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Dec. 9, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:23
The End Of Legitimate Elections | Ep. 912
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Democrats prepare to declare the 2020 election illegitimate, a terrorist attack strains U.S.-Saudi relations, and the media take Nikki Haley wildly out of context.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Well, I hope you had a wonderful weekend.
We're back here on a Monday, and that means it's impeachment time, man.
It's time for some impeachment talk.
So where are we in Impeachment Gate 2019?
Well, the Democrats are apparently planning to have this vote maybe before Christmas.
They're not talking about having this impeachment vote as early as this week, and they are rushing this thing through.
Today's impeachment hearings at the House Judiciary Committee They feature a bevy of Democratic lawyers because that's just what you need.
I'm very convinced.
Now that I know a bunch of Democratic partisan hacks like Barry Burke are speaking, this has totally changed my opinion of everything.
Barry Burke is a longtime Democratic partisan.
He's written a bunch for the Brookings Institute.
He suggested that Trump was guilty of collusion with regard to Russia.
He suggested that Trump was guilty of obstruction with regard to the Mueller investigation.
He was working for the House Judiciary Committee as early as February.
He actually left his law firm to work for the House Judiciary Committee in February.
Now, you may be asking yourself, Well, why was he working for the House Judiciary Committee in February when the Ukraine stuff only began to happen in like May and June?
And the answer is because Barry Burke has been pro-impeachment for a very long time.
But now we are supposed to take it with the utmost seriousness when the Democrats call forth people who have been for impeachment for years to say that actually they discovered an impeachable offense.
I mean, it's like amazing.
Unbelievably enough, Barry Burke, who really has been in favor of impeachment for years, All the constitutional experts who testified recognize that obstructing an investigation is an impeachable offense.
for the House Democrats testifying what House Democrats want to hear, which is that House Democrats should impeach President Trump.
All the constitutional experts who testified recognized that obstructing an investigation is an impeachable offense.
But here, the offense we're talking about that's being interfered or obstructed with is interfering with this very election that's coming up.
And I submit to you, given what happened with the Department of Justice investigation, given what's happening here, if in fact President Trump can get away with what he did again, our imagination is the only limit to what President Trump may do next, or what our imagination is the only limit to what President Trump may do next, or what a future president may do next, to try to abuse his or her power, to serve his own personal you're Your imagination is the only limit.
Wow, I have a pretty wild imagination, as it turns out.
Would it be considered abuse of power if a president, say, said directly to the Russian government that he would grant them extra flexibility on foreign policy?
Should they be nice to him before the election?
Would that be an abuse of power, per se?
You know, like just before an election, like Barack Obama did in 2012?
How about like if Bill Clinton were taking money from Chinese cutouts back in the 1996 election and simultaneously declassifying nuclear secrets.
Would that be a problem?
Again, it turns out that the presidency has a long history of manipulation with regard to politics.
But why are we supposed to take Barry Burke seriously?
The answer is because the media want you to take Barry Burke seriously.
But there's something that's deeper that's going on.
With regard to the House Democrats impeachment effort.
And it really has very little to do with the offenses supposedly committed by Trump with regard to Ukraine.
Again, none of this is defense of Trump's activity in Ukraine, other than to say this is not warranting of impeachment.
The Democrats wildly overplayed their hand here.
They should have gone for censure.
If they'd gone for censure, they probably could have peeled off a few Republicans to vote in favor of censuring Trump.
But they went for impeachment, and that makes the Republican case very easy, which is you don't have the necessary goods on President Trump For impeachment, but it really isn't about that.
It's about something else and something that actually is quite dangerous for the Republic.
Not just misusing impeachment, which, again, I'm not super bothered by parties misusing impeachment.
Impeachment was always a political power.
I'm much more bothered by something else.
A real danger, I think, to the Republic, and it doesn't come from presidential abusive power.
That's always been a danger.
It's something that's a little different this time.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so.
Why are the Democrats doing all of this?
Because they're setting up an argument that's going to be made about 2020 that they also made about 2016.
We have now had four elections in the past 20 years or so in which Republicans have won the presidency.
We had Bush 2000, Bush 2004, Donald Trump 2016, and maybe Donald Trump 2020.
Donald Trump were to win in 2020.
Not one of those elections have Democrats deemed legitimate.
In 2004, they said it was illegitimate because Bush was not legitimately elected in 2000.
They said that Al Gore was elected in 2000 because Gore won the popular vote, despite the fact that Gore did not actually win the vote in Florida, and they tried to manipulate as much as they could.
They tried to count certain ballots and not count other ballots in order to achieve their desired result.
The bottom line is, Bush won that election.
Hey, Democrats never accepted that he won that election, which means that everything that he did, in terms of shaping the Supreme Court afterward, is illegitimate, according to Democrats.
2004, because 2000, according to Democrats, was illegitimate, is also illegitimate.
2016, according to Democrats, is illegitimate, not just because Trump lost the popular vote, but because of quote-unquote Russian interference.
Doesn't matter, by the way.
That they still have not shown how that Russian interference swung the election to Trump.
This is always the dot that's never connected.
It's just not connected.
Democrats will say things like, well, the Russians were involved in the 2016 election and that shifted the election.
I need the evidence that it shifted the election.
I know they were trying to manipulate, but do you really believe that a few Facebook memes shifted the election in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania?
Is that truly what you believe?
Because as someone who is one of the, my personal Facebook page is one of the most highly trafficked Facebook pages on Facebook, and I can tell you the statistics that were shown by the Senate Intelligence Committee about the reach and power of Russian posts on Facebook, it was minimal.
Really minimal.
I mean, when people say, oh, this vast Russian campaign.
Okay, the vast Russian... The only case that you can make that the Russians really impacted the 2016 election is that the Russians were working with Wikileaks and they were sending out those DNC emails.
That at least is a fair case, because it shifted the nature of the election.
But again, if that had not come from the Russians, then it would have made a difference.
And also, Is that Russian manipulation or Wikileaks manipulation?
Even if it's Russian manipulation, let's assume that's Russian manipulation.
