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Aug. 20, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:07
How Democrats Chose The Radicals | Ep. 843
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Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib propagandize on behalf of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic BDS, the media ignore all of their priorities as per our usual arrangement, and President Trump tries to take control on the economy.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show.
Yes, really, an actual good development from Facebook.
We'll get to all of that in just one second.
First, geopolitical tensions are rising.
You just read the news or listen to the show.
Obviously, there's a lot of uncertainty at best about the economy.
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Okay, so, the Democratic Party is deciding right now whether they are going to move in the radical direction or whether they are going to move in the moderate direction.
Now, if they wish to win elections, they should obviously move in a moderate direction because Because all they had to do was not be crazy.
That's all they had to do.
They're running against a president who did not win a majority of the popular vote and whose approval ratings are extraordinarily low on average.
All they have to do is not be crazy.
And they simply cannot do it, apparently.
Instead, the Democrats have decided that the best available policy is to center all of their attention and focus on defending the most radical of their members.
That's because that's where they think the passion is.
Democrats now believe that they're going to win over the moderates because President Trump is so off-putting.
The biggest threat to them is that a bunch of people on the woke left will not show up to vote the same way they didn't show up to vote in 2016.
In the Democratic view, the reason that Hillary Clinton lost is because moderates showed up to vote for her and the base did not show up to vote for her.
And there's truth to that.
They look forward to 2020 and they say, OK, well, moderates will probably show up to vote for us.
We got to get that base out.
That means that we are going to center all of our attention on defending the most radical among us.
Well, that's making an assumption that may not be in evidence, which is that moderates will certainly swing to the Democratic Party, because remember, moderates voted for Hillary Clinton because they believed, I think wrongly, that Hillary Clinton was a moderate.
But if Democrats were to nominate on a presidential level somebody who is radical, Well, that changes the ballgame radically.
And the same thing is true in Congress.
If it turns out that the Democratic Congress cannot be trusted with power, if it looks to the American people like that Congress is going to perform in radical, polarized, partisan fashion, they will not vote for the Democrats.
This is why what you saw at the end of 2018 is pretty important right before the election.
About a month and a half out from the election, the Republicans had a significant Generic ballot deficit against the Democrats.
They were down 8 to 10 points in the generic ballot.
Then the Kavanaugh hearings happened about three weeks out from the election.
And those Kavanaugh hearings closed up that gap tighter than a tick.
I mean, it was extremely tight all of a sudden.
And that's because the more the American people saw of Democrats acting radical, The more they saw of Democrats acting foolishly and badly, the less they wanted to vote for them.
And then, of course, a couple weeks before the election, President Trump was sick of being out of the headlines, and he decided he was going to go out and campaign, and that immediately drove the gap wide again.
Well, the Democrats have decided that they are going to ignore the possibility that they are alienating people, and instead they are going to focus in on Trump.
Trump is the be-all, end-all.
It's a risky strategy, for sure.
And so what you're seeing right now is this divide inside the Democratic Party.
Now, when I say the Democrats are doing this, I don't mean all Democrats.
There is this fight going on inside the Democratic Party, and you can see it reflected in the polling in the Democratic primaries.
So Joe Biden, for all of the crap that has been tossed his way, for all of the talk about Joe Biden fading and Elizabeth Warren rising, Joe Biden is basically where he was a month ago in the polls.
In the overall national polls, he still has an extraordinarily wide lead.
He still has a narrow lead in places like New Hampshire.
In Iowa, he still has a narrow lead.
He has a very wide lead in places like South Carolina.
As soon as he gets to the South, where there's a heavy share of black voting, then Joe Biden suddenly jumps into this massive lead because Kamala Harris has no support in the black community and Elizabeth Warren has no support among black voters.
There's a brand new poll out from CNN today, and it shows that Joe Biden has actually expanded his edge over the Democratic field.
In a new CNN poll, 29% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning registered voters say they back former Vice President Biden.
That is up 7% compared with the late June CNN survey.
No other candidate has made meaningful gains over that time.
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are still stuck in this internecine fight for the socialist left.
Bernie Sanders is at 15%, Elizabeth Warren is at 14% according to the CNN poll.
The only statistically meaningful change in the candidate standings is a 12-point decline in support for Kamala Harris, who right after the first debate in June was up at 17% and now has dropped all the way back down to 5%.
Ouch.
Ouch.
Tulsi Gabbard.
Wow.
Turns out that Tulsi Gabbard clocking Kamala Harris into the next count, he basically may have destroyed Kamala Harris as a candidate.
The original June CNN poll was conducted in the days immediately following the first round of the DNC debate.
Biden's performance was panned and Harris's was praised.
Well, now she has dropped all the way back down to Pete Buttigieg levels.
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are exactly where they were before.
They may have flip-flopped for one point, and Joe Biden is all the way back up at 29.
Biden's advantage in this poll is boosted by stronger support from self-identified Democrats, 31 percent, then from independents, 23 percent, older voters, 34 percent, then younger ones, 23 percent among those under age 45 and from moderate and conservative voters.
So he's getting a lot of support among Democrats, older voters and moderate and conservative voters.
So that is the fight inside the Democratic Party.
Is the newly woke plurality of the Democratic Party in control?
Or is it the large segment that supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, that supported Hillary Clinton probably in 2008 against Barack Obama?
Those folks, combined with a serious share of the black vote, could propel Joe Biden to victory.
So this is a serious infight inside the Democratic Party.
And you're starting to see this have ramifications in terms of how the candidates approach policy.
