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Jan. 28, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:57
A Bolton Out Of The Blue | Ep. 941
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John Bolton's book excerpt upends the Trump defense team, Pam Bondi deconstructs Hunter Biden, and it's DEFCON 1 for Joe Biden against Bernie Sanders.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN's Stand up for your digital rights today.
Visit expressvpn.com slash Ben.
So let's begin with everything impeachment related, because let's face it, right now impeachment and 2020 are all tied together in a ball.
It is very obvious at this point that the president is not going to be impeached.
That does not mean that he cannot be damaged by the impeachment hearings.
And this is particularly true when you keep putting forward foolish defenses.
So the fact of the matter is very simple here.
The Trump defense team was putting forward a defense that Trump wanted them to put forward.
He was not putting forward his own best defense.
This is a point that Andy McCarthy has made at National Review.
It's a point that I've been making for literally months at this point, which is that President Trump's best defense from the beginning, as soon as it became clear that there was in fact a quid pro quo, was obvious.
Yes, a quid-pro-quo happened.
No, the quid-pro-quo is not impeachable.
And even if you don't like the quid-pro-quo, even if you think the quid-pro-quo is bad, that does not make it impeachable.
President Trump rightly suspected that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 election, not to the same extent as the Russians, and not in replacement of the Russians, but he was right to suspect that the Ukrainians were interfering in the 2016 election because there were multiple credible media reports on that subject, and he was being fed bad information by Rudy Giuliani about everything that was going on.
In Ukraine, ranging from the crowd strike, Hillary Clinton's server being buried in the woods outside of Kiev or some such nonsense, to the Hunter Biden stuff, which indeed was suspicious.
And because of that, he wanted all of that investigated, and so he used military aid to Ukraine as a way to leverage investigations out of Ukraine.
That's not impeachable.
You may not like his judgment.
You may think it's bad.
You may think that it's rough and tumble.
You may think that he shouldn't be using foreign policy in order to push for investigations that he could have done through the FBI or the DOJ.
All of that is subject for elections.
It is not subject for impeachment.
That should have been his argument all along.
But because President Trump is pathologically incapable of acknowledging that he has ever made a mistake, And because President Trump rips anybody who ever criticizes him as the worst person in the world, President Trump's defense team was then put in the position of making an argument that is not factually based, namely that Trump held up military aid for things having to do nothing with investigations.
Now, the problem with that Is it sooner or later there was going to be somebody in Trump's inner circle who said something different?
And in fact, we've already seen people in Trump's inner circle saying things that are different.
For example, Mick Mulvaney, his office of management and budget chief, the guy who is now his chief of staff.
He suggested in a press conference openly that yes, there is a quid pro quo.
No, the quid pro quo is not legitimate.
That is a fair defense.
And now John Bolton is suggesting the same thing.
And Team Trump is being sort of upended by this supposed revelation.
Now again, that shouldn't have been a revelation.
The normal response from Team Trump should have been, right, that's correct, he did withhold the aid, contingent on Ukraine doing investigations, but there's nothing illegal about that, nor is there anything impeachable about that.
But because President Trump insists that his people always defend, they can never make a strategic retreat, because he insists that his people always line up their defenses at the first point of contact and then hold the line no matter what, this leads to untenable situations where they are flanked.
And this is sort of what has happened here with Team Trump.
It doesn't mean he's going to be impeached.
It does mean that it is, I would say, very likely at this point that the Senate Republicans are going to allow the witness, are going to allow John Bolton's testify.
Whereas before, if John Bolton had come out and said this, they would have said, we don't need the testimony.
We already know all of this.
All of this was covered by Fiona Hill.
Now, because Trump has come out and called his own national security advisor a liar, we got a problem on our hands.
And you can see the New York Times editorial board is over the moon about this.
They're extremely happy about all of this.
The New York Times editorial board today says it's just possible that common sense and reality have a shot at prying open the doors to the Senate chamber after all.
After Republican senators claimed it was perfectly reasonable to put a United States president on trial without hearing from any witnesses, a few of them are showing signs of recognizing that the truth matters, or at least that the American people believe it does.
What has changed?
Shocking but not surprising revelations from John Bolton's book manuscript, which the New York Times reported over the weekend, have made impossible to ignore what everyone has known for months.
President Trump withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine to benefit himself politically and against the strenuous objections of his top aides in both parties in Congress.
