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Nov. 5, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:26
Afghanistan On The Border | Ep. 890
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A horrific massacre of American citizens takes place in the Mexican border state of Sonora, new polls undercut Elizabeth Warren's case for the nomination, and the Washington Nationals show Trump some love.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Okay, so the big news of the morning is really horrific news from the Mexican border state of Sonora.
Mexico has been, for a very, very long time, a deeply hellacious and violent place, at least in certain segments of the country.
There was just a couple of years ago a massive controversy over a study, it was in 2017, showing that Mexico is the second deadliest country in the world, like more deadly than every country other than Syria.
That was an annual survey by the International Institute for Strategic Studies that showed that Mexico's death toll was surpassed only by that in Syria.
President Trump at the time retweeted a link to a CNN article on the report.
Parts of Mexico, according to the UK Guardian, have suffered horrific violence since the then-president Felipe Calderón declared war on organized crime a decade ago.
The struggle, as of 2017, had claimed an estimated 200,000 lives and left more than 30,000 people missing.
That was as of two years ago, so the numbers are much larger now.
Mexico claims that large swathes of the country are unaffected by drug violence.
And he said, well, it's not like Syria, because the whole country there is engulfed.
But the fact is that the country of Mexico has been plagued by severe corruption issues, Extraordinary acts of violence in which you will actually see mobile gangs of cartels actually take over entire areas of the country.
The country is so poorly governed that there have been serious questions about the relationship between various administrations in Mexico and the drug cartels.
Are the drug cartels paying for those administrations?
Are they the ones really in control of the government?
Can Mexico actually control all of this?
It makes a pretty solid case for why there should be a border wall for President Trump.
Well, that case burst back out into the open today.
After a horrific massacre of nine Americans in Mexico, we'll get to that story in just one second.
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Okay, so here's the story.
In the UK, babies were burned alive after ruthless cartel killers slaughtered nine U.S.
Mormons in a targeted hit in Mexico.
The victims were ambushed by the merciless gunmen as they drove to a wedding in the border state of Sonora on Monday.
17 members of the LeBaron and Langford families were traveling in three cars when gunmen sprayed their vehicles with bullets.
Some of the victims, including babies, were then reportedly burned alive amid fears female victims were raped, according to the UK Daily Mail.
Alex LeBaron, who said he lost family members in the attack, told CNN, women and children were massacred, burnt alive.
Mothers were screaming for the fire to stop.
Several family members have now told how gunmen opened fire on one child running away and revealed how others burned to death inside a car that was torched.
Other young children managed to escape and hide by the roadside, while one of the mothers was shot in the chest as she put her hands up to surrender, according to the UK Sun.
Survivors described how one boy managed to hide his wounded siblings, some less than a year old, in bushes before he ran back to the nearby town to get help.
Others are still missing, sparking genuine concerns the death toll in the wake of the atrocity will go up.
It's unclear what motivated the killings.
They took place on a dirt road between Chihuahua and Sonora States.
But this is not the first time that members of the Breakaway Church have been attacked in northern Mexico, where their forebears settled decades ago.
In 2009, Benjamin LeBaron, an anti-crime activist related to those killed in Monday's attack, was murdered in neighboring Chihuahua State.
The authorities are even investigating whether the large family were mistaken for a rival cartel gang.
Security Minister Alfonso Durazo said that the attack could have been a case of mistaken identity between conflicting groups in the area.
Family members believe it was a targeted kidnapping after one relative reported receiving a phone call hearing screams before they were executed.
So this is just an absolute horror show.
It was revealed that one mother died saving her baby during the bloodshed.
Her name is Christina Langford Johnson, 31.
She was among the three mothers and at least six kids, including twin babies, who were killed when the gunmen ambushed their vehicles as they drove to a wedding in northern Mexico.
Christina's seven-month-old baby, Faith, was found alive on the floor in the back of the Chevy Suburban.
Relatives say the infant was rescued after spending hours inside the car with her mother's body.
It's just horrific, horrific.
Ronita LeBaron, 33, had broken down in her SUV when gunmen opened fire, torching the vehicle, causing the gas tank to explode.
She was found dead inside the bullet-ridden car along with her six-month-old babies, Titus and Tiana.
There's a video that was posted on social media.
from Crystal 10 and Howard 12, were also reportedly killed in the attack.
Eight miles ahead, Christina and Donna Langford, 43, and two of Donna's children, Trevor and Rogan, three, Trevor was 11, Rogan was three, were also killed in other SUVs.
Donna's seven other children were shot but survived, according to claims.
And further, children are understood to be missing after they escaped from the flames and fled.
There's a video that was posted on social media.
We did pull it, but we can't show it because it's just too graphic for Facebook or any of the other places that air this show.
A male voice in an American accent who's a reported relative.
He says, this is for the record, Nita and four of my grandchildren are burnt and shot up.
All the victims lived in a Mormon community in Lemoore, about 70 miles south of Douglas, Arizona.
They had dual U.S.
and Mexican citizenship.
Some of their community worship with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Mormon.
Others are from polygamous offshoots of the Mormon church.
Leah Staden, who grew up in the same Mormon community, said her brother found one of the bullet-written cars with charred bodies inside.
