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July 10, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:03:14

Storming The Bastille | Ep. 814

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Time	Text
	Joe Biden vows to free hundreds of thousands of prisoners.
	The Epstein allegations blow back on both Bill Clinton and the Trump administration.
	And President Trump's poll numbers actually rise.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Man, we have a lot to get to today.
	Mr. Beto, he's back on the road.
	And now he says that all of America is evil and racist, which is why a white man like Beto O'Rourke should be president of the United States.
	Very important.
	We'll also get to Megan Rapinoe, who is making the rounds as the new woke voice of the left.
	And she is very, very important because she kicks a soccer ball and because she kicks a soccer ball very well.
	And this means that she knows all there is to know about politics and also about media and also about everything.
	She's like Colin Kaepernick, except more inspiring.
	We'll get to more of that a little bit later on in the show.
	We begin at this hour with Joe Biden really blowing up his candidacy.
	It's amazing to watch.
	If you look at the polls right now, Joe Biden continues to maintain a fairly solid lead in the actual primary polling.
	So right now, if you look at that real clear politics poll average, which is the only one that really matters at this point because it's so early, Joe Biden is leading the rest of the field by an average of about 12 points.
	That would be the last 10 polls.
	There's an Economist YouGov poll that came out yesterday and that showed him up only four points over Elizabeth Warren.
	But there was an Emerson poll that came out the day before and showed him up 15 points over Elizabeth Warren and the rest of the field.
	That Economist YouGov poll had the race currently at Joe Biden, 22, Elizabeth Warren, 18, Kamala Harris, 15, and Bernie Sanders, 12.
	It's pretty obvious that Bernie Sanders is starting to feel the effect of Elizabeth Warren on his flank, and he is starting to drop voters to her.
	Well, Joe Biden, instead of strongly campaigning toward the middle and maintaining his brand and basically saying, come get me, guys, Come over here and get me.
	We're 40 percent of the bases.
	Come over here and find me.
	Instead, he is swiveling into what the rest of the Democratic Party wants from him.
	So he is swiveling toward the, quote unquote, majority of the Democratic base.
	Now, it is true that only a plurality of the Democratic base is, quote unquote, moderate.
	It's true that a majority of the Democratic base is probably what we would call progressive, maybe even radical.
	But that progressive base is going to splinter.
	There's not one candidate for them to rally around.
	And in fact, the moderate candidate in the last few Democratic presidential cycles has actually seemed to do better in the primaries than the person who's perceived as more radical.
	That was true in 2004 with John Kerry.
	It wasn't true in 2008 with Barack Obama, but that's because Barack Obama followed the most simple rule of American politics, run against Hillary Clinton.
	That is the number one rule of American politics.
	If you run against Hillary Clinton in anything but a New York Senate race, you will win.
	That is the rule.
	So 2008 was an example that did not fall toward moderation.
	But obviously by 2016, Hillary Clinton was perceived as moderate against Bernie Sanders.
	And she ended up winning the nomination on those grounds.
	Well, Joe Biden has a strategy.
	His strategy is to embrace his record and say, yes, it turns out that I am kind of moderate.
	It turns out that while I do want to see change happen, I don't think that America is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad place.
	And that was his opening ad.
	I know it feels like it's been years, but it's only been two and a half, three months since Joe Biden jumped into the race with an ad that he launched by talking about the historic greatness of America, not about historic evil of America.
	And then he is very quickly shifted over to his left in an attempt to crowd out the rest of the field.
	Instead, He has been sucked into the rest of the field.
	I think he was seeing this race as sort of an Indy 500.
	He was going to swivel out toward the far lanes, drive everybody into the wall.
	Instead, what has happened is he drove himself directly into a car crash, and now he is involved in that car crash.
	And he keeps getting more and more radical in his commentary, and it ain't going to help him.
	So, let's give an example.
	Yesterday, Joe Biden, there's tape of him, I guess this happened on Sunday, Joe Biden was asked about cutting prison populations in the United States.
	Now, Joe Biden was responsible for a crime bill in 1994.
	He was a co-signer of it.
	Co-sponsor of it.
	In 1994.
	That was dramatically helpful in decreasing the crime rates around the United States.
	I know that we like to forget history conveniently.
	The fact is, between 1960 and 1994, we had one of the greatest surges in crime in the history of the United States.
	Probably the greatest surge in crime, violent crime, in the history of the United States.
	Murder rates were at extraordinary highs in most of America's major cities.
	They'd risen dramatically across the country.
	And in 1994, the federal government decided that they were going to crack down on a fair number of crimes and provide new resources for policing to states and localities.
	And the crime rate began a historic reversal.
	Unprecedented reversal.
	The crime rates began to drop in 1994.
	They continued to drop all the way until the Ferguson effect reversed them in 2014, 2015, 2016.
	So that was a good thing.
	But Joe Biden is now being forced to run away from his quote unquote moderate record.
	He is now being forced to run on the progressive record.
	And that progressive record is supposed to be Well, let's free all the prisoners.
	Let's let everybody out of prison.
	Well, the nice thing about saying let's let everybody out of prison is that you never actually have to deal with what happens when bunches of people are let out of prison.
	You get to pose yourself as some sort of human rights activist while allowing criminals to wander free on the streets.
	We've seen this in the state of California.
	Jerry Brown, the former governor in the state of California, He participated in something called prison realignment instead of providing new funding that was necessary to keep prisoners in prison.
	He lowered sentences.
	He reclassified felonies as misdemeanors and the violent crime rate has gone up in the state of California, at least in its major cities.
	I live in Los Angeles.
	The quality of life has gone down dramatically with regard to everything from street crime to violent crime as well and drug crime too.
	All of this is a serious problem, but we're supposed to ignore it because we falsify the stats.
	It is very easy for Aside from murder, it's very easy to falsify statistics when it comes to crime statistics because police departments will be told by mayors that they need to simply reclassify crimes in different ways and report them differently in order to artificially lower the crime rates.
	But you can tell in terms of quality of life that California has had a rough time since prison realignment.
	We're going to get to what Joe Biden had to say in just one second.
	It is fully insane because this is where he thinks the Democratic Party is.
	It's like kind of Donald Trump back in 2016 speaking conservatism as a second language.
	Donald Trump has turned out to govern pretty conservatively.
	He doesn't know much about conservatism.
	And in 2016, Trump did this routine where he would sort of estimate where he thought conservatives lay.
	And so when it came to abortion, for example, he would say, sure, let's prosecute.
	Let's prosecute women for abortions.
	That is not the position.
	of anyone in the pro-life movement, nor has it been for decades.
	But because Trump isn't familiar with the pro-life movement, he sort of threw out what he thought they wanted to hear.
	Now you got Joe Biden doing the same thing with the woke brigade.