Okay, now again, that is actually not what Bolton charges.
What Bolton charges is that Trump was interested in 2016, which is exactly what some of us have been saying for months and months and months and months.
And if Trump had just admitted and said, listen, again, you may not like my judgment, but tough beans.
I've got an election in 11 months.
Just deal with it that way.
If he had said that, this whole thing would have been over a long time ago.
He didn't say that, and so now everything Bolton is saying is being treated as a massive revelation with actual ramifications.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
We will also get to Kim Trump making a counterargument that's going to hurt Joe Biden moving forward into the 2020 primaries.
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So, as I say, the New York Times is treating Bolton's words as a revelation.
And of course, you're seeing Republican senators who are now being ripped up and down by Team Trump saying that perhaps we are going to have to have witnesses.
So Susan Collins, the senator from Maine, she came out yesterday.
She said, yeah, probably at some point we're probably going to have to have witnesses.
She put out a statement.
She said, from the beginning, I've said that in fairness to both parties, the decision on whether or not to call witnesses should be made after both the House managers and the president's attorneys have had the opportunity to present their cases.
I've always said I was likely to vote to call witnesses, just as I did in the 1999 Clinton trial.
Okay, well, this is fully expected.
This should not have been any great shock.
Collins, by the way, was on the fence.
She was willing to not call witnesses if they didn't have anything new to tell.
But that relied very much on the story that Trump was telling.
Mitt Romney says the same thing.
He says probably we're going to end up having witnesses here.
People are treating Romney as though he's doing this because he hates Trump or something.
That this is all personal animus.
The reality is I think there are probably more than two votes to have witnesses in the Senate.
I don't think that John Bolton's testimony is going to lead to impeachment.
I'd be really surprised if it did.
But I think that there are a lot of Republicans who are in purple states and thinking, do I want to lose my seat over the image of me covering for the president when he is going up directly against his own national security advisor?
Probably not.
Here is Senator Romney.
I've said for some time that I hope to be able to hear from John Bolton.
I think with the story that came out yesterday, it's increasingly apparent that it would be important to hear from John Bolton.
I, of course, will make a final decision on witnesses after we've heard from not only the prosecution, but also the defense.
But I think at this stage it's pretty fair to say that John Bolton has a relevant testimony to provide to those of us who are sitting in impartial justice.
I think it's increasingly likely that other Republicans will join those of us who think we should hear from John Bolton.
That is, again, not particularly surprising, and it's also not surprising given the fact that the people who are closest to Trump are now having to put out statements that at the very least call into question their old statements.
So I point out Mick Mulvaney's statement on John Bolton.
He gave a statement yesterday talking about Bolton's claims that Mulvaney had been part of conversations in which the aid was discussed.
So Mulvaney did put out a statement Yesterday, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times actually tweeted out, it said, the latest story from the New York Times coordinated with a book launch has more to do with publicity than the truth.
John Bolton never informed Mick Mulvaney of any concerns surrounding Bolton's purported August conversation with the president, nor did Mr. Mulvaney ever have a conversation with the president or anyone else indicating that Ukrainian military aid was withheld in exchange for a Ukrainian investigation of Burisma, the Bidens, or the 2016 election.
Further, Mr. Mulvaney has no recollection of any conversation with Mr. Giuliani resembling that reportedly described in Mr. Bolton's manuscript as it was Mr. Mulvaney's practice to excuse himself from conversations between the president and his personal counsel to preserve any attorney-client privilege.
Now, we haven't actually seen Bolton's manuscript, remember, so we don't actually know what Bolton is claiming, but there's one sentence of that statement that seems to contradict Mick Mulvaney, right?
Mick Mulvaney said that he had never had a conversation with Trump or anyone else indicating that military aid was withheld in exchange for a Ukrainian investigation of Burisma the Biden's Or the 2016 election.
And then what exactly was Mick Mulvaney talking about when he specifically held a press conference suggesting that, sure, quid pro quos happen in foreign policy all the time.
The question is whether that is legit or not.
And you can see the differences even within Trump's defense team in the defenses they are presenting.
So on the one hand, you have members of Team Trump saying there was no quid pro quo at all, which of course is the case that Trump would prefer be put out there, but it's not the smart case.
And then you have the case put out there by lawyers who actually know what the law is and know what they are doing.
Like Alan Dershowitz.