Absolutely horrific.
Horrific.
One of the relatives said the victims were innocent and were caught up in a war involving rival drug cartels.
When President Trump immediately got involved, he suggested that it may be time for the United States to get involved.
He tweeted out, A wonderful family and friends from Utah got caught between two vicious drug cartels who were shooting at each other, with the result being many great American people killed, including young children and some missing.
If Mexico needs or requests help in cleaning out these monsters, the United States stands ready, willing, and able to get involved and do the job quickly and effectively.
The great new president of Mexico has made this a big issue, but the cartels have become so large and powerful, you sometimes need an army to defeat an army.
This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage war on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth.
We merely await a call from your great new president.
Now, the response from the media has obviously been somewhat subdued, because on the one hand, they don't want Trump to build a wall.
On the other hand, they don't want Trump to get involved in fighting the Mexican drug cartels, and you really cannot have it both ways.
There's a third solution that some in the libertarian movement have proposed, which is legalizing drugs on the American side of the border, thus Quashing the demand for drug cartels on the Mexican side of the border.
You legalize it, all this becomes mainstream.
You can have actual legal farms that produce all of this stuff.
But the fact is that people who are in the drug industry in Mexico are not going to turn to banking if things change in the United States.
They're going to continue to find other ways of involving themselves in lucrative illegal activity.
That's why they moved from, for example, marijuana over to harder drugs as the United States became more accustomed to marijuana.
Wherever the profit is, is where the drug cartels are going to move.
The bigger issue in Mexico is the fact that the administration in Mexico, and this has been true for decades at this point, they're stuck between a little bit of a rock and a hard place.
On the one hand, Some of these presidents presumably would like to see the drug cartels go.
On the other hand, if they call on the United States to help them, which really is maybe the only option here, then they could immediately be ousted by the people of Mexico, who are not particularly fond of America getting involved in Mexican politics.
The last time the United States got militarily involved in Mexico was 1914, when the United States invaded Veracruz, and that didn't go particularly well for either the United States or Mexico.
So, what exactly is the solution to this?
Well, the first solution, obviously, is yes, there needs to be a wall.
We do not want this stuff crossing America's southern border, leaving broad swaths of the American southern border open to drug cartels who are using those borders as thoroughfares for guns, drugs, human trafficking.
It's unthinkable.
Really, it's unthinkable.
I mean, if Trump cannot make the case for a border wall in the aftermath of an attack like this, Then it's very difficult to imagine how he could make the case for a border wall.
And if Democrats can make a case against a border wall in the aftermath of an attack like this, they're going to have to explain why.
And if they say, well, all this is just happening in Mexico.
It's not crossing the border.
Yeah.
Talk to people who are living in some of the border cities where there is no barrier.
It's easy to say El Paso is doing well.
Right.
El Paso has a wall.
If you look at some of the border areas in Mexico, rates of violence have skyrocketed thanks to the involvement of the drug cartels.
Now, the fact is that the United States has long considered the possibility of having to get involved militarily to help out the Mexican government.
But as I said, the Mexican government has proved itself unwilling to actually move forward with anything remotely like that.
In fact, the current president of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is a member of the political left there, Well, that isn't working either.
It turns out that the only way to wipe out actual criminal cartels is to kill members of the actual criminal cartels.
you try to work with them, you don't try to get violent with them, that merely escalates the situation.
Well, that isn't working either.
It turns out that the only way to wipe out actual criminal cartels is to kill members of the actual criminal cartels.
As I say, a case to be made for legalization of drugs in the United States that would presumably lower the market for these drug cartels in the first place and lower their power by extension, But that's not going to happen anytime soon, particularly with some of the harder drugs that we're talking about in the middle of an opioid epidemic.
And the fact is that a lot of these drug cartels are trafficking in precisely the kinds of opioids, particularly heroin, lactar heroin, that have caused the opioid epidemic to break out with such viciousness in the United States, leading to tens of thousands of lost lives in the United States.
Just a few days ago, just a few days ago, the UK Guardian reported that Manuel Lopez Obrador is under sustained pressure to rethink his non-confrontational security strategy amid lingering questions over the botched arrest of the son of El Chapo Guzman.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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As I say, the UK Guardian is reporting that Obrador is already under serious pressure to rethink his strategy with regard to the cartels.
Ovidio Guzman was briefly held in the northern city of Culiacan last month, but was freed after hundreds of gunmen launched a wave of attacks on security forces and blocked roads with burning vehicles.
The show of strength shocked even the most hardened observers of organized crime in Mexico.
Ismael Borges, editor of the investigative Sinaloa Weekly, Rio Doce described the moment as a watershed.
He said, life goes on, yes, but not in the same way.
We don't know if this will now be the reaction every time criminal groups feel threatened.
We know even less what the federal government intends to do about it.
The president of Mexico insists the incident marks a turning point away from the punitive policies of his two predecessors.
He says this is no longer a war.
It is no longer about forced confrontation, annihilation, extermination, or killing in the heat of the moment.
He said this is about thinking how to save lives and achieve peace and tranquility in the country using other methods.
He says those other methods are social programs to alleviate extreme poverty.