	Well, now he is going to try and pander to people who are woke by throwing out solutions that make no sense at all.
	We'll get to that in a second.
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	Okay, so Joe Biden is now out there proclaiming that he wants to free hundreds of thousands of prisoners.
	Now, this may be popular with folks on the left.
	It has never been popular in American politics to say that you actually want to Free hundreds of thousands of prisoners, including violent criminals.
	This has never been popular.
	Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York, New York, as far left the city as it is possible to have in the United States.
	Rudy Giuliani became a very popular mayor of New York, specifically on the basis of quality of life issues and crime.
	In Los Angeles, Mayor Richard Reardon did something very similar.
	Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was basically elected not just because of the Enron energy crisis out here in Los Angeles and in California, but also because of issues with quality of life.
	If you want a Republican elected in a country that is shifting to the left, all you have to do is point to quality of life.
	George H.W.
	Bush in 1988 may have won the election based on the perception that Michael Dukakis was soft on crime.
	So, I know that we are now living off the boon, off the bounty, of a 25-year, yeah, 25-year drop in crime rates.
	I understand all of that, but that doesn't mean that the American people are willing to see a reversal of the crime rates based on violent criminals being released from prison.
	Why am I making a big deal out of this?
	Because it's not getting any attention at all.
	I'm shocked by this.
	I mean, here's Joe Biden saying he, this is an insane vow.
	Here's Joe Biden vowing to cut the prison population in the United States by more than 50%, 5-0%, The ACLU has a roadmap for cutting incarceration by 50% through reforms that have been endorsed by both the right and the left, including four other presidential candidates and many conservatives.
	Do you commit to cutting incarceration by 50% if elected?
	We can do it more than that.
	Look, get his name, I'll send you exactly what my program is.
	Is it a yes or a no?
	Yeah, the answer is yes.
	Thank you.
	And I've got a better plan than you guys have.
	Okay, the answer is yes, of course, I'm going to reduce prison populations by more than 50%.
	Now, there's a lot of talk in the United States about mass incarceration.
	The reason people talk about mass incarceration on the left, particularly, is because a disproportionate number of people in prison, disproportionate to the population statistics, are of minority descent, are black and Hispanic.
	And this is supposedly a reference to America's deep-seated criminal justice racism.
	Well, the reality is that unfortunately a disproportionate number of black and Hispanic people in the United States are committing crimes as a percentage of the population generally.
	And that is true in everything from murder statistics to violent crime.
	There are certain crimes where it's disproportionately white.
	Crystal meth is a disproportionately white crime.
	People who are arrested for crystal meth distribution are disproportionately white.
	There are certain types of white collar crime that are disproportionately white.
	But when you're talking about violent crime, if you're talking about murder, for example, the people who are committing murder are disproportionately of minority races.
	Now, that is not a referendum.
	That is not a statement about race innately being linked to crime.
	It is just pointing out that if you are arresting a disproportionate number of people from a population group, That is not necessarily a reference to the racism of the system.
	That may be a reference to the people who are actually committing the crimes.
	That's not the fault of the police.
	That's not the fault of the criminal justice system.
	So, and that's the entire basis of the let's-free-hundreds-of-thousands-of-people-from-prison argument, is that the system is inherently racist, and therefore we need to let hundreds of thousands of people out, and we're going to reduce prison populations by 50%.
	So let's look at what the prison populations of the United States actually look like in terms of the crimes that they have committed.
	Because I don't care about the race of people in prison.
	I don't care about the race of people in any industry.
	I don't care about the race of people in the United States generally.
	I'm not interested in the racial demographics of the United States.
	I care much more about what people think and what people do.
	Because I thought we were supposed to not care about people's race because that's called racism.
	So instead, let's focus on what people have done to get themselves in prison.
	Now, we can all agree, if somebody is innocent and in prison, they should not be in prison.
	We all agree on that.
	So the question now is, which guilty criminals should we allow to go free?
	Because that's what Joe Biden is talking about.
	He's not suggesting that lots of innocent people are in prison.
	He is suggesting that a lot of people who have been convicted of actual crimes ought to go free.
	And he says more than 50% should be released.
	So let's look at the actual percentages of people who are in prison.
	So first of all, the vast majority of people in prison, and by the vast majority, I mean 13 out of every 15 people who are in prison, are in state prisons, not federal penitentiaries.
	And most crimes that are committed in the United States are state-level crimes.
	And most of those crimes happen to be violent crimes.
	Contrary to popular opinion, the vast majority of crimes for which people are in jail are not people who are picked up for smoking dope on the street.
	That is simply not correct.
	When you look at the state prisons, this is information from the Prison Policy Initiative, which is a fairly left-wing group on prison policy.
	They have a solid breakdown here.
	If you're watching the show that you can see this particular chart is why you should subscribe.
	State prisons currently hold about 1.3 million people.
	712,000 of those people are in prison for violent crimes.
	137,000 for assault, 172,000 for robbery, 163,000 for rape or sexual assault, 18,000 for manslaughter, 179,000 for murder.
	172,000 for robbery, 163,000 for rape or sexual assault, 18,000 for manslaughter, 179,000 for murder.
	So that means the single largest plurality of people who are in prison for violent crime are in for murder.
	So that's a lot of people who ought to be in prison.
	It seems to me if you commit an assault or robbery, a rape or sexual assault, manslaughter or murder, there's a very solid case that you should be in prison.
	And that represents over half of the people who are in state prisons.
	Then there are another 235,000 people who are in state prison for a property crime.
	And that would be fraud, burglary, theft, car theft, other property.
	That's a large share of folks.
	Okay, about 200,000 people are in prison for drug, for drug possession, for drug crimes.
	The vast majority of those people are not in for drug possession.
	First of all, most of the time when people are in prison for drug possession, it is because they pled down from drug trafficking.
	It's because a drug dealer was picked up and then cut a plea deal in which they pled guilty to speed up the system and they went to jail for drug possession, which is a lower sentence.
	They had their sentence degraded.
	I worked in a prosecutor's office for a summer.
	This is how it works.
	And the vast majority of those people, even the ones who plead guilty to drug possession, are not actually going to jail for drug possession.
	It is a pled down offense.
	Other drug crimes represent the vast majority, as in 75% of all the people who are in state prison for drug crimes.
	And then you have 151,000 people who are in jail on the basis of what they call public order offenses, which is, for example, weapons possession, possession of illegal weapons, or driving under the influence.
	So which of those people do you feel like ought to be released?
	According to Joe Biden, half those people ought to be released.
	Where is that going to come from?
	And since over half of those people are in prison for violent crimes, that means that if you were to release everyone who is not in prison for a violent crime on the state level, Everyone.