So Alan Dershowitz, for all of the talk about how he's been consigned to hell, SNL actually consigned him to hell over the weekend for the grave crime of defending Trump in this impeachment trial.
So weird.
They didn't care when he was friends with Jeffrey Epstein.
They didn't care when he was, or at least defense lawyer for Jeffrey Epstein.
They didn't care.
When Alan Dershowitz was defending OJ Simpson, they didn't care about any of that.
The moment that he defended Trump, then he was consigned to hell, and then all that old stuff comes back to haunt Alan Dershowitz, supposedly.
Well, anyway, Dershowitz makes the case, the Harvard Law professor, he makes the case against impeachment yesterday, and he says, listen, you guys keep saying quid pro quo.
I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.
Right?
Quid pro quo happens all the time in foreign policy.
Now, this is a correct defense.
Here's Alan Dershowitz.
Let's assume a Democratic president tells Israel that foreign aid authorized by Congress will not be sent or an Oval Office meeting will not be scheduled unless the Israelis stop building settlements.
Quid pro quo.
I might disapprove of such a quid pro quo demand on policy grounds, but it would not constitute an abuse of power.
Quid pro quo alone is not a basis for abuse of power.
It's part of the way foreign policy has been operated by presidents since the beginning of time.
Okay, this was always the best defense, right?
This was always the best defense.
And in fact, Pam Bondi laid out a very similar defense yesterday, because she was pointing out that quid pro quo is something that people do all the time.
And when Democrats do it, it's not even considered a terrible thing, right?
In fact, it wasn't even Pam Bondi.
It was another lawyer, Eric Hirschman, rather, who is a Trump defense guy.
And he says, listen, if you're talking about impeaching Trump over a quid pro quo on foreign policy, remember that time that Barack Obama literally sat with Dmitry Medvedev, who is the cutout for Vladimir Putin, and said to him that I will do something on missile defense, but you're going to need to give me flexibility until after the election.
That is literally what Barack Obama said.
So Eric Hirschman points this out.
This was trending on Twitter last night.
How dare anyone mention the sainted Obama?
It's amazing.
The minute you mention Obama in any context, Twitter goes nuts.
Because Obama, as we all know from the media coverage, the only scandal Obama ever had is that he wore a tan suit.
Nothing ever happened with the IRS, nothing ever happened with the HHS, nothing ever happened with Fast and Furious, nothing ever happened with Russia.
The Obama administration was scandal-free, right?
That's the line of the media.
So the minute that you mention the fact that Barack Obama acted in fairly corrupt ways on foreign policy, then suddenly it's the end of the world.
Okay, but let us remember, I'm going to read you the actual transcript of what Barack Obama said to Dmitry Medvedev that was caught on a hot mic.
Transcript.
Obama.
On all of these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved.
But it's important for him to give me space.
He's talking about Putin.
And Medvedev says, yes, I understand.
I understand your message about space.
Space for you.
And Obama said, this is my last election.
After my election, I have more flexibility.
And Medvedev says, I understand.
I will transmit this information to Vladimir.
That's a pretty obvious quid pro quo.
Eric Hirschman points out this is a pretty obvious quid pro quo.
President Obama used the powers of the presidency in a manner that compromised the national security of the United States and undermined the integrity of the United States' democratic process.
He thus ignored and injured the interests of the nation.
Does it sound familiar, House managers?
It should, as the case against President Obama would have been far stronger than the allegations against President Trump.
President Obama's abuse of power to benefit his own political interests was there and is here now for everyone to hear.
It was a direct, unquestionable, quid pro quo.
Okay, so again, he is correct about all of this.
He is correct about all of this.
And the fact is that this was always Trump's best defense, which is that you may not like what presidents do, but this is why we have elections.
We don't impeach presidents who engage in foreign policy quid pro quos, even when they benefit them politically.
Like the reason that he was saying he has flexibility after the election is because he is saying, back off, back off until the election.
And then after the election, I have more flexibility as to pursuing missile defense.
In other words, if you wait until after the election, then maybe I'll go soft on Eastern European missile defense with regard to Russia, right?
So Obama did that back in 2012.
I remember it was a big thing, right?
It was a big thing.
But that was never at any point purported to be the cause of an impeachment affair, right?
That was perceived to be a good reason not to re-elect the guy, which the American people then didn't take into account, obviously.
Didn't matter.