So for example, the Washington Post reports today that Democrats are now backing off their once fervent embrace of Medicare for all.
So Kamala Harris, among other Democrats, is starting to recognize that running hard to the left, there's no room over there.
Now I've been saying this since the beginning of the primaries.
I've been saying that any candidate Who found the spine to run in the face of the progressive woke left in their own party would actually do pretty well, given that they got some sort of media attention.
So it wasn't going to help somebody like Michael Bennett, who nobody knew who he was.
But when Pete Buttigieg first announced and was acting like a moderate, he started climbing in the polls.
Then he started acting like a radical and he declined again in the polls.
And he's been stagnant ever since.
Well, Kamala Harris is starting to recognize that playing a sort of Mini version of Elizabeth Warren isn't going to work anymore, and she is moving again.
So she's moving her positions up, down, and all around.
According to the Washington Post, leaning back on a black leather sofa as her campaign bus rumbled toward Fort Dodge, Kamala Harris tried to explain why she spent months defending a plan to replace private health insurance with Medicare for All, only to switch to a more modest proposal that would allow private insurance to continue after all.
Harris said, I don't think it was any secret I was not entirely comfortable.
That's an understatement.
I was finally like, I can't make this circle fit into a square.
I said, we're going to take hits.
People are going to say she's waffling.
It's going to be awful.
But she said she decided it was worth it.
Actually, what happened is that she thought that all of the political gain was to be made in the Medicare for all space.
It turns out that space was crowded.
And now she's bumper carring it off of that particular crash and trying to move into Joe Biden's lane.
According to the Washington Post, the Democratic Senator from California is hardly alone.
The idea of Medicare for All, a unified government health program that would take over the basic function of private insurance, became a liberal litmus test at the outset of the presidential campaign.
But in recent months, several of the Democratic hopefuls have shifted their positions or their tone, moderating full-throated endorsement of Medicare for All, adopting ideas for allowing private insurance in some form.
Worth noting, Kamala Harris was a co-sponsor of Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All bill.
So, for all this, oh, I was well known I was uncomfortable.
Was it, though?
Was it really?
I mean, about the time that you were signing right next to Bernie Sanders on the Medicare for All bill, was it well known that you were uncomfortable with Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All bill?
Don't think so.
Neera Tanden, who's a former top aide to Hillary Clinton and president of the Center for American Progress, she says, what I think has happened in the Democratic primary is people recognize that some of the concerns about single-payer are not coming from special interests, but the public.
Former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke is doing the same thing.
He originally embraced Medicare for All as the best way.
He now similarly supports a plan that would preserve the current employer-based insurance system.
Okay, so the gap is beginning to open up wide between the progressive left and the so-called moderates in the Democratic Party.
And this is being led by Elizabeth Warren, who's again trying to steal away support from Bernie Sanders and also trying to cut into the black level of support for Joe Biden.
She's doing this by attacking Joe Biden's crime policies.
And she's also attacking Kamala Harris's crime policies and Cory Booker's crime policies.
So Elizabeth Warren trying to outflank all of them on the left by basically calling Kamala Harris and Joe Biden cops.
The Washington Post reports that Elizabeth Warren said on Tuesday that his president should eliminate the death penalty, end the use of private prisons, curtail the cash bail system, and overhaul the use of presidential pardons.
The announcement was Warren's entry into the volatile debate over criminal justice reform, an issue that is resonating especially in the African American community.
Now again, I don't know where the Washington Post is getting these numbers that the issue is resonating especially in the black community.
If that were true, you'd expect that Donald Trump would have seen a significant uptick in support from the black community, considering that the dude signed into law criminal justice reform.
You would also expect that the attacks on Joe Biden by Kamala Harris would have borne some sort of serious repercussions, given her attacks on him over his 1994 crime bill.
They have not.
So I think that is an assumption that is being made that I'm not seeing a lot of statistical support for is that the black community is deeply enchanted and entranced with the idea of criminal justice reform.
Unlike earlier policy announcements, Warren did not hesitate to take implicit but unmistakable aim at policies embraced in the past by her rivals, especially former VP Joe Biden, Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.
Well, actually, the system preferences criminal justice pleas over prosecution.
Well, actually, the system preferences criminal justice pleas over prosecution.
To be real, most people plead out their cases because they are guilty and they know it and they don't want to go to jail for longer by going through the actual burden of a trial.
I love this sort of sloganeering.
We'll reduce incarceration.
So without reducing the levels of crime, you'll reduce incarceration.
How?
Wouldn't that imply that there will be more criminals on the street?
I mean, simply by dint of statistical analysis?
And when she says, by changing what we choose to criminalize, well, we've already decriminalized marijuana in the state of California, and we still have a lot of people in prison in the state of California.
They've done it in Washington state.
They've done it in Colorado.
Still a lot of people in prison because it turns out that the vast, vast, vast majority of people In prison in the United States are not in prison for simple drug possession.
Many of them are in prison for drug distribution and most of them are still in prison for other crimes.
We broke down those statistics in a podcast maybe two weeks ago, three weeks ago.
But obviously this is political pandering, and it's Warren attempting to cut into the black base of support by moving radical.
And you're seeing the entire Democratic Party now playing this game.
And it's not just the presidential candidates, it's the entire Democratic Party trying to have it both ways.
Trying to capture the zeitgeist of the radical progressives, while at the same time trying to appeal to moderates.
And that's a hard bridge to gap.
Now Trump could make it a lot harder for them to gap by not being so off the wall all the time.
