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Sept. 18, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:36
The Israel Impasse | Ep. 863
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Israel's elections end with no clear winner, President Trump receives support from a feisty Corey Lewandowski, and the woke scolds come for Joe Biden and comedy.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Absolute chaos in this Israeli election.
I will bring you the results and I will explain how those results work.
I am familiar with the system over there.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so Israel had its second election in like eight months yesterday, and that followed another election just a few months ago in which an impasse was created after Benjamin Netanyahu apparently had a majority bloc formed, and a man named Navigdor Lieberman, who was his former defense minister and actually a former member of and a man named Navigdor Lieberman, who was his former defense minister and actually a Yeah.
He took his party, the Yisrael Beiteinu party, and basically refused to form a coalition with Netanyahu, so long as Netanyahu was, in his words, pandering toward the religious parties in Israel.
So, there are several competing cross-currents in Israeli politics.
In the United States, abroad, everybody tends to think that Israeli politics is mainly and centrally about Policy toward the Palestinian Authority, or policy toward Europe, or policy toward the United States, and that simply is not true in much the same way that policy in the United States and politics in the United States are largely not about foreign policy.
And in the United States, most of the stuff we think about is domestic policy.
In Israel, most of the stuff that people think about is domestic policy, specifically because there is a widespread consensus ever since the Second Intifada of 2000-2001 There's a widespread consensus that there is no peace to be negotiated with a bunch of terrorists, which of course is true.
And this is the dirty little secret of Israeli politics that the press seem to want to ignore.
That dirty little secret is that even if Benjamin Netanyahu does not end up as Prime Minister of Israel, there is no world in which there are bilateral negotiations with the Palestinian Authority ending with a peace deal.
It's not a thing that's going to happen.
Kachov LeVlam, the blue and white party.
In Israel, which is led by a former IDF chief of staff named Benny Gantz, who right now, the Europeans are attempting to try him for war crimes or some such because if you ever served in the Israeli military, the Europeans will try to try you for war crimes.
Benny Gantz is not going to fundamentally shift Israeli foreign policy.
He may shift domestic policy with regard to economics.
Bibi has been, Netanyahu, has been a liberalizing prime minister in terms of trying to free the economy.
He has also worked hand-in-glove with a lot of the religious parties.
And this is another competing cross-current in Israel.
So there are a bunch of domestic competing cross-currents in Israeli politics, as I mentioned.
One is economic.
The foundations of the state of Israel are socialistic.
If you go back to the foundation of the state of Israel, it was founded on the socialist ideal.
People lived on kibbutzim, which were basically communes.
That fell apart.
Israel has been moving in a more capitalist direction ever since, which is why it is one of the world's tech leaders now, which is why there are a lot of companies that are based in Israel.
It is leaps and bounds ahead of a lot of other countries on a per capita basis in terms of technological development and education.
That is because of a liberalization of the economy, but there's a significant and huge social welfare state in the state of Israel, and that's been a source of tension in the state of Israel.
And then another major source of tension has been the religious versus the secular in Israel.
So the state was founded by secular Zionists, people who believed that there needed to be a homeland for Jews to keep them safe, but weren't particularly religious, didn't have a lot of relationship with traditional Jewish religion.
And then there's a big block of people living in Israel who are very religious, and there's all sorts of conflict over Public laws.
Like, for example, should the buses run on Shabbat?
Should the buses run on Sabbath?
The religious say, no.
Why are we publicly funding buses to run on the Jewish day of rest?
It is a Jewish state.
And secular Israelis saying, right, it's a state for the Jews.
It's a Jewish state where Jews are supposed to be safe.
But it is not a Jewish state in terms of ritual law.
Okay, so that's one area of conflict.
A smaller one.
A bigger one is whether the so-called Haredim, the media called them ultra-Orthodox, but basically it is a sect of Orthodox Judaism, whether the Haredim should serve in the military.
Because the military is overwhelmingly secular, a lot of the...
The Haredim say they don't want to serve in the military, and so they get some sort of religious exemption.
Now, on a personal level, I'm not in favor of the religious exemption.
On a personal level, my belief is that if a secular Israeli is serving in the military, then a religious Israeli should serve in the military.
That everybody should serve in the military in Israel, and there are things called Hester Yishivot, where there are a bunch of Orthodox Jews who do serve in the military in Israel, and that should become the model in Israel, this sort of religious Zionist movement, and that's a powerful movement in Israel.
But the conflict between the more Orthodox parties and the secular parties broke out into the open a couple of years ago, within the last couple of years.
Because Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition in Israel, it's not a two-party system.
It's a multi-party system.
You have to have a bunch of parties that form a majority and they all have to get together and then they have to form a majority of the Knesset in order to govern.
Bibi's coalition has been formed with the help of the so-called right-wing parties as well as with the religious parties.
So that would be parties like Yisrael Beiteinu, which is a secular but right-wing party, particularly when it comes to foreign policy, as well as parties like Shas or UTJ, United Torah Judaism, which are the religious parties and vote largely based on religious concerns and subsidies to religious communities and all of that.
So, Yisrael Beiteinu decided, Avigdor Lieberman, who has a real dislike for Bibi Netanyahu, there's a significant personality clash between the two of them.
And that is partially because Netanyahu has a long history of basically stymieing the growth efforts of people within the Likud.
So one of the weird things about Israeli politics also is that a lot of the other parties in Israeli politics were started by people who were castoffs from the Likud.
In other words, people who wanted to succeed Netanyahu, and Netanyahu wasn't making room for them.
Because in Israel, very often, the leadership of the party sort of moves on to make room for the up-and-comers.
So you have a bunch of people who are outside of Likud now, outside of Netanyahu's party, who started their own parties because Netanyahu was not really allowing them a path to power.
So that would include Ayelet Chaked.
Ayelet Chaked is a very... She's been noted in the foreign media because she's very attractive.
She also happens to be a brilliant lawyer.
She was Justice Minister under Benjamin Netanyahu.
And now she is the head of a different party.
