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Aug. 12, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:16
Is There An Epstein Conspiracy? | Ep. 837
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Time Text
Jeffrey Epstein commits suicide within days of being taken off suicide watch.
Conspiracy theorists, including the president, jump on board.
And Democrats launch some conspiracies of their own.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
We apologize for the slight delay in bringing you today's show.
I had to forcibly take over Andrew Klavan's studio and expel him physically from that studio.
The good news is I own the studio, so there's nothing he can do about that.
We'll get to the news in just one second.
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Okay, so obviously, The big news on this Monday morning is the death of Jeffrey Epstein.
Jeffrey Epstein, of course, the convicted pedophile who was recently rearrested on federal charges of sex trafficking.
There's a lot of worry in the nation's highest corridors of power about what exactly Jeffrey Epstein might say.
In fact, just on Friday, there was a federal court that unsealed documents from a lawsuit by one of Jeffrey Epstein's accuser against his mysterious girlfriend and alleged procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell.
So the accuser, her name is Virginia Giuffre, accused Maxwell of procuring young girls for sexual abuse by Epstein and his powerful friends, according to the Daily Beast.
Some of the major revelations include, in 2016, Giuffre said that Maxwell specifically instructed her to serve former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who at one point was a front-running Democratic presidential candidate, Britain's Prince Andrew, wealthy financier Glenn Jubin, Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, modeling scout Jean-Luc Brunel, and scientist Marvin Minsky.
Giuffre also said that Maxwell and Epstein directed her to have sex with another prince, a foreign president, a well-known prime minister, and the owner of a large hotel chain.
None of the men named have been charged with a crime, and all have denied inappropriate behavior.
Apparently, there are also accusations, according to another one of the women who dealt with Epstein, that Epstein was basically sexually voracious and thus preyed on girls at an insane rate.
Juan Alessi, Epstein's former house manager, testified he saw probably over 100 girls serve Epstein at his Palm Beach home over 10 years.
After each encounter, Alessi said he would clean up the home's upstairs massage room.
On multiple occasions, he said he found sex toys and put them in Maxwell's closet because he knew that's where they kept such items, along with a shiny black costume.
This is all really disgusting, obviously.
And these revelations came as of Friday.
So there's a lot of talk about whose name was going to drop next.
What were the next steps in the Epstein trial?
Well, within 24 hours of all of that dropping, Jeffrey Epstein allegedly committed suicide and apparently committed suicide.
He was just 11 days removed from being on suicide watch.
According to CBS News, Epstein, who is facing federal sex trafficking charges, died Saturday from an apparent suicide, federal officials said.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons said in a statement the FBI was investigating his death.
Epstein, who is 66, was found unresponsive in his cell at a holding facility in New York City at around 6.30 a.m., according to the statement.
Staff at the Metropolitan Correctional Center tried to revive him.
He was eventually taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead.
The New York City Medical Examiner's Office was also investigating Epstein's cause of death, a spokesperson told CBS News, and will conduct an autopsy and toxicology test to determine the cause.
There's a statement put out by the Medical Examiner's Office saying they were still going to determine cause of death.
That doesn't mean they suspect homicide.
It means they still have to finally determine cause of death, although they think they know what happened here.
Federal prosecutors in New York alleged Epstein abused dozens of underage girls as young as 14.
Epstein was found injured on the floor of his cell in late July.
At the time, law enforcement sources told CBS News that Epstein was found semi-conscious with slight bruising around his neck.
So apparently he tried to hang himself at that juncture and he was put on suicide watch.
So there's all sorts of weird stuff surrounding this particular suicide, and it's leading a lot of people toward conspiracy theories.
The chief medical examiner, Dr. Barbara Sampson, released a statement on Sunday saying that her office had conducted an autopsy on Epstein, but that the medical examiner's determination is pending further information at this time.
She said this is routine.
She said, A lot of Epstein's victims are upset because they felt like this was their chance at justice.
Attorney General William Barr says the investigation will continue.
There are associates and co-conspirators with Epstein who will, in fact, be on the hook for whatever crimes they committed.
So this thing does not end with Epstein being dead.
This sex trafficking case was very important to the Department of Justice and to me personally.
But let me assure you that this case will continue on against anyone who was complicit with Epstein.
Any co-conspirators should not rest easy.
The victims deserve justice and they will get it.
So, the conspiracy chatter picked up almost immediately.
You had dueling hashtags on Twitter that were trending.
One was Trump body count and the other was Clinton body count.
There was accusations by the right that Clinton body count wasn't trending because Twitter is biased to the left.
Certainly Twitter is biased to the left.
I don't know why that wasn't trending.
The fact is, this was neither Trump nor Clinton by all available evidence.
But you saw that implication put forward by a variety of sources.
MSNBC's Joy Reid actually suggested that Attorney General William Barr might be covering up Epstein's death at Trump's behest because Trump, of course, is friends with Jeffrey Epstein.
The investigation of Epstein's death now falls into the hands of William Barr, Donald Trump's consigliere and Attorney General, who refused to recuse himself on the Epstein case despite his association with a law firm once involved with Epstein, whose father once hired Jeffrey Epstein as a teacher with neither experience nor degree, and whose prime directive is to protect Donald Trump.
No matter what.
OK, so there she is putting out her own conspiracy theory.
Then President Trump, in his own inimitable fashion, decided, you know what would be a great idea?
I'm going to retweet whatever I feel like.
And I feel like retweeting a wild conspiracy theory.
So he retweeted a tweet from a guy named Terrence Williams on Twitter.
And the tweet says, died of suicide on 24-7 suicide watch.
Yeah, right.
How does that happen?