If Trump appeared to be a steady, calming influence in American politics, then that gap would open wide.
We saw this just a month ago, when Nancy Pelosi and AOC looked like they were about to beat each other over the head with claw hammers.
And then Trump jumped in and was like, hold up a second, LEROY JENKINS, and decided that he was just going to bigfoot that entire conversation and become the center of attention.
Trump right now is papering over a lot of the internal Democratic gaps.
But those gaps do exist, and they are going to widen in the near future.
I'll explain how this is happening on a congressional level in just one second.
First, let's talk about big tech, particularly Twitter.
There are a lot of these big tech companies, we'll discuss one actually in a little while, that I think is attempting to make some good moves.
But there are a lot of big tech companies that are not particularly friendly to conservatives.
Twitter, my personal bugaboo.
A company that not only is not friendly to conservatives and throws them off the platform, some of them without any actual proper explanation, but decides what trends in obviously biased ways.
Well, if you can't trust certain elements in Silicon Valley to treat conservatives fairly, how can you trust them to handle your privacy and personal online data?
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Okay, so as I say, this battle between the woke progressives, and I keep saying woke because woke is sort of an internally used term in progressive circles to denote people who have the right views on issues and then link them with racial views.
That is the idea that wokeness results from identifying race at the center of American life, intersectional politics at the center of American life.
That's what I mean when I talk about the woke progressives versus sort of the moderate Democrats, so-called moderate Democrats.
You're seeing this play out in real time in Congress.
So, if the Democratic Party were smart, they would be featuring people like Representative Abigail Spanberger.
So you've never heard of Representative Abigail Spanberger.
Why?
Because she's a moderate from Virginia.
And Democrats don't want to feature her, which makes very little sense considering that Representative Spanberger is exactly the sort of candidate that Democrats need in order to win a majority.
Now, Nancy Pelosi knows this.
Which is why Nancy Pelosi has openly stated in the past that all of those purple districts are the ones she has to worry about.
Not Ilhan Omar's district, not Rashida Tlaib's district.
Those are pure blue districts.
Not AOC's district.
But Spanberger is getting clocked on all sides for the crime of being a moderate in the Democratic Party.
According to the Washington Post, at the end of another long week in Congress, Representative Abigail Spanberger poured herself a cup of coffee and waited in her D.C.
apartment for her family to arrive from their home outside Richmond.
She felt satisfied with the job well done.
Then she looked at Twitter.
The Democrats saw liberals lashing out at moderates like herself for approving $4.6 billion in emergency aid for migrants at the southern border, a deal they said did little to rein in the Trump administration's immigration policies.
Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin accused lawmakers like Spanberger of being part of a child abuse caucus.
The chief of staff for AOC said their vote would enable a racist system.
On Facebook, Spanberger was labeled too late and clueless.
Twitter, by the way, is a massive bubble that has very little impact on real-world thinking, which is why members of the media who spend an enormous time on Twitter seem to think that that's real life.
That is not how people actually think, which is why Spanberger is much more important to Democrats in real-world time than are Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, but that's not how the Democrats are treating them.
Spanberger was stunned it was the first time the freshman congresswoman could not make sense of what was happening.
Reflecting on the late June episode, Spanberger said she learned a hard lesson she did not anticipate in 2018 when she unseated Republican Dave Brat and helped Democrats win the House majority.
Sometimes your biggest foes will be in your own party.
In the eight months Spanberger has served in Congress, she's been a lawmaker in the middle.
She comes from a historically Republican district that just five years ago replaced Eric Cantor with someone more conservative, but she won last year in large part thanks to left-leaning groups like the Liberal Women of Chesterfield County.
She beat Bratt by just two points.
She's a district Democrats need to keep.
Doesn't matter.
Democrats are attacking her.
She says, That week showed me that for some people, ideology matters more than putting food in the mouth of a child, and that was stunning to me.
Now, if you are Donald Trump, if you are a Republican looking forward to 2020, then maybe you celebrate the fact that Spanberger is being ousted by her own party.
But if you are just an American who cares less about partisan politics than you do about the future of a two-party system, you want people like Spanberger to win.
Not the C, but you want her to defeat her more left-leaning colleagues in Congress.
You want two viable parties that are centered around where the American people are, not a party that is running wildly to the left, far away from the American public, and simply winning on the basis of Republican unpopularity.
Right?
Spanberger is somebody that I would like to see in a leadership position in the Democratic Party, and I think most reasonable people would, not Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
And again, I don't even want to see her in Congress.
I want to see a Republican in Congress.
I like Dave Brat.
I'd like to see Dave Brat back in Congress.
But if you are going to choose between Democrats, that choice does have ramifications.
So there's a theory among Republicans that it's better for Democrats, it's good for Democrats to polarize and centralize around the Elizabeth Warrens and around the Ilhan Omars and the Rashida Tlaibs and the AOCs and the Ayanna Pressleys.
And that's good because the American people look at that and then vote Republican.
That's a dangerous game.
I would much rather have a choice between the Republican Party and a more reasonable Democratic Party, because that means that the backstop of Republicans losing isn't insanity.
I don't want a choice between Republican and insane.
That's a bad choice.
Because while it may mean that Republicans win more often, it also means that when they lose, insane is in charge.
And that is a dangerous, dangerous thing.
And that is what we are seeing with the Democratic Party rallying around Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
So Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are still being championed by the top members of the Democratic Party at this point.
And that is insane.
And members of the media, by the way.