She's the head of another right-wing party that is also led by Naftali Bennett, who also used to be a member of Likud, I believe.
And then you have Benny Gantz, who I believe also used to be a member of Likud, leading Kachov Levan.
And you have Yigdor Lieberman, who used to be a member of Likud, leading Yisrael Beitenu.
Bibi has maintained power at the expense of kicking out, or forcing out, or convincing people to leave, moving them out of Likud.
And this has led to an erosion in the size and umbrella status of Likud, but it has led to Bibi Netanyahu being able to maintain power with a series of coalition governments.
So anyway, a couple of years ago, Avigdor Lieberman basically made it clear that he and Netanyahu were significantly at odds, and he was not going to sit in a government that was led by Netanyahu.
Okay, so it looked as though Netanyahu might cut a deal with Lieberman.
And the deal was going to be that he was going to force the religious groups with which he was already in a coalition.
He's going to force those groups to do things they didn't want to do.
He might think about trying to push some of them into more military service or cutting subsidies or any of that sort of stuff.
And Lieberman was pushing very hard for that, Netanyahu said no, and so the government fell apart.
There was an election, and Lieberman was still the kingmaker.
And if Igor Lieberman is a clever political player, he was still the kingmaker, because basically you had two blocks inside of Israeli politics.
You had Likud and the right-wing parties and the religious parties, and then you had Blue and White, which the media are calling center-left, but it really is not a center-left party.
It's sort of a slightly to the left of Likud party.
A central left party would have been in the old days labor, but labor is no longer really even a player.
It's kind of amazing.
Blue and white with the rest of the left and the Arab party.
So 20% of Israel's population is Arab and Muslim, which again goes to the idea that Israel is an apartheid state.
The third largest party in the Knesset is a Muslim Arab party, right?
The joint list.
Okay, so.
That other block also had like 55 seats and Lieberman was the kingmaker.
Well, Bibi had a coalition he could have formed with Lieberman but they couldn't cut a deal so Bibi called new elections.
This was the second round of the elections and they result in exactly the same situation.
So Bibi ends up with basically 56 seats in the right-wing coalition.
The center-left and joint list end up with 55 seats or 56 seats.
The results are still coming in, in their coalition.
And Lieberman ends up being the swing.
So there's a lot of talk about how exactly all of this ends up, right?
Does it end up that Lieberman sides with the center-left and the joint list?
Does he side instead with Netanyahu and the religious parties and they somehow find a way to bridge that gap?
Or do they do what Lieberman wants?
What Lieberman wants is he wants to be seen as the kingmaker in what they call a unity government.
A unity government is where people from across the aisle come together and then they just form a broad coalition for purposes of governing.
And what he wants is for Cajol the Levan, which is Netanyahu's chief rivals, to join a coalition government with Netanyahu's Likud and Lieberman holding them together.
And that would be an extremely strong majority.
Because if you have blue and white, which has I think 32 seats, and you have Likud, which also has 32 seats, or 33, and you add those together, it's 55, and then you have Lieberman on top of that, you now have 64, you can add in...
You can add in another bunch of seats from probably the right-wing, I yell at Shaqqaid, Naftali Bennett party.
You end up with probably well over 70 seats.
Now, the problem with the unity government is it's kind of fragile, right?
Because people don't get along so well, right?
They don't have a lot of shared political priorities.
So again, three options on the table.
Lieberman joins the central left and the Arab party.
To create a majority coalition.
That's not going to happen.
So the media are invested in the idea that's going to happen.
It's not going to happen.
Okay, Lieberman is not joining a coalition with the Muslim Arab Party joint list in Israel.
The reason being, members of that party, the parties that formed that joint, it's called the joint list because it used to be a bunch of smaller parties that all joined together to create a joint list.
Those parties have openly in the past called for the destruction of the State of Israel.
Lieberman is a hawk on security.
It would be like John Bolton joining a coalition with Ilhan Omar.
It's not going to happen.
Avigdor Lieberman is not joining a majority coalition with the Joint List, and he has said so.
It's not me saying that, it's Avigdor Lieberman saying that.
The media, because they hate Netanyahu so much, they keep acting as though Lieberman is going to join that coalition and cast Netanyahu completely out of power.
That is not a thing that's going to happen.
So, the other two possibilities are that Lieberman joins the right-wing coalition because Netanyahu pays him off with something.
Netanyahu gives him a particularly juicy post.
He puts a bunch of members of Yisrael Beiteinu into the government in various posts.
He makes concessions to Yisrael Beiteinu with regard to the religious parties.
And Lieberman is able to pry out of Netanyahu what he wasn't able to pry out of Netanyahu before, and Netanyahu remains prime minister.
Or alternatively, you end up with a rotating prime ministership.
And there was some talk about this after the last election, that basically, you would end up with almost what the founders envisioned when they had the president elected as the person with the most vote, and the vice president became the second most voted person.
And you ended up with this weird government where Thomas Jefferson was serving in John Adams' administration.
It's kind of like that.
You would end up with Benny Gantz as part-time prime minister, and you'd end up with Bibi Netanyahu as part-time prime minister, and Lieberman as the power broker between the two.
Those are the two available choices.
And if none of those choices happen, we get another election, and they just keep doing this thing until they form a coalition.
So that is where things sit.
The way the media are playing this as big loss for Bibi Netanyahu.
Except I'm not sure that Netanyahu really thought that things were gonna radically change from the last election cycle.
In fact, the best thing for Bibi Netanyahu is for Bibi Netanyahu probably to enter the unity government.
Now, I don't know if Netanyahu believes that.
But Netanyahu may believe that his best path is to continue to maintain power by cutting a deal with Lieberman.
And Lieberman is going to exact a heavy price in order to make that happen.
There's been a lot of talk in Israel about whether Netanyahu's relationship with Trump didn't pay off to his benefit, that he was saying that he's super tight with Trump, and that the Israeli public was basically like, well, it doesn't have to be you, it could be Benny Gantz negotiating with Trump.
Also, he had mentioned the possibility of a joint defense pact, and Trump Had not come through with anything like that in the days leading up to the election.
