our forward-thinking governor here in the state of California?
Well, he says, you know, homelessness is a problem in California.
He's got a solution.
You know what it is?
A task force.
You know, if we just have a bunch of people, Blue Ribbon Task Force, like they'll sit around, they'll talk about things, then they'll issue a white paper that they'll do nothing about.
Gavin Newsom used to be the mayor of San Francisco.
You know what he did when he was mayor of San Francisco?
He pledged to end homelessness in San Francisco.
Has homelessness been ended in San Francisco?
Well, there's an article in the Washington Post today called How San Francisco Broke America's Heart.
No, he did not end homelessness in San Francisco.
It multiplied rapidly under him.
Now he's the governor of the state, but he's got an idea.
It's a task force, guys.
Last count, we had 24% of the nation's homeless.
As Mayor Schaaf said, the number that are unsheltered is substantially higher than that.
It's a state challenge that manifests in cities and counties, large and small.
And as a consequence, it requires leadership at all levels.
This task force, this work group of leaders, will organize a framework of specific and prescriptive goals at all levels.
And with those goals, we will advance our efforts at the state level to help fund and access the resources to achieve those goals.
We got work to do.
This is a national disgrace.
You are a national disgrace, sir.
I'm sorry, you and democratic governance in this state are a national disgrace.
The homelessness problem in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, increasingly in San Diego, across democratic areas, in big cities, is a national disgrace.
Again, I talk to people who are on the neighborhood councils.
I talk to the LAPD.
Every major park in the Los Angeles area has been overrun with homeless encampments.
Every single one.
You cannot let your kids play in a major park unsupervised in Los Angeles.
You just cannot.
It's insane.
And that is a result of Democrats who have decided to go along to get along with the ACLU and have declared that you have a right to sleep in your car, you have a right to sleep on the street, you have a right to do all this stuff.
Now, how would you actually solve the homelessness problem?
Well, the homeless break down into a bunch of separate categories.
By the way, I just want to point out, the New York Times has a piece today.
Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York.
I'll get to the solutions when it comes to homelessness in just one second.
First, I just want to mention this.
Bill de Blasio wants to run for president of the United States.
Here's an article from the New York Times today.
Rats are taking over New York City.
The city that he runs.
Why?
Because just like in LA, nobody's collecting the garbage.
That is the reason that rats are taking over the city of New York.
In New York, says the New York Times, rats once scurried in the shadows, but now they frolic brazenly in broad daylight.
Mr. de Blasio, calling for more rat corpses, unveiled a $32 million assault on rats in 2017, which included increased litter basket pickups, deployment of solar-powered trash-compacting bins, and rat-resistant steel cans.
The city has also used dry ice to smother rats where they live.
But rat sightings are on the upswing anyway.
Why?
Because nobody is still picking up the trash.
City health inspections found 31,000 instances of active rat signs, including sightings and droppings, at buildings and properties last year, nearly double the instances in 2014.
A major contributing factor, according to the New York Times, is how the city collects trash.
Bags are left outside on the curb for hours before pickup the next morning.
It's just an all-night buffet for the rats, says Jason Munchie-South, a biology professor at Fordham University, who has led rat safaris to observe the vermin in Columbus Park in Chinatown.
Michael Deutsch, an entomologist with the Arrow Exterminating on Long Island, said there's no magic bullets reducing rats.
You can't just go in and order an airstrike and then leave.
Rat populations can rebound unless you are always pressing them.
And by the way, one thing that contributes to this is open trash, is people living in trash.
All of this is a good indicator that maybe if you are concerned about the future of your community, if you're concerned about Times Square not turning back into what it was during the 1970s and 80s, under people like Ed Koch and David Dinkins, if instead maybe you'd like, I don't know, a cleaned up area of New York, If you would like a Los Angeles that looks, at least in terms of clean streets, more like it did a couple of decades ago and less like homeless people on every bench.
I mean, it's basically.
There was an old political slogan, a chicken in every pot.
Okay, Los Angeles can promise you, Los Angeles can promise you that there will be a homeless person on every bench.
