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Aug. 13, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:45
The Fredo Slur | Ep. 838
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Is Trump pushing the culture wars or are Democrats?
Plus updates on the Jeffrey Epstein case and Chris Cuomo of CNN confronts a heckler.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show.
We're going to get through all of it in just an hour.
I mean, we're really going to pump through this stuff in far less than an hour.
Actually, we begin today with the most important story of the day.
And that, of course, is CNN's Chris Cuomo gets into an altercation with a heckler.
So.
As somebody who has had hecklers in public before, let me say that how you handle hecklers is kind of important part of your job as a public figure.
Now, I have been rarely confronted by people while I am with my family, but there are jerks out there who will do this.
There are people who will come up to you and say something nasty when you are with your family, and generally the best tactic is to basically push them off and let them go.
I don't mean physically push them off, just kind of like back off, say what you're going to say, man, and then just take off.
And that's not a sign of weakness, that's a sign of being smart, because getting into an altercation likely ends with cell phone video of the altercation at the least, and a lawsuit at the most.
It's never a very good idea.
I mean, this happened to me, like, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago.
We were out in public somewhere, and some woman came up to me while I was with my kids, and they're five and three, and my wife was somewhere else, I think she was going to the restroom or something, and I'm holding my five-year-old in one hand, my three-year-old in the other hand, and some woman comes up to me to explain that I'm a white supremacist.
I was like, well, you know, we'll have to agree to disagree, have a nice day, and off she went.
Well, that is not exactly how things went with Chris Cuomo.
So, a bunch of things can be true.
One, hecklers are jerks.
People who come up to you in public, I don't care what your politics, they come up to you in public, they come up to Ted Cruz, they come up to me, they come to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, they come up to Chris Cuomo.
If you go up to Chris Cuomo and you start calling him names in public when he's with his family, you're a jerk.
It is one thing to make him make fun of him on a show like this because that's the nature of the game.
That's the nature of political entertainment.
That's the nature of the dialogue.
But I promise you that if I were in a room with Chris Cuomo, I wouldn't be insulting him and nor would he be insulting me.
That's not the way this works.
Now, somebody went up to Chris Cuomo in a public place and started calling him by a name that we on the right frequently use for Chris Cuomo, Fredo.
And the reason people call him Fredo is not because he's Italian.
The reason that people call him Fredo is because that's a reference to the dumb brother from The Godfather, obviously.
The implication being that his brother is the smarter brother.
I've been saying for a long time that there's an open competition between Chris Cuomo and his brother Andrew as to which is the dumber Cuomo brother.
Usually Chris tends to take the cake.
Sometimes Andrew surpasses him.
Although that's a rare occasion.
In any case, Chris Cuomo is out in public and some young dude walks up to him, kid's a jerk, and calls him Fredo.
And, again, I understand Chris Cuomo getting angry.
I really do.
I've been there myself.
I understand Chris Cuomo getting ticked off and telling the guy off.
I get that.
But where Chris Cuomo goes with the term Fredo is a very weird place.
And where the media then go with this story is an even weirder place.
So here is the altercation, if you can hear the audio.
I thought that's who you were.
I don't know who you are.
Isn't that your brother?
I'm a little Italian.
I'm an anchor on CNN.
Fredo is from the Godfather.
He was our weak brother.
Isn't that your brother?
And they use it as an Italian aspersion.
Any of you Italian?
Are you Italian?
It's a f***ing insult to your people.
It's an insult to your f***ing people.
It's like the n-word for us.
Is that a cool f***ing thing?
You're going to have a f***ing problem.
What?
What are you going to do about it?
I'll f***ing ruin you.
I'll f***ing throw you down these stairs like a f***ing punk.
Come on, come on, boy!
Come on, boy!
You want to call me s***?
Call me s*** then.
I'll f***ing wreck your s***.
I'll f***ing wreck your s***.
Okay, so you do want to ramp down the aggression just a little bit.
This is not the smart way to handle all of this.
Now, Sean Hannity came out and praised Chris Cuomo and said Cuomo did nothing wrong here.
We're getting a couple things wrong here.
Number one, let's be clear.
If this were somebody on the right shouting at a protester and threatening to throw them down the effing stairs, it would be yet another in the line of data points proposed by the media that the right is too violent.
There's just no question.
I mean, if this had been a video of me in public threatening to throw some guy down the stairs, it would be Shapiro unhinged.
Shapiro loses it.
The same thing is true of any Fox News host or any talk radio host.
That's just the way the media operate.
When it's Chris Cuomo, it's brave man stands up to young heckler, right?
That's number one.
Number two, what is he talking about when he says that Fredo is like the N-word for Italians?
No, the N-word is mostly like the N-word.
Mostly Fredo is not like the N-word for Italians because that's crazy!
I was so curious about this, like maybe I had missed it, that I actually googled Fredo and ethnic slur yesterday.
There is not a single relevant hit on Google.
Not one.
It has never been an ethnic slur.
It has always been something you say about a dummy.
If you think somebody's a dummy, then you say that they are Fredo.
If they're the weaker, younger brother.
Everyone flashes to the scene from the godfather of John Cazale saying, I'm not dumb, I'm smart!
Somebody who really has an outsized opinion of their own intelligence and is insistent that they can handle things, but they're absolutely incompetent and cannot handle things.
That is what the term Fredo has come to mean.
And to be fair, I really don't think that when it pertains to CNN, Chris Cuomo probably isn't Fredo.
Probably Jim Acosta is Fredo.
Probably Chris Cuomo is more like Sonny, right?
He's gonna beat somebody to death with the top of a trash can or something.
And that makes Jake Tapper, by default, Michael.
Probably.
We'll get to more of this in just a second.
Everything's absurd, guys.
We live in the Godfather.
Jeffrey Epstein is Frank Pantangeli, opening his veins in the bath.
And then you've got Chris Cuomo, who is very upset that somebody called him Fredo.