Let's do a quick thought exercise.
We did a little bit yesterday on the radio show.
Let's do a quick thought exercise.
Imagine for a second that you had two white Republican congressmen.
And they planned a trip to Israel in conjunction with an organization that had run pieces quoting anti-Semitic myths about Jews imbibing Christian blood for Passover matzah, that republished a neo-Nazi article decrying the Jew-controlled entertainment media, that suggested that terrorists who murder Israeli children should be honored.
Imagine they're white Republican congresspeople for a second.
Do you think that might be a story?
What if those two sitting white Republican congressmen tweeted out a cartoon from a cartoonist so anti-semitic he won second prize at Iran's Holocaust denial cartoon contest?
Imagine that these two white Republican congressmen had themselves engaged in open anti-semitic slurs ranging from a suggestion that Israel supporters in America suffer from dual loyalty to the accusation that Israel hypnotizes the world to the suggestion that it's all about the Benjamins, American support for Israel.
Imagine these two white Republican congressmen had expressed support for terrorists like Razmia Odeb Imagine that both congresspeople had a long history of associations with open anti-Semites who hate Jews.
And finally, imagine that both white Republican members of Congress were calling for a complete cutoff of aid to Israel, as well as boycott, divestment, and sanctions from Israel, and demanded entry to Israel.
Do you think the story might be the beliefs of the two white Republican congressmen, or would it be how mean Israel is to these people in not allowing them to come?
We all know the answer to this.
If we were talking about Steve King and Pat Buchanan, you know, as a representative, then this would be the story.
The story would be their evil, terrible, horrible, no good, very bad beliefs.
However, make these members of Congress Females of color who are Muslim.
And suddenly the math completely shifts.
And we are not allowed to talk about any of this.
There is no mainstream media coverage of any of these things.
And if there is mainstream media coverage, it's about how audacious these women are.
How they are raising issues that haven't been thought of before.
You know, issues like whether Jews drink Christian blood.
I mean, that is literally what the group that was sponsoring their trip has put on their website.
This is where the Democrats are.
They will defend anything that these women do.
And they will do so if it means justifying full-on terrorism and anti-Semitism.
This became fairly clear yesterday when Rich Lowry of National Review was on CNN with Peter Beinart, representative Hamas.
On CNN.
So Peter Beinart writes for a bunch of publications, including the New Republic and the Nation.
Peter Beinart has always been a representative of the pro-Hamas position in the Israel-Hamas, Israel-Palestinian debate.
He has never seen an action by Israel that he finds appropriate.
He has always justified, and he justified terrorism yesterday on CNN, I mean on national television, in order to defend Omar and Tlaib.
This is how far the left is willing to go to defend these women, specifically because they're trying to, again, grab hold of the passionate base in full knowledge that they are alienating moderates in the process.
Here's Beinart being insane.
Palestinians don't have to be saints in order to deserve the basic rights that all of us take for granted, right?
Mifta has said things that I disagree with.
They made an anti-Semitic statement that they apologized for.
These are strong supporters of the BDS movement.
They are not honest brokers.
We wouldn't afford a white nationalist organization the leeway that Peter is giving this organization.
Oh, they're not saints.
This is an anti-Semitic.
Okay, then this prompted Beinart to actually start justifying terrorism.
civilians and children.
And no matter what you think of the dispute between the Palestinians and Israel, that is an illegitimate tactic that no one should associate with advocates of.
Okay.
And this prompted Bainar to actually start justifying terrorism.
He loses it and he starts justifying terrorism on national TV.
Hannah Neshrawe has devoted her life as a nonviolent activist to opposing an oppression, which none of us does not accord with the values that any of us believe in as Americans.
So she doesn't control her own organization and what it publishes?
Rich, why don't you try spending a little bit of time focusing on the fact that almost $4 billion of U.S. aid is used to put children in detention.
You're the one distracting from the issue.
I'm asking you.
No, no, no.
This is the issue.
You're distracting from the issue because National Review just as National Review defended apartheid and just as you defended segregation, you now defend Israel's oppression of Palestinian basic rights.
It's a tradition for you guys.
Okay.
Then Bainar went even further and he suggested that terrorism may be justified by the fact that Israel is oppressive.
And this is what, this is what Beinart has been saying for years.
I mean, I've been on CNN talking with Peter Beinart and I've said openly that this guy represents the Hamas position.
He's doing all of that because, and increasingly so are members of the Democratic Party, in order to try and make the case that Omar and Tlaib are not out of bounds.
Beinart then tried to defend himself and he said, today I was asked if I support Palestinian suicide bombers.
God forbid, a friend was killed by one, but, but, How's their butt at the end of that statement?
But Palestinians don't forfeit their rights because some in their midst pursue them in an immoral way.
Mandela and Malcolm X endorsed violence, didn't make their oppression okay.
So we're now comparing Nelson Mandela to Mifta and Palestinian terrorists?
All of this to defend the evils and the horrible viewpoints and the anti-Semitism of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
In a second, we'll get to Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
So Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
Well, the press conference yesterday and in this press conference, they make a bunch of anti-Semitic statements and the Democratic Party, again, backing them to the hilt because this is the game in the Democratic Party.
They will defend their radicals.
Under nearly every circumstance, without even asking as to whether their viewpoints are radical.
Here's Rashida Tlaib comparing Israel to South Africa, despite the fact that Arabs and Muslims in Israel can vote, hold positions in the Knesset, are members of the Israeli Supreme Court, that Arabic is an official language in Israel, despite the fact that Arab Muslims in Israel are treated better than they are anywhere in the Arab Muslim world.