That was the Herbert Hoover campaign slogan in 1928, a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.
In Los Angeles, the promise is if you pay enough taxpayer dollars, there'll be a homeless person on every bench and open needles on every street corner.
In San Francisco, it's poop on every street corner, human poop on every street corner.
By the way, it's funny, I was talking with Newt Gingrich the other day, and the former speaker pointed out that in San Francisco, you get a $300 fine if your dog craps on the corner and you don't pick it up.
If you're a human, you crap on the corner, you get nothing.
So, if you own a dog, your best solution is to let your dog crap on the corner and then just claim it was you.
If the police stop by to find you or something.
Okay, so what exactly could be done with regard to the homeless problem if people actually had the stones to do it?
First of all, you have to break down the homeless problem into several categories.
Who are the homeless?
Okay, now the reason there are two problems here and you want to solve both of them.
OK, but what's funny is that the left wants to ignore one of them completely.
So the two problems are this.
The actual problems of the homeless.
How do you help homeless people in a sympathetic way?
How do you help them?
People who are heroin addicts, people who are severely mentally ill, people who are suffering from temporary economic downturns.
How do you help those people?
That is problem one.
And then there is a second problem, which is not irrelevant.
And the people who pointed out are not bad people.
There are good people who would like to see their taxpayer dollars used in a proper way and who'd like to live in safe communities.
The second problem is the impact of homeless people on every park bench, on every street corner, shooting up in doorways, leaving open needles on the street, pooping on street corners.
It is not irrelevant that there are externalities to homelessness.
And one of the things that many members of the political left have done is they have said that if you call the cops on a homeless person who's outside your front door beating the crap out of his bicycle with a crowbar, that you're part of the problem now.
Because now you've called in the authorities.
And don't you have sympathy for these homeless people?
I can have sympathy for someone and still recognize That when you are infringing on the public space that I paid for, you do not have a right to do that, and you are making my community worse.
It is a community in which I live, and I pay taxes, and I raise my children, and you do not have a right to make that community worse.
Both of these problems can be handled, but it means getting serious.
And yes, it means some consequences for a certain group, particularly of homeless people.
So let's take the homeless problem as an example in terms of governance.
As I say, there are four types, I think, four types of homeless people.
One, they're the severely mentally ill.
Those people do not have a right to live on the street.
Those people need to be institutionalized.
If you are a schizophrenic who is living on the streets and storing, I mean, there's an article in the New York Times today, or actually it's in the Huffington Post, rather, a couple of years ago, I think.
About the homelessness issue.
If you are a severely schizophrenic person who takes your unemployment or welfare check and you stash wads of cash around the city because you're schizophrenic and mentally ill, we are not doing you any good by allowing you to do that.
We need to make it easier to institutionalize people who are severely mentally ill.
You are doing mentally ill people no favors by allowing them to live in their own filth on city streets.
I don't know when this became sympathy.
It's insane.
And if that means more public funding of mental health facilities, that's what it means.
Good.
Fine.
I've been calling for that for years, by the way.
And I'm a libertarian.
So, there's that.
That's the severely mentally ill.
Then you have the problem of people who are addicted.
Heroin addicts.
And here, the answer is that if you're a heroin addict, you do not have a right to live on the street.
So, you will be arrested for loitering, and you will be arrested for trespassing, and then, instead of being jailed, you will be put into a clean-out program.
And we will fund those clean-out programs.
We will make sure that you can go to a clean-out.
And if you refuse to abide by that, if you go back to living on the street, then you will be jailed.
There are consequences to doing this sort of thing.
Then there are people who just want to live on the street, no matter what.
They just feel like they have a right to live on the street in Los Angeles.
Many of those people claim that their jobs won't pay for rent, they won't pay for an apartment.
And the answer to that is, here's money for a bus ticket.
If you live on the street, you're going to be arrested.
And if not, here's a bus ticket and you can leave.
Because if the question is, I can't afford to live here, then you should not be living here.
We're not talking about mentally ill people.
We're not talking about addicts.
We're talking about sane people.