But the notion that the quid pro quo that Trump was engaged in with Ukraine was fundamentally not illegitimate, or at least not impeachable.
That was always the best defense.
But again, the problem for Trump and Team Trump is that they didn't make that defense because Trump forbade them from making that defense because Trump is not his own best defense attorney.
Trump's strategy whenever he's accused of a thing is to pretend that the thing never ever happened.
And the problem is that further facts tend to corroborate the fact that it happened even if it wasn't as bad.
And Trump doesn't understand that the basic political rule which is that the coverup is usually worse than the crime is absolutely true with regard to Trump.
Every activity in which Trump has allegedly engaged that has caused legal trouble for him has been an activity where the coverup was worse than the actual crime.
I take for example, Stormy Daniels.
Yeah, it turns out that it's not great when you schtup ladies who aren't your wife and are porn stars while your wife is pregnant.
Turns out that's a bad thing to do.
You know what turns that into a subject for criminal investigation?
When you start telling your lawyer how to funnel money to Stormy Daniels to shut her up, right?
At that point, that's when all of a sudden this balloons out and becomes a bigger issue.
You know what is actually not that huge a deal, or at least it may be a big deal, but really it's not.
It's more like you're just mouthing off.
When you tell randos that you don't like the ambassador to Ukraine, when you tell randos like Lev Parnas, yeah we had a conversation, and I said I don't like that ambassador, and if you have any information on her, let me know.
That's not actually anything close to impeachable.
If Trump had just said that, All right.
Not great.
Not fond of it.
Don't like the tactic.
Think it's immoral.
But is it impeachable?
No.
But then when you say, I've never met Lev Parnas.
I don't know who Lev Parnas is.
Don't know him from Adam.
And then he brings a tape forth in which you are talking with him explicitly about the subject of the investigation.
Then it becomes an issue.
If you just say, listen, sure it was a quid pro quo.
I was looking into 2016.
Then we're all like, OK, I may not like that.
I may think you're operating on the back of bad information and confirmation bias.
It doesn't seem impeachable to me.
The minute you say, however, that that never happened at all, now you have a factual dispute.
And a factual dispute is always going to subject you to more scrutiny and more investigations.
And that is why the media are jumping all over the Bolton thing.
That's why the Bolton thing is a problem for Trump.
It is not a problem for him in terms of impeachment.
It is a problem for him in terms of this thing being dragged out.
Because right now we're in the middle of the 2020 election.
Right now, the best thing for Trump is to get this thing behind him.
What Trump would like is for this to not be an issue moving forward.
We can talk about the great economy.
We can talk about his foreign policy accomplishments.
We can talk about all of those things.
But if we're talking about John Bolton, that's not great for the president.
Now, one of the things that this has led to, of course, is the media to be able to try and condemn Trump supporters as utterly crazy, right?
Because now you have John Bolton going up directly against the president.
People who liked John Bolton five seconds ago now hate John Bolton.
You're seeing people who hate John Bolton generally on foreign policy now trying to condemn him as a Democratic stooge.
This has been happening.
I think Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs both did this last night, which is of course very silly.
John Bolton is not a Democratic stooge.
There's only one group of people who hate John Bolton more than Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs, and that is Democrats.
They despised John Bolton until today.
The fact is that if you're trying to paint John Bolton as a liar, and this is now a test of credibility between Donald Trump and John Bolton.
That's not going to end great for Donald Trump.
Now, does that mean that this thing isn't going to blow back on Democrats?
No, we're going to get to that in just one second, because here's the problem as we move into 2020.
The person on the Democratic side who's most likely to be hit over all of this is Joe Biden, which means that Bernie Sanders is more likely to become the nominee, which we'll get to in a moment.
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Okay, now, it's not just gonna blow back on Trump, this whole impeachment hearing.
Obviously, it's gonna have some impact.
On Joe Biden.
And the reason for that is because what was at the center of this whole Trump wanting to know about Ukraine stuff was his suspicion of Joe Biden.
Well, yesterday, Pam Bondi, who is one of Trump's lawyers, former attorney general of the state of Florida, she came forward and she gave a case against Hunter Biden that's pretty damning because the reality is that no matter whether you think Joe Biden is pure as the driven snow or what, Hunter Biden certainly is not.
Here's Pam Bondi going after Hunter Biden.
Burisma was so corrupt that George Kent said he intervened to prevent USAID from co-sponsoring an event with Burisma.