Does not matter.
Rashida Tlaib ripping on Israel, calling it an apartheid state.
History does have a habit of repeating itself.
I learned this week that a former member of Congress, Congressman Charles C. Diggs, Jr.
Was denied entry into apartheid South Africa in 1972.
He was also the representative for the 13th congressional district in Michigan.
I was born and raised in the beautiful Detroit where many of my African American teachers taught me about the realities of oppression and justice and the need to speak up and take action.
Calling Israel an apartheid state is obviously anti-semitic because it is not an apartheid state.
And it is, of course, singling out Israel in a way that Rashida Tlaib would never single out anybody else.
And Ilhan Omar made this perfectly obvious.
She actually called for an end to aid to Israel.
I can't imagine why Israel didn't let her in.
She's literally calling for an end to aid to Israel and a boycott of the state of Israel.
I can't imagine why they didn't allow her in to propagandize on behalf of Israel's destruction.
We give Israel more than $3 million in aid every year.
This is predicated on their being an important ally in the region and the only democracy in the Middle East.
We must be asking, as Israel's ally, the Netanyahu government stop the expansion of settlements on Palestinian land and ensure full rights for Palestinians if we are to give them aid.
Okay, like she wants to give Israel aid, and like they're an ally.
Okay, let me be frank about this.
Benjamin Netanyahu put a unilateral settlement freeze in place two years ago, and none of these people cared one iota about it.
This is all a lie.
Ilhan Omar.
Rashida Tlaib, they want Israel destroyed.
And they're obvious about this, and they're so disingenuous about it as well.
Again, the idea that she is a secret ally of Israel is insane.
You have to be a nutty person to believe this sort of nonsense.
And she tried her intersectional appeal.
She tried to say, you know, people keep calling me an anti-Semite.
I don't know why, even though I just tried to campaign with a group that has pushed the blood libel.
Sure, I don't know why people keep calling me an anti-Semite.
You know what this is?
This is all about Trump trying to separate Muslims from Jews.
I would go more with it is you being a radical Jew hater.
I got into a little bit of a spat with Ilhan Omar on Twitter yesterday, because the folks at Media Matters doing their usual solid work took me out of context on something.
I tweeted about it.
Ilhan Omar then tweeted that I was both a fool and hateful, to which I tweeted back, well, you know, I must have hypnotized the world using my Benjamins.
But in any case, Ilhan Omar tries this intersectional approach where she's not an anti-Semite.
It's just the Trump administration trying to separate off the Jews and the Muslims.
This is this is insanity.
We know Donald Trump would love nothing more than to use this issue to pit Muslims and Jewish Americans against each other.
The Muslim community and the Jewish community are being othered.
And made into the boogeyman by this administration.
But as we will hear today, people of all different faiths are coming together to speak up against the status quo in the region.
I'm grateful for the solidarity shown by this.
This is the myth.
This is the myth that Ilhan Omar and the Democratic Party tell themselves.
The myth they tell themselves that there is such a thing as an intersectional coalition and they're all on each other's side and they all oppose Trump.
And that's what will hold them together.
In the end, that coalition will fall apart.
It will break apart on the shoals of its own identity politics.
The fact is this, Ilhan Omar, she don't like the Jews very much.
And it is obvious from all of her behavior and everything that she says that this is the case.
And then she brings in token Jews from Jewish Voice for Peace, which is a pathetic anti-Israel, anti-Jewish organization.
And then she talks about how pro-Jewish.
It's insanity.
The idea is that hatred of Trump will hold that coalition together.
It will until it doesn't.
It will until it doesn't.
And it's one of the reasons why it is incumbent on President Trump to actually, as president, try and embolden the decent people still left in the Democratic Party, and there are many of them, to stand up against the hatred inside their own party.
It's funny, I hear from Democrats all the time, like, why won't Republicans denounce people inside their own party who say bad things?
If you've ever listened to this show, you know that I do it on a regular basis.
You know that I've denounced people up to and including President Trump repeatedly for things that they have said.
You know that I maxed out to Kevin Feenstra, Steve King's opponent in Iowa, right, out of my own pocket, and I've encouraged, Kevin Feenstra's raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, in large part because I have had Kevin Feenstra on my show, because I think that Steve King needs to be ousted from Congress.
People in the Republican Party are doing a much better job of standing up to people inside their own party.
Democrats are rallying around Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
They're not even asking the question, oh, weird that they would be rallying with groups that want the destruction of the state of Israel and openly celebrate terrorism.
Very weird, very odd.
We mustn't pay attention to it because, after all, the heart and soul, the scheidenfreude, the zeitgeist, not scheidenfreude, the zeitgeist of the time suggests that Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are in the ascendancy.
And I don't think it's in the long term or even medium term interest of the country for the Democrats to rally around their worst members any more than I think any more than I think Democrats should should root for Republicans to rally around their worst members so that they can nut pick and then use the worst Republicans in order to suggest that that is the entire Republican Party.
Okay, in just a second, I want to get to an actual good development from Facebook.
Really, believe it or not.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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All righty.
So let's talk about Facebook doing something right.
Okay, so Facebook actually did something right.
Senator John Kyle was brought in by Facebook to investigate claims that Facebook has an anti-conservative bias.
And I have had suspicions over the past few years, particularly in 2018, there was a Facebook algorithmic change that really hurt conservative sites in a serious way.
And it turns out that there are serious concerns.