The whole thing is rid- I don't know what black hole we entered to end up in this parallel universe, but it was the most fun of the black holes, probably.
This is wild.
Okay, we'll get to that in a second.
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OK, so.
If you couldn't actually hear the audio, this guy walks up to Cuomo, he calls him Fredo, and Cuomo says, no punk-ass bitches from the right call me Fredo.
My name is Chris Cuomo.
I'm an anchor on CNN.
Fredo's from the Godfather.
He was that weak brother.
They're using it as an Italian aspersion.
It's like the N-word for us.
And then he threatens to throw the guy down the stairs like a bleeping punk.
So, as I say, when it comes to people having outsized reactions to people heckling them in public, I have a lot of sympathy.
When it comes to Fredo is like the N-word, not so much.
Now, here's the hilarious part.
CNN not only defended Cuomo's behavior, which is fine, they actually came out and defended the notion that Fredo is a slur.
So all it does to turn a word into a slur is have an anchor at CNN call it a longstanding ethnic slur.
Fredo is not an ethnic slur.
You know how I know?
Because I'm saying it right now.
Fredo.
Not an ethnic slur.
When we say the N-word, we say the N-word.
When we say the F-word, the slur that's been used for gay people, we say the F-word on this program.
If I were to say, the slur used for Jews, it would be the K-word.
Right?
We all know the ethnic slurs.
But Fredo is not an ethnic slur, and I can tell because I'm using it.
Like, Fredo.
You see how I did that right there?
Not an ethnic slur.
CNN defends its anchor with this statement, quote, It's not an ethnic slur.
It isn't.
You know how I know that it's not an ethnic slur?
I have a few ways I know it's not an ethnic slur.
Way number one, I know it's not an ethnic slur.
Like, you would assume that if it were a terrible, terrible ethnic slur, Then, if somebody used it, like, in front of Chris Cuomo, probably, but not about Chris Cuomo, he would stop them, right?
If somebody used the N-word in front of you, you would stop them, you'd say, it's not appropriate, stop using that sort of language around me, right?
What if somebody used it in front of you on national TV?
Then you certainly would stop it.
You'd say, guys, we can't do this, right?
We can't use that kind of language on TV.
That's derogatory and gross.
Okay, here's Ana Navarro, like, five months ago, likening one of Trump's sons to Fredo.
Zoos maybe have fences to protect the animals from people like Donald Trump Jr.
who like to shoot them.
This is an entitled, rich, spoiled little brat whose only call to fame is being his daddy's son who hasn't built anything of his own, who hasn't done anything of his own, who is somehow trying to hang on to the fame of his father in order to have some level of relevancy.
Steve is right.
He didn't even make the cut.
Look at Chris Cuomo jump in right there and say, Anna, you really can't use that kind of language on my show.
Did you hear him say it?
I didn't either because he didn't say it because it's ridiculous.
Because who cares?
Seriously, it's ridiculous.
There are a bevy of articles online calling the Trump family members Fredo.
Again, it is not an ethnic slur.
Everyone knows it's not an ethnic slur, apparently, except for, except for Chris Cuomo.
And even then, it's only an ethnic slur when applied to Chris Cuomo.
If it were such an ethnic slur, then I don't think you'd get Chris Matthews.
Just a few months ago, calling Don Jr.
Fredo.
I come on in here, and I'll rumble, look like I slept underneath an embankment, look like I went under the freeway, and I roll on in here all looking weird, come out of the show, get in that seat, roll around, and start calling people Fredo using ethnic slurs.
Like, that one time I went to an Italian restaurant and I ordered some fettuccine alfredo.
Ha!
Go!
Like inviting the son, Fredo-like son, of the president to a meeting to give him dirt on his father's opponent in a way that a child would accept that.
Anyone else would say, wait a minute, I'm not going to a meeting with the Russians.
You only see Don Jr.
He's like Fredo.
It's not an ethnic slur.
It's just how we use language out here.
Unless I'm a vicious, brutal racist, like everyone else on the right.
Chris Matthews using the word Fredo.
No one cares.
Because it's not ethnic slur.
Because this is all ridiculous.
Okay, that part's the part.
Again, I am not on Chris Cuomo's case for getting up in somebody's face who is bothering him in public.
It's not something that I would do.
I don't think it's good practice.
But I do understand the reaction.
Because, again, when people confront other people in public and act like jerks, and people lose it, I kind of get it.
I kind of get it.
However, I would not expect the left to extend the same courtesy to anybody on the right.
I remember when Tucker Carlson was confronted at a restaurant in front of his kid and people on the left lost it.
How could Tucker Carlson be such an unhinged maniac going crazy in a restaurant?
So, I wouldn't expect the same courtesy from those on the left, mainly because people on the left very often don't see people on the right as human beings.
Like, I think Chris Cuomo is wrong about a lot of things.
I don't think he's very good at his job.
But he's a human being, and so I understand him having a human reaction.
For a lot of folks on the left, people on the right are simply not human.
And so, if Tucker Carlson gets confronted at a restaurant, and then gets in somebody's face, that's because Tucker Carlson is a monster.
Because, it doesn't matter what the beginning of the sentence is, the end is always, Tucker Carlson is a monster, if you are somebody on the left.
Nonetheless, The equation of Fredo with the N-word is quite astonishing.
And frankly, I don't know how Chris Cuomo was able to get away with comparing everything he doesn't like to the N-word.
If somebody on the right did this, you would assume that this amounted to a tremendous racial insensitivity.
If you just kept saying that X, Y, or Z was the equivalent of the N-word on the right, they would say, well, you don't understand the N-word, you don't understand the context, you don't understand its place in American life.
There's no real equivalent to the N-word.
All of that would be true.
All of that would be true.
And if somebody on the right did this, if somebody, um, if somebody came up to me and, and used the, the, the very oft-used sort of alt-right rhetoric against, somebody come up to me and they're like, oh, you're short, you're 5'4".