Yeah, good luck with that.
I'm sorry, but if you think that social programs are going to alleviate the fact that the most profitable enterprises in Mexico right now are these drug cartels... Yeah, sure.
Sure.
He says that exhortations toward good behavior and the insistence he has now banned corruption will help.
He has also pledged to offer what he calls abrazos no brazos, hugs not bullets.
Yeah, hugs for the people who are shooting down tens of thousands of Mexican citizens, and who just shot nine American citizens as well, and burned them to death, and maybe raped them.
He's also created a new militarized national police force, though this has not yet taken a significant role in operations against organized crimes.
The problem, according to security experts, again, this is the UK Guardian reporting, is that nothing in Obrador's strategy directly addresses the terrifying power of the country's criminal underworld, which was brazenly displayed on October 17th.
Even before troops detained Guzman, convoys of heavily armed cartel gunmen were speeding to strategic positions in and around the city.
The effort to rescue Guzman held the city hostage, but also targeted the military's weakest points, such as buildings where soldiers' families live.
What we saw in Culiacan was the parallel state showing itself, said Edgardo Buscalia, an expert on organized crime at Columbia University.
Euskalia broadly agreed with Obrador's critique of his predecessors, but argued that fighting poverty cannot alone end criminality.
Many countries far poorer than Mexico suffer far less from organized crime.
Instead, the government has to start with a concerted strategy to dismantle the entrenched political and business interests which protect and profit from organized crime.
What Lopez Obrador needs is not a security strategy.
He said what he needs is an anti-mafia strategy.
But again, the problem is that there may not be the institutional power necessary at the level of the federal government in Mexico to actually take care of this problem.
A lot of the federal institutions have been honeycombed with With advocates for the cartels, with people who work with the cartels.
Police forces in Mexico have long been plagued with serious corruption problems.
People are working for the cartels while simultaneously supposedly working for the police.
There are a lot of people who are, of course, again, suggesting American involvement, but it's difficult to imagine Obrador actually calling for America to get involved at this point, which, again, leaves Trump with virtually no alternative to the building of the wall, right?
I mean, this is the point.
You can't let that violence spread north into the United States.
A horrifying, horrifying story.
There's no easy solution, and I'm waiting for solutions from the left that don't involve building a wall.
And if you say just send more money to the Mexican government, we have been sending billions of dollars to the Mexican government.
We do enormous amounts of trade with the Mexican government, presumably designed to actually strengthen the federal government in their capacity to fight all of this.
But that hasn't helped, and it's going to continue not helping so long as the Mexican drug cartels maintain this enormous sort of power.
In the United States, when we had a mafia problem, we had to activate the federal government on a massive level to destroy the mafia in the United States, and to destroy the various alcohol cartels that existed during Prohibition.
We really, really activated every resource at our disposal.
The Mexican government may not actually have those resources at their disposal, so I'm waiting to hear solutions.
People can rip on Trump for being, for going off half-cocked with regard to these tweets, but I'm not seeing any other solutions.
I really am not.
A wall, or answering Mexico's call for aid.
Those would be the only two solutions that are truly on the table at this point.
Now meanwhile, There are a bunch of brand new polls, some good for Trump, some bad for Trump.
The national polling is not particularly good for Trump.
The state polling, however, is actually quite good for Trump.
And that radically reshifts the nature of the 2020 presidential race.
This attack in Mexico should remind people that it's a cruel world out there, a cold world out there, and that the sort of open borders policy of the Democratic Party is not something the United States should be accepting under any circumstances.
The same Democratic Party saying they want to decriminalize border crossing, not at ports of entry.
They want to decriminalize that and make that not a crime anymore.
The same party that says we don't need a wall with Mexico?
Do you want to give them power?
Is that truthfully something that you want to do?
Like, this is where Trump really should be pushing.
Okay, but in the new national polling, according to the Washington Post, Dan Balz and Scott Clement reporting, one year from the 2020 election, President Trump trails some potential Democratic rivals in head-to-head matchups.
His national support level is fixed at about 40%, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The new poll highlights the degree to which most of the country already has made a judgment about the president's performance and his voting preferences next year.
Among the 39% of registered voters who approve of Trump's job performance, Trump is winning at least 95% support against each of five possible Democratic opponents.
But among the 58% of voters who disapprove of Trump, he receives no more than 7% of support.
Biden, Sanders, and Warren run strongest against the president nationally, according to this new poll.
The new poll has Biden up 17 points, 56 to 39, Warren 15 points, 55 to 40, and Sanders up 55 to 41.
Pete Buttigieg leads 52 to 41, Harris 51 to 42.
Again, in all of these numbers, Trump's stuck somewhere between 39 and 42%, but those were the same numbers that we saw in the run-up to the 2016 election as well.
We kept seeing Trump stuck in the low 40s, and then he performed at about 47% in the national election, which was enough to win him the presidency.
The poll reflects national findings, but other state surveys have shown tighter races, particularly in the swing states.
Republicans and Democrats are mostly locked into their voting intentions, but what these polls tend to show is that independents are moving away from Trump.
But that may not be the case in the near future if, again, Democrats continue to be as radical as they are.