That's not Trump-Russia collusion, number one.
And number two, the other element of the Russian manipulation that Democrats are constantly talking about is the Facebook post with all of that.
So again, the best case that the Russians manipulated the 2016 election has to do with the release of those DNC emails where John Podesta was phished and then all of those emails were released.
You'd have to show that in the absence of the release of those DNC emails that the Democrats still don't lose that election because it turns out that the bigger issue was not what was in those DNC emails, which again was part of the campaign but certainly not the entirety of the campaign.
The biggest issue in the 2016 election was that Hillary Clinton had taken 33,000 class emails and put them on her private homebrew server in her bathroom and then they disappeared and then she bleach bit the thing.
Right, that was a bigger issue.
That's what Trump really honed in on.
So yeah, it caused some chaos that Jon Podesta was emailing mean things about Bernie Sanders and such.
But did that shape the entire outcome of the election?
Hard to say.
It's very difficult to say that a single factor in isolation shifted the nature of the election.
It certainly wasn't the Facebook manipulation that the Russians were engaged in.
That much I can certainly say.
Okay.
With all of that said, the Democrats refuse to accept the results of the 2016 election.
They see it as completely illegitimate.
They believe that Hillary Clinton was the elected president.
And we've seen the Democrats extend this line of thought to the George Governor's race, for example, where Stacey Abrams lost by 50,000 votes.
You can say that that's a close election.
It is percentage-wise.
It is not in terms of absolute vote.
Stacey Abrams lost by a fairly large margin in the absolute vote in Georgia.
Democrats still claim that Stacey Abrams was the fairly elected governor of Georgia.
So now moving forward to 2020, what Democrats are attempting to do with this impeachment effort is set up an argument that if Donald Trump is elected in 2020, it's because of Ukraine manipulation.
That if it were not for Trump interfering in Ukraine and trying to militarize American military aid to Ukraine in order to get dirt on Joe Biden, that Trump wouldn't have won the 2020 election.
They're setting this thing up in advance.
This is why they say it's urgent to get Trump out now.
They say if we don't get Trump out now, then Trump will manipulate 2020 just the way he manipulated 2016.
Well, you cannot have a functional republic when people do not accept the results of elections.
This used to be a Democrat talking point.
They said this in 2015-2016 about Trump.
They said, Trump's never going to accept the results of the 2016 election.
And he's just going to agitate from the outside.
And then we're not going to be able to have a republic.
Because the truth is, what holds a republic together... Yoni Appledam had a piece like this over at The Atlantic making this argument.
What holds a republic together is your feeling that the pain that you experience staying in the republic is less egregious than the pain that you would experience leaving the republic.
In other words, you have to feel as though even if you lost the election, number one, it's not a threat to your very way of life, and number two, you have to feel like the election was legitimate.
Those two factors have to be there.
Well, Democrats are tearing away at both of those factors right now.
They're saying that Trump is not only a threat to your way of life, he's an incipient Hitler, right?
This guy is going to vi- Your imagination is the only limit on the boundaries of what President Trump will do to violate the American compact.
And number two, his election is illegitimate, right?
They're setting this thing up in advance.
In a second, I'm going to show you Jerry Nadler Jerry Nadler saying this openly, I mean saying openly that if Donald Trump is not impeached that he will cheat and that the election will be skewed and that nobody should accept it.
We're living in a very dangerous, this is dangerous stuff.
It is.
And by the way, it was dangerous if Trump had not accepted the results of the 2016 election if Hillary Clinton won.
It would be dangerous if in 2020 a Democrat were to win and Donald Trump were to sit outside and say this election was not fair and I don't accept the result of the election.
That's dangerous.
The one good thing that Al Gore did, in short-lived fashion, but the one good thing that Al Gore did is after he lost that election, he said, okay, George W. Bush is president of the United States now.
That was a good thing that Al Gore did and a worthwhile thing that Al Gore did.
If we are not coming to the point where Democrats refuse to accept the results of elections they lose, we got a problem.
And if Republicans do the same thing, we don't have a Republic anymore.
We just have people clubbing each other over the head.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so Jerry Nadler, who is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, He comes out over the weekend.
He's on Chuck Todd.
And he says that if Trump isn't impeached, the 2020 election may not be fair.
And so the corollary would be, so we may not actually respect the results.
Here's Jerry Nadler.
We also are faced with a very direct threat that this president put himself repeatedly above the interest of the country and poses a threat to the integrity of the next election.
That's not something we were talking about 20 years ago.
He poses a threat to the integrity of the next election if he's allowed to continue to do what he's doing.
Okay, that right there is a pre-emptive claim by Jerry Nadler that whatever happens in the next election, if a Republican wins, it's corrupt.
That's supremely disturbing.
It should be upsetting to everybody.
Again, this was one of Hillary Clinton's big pitches in 2016.
Now she's wandering around the woods of Chappaqua explaining that she's the actual president of the United States.
We have not had, according to the Democrats, a legitimately elected Republican president in this country since 1988.
According to Democrats.
Since I was four years old, we have not had a legitimately elected Republican president in this country since I was a four-year-old child, according to the Democrats.
And that is because, again, Bush was illegitimate, and now Trump is illegitimate.
And then Democrats wonder why Republicans look at them and they say, okay, well, we don't trust you with power.
Why would we trust you with power?
You think every time people dismiss your concerns, your political concerns, every time you think that people overrule you and think that you're wrong, that that is because the American people are not actually overruling you and thinking you are wrong.
According to Democrats, Democrats have never been wrong.
The American people have just been screwed in some way by the electoral system.
It's why you see Elizabeth Warren running around saying the Electoral College is unfair.
It's why you see the Democrats running around for the past several years saying the United States Senate should be reconstituted according to population, which of course defeats the purpose of the United States Senate.
The Democrats, for all the talk about Trump as a threat to the system, Trump has not actually threatened the system.
Trump, like really, what is the giant threat to the system that Donald Trump has provided?
So far, Donald Trump has done less with executive orders than Barack Obama did.
He hasn't been droning American citizens overseas the way that Barack Obama was, so far as I'm aware.