	That would still only represent about 40% of the people who are in state prison, so you still have to have another 10% coming from somewhere.
	That means you would have to release about 118,000, by this chart, 118,000 violent criminals onto the streets of the United States.
	You think it's going to make America a better place or a worse place to have violent criminals walking around?
	Okay, so let's even assume that we're talking about federal prisons and jails.
	So if you look at federal prisons and jails, what you see Is that contrary again to popular opinion, the majority of people who are in federal prison are in federal prison for non-drug offenses.
	Okay, 75,000 people, 76,000 people, according to the Bureau of Prisons, are in prison for drug offensives.
	That represents about 45% of the total number of people in the federal pen for drug offenses.
	Again, the vast majority of those people are not in for drug possession.
	The vast majority of those people are in for drug trafficking, meaning you have a drug dealer on the street who is dealing to kids, right?
	Somebody who is importing Now, if you want to make the case that we ought to legalize drugs in the United States, you want to make the full libertarian case, that's a case I'm willing to hear.
	But if the case that you are making is that there's going to be no negative impact to releasing drug traffickers back onto the streets of the United States, let's hear that case, gang.
	I can see the costs and the benefits of this particular case, but I'm not feeling that people are making honest arguments about this sort of stuff.
	There will be costs to releasing drug traffickers back onto the streets.
	Those people are not generally going to go get a job at the local Walgreens.
	Many of those people are going to go right back to crime.
	The recidivism rate in the United States is extraordinarily high.
	The recidivism rate for many crimes in the United States is upward of 75 or 80 percent.
	Take, for example, California.
	According to a 2012 report by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, more than 65% of people released from California's prison system are back in prison within three years.
	According to the National Statistics on Recidivism, The National Institute of Justice reporting 60% of arrests occurred during the years four through nine.
	An estimated 68% of all released prisoners were arrested within three years, 79% within six years, 83% within nine years.
	Those recidivism rates are incredibly, incredibly high.
	So let's not pretend that these folks are going to go back to living a life of crime-free existence.
	The vast majority of them won't.
	Some of them will.
	Some of them will.
	If we could pick and choose which ones would, then there's a case for early release for those people.
	But if you're just talking about blanket release of an enormous number of people, like Joe Biden is apparently talking about, releasing half the prison population, Good luck with all of that.
	Good luck with all that.
	But again, this is not directed toward anything remotely like a policy that is workable.
	Joe Biden wouldn't do any of this as president.
	This is exactly like when Kamala Harris was ripping into Joe Biden over supposedly not backing forced busing.
	And then she was asked, so do you support forced busing?
	And she's like, no, not really.
	And people should use it as a tool, but I'm not really, not really going to impose forced busing from above.
	In other words, right now, the Democratic Party primary is a bunch of virtue signaling.
	And if people take that virtue signaling as an actual platform, they're going to be scared to death, which is the reason that the polls for President Trump I've been rising consistently in the general election numbers.
	There's a very good poll out for President Trump yesterday from Emerson, and it showed a bunch of head-to-heads of Democrats.
	Now, in most of the head-to-heads prior to this, Trump had been in a little bit of trouble against most of the Democrats, although there is a trend.
	The trend is that Trump is basically even with all the Democrats except for Biden.
	That is from the two last polls.
	So there was an ABC News Washington Post poll that came out on Sunday, and here's what it showed.
	It showed Biden 53, Trump 43.
	That one's the outlier, right?
	And that is because Biden is widely known.
	He is perceived as moderate.
	The further left he moves, the worse it is for him.
	He's making himself vulnerable with this sort of stupidity.
	But running against Kamala Harris, Trump is basically in a dead heat.
	It's Harris 48, Trump 46, according to ABC News Washington Post.
	It is Sanders 49, Trump 48, according to ABC News Washington Post.
	Warren and Trump tied at 48.
	Buttigieg and Trump tied at 47, according to the ABC News Washington Post poll from Sunday.
	And then those results are mirrored in the Emerson poll.
	So according to the Emerson poll, Biden is up six.
	He's the only one with a clear lead on Trump right now.
	Trump actually beats Kamala Harris by two, according to that poll.
	He is behind by two to Bernie Sanders, 51-49.
	He's at 51 against Warren and 51 against Buttigieg.
	In other words, he's hitting numbers that he actually would need to hit in order to retain the presidency.
	This is because the more people see of the Democrats, the more it's a referendum on their radicalism.
	Having Joe Biden out there proclaiming to the sky that he is going to release hundreds of thousands of prisoners onto America's streets.
	Honestly, if Trump doesn't run on that, I don't know what he's doing.
	And I have a feeling that Trump is certainly going to run on the Democrats being extraordinarily weak on crime.
	Everything from their willingness to dump hundreds of thousands of prisoners into the American population, to decriminalizing illegal immigration, which is something they continue to push to do.
	There's something else that's been happening, I'm going to talk about in just a minute, and that is this push from the social left to get corporations to do their bidding as well.
	What we are experiencing right now is not merely a political polarization, it is a cultural polarization that is leading to a breakup in the country.
	And I'm not talking about like full-scale secession, but I'm talking about an increasing feeling that we ought not live in the same country, That is burgeoning on the left and then in response on the right.
	It's really bad.
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	Alrighty, so as I say, the culture seems to be coming apart.
	So it is not merely that politicians are polarizing because it's primary season.
	And now they have to appeal to the most radical among us.
	Now there's pressure that is being put on private industries to do the same.
	You've seen this with Nike going woke in order not to go broke.
	This is Nike's new strategy is that they are going to be as woke as humanly possible.
	They're going to embrace Colin Kaepernick.
	They're going to suggest that women are somehow put down in American society.
	Well now SunTrust A bank has decided that they are not going to be involved in the private prison industry.
	According to Forbes.com, SunTrust Bank announced this morning they are ready to join other major banks in moving away from the private prison industry in the wake of deep public sentiment against their role in mass incarceration and family detention.
	Sue Malino, chief communications officer of SunTrust Bank said, quote, following an ongoing and deliberate process, SunTrust has decided not to provide future financing to companies that manage private prisons and immigration holding facilities.
	This decision was made after extensive consideration of the views of our stakeholders on this deeply complex issue.
	In other words, a bunch of people whined and suggested it was very bad to fund private prison complexes that are necessary for keeping prisoners there.
	That it would be very bad to have private detention facilities that allow for, you know, more humane detention of illegal immigrants in the United States.
	And so SunTrust is pulling out.
	And we're seeing this from other banks as well.
	We've seen Bank of America direct action against particular groups that it does not like.
	And while you or I may agree on the groups that they don't like, it is very bad policy to have banks rejecting groups not based on illegal activity of the groups, but based on viewpoint discrimination.
	It's very bad for the country.
	Now, they can do what they want.