There was this idea that maybe he had undermined Netanyahu.
Jerusalem Post was talking about that.
I don't think that's really the case.
I think the people are just frustrated that Netanyahu didn't form a government last time.
And so they voted exactly the same way this time that they did last time.
Which makes sense.
If we re-held the vote of 2016, in 2017, it would probably look a lot like the vote of 2016.
So, that is where things currently lie.
I think that the most likely outcome probably is the unity government.
I think that that would be the smartest thing for Netanyahu to do, because Netanyahu is currently under the possibility of indictment.
He can't be indicted while he is the sitting prime minister.
So, so long as he is the sitting prime minister, rotating power with Benny Gantz, it's not bad for him.
Plus, let's be real about this.
Benny Gantz, who's this general, the head of the Kachov Levan, the blue and white party, Benny Gantz is an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a riddle.
Nobody knows anything about him.
They know sort of his military background.
He's a lot like a lot of other former Israeli leaders who have a military background, but they've kept their politics pretty hidden.
That'd be people like Yitzhak Rabin, who ended up on the left, and Ehud Barak, who's also an IDF chief of staff, who ended up on the left.
It would also include People like Ariel Sharon, who ended up on the right, but not near as right as people thought he was going to be, who was a general in the Israeli army.
Israel has a habit of electing high-ranking military men to positions of power because Israel is constantly in a tenuous international situation with regard to security.
But if the Israeli public see a rotating prime ministership between Bibi and Benny Gantz, or a shared power arrangement between the two of them, It's pretty obvious who's going to win that public relations battle.
Benny Gantz is not good at this.
They've been hiding Benny Gantz basically behind a tree this whole election cycle.
And Benny Gantz has said five words maybe for the entire election cycle.
So if he actually ends up in power, I do not think that that is a long-lasting arrangement.
Now the other possibility...
is that the Likud actually ousts Netanyahu in order to cut a deal with Lieberman.
That is sort of the out of left field possibility, is that the internal Likud battle takes place and somebody else, like a second tier person, there are a few names that are floating around, ends up taking over the leadership of Likud.
He cuts a deal with Lieberman and he ends up becoming the next prime minister.
What does this mean for foreign policy?
The answer for foreign policy is it doesn't mean a hell of a lot.
Really, it does not mean a hell of a lot.
Because again, there's a widespread Israeli consensus.
Iran wants to murder us.
Hezbollah wants to murder us.
Hamas wants to murder us.
This is what Israelis think.
And the Europeans don't like us.
And Trump's our friend.
And we're not cutting a deal with a bunch of terrorists who want to murder us.
That is the internal Israeli consensus over there.
That's not changing, whether Benny Gantz ends up in power or whether Netanyahu ends up in power.
And it's going to be a widespread surprise to the left when Benny Gantz ends up basically governing like Bibi Netanyahu would on foreign policy.
And it'll be fascinating to see how they react to that, frankly, because they've always posed it as that Bibi Netanyahu was the obstacle to peace in the Middle East.
The obvious truth is that it is all the terrorists that surround Israel that are the obstacle to peace in the Middle East.
And then I predict what you will see Is the media turn on the Israeli public and suggest that the Israeli public is the real obstacle.
So it's no longer Netanyahu.
It's no longer Benny Gantz.
It's all the people who elect these people.
If only they would elect, they'd bring back the Meretz party.
If only they bring back Shalom Arshav, then bring back the Peace Now party from the mid-90s, then everything would be healed and be all better.
The media have a vested interest in trying to portray the Israel-Palestinian conflict as Israel's fault.
It is a bunch of crap.
It has always been a bunch of crap.
They will continue to press that forward.
They've tried to blame it on Netanyahu so they can avoid the baseline reality, which is that the Israeli public are not going to make concessions to terrorists.
But I think they're soon to be disabused of the notion that this is just a Netanyahu policy.
This is an Israeli policy.
Israelis are not cutting deals with Mahmoud Abbas's terrorist Palestinian Authority or Hamas or Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah.
They're not doing any of those things.
Okay, coming up in a second, we'll talk about Mike Pompeo, who's heading to the Middle East to figure out Iran strategy.
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Okay, so Mike Pompeo, meanwhile.
is headed over to the Middle East to figure out Iran's strategy.
It's unclear the Iran strategy that is actually being pursued at this point.
As I say yesterday, I think that the actual foreign policy of the United States is, was, and kind of always will be muddled through because the American people aren't interested in empire building.
I think correctly so.
The American people are also not interested in full-scale isolationism because every time the United States gets isolationist, we get a Pearl Harbor or a 9-11.
So we end up kind of being mildly reactive.
Yeah, we're present in the world.
We have bases all over the place.
We have a strong military, and we can react to threats, but we don't want long-term occupations or invasions.
We're not into that sort of thing.
And so what happens when there's a hotspot like Iran tends to be the possibility of a flare-up, and then it kind of recedes.
Iran is the herpes outbreak of the Middle East, the Iranian government.
They flare up, and then they sort of recede.
So Mike Pompeo is trying to create a policy right now.
The Washington Post reporting, That the Trump administration has announced that Pompeo would fly to the Persian Gulf on Wednesday to discuss a response to an attack on Saudi oil facilities as Iran's Supreme Leader ruled out any direct talks with the United States.
Pompeo's spur-of-the-moment trip, which will include stops in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, underscores the danger that tensions with Iran could spiral into military conflict.
President Trump has said Iran was probably responsible for the attack, that he would like to avoid a war Pompeo has assigned blame more directly.
Obviously, obviously does not wish for there to be a war with Iran at this point.
This is why I've suggested that the likeliest solution here is that the United States pledges to strengthen the defense of Saudi Arabia without pledging any sort of aggressive action against Iran.
I think that's probably the happy medium where the U.S.
ends up.
We maybe end up helping flag some tankers in the Straits of Hormuz and guiding those tankers through the Straits of Hormuz against the possibility of Iranian aggression, reestablishing some sense of deterrence.