He's continued to drone more, but not nearly at the same rate that Barack Obama was.
He certainly didn't militarize the IRS the way that Obama's IRS was militarized.
He didn't militarize his HHS the way that Barack Obama militarized his HHS.
So where is the threat to the press?
Where's the threat to the press?
He hasn't been going after members of the press and trying to jail them and phone tap them the way that Barack Obama's DOJ was.
So where exactly is the threat?
The threat, according to the Democrats, is in Trump's personal behavior.
That Trump acts transactionally with regard to the presidency.
And again, I don't think that there is untruth to that.
I think a lot more president, I think he's just more obvious about it than other presidents.
I think Barack Obama did too.
I think Obama was just elegant and subtle in a way that Donald Trump is not.
I mean, Donald Trump is a direct rebuttal to the subtlety and elegance of Barack Obama in a variety of ways for both good and bad.
But with that said, if you're talking about threats to the system, Democrats are openly calling for the overthrow of the Electoral College, they want the reconstitution of the United States Senate, and they are saying that if Donald Trump wins in 2020, it is fundamentally illegitimate.
At the outset.
From the beginning, it is fundamentally illegitimate.
And it's not just Jerry Nadler.
Al Green, the representative from New York, who's been trying to impeach Trump since literally the first day that Trump was in office.
Al Green says that Trump has to be thrown out of office, not because Donald Trump has committed some sort of impeachable crime, but because Donald Trump is a bad man who represents the history of slavery in America.
If you believe that Donald Trump is a representative of slavery in the United States, and also that if he wins election, it's fundamentally illegitimate, How do you live in a country with people who believe that every election is stolen from them?
I don't know how that's gonna work.
And by the way, I'm scared of that on the other side too.
I am.
The fact is that if Donald Trump loses, and if Donald Trump then goes out and he says, this election was stolen from me for whatever reason, right?
He can complain about the media.
That's fair.
The media hate him.
He can complain about the fact that the Democrats lie about him routinely.
We'll get to that in a second.
They do.
Okay, but if Trump loses in 2020, and then he comes back the next day and he says, actually, I didn't lose.
Actually, I won.
And people believe him.
We got a problem.
You have to accept the results of elections.
But Democrats never have, and this is the great hypocrisy of Democrats.
They were blaming Trump for this preemptively, and they have yet to accept the result of an election since, again, for 20 years they keep saying that Republicans who are elected are not actually elected.
Meanwhile, you have actual manipulated elections like Norm Coleman versus Al Franken in the state of Minnesota, where votes are magically discovered after the final count is in.
Or the Dino Rossi race in Washington state, A few years back, where a Democrat suddenly discovers votes that puts the Democrat over the top.
Like, those are actual questionable elections.
But I'm sorry, 2016, as far as the actual vote count, was not a questionable election.
And Donald Trump did not coordinate with the Russians, as the Mueller Report found.
And yet we are still told he's illegitimate.
And now the Democrats are playing up that Trump is illegitimate going into 2020.
And no matter what happens, he will be illegitimate even if he wins.
Also, he happens to be a vicious pro-slavery racist, according to Al Green.
So, things are going well in the country.
I do believe, ma'am, that we have to deal with the original sin.
We have to deal with slavery.
Slavery was the thing that put all of what President Trump has done lately into motion.
But until we deal with the issue of invidious discrimination as it relates to LGBTQ community, the anti-Semitism, the racism, the Islamophobia, the transphobia, and also the misogyny that he has exemplified, I don't think our work is done.
Okay, what the hell does that have to do with impeachment exactly?
Remember, the question before that was an impeachment question.
What does that have to do with impeachment?
And by the way, again, Nancy Pelosi is engaged in this sort of language.
So, here's what we've learned from the Democrats.
If Donald Trump is re-elected, or if he is not impeached, the civilization itself is at stake.
Nancy Pelosi says this.
The civilization is at stake.
Also, if he is elected, it's illegitimate.
I mean, I can't think of much more of a recipe for chaos and conflict than that.
that.
Here's Nancy Pelosi saying, American civilization is at stake if Donald Trump is not impeached over Ukraine.
Sure.
And what does America...
Our values.
Values of what we care about as a nation.
A model, a beacon of hope to the world.
And he devalues that.
So, again, we don't agonize, we organize.
And we do so in a way that, again, is unifying for our country.
It is absolutely imperative.
Civilization, as we know it today, is at stake in the next election.
Civilization is at stake in the next election.
If Donald Trump wins, civilization is over.
It's oh, by the way, I didn't like this language when Republicans used it about Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Go back and listen to my podcasts.
You can hear it.
You know, the idea that America was over if Hillary Clinton won.
Yes, America would have been worse if Hillary Clinton won than if Donald Trump won.
But was civilization over?
Were you gonna go home and sell your house and pack up and move to New Zealand?
The answer was no, because the civilization isn't close to over.
We're the greatest civilization in the history of mankind.
No.
No, it was not.
This is dangerous, dangerous stuff.
By the way, I'll just note that Nancy Pelosi, the same person who last week was suggesting that it would be ridiculous to say that she hates the president and that's why she's impeaching.
Back in 1998, she said the only reason Republicans were impeaching was because they hated President Clinton.
Today, the Republican majority is not judging the president with fairness, but impeaching him with a vengeance.
In the investigation of the president, fundamental principles which Americans hold dear Privacy, fairness, checks and balances have been seriously violated.
And why?
Because we are here today because the Republicans in the House are paralyzed with hatred of President Clinton.
And until the Republicans free themselves of this hatred, our country will suffer.
Amazing.
This is the same person who said you should never use hatred about impeachment in me.
I'm a Catholic.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, we'll get to more of this in just one second, and we'll get to the added incendiary factor here of media malfeasance when it comes to coverage of our politics, because the media just lied about our politics on a routine basis.
It's astonishing.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so.
It is.
So we have a few factors that are militating in favor of heightened conflict right now in the United States come 2020.
I mean, it feels like fever pitch.
It does.
And I will say, I think that part of the reason that Democrats are pushing the feeling of fever pitch is a sort of a tacit threat.