And I was like, you know what?
That's the equivalent of the N-word.
People are like, well, that's kind of insensitive to black folks, isn't it?
To black people.
I mean, like, that's not the N-word.
That's just somebody calling you short.
5'9", for the record.
In any case, Chris Cuomo.
That's not the first time that he has equated something with the N-word, and he's got to stop doing it, guys.
It's not good policy.
And CNN backed him on it, right?
CNN was like, yes, Fredo is an ethnic slur, not an ethnic slur.
Here is just a few months ago, Chris Cuomo declaring that if you use the term fake news, fake news is like the N-word for members of the media, which makes perfect sense because members of the media have been ganged up on, lynched, hanged for centuries in America, enslaved, treated like second-class citizens, subjected to Jim Crow.
Oh wait, none of that has happened to journalists.
So this is a bunch of crap.
Here's Chris Cuomo saying a dumb thing about the N-word. - I see being called fake news as the equivalent of the N-word for journalists, the equivalent of calling an Italian any of the ugly words that people have for that ethnicity.
That's what fake news is to a journalist.
It is an ugly insult and you better be right if you're going to charge a journalist with lying on purpose.
It's just like the N-word.
It's just like the N-word.
For Chris Cuomo, everything apparently that offends him is like the N-word.
By the way, I just wanted to put it out there.
If Fredo is an ethnic slur for Italians, a few others we should be careful of, Frodo is apparently an ethnic slur for Hobbits, and Greedo is actually an ethnic slur for Rodian bounty hunters.
So we should be very careful about the kind of verbiage that we use.
We don't want to trigger people.
We don't want them to get too upset.
Enter Donald Trump through the wall like the Kool-Aid man.
Is there a controversy?
The bat signal is up in the night sky.
The big T for Donald Trump.
Somewhere, someone has said something foolish and Donald Trump must weigh in.
So Donald Trump descends, like the caped crusader he is, into the middle of what is an irrelevant stupid fight.
And he jetpacks in there, like the rocketeer.
He says, I thought Chris was afraid of ulcer.
The truth hurts.
Totally lost it.
Low rating, CNN.
Okay, come on, guys.
That's some funny bleep.
Come on.
I mean, like, I understand.
Not Lincoln, right?
Not... We get it.
We get it.
Okay, we get all the critiques.
I get Bill Kristol ripping on him, demeaning the office of the presidency.
I get all...
Okay, I get it.
I understand.
I understand.
Okay, I'm on the same page, guys.
But come on!
Okay, this is funny.
If you can't appreciate the fact that a CNN anchor who calls Trump a white supremacist on a fairly regular basis is likening Fredo, the young, stupid brother from The Godfather, to the N-word, and that Donald Trump is then jumping in to be like, that's right, Fredo.
Get it, Fredo?
The truth hurts.
Totally lost it.
Low ratings.
It's like he's a bot programmed to watch a thousand hours of Trump.
And then this is what the tweets come up with.
At this point, I don't even know that Trump is tweeting for himself.
There's a robot Trump tweeting for Trump, just taking old phrases of Trump's and then stringing them together in tweets.
All the tweets are three word phrases.
My favorite is the tag at the end.
Low ratings at CNN.
What does that have to do with anything?
But it's the best, and also the worst, and the best also.
I thought Chris was Fredo also.
I love that movie.
That movie's great.
Didn't really understand the plot to Godfather 2.
And Godfather 3?
Why would he ditch Bridget Fonda for Sofia Coppola?
Makes no sense.
But, Chris, Fredo, on the mark.
Mr. President, you're required to the Situation Room, sir.
Well, the good news is this means that the media will now have to declare that Fredo is, in fact, an ethnic slur for Italians.
Because now Trump said it, right?
So now we're just going to rewrite the whole English language because everything Trump says is an ethnic slur.
Oh my god.
It's so absurd.
Everything is absurd.
How did we enter this reality?
How do we get back to the regular reality where Mitt Romney is president since 2012?
How do we get back there?
I don't know.
But I also know it won't be nearly as entertaining.
We'll get to more of this if there's more to get to, if I can handle my bleep here.
We'll get back to that in just...
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All right.
So.
The fact that the president of the United States is sounding off on I thought Cuomo was Freda.
Freda's the best.
It's the fact that that he's doing that.
This means that the media naturally are going to have a 48 hour news cycle about how Trump is so unpresidential.
Yeah, we all get it.
We all know.
Whatever, man.
I mean, whatever, man, is, I think, the reaction of most Americans at this point.
Did we think that we were actually getting George Washington when you elected the guy from The Apprentice who is mostly famous for saying that he fired people?
Like, what did you think that you were getting when you elected the guy who was revealed on tape three weeks before the election talking about how often you like to grab women by the genitals?
Like, we all get it, right?
And the guy who tweets, he's a stand-up comedian, right?
The guy who tweets like this.
Now, to get serious for just a brief moment, I will note that there is something that is going on in our country that actually is Dangerous, but it's not dangerous in the sense that, like, Trump is responsible for it or Trump is responsible for all of the stupidities of people going out and confronting people in public.
In fact, I think that the left is actually more responsible than the right for stuff like this because the left cheers it on.
I mean, within the last week, the left was cheering on a sitting congressperson doxing Trump donors.
Within the last week, the left is calling for open boycotts of companies that have stockholders who donated to President Trump.
There were full editorials in the Washington Post talking about why Sarah Huckabee Sanders should be hounded out of a restaurant.
We've seen videos of Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk from TPUSA being harassed outside a restaurant, and that was not a national story.
So, this sort of stuff has been going on for quite a while.
From the left, public heckling.
Not just public heckling.
People attempting to do violence.
People mobbing folks on the right.
I mean, this obviously has happened to me several times at different universities.
So, this sort of stuff has been happening for quite a while.