Hashtag Jeffrey Epstein had information on Bill Clinton, and now he's dead.
I see Trump body count trending, but we know who did this.
Retweet if you're not surprised.
Hashtag Epstein suicide.
Hashtag Clinton body count.
Hashtag Clinton crime family.
And then he released a little video discussing why he thought that the Clintons had murdered Jeffrey Epstein.
Now, this has been a long-standing meme on the right, is that the Clintons routinely murder their political opponents.
Not a lot of evidence to suggest that that is true, despite widespread speculation about characters including Vince Foster, for example.
President Trump tweeted that out and that was awkward.
Here's a little bit of that Terrence Williams video in which he talks about all of this.
Shaking my head.
I'm not surprised.
I told y'all last month this was going to happen, but didn't nobody want to listen to me.
But then guess what?
Next month he dead, and you know what?
All the liberals were calling me a conspiracy theorist, saying, Terrence, you coming up with crazy conspiracies, and you need to be banned from Twitter.
And then guess what?
The man really ended up dead, and you know what?
He had information on the Clintons, and the man ended Okay, that's enough of that.
So Trump actually retweeted that.
Trump actually retweeted that.
Now, number one, this wasn't the Clintons, okay?
As we will see, this is wild incompetence by jail officers, which, frankly, is not all that uncommon.
I mean, it is an unfortunate truth of life that human beings are wildly incompetent generally, and it's also another unfortunate truth that treatment in American prisons It depends on the prison, but many prisons are horribly run.
The guards don't do their jobs to the apex of their abilities.
They feel like they're dealing with criminals, and therefore they sort of slack off a bit.
That's not an indictment of all prison officers by any measure.
A lot of prison officers, probably the vast majority of prison officers, do their job with honor and diligence, but there are going to be some who do not, obviously.
And this one falls under Hanlon's razor.
Never attribute to malevolence that which you can attribute to human stupidity.
And while this all looks very suspicious, because obviously Epstein was the most watched federal prisoner in America, Still, I am much more inclined to chalk this up to prison guards didn't do their job, then Bill and Hillary Clinton sneaked somebody into Jeffrey Epstein's cell to kill him in his cell.
I mean, the lady couldn't even find Wisconsin on a map.
I don't think that this has to do with Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton deciding that it's time for Jeffrey Epstein to be offed.
Why wouldn't they off him before he was arrested?
I mean, the whole thing doesn't make any sense.
And as it turns out, there's lots of evidence of incompetence here.
Apparently, according to the Associated Press, guards on Jeffrey Epstein's unit were working extreme overtime shifts to make up for staffing shortages the morning of his apparent suicide, a person familiar with the jail's operations told the Associated Press.
The person said that the Metropolitan Correctional Center's special housing unit was staffed with one guard working a fifth straight day of overtime and another who was working mandatory overtime.
The person wasn't authorized to discuss jail operations publicly, spoke Sunday on the condition of anonymity.
Epstein's abrupt death cut short a criminal prosecution that could have pulled back the curtain on the inner workings of a high-flying financier with connections to celebrities and presidents.
The jail staff failed to follow protocols leading up to Epstein's death, according to a report from the New York Times deepening the fallout from what led to his apparent suicide.
The New York Times reports That Epstein was supposed to have been checked by two guards in the protective housing unit every 30 minutes.
He was alone in a cell just 11 days after he'd been taken off suicide watch.
That was not supposed to happen.
He was supposed to have somebody else in the cell with him.
The procedure of him being checked every 30 minutes was not followed that night.
Because Epstein may have tried to commit suicide three weeks earlier, obviously, that other inmate was supposed to be in there, but the jail recently transferred his cellmate and allowed Epstein to be housed alone, a decision that also violated the jail's procedures.
Attorney General William Barr was fighting mad about that today as well.
He suggested that there could be prosecution on the table for negligence for some of the people who are associated with all of this.
In addition, according to the UK Daily Mail, every 15 minutes, guards are required to make another check on prisoners who are on suicide watch.
The decision to remove Epstein from suicide watch has both baffled former wardens and veterans of the federal prison system alike.
As Matt Walsh of Daily Wire pointed out, suicide watch is not supposed to be taken quite so literally.
You're not actually supposed to watch while the person commits suicide.
So, well done everybody involved.
Now, It's Trump's retweet that's getting all the attention today.
It is President Trump tweeting out a conspiracy theory that's getting all the attention.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
Also, I want to discuss why it is that generally people tend to buy conspiracy theories even though conspiracy theories rarely end up being true.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, so number one.
Why do so many people buy into conspiracy theories like this?
There are really a couple of reasons.
One is that social media tends to amplify conspiracy theories these days.
It's very easy to hit retweet.
It's very easy for jokes to go viral and then people to take them seriously.
Social media tends to take pockets of fringe opinion.
And if there are many pockets out there of fringe opinion, it then sort of agglomerates them into one giant fringe opinion that starts to look more and more mainstream and less and less fringe.
This is what has happened in pretty much every area of American life with fringy opinion, ranging from white supremacism to conspiracy theorizing.
It used to be that you were the weirdo in your town, you were on your own.
Now you're the weirdo in your town, you can hang out with every weirdo online, and then you can form these kind of giant blocks of people who believe in crazy stuff.
Part of the rise of conspiracy theories also has to do with generalized distrust of the media.
As we'll get to, the media only seems skeptical of certain types of conspiracy theories.
Other types of conspiracy theories the media are totally on board with.
Most of this has to do with the human inability to accept widespread incompetence.
So as I say, it is very difficult to accept incompetence.
It's much easier to simply understand that or believe that people are nefarious, that people are in control.