If you reelect Trump, there will be people in the streets.
This chaos will continue.
And it's not just Trumpian chaos.
It's not just that Trump is a Crazy man, you don't know what he's gonna do.
We are not going to allow the country to go back to a certain level of stasis.
The fact is the economy right now is historically booming.
It's as good as it has ever been in the history of the United States.
We are at the lowest unemployment rates in American history for the last 100 years.
Since 1969, we have not had unemployment rates this low.
We have a booming stock market.
It's up around 28,000.
These are enormous, enormous numbers.
We should be pretty happy, right?
Things are going fairly well.
We are not engaged in any massive foreign conflict.
Yes, we have long-lasting wars in places like Afghanistan, places like Syria, but those are low-level conflicts.
There's no draft.
Like, we're not in the middle of a massive foreign campaign.
Like, things are actually pretty good.
And most Americans walking around the country today don't feel terrible about the country or feel bad about themselves.
But the media, the Democrats, they're trying to suggest that civilization itself is at stake.
We've had three years of Donald Trump.
Has civilization been completely destroyed by Donald Trump?
I don't like a lot of the things the guy says.
You don't like a lot of the things the guy says.
But the economy's good.
We're doing okay on foreign policy.
The attempt to heighten the chaos is one of the things the Democrats and the media want to do, because if you heighten the chaos, then it provides the contrast of a quote-unquote back-to-normalcy campaign for the Democrats.
This is why Joe Biden is doing well in the general polling.
It's also why he's doing well in the primary polling, because most Americans are tired.
They are tired of this.
It's why I've said that I think President Trump needs to tone it down.
He doesn't have to play into it, but this is also a purposeful plan.
By some people in the media.
Many in the media would like to see this conflict heightened.
Make the stakes higher.
Because the higher you make the stakes, the more you can get your voting base out to vote.
And convince moderates that all of this will just go away.
Everything will go back to normal.
Everybody will calm down if Joe Biden becomes President of the United States.
Okay, so let's get to the media.
So we've had over the past few weeks, we've had past few years, we've had Democrats claim fundamental American institutions, like key American institutions need to go because they're not democratic.
We've heard that Republicans are vicious racists.
We want to put y'all back in chains in the word of Joe Biden about Mitt Romney, the most milquetoast human being who has ever walked the earth.
We've heard from Democrats that they want to get rid of the Electoral College, they want to rewrite the U.S.
Senate, they want to stack the Supreme Court, because Republicans are a threat to everything you hold dear, and every time Republicans win a presidential election, it's illegitimate.
And by the way, if Donald Trump wins in 2020, it's because he wasn't impeached and because he is And because he's militarizing American foreign policy in order to benefit himself in the 2020 election.
Add on top of that the media claiming that Republicans are invariably and always crazy people and the media covering these things in incredibly false ways.
So let me give you a couple of quick examples.
First example is about President Trump.
So President Trump over the weekend, speaks at this pro-Israel council, the Israeli-American council.
And he says a couple of things.
And Democrats, particularly reporters from places like Vox, or activists from places like Media Matters, they immediately clip these things out of context in order to suggest that President Trump is a vicious anti-Semite while he's being cheered loudly by the Israeli-American council.
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You're brutal killers.
Not nice people at all, but you have to vote for me.
You have no choice.
You're not going to vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that.
how people in the room are hard-nosed business people.
And here is what he says. - A lot of you are in the real estate business 'cause I know you very well.
You're brutal killers, not nice people at all, but you have to vote for them, you have no choice.
You're not gonna vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that.
You're not gonna vote for the wealth tax.
Yeah, let's take 100% of your wealth away.
No, no.
Even if you don't like me, some of you don't.
Some of you I don't like at all, actually.
And you're going to be my biggest supporters because you'll be out of business in about 15 minutes if they get it.
Okay, so people in the media played this as though he was being anti-semitic in this clip.
I'm not kidding you.
There were people in the media who suggested that this was an anti-semitic line because he was saying to Jews that some of them are not nice people.
He's explicitly talking about people he did real estate with.
The entire clip is about how I do deals with you guys.
You guys hate me.
I hate you.
You're gonna vote for me anyway because at least I'm not a crazed socialist.
The media played this as though Donald Trump was being an anti-Semite in that clip.
That's incredibly dishonest.
Incredibly dishonest.
Okay, and then Trump talks about Israel.
And he is at the Israeli-American Council.
Okay, so these are people who care deeply about Israel.
And he makes a point.
Okay, as usual, not always in the best way, but what he says here is not actually wrong.
Here's President, and again, they try to claim that this is anti-Semitic.
Here's President Trump saying that he is very pro-Israel and Jews should be more pro-Israel.
Now, as I've said before, if what he means by that is that people with the last name Berg and Steen ought to be more pro-Israel, then that's silly because there are a lot of people who are born Jewish who don't give a damn about Israel.
But if he means people who actually care about Judaism, people who consider themselves Jews for purposes of public discussion, Then he is correct.
There are many Jews who do not care enough about Israel.
Many, many Jews who do not care enough about Israel, who care more about abortion until ninth month and same-sex marriage than they do about Israel.
Which, if you have any semblance of understanding of Judaism, is kind of ridiculous.
Trump is not wrong in what he says here.
The media portrayed this as anti-Semitic.
We have to get the people of our country, of this country, to love Israel more.
I have to tell you that.
We have to do it.
We have to get them to love Israel more.
Because you have people that are Jewish people, that are great people, they don't love Israel enough.
You know that.
You know that.
Okay, nothing he says there is wrong.
The media played this as though this is anti-Semitic.
He's literally saying that people should be more pro the Jewish state.
And also there are lots of Jews who don't care enough about the Jewish state.
100% true!
Okay, but we're gonna pretend that that is him being virulently anti-semitic from the same party that voted in the last week.
That Jews settling in historic Jewish areas is a violation of international law, and four members of the House Democratic Party decided they would not vote even for that condemnation of Trump because it would suggest a two-state solution.