But what we are seeing, and it is ugly, is the bleed over from the online sphere into the real world.
And this is a lack of social institutions on a broader level.
Online was supposed to be more fun.
Online was the place that you went.
I remember at the beginnings of the internet, the very... Let me take you in the Wayback Machine, small children, and I'll take you back to the origins of the internet.
When you sat next to your AOL dial-up and you listened to the horrible sounds, the horrible grating sounds that connected you online, and then, if you were like 12 or 13, you found chat rooms with people who went to school and who were your age, and you would chat about movies or you'd chat about sports.
And online was just kind of like a thing that you did for maybe half an hour a day.
And then you went outside and you played with your friends.
And now online has taken over everybody's life.
And so, predictably speaking, people are taking the online world, in which they are now spending more time than they are the real world, and they are taking the ethics of the online world and they are now applying it to the real world.
In the most extreme cases, you're seeing this in the most evil ways with places like 8chan, where people create an alternative reality for themselves, and then they go out into real reality and carry out their sick fantasies in public.
Well, you see this on a smaller scale when you go to a college campus and people are mobbed, or when you're out in public and people harass you and then tape it because they want to show all their friends that they are virtuous Folks who are standing up to the modern-day evil that is the right wing, or the modern-day evil that is Chris Cuomo.
I think that we're not focusing enough on the kid here who is a jerk.
We're focusing on Cuomo because Cuomo is, in fact, adult.
But the person who went up to Cuomo and called him Fredo in public is a jerk.
And I think that that is becoming more common on both right and left.
And a lot of that has to do with lack of militating social institutions.
It has to do with the fact that we are engaged too much online.
They get our validation from how many clicks and likes we get on places like Twitter and Facebook.
And what that means is also that stuff that people said 10, 15 years ago in jest because it was just a thing you did for fun online.
Now people are going back and they're applying the new Internet ethics, which is that the real world is the online world.
And they are applying it to 15-year-old statements, which is why you see people digging up old statements by comedians on Twitter and then treating it as though they said it in public in real life in front of a crowd of a thousand people. - No.
We treat online like the real world, and we treat the real world like online now.
It used to be that there was much more of a division between the two, and this is going to lead to more and more dangerous confrontations.
Now this, this confrontation with Cuomo wasn't dangerous.
This was a guy who was just being a jerk, and Cuomo backed him off, and Cuomo was really aggressive with him.
And again, not something I would do, not something I think is particularly smart, and if somebody on the right had done it, the media would be up in arms.
Plus, Chris Cuomo's adult if he thinks that Fredo is a slur on the order of the n-word, or a slur at all, frankly.
But, As far as the behavior of people in public, it is getting worse.
It is getting uglier.
Because people want to take the spoils of what they do in real life, and then they want to go back to the video game that is the online world, and brag to all their friends that they have racked up virtue coins.
It's like out there in the real world.
Remember the old Mario Brothers game where Mario is running through the landscape picking up coins?
Ba-ding!
Right?
And every time he picks up a coin, he moves closer to another life.
That is what we do in the real world now.
We rack up points in the real world by taking tape of stuff that happens and then putting it online for the likes and the clicks and the fake social acceptance that comes along with it.
And that, I do think, is actually kind of dangerous.
In one second, I want to get to some real news of the day beyond the fact that the President of the United States tweeted out that Chris Cuomo is Fredo, which is just, I got to admit, hilarious.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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OK, so on to the 2020 race where the Democratic Party has basically settled in.
On its narrative, its narrative is that Donald Trump is fighting terrible, terrible culture wars and that the culture wars are in fact Donald Trump's fault.
The culture wars did not predate Trump.
The culture wars came along with Trump.
The world began spinning when Donald Trump announced when he came down that escalator.
That is when the universe was formed.
It was the big bang of politics.
Trump was not a symptom of a broken political system.
Trump was not a symptom of culture civil wars that we've been fighting in this country for a decade, mainly during the Obama administration, thanks to polarization along economic and racial lines.
No, Donald Trump was the initiator of all of this.
And this is the narrative Democrats are going to run with, because they have to run with that narrative.
Remember, if they acknowledge the truth, which is that a lot of this polarization started really under George W. Bush, And then exacerbated radically under Barack Obama and now has exacerbated again under Donald Trump.
If they were to acknowledge that, then it would make them have to abandon their main point in this election cycle, which is the return to normalcy point.
Joe Biden is running as a return to normalcy candidate.
He's running as the guy who's going to restore some sense of calm and order to the United States.
But if people correctly recollect back just Four years ago, when Barack Obama was in power, and Ferguson was rioting and burning, and Baltimore was rioting and burning, and we were seeing police officers gunned down in the streets of Dallas.
If we all recollect back then, then the Return to Normalcy campaign doesn't have quite the same feel, does it?
Because things weren't normal.
Things were really messed up.
And they're messed up in different ways now, but they were messed up before Trump ever got on the scene.
So this means the Democrats and the media have to put out there the line that the culture wars we are currently experiencing are solely due to the peckish temperament and bizarre character of President Trump, as opposed to underlying issues.
That the country has been facing for quite a while here and that burst out really into the open in extraordinarily ugly ways during the Obama administration and now continuing on into the Trump administration.
Now, the reason Democrats have to run on the culture war kind of stuff is because if they run on policy, they're going to get skunked.
Most people are not interested in Kamala Harris nationalizing their health care.
Kamala Harris went to an old age home in Iowa.
One of the bizarre things about how American campaigns are run is that you end up with tape of Kamala Harris at an old age home in Iowa, at a retirement home in Iowa.
First of all, all those people were like 17 when she incarcerated them.
And now they're like 85.
But she went there and she actually played bingo with the members of the old age home.
And then a woman asked her, so you're going to take away my health care, aren't you?
And Kamala Harris is like, no, no.
She's like, yeah, you are, aren't you?
Kamala's like, no, kind of.