And this is what we are seeing in the swing states.
We'll get to the swing state poll that came out from the New York Times.
It's devastating for Elizabeth Warren's case for being the presidential nominee.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So as I say, the national polls for Trump are not looking particularly good.
The state polls for Trump are a different story.
So among likely voters, there was a poll came out from the New York Times yesterday, the New York Times and Siena College, and here is what it found.
It found that Joe Biden was up very slightly in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, and Arizona, and down slightly in North Carolina.
All of this within the margin of error.
It shows that Bernie Sanders was ahead in Michigan by three, but behind Trump in all of those other swing states.
And here's the kicker.
It shows that Elizabeth Warren is down to Trump in every single swing state.
All of them, according to the New York Times, Siena College poll.
It shows Warren down four in Michigan, down two in Pennsylvania, down two in Wisconsin, down four in Florida, even in Arizona, down four in North Carolina.
Which shows, again, that the national polling numbers are less indicative of where this race is going than those state polling numbers.
People can say this thing is over, Trump's done, he's toast, but that's not the reality.
And Elizabeth Warren, I think she's set up for a fall here.
I think she is.
I mean, remember, at the same time that we are seeing American citizens being slaughtered just south of the American border and Democrats are trying to say that there shouldn't be a wall.
The Democrats are also trying to claim that America's foreign policy is deeply egregious.
For example, just to give an example, why is Elizabeth Warren set up for a fall?
Again, her case has to be that she is electable, but if she's not perceived as electable, then she's basically toast.
Right now, she is coasting on months of positive media coverage.
But I don't know how long that's gonna last as the American people see her.
I mean, for example, yesterday, Elizabeth Warren was doing a Q&A, and some radical leftist got up and suggested that the American government supports genocide.
And Elizabeth Warren nodded along with this.
Here is this bizarre exchange.
Right now, the United States is bombing at least seven countries.
We support genocides in Palestine and in Yemen.
Um, as president, will you stop U.S. support of murder, whether it's intersections, or in support, or in support?
I'd like to refrain on this.
Um, you know, here's how I see it.
We want to be a great nation, lead the world.
Then we need to live our values every single day.
And that means we don't support, for example, what's going on in Yemen.
I like your take on this.
He literally said that America supports genocide in not only Yemen but quote-unquote Palestine.
By the way, if you think there's a genocide in Palestine, I urge you to go visit Palestine.
Okay, a state that does not exist.
It's like Narnia.
But I urge you to go visit the Palestinian territories where the population has been growing hand over fist.
I mean, rapidly.
There's some five to six million Palestinians who are now living in the so-called West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
That's the worst genocide of all time.
But Elizabeth Warren just humors that kind of stuff.
So in a threatening world, in a world of actual threats, are people going to turn to Elizabeth Warren?
And as it turns out, Elizabeth Warren's plans are garbage too.
So if she is not perceived as likable, if she is not perceived as credible, If she's not perceived as able to beat Trump, you could start to see the media turn away from her.
And again, the hits keep on coming with regard to the Medicare for All plan that she released over the weekend.
I mean, even other Democrats are looking at her and crossing their eyes.
For example, Stephen Ratner was a counselor to the Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration.
He's a lifelong Democrat.
He has a piece in the New York Times today called, The Warren Way is the Wrong Way.
He says Senator Elizabeth Warren has unveiled her vision for how to pay for Medicare for All, a daunting mountain of new taxes and fees.
Thanks for providing us, Ms.
Warren, with yet more evidence that a Warren presidency is a terrifying prospect, one brought closer by your surge in the polls.
Left to her own devices, she would extend the reach and weight of the federal government far further into the economy than anything even President Franklin Roosevelt imagined, effectively abandoning the limited government model that has mostly served us well.
Ms.
Warren may call herself a capitalist, but her panoply of minutely detailed plans suggests otherwise.
Again, this is an Obama official.
She would turn America's uniquely successful public-private relationship into a dirigiste European-style system.
If you want to live in France, economically, Elizabeth Warren should be your candidate.
He says, as a lifelong Democrat, I freely acknowledge that substantial reforms are much needed, both to achieve a more equitable distribution of income and wealth, and to make good on Donald Trump's failed pledge to raise the economy's growth rate.
But the Warren way would be, quite simply, the wrong way.
To date, public attention has understandably focused on Ms.
Warren's support for Medicare for All, as well as her long list of other new social programs like the Green New Deal, free college tuition, universal childcare, student debt forgiveness, and on and on.
Her armada of changes would be highly disruptive, for example, to the 156 million Americans who have private health insurance, and expensive, at least $23 trillion over the next decade.
By the way, it's not $23 trillion over the next decade.
It is more like 50 trillion dollars over the next decade if you're including the already present spending with regard to healthcare in the United States.
She wants to expand new taxes, increasing federal revenues by more than 50%.
Plus, she wants to impose vast new regulatory burdens, and she's also lying about all of this.
She's also lying.
I mean, her proposals are fully insane.
And Stephen Ratner points out that workers would occupy 40% of board seats, another page out of the failed European playbook.
Even Germany has had a significantly slower growth rate than ours for many years because of this sort of stuff.