Rashida Tlaib, who's a blatant anti-Semite from Michigan, she suggested that when it comes to Israel, there should not be a Jewish state.
She said there should not be a two-state solution, okay?
Understand, a two-state solution, according to Rashida Tlaib, would be a Palestinian state and a Jewish state.
She doesn't want that.
She wants it to go away.
She says that would be an apartheid state.
So she wants the destruction of the Jewish state?
No commentary from the media.
None.
Nobody even asks a question about it.
But Trump is very divisive on Israel.
The Democrat, the media, their attempts to play up the radicalism of the Republicans is quite insane and completely complete.
And downplay, by the way, the radicalism of the Democratic Party is completely, completely dishonest.
Incredibly dishonest.
I'll give you another example of that in just one second.
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The media are not content with lying about Trump.
They're also lying about Nikki Haley.
So Nikki Haley did an interview with the former ambassador to the UN, former South Carolina governor.
Remember, when she was governor of South Carolina, while she was governor, there was a mass shooting at a Charleston church by a brutal terrorist racist, white supremacist racist.
And then there was a picture of that guy holding a Confederate flag.
And Nikki Haley, as the governor of the state, had the Confederate flag, battle flag, removed from state grounds and put in a museum.
And she made a speech about it at the time talking about the the conflicted history of the confederate flag how many people saw it as a symbol of bravery and and home and hearth and how many people saw it as a symbol of racism which of course it originally was right and how that morphed over time for many people and so it didn't have its original relation to slavery but she saw how it was divisive and she saw how how it hurt people and and all of this okay so she was on Glenn Beck and she was asked about the confederate flag controversy and here is what she said
And the ability of the media to take perfectly innocuous statements out of context and use it to call people like Nikki Haley racist.
Remember, she's the person who took it off state grounds in South Carolina in 2015 and made a speech about the history of the Confederate flag.
She made a statement about it, about how she totally understood why when black Americans looked at that flag, they saw, effectively speaking, a swastika.
She got that.
But she also understood that the vast majority of people who had a Confederate flag bumper sticker on the back of their car were not Nazis and were not white supremacists.
All of which is true.
All of those things can be true at the same time.
They suggested, over the weekend, that Nikki Haley was actually a racist who was making excuses for the original Confederate flag and pretending that it didn't have any link to historic racism.
They did it based on taking her out of context on Glenn Beck's show.
Here is this guy that comes out with his manifesto holding the Confederate flag and had just hijacked everything that people thought of.
We don't have hateful people in South Carolina.
There's always the small minority that's always going to be there.
But people saw it as service and sacrifice and heritage.
But once he did that, There was no way to overcome it, and the national media came in in droves.
They wanted to define what happened.
They wanted to make this about racism.
They wanted to make it about gun control.
They wanted to make it about death penalty.
Okay, so she says that, and they say, oh, well, that means that she thinks that the Confederate flag doesn't have any history of relation to racism.
That's what she thinks.
Okay, she, no, no.
In 2015, she specifically made statements about exactly what these, what exactly the Confederate flag was, right?
She gave a statement, June, 2015, right?
A televised statement, and she talked about the people of South Carolina, and she talked about the, she talked about the Confederate flag, And she said in that speech on matters of race, South Carolina has a tough history.
We all know that many of us have seen it in our own lives and lives of our parents and grandparents.
We don't need reminders.
In spite of last week's tragedy, we've come a long way since those days and have much to be proud of.
But there's more we can do.
That brings me to the subject of the Confederate flag that flies on the statehouse grounds.
For many people in our state, the flag stands for traditions that are noble, traditions of history, of heritage and of ancestry.
The hate-filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag.
In no way does he reflect the people in our state who respect and in many ways revere it.
Those South Carolinians view the flag as a symbol of respect, integrity, and duty.
They also see it as memorial, a way to honor ancestors.
That is not hate, nor is it racism.
At the same time, It is what she said in 2015, when she removed the flag from state grounds.
At the same time, for many others in South Carolina, the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past.
As a state, we can survive, as we have done, while still being home to both of those viewpoints.
We do not need to declare a winner and a loser here.
We respect freedom of expression and that for those who wish to show their respect for the flag on their private property, no one will stand in your way.
But the statehouse is different.
And events of the past week call upon us to look at this in a different way.
Fifteen years ago, after much contentious debate, South Carolina came together in a bipartisan way to move the flag from atop the Capitol dome.
Today, we are here in a moment of unity in our state without ill will to say it's time to move the flag from Capitol grounds.
And now they're trying to paint Nikki Haley as a brutal racist.
Now they're trying to paint Nikki Haley who moved the flag.
as a brutal racist.
Hey, this is part of a broader agenda to suggest that the Republican Party utterly and completely is radical and is trying to tear apart the country and is dangerous to the country.
And also, if they win elections, the elections are illegitimate.
They're trying to steal elections.
This is why you hear Democrats talk about voter suppression.
There is no evidence of widespread voter suppression in the United States.
None.
Okay, the evidence that Republicans are attempting to quote-unquote suppress the vote and keep people from being able to vote based on voter ID laws is absurd.
The idea that you want to make sure that somebody is voting, who says they're voting, by having them show an ID, that is not voter suppression.
Poll taxes are voter suppression.
Poll tests, those are voter suppression.
Constitutionally speaking, it is not voter suppression to suggest that polling places have to be open for widespread hours, not at specific hours of the day.
It is not voter suppression.
When in Georgia, the case where Democrats keep saying there was voter suppression, black turnout has outpaced black share of the population in Georgia for years, including in the Stacey Abrams race.
Hey, that's not voter suppression, but Democrats keep claiming this stuff so they can claim that every election is illegitimate.
And then you get people like Charles Blow, again, awful columnist for the New York Times, with a piece called, Oh, Nikki, You're So Wrong.
There is much Nikki Haley could learn from a true heroine of the South Carolina Confederate flag removal, Bree Newsom Bass.
And then he has a long column about how Nikki Haley About how Nikki Haley doesn't understand the history of the Confederate flag.
She gave an astonishing statement for the very brazenness of its erasure of history and its bowing to a racist narrative.