That there are serious concerns with regard to Facebook's bias.
But it appears that Facebook, unlike a lot of the other big tech companies, is taking those concerns seriously.
And we here on the Ben Shapiro Show like to give credit to people when they do the right things, even as we like to clock them when they do the wrong things.
So good for Facebook.
So Senator John Kyle, the Republican, former Republican Senator from Arizona, he was brought in with Covington and Burling to do a full-scale investigation into this.
And here is what they found.
He says we cast a wide net using a broad definition of conservative in order to capture for this report the concerns raised by all types of conservatives.
Conservative is an imprecise term.
For our purposes, it includes political conservatives, people of Orthodox religious views, libertarians, pro-lifers, traditionalists, Republicans, and free speech advocates.
As an initial step, we identified key conservative organizations, individuals, and lawmakers who either use study or have the potential to regulate Facebook.
Since May 2018, we have interviewed approximately 133 of them.
We presented our preliminary findings to Facebook in early August 2018, and then they conducted follow-up interviews.
So here is what they found.
Here is what this internal study over at Facebook, led by Senator John Kyle, found.
And this is a good study that is attempting to do the right thing.
All of big tech should take note.
Twitter, particularly, should take note because that continues to run like a garbage heap.
Okay, but Facebook is actually trying to do the right thing here.
So here is what they found.
There were six categories of concerns.
All of these are legit.
Okay, content distribution and algorithms.
In order to sort through the thousands of posts that Facebook users could potentially encounter on a given day, Facebook deploys a variety of mechanisms to prioritize the content most relevant to each individual user.
Conservatives fear that these mechanisms prioritize content in ways that suppress their viewpoints.
Interviewees voiced three general concerns on this front.
First, the January 2018 newsfeed algorithm change.
I talked about this at the time.
In January 2018, Facebook changed its content ranking algorithm to favor content that a given user's friends and family comment on and share, as well as news from quote-unquote broadly trusted sources.
People on the right were very concerned at Facebook's definition of broadly trusted sources, as well we should have been.
This is correct.
Clickbait and spam.
Also, Facebook made a concerted effort to deprioritize clickbait and spam.
Interviewees generally supported this goal, but found Facebook's policies for doing so too opaque.
Again, that is a correct critique of Facebook, that Facebook was prioritizing as spam headlines that didn't read like a boring headline from the New York Times.
Finally, fact-checking in false news.
Interviewees expressed significant concerns about Facebook's efforts to combat what the company refers to as false news.
In particular, interviewees pointed to examples of instances when some of the third-party fact-checkers utilized by Facebook at various times, Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, AP, which are certified by the Poynter Institute, an entity that owns PolitiFact, have skewed to the ideological left.
We note that Facebook has accepted fact-checkers affiliated with conservative publishers, including the Daily Caller's fact-checking unit, once it was approved by Poynter.
Now, as I have said for a long time, using left-wing Facebook fact-checking sites as a proxy for actual fact-checks is nonsense.
PolitiFact is wildly biased to the left.
Snopes tries to debunk the Babylon Bee every five minutes.
Using them as a proxy for fact-checking sites is nonsense, and there are no fact-checking sites on the right.
The Daily Caller has one.
The Weekly Standard used to have one, but then it stopped being operational.
And so what Facebook needs to do is either form their own independent fact-checking group that includes Republicans and conservatives and libertarians, or they need to work with conservative groups to come up with alternatives to PolitiFact and Snopes and FactCheck, because otherwise, just by absence of right-wing fact-checking organizations, left-wing fact-checking organizations become a club to wield against conservative media.
Okay, so those are three of the concerns.
Other concerns were content policies.
Hate speech designations, for example.
Interviewees' concerns stemmed both from the notion of having a hate speech policy in the first place and from unfair labeling of certain speech as hate speech.
Interviewees pointed out the highly subjective nature of determining what constitutes hate, an assessment that may be subject to the biases of content reviewers.
Also, Facebook prohibits the use of the platform by terrorist groups and hate organizations, and it is unclear exactly how the hate organization designation is made, especially considering that Facebook had been perceived to rely on the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is a garbage left-wing hit group.
So, same sort of issue as the fact-checking group.
And then finally, there were other content policies that a lot of conservatives were worried about.
They believed that Facebook's community standards were disproportionately affecting conservative content, particularly pro-life, socially conservative, religious content, because Facebook would constantly flag conservative content.
So, Facebook is now responding, and they're changing some of their policies.
They're changing some of their policies.
So they are changing their content enforcement policies.
Again, this is good for Facebook.
Again, we should give them credit when they're moving in the right direction.
They're going to specifically try to fight back against badly flagged content.
They're going to create the ability to appeal decisions.
They're going to change their political ad requirements.
So this is good.
They're adding to transparency.
So let's talk about some of the things that Facebook is actually going to do.
So, they're going to help users understand why they do or do not see certain content in their newsfeeds.
This is all you can ask from a big tech company is that they be more transparent about what they are doing.
Facebook introduced Why Am I Seeing This post to help users understand why they see certain content.
They are going to provide explanations of the newsfeed rankings.
Facebook has really not clarified its community standards and newsfeed ranking, but now the company says that they want to do so.
They also want to give people ways to control their newsfeed so that you are not going to be controlled by the great minds over at Facebook.
They want to make enforcement actions against pages more transparent so people know exactly why they are being flagged, why their posts are being treated as bad policy.
And they're going to share more details on exactly how they create their community standards.
So this is all.
Transparency is a good thing.