One of the harder revelations in life as we become adults is recognizing that most people are just as incompetent as they were when they were seven years old and picking their boogers and eating them.
They're just adults now.
So, now they're incompetent and they get paid, and you hope that their incompetence isn't so off the charts that it actually harms somebody?
People get harmed more often than you think.
But going back to the media for a moment, the media were all over Trump for retweeting the conspiracy theory.
And that's fair.
I mean, it's wild that the President of the United States is retweeting conspiracy theories about his lead political opponents, the Clintons, in 2016, murdering somebody in federal custody.
I mean, I would say that I'm surprised, except that he accused Ted Cruz's father of murdering JFK.
So I think we've been here, right?
And this is the part where I remind everybody that it's all baked into the cake with President Trump.
This is the part where I remind everybody that there's nothing new here.
Okay, so for everyone who's expecting his approval rating to plummet, no, we had no expectations.
There were no expectations that Trump would not retweet something like this.
Does that make it right?
No.
It's still wrong.
It's still unpresidential.
It's still ridiculous.
And the president deserves all the scrutiny that he's getting.
Trump deserves every bit of scrutiny he's getting.
It's really gross.
It's disgusting.
It's morally reprehensible for the president to tweet without any evidence.
I mean, he is the president of the United States.
Tweet without evidence that somebody on the other side is responsible for a murder or may be responsible for a murder.
If Barack Obama had done it, then we would all be up in arms on the right.
Now, the reason that we're not quite as up in arms about Trump as we are about Obama isn't just because Trump is a Republican.
It's also because, as I've said before, Trump is not as serious a human being as Barack Obama is.
And anybody who says they take Trump as seriously as they take Obama is lying to you.
They're just people in your life.
You don't take all that seriously because they mailed off on a consistent basis.
Donald Trump is one of those people.
Barack Obama was much more planned.
So if Obama had dropped a line like this, you would have assumed it was part of a broader scheme.
If Trump does something like this, you just assume that his id took over for a moment, then he hit the retweet button and we're done.
Everybody has sort of baked that in.
With regard to Trump, nonetheless, Trump earning the disdain of the media for this is not unfitting.
Here is George Stephanopoulos over at ABC News suggesting that it is stunning for Trump to insinuate that Clinton was complicit in the Epstein suicide.
You mentioned conspiracy that the U.S.
Attorney is investigating.
Also a lot of conspiracy theories online.
One propagated by President Trump himself.
He retweeted a tweet that seemed to suggest that Bill Clinton was somehow complicit in the death of Jeffrey Epstein.
It shouldn't go without remarking.
Kind of stunning that a President of the United States is accusing his predecessor, one of his predecessors, of complicity in murder.
And the fact is, Tom Yamashita, you spent a lot of time looking at the Jeffrey Epstein case.
He had relationships both with Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.
OK, so again, it's not wrong for the media to criticize President Trump for all of this.
Cory Booker then puts on his angry eyes and he says, this is dangerous.
It's dangerous.
Very angry.
I'm so angry.
Mr. Potato Head busting through that wall like the Kool-Aid man.
Here we go.
This is just more recklessness.
What he's doing is dangerous.
He's giving life to not just conspiracy theories, but really whipping people up into anger and worse against different people in this country.
And so this is a tired way that the president does.
He's been using the Clintons as a means for a lot of his false accusations.
But remember, this is a nation now where we've seen just horrific acts, whether it's someone walking into a pizza shop based upon these kind of conspiracy theories to take violent action.
Conspiracy theories are dangerous.
They are dangerous because, again, they suggest that there is somebody who is nefarious, behind the scenes, manipulating everything, and if you took that person out, then you would end the conspiracy.
It's all three days of the Condor, and there's somebody who's hiding behind that curtain at the end of the story, and if you just take out that person, then the entire conspiracy collapses like a house of cards.
That's the other thing about conspiracies, is that there seems to be an easy solution, which is you take out the person who's at the head of the conspiracy.
But one of the reasons that people are suspicious of the media, one of the reasons that conspiracy theories are running roughshod, particularly on the right these days, and I think it is more on the right than it is on the left, is because conspiracy theories on the left are actually mainstream.
So on the right, there are conspiracy theories, and they tend to be fringy, moving over into the mainstream as people react to the left.
On the left, stuff that is considered basically untouchable are conspiracy theories.
I mean, the left will say open things that are conspiratorial, They will put out there absolute conspiracy nonsense that is unsupported by evidence, and the left will simply accept it.
It's not counted as a conspiracy theory, in other words.
Now, we can all point to the Epstein suicide, and when somebody says, it was Trump or it was Clinton, we can say, that's silly, that's a conspiracy theory.
But the left will put out there stories that are obviously untrue and that are, in fact, conspiracy theories, and the press will treat them as though they are perfectly legit.
Let me give you an example.
So, over the weekend, MSNBC releases a documentary.
about Stacey Abrams.
Stacey Abrams, the Democrat in Georgia, she's a Georgia state legislator who ran for governor and lost by some 50,000 votes.
She has been going around for literally months, ever since she lost to Brian Kemp, the actual governor of Georgia.
She's been going around for months and suggesting that nefarious scheme was perpetrated by Brian Kemp and the Republicans, and that she actually is the governor.
Now, there is no evidence that she wins that election.
None.
She lost by 50,000 votes.
This is not a close election.
There's a lot more evidence that in past cases like the Washington state gubernatorial election circa like 2006 that there was some voter interference or that the actual senator from Minnesota in the Al Franken Norm Coleman election was Norm Coleman.
Those were very close elections where manipulation of a few votes could have changed the outcome of the election.
But when you lose by 50,000 votes, you lost the election.
Stacey Abrams lost the election.