	They're a private industry.
	But the predictable result will be that there will be alternative banks that spring up to lend to a lot of these sorts of industries.
	And so what you'll end up with is banks that do not politically discriminate and banks that do politically discriminate.
	And this is happening in virtually every area of corporate America.
	What the left has realized for a while is that if they pressure corporations to do something, corporations will likely do it.
	That the squeakiest wheel tends to get the grease.
	Most of us don't really think about the corporate messaging of the products that we buy.
	We just go and look for the best products.
	It's particularly true for conservatives.
	We basically go and we look for the best products and we buy them.
	Like, I didn't care about Nike's politics until the last five minutes because why would I care about that?
	I need a shoe.
	But there are a lot of people On the left, you do not feel the same way.
	And they actually look to corporations to mirror their social justice preferences.
	So if you are a corporation and you feel no blowback from the right when you go woke, but you feel lots of blowback from the left when you do not go woke, you are likely to cater to the left.
	Well, eventually the right is going to get wise to this and they're going to stop buying Nike shoes.
	They're going to stop banking with institutions that they don't like.
	Or, alternatively, they will be expelled from those institutions because the only thing a lot of the left wants is to ban all of this stuff from entering the public square at all.
	They want to use the corporations as their tools.
	They want the corporations to do their dirty work for them.
	That will lead to an alternative market, a resegregation of the political market.
	It's sort of like how this happened in news, right?
	You've seen the Daily Wire spring up on the right and then you've got Huffington Post on the left.
	You're gonna see this happen with non-informational driven exchanges.
	You're gonna see this happen with bigger corporations.
	That's actually very bad for the country.
	You're seeing this happen right now with regard to Home Depot.
	Home Depot is being boycotted.
	And a lot of this is just based on bad information.
	It's based on bad policy.
	It's based on media coverage that is not true.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	So as I say, the pressure on these banks to divest from the prison, the so-called prison industrial complex, is coming from the left.
	Ash Scowl, writing for Daily Wire yesterday, points out that during the first round of Democratic presidential debates, Senator Elizabeth Warren slammed private prisons and called for their elimination.
	She said, our criminal and immigration systems are tearing apart communities of color and devastating the poor, including children.
	Okay, first of all, Arresting criminals and taking them out of communities is one of the things that makes it easier to live in a community.
	And if you don't... This weird idea that all these guys who are going to prison for crimes are actually responsible fathers and wonderful family figures, and then they just sort of get randomly plucked up and put in prison.
	I'm not seeing a lot of evidence of this.
	In any case, she claimed that the economy is benefiting a thinner and thinner slice at the top, and she noted people who want to invest in private prisons, but This is not true.
	Private prisons under President Trump have not actually been doing very well.
	CoreCivic, which was formerly Corrections Corporation of America, is down about 25% since Trump's inauguration.
	GEO Group is down about 20%.
	Bank of America and SunTrust have also announced they would stop financing for-profit prisons.
	There is basically no evidence to suggest that the private prison complex is doing great under President Trump and is benefiting from all of these crime policies or any of that.
	But again, bad information is more important than true information, so long as the bad information gets broader play.
	You're seeing the same thing today with regard to a boycott, a so-called boycott of Home Depot.
	Now, it is important to note, the vast majority of people who say they're going to boycott these companies on the left never do any of this stuff.
	How many of the people who say they're going to boycott Home Depot actually shop at Home Depot?
	The answer?
	Probably none.
	How many of the people who say they're going to blow back on SunTrust actually bank at SunTrust?
	I would bet very, very, very few.
	The truth is that boycotts have a long failed history in the United States.
	It is very rare to see a successful boycott.
	The Montgomery bus boycott is one good example of a successful boycott.
	But it is exorbitantly rare today, particularly, for a boycott to actually hurt a company.
	All you have to do is look at Nike.
	A lot of conservatives fulminating over Nike and Colin Kaepernick.
	Their stock has been up since the beginning of the year dramatically.
	Nike knows that.
	That's why they're smart enough to ignore the detractors and just do what they want to do and pander to the people they want to pander to on the left.
	Well, apparently most corporations are not that smart.
	Nonetheless, people are targeting Home Depot.
	Why?
	Well, because one of its founders, Bernie Marcus, has said that he intends to support President Trump's re-election campaign.
	And this means that a bunch of people say that they are not going to actually shop at Home Depot anymore.
	Well, this is really stupid because Bernie Marcus retired from Home Depot 15 years ago and doesn't speak on behalf of the company.
	The company doesn't endorse presidential candidates.
	So, he still continues to own shares in the business?
	But he is not speaking on behalf of Home Depot.
	This is just as dumb as the boycott of Chick-fil-A based on the political preferences of the owners of Chick-fil-A.
	Now, Chick-fil-A caters to customers of every name, every kind, every sexual orientation.
	Apparently, none of that matters.
	All this is doing is polarizing our culture.
	And when we continue in just a second...
	I'm going to show you how even the most anodyne, silly topics like women's soccer have become incredibly polarized and polarized by, frankly, celebrity figures who don't know what the hell they're talking about.
	Megan Rapinoe would be today's key example of a celebrity figure who does not know what the hell she is talking about, contradicts herself all over the place, and is feeded by the media for her trouble because she obviously checks some intersectional boxes.
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	In just a second, we're going to get to Megan Rapinoe's astonishing interview on Anderson Cooper last night.
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	So talking about cultural polarization, it's funny.
	The moments that are supposed to be unifying for the country are no longer unifying for the country.
	So the Women's World Cup team wins the World Cup.
	And as I said, I don't care about this other than I like America.
	I'll root for America whether we are winning in curling or whether we are winning in badminton or women's soccer.
	I really don't care.
	I have no particular love for soccer generally.
	I certainly have no particular love for women's soccer.
	Mainly because I care about skill level and women's soccer is just not at the same skill level as men's soccer.
	I mean, really not even as teenage boys soccer in many cases.
	In any case, this has become a big deal.
	That's fine.
	That's fine.
	But what made it political is that many on the U.S.
	women's national team decided that they were now going to be social justice heroes.
	And this meant that they were going to stump for so-called equal pay.
	Now, as we've talked about on the program, this is a bunch of crap.
	Women do not deserve equal pay in the World Cup with the men.
	They do not earn as much money.
	They do not sell as many tickets.
	That is simply a fact.
	When it comes to the U.S.
	soccer, U.S.
	national soccer, you know, like in non-World Cup years, then there's maybe a case that women should be paid more.
	But guess what?
	They have collective bargaining rights, and they collectively bargained for a contract two years ago.
	So if they did a bad job negotiating, that would be on them.
	Also, it is true they don't sell as many tickets overall as the men, particularly when you include World Cup years.
	When you include World Cup years, men dramatically outsell the women, like by $10 million.