You know what this event was?
It was a child's contest.
So Hunter Biden is paid over $83,000 a month.
Hunter Biden had no experience in natural gas.
No experience in the energy sector.
No experience with Ukrainian regulatory affairs.
As far as we know, he doesn't speak Ukrainian.
ABC.
Good Morning America.
The Washington Post.
The New York Times.
Ukrainian law enforcement.
And the Obama State Department itself.
They all thought there was cause to raise the issue about the Bidens and Burisma.
Okay, all of this is 100% true.
Beth Bauman, writing for townhall.com, talks about this today.
She says, although former Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly talked about ending corruption, ABC News launched an investigation called Hunter Biden's Foreign Deals.
It talked about Biden's dealings with Burisma and even in China.
Less than two weeks after the VP and his son were seen in China, Hunter's firm had new business with the government-controlled bank of China.
Bondi explained, in fact, every person who was asked about Hunter Biden's involvement with Burisma agreed there was a potential appearance of a conflict of interest.
Multiple House Democrat witnesses, including those from the Department of State, the NSC and others, unanimously testified that there was a potential appearance of conflict of interest.
And that, of course, is 100% true.
So all of this does have an impact on Joe Biden's electability.
And right now, this is the problem for Biden.
Biden's entire case for being the nominee is his electability.
So Biden is now caught in a vice.
He's caught in a vice.
On the one hand, Democrats believe that Donald Trump is having real trouble in this election.
They look at the national polling and they see that Donald Trump is trailing to all of their major candidates.
And they say, okay, well, Trump has a pathological inability to keep his mouth shut.
Trump says wild things on a regular basis.
He did not perform well for Republicans in 2018.
And so he didn't win the popular vote in 2016.
We don't think that we need to run somebody super electable to beat Donald Trump in 2020.
So on the one hand, Democrats are overestimating the unpopularity of Donald Trump.
Because they look at Trump and they say, this is a person who makes a lot of mistakes.
We could run a ham sandwich against this guy and win.
And then on the other hand, they're looking at Joe Biden and they're seeing somebody who is doddering, somebody who's old, and somebody who is now implicated in questions about corruption, which really hurts him when he's attempting to attack Trump on character grounds.
If you're trying to attack Trump as a corrupt actor, and in the meantime, you're weathering charges that your son was cashing in on your last name, you got a problem on your hands.
And so Biden's candidacy is now caught in the middle.
And he has no rock core of enthusiasm.
There's no enthusiasm for his candidacy.
And so what you're starting to see is him fade in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, which means that right now the odds on favor for the Democratic nomination is a geriatric communist, Bernie Sanders, which is unbelievable.
Good for Trump in the sense that if he had to sort of handpick a candidate Trump can run against, it would be Bernie.
Horrible for the country in that half the country will now resonate to a communist message.
And not only will they resonate to the messages of a com... And by the way, when he says democratic socialists, he doesn't mean democratic socialists.
That is just him putting a friendly face on all of this.
The heads of Norway and Denmark will talk in copious detail about the glories of capitalism.
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But that guy is likely to be the Democratic nominee at this point.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Ray Shapiro in there.
How did you hear about us box?
So they know that we sent you.
So as we see, The fact is that right now, Joe Biden has some serious trouble.
He has some serious trouble.
And the points that he makes about Bernie Sanders are correct.
The problem is that Joe Biden has always been a weak candidate.
And at a certain point here, that means that Barack Obama is going to be the one who has a choice.
At a certain point here, Barack Obama is going... Let's say that Bernie wins Iowa and New Hampshire.
At that point, Barack Obama has a one-time opportunity to step in and stop all this nonsense.
At that point, Barack Obama will need to come out and say, listen, I don't think Bernie can win.
I trust Joe.
I know Joe.
Joe's my man, right?
And then he will have the opportunity to prop Joe Biden up to the nomination.
But if he does not, it seems as though Bernie Sanders is the one with all the momentum at this point.
Joni Ernst, senator from Iowa, she says, listen, you know, I'm looking at this trial.
I'm wondering if voters are going to support Biden, given the fact that the Hunter Biden stuff is on the table now.
Iowa caucuses, folks.
Iowa caucuses are this next Monday evening.
And I'm really interested to see how this discussion today informs and influences the Iowa caucus voters, those Democratic caucus goers.
Will they be supporting Vice President Biden at this point?