They're creating an oversight board for content decisions.
They will issue kind of quasi-judicial decisions on how they are controlling content.
And they're going to include a conservative feedback in that process as well as a public comment period.
They're going to ensure that that oversight board has viewpoint diversity.
They're going to create an appeals process.
If you get flagged, then you can now appeal it.
And they're going to increase staffing so that publications can reach out to Facebook more directly.
They're also going to change their advertising policies.
One of the big complaints is that Facebook had banned any ad that had pictures of fetuses or born human babies, premature, that were pro-life.
And now they are changing those content policies.
Facebook has historically prohibited advertisements showing medical tubes connected to the human body.
That policy resulted in the rejection of pro-life ads.
They are changing that now.
So again, is this a final answer for all of Facebook's problems?
No.
But good for Facebook for taking this seriously.
Really good for them for taking it seriously.
And conservatives should say that.
Conservatives should come out and they should say when Facebook does something right, when Big Tech does the right thing, they should be praised.
This encourages them to do the right thing, guys.
And I understand there is now sort of a cottage industry and beating up on Facebook particularly, but beating up on all of Big Tech?
And I think that a lot of the time Big Tech deserves it.
I've beaten up Big Tech my share.
But it is because some of these companies are better than others at dealing with the criticism that they should be praised when they actually deal with it in the right way.
Now, we'll keep an eye on Facebook and make sure that they actually implement some of these solutions, that they continue to evolve in their pursuit of solutions here, but good for them.
And don't trust anybody on the left who is trying to make common cause with people on the right to regulate Facebook.
I do not think Elizabeth Warren has the same priorities on Facebook as Josh Hawley.
I really don't think so.
So be very careful before you call for government regulation of big tech, when as it turns out, a lot of the big tech companies are actually seeking to, not a lot, some of the big tech companies are seeking to fix some of their internal problems.
So again, good for Facebook.
Okay.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, the big story yesterday out of New York is that the officer in the Eric Garner case was fired.
That officer, his name is Daniel Pantaleo.
He was fired after it has now been five years since the death of Eric Garner, and that was tragic.
I mean, Eric Garner was distributing loosies, loose cigarettes, on the streets in New York.
He resisted arrest.
He was put in a suppression hold, and then he didn't die because his windpipe was crushed or because he was choked to death.
He died because the physical stress of being put in that hold Triggered his asthma.
He was 395 pounds, had pre-existing conditions.
He had an enlarged heart that was twice normal size, and he died effectively of asthma and heart attack on the way to the hospital.
The officer in that case was targeted by the media as an example of race-based policing.
Now, if you want to make the case that that law shouldn't have been on the books, I'm with you.
If you want to make the case that the police have been empowered to aggressively pursue minor crimes that should not be in fact crimes, that's not the police's fault.
That's the legislature's fault.
That's the city council's fault in New York City.
When you attack cigarettes at insane rates, and then people start a black market for cigarettes, and then you empower the police to go enforce that, the police are going to do what they're supposed to do.
Instead, that turned into a whole racial narrative, and this particular officer got caught up in it, never mind the fact that he was ordered by his lieutenant to suppress Eric Garner, who was in fact resisting arrest, never mind there were black officers on the scene, never mind that Eric Garner The United States Department of Justice, absent and unwilling to act, even to come to any decision, for five long years.
his job and he has to be fired.
And then we all have to celebrate Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was knocked by the left for not having fired Pantelio.
He said today we saw justice done.
United States Department of Justice absent and unwilling to act even to come to any decision for five long years.
But today we have finally seen justice done.
Today we saw the NYPD's own disciplinary process act fairly and impartially. - Thank you.
Okay, so that is not the process acting fairly and impartially in reality.
This was a railroading of an officer.
Again, I don't know that the officer acted entirely appropriately, but this is certainly not a fireable offense, okay?
Using a suppression hold on a person who is resisting arrest, and the person dies because the person happens to have pre-existing medical conditions.
Not because you intended to kill him, not because you acted in reckless and irresponsible fashion knowing it would kill him, but firing the guy over this?
It's pretty clear that this was a political process.
Even the NYPD commissioner admitted.
He said, listen, if I was a police officer today, I'd be very, very angry at me.
I've been a cop a long time.
And if I was still a cop, I'd probably be mad at me.
I would.
You're not looking out for us.
But I am.
It's my responsibility as police commissioner to look out for the city and certainly to look out for the New York City police officers.
They took this job to make a difference.
And you all know the city's been transformed.
Had a lot of help.
But it's the cops out there right now and the thousands that have come before us that continue to make this city safe.
I know some NYPD officers.
I can guarantee you that they do not feel comfortable that if they do their jobs, they're going to be backed up by the political forces at work in New York City.
It's the same thing in Los Angeles.
It's the same thing in most of our major cities.
The political forces always have an interest in throwing officers under the bus.
I mean, again, there's this revisionist history that has set in around this particular case, but it is important to recognize what exactly happened here.
Barry Latzer had a piece in City Journal back in September of 2017 talking about what exactly happened.
He said, context is everything here.
The Garner case became a cause celeb because Garner was black and Pantaleo was white, and the death fit a media narrative about interracial law enforcement confrontations.
But the facts of the Garner case demonstrate the incident bears little resemblance to such characterization.
An NYPD lieutenant erected Pantaleo and his partner to arrest Garner, so charges that the officer singled him out because of his race are nonsense.
The arrest order was issued because that part of Staten Island near the ferry docks was the subject of repeated complaints about illegal street vendors, diverting customers from shops, and even selling drugs.