And the lady's like, don't do it.
Pretty amazing.
I understand that you are advocating health care for everyone.
Yes, ma'am.
Who's going to pay for it?
Well, we're going to pay for it, because right now, let me tell you something, we're all paying for health care for everyone, and it's in an emergency room.
No, ma'am, you need to leave our health care system alone.
Okay.
And we don't want to get it messed up.
Okay, I don't intend to mess... Do you have Medicare?
Yes, ma'am, I do.
Okay, well...
Lies.
Lies.
Don't lie to the old lady, Kamala.
So I'll promise you that, okay?
I won't mess with the health care that you have.
Lies, lies.
Don't lie to the old lady, Kamala.
It's not nice to lie to old people.
It's not nice to jail them, and it's also not nice to lie to them.
So she gets wrecked by this old, again, Democratic policy, not popular.
Joe Biden, meanwhile, trying to trot out another creative policy, by which we mean an old policy that accomplished nothing.
He had an editorial in the Washington Post yesterday, in which, in the New York Times rather, in which he argued in favor of an assault weapons ban again.
Doesn't matter that it didn't work between 94 and 2004.
Biden wrote, many police departments have reported an increase in criminals.
But that's not really true.
weapons since 2004.
Multiple analyses of the data around mass shootings provide evidence that from 1994 to 2004, the years when assault weapons and high capacity magazines were banned, there were fewer mass shootings, fewer deaths, fewer families needlessly destroyed.
But that's not really true.
Robert Verbruggen, writing for the National Review, he points out that the studies that Biden links to really one study are very, very flawed.
He He says, first, a quick bit of history.
The US had a ban on assault weapons, semi-automatic guns with certain combinations of tactical cosmetic features, including pistol grips and folding stocks from 1994 to 2004.
The existing guns were not confiscated.
It was just illegal to sell new ones.
The same law banned high capacity magazines, setting the threshold at 10 rounds, which is actually below the standard capacity of many modern handguns.
After the ban was allowed to expire, experts were more or less unanimous that it hadn't had a strong effect on overall homicide.
Certainly, there are fewer of the banned items in circulation, but the law's definition of assault weapon focused on features that don't really affect a gun's lethality.
Few murders are committed with long guns of any kind to say nothing of assault weapons in particular.
Recently, though, some have claimed that the law reduced mass shootings in particular, which account for a tiny fraction of overall homicides, but commands an incredibly disproportionate amount of public attention.
What seems to be true is that the Banyers were relatively peaceful on this front, despite covering the rash of school shootings that included Columbine.
However, the three most important facts about mass shootings are one, they have historically been incredibly rare, with entire years passing without one sometimes.
B, they aren't contagious, with high-profile incidents inspiring copycats and competitors.
And C, they are incredibly variable in the number of fatalities, from a low bound of wherever the researcher chooses to set it.
The study Biden cites uses four, not including the perpetrator, all the way up to 58 in Las Vegas.
Trying to detect a pattern in data like this, then attributing the pattern to a single law change that covered the entire country for a 10-year period is madness.
Some charts from the study show the core problem here.
The total count of mass shooting fatalities by year shows that these things go in spurts.
And recent years in particular have been horrible, but that doesn't show that the assault weapons ban mattered.
And because the fact is that, again, what it shows is that there was a these kind of space between 1998 and 2001.
And then there was a space between 2010 that is really radically increased.
So this sort of data does not support Joe Biden's argument.
Plus, it's not going to be popular.
You tell people that they can't buy the rifle they want.
Good luck with that.
So Democrats have been relegated to going back to the drawing board.
And their drawing board is Donald Trump is the culture warrior.
As I have said, Donald Trump certainly is a culture warrior.
He was elected to be a culture warrior.
It's why his base loves the tweets about Chris Cuomo.
Loves them.
I think that they're hilarious.
I think very often those kinds of tweets damage him and not the Cuomo one.
I don't think the Cuomo one does anything to him.
But I think that when he tweets out about people going back to their home countries and they're Americans, I think that stuff damages him.
And frankly, I think it should damage him politically because it's bad.
But he was elected to be a culture warrior.
That's a feature, not a bug.
That's why he was elected.
But he was elected in response to a culture war that the right already knew was being waged by the left upon them.
The left, again, is now trying to claim that that year zero was Trump's election.
We'll get to this in just one second.
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Okay, so in just a second, we'll get to the left's case that Donald Trump is the leading cause of the culture wars.
Not true.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So as I say, with the Democrats failing on policy, this leaves them with their backup plan.
Their backup plan is that Donald Trump is the most divisive force in the history of the country and that Donald Trump must be stopped.
And to that end, the Democrats are ratcheting up divisive rhetoric.
They're ratcheting up the sort of rhetoric that actually does increase the chances of violence and does lead to greater opposition between Americans of different political views.
See, when you call Trump a Nazi, you are calling his supporters Nazis.
When you say that Trump is a white supremacist, you are suggesting that his supporters are racist, or at the very least, ambivalent or uncaring about racism.
Which is not true.
And yet, this has become the Democratic talking point du jour.
Here is Kamala Harris, who can't explain to an old woman why she won't steal her health insurance, but also will say that Donald Trump is responsible for the El Paso Walmart shooting.
I will tell you, this stuff is not new in our country.
It certainly predates the election of Donald Trump, but it has also increased under Donald Trump.
And, you know, he's been fueling the flames of hate.
And, you know, I've said recently, you know, on the issue of El Paso, you know, no, when people ask me, is he responsible for those killings?
Well, no, I mean, he obviously didn't pull the trigger, but he's sure been tweeting out the ammunition.
Oh, wow, he's tweeting out the ammunition.
So that's what we're going to do now.
So when Barack Obama ripped into police officers routinely across the country, suggested they were racist, and then an evil member of Black Lives Matter decided to shoot up Dallas police officers, he didn't pull the trigger.