It has become an article of faith on the left that Stacey Abrams was legitimately elected governor of Georgia and that Brian Kemp stole that election.
That is a conspiracy theory.
It is not supported by evidence.
And yet it will be perpetuated by entire swaths of the media and the Democratic establishment.
So, for example, Katie Tour on MSNBC asked Tasty Abrams, quote, do you think the vote was stolen from you?
The election was stolen from you.
And Abrams replied, I think the election was stolen from the people of Georgia.
I don't know that empirically I would have won.
But if you add together the thousands of people who faced extraordinarily long lines, who faced hurdles that should not happen in democracy, the votes that we know were not counted.
The secretary of state, who is also my opponent in the race, purged more than one point four million voters over basically an eight year period.
Now, she's still not naming the voters who wanted to vote who weren't able to vote.
Being in a long line does not prohibit you from voting.
By the way, that's just called a long line.
Turr noted that Kemp's so-called purges were legal and were enforcement of a law passed by Georgia Democrats who dominated state politics for more than a century after the Civil War.
Registered voters who don't vote, update their registration information, file a name or address change, sign a petition or respond to attempts to confirm their address for three years, are moved to inactive status, but can still participate in elections, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Washington Free Beacon.
If they are inactive or don't respond to election officials for another two election cycles, they're removed from the rolls.
Oftentimes, the voters have moved out of the state or died.
Abrams said they knew people had been purged from the rolls who didn't meet the criteria but didn't elaborate how she knew or who these people were.
She claims that 53,000 voters were put on hold by Kemp to prevent them from voting during the race.
And that's deceptive.
It is simply not true.
Nonetheless, Abrams continues to maintain this and she's supported in this by figures ranging from other Democratic presidential candidates to columnists like Jamel Bowie, people who continue to suggest that Stacey Abrams is legitimately the governor of Georgia.
That's a conspiracy theory.
And yet it's not treated as a conspiracy theory.
It's just treated as a theory.
It's treated as a normal theory.
Everyday politics.
I'm old enough to remember when people were suggesting that if Trump lost the 2016 election, he would suggest that he had that he had wrongly lost and that he actually won.
And then we spent two years with the Democrats Perpetuating another conspiracy theory, which is that the Russians were behind Trump's election, that if it weren't for Russian interference in the election, Trump would have won, and that Trump and the Russians were actively colluding with one another in order to move the election out of Hillary Clinton's column.
That turned out not to be true either.
It took two years and, what, $12 million to investigate that particular conspiracy theory?
But it's not a conspiracy theory, according to the left.
According to the left, Trump still did collude.
Trump is still a traitor, and we should impeach him for this.
This is the point I'm making.
Generally speaking, conspiracy theories from the left are treated as extraordinarily mainstream.
Conspiracy theories on the right are fringe.
And then they gain some momentum, and it doesn't help when Donald Trump lends his weight to them, whether you're talking about birtherism or whether you're talking about what just happened with Jeffrey Epstein.
But when it's on the left, it's not treated as a conspiracy theory.
It's treated as something completely normal.
I'll give you another example that happened over the weekend, completely ignored by the media in every conceivable way.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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OK, so speaking of other conspiracy theories that are going to be completely ignored, completely and wildly ignored by the media over the weekend was the five year anniversary of the Ferguson incident involving Ferguson, Missouri, involving Michael Brown.
Michael Brown was an 18 year old, very large dude, black guy.
Who, according to the media reports at the time, supposedly was murdered in cold blood by a white police officer named Darren Wilson.
And that was done out of racial hatred because the police force in Ferguson was deeply racist and Michael Brown was in fact surrendering at the time.
And this is how you end up with famous pictures on the news of people like Sally Cohn and other commentators raising their hands and saying, hands up, don't shoot.
The idea was, or I can't breathe, they used the Eric Garner slogan, but hands up, don't shoot, was what this became.
You had NFL players in St.
Louis running out onto the field, raising their hands, hands up, don't shoot, because black people were surrendering to police, and then the police saying, oh, well, there's a black guy, would you shoot the guy down?
And Michael Brown was used as the case in point of all of this.
Well, as it turns out, that's not what happened at all.
Michael Brown, Had earlier in the day gone to a store, a convenience store, and he had stolen some Swisher Sweets, which are very often used in the cigars.
They are often used in the tobaccos removed, marijuana is put in.
That's beside the point because drug use really isn't the issue here.
And Michael Brown assaulted the store owner and then walked out.
Darren Wilson, the cop, was driving around town, and he got some news that criminal activity had been taking place.
He saw Michael Brown walking erratically with his friend Dorian Johnson down the street, and he told them to pull over.
They refused to pull over.
He kind of pulled in front of them, so they pulled over, at which point, According to witness testimony and physical evidence, Michael Brown walked up to the side of the car, punched Darren Wilson in the face, tried to grab Darren Wilson's gun.
The gun went off in the car.
Darren Wilson got out of the car.
He told Michael Brown to stop.
Brown was running away.
Brown then turned around and charged at the officer.
This is according to witness testimony.
And those witnesses are black.
This is not a race thing.
Testimony and physical evidence.
Dorian Johnson, his friend, lied to the press.
He said that he had turned around, he had said, hands up, don't shoot, and that he was actually shot in the back by the police officer.
The police officer had shot him in the back.
As it turns out, the wound pattern on Michael Brown, on his body, showed that he was shot not only from the front, but approaching.
That Wilson was shooting at him as Brown was running at him.
And Brown was a very, very large man.
He was 18 years old and a very, very large dude.