	So, all of this has been a bunch of nonsense.
	Even the sort of more left-wing publications, the Washington Post, the New York Times, that have been calling for quote-unquote equal pay recognize that women have not actually earned equal pay on the World Cup stage, but they just won it anyway.
	So, This has been their thing.
	The lead voice in this has been Megan Rapinoe.
	Now, Megan Rapinoe has basically been, since 2016, doing the Colin Kaepernick routine.
	Getting famous off the radical left social justice stuff that she has been pushing.
	And that's the reason why she's really being celebrated today.
	Not because she's a terrific soccer player, which she apparently is.
	But because she is an outspoken lesbian, because she is a very outspoken SJW on so-called equal pay issues, even though, again, she's not really stumping for equal pay, she's stumping for disproportionate pay for women on the basis of media coverage, effectively.
	And she has become this sort of obnoxious advocate for her position.
	The reason I call it obnoxious is because, I'm sorry, but if you go to University of Portland on scholarship for women's soccer and then you're whining about this country, shut up.
	Really, this is a pretty great country when you get to go to college for free because not only do you kick a ball, you kick a ball in a sport people pretend to care about once every four years.
	When I say shut up, by the way, I don't mean that she should be made to be quiet.
	She can talk as much as she wants.
	I'm just saying it's obnoxious.
	Because guess what?
	It is obnoxious.
	When she's kneeling for the national anthem in a country that is celebrating her as a heroine, she's getting paid millions of dollars to make ads for Nike about how she is a lesbian and outspoken and a soccer player.
	It seems to me you should be sort of grateful for the country that makes all that possible.
	It seems to me you should be pretty happy about the country, not sitting back and talking about how terrible the country is all the time.
	More than that, Rapinoe demonstrates an obvious unwillingness to even talk with anybody on the other side of the aisle.
	Now, before people say, why would she talk with you?
	You're criticizing her.
	Right.
	I'm criticizing her specifically because she has evidenced no desire to have a conversation of any merit or substance on these issues.
	Instead, she appears on media outlets that drool over her and ask her silly, stupid questions and allow her to get away with silly, stupid answers.
	So I want to give you a couple of examples of how Megan Rapinoe is being treated and how she says dumb things on a regular basis.
	And nobody calls her out on it because, again, her intersectional credentials are in order.
	Because even though she grew up, from what I understand, middle to upper class, right?
	I mean, she's playing soccer from the time she was five years old.
	She went to, I believe, a private high school.
	I'm not sure she wants to eat.
	I know that she was playing on the on the junior soccer circuit and all of this.
	She's lived a pretty good life in the United States.
	I think it's fair to say.
	Megan Rapinoe has lived a pretty good life in the United States.
	Still, she talks about how America is really, really a bad place.
	And then she also suggested that she didn't want to meet with people.
	I mean, it was really amazing.
	She said she did not want to meet with people who disagree with her.
	So here she is giving a shout out to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, because this is what we're talking about here.
	I know you've been invited by, I think, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I think Nancy Pelosi.
	Shout out AOC.
	So does that mean, is that an invitation you're taking up?
	I think everyone is interested in going to Washington.
	I think we've always been interested in going to Washington.
	This is such a special moment for us and to be able to, you know, sort of leverage this movement and talk about the things that we want to talk about and to celebrate like this with the leaders of our country is an incredible moment.
	Okay, and then she continued by suggesting that she didn't want to meet with the Trump administration.
	So instead of everybody celebrating together, or maybe her making her point to, you know, people who disagree, maybe she could make an affirmative case.
	Instead, she says she's not going to meet with the administration because she doesn't want to be co-opted or used by the administration.
	Yes, I am sure that that would have been the media coverage.
	Is Megan Rapinoe co-opted by President Trump?
	It wouldn't have been her going to the White House and then mouthing off to Trump about equal pay.
	That would be the smartest thing for her to do.
	what would have happened, right?
	That would have been, honestly, if I were her media advisor, that's what I would tell her to do.
	Accept the invitation from the Trump White House, go there and then make a comment directly to Trump's face about equal pay, right?
	That would be the smartest thing for her to do.
	She's not gonna do that.
	Yeah, I don't think anyone on the team has any interest in lending the platform that we've worked so hard to build and the things that we fight for and the way that we live our life.
	I don't think that we want that to be co-opted or corrupted by this administration.
	And going to the White House would be, in your opinion, Risk co-opting or corrupting your message?
	Yeah, I think so.
	I think it's an opportunity for this administration to sort of put us on display as their, you know, sort of guest for the day.
	And I don't think that that makes sense for us at all.
	Okay, so quick correction.
	She went to a public high school, not a private high school.
	Doesn't change the general point.
	She's lived a pretty good life.
	She also said in this interview that she had an immense sense of pride and responsibility by kneeling during the National Anthem.
	Nothing says pride and responsibility quite like kneeling during the National Anthem of a country that has fought for your rights to be an incredibly famous person based on kicking a ball and having the proper leftist messaging.
	Also, Megan Rapinoe suggested that she would only meet with people who agree with her.
	So, she said she would go to D.C.
	and have a substantive conversation with, quote, anyone who believes the same things we believe in.
	Yes.
	Wow.
	Doing amazing work on behalf of her perspective by meeting with people who already agree with her.
	Really tremendous stuff.
	The best part of this Megan Rapinoe interview is that she was asked how fans can support the fight for equal pay.
	Her answer is just incredible.
	In the moments immediately following the final whistle, you get that USA, USA chant, but equal pay, equal pay along that same cadence.
	I think fans want to know what they can do to support that fight.
	Fans can come to games.
	Obviously the national team games will be a hot ticket.
	But we have nine teams in the NWSL.
	You can go to your league games.
	You can support that way.
	You can buy players' jerseys.
	You can lend your support in that way.
	You can tell your friends about it.
	You can become season ticket holders.
	I think in terms of that, that's the easiest way for fans to get involved.
	Oh, you mean that fans can actually create the economic incentives for you to get paid more?
	You mean that capitalism can actually raise your pay?
	So what you're saying is that the reason you're not getting equal pay right now is because you're not making equal money for your league, and the best way for you to raise your pay would be for people to come and purchase tickets and memorabilia from your team, which suggests that this isn't about sexism at all.
	This is about you just complaining about sexism for publicity.
	It's just this sort of stuff, and there's no follow-up there at all, of course.
	And Rachel Maddow is never going to do the follow-up.
	That's who's interviewing her there.
	Rachel Maddow is never going to say to Megan Rapinoe, so you're saying capitalism can actually increase your pay?
	That's never going to be a thing that anyone on the left asks.
	Instead, we all have to pretend that this is all normal, and that it's not divisive at all, and that truly she's a hero to everyone.