Any image of morality and unity Haley had cultivated vanished when those words left her lips.
She did not say, my view of the Confederate flag is that the Confederate flag only represents heroism and decency.
That's not what she said.
She said, the vast majority of South Carolinians who fly the flag, it doesn't represent being a fan of Jim Crow or racism, which is true.
How do we know that's true?
Because five minutes ago, Democrats were saying the same thing.
Joe Biden praised a group that displayed the Confederate flag as fine people, like three years ago, four years ago.
Howard Dean famously invoked the Confederate flag in his 2004 race.
Here is Joe Biden, this is just a few years ago, talking about the fine people who displayed the Confederate flag.
A very moving and eloquent speech as a son of the Confederacy.
Acknowledging that it was time to change and yield to a position that Senator Carol Moseley Braun raised on the floor of the Senate, not granting a federal charter to a organization made up of many fine people who continue to display the Confederate flag
Okay, so again, many fine people who displayed the Confederate flag.
Howard Dean did the same thing back in 2004, and he said that he wanted to be the candidate for Democrats who flew a Confederate flag on their bumper sticker.
This was acceptable until five seconds ago.
Nikki Haley says it, it's no longer acceptable because everyone apparently who has a Confederate flag on their bumper sticker is a racist, which is a hell of a way to win elections in the South if you're a Democrat, really.
To call everyone who has a Confederate flag a vicious racist?
Like the Dukes of Hazzard are now vicious racists?
Okay, good luck with this.
Here's Howard Dean back when the Democrats were slightly less insane.
I don't want to win without the South.
I'm going to go to the South and I'm going to say to white guys who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back of their car, we want your vote too because your kids don't have health insurance either!
Okay, when Democrats said it, it was fine.
When Republicans say it, apparently it is truly, truly awful.
Meanwhile, if you're a Democrat, you can say pretty much anything and the media will let you get away with it.
So, AOC, the illustrious AOC, the brilliant AOC, she tweeted out that Amazon is coming to New York.
Amazon is coming to New York.
They agreed to open in Hudson Yards.
They didn't get any financial incentives from New York City or state.
She tweeted out a picture of herself, like sitting in the lounge of her upscale Washington, D.C.
Apartment building.
Again, she doesn't even understand Trump's food stamp policy.
The food stamp policy that has work requirements does not apply to families with children.
80 deals, helipad handouts for Jeff Bezos and corporate giveaways.
Maybe the Trump administration should focus more on cutting public assistance to billionaires instead of poor families.
Again, she doesn't even understand Trump's food stamp policy.
The food stamp policy that has work requirements does not apply to families with children.
It only applies to single people who are not working because she doesn't like a Again, she's mischaracterizing this stuff.
Again, she's mischaracterizing this stuff.
But also, it's worth noting that the 25,000 Amazon jobs that were supposed to come to New York, they were supposed to come to her district.
Now, 1,500 jobs are coming to New York outside her district.
She's an idiot.
Okay?
And she's always been an idiot.
She doesn't know what the hell she's talking about, but the media are gonna continue to treat her as though she's worth talking about.
Okay, so what is all of this designed to do?
All of this is designed to create a feeling of chaos.
And the feeling of chaos can only be alleviated.
Only be alleviated if you give Democrats what they want.
It can only be alleviated if you give Democrats what they want.
Now, the most extreme version of this sort of politics was practiced, you know, decades ago by Marion Barry in Washington, D.C.
This is not a racial thing.
Marion Barry absolutely said that he would create unrest in the streets unless his constituents were given what they wanted.
And there's a very good book on this, and the name of it escapes me, but I've mentioned it in the past on the show.
Talking about how America's major cities were riven by chaos, specifically designed to create government policy from the inside.
There's sort of this inside-outside game.
You see it on college campuses a lot, where there will be chaos when a speaker comes to campus, and then the administration, instead of cracking down on the people who are committing the chaos, the administration just caves to the chaos and says, okay, I guess we'll alleviate your woes.
We'll give you what you want.
Hey, Democrats in the media are now doing the same thing.
It's chaos out there.
It's craziness.
Now, a lot of that is being pushed by the Democrats in the media, that it's chaos and craziness out there.
Because again, walk outside today.
Are you seeing a zombie apocalypse?
I'm not.
When you're not watching the news, when you turn off Twitter, Do you really feel as though the country is in a state of vast chaos?
Complete breakdown?
When you turn off, and by the way, it's not just left-wingers.
When you turn off Fox, when you turn off my show, when you turn off any of the other, when you don't follow politics for five seconds, does it feel like chaos or does it feel like things are kind of okay?
It feels like things are kind of okay.
But for a lot of the members of the democratic media, the goal is to create this feeling of chaos so that you're gonna go, okay, fine, just put old Joe in there.
Honestly, like old Joe, just do old Joe.
Because old Joe, I mean, like, guy's not even alive.
Just put him in there.
Speaking of Joe Biden, right?
Corpse Joe Biden walking the earth.
He is proof that there is eternal life and it's not just government programs.
It's also if you're a senator from Delaware who never stops running for president.
So Joe Biden, Joe Biden over the weekend, he made the little admission that he should put restrictions on Hunter.
This is kind of hilarious.
He's been saying the whole time that Hunter never did.
He never did anything wrong with regard to Hunter.
But now he's like, I suppose we should put some restrictions on Hunter, like not allowing him to trot around the globe, picking up bags of cash because his last name is the same as mine.
Here's Joe Biden now reversing course.
Say you're elected, you're in office.
What guardrails would you have to be sure that your son, your brother Jimmy, doesn't do anything to trade on the family name?
They will not be engaged in any foreign business because of what's happened in this administration.
No one's going to be seeking patents for things from China.
No one's going to be engaged in that kind of thing.
So no foreign business for your relatives?
Correct.
Because it happened in this administration, not because of the questions about him and his son.
No, it's just because of Trump.
It's because of Trump.
It's all because of Trump.
By the way, that was not the only gaffe that Joe Biden made about his son over the weekend.
He was interviewed by NPR.