So that's not just what was found by the grand jury in the Ferguson, Missouri case, which touched off rioting in Ferguson, egged on by the President of the United States, who suggested that perhaps the grand jury had come to the wrong conclusion and that people weren't making up stories like this when this was, in fact, a made-up story by Dorian Johnson.
The DOJ did a full-scale investigation.
Barack Obama's own Department of Justice did a full-scale investigation of the Michael Brown situation and came to the conclusion that, in fact, it was not a racial shooting.
In fact, it was a justifiable homicide.
Meaning that Wilson shot in self-defense.
He did what he was supposed to do.
That is what the Obama DOJ found.
There's a full report on all of this.
You had the grand jury report, and then you had the Barack Obama DOJ report.
None of these reports found that Michael Brown was murdered.
None of them.
It is an ongoing conspiracy theory to suggest that Michael Brown was murdered for racial reasons in cold blood.
All the evidence is against this, including witness evidence from the town.
And if you actually read the witness testimony, it's kind of heartbreaking in that particular case.
I mean, we went through this at the time in detail.
The witness testimony in the case was devastating because a lot of the witnesses said that they'd been threatened by members of their community for even coming forward and testifying.
And that when the police tried to investigate, people would hide from the police because they didn't want to blow back from members of their own community.
Okay, so with all of that as backdrop, here's what happened over the weekend.
Okay, so over the weekend is the five-year anniversary of Ferguson.
And as I say, Dorian Johnson, the original witness, was lying by all available evidence.
And it's clear from the media coverage, by the way, that he is lying still.
So the Washington Post helped perpetuate this lie.
They had a story called Dorian Johnson, witness to the Ferguson shooting, sticks by his story.
It's by Wesley Lowry, who was one of the reporters on scene in Ferguson, did a lot of reporting from there at the time.
Michael Brown was still lying dead in the street when his family gathered in the kitchen of a nearby apartment to hear from Dorian Johnson, the friend who saw what happened.
Through thick tears, Johnson recounted how he and Brown, 18, had encountered Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson and how Wilson had pumped half a dozen bullets into Brown's body.
When Johnson finished, Brown's family had one request.
Tell the media.
And so minutes later, a trembling Johnson was staring into a local TV news camera, uttering the words that would change both the nation and his life.
He put his hands in the air, Johnson said of Brown in his final moments.
He started to get down, but the officer still approached with his weapon drawn and fired several more shots and my friend died.
The Killing of Michael Brown On August 9th, 2014, began one of the most incendiary events in American history, spawning the Black Lives Matter movement's most powerful rallying cry, Hands Up, Don't Shoot.
Ultimately, two separate law enforcement investigations concluded that Brown did not have his hands in the air when Wilson opened fire.
A controversy over Johnson's account raged for months.
So now Johnson is speaking out again.
Here's what Johnson says.
And it's obvious from his statement that he was lying in his first statement.
Here's what he said, quote, So in two sentences, he denies his original account.
His hands were definitely up, whether his hands were up, halfway down, fully down or up.
He was killed and he was unarmed.
He wasn't posing a threat.
So in two sentences, he denies his original account.
His hands were definitely up.
Whether his hands were up, halfway down, fully down or up, he was killed and he was unarmed.
He wasn't posing a threat, except for witness testimony, except for forensic evidence.
OK, so Dorian Johnson still telling this tale.
So as we'll see, Democratic candidates, presidential candidates perpetuated a conspiracy theory over the weekend, and the media didn't care.
Not only didn't the media not care, they saw it as a sign of moral truth and decency that these Democratic candidates decided to purvey this conspiracy theory.
We'll get to that.
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Okay, in just a second, we're going to get to Democratic presidential candidates perpetuating conspiracy theories.
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Okay.
So as I say, these democratic presidential candidates are perpetuating their own conspiracy theory Not a single question I saw in the media asked about this.
Not one.
Not one.
So, very properly, questions asked about Trump, talking about Jeffrey Epstein's death and all of this, but it is somewhat newsworthy that Democratic presidential candidates are just spouting absolute debunked lies.
Lies debunked by Barack Obama's DOJ, led by Eric Holder, about Michael Brown.
So Elizabeth Warren, who's pandering for black votes, she tweets out five years ago, Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
Michael was unarmed, yet he was shot six times.
I stand with activists and organizers who continue the fight for justice for Michael.
We must confront systemic racism and police violence head on.
Virtually every word of this is a brutal lie.
There's no evidence that he was murdered.
Murder has a very specific meaning.
He was unarmed.
He was charging a police officer at the time.
He had already tried to grab the police officer's gun by forensic evidence.
The gun went off in the car.
Witnesses say that Brown was inside the car.
He had put his head inside the car and his hand inside the car.
Elizabeth Warren tweeting out absolute crap.
This is conspiracy theory nonsense.
And I guess the conspiracy theory would have to include that Obama DOJ they found differently.
Kamala Harris did the same thing when she's not locking people up.
She is apparently trying to justify somebody charging a police officer.
She tweeted out Michael Brown's murder.
Again, that's a very specific word.
Murder.
Forever changed Ferguson and America.
His tragic death sparked a desperately needed conversation and a nationwide movement.
We must fight for stronger accountability and racial equity in our justice system.
So that's two front-running Democratic candidates who are engaged in an open conspiracy theory suggesting that Michael Brown was not killed justifiably as per two law enforcement investigations and a grand jury investigation.
No, he was shot.
He was murdered.
He was murdered.
Beta O'Rourke says, Again, you want to use examples of black folks getting shot unjustifiably?
I mean, there's a case in South Carolina of that happening.
Too many similar stories to count.
In each, we're reminded of an idea as urgent and as ignored today as it was when Michael was killed.
Black lives matter.
Again, you want to use examples of black folks getting shot unjustifiably?