We've decided they would rather live in their car in Los Angeles than go get a job somewhere else and live in an apartment.
You don't have a right to do that.
So we'll pay for your bus ticket, so you can leave.
Because if you can't afford to live here, you should not be living here.
And then finally, there are the chronically homeless, who are kind of in-betweeners.
You know, people who may have mental issues, but are not significantly a danger to themselves or others.
People who are incapable of holding down a job.
And there, if you have to build more public housing facilities, you build more public housing facilities.
If you have to open more shelters, you open more shelters.
This is the way that you would handle the problem.
But yes, you do have to give police the ability to move people.
You do have to give police the ability to take people's crap that is in a stolen shopping cart away from them.
You have to pay attention to quality of life issues.
And that doesn't mean shuffling them over into the poorer areas of Los Angeles and leaving them there.
It means that every area of Los Angeles should be free of people who are living on the streets.
You do not have a right to live on the streets.
And if people choose to live outside the borders of Los Angeles, in homeless encampments, then that becomes the local authority's issue there.
But instead what we've gotten from the left is, it's unsympathetic.
It's NIMBYism to say I don't want a homeless person shooting up heroin outside my front gate.
Okay, then call me a NIMBY.
Fine.
And call most Americans that way.
Because it turns out, you know what we'd like?
We'd like clean neighborhoods.
We'd like neighborhoods where our kids can walk.
We'd like neighborhoods where there isn't open crap and open needles on the street.
And if Democrats won't do that, and they're too focused on weeping over Donald Trump being president, and they're too focused on what Alabama chooses to do to protect human life, and if their great governing suggestion is that we have to make sure the taxpayer dollars are used not to clean up city streets, but to ensure that a woman who has sex with a guy and then gets pregnant can pay for the killing of that unborn child, that's where my taxpayer dollars are supposed to go, then, you know what?
Run on that.
Run on that and see how you do.
By the way, Republicans are fools if they do not run on these public safety issues.
They are fools.
Absolute fools.
Remember, there's a gubernatorial candidate in California.
He was running as a Republican several years ago.
And the homelessness problem was already an issue.
There was also something called prison realignment that was pursued by Governor Jerry Brown, in which he basically released criminals into the public square by reclassifying felonies as misdemeanors and then sending misdemeanor prisoners over to local jails that would not hold them.
And I said to this Republican candidate, I do not understand for the life of me why you are not running on quality of life and safety issues.
No, I'm going to run on education.
So then you're an idiot.
Of course you should be running on quality of life and safety issues.
By the way, Donald Trump should as well.
Donald Trump should be running on this problem.
He should be pointing out that Seattle, which is a gem of a city, is being turned into a giant Hooverville.
You should point out that San Francisco is being turned into a stratified society where if you can afford to, you live on the penthouse level and you never have to deal with the homeless encampments.
And then, if you can't, then you're homeless.
It should be Republicans pointing this stuff out and proposing solutions.
And yes, that obviously is going to involve the ability of the police to at least move people.
That doesn't mean that police have to be trained in how to deal with mentally ill people.
They have a rough job, the police do.
We have to take that into account.
Or we have to form new forces of people who are specifically designed to deal with mentally ill people or addicts.
And they have to have the authority to move people.
And they have to have the authority to call in the police to arrest someone if they are violating the law.
But Democrats don't want to handle any of these issues.
They want to throw up their hands and declare that it's unsympathetic to handle any of these issues.
Well, guess what?
Most Americans don't consider themselves unsympathetic if they wish to live in a place where their kids can run around free.
Tell me more about how you're crying over Donald Trump's election, though, Democrats.
Make sure that you focus in on that.
OK, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
As you know, I am a huge baseball fan, and there's a great baseball book that came out a couple of weeks ago by Tyler Kepner, who's a baseball writer over at The New York Times.
It's called K. A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches.
K, obviously, is the scorecard sign for a strikeout.
And it's just great.
It's got all sorts of anecdotal stories, wonderful little tidbits, data about 10 pitches, everything from the forkball to the split-finger fastball.