But did he tweet out the ammunition?
Again, this is a talking point that actually is in and of itself dangerous.
Crediting your political opponents with violence is a dangerous thing to do, and yet you are seeing folks on the left do it.
And the language of the left, not the entire left, but the radical left, right, certain members of the left, the language that is accepted in high-ranking circles in the left is extraordinary.
Extraordinary.
We keep hearing about the right is so accepting of Donald Trump's rhetoric.
I think that the right has been too accepting of a lot of things that Donald Trump has said.
That's why I've tried to be a fair-minded conservative in condemning Trump when he says things that I think are morally reprehensible.
The left has had no such compunction.
Let's take an example.
So, over the weekend, there's a guest on MSNBC named Eli Mistel, who is an editor at Above the Law, and he literally said that Trump supporters who are white should be destroyed.
How is that going to make the country better?
Is that a culture war leveraged by Trump supporters, or is this a comment that contributes to the flames?
Is this throwing gasoline on the flames that already exist?
You don't communicate it to them.
You beat them.
You beat them.
They are not a majority of this country.
The majority of white people in this country are not a majority of the country.
And all the people who are not fooled by this need to come together, go to the polls, go to the protests, do whatever you have to do.
You do not negotiate with these people.
You destroy them.
You destroy them.
You destroy Trump supporters.
You destroy these people.
You don't negotiate with these people.
You destroy them because they're all racist.
No, don't worry.
It's only the right that is fighting a culture war.
Right here.
And this predictably leads to the backlash.
And there is a clip going around yesterday of an Iowa voter who was asked who he's voting for.
And he said, basically, they keep calling me a racist.
And then he described why he is not a racist.
And this led the media to, predictably enough, call him a racist.
Here's the clip.
And I'll explain why the media take away the wrong lesson.
What do they call you?
I'm a racist.
I went to school.
I shared my dorm with a colored guy.
I have nothing against him.
I grew up in the East.
We grew up with people.
Do you think the president's a racist, though?
No, I don't.
I really don't.
Okay, so the evidence here is that because he used the word colored, which is a very old-fashioned, out-of-date word for black people, then he must be a racist.
So he says, you guys keep calling me a racist, so I'm gonna vote for Trump.
And they're like, well, that's because you're a racist.
Keep going with this.
I'm sure that... Do you want to win that guy's vote or no?
So according to Eli Mistal, probably that guy has to be destroyed because he may have shared his dorm with a black guy and he may not be a racist.
And you don't know who that guy is.
You don't know his record.
Do you have any record of him being a racist other than he used an out-of-date word with regard to black people?
And did it seem like when he spit out the word colored that he was doing it because he knew it was a racial slur?
Or did it seem like he's an old dude who was using a dated term for black people that was used back in the 1960s?
But the media immediately, this is evident.
Trump voters are racist, right?
So the accusation is Trump voters are racist.
So Trump voters say, you're going to call me a racist?
Go to hell.
You know, that guy out there, you keep calling a racist.
I'm not going to trust your take on him either.
When it comes to the culture wars, there are two sides.
It is not a one sided culture war.
It is a two sided culture war.
And the media's attempts to derive a narrative from this are absurd.
There's an article in The Washington Post today.
Oh, really?
Well, I'm old enough to remember in 2012 when Barack Obama was suggesting that Mitt Romney was a racist who hated women, and Joe Biden was out there suggesting that Mitt Romney, the most milquetoast human ever to walk the earth, wanted to put black people back in chains.
But listen to the way the Washington Post handles this.
Again, it's the Washington Post's unwillingness to recognize that the left is a side in the culture war.
They're not even a side.
See, if you're on the left, you can't even acknowledge that you're a side.
And there's this weird phenomenon where you don't think you have an accent.
And there are lots of accents around America.
I don't think I have an accent, right?
I think that I sound like how people normally speak English.
If I speak to somebody from New York, they can't hear very often they have a New York accent.
Somebody from the South believes they have no accent, I have an accent.
British people speaking English don't understand they have a British accent.
When you're in the accent, you don't understand that you're speaking with an accent, typically speaking.
It's only when you start trying to speak with somebody else's accent that you realize that maybe you have an accent of your own.
Well, the same thing is true in politics right now.
People fail to recognize that they have a political bent.
And so if you're on the left, And Donald Trump is saying stuff you think I'm just a fair-minded individual who has not taken part in the culture wars.
It's just that horrible Trump.
And this is what you get from the journalists at the Washington Post.
So much journalism-ing.
I would say that this article is fake news, except I know from Chris Cuomo that's the equivalent of the N-word.
Or something.
In any case, this article says, George W. Bush had freedom fries.
Sarah Palin had the big gulp.
Dan Quayle had the Hollywood portrayal of an unwed single mother named Murphy Brown.
For President Trump, it's paper straws.
The latest addition to an ever-growing list of cultural flashpoints his campaign is seeking to highlight as part of a base-focused re-election effort.
Remember that time that Barack Obama flashed a rainbow flag on the White House after Obergefell?
Remember that?
Was that like a culture point or no?
Was that a cultural flashpoint?
Or how about that time he said that the Cambridge police acted stupidly?
Was that a cultural flashpoint or no?
Or when his campaign made a big deal out of Mitt Romney suggesting that he had binders of female candidates brought before him for hiring?
Was that a cultural flashpoint or not a cultural flashpoint?
When Barack Obama said that Trayvon Martin could have been his... Cultural flashpoint or no?
But they only exist on the right because George W. Bush said freedom fries once.
I mean, man oh man.
As cities and coffee chains across the country have adopted policies aimed at limiting environmental damage, the president's campaign has targeted what he calls liberal paper straws.
It's selling a Trump-branded plastic version as a fundraising tool.
So I love that it is not considered political to ban straws in restaurants.
It is considered political to oppose a ban on straws at restaurants.
By the way, paper straws suck radically.