I mean, there's a case in South Carolina of that happening.
Philando Castile was shot wrongly in his car by a, I believe, an Asian police officer.
Michael Brown is a horrible example.
And when you engage in the Michael Brown mythology, you're in fact engaging in a conspiracy theory.
And this does have real-world effects.
The real-world effects include continued failures in exactly the areas that need more police officers, not fewer police officers.
You know, the fact that there are so many people on the left who don't actually seem to care.
about what people in crime-ridden areas need.
And yes, many of those areas are minority areas where there's high tension with police.
You know what you need?
Lower crime rates in those areas.
Okay, this is, it is wildly and insanely ridiculous that the Democrats continue to push the notion that police departments are actually the enemy when it comes to the inner city communities.
That actually do require people to police those communities.
You need lower crime rates.
If you actually want to have a safer America, if you want these areas to be safer, you need to build trust with the police.
You need to stop accusing every police officer of being a murderer, even when they are not a murderer.
You need to start recognizing that in order to build credibility between police officers and communities, you need to stop implying that every police officer is a murderer when he's not a murderer, that there's a conspiracy of silence at the top levels of law enforcement, that in places like Baltimore, where the majority of the police force is minority, where the police chief is black, That that police department is out to get black folks?
In Ferguson, you've seen a radical turnover of the Ferguson Police Department.
Ferguson's police department has become much, much more minority.
The reason it wasn't as minority before is because they were having trouble finding applicants, frankly.
But right now, according to the New York Times, more than half of Ferguson City Council members and police officers are now black.
But guess what?
That hasn't changed the conditions on the ground in Ferguson, nor has it changed the attitude of many citizens toward police.
Because when you keep perpetuating the myth that police officers are generally out to get black people, it turns out that has real world effects.
There's this article in the New York Times.
It is called, he's a veteran of upheaval molded by Ferguson's traumas.
He's seven.
And it's a profile of a kid named David Morrison, who's seven years old.
It says, David Morrison carries the scars of Ferguson's upheaval.
A veteran protester, he has fled gunshots and tear gas, marched, waved signs, played dead on the asphalt in years of activism, then unspooled after a white police officer killed an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown.
I'm so angry, he shouts.
He is seven years old.
So are you telling me that he's had bad run-ins with police officers?
He's seven.
Or is it that his mom has taken him to a lot of protests, backed by, presumably, these sorts of presidential candidates?
Well, as the article makes clear, it is the latter.
As the article makes clear, his mother was taking him to protest from the time that he was like two.
David's mother got involved in a citizen journalism project after the shooting of Michael Brown and took David along to protest when he was a preschooler.
But one night after she had scooped David into her arms and raced to her car, when gunfire erupted, she began to notice the toll.
He jolts awake from nightmares on the living room couch where he often sleeps, then cracks open her bedroom door to reassure himself she is still there.
David and his mother were driving on a summer afternoon when the conversation turned, as it often does in Ferguson, to race and injustice.
David piped up from the backseat, I can fight the police.
No, you can't.
Yes, I will.
David, his mother said, you're going to end up dead if you do that.
Quit using your imagination.
It's time to use reality.
Seven-year-olds don't generally say they can fight the police unless they are told by their relatives that they should fight the police and that the police are the bad guys.
Does it help when you have national political figures lying and saying that a police officer who did not murder a black man murdered a black man?
Is that helpful?
A detailed federal review cleared Officer Wilson of any civil rights violations and largely supported the officer's version of the story.
Investigators concluded Officer Wilson had confronted Mr. Brown in connection with a theft at a nearby convenience store.
Then the report found Brown attacked Wilson while the officer was seated in his SUV and struggled for control of his gun.
After a brief chase on Canfield Drive, the report said, Brown was moving toward Officer Wilson on the street when he was fatally shot.
After the shooting, Ferguson officials entered into a contentious agreement with the Justice Department, promising to overhaul its court process, make new guidelines for stops and searches, give police officers more training, require them to wear body cameras.
Progress has been agonizingly slow.
And as it turns out, crime rates jumped in the aftermath of Ferguson.
Not the opposite.
Who did that hurt?
Law-abiding citizens in places like Ferguson.
There's an article by Justin Hansford, who is a law professor, in the New York Times over the weekend.
He's at Howard University School of Law and Executive Director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center.
And this columnist says five years after Ferguson, we're losing the fight against police violence.
Well, let's make something clear.
After Ferguson, crime rates spiked due to something that Heather McDonald correctly called the Ferguson effect.
Police officers, of whom I know many, not wanting to go into situations in which they could be dragged up on chargers for simply doing their job the way that Darren Wilson was.
It turns out this law professor, what exactly does he think is the solution to all of this?
He thinks the solution isn't more police and less crime.
He thinks that the solution is to end policing and prisons altogether.
Quote, in the five years since the uprising, Ferguson activists have shifted from a demand to stop killing us to calls for broader civil rights and human rights standards and appeals for the ultimate structural change, an abolitionist ethic that seeks to end policing and prisons altogether.
End policing and prisons altogether.
This conclusion, admits the law professor, dubious and far-fetched to many, is a response to the thoroughly credible and highly researched position that the use of the criminal justice system as a tool of racial control reflects its original design.
Yes, I'm sure that this is going to be better for all the people who are law-abiding in their inner city, in their inner city communities.
I'm sure the best thing will be to continue perpetuating the myth that Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown in cold blood, just like officers across the country would do, and that has no impact on people's lives in these places.
Conspiracy theories do have impact, but folks on the left are willing to go along with those conspiracy theories so long as they support their political agenda.
And as it turns out, I mean, in a wild piece, the New York Times is promoting yet another conspiracy theory today.