And he said, no, nobody even nobody even raised the issue to me.
OK, we know in open testimony, George Kent said that he went to Vice President Biden's team and they said we didn't have time for this.
So it turns out that wasn't true.
Here's Joe Biden saying an untrue thing.
But there were former White House aides of yours who tried to warn you about the potential conflicts of interest.
Nobody warned me about a potential conflict of interest.
Nobody warned me about that.
And at the same time, this was done.
George Kent, the State Department official, testified that he raised it to you.
No, he didn't say me.
To your staff.
He did not say me.
To your staff.
I stand corrected.
I never, never heard that once.
At all.
To your staff.
And your staff told him he has no bandwidth.
Well, my son was dying.
I guess that's why he said it.
Because my son was on his deathbed.
But that's not the reason why they should have told him.
Okay, so now he's saying they should have told him.
But the reason they said they didn't tell him is because they were afraid he was going to blow up at them if they did tell him.
So Joe Biden is certainly not any representative of institutional stability or personal stability, as it turns out.
And by the way, he's a radical, too.
He's revised himself on his own positions that used to be moderate.
He came out over the weekend and again suggested we have to dump the Hyde Amendment, which means federal funding for direct abortion.
I came out a while ago saying we have to get rid of the Hyde Amendment because it's no longer doable and usable and no longer a serious option for anybody.
All the, you have all these states going out and not only challenging whether or not there is a, they're saying that it's a criminal offense, that you're going back to the agreement.
Here, let me, let me, the best way to say it.
If I get elected President of the United States and the Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade, I'm going to send legislation to the United States Congress to pass it and codify it.
Okay, so the media's play here is put that doddering old nut in the White House.
Because if you put that doddering old nut in the White House, then everyone will feel more stable.
Do you feel more stable, looking at that guy?
Do things feel more stable?
The only way they feel more stable is if Trump keeps saying crazy things.
It's why Trump should stop saying crazy things, but does that seem like a beacon of stability to you?
Maybe Elizabeth Warren seems like a beacon of stability to you.
Again, the play of the media here is make things feel like the house is on fire and that the arsonists will come in and put out the fire if, and only if, you pay the ransom.
But does Elizabeth Warren feel like a beacon of stability?
By the way, it was really funny.
Over the weekend, Elizabeth Warren finally admitted she shouldn't have called herself Native American publicly.
So this only took forever.
I do appreciate her blue sweater today.
She has this rotating, we've been noticing this, she has a rotating series of sweaters every single day, this very weird kind of 1970s teaching.
I am not a person of color.
I am not a citizen of a tribe.
Harvard Law School, to be fair.
So she's this is nothing new.
Here is Elizabeth Warren in a blue sweater, which she's changing it up today, talking about how she shouldn't have called herself Native American, which is weird.
She did so for decades to the cheers of the to the cheers of the academic left.
I shouldn't have done it.
I am not a person of color.
I am not a citizen of a tribe.
And I have apologized for confusion I've caused on tribal citizenship, tribal sovereignty and for or any harm that I've caused.
Weird how every Republican complaint about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden has now been half-legitimated by Joe Biden saying he's going to redo the restrictions when he becomes president.
And every complaint about Elizabeth Warren being foca-hontas.
Those have been legitimized by now, her backing off.
But for years, we were told that you're not allowed to ask about Hunter Biden.
We're still being told that.
And we were told that it's racist to note that Elizabeth Warren is actually not Native American.
Because stability, guys.
That's what we need.
Stability.
And I trust our media to establish that baseline level of stability.
By the way, these are the same Democrats who are claiming, again, that Donald Trump is responsible for every evil thing.
Hillary Clinton suggesting that Trump is inciting mass shootings at synagogues and churches and Walmart.
Here is Hillary Clinton, who's definitely, definitely not campaigning for president.
Saying that chaos has broken out because of Trump.
By the way, there were shootings at synagogues before Trump was president.
There was shooting at the Charleston church shooting was in 2015.
Barack Obama was president at that time.
But here's Hillary Clinton suggesting that it's only all chaos is due to Trump.
Clearly he just incites these deep irrational and unfortunately sometimes violent emotions.
Some of the people who have gone into synagogues and churches and Walmarts and other places and shot them up and murdered people have clearly been unleashed.
I don't want to say it's a direct cause.
I don't think that's fair.
People are amped up.
People are amped up.
Okay, people, yes.
As opposed to, if you just elect an old, stodgy Joe Biden, everything will be better.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
The Democratic Party has claimed for years that the Great Society helped the country in innumerable ways.
Now, the Great Society, really, it was the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, right?
Those were good pieces of legislation, with the exception that I've always said that the Civil Rights Act should not have been applied to private businesses, that the direct impact of the Civil Rights Act should have come down on state governments that were imposing Jim Crow from above.
Now, if you have to vote for the entire thing, or not the entire thing, you vote for the entire thing, because more important to stop Jim Crow than even to protect private property rights at the time.
But, with that said, The rest of the Great Society programs were a dud.
Not only were they a dud, they were a deeply damaging dud that achieved precisely the opposite of what they intended to achieve in quashing poverty.
The rates of poverty basically continued to decline at the same rates they were declining before the Great Society programs, except now we were spending 20 trillion dollars on it.
Amity Shlaes has a great new book about this.
She's a terrific author.
She's the author of the book, The Forgotten Man, all about the failures of the New Deal.
She has a great book about, it's called Great Society, A New History.
She really, you know, points out sort of the leadership in this movement.
Walter Reuther comes in for some serious criticism, the former head of the United Auto Workers.
The book is really well written.
It is worthy of the read.
Great Society, A New History.
Go check it out by Amity Shlaes.
For everybody who suggests that the Democrats healed America with the Great Society programs.
Nah.
No, they really did not.
They led to decades of economic stagnation through the Great Society programs, and we are still bearing the legacy of those in the massive national debt that we carry.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So there's a performance artist and he taped a banana to a wall.
It sold for $120,000 at Miami's Art Basel Festival this week.
If you want to say that we are in the final stages of a civilization, this would probably be a good indicator.