The weekend attack, which the United States says it believes originated in Iran, despite claims by rebels in Yemen that they carried it out, appears to have dashed all hope that Trump might meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the UN General Assembly in New York.
While the Iranians, I don't think, were all that interested in face-to-face meetings with Trump, I think they're more interested in pressuring the Europeans to break with Trump and undermine the JCPOA, the revocation of the Iran nuclear deal.
The Europeans want to surrender to Iran.
It is pretty much that simple.
The Europeans want Iran to get their money.
They want Iran to be part of the world economy.
And they don't care if Iran spreads terrorism all over the Middle East.
They simply don't care.
Because they figure the U.S.
is going to foot the bill anyway if something goes wrong.
Which unfortunately has been European foreign policy since basically the late Cold War.
You know, the fact that Trump, when Trump says that Europeans have not paid their fair share for defense, that is technically true.
I mean, the United States basically footed the bill for all of European defense for several decades during the Cold War, and that allowed them to live high on the hog in terms of social welfare programs.
Well, Europe can pursue that policy again, but there will be some tragic consequences to that policy.
And you're starting, by the way, to see those consequences in terms of the outbreak of nationalist sentiment in Europe, largely driven By the increase in unvetted Muslim refugees coming from the Middle East into the heart of Europe and creating all sorts of social schisms.
The Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah al-Khamenei said all the officials in the Islamic Republic unanimously believe there will be no negotiations at any level with the United States.
Again, they're trying to pressure the Europeans.
This is not about the United States at this point.
I think that the way this ends probably is with the United States trying to strengthen, shore up Saudi defenses without getting involved in a conflict.
Okay, meanwhile, There's a new NBC Wall Street Journal poll out.
Joe Biden continues to lead the 2020 Democratic field.
Elizabeth Warren continues to steal support from Bernie Sanders.
So she's not actually taking support from Joe Biden.
She's taking support from Bernie Sanders.
And sooner or later, Sanders is going to have to open up the guns.
See, if these poll results are real, sooner or later, Bernie Sanders is going to have to go to war with her.
So this was the question.
As I said last week, before the last debate, there was basically a Mexican standoff, like at the end of Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, in which Joe Biden was pointing his guns at Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and Warren was pointing at Sanders and Biden, and Sanders was pointing at Warren and Biden, but nobody wanted to fire.
Because if you're the first person to fire, you lose.
That was the basic rule.
It was a reservoir dog standoff scenario.
It was, it was, Joe Biden wanted to watch Elizabeth and Bernie go to war and wreck each other.
And Warren wanted Sanders and Biden to go to war and wreck each other.
And Biden, and they all want the other two to go to war.
Sanders wants Warren and Biden to go to war and wreck each other.
That was the basic math.
But if Elizabeth Warren starts stealing away enough support from Bernie Sanders, he's not going to have a choice, but he has to wreck her.
Because he's hoping that if he wrecks her, then maybe those people come back flooding to him.
And if he sits still, he's out of the race.
So we'll get to those poll results in just one second.
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OK, so here are the latest poll results.
There are two new polls out.
They both show Joe Biden up.
They both show Bernie Sanders down.
That is the trend.
So there's been, let's see, four polls taken since the debates last week, and two of them Have Biden up a lot larger and two of them have Biden up a lot smaller.
So there's a political morning consult poll that came out yesterday and the polling period was, let's see, today is the 18th.
So the polling period would have been Saturday through Monday.
And that poll, the Political Morning Consul poll, showed Biden with 32, Sanders with 20, Warren with 18.
So basically Biden way ahead, and Warren and Sanders neck and neck.
There's a SurveyUSA poll, same basic period, and it shows Biden at 33, Warren at 19, Bernie at 17.
So Warren ahead of Bernie.
But still close.
Then there's the NBC News Wall Street Journal poll, and this is the one that has got to have Bernie Sanders in a panic.
It has Joe Biden up at 31, Elizabeth Warren at 25, and Bernie Sanders at 14.
In other words, the media attention on Elizabeth Warren is driving people from Bernie Sanders over to Elizabeth Warren.
Now, I'd suggested that last week's debate was a blown opportunity for Warren, that if she wanted to make a strong move, then she would have to, at some point, go after Biden.
That she's figuring if she bides her time, it'll be okay.
I still think that she blew an opportunity.
I think that she receded into the field.
But it is also true that she is becoming the default, not-Biden, not-Sanders candidate.
And that is something, right?
I mean, just being there and being the person who is not slow, moderate, gaffy Joe, and also not being Bernie crazy Sanders, It's a thing.
It's a thing.
There's room for that.
Being progressive enough for some of the Sanders people, but being not crazy enough for some of the Biden people, that's not a bad place to be.
Is it enough for her to win the primaries?
I don't know.
Because again, she has no black support.
Like, none.
None whatsoever.
And she's received just fawning media attention.
Absolutely fawning.
The New York Times, fawning over the fact that she brought out several thousand people to Central Park in New York yesterday.
And Donald Trump rightly pointing out to the media, guys, if you stop in the middle of 42nd Avenue in New York City, there are like a thousand people there.
If you can't draw a crowd in New York City, you suck at politics.
Kamala Harris drew like 10,000, 20,000 people to her lead off in Sacramento.
So drawing a big crowd, as Mitt Romney learned at the end of the 2012 election, does not mean that you're going to win an election.
Trump is right about that.
With that said, there are two polls, both of them show Warren up over Sanders now.
NBC News Wall Street Journal, Biden 31, Warren 25, Sanders 14.
Economist YouGov, this one has always been very favorable to Elizabeth Warren, actually.
The last time they did this poll, this Economist YouGov poll, it showed Biden and Warren basically even, so she's actually dropped a little bit in this poll, from what I see.
Biden at 26, Warren at 21, Sanders at 14.
So that means that she's closed within striking distance of Biden, but she would have to convince half of Sanders' support to move over to her.
And I wonder if that's the case.
I do wonder if that's the case, because it seems to me that the Bernie bros, the people who love Bernie, they gotta be looking at Warren and saying, she's a phony.