That conspiracy theory is that the shooting in El Paso, Texas, the white supremacist racist shooting in El Paso, Texas, is due to, I kid you not, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and virtually everybody else on the right who has ever been critical of law enforcement when it comes to illegal immigration.
There's an article in the New York Times called The New Nativists, how the El Paso killer echoed the incendiary words of conservative media stars.
And it basically looks like that actor from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia standing next to the conspiracy board.
Right?
I mean, it's just them looking.
I mean, they literally took the manifesto of the killer in El Paso, of the shooter, the white supremacist piece of trash in El Paso, and then they scanned it for the word invasion.
And then they went and found other people who use the word invasion.
And that apparently is enough to blame those people for the crime.
To link those people... It's so weird how they didn't do that with the manifesto of the guy who attacked the ICE facility like three weeks ago, calling it a concentration camp.
So they've all now become Charlie Day in the conspiracy photo.
There's a striking degree of overlap between the words of right-wing media personalities and the language used by the Texas man who confessed to killing 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso this month.
In a 2300-word screed posted on the website 8chan, the killer wrote that he was simply defending my country from a cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion, according to the New York Times.
It remains unclear what or who ultimately shaped the views of the white 21-year-old gunman, or whether he was aware of the media commentary.
Well, wouldn't that be the thing you should investigate, you morons?
If you're going to perpetuate a conspiracy theory about how he watched lots of Tucker Carlson, then went out and shot up an El Paso Walmart, maybe you ought to check out whether he watched Tucker Carlson all the time.
And even by that logic, maybe you should talk with the shooter in the congressional baseball game, find out how often he was stumping for Bernie Sanders and listening to what Bernie had to say.
But the New York Times openly admits that they don't have any direct connect between the white supremacist terrorist who shot up an El Paso Walmart and Tucker Carlson, but they're still going to push this.
It remains unclear what or who ultimately shaped the views of the white 21-year-old gunman, but his post contains numerous references to invasion and cultural replacement, ideas that, until recently, were relegated to the fringes of the nationalist right.
Again, I don't like the language of invasion, and I don't believe I've used it.
If I had, I'm sorry I did, because I don't think that it is correct, but I'm fairly certain I never did, because I never considered it a quote-unquote invasion when illegal immigrants cross our southern border.
But, and I certainly don't believe in the idea of quote-unquote racial replacement, because I literally do not care about the races of people who live in America.
I care about their ideas and their ideology.
But the New York Times decides that because there is language that sounds similar to stuff that Tucker Carlson has said, they are now going to attribute this shooter to Tucker.
Zucker, quote, an extensive New York Times review of popular right wing media platforms found hundreds of examples of language, ideas and ideologies that overlapped with the mass killers written statement, a shared vocabulary of intolerance that stokes fears centered on immigrants of color.
Again, this is a conspiracy theory.
And the conspiracy theory, this one is deliberately designed in order to link together basic conservative tropes about immigration with white supremacism.
This is how you end up with the Washington Post running a piece today on their front page about how evil the Trump administration is for cracking down on welfare use by legal immigrants.
Abigail Haas-Lohner and Nick Miroff have a piece today in the Washington Post titled, Trump Administration Aims to Make Citizenship More Difficult for Immigrants Who Receive Public Assistance.
They say legal immigrants who use public benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps, or housing assistance could have a tougher time obtaining a green card or U.S.
citizenship under a policy change announced Monday that is at the center of the Trump administration's effort to reduce immigration.
The new policy for inadmissibility on public charge grounds, which appeared Monday on the Federal Register's website and will take effect in two months, sets the new standard for obtaining permanent residency and U.S.
citizenship.
The Trump administration has been seeking to limit those immigrants who might draw on taxpayer-funded benefits, such as many of those who have been fleeing Central America.
Now, again, this is a good policy, but you watch as the rest of the week is dedicated to the notion that the Trump administration is racist for attempting to curb public welfare use by people who are legal immigrants to the United States.
If you legally immigrate to the United States, you should not be dependent on public welfare.
If you're illegally immigrant to the United States, you should not be dependent on public welfare.
I mean, frankly, if you live in the United States, you should try not to be dependent on public welfare, but we have no obligation to bring in people who are then going to be dependent on the taxpayer dime.
That doesn't make the country economically stronger.
But again, this is all part of a generalized push by the left.
Beto O'Rourke suggesting that the terrorist attack, I mean this has become his thing, that the terrorist attack in El Paso was motivated by President Trump.
Again, this is all part of the giant conspiracy theory that suggests that the entire right is tied in with white supremacists who shoot up the El Paso Walmart.
He's changing the conversation, and if we allow him to do that, then we will never be able to focus on the true problems of which he is a part and make sure that we get to the solutions.
And then you reported this week that his Department of Homeland Security has been begging the president to focus on the kinds of threats that we saw in El Paso, and he's ignored them or willfully suppressed action on those ideas and those programs and those policies that could have saved lives in El Paso and across the country.
So Trump is apparently part of the problem here.
Kamala Harris goes even further, of course, because she always goes further.
And she suggests that the Trump administration instructed the DHS to commit raids against a chicken factory in Mississippi, specifically as part of a quote unquote campaign of terror.
Those are specifically chosen words, campaign of terror.
And they're obviously supposed to connect to El Paso.
This administration has directed DHS to conduct these raids as part of what I believe is this administration's campaign of terror.
Which is to make whole populations of people afraid to go to work.
Children are afraid to go to school for fear that when they come home their parents won't be there.
Campaign of terror.
Campaign of terror.
And this is the language they're using.
Again, conspiracy theories on the right are treated with precisely the sort of disdain that they merit.