Garner had had at least three previous encounters with police just that year.
He'd been arrested twice and given a warning.
At the time of the fatal incident, he was free on bail for offenses including selling untaxed cigarettes, driving without a license, marijuana possession, and impersonation.
The case against Pantelio rests on the supposed chokehold he used to make the arrest.
He never sought to choke Garner to death or even injure him.
He was doing his job taking the resisting man to the ground, as NYPD regulations provide.
Had Garner been cooperative, as the officers requested, the confrontation never would have happened.
Garner resisted when the police tried to grab his flailing arms.
He says, every time you see me, you want to mess with me.
I'm tired of it.
It stops today.
Pantaleo put his forearm around Garner's neck and twisted him to the ground, probably the simplest way of subduing a man of Garner's girth.
Pantaleo then held Garner's head down to the sidewalk.
The neck hold, characterized by the medical examiner's office as a choke hold, lasted 15 seconds.
Pantaleo released it once Garner was down on the sidewalk.
And that is when it became clear that Garner was actually having a serious problem breathing.
He said, I can't breathe because he was suffering from asthma.
Apparently, people didn't even think that he was being abused.
There were supervising officers at the scene, including a black police sergeant.
They didn't really believe even that he was in medical distress, because they didn't see how he could be, given the treatment that he just received.
Here's the reality.
If Eric Garner had not had pre-existing medical conditions, not only is this not a national news story, the NYPD dismisses all charges against Pantaleo.
So, again, this is an example of how politics tends to infuse situations with import that they do not carry.
I don't mean that it's not important when a person dies after being put in a suppression hold by police for 15 seconds.
Of course, that's important to the family.
Of course, we should always try to keep a tight leash on how the police act with regard to civilians.
Of course, of course, of course.
But the question is, in this case, Did Pantelio, who was not prosecuted, who the DOJ investigated for five years, deserve to lose his job at NYPD over political posturing by Bill de Blasio and the NYPD commissioner?
I don't understand how you're not going to get blowback from police officers and why you're not going to get another Ferguson effect.
Police officers saying, I'm not going to go and do these things you want me to do because every time I do, you guys undercut us.
We're playing a dangerous game here.
When we make the Police's ability to do their job, subject to political whims.
I don't mean, again, the subject to common standards of decency.
I mean political whims, meaning this, again, this case would not have been a national story if Pantelio were not white, or if Eric Garner were white.
It was made a national story by the media for a particular racial narrative, and now it costs Pantelio his job, and if you're a police officer in the NYPD, I'm not sure how much trust you can have in the political processes above you.
I'm not just saying that for me.
I think that it's pretty clear from the officers I talk to that they feel the same way.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
Matt Best is a former member of the military and he is also a former Army Ranger.
He's also one of the founders of our sponsors of our Black Rifle Coffee.
Which is, by the way, the best coffee on the market.
And he's also an awesome dude.
I mean, just a really great dude.
He has a great book out called Thank You For My Service, obviously a play on Thank You For Your Service.
Thank You For My Service, because he says that it changed his life, it made his life inestimably better.
He wants to prove every day, he says, that, in the book, he wants to prove that not all members of the military are sort of these Hollywood characters who are suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, that not every member of the military is a broken man.
He's leading a successful, rich life, and his book, Thank You For My Service, is well worth reading, so you can go check that out.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so, you remember that time, like a week and a half ago, when Chris Cuomo got into an altercation with somebody in public?
I said at the time, I don't blame Chris Cuomo for getting into an altercation with somebody in public.
The person was harassing him in public.
The online attitude has now spilled over into real life.
The online attitude, which is that you dunk on people and you yell at people and you act like an ass to people, has now spilled over into real life, where people are confronting each other publicly just to show their disdain for one another.
And it's gross.
And that's true whether it's the right or the left.
It's happened to me a couple of times in the last three weeks.
It's in front of my family.
It's really inappropriate, and it's disgusting, and I don't blame Cuomo for getting kicked.
I do blame Cuomo for suggesting idiotically that somebody calling him Fredo is the same thing as calling somebody the N-word, or that Fredo is, in fact, a racial slur.
It is not.
It is a specific reference to a movie character who is seen as a weak younger brother.
Well, one of the ways that you don't actually get rid of that stereotype of you as a weak younger brother is to have your older brother come out and defend you.
So, Andrew Cuomo, Chris's brother, came out yesterday on the radio, and he said, no, no, no, this was a racial slur, and I'm coming out in defense of my younger brother Fredo.
It fuels the hate.
Italian-Americans are not mafia.
They're not mafia.
The Godfather movie, don't you dare, don't you dare liken my family to the family you saw in The Godfather or The Sopranos.
Mario Cuomo lived with those rumors of the mafia.
They hurt him.
They scarred him.
Every Italian lives with it.
Really?
I know a lot of Italians.
Most of them, I don't think, walk around being like, yeah, everybody keeps seeing me as a character from The Godfather.
I can't stand it.
Also, my favorite part of this is, don't you dare.
Don't you dare.
Or what?
Or what?
Like, what?
I don't want to appear like a mafioso, so I'm going to defend my brother by threatening you.
Well done, Andrew Cuomo.
Just really strong, strong stuff.
Don't you ever take sides against the family again.
That's where we are.
Every day, again, that running gun battle for dumbest Cuomo brother continues apace.
And it appears from that clip that Andrew took the lead just for a brief moment in time.
Okay, we will be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
We will see you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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