And then she wants the Department of Economic Development charged with creating and defending good American jobs.
But really, this is the government trying to pick winners and losers and raise tariffs.
And then she wants new committees to allow consumers and rural areas to delay trade deals that worry them.
It's just a disaster.
So Ratner going after her.
Okay, the fact is, by the way, that her, again, her Medicare for All plan is just a perfect window into the bizarre mind of Elizabeth Warren.
According to Reason.com, her plan to finance Medicare for All at a total price tag of nearly $52 trillion, including about $20 trillion of new government spending, an estimate that is probably low.
She keeps saying that she's not going to increase middle class taxes.
But that's obviously false.
For example, the chief trick that she plays when she proposes Medicare for All is that she says that the employee-based insurance program, so your employer pays in and then you pay in.
Your employer pays in maybe 8%, you pay in maybe 7%, and that pays for your healthcare.
She's just gonna take all of that and turn that into a tax that goes to the federal government.
That's called a tax.
Now, people may say, well, it doesn't come out of my bottom line.
Well, it does because, see, here's the thing, your employer-based healthcare insurance is actually good.
Medicare?
Not nearly as good.
So, she's just converting private expenditures into a tax and then not calling it a tax.
She refers to it as an employer Medicare contribution.
Oh, it's voluntary now.
Sure, that is, in fact, a tax, obviously speaking.
Also, she is counting on insane statistics.
So for example, she says that we are going to increase IRS enforcement on billionaires.
And she says that would generate $55 billion in revenue over a decade.
Okay, she says that it would generate, I'm sorry, wrong.
$550 billion in revenue over the decade.
Maybe $2.3 trillion.
I'm getting this wrong again.
$2.3 trillion in additional federal revenue just by staffing up the IRS.
That is 40 times the estimate by the Congressional Budget Office.
So she's just falsifying all of this stuff.
It's just sheer, absolute nonsense.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board points this out.
They say she has $30 trillion to finance, but Warren waves her wand and says the bill will really be $21 trillion.
She makes the rest vanish by positing magical savings from things like comprehensive payment reform.
She says hospitals would be reimbursed at an average of 110% of current Medicare rates, but hospitals now rely on private insurance, which would be gone in the future.
Also, she said she's going to restore healthcare competition by, what, abolishing healthcare competition?
In a word, she wants rationing, which is not a shock.
That is where all of this is going.
So, as we see these polls in the swing states that show Warren trailing Trump, You could see a move away from Elizabeth Warren and back to, wait for it, Joe Biden.
I'll get to a new poll in Nevada that shows that's exactly what is happening in just one second.
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More on the on the possible fading of Elizabeth Warren.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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OK, so as I say, when it comes to Elizabeth Warren, what you may see in the near future is Joe Biden starting to recover in some of the in some of the early states.
So, her entire campaign right now is staked on Iowa and New Hampshire.
Buttigieg is making some serious moves in Iowa.
If he takes Iowa, and Warren takes New Hampshire, Biden is still very much in the race.
Because, at that point, it's sort of a split.
And a three-way race benefits the person who's the biggest name.
Right now, Biden is continuing to hold a 10-point lead over Warren and Bernie Sanders among likely Democratic presidential caucus-goers in Nevada.
And that is buoyed by the fact that people want somebody who can beat Trump.
The poll found that the former vice president's lead narrows to between 3 and 4 points among respondents who described themselves as being strongly committed to their first-choice candidate and identified either Warren or Sanders as their top second-choice pick for the presidency, indicating that the race is far from settled.
But again, the more people see of Elizabeth Warren, the less they like Elizabeth Warren.
And I think that is a trend that is likely to continue over time.
She's pretty terrible.
She's pretty terrible.
And Bernie Sanders is going to go at Elizabeth Warren, right?
Now she's the front runner, and she's the front runner early.
That means that Bernie Sanders is going to turn his guns on her.
It means Pete Buttigieg is going to turn his guns on her.
It means Biden will turn his guns on her.
It means Kamala Harris will turn her guns on her.
So things are going to get ugly for Warren here pretty quickly.
Take, for example, Bernie Sanders.
Sanders is looking at Warren and saying, why is she getting all the attention?
She steals my ideas.
And then she lies about my ideas.
And here I am, guys.
You want the real deal?
You want the real deal?
You want some pudding?
Come to me.
Free pudding and also socialism.
Here at the Bernie Sanders headquarters.
But at least Sanders is honest.
He says, listen, I'm not going to lie to you and tell you Medicare for All is going to be free.
Because we are getting rid of the profiteering and the corruption in the healthcare industry, the drug companies and the insurance companies, we'll be able to provide all of that to people at a fraction of the cost they are paying right now.
Not here to tell you it's going to be free, you're going to have to pay something, but it's going to be a heck of a lot less than what you're currently paying.
So, I mean, there's Bernie at least being more honest about all of this.
I think that Elizabeth Warren, who's a media creation, there's a possibility she starts to fall apart somewhere in here.
Okay, other big news of the day.
So, a couple of pieces of big news.