	Absolute, absolute.
	Silliness.
	Absolute silliness.
	And bad for the country, by the way.
	When even the stuff that we take a break with, you know, sporting, is turned into this, it's pretty obnoxious.
	And we're not talking about 1968 in the middle of the civil rights movement with U.S.
	sprinters on the U.S.
	national team at the Olympics raising the black power fist because American politics are polarized around race in 68.
	We're not talking about that.
	We're talking about gay marriage is legal across the United States by Supreme Court diktat.
	We are talking about Megan Rapinoe is getting million-dollar contracts specifically because of her sexuality.
	And because she is a very, very good soccer player.
	But let's not make any mistake, if she were a very good soccer player, and she were not a very outspoken lesbian, she would be getting fewer contracts.
	Because she is seen as a political figure.
	She's sort of Colin Kaepernick, but with actual talents at her sport.
	So, it's... all of this is obnoxious, but we're supposed to pretend that actually she's quite charming and wonderful.
	That it is not obnoxious to live in the most... to live in the best time for women, in the best time for lesbians, in the best time for women's soccer, in the history of the world, and in the best country in the history of the world for any of those things.
	We're supposed to pretend that actually she's a victim and America's a terrible place so that she can make more money, presumably.
	Pretty gross.
	Okay, meanwhile, quick update on the Jeffrey Epstein story.
	So the Jeffrey Epstein story, there's no real news that is coming out about it.
	People are mostly just fulminating over what's going to happen next.
	So, is Bill Clinton the next shoe to drop?
	Or is Alex Acosta, the Secretary of Labor, the person who is going to feel the brunt?
	A couple of details about the Alexander Acosta connection that are worthy of note here.
	Some information that people haven't really been given or people haven't talked about, and that is what exactly did the Labor Secretary do when he was the federal prosecutor down in Miami, when he was a U.S.
	attorney down in Miami with Jeffrey Epstein?
	So right now people are calling for Acosta to resign.
	Because there seemed to be a sweetheart deal in 2007 between Jeffrey Epstein and Alex Acosta's office of the U.S.
	Attorney in Miami.
	And in that plea deal, or in the deal, Epstein struck a bargain that included Epstein pleading guilty to two felony solicitation charges, agreeing to 18 months in prison, eventually served 13, and registering as a sex offender.
	The deal also closed an ongoing FBI investigation and kept the case under seal, including by not notifying Epstein's accusers.
	So it's a really, really good deal for Jeffrey Epstein.
	And the person who was working at that office at the time was Alex Acosta, who is now the Secretary of Labor.
	Aaron Blake actually has a really good piece over at the Washington Post talking about what Acosta has said in response to all of this.
	So, Acosta's handling of the case, according to Blake, has been called into question before, but in December, the Miami Herald published a blockbuster story revealing potential deferential treatment that Acosta and other prosecutors gave Epstein's lawyers, especially when it came to keeping the matter private.
	Akasa has readily commented on the matter.
	When he has, he has declined to do so in detail, sometimes citing ongoing litigation and a fading memory.
	He did write a lengthy letter in 2011 and was asked about it in 2017.
	It came up in 2018 at a hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee.
	Akasa sent his 2011 letter to the Daily Beast.
	In that letter, he suggested that evidence that came out after the plea deal has led to some revisionist history.
	He said, some may feel the prosecution should have been tougher.
	Evidence has come to light since 2007 that may encourage that view.
	But he said it was the right decision at the time.
	He said, I supported that judgment then.
	Based on the state of the law as it then stood and evidence known at the time, I would support the judgment again.
	In the 2011 letter, Acosta, there's a detail that matters.
	He came out strongly against another controversial aspect of Epstein's treatment.
	Part of the deal was that Epstein would be able to leave jail during the day and then return at night.
	Acosta noted that state authorities were in charge of that, not federal authorities.
	He added that, quote, without doubt, the treatment he received while in state custody undermined the purpose of the jail sentence.
	In 2017, in testimony, he called that arrangement awful.
	Acosta also said that Epstein's lawyers, which included Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr, were ruthless and willing to dig into the personal lives of prosecutors.
	He said it was a yearlong assault.
	He said, I confess, it's been difficult for him to be cordial with his opponents after this case.
	He said the aggressive tactics didn't influence his decisions one way or another.
	So that has been it.
	Acosta has also said that there was a consensus or broadly held feeling within the prosecutor's office that the deal was about as good as they were going to get.
	There was at least one agent who told the Miami Herald that people were very disappointed with that particular deal.
	So I'm sure there will be more information to come out, but it is worthy of note that Acosta, for example, opposed what is obviously the most lenient part of the sentence, which is Epstein being able to leave jail during the day and come back at night.
	Meanwhile, how deeply is Bill Clinton tied in?
	Well, there's a woman who is an expert on underage sex trafficking.
	Her name is Conchita Sarnoff.
	She runs a foundation based on it.
	She was asked on Fox News about Bill Clinton.
	She says, there's another shoe to drop here.
	I know from the pilot logs, and these are pilot logs that, you know, were written by different pilots and at different times, that Clinton went.
	He was a guest of Epstein's 27 times.
	Almost every time that Clinton's name is on the pilot logs, there are underage girls.
	There are initials and there are names of many, many girls on that Private plane.
	So you have to ask yourself, why would anyone, not only a former president, fly on a plane 27 times?
	Okay, so there's still some other... I'm sure there'll be more news to drop here, so we'll keep an eye on all of that.
	Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
	So, things that I like today.
	So, as you know, I'm a devotee of baseball.
	I love baseball.
	This is one of the best baseball books I have ever read.
	It is an older book.
	It is from Daniel Okrent, who used to be one of the editors over at the New York Times.
	He's written a couple of really good baseball books.
	The book is called Nine Innings, The Anatomy of a Baseball Game, and O'Krent takes a 1981 baseball game between the St.
	Louis Cardinals and the Milwaukee Brewers, and he breaks it down out by out and pitch by pitch.
	It's really good.
	If you're a baseball fan, this stuff is just nirvana.
	It's a terrific, terrific book.
	I can't believe I hadn't heard of it before.
	But it is certainly worth the read.
	So if you're a baseball fan or a sports fan generally, this is about as good as it gets for baseball books.
	Daniel Okren's nine innings.
	Go check it out right now.
	Other things that I like.
	So, as I mentioned yesterday, Mitch McConnell had been hit with an NBC News report that his great-great-grandfathers, two of them, We're slave owners.
	Wow, going back 150 years and finding something in the family tree that you don't like.
	Amazing, amazing.
	Well, Mitch McConnell was asked about this yesterday, and this is about as good as it gets for cocaine Mitch.
	So cocaine Mitch really just snorting a line and then going full Scarface on the reporter in this particular exchange.