She's a fraud.
And this is not someone sufficiently committed to our communist way of life.
And I think that there will come up, it's still very early, there will come a point somewhere in here where Warren starts to earn some negative media attention.
It happens to every candidate.
They got their ups and their downs.
She started with a real bad down with the, I'm Native American, oh wait, no I'm not.
That was real bad.
And then she's had a consistent uptick.
In media energy and attention and sycophantic coverage directed at her for months.
And that's led to this increasing steady rise.
As opposed to some of the other candidates who've added up to now.
Like Beto started here and just went directly down.
That was Beto's candidacy.
Elizabeth Warren starts down and has been trending up.
But it's still early.
There's still room for people to go after Elizabeth Warren.
Even Stephen Colbert was tempted to do that last night.
He asked her about the whole, you know, you keep saying that you're not going to raise taxes on the middle class or you avoid the question and you're avoiding the question.
There hasn't been Medicare for all before.
You keep being asked in the debates, how are you going to pay for it?
Are you going to raise the middle class taxes?
How are you going to pay for it?
Are you going to raise the middle class taxes?
So here's how we're going to do this.
Costs are going to go up for the wealthiest Americans, for big corporations.
Taxes?
What do you mean by cost?
Yeah.
And hard-working middle-class families are going to see their costs go down.
But will their taxes go up?
Well, but here's the thing.
No, but here's the thing.
I've listened to these answers a few times before.
Okay, and then he keeps saying, like, good for Stephen Col... I've never said these words before.
Good for Stephen Colbert.
So Stephen is kind of... Colbert is basically a Bernie bro.
Stephen Colbert asking her a very straight question and not getting a straight answer.
Eventually, this is going to come back to haunt Elizabeth Warren.
There is this image of her as this pristine progressive and it's such nonsense.
She is just as phony as Kamala Harris.
She's just better at it.
And I think that the progressive left is going to wake up to this.
And when that happens, there's going to be a virulent reaction and there will be an internecine war between Joe, not between Joe Biden, between Elizabeth Warren and between Bernie Sanders.
That internecine war is coming.
You remember, Bernie actually did this same routine with Hillary Clinton early in the primaries.
Early in the primaries, he said, I don't care about her dumb emails.
And then by the end of the race, he was like, remember those emails, guys?
Remember that?
That was weird.
Bernie Sanders steered clear of Hillary until it became clear he could not steer clear of Hillary anymore.
Well, you're going to see the same thing happen with Elizabeth Warren.
He went on The View and he was like, Elizabeth and I are good friends.
We've been good friends for 20 years.
At a certain point, he's going to start flinging pudding at her.
Here, take this, chocolate pudding!
And that's the way this is going to go, because it can't go any other way.
I mean, if he starts to lose support, who the hell is he gonna go after, Joe Biden?
Really, there's no case for that.
Now, in a second, we're gonna talk about the great hope for Elizabeth Warren, and it lies not in stealing Bernie Sanders' support, but in finishing Joe Biden.
Because again, Joe Biden's base of support is heavily minority.
A lot of black voters really like Joe Biden.
Why?
Well, because he is stapled to Barack Obama's pant leg.
He is the chicken who crossed the road.
Barack Obama was the chicken who crossed the road, and Joe Biden is the person stapled to the chicken's pant leg.
That is what happened here.
Joe Biden is a hanger-on.
He's always been a hanger-on.
But that's not a bad place to be with black voters in the United States, among whom Barack Obama is still extraordinarily popular.
We'll get to Joe Biden in just one second.
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In just a second, we'll get to Joe Biden and the only attack that matters on Joe Biden.
We'll get to that in just one second.
We'll also get to Corey Lewandowski really going at it with the House Judiciary Committee Democrats.
For some good and some ill.
We'll get to that in one second.
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So as I've now been saying for several weeks, there are two lines of attack on Joe Biden that have been used.
One is that he's old and we keep seeing him gaffe.
So for example, he said yesterday that the child tax credit that he's pushing could put 720 million women back in the workforce, which is a weird stat considering there are 330 million people in the United States.
So I'm not sure where he's coming up with the other 400 million people and why all of them are women.
Is this a weird Joe Biden fantasy?
Who knows.
A lot of shoulders to rub there.
But Joe, is that sort of stuff going to hurt Joe Biden?
No, that's not going to hurt Joe Biden because again, we all know he's slow old Joe and he gaffes all the time.
He's been gaffing for years, right?
He was called Uncle Joe because he was the kind of dopey uncle at the Thanksgiving party who would have one too many beers and stumble into the den while you're watching football and knock over the chips, right?
That's who Uncle Joe was when he was Uncle Joe.
Now he's just Grandpa Joe, and he can't stumble into the room anymore and knock over the chips.
He basically just sort of conks out on the 1970s-era recliner with his feet up and his shoes off.
That's Joe Biden now.
I say in a general election, I don't think that hurts him.
I mean, I think that a return to normalcy, even if the normalcy is just basically a comatose human being, that's not a horrible pitch.
But in a primary, it ain't going to help him too much.
But at the same time, it's not going to hurt him too much.
We all know who he is.
You know, they keep pretending that gaffe upon gaffe upon gaffe.
I promise you, Elizabeth Warren's gaffes, it seems like far bigger than a gaffe that she just keeps lying about whether she's going to raise middle class taxes.
It seems like that's not a gaffe.
That's like an actual policy fail for Elizabeth Warren.
So, you know, I don't think that's going to hurt him.
The second line of attack on Joe Biden is that he has to be canceled.
And this one, again, I have a hard time believing that this is going to hurt him simply because the nature of the messengers carrying the attack are not capable of hurting him.
So Kamala Harris briefly hurt Joe Biden when she went to the, you didn't want forced busing, even though she didn't want forced busing and nobody wanted forced busing in the 1970s.
And she briefly hurt him with the, You were hanging out with segregationists, and he was like, no, they're just senators, and I was working with them, and some of them are bad people, and I said so.