So, our friend James O'Keefe, the undercover journalist over Project Veritas, he has now gotten hold of tape of an ABC News anchor saying on an open mic, her name is Amy Robach, and she was caught on camera slamming her own network for allegedly sitting on the Jeffrey Epstein story three years ago.
Here's a little bit of what that sounded like.
It's pretty incredible, actually.
She had pictures.
She had everything.
She was in hiding for 12 years.
We convinced her to come out.
We convinced her to talk to us.
It was unbelievable what we had.
Clinton.
We had everything.
I tried for three years to get it on to no avail, and now it's all coming out, and it's like these new revelations, and I freaking had all of it.
I'm so pissed right now.
Okay, and she's talking off-air about the fact that now all these revelations were coming out about Jeffrey Epstein.
She says, I had this years ago and ABC News quashed it and sat on it.
And now she has issued a statement.
Robotch, I mean, this just shows you how the media works.
Bad look for the media, right?
In the aftermath of NBC News basically quashing the Harvey Weinstein story for years until Ronan Farrow broke it.
And now it appears that ABC News was sitting on the Jeffrey Epstein stuff for years.
These are the media you are going to trust?
The public trust in the media is already at an all-time low.
This is certainly not going to help, nor should it.
Robach said her comments were made, quote, in a private moment of frustration.
I was upset that an important interview I'd conducted with Virginia Roberts didn't air because it could not obtain corroborating evidence to meet ABC's editorial standards about her allegations regarding Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew, and Bill Clinton.
She added that in the years since the 2015 interview, no one ever told me or the team to stop reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, and we have continued to aggressively pursue this important story.
An ABC News statement issued says, at the time, not all of our reporting met our standards to air, but we have never stopped investigating the story.
Well, you kind of did, didn't you?
I mean, just a little bit?
I mean, the fact is that if it didn't meet your standards to air, well then, presumably, you should have kept digging.
Presumably you should have kept digging.
So that is a pretty damning indictment of ABC News.
That's not what she's saying there, right?
I mean, what she is saying in that clip is that she had the interview, she had the goods, she says she has pictures there.
So it's different than what she is saying in her statement.
In her statement, she's like, oh, well, we didn't have all the goods.
But in that tape, she's saying, yeah, we pretty much had all of the goods.
If the media was involved in covering up or at least neglecting to investigate Jeffrey Epstein because they thought that it was going to hurt the Clintons, that's a massive, massive story, obviously.
And goes again to the level of media bias that is involved in all of this.
Pretty astonishing.
Mollie Hemingway over at the Federalist, she tweets, in addition to these statements not actually being responsive to what the initial hot mic claims were, mostly what this shows is that ABC News has an indefensibly different standard for e.g.
the Kavanaugh allegations or for the Covington boys than it does for Clinton-connected pedophiles, which is of course exactly right.
They're willing to run with any level of speculation, including false speculation, about anything.
About anything.
That hurts Republicans, but if it could possibly damn the Clintons, then all of a sudden they run away from this stuff, like wholesale.
And then you wonder why the American people have trouble trusting the media?
That would be the reason.
Speaking of the media, by the way, they went nuts yesterday because President Trump hosted the Washington Nationals at the White House, and obviously, this was a disaster.
I mean, the media only likes sports teams that boycott Trump's White House.
Yesterday, at the White House, Trump hosted the Washington National.
It turns out that a bunch of members of the Nationals are actually Trump fans, which is not really a shock.
If you look at sort of the political breakdown of various sports leagues, the NBA is obviously the most anti-Trump.
The NFL is somewhere in the middle.
The MLB, Major League Baseball, tends to be...
Where's Kurt?
majority pro-Trump, more of a Republican league, more of a conservative league, at least in terms of the players.
And the NHL, I believe, tends to be overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly more conservative.
And that's none of that is a particular shock given the polarized racial politics of the country right now.
But the media went nuts because some of the Washington Nationals players were committing the great and evil sin of wearing MAGA hats.
So Kurt Suzuki, who's the catcher for the Washington Nationals, he put on a MAGA hat.
Here is what that looked like.
Where's Kurt?
Where is he? - Come on.
It's coming.
Come here.
Say a couple words.
Come on.
I love you all.
I love you all.
Thank you.
What a job he did!
I didn't know that was going to happen.
How dare he wear a MAGA hat?
The media went nuts over all of this.
Ryan Zimmerman, who plays third base for the Washington Nationals, he also got up there and he thanked President Trump, which, of course, is terrible.
It's one thing if you go to the White House and you praise Barack Obama.
If you praise Trump, this is obviously a terrible, terrible thing.
Here's Ryan Zimmerman thanking Trump yesterday.
Mr. President, me and my teammates, first of all, I'd like to thank you for having us here.
This is an incredible honor that I think all of us will never forget.
And we'd also like to thank you for keeping everyone here safe in our country and continuing to make America the greatest country to live in the world.
That's right.
Thank you, man.
That's so nice of you.
Thank you very much.
Terrible, terrible, terrible.
This prompted a spasm of stupidity from a left-wing outlet called Poma Report on Twitter, talking about how wearing a MAGA hat is basically like being a Nazi.
This Palmer Report person said, putting on a MAGA hat is a form of racist hate speech and an implicit threat of violence.