It's a contemporary art piece titled The Comedian.
And again, it sold for a staggering $120,000.
It is now in a different artist's stomach, according to reports.
The comedian was an installation meant, ostensibly, to make fun of the art world's obsession with banal and uninspired works, according to its creator, Maurizio Catalan.
But most viewers saw it as simply a rotting banana duct-taped to a wall.
Daily Wire's Amanda Prestigiacomo reported earlier this week that the piece presented at Art Basel, the American version of the avant-garde Swiss art showcase, is one of three similar pieces showcased around the world, and the artist, Catalan, prides himself on mocking the rest of contemporary art with his work.
Ah, irony.
The Banana is a follow-up to his 2017 installation, A Golden Toilet, that sold for $6 million, but is currently missing after a shocking art heist that took place in the UK earlier this year.
Apparently, The Golden Toilet is now installed at the Pentagon.
On Saturday, Another contemporary artist decided to make his own show of the duct tape banana.
He peeled the fruit off the wall and consumed it in front of a crowd of horrified omelookers.
Here's what this looks like.
He just goes right for it.
He peels it off the wall and eats the banana.
He calls it Hungry Artist.
It took some work for this guy to find the banana.
It was removed from public display after Art Basel concluded earlier this week and relocated to a gallery.
De Tuna was also given incredible leeway for the stunt.
He actually conversed with several patrons who were treating his efforts with utter seriousness because this was, in fact, a work of art.
Catalan worked on his art for a year according to the press release from the gallery where Catalan's banana was being exhibited for sale.
The gallery claims it has sentimental value to the artist.
Apparently, the good news is that it's easy to replace the banana.
Shocking.
You can get it for under a dollar anywhere in the United States.
So, don't worry.
It's art, though.
It's definitely, definitely art.
It's not the decline of art.
It's not the decline of Western civilization.
It's not the fact that we have too much money apparently being held by... Like, you want to turn me into a Bernie Sanders socialist?
Tell me someone paid $120,000 for a banana duct-taped to a wall.
That would be the answer right there.
Solid stuff there.
Yeah, the death of art definitely has taken place in real time, which is why you go to a modern art museum and you're like, oh my kid could paint that.
Right.
Your kid could paint that.
This is correct.
Because art has been completely separated from skill.
It's the message of the art that matters.
The message.
And once the art becomes about the message and not about the actual art, The art is supposed to be universal in the sense that it's supposed to have meaning for everyone who takes a look at this.
You know what this means?
This duct tape banana to a wall?
It means that everyone's a moron.
So I guess it achieves that effect.
It achieves that purpose.
The art critic, by the way, over at the New York Times defended this thing and said, no, no, no, it is indeed art.
A grudging defense of the $120,000 banana.
Jason Farago says art may be long and life short, but the existence of a hand fruit is most ephemeral of all.
This week at Art Basel Miami Beach, the art world's premier champagne-steeped swap meet.
No work drew more grins, guffaws, and selfies than a new sculpture!
I call it a sculpture.
by the semi-retired Italian trickster Maurizio Cattelan, a banana duct taped to a wall, its peel already speckled with brown spots.
It's titled Comedian.
By Wednesday, it had already won art world notoriety.
On Saturday, it achieved a public visibility that any artist would envy, after a self-promoting wag tore the banana off the wall and gobbled it up.
Suffice it to say that works of contemporary art rarely make the cover of the New York Post, but this is Mr. Cattelan's second recent appearance on the tabloid's front page.
When it comes to the banana's ontological status as art or produce, I thought we had settled this already.
If you buy a lightwork by Dan Flavin and the fluorescent bulb starts flickering, you can replace it with a new one.
If you buy a Sol LeWitt wall drawing and you move a house, you can erase the old one and draw a new one.
A banana, even more than a light fixture, was always going to require replacement.
Catalan had already drawn up instructions for the lucky collectors to replace the fruit every day to ten days.
As to why Catalan's banana has gripped the public imagination, it has something to do with the price.
Something to do also with the comic potential of bananas.
Is it art?
Did you have to be there?
Let me reassure you, you are not a hopeless Philistine if you find this all a bit foolish.
Foolishness and a deflating sense that a culture that once encouraged sublime beauty now only permits dopey jokes is Mr. Catalan's stock in trade.
But perhaps you will find more to appreciate in Catalan's work if you take notes of two points.
One formal, one social, says the New York Times art critic.
First, I've been dismayed to discover that for a work that has been endlessly photographed and parodied over the course of its one week life, almost no one has discussed that it is not just a banana.
It is a banana and a piece of duct tape.
And this is a significant difference.
Comedian is not a one-note Dadaist imposture in which a commodity is proclaimed a work of art, which would be an entire century out of date now, as dated as a film director mimicking D.W.
Griffith.
Comedian is a sculpture, one that continues Mr. Catalan's decades-long reliance on suspension to make the obvious seem ridiculous, and to deflate and defeat the pretensions of earlier.
Okay, fire this guy.
Fire this guy.
Seriously, fire the critic, fire the artist, fire everyone.
The culture that produced the Sistine Chapel has now produced a man duct taping a banana to a wall.
The culture that produced Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms has now produced a piece of fruit that is rotting on a wall taped there with duct tape.
And we are supposed to believe that this is a deep and profound commentary On American culture.
The only commentary on American culture is that anybody took this thing seriously in the first place.
It's ridiculous on its face.
And the fact that nobody aspires anymore.
Instead we just find joy in mockery.
And nobody aspires anymore.
Maybe that's the only thing it has to say about our culture.
Maybe that was Catalan's point.
It ain't worth 120 grand.
I just gave it to you for free.
So enjoy.
Alrighty.
We'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
We have a lot to get to a little bit later today.
So definitely tune in.
Or show up here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Politics is downstream of culture, but politics affects culture, too.
As a banana duct taped to a wall sells for $120,000 at Art Basel, as Drag Queen Story Hour hits preschools, and as kids get hooked on hardcore porn before the age of 10, libertarians beware we examine whether politics can help us fix our screwed up culture.
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