Conspiracy theories on the left are treated as perfectly normal rhetoric.
And then you wonder why people on the right react strongly to the media condemning Trump over conspiracies.
Again, Trump is dead wrong to say that Hillary Clinton has anything to do or Bill Clinton has anything to do with the Jeffrey Epstein suicide.
That's silly.
There's no evidence to it.
And guess what?
A media that refuses to acknowledge the conspiracism inherent in saying that Stacey Abrams is governor of Georgia and Michael Brown was murdered, that Donald Trump is complicit in a terror attack in El Paso and that Tucker Carlson is responsible, Yeah, the conspiracism isn't just on the right, guys.
And if you actually want to bring down the temperature, then you're actually going to need to call it out whenever you see it on both sides.
I'll call it out from Trump.
I'm not seeing a lot of people on the left calling out Elizabeth Warren today over the Michael Brown nonsense.
OK, time for a thing I like and then a quick thing I hate and we'll be out of here.
So a thing I like today, over the weekend I had the opportunity to read a great piece of hard science fiction called Three Laws Lethal by David Walton.
It's really good.
So the basic premise of the book is that there are these self-driving cars And there are these programmers who have designed the self-driving cars, but they come up with a system for making the self-driving cars incredibly efficient.
It involves building AI, and then the AI, as it is wont to do, goes out of control.
I think that it's a fascinating book.
It does raise serious questions about AI and the nature of being.
Actually, one of the great things about science fiction, I love science fiction because it's idea-driven fiction.
Very often, fiction is emotion-driven fiction.
Sci-fi tends to be ideas-driven fiction.
David Walton is great at this.
The book is Three Laws Lethal.
Go check it out.
It raises serious questions about what it means to be human, AI, the nature of identity, and it gets there from basically All of the rideshare services that you use right now.
So it's kind of a cool entry point.
It is worthy of the read.
I haven't read his other books, but now I want to.
David Walton's Three Laws Lethal.
Go check it out right now.
Okay, a quick thing that I hate.
Well, a couple quick things that I hate.
So first of all, Democrats, now apparently it's become an article of faith that it's time to dox people who back President Trump.
It's time to go after them.
Kirsten Gillibrand, desperate for attention, failing at 0% in the polls.
Kirsten Gillibrand, she came forward over the weekend.
She said that it's very good to go after President Trump's donors and try to shame them or hurt them.
What about, though, what Joaquin Castro, the congressman, did this week with publishing the names of some of President Trump's top donors?
It's publicly available information, but some would say he was targeting these individuals.
Is that helpful, or is that dangerous, given what you're describing?
Those are his choices, not mine.
I will call out racism when I see it.
I will call out white supremacy when I see it.
I will call out hate, and I will stand up against it in every form.
Okay, so again, she'll stand up.
She wouldn't do it that way, but still, people have to be called out.
I'll call out racism and hate, so she's not ruling out the doxxing.
Guys, giving to a political opponent does not mean that you are an evil, horrible, no good, very bad racist.
I may disagree with you politically, but if we start seeing each other in that sort of light, there ain't gonna be a lot of future, okay?
Final thing that I hate today, L.A.
County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas finally beginning to recognize that L.A.
has turned into a trash heap, and it really is.
It's a garbage hole.
I mean, I've lived here my entire life, and the conditions, the living conditions here are awful.
Open needles on the street virtually everywhere.
There are homeless people living in piles of trash.
There's danger of disease, particularly on Skid Row in L.A., but you can't go beneath a freeway underpass and not see an entire homeless city.
L.A.
County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas says, hey, you know what?
Maybe we should do something about this homeless problem.
We have a crisis.
I'm essentially advocating with my co-chair, Daryl Steinberg, that we declare a state of emergency.
The situation is not getting better, it's getting worse.
We should not adjust to a new normal that suggests in any way that people ought to languish on our streets, any place in California.
We take roughly a 130 Three people out of homelessness every day in the county of Los Angeles and 150 come in.
Why?
Because of the force of poverty.
Therefore, we have to act quickly.
A state of emergency, the right to housing.
No more status quo.
Okay, you think the right to housing is going to solve all of this?
You think rent control is going to solve all of this?
Where's the housing going to come from?
It turns out that a lot of people here want to live on the streets.
There are a lot of people who are drug addicts, who can't actually last in housing, who are mentally ill, who actually need medication but won't take the medication.
They've tried exactly these solutions in Seattle and it's exacerbated the homeless problem.
You think a right to housing isn't going to bring more homeless people to the city of Los Angeles?
We're living in an economy with like a 3.7% unemployment rate.
And yet we're hearing about endemic poverty creating the homelessness problem in LA.
Why was it that 10 years ago when the homeless rate, when the unemployment rate was a lot higher, why is it that in the middle of the Great Recession, the homeless population of Los Angeles was significantly lower?
It has something to do with the policies pursued by the Democratic legislators and county supervisors in Los Angeles.
It ain't gonna get better until you start actually arresting people for trespass, until you are able to rouse people and move them, until you are able to get people the help they need by putting them in drug clean-out centers, even if they don't want to be there, until you're able to take people who are mentally ill and get them the treatment that they need, until you're able to arrest people who are willingly living on the streets.
You're not going to be able to do anything.
And it's going to get worse.
And these politicians are too gutless to do anything about it because they're afraid of being called mean.
Well, guess what?
It ain't exactly nice to taxpayers to have homeless people lying face down in drug-induced states of apathy outside your front door, which all too often is happening in the city of Los Angeles.
You do not have a right to do that.
And affordable housing ain't going to cure that.
OK, we will be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
If not, we'll see you here tomorrow.
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