She briefly heard him because she had the credibility to speak on the issue, because in our era of identity politics, a white person saying that to Joe Biden has no impact.
A black candidate saying that to Joe Biden has some impact.
And then her poll numbers started to drop and his started to rise again.
And he wasn't supremely damaged by any of that.
Elizabeth Warren playing that card ain't gonna have any sort of, like, that ain't gonna work at all.
Elizabeth Warren is whiter than the backside of this piece of paper.
I mean, she is as white as snow.
Elizabeth Warren is whiter than I am and that is pretty damned white.
I mean, I clap on one and three gang.
I mean, she is she she is very white.
And so her going after Biden's base of support is likely unavailing.
And so instead, what you're seeing is some of the so-called opinion journalists in the media Some of the professors of history going after Joe Biden on her behalf, hoping that if they knock him down, that she will rise up again.
I don't think that that is likely to work particularly well, but they're going to try.
Marsha Chatelain is the distinguished associate professor of history at Georgetown University, and she has a piece in The Washington Post today called Joe Biden isn't the only Democrat who has blamed black America for its problems.
She says, former Vice President Joe Biden spent Sunday at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, speaking on the anniversary of a bombing there that killed four black girls.
The candidate has had some trouble handling issues involving race.
After conceding that institutional segregation and redlining banks exist, Biden veered away from a logic that might have called for some strands of reparative justice.
Instead, he turned to the old liberal playbook, castigate black families.
Look, he started, you talk about education.
After rightly suggesting higher wages for teachers and more funding for schools with Title I designation, Biden reminded listeners that teachers, a profession that is majority white, cannot do it alone.
They have, he said, every problem coming to them.
And the way to improve outcomes in segregated schools would be simply to send social workers to visit black families to teach them how to raise their children better, complete with the record player on at night to expose kids to more words.
While Biden was criticized roundly for that answer, it fit quite neatly into the grand American political tradition of evading serious conversation about the legacy of slavery by expressing displeasure with the victims of it.
Well, I'm sorry if you knock up a woman and then leave, that is not you being a victim of slavery, that's you being a bad person.
I mean that... No.
The answer is no.
You don't get to blame the personal decision that you made to have a child out of wedlock with a person with whom you were not married on slavery.
Because you were not enslaved, that person was not enslaved, their parents were not enslaved, their grandparents were not enslaved, their great-grandparents were likely not enslaved, their great-great-grandparents maybe were enslaved, probably you're talking about their great-great-great-grandparents.
So no, you don't get to do that.
But I guess the idea is that if Joe Biden suggests that if you are going to prosecute criminality or encourage parents to spend more time on education in the home or encourage parents to stay married, that this is the vestiges of slavery, of victim-blaming, I don't think that I don't think that dog hunts, but I think that the left would like for that dog to hunt.
And so they're going to continue pushing that.
We'll see if the Democratic Party falls for it.
I have my doubts about that.
So predictions.
I think that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders will go to war in quite short order.
I think that Joe Biden is going to sit this one out.
And I think that Joe Biden will probably benefit from that war at least a little bit.
OK, meanwhile, there was a big hearing yesterday At the House Judiciary Committee, Democrats called Corey Lewandowski.
Why?
Well, when Corey Lewandowski was an aide to Donald Trump, Trump, according to the Mueller Report, called on Corey Lewandowski to deliver a letter to Jeff Sessions, basically firing him for not firing Robert Mueller.
And Lewandowski conveniently just didn't do it, right?
Corey Lewandowski was like, that's kind of a bad idea.
We're not going to do that.
And it was in the Mueller Report.
There was talk about whether it amounted to obstruction.
There's an argument, yes.
There's, I think, a more solid argument, no.
Although I definitely see the argument for yes.
But it's all in the Mueller Report.
Democrats can't let the Mueller Report go because the Mueller Report did not recommend prosecution.
It didn't make any recommendation at all.
And as it turns out, it would have been very difficult to prove obstruction of justice on the basis of the allegations that were made in the Mueller Report.
Democrats don't even want to impeach on that basis.
And Nancy Pelosi does not want to impeach on the basis of the Mueller Report.
Democrats nonetheless have to prove their mettle to their own supporters, and so they called forth Corey Lewandowski, and it went really poorly for them, because it turns out that you know what Corey Lewandowski is fantastic at?
Grandstanding.
I mean, really great at it.
And Democrats were sending mixed messages.
On the one hand, they were like, you know, Corey, if you delivered that letter, that would have been obstruction of justice.
That was really bad.
On the other hand, they're like, you're a chicken for not having delivered.
You're a chicken for not having delivered.
Here is Needles Cohen, Steve Cohen.
I call him Needles because he really, he resembles in both face and manner, Needles from Back to the Future 2, trying to tempt Marty McFly into a game of chicken.
Here's Steve Cohen saying to Corey Lewandowski that he's a chicken.
Steve Cohen, I don't know what his thing with chicken is.
You remember he actually went to a press conference to call somebody a chicken and he actually brought along like a KFC container.
I don't know, what's the obsession with chicken?
I don't get it.
Here's Steve Cohen.
Donald Trump talked to you outside normal channels so there'd be no record of anything that he asked you to do to obstruct justice.
Nothing to do with that at all.
The President knew what he was doing was wrong.
Mr. Sessions knew what he was doing was wrong.
Mr. McGahn knew what he was doing was wrong.
You seemed to be the only person who didn't think it was wrong.
But Mr. Trump was wrong.
Because at the last minute, you got cold feet.
You chickened out.
The President's trust was misplaced.
You decided not to do what you told the President you were going to do.
And you handed it off to somebody else.
Yeah, McFly, you chicken!
You chicken!
Lewandowski isn't going to confess to committing a crime.
Like, what does Steve Cohen think he's doing?
And this whole thing ended up being a debacle because Lewandowski basically just said to Democrats, you're not getting anything else out of me.
So this is a waste of my time.
Here's Lewandowski talking to Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, saying, why am I even here?
This is stupid.