Implicit threat of violence.
Kurt Suzuki should be banned from baseball.
If you don't like this tweet, F you.
So, just to be straight, if you wear a MAGA hat, you should be banned from baseball entirely.
My favorite was Matt Iglesias tweeted out about this.
He's like, well, there are a lot of white non-college educated players in the MLB.
Ryan Zimmerman went to University of Virginia and Kurt Suzuki is not white.
So, you're making a couple of basic category errors in all of this.
Now the fact is that Democrats are not taking into account the backlash that is going to attend to the insanity of the radical left, to the insanity of Elizabeth Warren, to the insanity of Bernie Sanders.
President Trump held a rally last night, and his basic point is going to play well.
As I keep saying, if President Trump simply campaigns, simply campaigns on pointing his finger at the Democrats, he'll probably be okay.
He'll probably be okay.
I mean, here was President Trump yesterday at a rally explaining the Democratic agenda with regard to indoctrinating American kids.
They want to indoctrinate your children, you know this?
Destroy anyone who holds traditional American values.
All you have to do is ask the boys from Covington Catholic High School, some of whom are here tonight.
The far left wants to impose their authoritarian ideology on the nation, telling you what to think, what to believe, and how you should live.
Okay, and he's exactly right about all this.
And then they lie about it, right?
Joy Behar let the cat out of the bag yesterday on The View.
She said, yeah, that's kind of what we want to do, all those things, but we have to keep it kind of a secret, guys.
That's really what we have to do, is keep it a secret.
They should not tell everything they're going to do.
Like, if you're going to take people's guns away, wait until you get elected, then take the guns away.
Don't tell them ahead of time.
By the way, that's what people like me think you're going to do.
That's what people like me think is going to happen, so I appreciate his honesty.
OK, with all of that said, I mean, this is the reason.
I mean, Meghan McCain is right over there.
We can read between the lines, guys.
We know exactly what it is that you are doing.
And so Democrats have been forced, as I keep saying over and over, and this is this is the feeling I think the American people additional are increasingly getting the feeling.
that the reason Democrats are so focused in on impeachment is not because they believe that Trump did anything extraordinarily vile or terrible in Ukraine, anything so beyond the pale.
It's because they think that if they don't impeach Trump and sully him in some new and unforeseen way, then he will win re-election.
That is obviously what is in Democrats' minds.
Now, with that said, there are some updates on the progression of the investigation.
The Democrats have been releasing the transcript of some of the conversations that have been had in the Intelligence Committee yesterday.
They released House transcripts with former Ambassador to Ukraine Mary Ivanovich, as well as Ambassador Michael McKinley, who is a senior aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
So.
And none of these transcripts look good for Trump, but none of them actually uncover criminal activity.
And none of these transcripts are wonderful looking, but none of them actually suggest that Trump was involved in the sort of criminal impeachable activity that Democrats have been claiming.
And so, Democrats are looking for new sources.
One of the sources they're counting on, and they're very excited about this, is Lev Parnas.
He's an indicted Ukrainian-American businessman who has ties to President Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
According to Reuters, he is now prepared to comply with requests for records and testimony from congressional impeachment investigators, according to his lawyer.
Parnas helped Giuliani look for dirt on Trump's political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.
And he's a key figure in this impeachment inquiry because presumably Parnas could theoretically testify that Giuliani wasn't concerned about overwhelming corruption in Ukraine.
He wasn't interested in Burisma.
He wasn't interested in generalized Ukrainian corruption.
Parnas could say, maybe secondhand, that Giuliani had said, Trump wants to get Biden, help me out.
So Parnas could be a difficult witness against Trump.
Now, it is also true that Parnas is currently under indictment.
So that means that he is not the most trustworthy witness.
You could end up with a Michael Cohen problem for Democrats, which is Michael Cohen is indicted, he's going to go to jail, and suddenly he swivels and he starts singing like a bird.
And everybody's like, well, can we believe him now?
Because it seems like he has something to gain out of all this.
According to Reuters, Parnas's apparent decision to work with the congressional committees represents a change of heart.
Parnas rebuffed a request from three House of Representatives committees last month to provide documents and testimony.
His lawyer said, quote, we will honor and not avoid the committee's requests to the extent they are legally proper while scrupulously protecting Mr. Parnas's privileges, including that of the Fifth Amendment.
Giuliani has not immediately responded to requests for comment on Capitol Hill.
The White House, the House leadership and a spokesperson for the House Intelligence Committee declined comment as well.
But juxtapose all of that with a new report from John Solomon.
I mean, all of this is turning into a mess, as you would predict.
John Solomon, who's done a heavy amount of lifting over at the Hill.
Democrats hate him.
The media hate him because he keeps pointing out that there may have actually been some there there with regard to Biden corruption.
He has a story today over at JohnSolomonReports.com.
The headline is, Hunter Biden's Ukraine gas firm pressed Obama administration to end corruption allegations memos show.
In other words, it sounds like maybe something really did corrupt and investigatable was happening in Ukraine.
According to John Solomon, Hunter Biden and his Ukrainian gas firm colleagues had multiple contacts with the Obama State Department during the 2016 election cycle, including one just a month before VP Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating his son's company for corruption.