	Solid stuff from Mitch McConnell.
	You know, I find myself once again in the same position as President Obama.
	war and has that revelation caused you to change your position on reparations you know i find myself once again in the same position as president obama we both oppose reparations and we both are the descendants of slaveholders 100 true mentioned it yesterday on the show barack obama is descended on his mother's side from slave owners.
	By the way, so is Kamala Harris, apparently.
	Her dad has written about the fact that...
	He is descended from slave owners as well.
	So if this is the way this is going to work, that if somebody in your family treated something wrong, then we are going to hold you to account.
	Good for Mitch McConnell for doing this.
	That is solid stuff.
	You can always tell Mitch McConnell knows he's getting off a good line when that slight smile creases the turtle face and suddenly he is dropping, dropping hot fire on people.
	Pretty good stuff.
	Okay, time for some things that I hate.
	So there are a bunch of candidates who are just hanging around in this Democratic race who should not be hanging around in this Democratic race.
	One of those candidates is Beto O'Rourke.
	Now remember that time when Beto was a serious candidate?
	Wasn't that funny?
	Beto O'Rourke?
	I remember.
	It was really, really hilarious.
	Well, now Beto O'Rourke is polling.
	It's sad news for Beto, man.
	He is down all the way to 2.6% in the RealClearPolitics poll average, just beating out Cory Booker and Tulsi Gabbard.
	Ouch.
	This is a guy who had raised an enormous amount of money.
	When he jumped into the race, he was polling at nearly 10%.
	Back in January, when he actually jumped in, he was all the way up in some of the polls to 9, 9.5%.
	He was running basically third in the polls.
	He'd gotten up to third in the polls by mid-April.
	It was going Biden, Sanders, and then O'Rourke, and he has just fallen off a cliff all the way down to 2%, and now he is relegated to doing his worst Noam Chomsky impersonation.
	Taking a drag, brah, riding a skateboard, and then talking about how America's the worst, America's terrible and racist, even though you can be a totally unsuccessful congressperson who runs for Senate, marry into wealth, have an incredibly privileged life, go to Columbia University, spend like a decade bro-ing out with your bro-friends, and playing crap gigs around the country while dressed as a sheep.
	Then you can run for city council, congress, senate, lose, and then run for president.
	This country sucks, man.
	And if you're Beto, you know it sucks because you're talking to people who are minorities and you assume they also think it sucks.
	This country was founded on white supremacy.
	And every single institution and structure that we have in our country still reflects the legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression, even in our democracy.
	Yeah, I'm sure.
	So it was founded on white supremacy.
	This is a claim that you keep hearing from the left.
	And I've said before, I think this is a key divide in the American mind right now, that there are a lot of people, mostly on the right, but not entirely, who say that America was founded on good, true, eternal principles.
	We haven't always lived up to those principles.
	But the story of America is about us establishing grand and great principles in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, and then working to broaden out those principles to apply to the people to whom they always should have been applied to.
	But thanks to cultural standards of the time, they were not fully applied.
	In the line of thinking of this, by the way, is Frederick Douglass, whose speech was quoted out of context by Colin Kaepernick, who knows as much about history as I do about blitz packages.
	And Colin Kaepernick tweeted and quoted Frederick Douglass way out of context.
	Frederick Douglass has a very famous speech when he talked about what the 4th of July meant to the black person in America.
	And he talked about how it didn't apply to the black person in America, but that's because the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were liberty documents that had not been properly read and had not been extended out as they should have been.
	That is, in that line of thinking are an enormous number of civil rights leaders.
	I would say that Martin Luther King was in this line.
	There's a reason why Martin Luther King correctly would use American principles as the greatest defense to his position, and that was effective.
	That was effective.
	That's one line of thinking.
	Then there's another line of thinking, and that's the thinking that basically all the grand and glorious principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, all the talk about natural rights and natural law, all of those things, it was merely a guise, a guise for power politics.
	In this line of thinking, there are two particular strains of relevance.
	One is the economic strain.
	So there's a group of people led in the early 20th century by a sociologist and historian named Charles Beard that suggested basically that the founders were a bunch of rich white dudes and they were trying to enshrine their rich whiteness by creating these highfalutin ideals and then using the highfalutin ideals in order to Push their actual agenda, which was to enshrine their own wealth.
	There's the Charles Beard economic analysis of American history.
	It is not true.
	It is bad history.
	But nonetheless, it has become very popular to cite from people ranging from Woodrow Wilson in the early 20th century to Bernie Sanders in the now.
	And then there's the racial aspect, which says America was founded in white supremacy, that when Thomas Jefferson wrote, all men are created equal, he didn't mean black people, which is actually not really true.
	Thomas Jefferson did mean black people, he just didn't want to apply it to black people.
	It's why Thomas Jefferson is a really troubling character in American history, and really symbolizes a lot of the conflicts of American history.
	Jefferson knew what he was writing, and then he proceeded to ignore what he was writing.
	He proceeded to live with the cognitive dissonance.
	Early on in Jefferson's career he was pretty anti-slavery, and then as he became accustomed to having his own slaves, being a slave holder, You know, by most evidence, siring children by Sally Hemings and all of this.
	As he did that, he accustomed himself to living with the cognitive dissonance of participating in an act of evil that he knew was actually deeply wrong.
	But, to suggest that the Founders universally were pro-slavery is untrue.
	To suggest the Founders universally didn't think of black people as people is simply untrue.
	You can read Founders including John Adams talking about all of this.
	Nonetheless, nonetheless, there's this claim made that basically what really undergirds the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is white supremacy, not that whiteness and white solidarity and degrading of other races was common to an enormous number of people at the time, including in Europe, where slavery was still legal at the time of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
	Not only that, but that that was actually at the root of all of this, that the real root rationale for the founding of the country was the preservation of white supremacy.
	Now, the difference is that we all live in sort of the cultural swamp of our times, right?
	A hundred years from now, people will look back on us and look at us as primitives, because that's how everybody has done things for all of human history.
	I think the area in which they're most likely to do that is with regard to the eating of animals.
	I think that over time, and I love eating meat, but I will admit that I think in a hundred years, people are going to look back when we have created better meat substitutes, when we've created the ability to grow protein, animal protein, without actually killing animals.
	They'll look back in a hundred years and go, how could people slaughter animals like that?
	Right?
	In a hundred years, people will look back at us.
	They'll certainly do this about abortion.
	Within 30 years, people are going to look back at us and say, wait, you people were arguing that you should be able to kill a baby up until the point of birth?
	That's what you people were doing?
	I mean, those of us who are doing that now.
	But the question is whether that defines the society or whether that is just an aspect of the culture that is taken for granted as sort of the background noise of the culture.