We as a nation would be better served if elected officials like yourself Concentrate your efforts to combat the true crises facing our country, as opposed to going down rabbit holes like this hearing.
Instead of focusing on petty and personal politics, the committee focused on solving the challenges of this generation.
Imagine how many people we could help, or how many lives we could save.
Okay, yeah, so Lewandowski doing that routine, it's not a bad routine.
So the good of Corey Lewandowski is he did call out the Democrats repeatedly for political grandstanding.
And so Lewandowski completely derailed the impeachment hearing.
I mean, he just went after people with hammer.
He wants to run for Senate in New Hampshire, so it's a good political moment for him.
Here he is pretty much fully derailing this impeachment hearing.
Mr Lewandowski, is it correct that as reported in the Mueller report on June 19, 2017, you met alone in the Oval Office with the President?
Is there a book and page number you can reference me to, please?
I don't have a copy of the report in front of me.
Volume 2, page 90.
Could you read the exact language of the report, sir?
I don't have it available to me.
I don't think I need to do that, and I have limited time.
Did you meet alone with the President on that date?
Congressman, I'd like you to refresh my memory by providing a copy of the report so I can follow along.
You don't have a copy with you?
I don't have a copy of the report, Congressman.
Mr. Chairman, I request that the clock be stopped while this charade is sorted out.
Okay, and then Lewandowski went after Sheila Jackson Lee.
So she was in fact ranting about how Trump is a criminal.
And he was like, why are you ranting at me?
Stop ranting at me.
Look, it's entertaining.
Is it good?
No, I mean, Corey Lewandowski was engaged in bad activity with Trump.
I mean, Trump was in fact telling him to go fire somebody in his administration because he didn't like the investigation that was being conducted.
Now, was he attempting to obstruct the Mueller investigation?
I mean, not really, because Mueller didn't find anything.
Sort of goes to intent here, as opposed to Trump just being irritable and volatile and saying things.
I mean, that's why, again, I see it would be difficult to prosecute.
I think that it probably doesn't amount to obstruction because you have to have intent to obstruct in order to do that.
And Trump does have the executive capacity to fire Robert Mueller.
I mean, he works for the executive branch.
But here's Corey Lewandowski ripping into Sheila Jackson Lee.
We will expose the truth.
The president can hide behind you any longer.
You should be here to be telling the truth.
The truth will set you free and the American people.
I yield back.
The time of the gentlelady has expired.
The witness may answer the question.
I don't believe there was a question, Congressman.
Yes, there was.
Could you repeat the question?
I didn't hear it.
I'd be happy to repeat the question.
It's just a rant.
Okay, and that is actually true.
I mean, because all of these house hearings are really stupid.
The truth is, when was the last time you watched a house hearing and you were like, oh!
A new piece of information we didn't know!
It's all grandstanding crap.
Now, was it all good for Corey Lewandowski?
No, because the fact is that Corey Lewandowski and the Trump administration do engage in dishonesty fairly regularly with the media.
So Corey Lewandowski was asked by a lawyer named Barry Burke.
This is the new thing, is that Democrats are calling in lawyers to do the questioning they suck at.
They call in this lawyer, Barry Burke.
And Barry Burke plays a clip of Lewandowski on MSNBC saying that he'd never had any communication about Robert Mueller with Donald Trump.
And here's Lewandowski being like, yeah, okay, so I lied.
What you gonna do about it?
What you gonna do about it?
I don't ever remember the President ever asking me to get involved with Jeff Sessions or the Department of Justice in any way, shape, or form ever.
Did you hear that, sir?
That was you saying on MSNBC, you don't ever remember the President ever asking you to get involved with Jeff Sessions or the Department of Justice in any way, shape, or form.
That wasn't true, was it, sir?
I heard that.
And that was not true, was it?
I have no obligation to be honest with the media just because they're just as dishonest as anybody else.
Okay, that is a hell of a line.
Now, here's the thing.
He's admitting to lying, right?
Publicly lying.
But I think that this is, it is kind of baked into the cake.
I mean, unfortunately, this is the state of our politics.
Is that bad?
Yeah, it's bad.
It's bad.
You shouldn't lie to the media.
At the same time, is it baked into the cake?
Politically speaking, did this hurt Trump in any way?
The answer is no, and you can see that the media were really disappointed that it didn't.
An NBC correspondent just came out and said, listen, this hearing was a failure.
It was a total fail.
Insofar as this was an effort to get a particular narrative out, today has been rocky.
Yes, Sally, I think it's largely been a failure and I think it's in part because Democrats have been more interested in getting their moment on television of yelling at Corey Lewandowski and making the point and winning the argument rather than patiently questioning him.
OK, and that, of course, is exactly true.
It's exactly true.
And because everybody feels like everything is a political football these days, nobody's going to like.
Did anyone was anyone under the wild misimpression that Corey Lewandowski is like a deeply honest human being?
If so, I'm wondering why and why they would be under that misimpression.
So it hurts Democrats more than it hurts Republicans.
But it just reinforces the fact that Democrats are there to pander, Republicans are there to pander, and everything kind of sucks.
Now, meanwhile, the polarization of the American public continues apace, with woke scolds doing their best to ruin every aspect of American life.
I'm very excited that Merriam-Webster Dictionary has now added the non-binary pronoun they to the dictionary.
Because when I look at a book for definitions of words, what I want is a made-up definition of a word That has never been used this way in all of human history.
A plural noun used as a singular noun to refer to a singular gender.
We're going to use a plural noun.
And Merriam-Webster is going to go along with this, which just demonstrates once and for all that logic has gone out the window.
People are tailoring science to meet politically correct demands.
People are tailoring language to meet politically correct demands.
Merriam-Webster, according to the Washington Post, has added a new definition of the word they to its dictionary, declaring the pronoun may be used to refer to a single person whose gender identity is non-binary.
They, according to the Washington Post, is a liberating pronoun for many non-binary individuals.
What the hell is a liberating pronoun?
How does a pronoun liberate you?
Were you in shackles and then someone said they and now you're out of the shackles?