They're awful.
They collapse in on themselves.
They taste like garbage.
They're terrible.
If you want to talk about banning the plastic cups at Starbucks, I promise you those cups have more plastic in them than the straws do.
The ban on straws ticks people off because it feels like virtue signaling that has no real impact on the environment.
And Trump is not wrong to pick on that because that's kind of what it is for a lot of folks.
Pointing to the runaway success of the straws, which have earned the campaign more than $670,000 in a month, Communications Director Tim Murtaugh said they represent Trump's ability to make a political point using a cultural issue everyday voters can relate to.
And it's true, Trump is good at this.
But again, Trump isn't the only one who is good at this.
The Washington Post, though, says Trump is deliberately amplifying public tensions by seizing on divisive topics to energize his base, according to campaign aides and White House advisers.
I thought this was just called politics, but listen to this take.
I mean, you want a hot take from the Washington Post?
Here it is.
As Democrats debate policy, Trump has sought to force his potential rivals to defend the most far-reaching cultural ideas circulating within their party.
Oh, is it debating policy when AOC released a frequently asked questions calling for a ban on cows and air travel?
Was that debating policy?
Is it really debating policy when Kamala Harris suggests that Trump is responsible for a mass shooting in El Paso?
Or is that more like her just actually looking for a cultural flashpoint?
The blindness of the media to their own bias is one of the reasons why people don't trust the media and why people think that Chris Cuomo is a Fredo.
This is why.
It's why people, let's be real about this.
People on the right think the entire media is Fredo.
They think the entire media is a bunch of weaklings masquerading as smart people who believe they are brilliant, brighter than you, but in fact are taking waitresses two at a time and bankrupting casinos.
That's what most Americans think of the media at this point.
Okay, meanwhile, we gotta run through some other news here.
So it turns out that Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself with a prison bedsheet.
How the dude ended up with a bedsheet after being on suicide watch is insane.
Apparently his lawyers wanted him off suicide watch, which makes it sound premeditated, the suicide.
And you take the guy off suicide, his lawyers go, you know, he's not gonna commit suicide, it'll be fine.
It'll be fine.
Just take the other guy out of the cell, take him off suicide watch, he's gone.
I mean, shocker.
According to the New York Post, Epstein was found hanging in his lower Manhattan jail cell with a bed sheet wrapped around his neck, secured to the top of a bunk bed.
How'd he end up in a bunk bed?
Because he was in a cell by himself?
Because they removed the person who was in the cell with him.
All of which is going to make people somewhat suspicious.
He apparently killed himself by kneeling toward the floor and then strangling himself with the makeshift noose, which is a pretty terrible way to go.
Stafford's attempted to revive him.
He was taken to an infirmary inside the lockup, and then he was pronounced dead.
So with him, presumably, will die some of his secrets.
There was an article, I believe it was in the New York Times yesterday, from a columnist who said he met with Epstein off the record, and then now has printed a story about how Epstein knew all these famous people and had dirt on them.
You know, off the record, I understand you want to keep your journalistic ethics, but when you're talking to a convicted pedophile, I feel like most people are going to be okay with you spilling on who he may have mentioned.
There are a bunch of security lapses at the jail, according to the Daily Mail.
The 66-year-old was found alone and unresponsive in his cell.
His defense attorney has since faulted jail officials.
Apparently, last year, a prison guard at the jail pled guilty to taking more than $25,000 in cash bribes to smuggle cell phones, alcohol, and food to a wealthy Turkish gold trader.
Between 2016 and 2017, he also received thousands of dollars in payments from another inmate, which were given to him by the prisoner's relatives and a paralegal representing him.
He was sentenced in January to three years in prison by a judge who called the crime an assault on our entire system of justice.
So, this guy was not the person who was guarding Epstein.
Suffice it to say that corruption in prisons is indeed a thing.
So, there are open questions about exactly what went wrong here.
Also, Jeffrey Epstein's Little Black Book is now in the possession of federal authorities.
He apparently listed 301 British associates, over a thousand associates generally.
Now, just because you're in somebody's phone doesn't mean that you were benefiting from their sex trafficking, but this dude did travel in powerful circles.
The FBI apparently raided so-called Pedophile Island yesterday, so we'll find out what exactly they found on Pedophile Island.
In other news, I'm going to give you the update on the situation in Hong Kong, which continues to get more and more tense.
Why President Trump has not spoken out about this, but about Chris Cuomo is beyond me.
The president of the United States ought to ignore the Fredo stuff and focus in on, you know, the millions of protesters in the streets who may be about to be mowed down by the Chinese government.
Wouldn't this be a time, as I said yesterday on my radio show, would this not be a time for the president of the United States to ratchet up the pressure on China?
He's in the middle of a trade war with them.
Wouldn't this be a great time to explain to the American people that the reason that we have to take harsh measures against China is because they are insanely aggressive with people they've already made agreements with, including the people of Hong Kong, not to violate their sovereignty.
And now they're about to run tanks in there.
Apparently, the trucks and the tanks are massing at the border.
The Hong Kong protesters completely at the mercy of the Chinese government at this point.
According to the Washington Post, anti-government protesters brought chaos to Hong Kong's airport for a second consecutive day on Tuesday.
They forced airlines to suspend check-in for departing flights as demonstrators extended their standoff with authorities who have been unable to quell months of dissent.
After mass cancellations the previous evening, flights had been gradually returning to normal throughout Tuesday, even as thousands of black-clad demonstrators returned to occupy the terminal with placards denouncing police brutality and calling for freedom for Hong Kong.
By the way, they were waving the American flag.
For all of those people in America who think that America's flag is not a symbol of freedom around the world, look at the flag that the folks in Hong Kong were waving.
They weren't waving the Turkish flag.
They weren't waving the French flag.
They were waving the American flag, and that is for a reason.
America still symbolizes freedom around the world.
It's why it behooves the president.