Newly released memos show.
During that February 2016 contact, a U.S.
representative for Burisma Holdings sought a meeting with the Undersecretary of State Catherine Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the Ukrainian firm where Hunter Biden worked as a board member, according to memos obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Just three weeks before Burisma's overture to state, Ukrainian authorities raided the home of the oligarch who owned the gas firm and employed Hunter Biden, a signal the long-running corruption probe was escalating in the middle of the U.S.
presidential election.
Hunter Biden's name, in fact, was specifically invoked by the Burisma representative as a reason the State Department should help, according to a series of email exchanges among U.S.
officials trying to arrange the meeting.
The subject line for the email exchanges read simply, Burisma, quote, per our conversation, Karen Tramontano of Blue Star Strategies requested a meeting to discuss with U.S.
Novelli, USG remarks alleging Burisma of corruption.
So, all of this stinks.
24th 2016 email between state officials.
She noted that two high-profile U.S. citizens are affiliated with the company, including Hunter Biden as a board member.
Tramontano would like to talk with the U.S. about getting a better understanding of how the U.S. came to the determination that the company is corrupt.
According to Tramontano, there is no evidence of corruption, has been no hearing of process, and evidence to the contrary has been considered.
So all of this stinks, at least a little bit.
The emails show that this person Tramontano was scheduled to meet with Novelli on March 1st, 2016, and its State Department officials were scrambling to get answers ahead of time from the U.S. administration.
Embassy in Kiev.
So if it appears that Hunter Biden's company, Burismo, is pressuring the Obama administration to drop the investigation in the months leading up to Joe Biden pressuring Ukraine to dump its prosecutor, it's not a great look right there.
Not a great look.
So if all of this ends up basically coming down to a partisan fight, this isn't going to damage Trump in the end at all.
And it will come back to the electability of President Trump versus the electability of Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I like and then a quick thing that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
Paul Johnson is one of my favorite historians.
He's a wonderful historian.
His book, Modern Times, is one of the great sort of Comprehensive histories of the early 20th century and late 19th century.
He has another book that's not quite as well read called The Birth of the Modern World Society 1815 to 1830.
And you think to yourself, what the hell happened 1815 to 1830?
It turns out, a lot.
And the book also covers sort of the period slightly before 1815 and the period slightly after 1830.
But it is amazing how many of the arguments we're having today do have roots in this period.
The book is really first-rate.
I really enjoy, as I say, Paul Johnson's work.
I think he's terrific.
Check it out, The Birth of the Modern.
It is a heavy read, okay?
This thing is like a thousand pages, but come on, you have time.
Go check it out, The Birth of the Modern by Paul Johnson.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
One of the reasons why so many Americans think the Democrats are radical is because on issues like abortion, they've gotten more radical over time.
And their language has gotten more radical over time.
Take, for example, this Pennsylvania state representative.
Her name is Wendy Ullman.
She's a Democrat from Bucks, Pennsylvania, and she was making a speech about anti-abortion laws when she dropped this bizarre line about miscarriage.
We're also talking about a woman who comes into a facility and is having cramps.
And not to be concrete, an early miscarriage is just some mess on a napkin.
And I'm not sure people would agree that this is something that we want to take to the point of ritual.
Okay, an early miscarriage is just a mess on a napkin?
Really?
That sort of language is what Democrats want to run on?
She's come forward now and she's apologized.
She said, many women and family find tremendous comfort and solace in ritual burial or cremation in the case of early miscarriages.
Others do not.
Some would choose donation for medical research, like my family friend, who I quoted in a committee meeting saying, so my loss can have meaning.
What she was speaking against was a Pennsylvania house bill that would require abortion clinics and healthcare facilities to bury or cremate Lost unborn children, as opposed to tossing out the kids like routine medical waste.
So she uses that sort of language.
She's not the only Democratic representative who's using that sort of language.
A Virginia senator is also using language that is quite bizarre, saying, don't worry guys, you know, the real reason that men care about abortion is because women are the ones who have abortions.
This Virginia state senator says, if men were the ones having abortion, this sort of stuff is so irritating, if men were the ones having abortion, then there would be an abortion clinic on every street corner.
Reproductive health.
It is nobody's business.
Nobody's business who has to access the abortion process other than that woman.
And I have told audience after audience, if men could get pregnant, you'd see more abortion clinics in this country than Starbucks.
Okay, and that got big cheers.
His name is Dick Saslaw, that state representative.
Which, doesn't that undercut his argument?
Isn't the argument that men are terrible and bad?
And men are terrible and bad, and thus they would be having more abortions than women.
Okay, well, that's sort of a pro-life argument.
Maybe that's true.
Maybe if men could get abortions, they would be pushing for more abortion.
But that sort of suggests the immorality of abortion, doesn't it?
Not the wonderful, the sort of wonderful, generous nature of abortion.
Okay, we'll be back here later today with all the additional updates on the situation over in Mexico, on the presidential race.
We have a lot more news to cover a little bit later today, so stick around for that.
Two additional hours coming up a little bit later today, or we'll see you here tomorrow with all the latest.
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