	And does that provide the root of the society, or is that just part of the background noise?
	So, it is true that racism was part of the background noise of society in 1775.
	That was certainly a huge part of society, undeniably.
	Was that what differentiated America from other places?
	No.
	What differentiated America from other places is the acknowledgement of those high ideals.
	When Beto O'Rourke says America was founded in white supremacy, what he means is that white supremacy lay at the root Right?
	It was the actual driving force behind the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States and the creation of the country.
	That's a lie.
	It's not true.
	And recognizing the shadings of history, recognizing the truth of cultural mores being different in 1770 than they are in 2019, there is nothing more historically ignorant or frankly arrogant than suggesting that you are a better person than Thomas Jefferson was when you live in a completely different society than Thomas Jefferson did.
	I don't know what you would have done in 1776.
	You don't know what you would have done in 1776.
	You certainly wouldn't have the same values that you do now because you weren't brought up in the same values that you've been brought up with.
	So this sort of You're pandering, ridiculous.
	America is a deeply evil place because in the past people did bad things.
	Guess what?
	In a hundred years, people are going to look back and think that you were pretty garbage, too.
	That's the way this all works.
	This is not unique to Beto O'Rourke, of course.
	The radicalism of the Democratic Party is continuing and ugly.
	Elizabeth Warren, of course, has gained a lot more support than Beto O'Rourke, mainly propped up by media attention.
	So the media have now given Elizabeth Warren the sort of attention that they used to give to Beto.
	They used to suggest that Beto was the golden, fair-haired child.
	Now it's Elizabeth Warren who is the golden, fair-haired grandmother.
	And she apparently has all the ideas and all the solutions.
	She is deeply radical on a variety of issues, not least including the Middle East.
	She has one advisor named Max Berger, who is supremely radical on this issue.
	He has sympathized in the past with terrorists, with Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip.
	He has maligned the Israeli government, is committing pogroms.
	He's really, really bad.
	And he's her top foreign policy advisor.
	Elizabeth Warren was asked yesterday at some event about whether she would commit to ending Israel's so-called occupation.
	Now, for those who don't know about the quote-unquote occupation, basically, Israel, in 1967, was attacked by a variety of Arab nations, Jordan, Egypt, Syria.
	They all attacked Saudi Arabia.
	They all attacked.
	Right before they attacked, Israel launched a preemptive strike and blew up the Egyptian air force on the tarmac.
	In the Six Day War, Israel ends up winning a huge swath of land, including Judea and Samaria, which is the historic heart of biblical Israel.
	They include the unified Jerusalem, the Israelis, they take the Gaza Strip.
	Now, when you launch a war and then you lose the territory, typically you don't get to claim that it is occupied territory.
	That's silly towns.
	But in any case, the UN creates a resolution, UN Resolution 242, which suggests that Israel has to give up occupied territories.
	Right, not THE occupied territories, occupied territories.
	Now, the reason that it leaves out the word THE is because some of those territories are given up and some of those areas are maintained.
	Israel no longer occupies, if that's a word you want to use, the Gaza Strip.
	Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005.
	They, in fact, forcibly removed all Jews from Gush Katif in 2005.
	Since then, it has been completely run by the terrorist group Hamas.
	The Israelis have nothing to do with it except they prevent the importation of weaponry and they prevent terrorists from crossing the border.
	And in the Palestinian areas in the so-called West Bank, Judea and Samaria, the vast majority of the Palestinian population lives under direct Palestinian governance.
	Again, Israel polices the borders to make sure that weapons aren't being shipped in.
	But the so-called occupation?
	Israeli soldiers are not wandering around in Ramallah.
	That is all run by the Palestinian Authority.
	Nonetheless, here's Elizabeth Warren suggesting that Israel is an occupying force despite all of that history and despite the truth, which is that the Palestinian Authority is a terrorist entity.
	Hamas is a terrorist entity.
	They steal the money of their citizens.
	They treat their citizens like garbage.
	And in the last elections, which were like 2005 for Hamas, 2006 for Hamas, Hi, we're American Jews.
	We really love the way you're fighting corruption.
	We'd really love it if you also pushed the Israeli government to end the occupation.
	Excellent.
	So I'm new.
	Thank you.
	left so she doesn't have to know history.
	- Hi, we're American Jews.
	We really love the way you're fighting corruption.
	We'd really love it if you also pushed the Israeli government to end the occupation.
	- Yes, yes.
	- Excellent.
	- So I'm here.
	- Thank you.
	- So nice to see you.
	- Nice to see you.
	- Here, let me get the milk.
	- Okay, those women, by the way, work for a group called If Not Now, which is an extraordinarily radical anti-Israel group that basically considers Israel's very existence nearly illegitimate.
	If Not Now is a terrible, terrible group.
	They're constantly stumping in favor of boycott, divestment and sanctions from Israel, which is an anti-Semitic policy.
	They've stumped in favor of Hamas's use of civilian shields in the Gaza Strip.
	They're really bad.
	There's Elizabeth Warren pandering as hard as she possibly can.
	This is the new Democratic Party.
	This is the new Democratic Party.
	Shout out to one member of the Democratic Party, by the way, who actually said a true thing.
	Tulsi Gabbard, who is getting a little bit of attention but probably not enough based on her pretty decent debate performance, Tulsi Gabbard said something true.
	I know, it's always a shock to me.
	She said that Kamala Harris was pandering on busing, that it was all a ploy, that the federal busing ploy was a bunch of nonsense.
	This is true.
	… levying this accusation that Joe Biden is racist, when he's clearly not, as a way to try to smear him.
	And as you point to the article that I linked to in my tweet, really, what she's saying is her position is the same one that she was criticizing Joe Biden for.
	So, this is just a political ploy, and I think a very underhanded one, just to try to get her self-attention, to move herself up in the polls.
	I think that we need to be above that, all of us.
	Okay, 100% true.
	Tulsi Gabbard for the win right there.
	That is 100% correct.
	By the way, it is Elizabeth Warren's, it is Kamala Harris' inability to go more than five minutes without switching a position or lying or being overtly political that is leading to her not actually benefiting as much as she probably should be from her debate performance.
	Elizabeth Warren instead continues to run by most polls in second place.
	This is a four person race at best, probably a three person race, probably Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden.
	All righty.
	Well, we'll be back here a little bit later today for two additional hours of content.
	So be there or be square over at DailyWire.com.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
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	Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
	Abused children, they only become news when the left can use them for political purposes.
	If they can attack Trump's attempts to secure the border, or give the Catholic Church a bad name, or take out a Republican candidate who did something wrong.
	But when it comes to the persistent, organized sexual abuse of underage girls and boys, the story always dies.
	Let's keep an eye on this Epstein case and see where it goes on The Andrew Klavan Show.

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