Donald Trump needs to speak out now about what China needs to do with these protesters, and that is leave them alone and deal with them as the sovereign people they are.
China is a tyranny.
It is a communist tyranny.
We've all blinded ourselves to that fact because they produce cheap goods for us.
But that has nothing to do with the amount of tyranny they steep on their own people.
In fact, there's a case to be made that opening China back in the 1970s, while necessary in order to counterbalance the Soviet Union, we were trying to split Mao from the Stalinists over in Russia, Well, it may have been a temporary expedient.
It has radically strengthened a Chinese communist regime that seeks to quash its own people.
If Trump wants the American people to undertake economic sacrifice in the name of fighting Chinese influence, wouldn't this be a great time to speak out?
When Barack Obama did nothing as Iranian protesters were mowed down in the streets in 2009, those of us on the right were extraordinarily critical, as we should have been.
Donald Trump needs to speak out.
He needs to speak out now about these Hong Kong protesters.
He needs to make any resources available to them available to them, short of heavy weaponry and light weaponry.
We shouldn't be providing weapons.
We don't want a war, obviously.
But we can exert an awful lot of pressure on the Chinese government to come to some sort of arrangement with the people of Hong Kong.
Because gradually, over the last Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then a quick thing that I hate.
with Hong Kong that was agreed to when the British abandoned Hong Kong to its fate at the behest of the Chinese government.
Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then a quick thing that I hate.
So, thing that I like today, yesterday on the program we hosted Mohamed El-Erian.
He's an economist.
He's the former head of Allianz.
And he is also the author of the book, The Only Game in Town, Central Bank's Instability and Avoiding the Next Collapse, It's an easy to read book about economics and about why it is that so many people seem to be reliant on central banks.
His main thesis is that The American economy, the European economy, the Chinese economy, all of these economies have become more and more reliant on policymaking from institutions that were never meant to make policy.
The Fed was never meant to control American economic policy.
Now the markets respond directly to what the Fed is doing after the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
The Fed exerted more and more influence and power.
The same thing happened in Europe.
It was supposed to be a temporary expedient.
Instead, it has become the new normal.
And that's dangerous, because you can't just inflate and deflate currencies, raise and lower interest rates, and hope to fix economies that way.
There are underlying structural problems with economies that have to be dealt with, including the fact, by the way, that the United States continues to run up these record deficits.
Federal spending has set a record through July.
3.7 trillion dollars have been spent in the first 10 months of fiscal year 2019.
The government is now running a yearly deficit of 867 billion dollars.
It's insane.
These are numbers that are unthinkably large.
And they are going to undermine the future of a productive American economy.
You can't rely on the Fed to bail you out of that thing simply through inflation.
The U.S.
budget deficit already exceeds last year's total figure.
And again, we are only 10 months into the fiscal year.
So, this is all bad news.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
If you're in the state of California, take your kids out of public school.
Public schools are garbage, and not only are they garbage, they are run by people who are interested in cramming down a leftward view of the world upon your children.
The latest evidence of this...
According to Adam Credo at the Washington Free Beacon, the state of California has now introduced blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel lessons into its official high school curriculum, drawing outrage and concern in the state's Jewish and pro-Israel communities, according to multiple sources involved in the controversy.
The California Department of Education is facing backlash after permitting a host of anti-Israel activists to build a statewide educational curriculum that demonizes Israel and is said to be fostering hatred of Jewish and Israeli-American students.
Apparently, there are a bunch of anti-Semitic courses that are fostering an unsafe environment for Jewish and Israeli-American students, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
A coalition of 83 pro-Israel organizations, led by the AMCHA initiative, which is a watchdog group, says we are aware that many individuals and groups affiliated with the Jewish community have already written to you about the Education Council's shocking omission of information about American Jews and anti-Semitism, its use of classic anti-Semitic stereotypes, its blatant anti-Israel bias.
The proposed curriculum is ridiculous.
It portrays Jews in Israel as, quote, part of interlocking systems of oppression and privilege.
They endorse the California education system, explicitly endorsing the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment and sanctions movement that specifically seeks to destroy the state of Israel.
It was designed by its advocates to do just that.
The curriculum itself is ridiculous on nearly every level.
It is not just about antisemitism, but there are insane violations of normalcy and educational realism in this program.
Here are some of the terms that are used in this Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum now being perpetuated by the California Department of Education.
They talk about Herxtery.
Okay?
H-X-R-S-T-O-R-Y.
I mean, this is radical nonsense.
The Cisheteropatriarchy.
You're supposed to be taught grievances about capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.
The Four I's of Oppression.
Ideological, Institutional, Interpersonal, and Internalized.
Internalized oppression means that you disagree with the prevailing leftist orthodoxy.
You're supposed to be taught about patriarchy, sexism, heteropatriarchy, and cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, xenophobia, and the ethnic studies course overview only singles out marginalization or discrimination against five groups.
Okay, who?
Latinas, blacks, Asians, Native Americans, and Arab Americans.
Jews notoriously left out, though they are the number one targets of hate crimes in the United States.
The particular section of the course overview talking about the oppression of Arab-Americans specifically identifies the country of Israel as, quote, Israel-Palestine.
Palestine does not exist.
It discusses the, quote-unquote, Nakba, which is the supposed dispossession and dispersal of Palestinians from the new state of Israel in the 1948 war.
The lesson plan includes hip-hop as resistance and contrast Busta Rhymes' song, Arab Money, with Narsi's song, The Real Arab Money.
And then calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions.
There's still time to protest this.
The department is accepting public comment through this Thursday, August 15th.
But this is all absurdity.
Of course, the absurdity of the California educational system has been known for a long time.
Kids can't read or do math, but we must teach them about the cisheteropatriarchy and herkstery.
Solid stuff.
Solid stuff.
All righty.
We'll be back here later today to additional hours of content.
Plus, we'll be back here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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