What kind of nonsense is this?
For many Americans, the use of they as a singular pronoun can be ungrammatical and confusing.
That would not be for many Americans.
That would be for all Americans, unless you're talking about the small group of SJWs who decide we have to redefine all of language in order to meet politically correct demands.
It is insane.
And then you wonder why people, like the same people who demand truth, truth, absolute truth.
We're the media and we want the truth.
Also, they is a singular pronoun.
Not what now?
Obviously, look, honesty has taken a backseat on all sides to whatever is the political motivation of the day.
This is just sort of an encapsulating perfect example.
Okay, time for a thing I like and then we'll do a quick thing that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
I've mentioned Howard Zinn before on the program.
For people who have never read Howard Zinn's awful book, A People's History of the United States, which is basically A pastiche of horrible things about the United States taken out of context, out of historical context.
A history that basically paints the United States the same as Nazi Germany.
A history that suggests that the United States is uniquely responsible for every evil the world has ever seen.
Howard Zinn was a garbage, a garbage historian and his book is terrible.
There's a good book debunking all of Howard Zinn's stupid ideas by Mary Graybar.
The book is called Debunking Howard Zinn, exposing the fake history that turned a generation against America.
His book is still a massive bestseller.
If you ever watched Good Will Hunting, it's invoked as like the apotheosis of American history by the brilliant Matt Damon character.
And that's how I knew that Matt Damon was an idiot in that film, was because he's citing Howard Zinn.
If you want to know what Howard Zinn was, namely a Marxist, if you want to know why his history is incorrect, Just take a look at the book.
American history does have shades.
American history has good and it has bad.
But according to Howard Zinn, it was all bad.
Like, every aspect of it was bad.
Even the best parts were bad.
I mean, Howard Zinn spends a significant portion of a people's history of the United States explaining why Lincoln was bad and why he didn't really want to free the slaves.
I mean, it's pretty astonishing stuff.
But this book is good.
Debunking Howard Zinn.
Go check it out right now.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so Sean Spicer was on Dancing With The Stars.
So I will admit that Dancing With The Stars may in fact be one of the things that I hate.
Like I think that this is just, it is the apex of American stupidity and maybe Western stupidity generally.
I assume they like this sort of thing in Europe as well.
I mean, if you've ever seen the Eurovision concert, there's a lot of dumb in that as well.
But Dancing With The Stars, which is basically where we take a bunch of B-listers and then we try to prepare them to dance and then we watch them.
It does feel like the late days of Panem when you watch Dancing With The Stars.
In any case, Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary who was widely derided for his bizarre sort of hostage videos from the White House press secretaryship, where he would be asked a question and he didn't want to give the answer, and so he would kind of stare into the distance and try to blink the answer in Morse code.
In any case, Sean Spicer, who was ousted pretty early on in the Trump administration, is now on Dancing with the Stars.
And here is what it looked like.
- Former White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer.
- Head to the world!
Everybody, here we go! - When you're feeling sad and low, we will take you where you gotta go. - Hi, Steve, yeah, hold tight! - Yeah, well listen, I will give it to Sean Spicer.
It takes courage to wear that shirt.
And to play the bongos and to dance.
That is the thing.
That's not actually a thing I hate.
So the thing that I hate is that all of this is stupid.
But all of... I mean, come on.
The whole... Is this intelligent television?
Did it make your life significant?
No.
But of course it's stupid.
That's the whole point.
It's kitschy.
I get it.
It's kitschy.
And it's fun kitsch.
The left went nuts.
How could you possibly treat Sean Spicer like any other B-list celebrity?
After all, this man ruined the United States.
The same people, by the way, who made Donald Trump into Donald Trump, right?
They took a man who was a B-list celebrity in the 1990s and then turned him back into an A-list celebrity in the 2000s with a kitschy reality show in which he fired people or pretended to fire people.
Those same people are like, we can't humor Sean Spicer.
We can't humor Sean Spicer.
And the Washington Post has a piece called, Dancing with the Stars Perfected a Formula for Kitschy Escapist Joy.
Can it survive today's politics?
Critic Linda Stassi snarked of the premiere, ABC must have gone to the well, or maybe that's the cesspool, and dredged up some of the lowest-level celebrities available in the country today for this competition show.
But then the Post had to run a headline that said, Dancing is a Swinging Success, because people were perfectly willing to watch Dancing with the Stars.
But they are very angry with Sean Spicer.
On Monday's episode, Spicer donned a lime green shirt with ruffled sleeves and performed a salsa to the Spice Girls' Spice Up With Your Life with professional partner Lindsay Arnold.
In a pre-recorded introduction, Spicer noted his time in the White House was tumultuous and that he finally felt it was time to have some fun.
The judges were not impressed with Spicer's dance skills, awarded him 12 points out of 30, the second lowest score of the night.
Some fans of the show complained loudly, as did high-profile ABC personnel.
I deeply abhor this decision by the company I work for and truly love, tweeted Grey's Anatomy showrunner Krista Vernoff.
I have a question.
Is being on Dancing with the Stars like receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
Is this something we have to take with a great level of seriousness?
Oh my god, they rewarded Sean Spicer, one of history's greatest monsters, with a slot on Dancing with the Stars, dancing to the Spice Girls in a lime green shirt while playing the bongos?
Does he deserve that kind of honor?
Everybody, lighten up.
Seriously, lighten up.
Like, if Robert Gibbs had shown up on Dancing with the Stars, would I have been like, oh my god, I can't believe they had Robert Gibbs on Dancing with the Stars.
This is so stupid.
Even the show's affable host, Tom Bergeron, recently released a statement suggesting he was disappointed by a choice as political as Spicer.
Really?
Really?
It's all so dumb.
It's intensely dumb.
But this is every aspect of American life now has to turn wildly political.
If you can't deal with a guy you didn't like as press secretary, who was not super great at being press secretary, dancing the salsa on TV, I suggest that you get a life because you don't have enough of one.
All right, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Assistant director, Pavel Wydowski.
Edited by Adam Siovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.
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