It's just great.
If you're a baseball fan, it's really one of the better baseball books that I've read recently.
Tyler Koepner's K. A History of Baseball in 10 Pitches.
Go check that out right now.
Okay, now time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay.
Thing that I hate, number one, I kind of love it.
I'll be honest, I kind of love this.
Kamala Harris is being asked softball questions by CNN, because this is how it goes if you're a Democrat.
You never get asked by CNN if you're a Republican what your favorite song is, or how you thought of the Game of Thrones finale.
But if you're a Democrat, you get asked these questions all the time.
Watch as Senator Kamala Harris, who I don't know.
When God distributed the awkward from his jar of awkward in the creation of human beings, he used a heavy dose on Hillary Clinton and he used what was left over on Kamala Harris.
Here's Kamala Harris being incredibly awkward about a pretty simple question.
Do you have a favorite band or a favorite musician?
I'd say one of my favorites is Bob Marley.
Good choice.
You can't go wrong with that.
That's a crowd pleaser.
On your mixtape, what would be like your favorite three songs?
Oh, okay, let's see.
Aretha Franklin, anything Aretha Franklin.
I would say Bob Marley and then, I don't know, I love Cardi B. As she says.
Awkward laugh.
And I love that the anchor there is like, I asked you for your favorite songs and you just gave me.
So who's your favorite singer slash artist?
Bob Marley, who's your favorite song?
Bob Marley.
Strong answer there from Senator Harris, who, by the way, has just been a dud as a candidate.
You would have expected her to be growing by leaps and bounds, right?
She's the most intersectional candidate in the field.
Nope!
She has been a giant fail from launch, effectively.
Now, maybe that changes, but she is not nearly the talented politician a lot of people thought that she was going to be.
I mean, she's had her thunder stolen by Pete Buttigieg.
What does that say about her?
And meanwhile, Democrats are calling for impeachment, but they are split on it.
So this is kind of humorous.
So Democrats don't know whether they want to impeach President Trump or whether they don't want to impeach President Trump.
And this is leading to a split in the Democratic soul.
You end up with James Clyburn, the House majority whip, saying that a majority of Democrats are actually no on impeachment.
If you did a secret ballot among the Democratic caucus, yes or no on impeachment, what would the majority likely be?
Oh, the majority would be no.
Do you believe that?
Yes, I do.
It's not as big a majority today, or yesterday, as today.
But a majority will be for staying steady, staying focused, staying on what we're doing, because this thing is moving in our direction.
Okay, so it's pretty amazing.
Even the House leadership, Pelosi, Clyburn, like, no, we're not going to do that.
And then you have AOC, who's like, yeah, we should totally impeach him because what does she care?
She's from a heavy blue district.
I trust the Speaker is taking a measured approach to ensure that we're moving everyone forward.
I know that, you know, being a Speaker is hard.
Holding this party together is a difficult task, but I think that we know what we need to do.
I personally believe that I think we have to move forward.
We have to move forward, according to AOC, and of course, according to Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, who also says she's yes on impeachment.
So prepare for the battle inside the Democratic Party.
This should be fun to watch.
Today, in the next 48 hours, I'll be introducing a resolution of investigation.
The opening comments in that resolution says that the Judiciary Committee will investigate whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise the power Okay, so I'm gonna have to ask her, what exactly is the ground?
Is there a charge on the impeachment?
Like, what exactly is the grounds other than you hate Trump?
It'll be amusing to watch Democrats run in 2020 on Trump should be impeached and we don't know why, and also abortion is awesome.
Make that your platform.
Please.
I dare you.
Go for it.
Alright, we will be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
This is why you should subscribe.
Either we'll see you later today or we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
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Edited by Adam Sajovic.
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Copyright, Daily Wire 2019.
Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
Donald Trump is doing everything he can to force the Democrats to play out their impeachment fantasies right here in reality, where they'll make them look like idiots.
Nancy Pelosi knows it, can't do a damn thing about it.
Sad Nancy, smart Trump.
We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show, plus The Mailbag.
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