Okay, now Republicans, you can see they're grinning about this.
They're rooting for it.
Republicans are saying we'd love to run against Bernie Sanders.
Let me just remind you, folks.
Whenever people say, here's who I would like to run against, beware.
I'm old enough to remember when a lady named Hillary Clinton was encouraging Donald Trump to run in 2016 because she would love to have run against Donald Trump.
She got her wish, and now she's wandering the woods of Chappaqua while Donald Trump is sitting in the Oval Office laughing at her and tweeting about her on a regular basis.
Be careful what you wish for.
Politics is the monkey's paw, man.
You can wish for what you want, but it may not end up being exactly what you want.
Now, as I say, Biden's critiques of Bernie Sanders are absolutely correct.
Like Joe Biden came out yesterday.
He says, listen, Sanders doesn't know how much his plans cost.
Sanders doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
But this is the point.
The people who love Sanders love that he doesn't know how much his plan costs.
The people who love Sanders love that he's impractical and insane.
They love the fact that none of what he's saying makes sense because he's promising them a better world.
This is always the promise of Marxism.
Marxism has never worked anywhere.
The best that Marxist programs can do is live off the back of capitalism like leeches and redistribute the profits and the products that are created by the free market.
That is the best thing that any sort of socialistic program can do.
They can't create anything new.
They cannot generate new prosperity.
There has never been a socialist program anywhere in the world that has done any of these things.
Okay, but the problem is that if you are Bernie Sanders and you are pledging people a greater world, Your vagueness is your appeal.
See, Bernie Sanders didn't make the same mistake that Elizabeth Warren made.
There's a reason Elizabeth Warren has been taking a dump in the polls.
The reason that she's been falling in the polls is because she made the crucial error.
She tried to put meat on the bones of Bernie Sandersism.
But there's a problem.
You can't put meat on those bones.
They don't sustain the weight.
So when Elizabeth Warren came out and she was like, let me explain to you how I'm going to pay for all of this.
I'm going to find money in the anus of a unicorn, and I'm going to use that to pay for this $19 trillion healthcare program that actually costs $33 trillion, but I'm going to call it $19 trillion by double counting all this money.
When people said when she did that and everybody laughed at her, it was like, oh, because suddenly the fantasy had been made reality.
And it turns out that everybody had been fantasizing about the Victoria's Secret model.
And what they actually got in the mail was the not online version of the Match.com profile.
It turns out that communism is a Match.com profile.
Communism looks real nice in the Match.com profile photo, and then they show up at the coffee bean, and it turns out they're a hideous old hag.
That is communism.
Well, the problem is that Elizabeth Warren made that clear.
Bernie Sanders is still pushing the Match.com profile pic of communism.
The minute that he gets down to real reality with regard to his plans, then it begins to fall apart.
And Democrats keep trying to drag him down and say, OK, well, here's the reality of your plan.
But people who love Bernie don't want to hear the reality of the plan.
They are forcibly They are forcibly suspending their disbelief.
Bernie Sanders is a movie to them.
He's not an actual program.
He's a dream.
And when you pitch a dream, it's very hard to get people to wake up.
So here's Joe Biden trying to get people to wake up.
Good luck to him.
It's not one of those things where, as one of the leaders of the effort for Medicare for All said, I don't know how much it's going to cost.
I don't know what it's going to be.
We're just going to have to do it.
Well, that's not a likely way to pass something through the Senate saying, I don't know how much it's going to cost, and the person who's offering it.
So we've got to get real about what we can do to protect people's health here.
Okay, but you can see the difference in the crowds.
Okay, so here's Biden speaking yesterday.
If you saw the tape yesterday of Bernie Sanders speaking, it's all young people.
It's all young people.
And in Iowa, that matters.
In Iowa, that makes a big difference.
Now, Bernie Sanders is counting on all those young people to show up and vote for him in the 2020 election.
I'm not sure that that's a good bet for him, but it is obvious that everybody above the age of 65 supports Joe Biden, and nobody under the age of 40 supports Joe Biden.
Biden, by the way, also is saying that he can take a punch.
That is quite unclear at this point, given the fact that he has not risen in the polls, he has basically stagnated in the polls, and he's run a very poorly organized campaign.
Here is Joe Biden, who basically was trying to limp his way to contention here, I mean, it felt a lot like, it feels a lot like Jeb Bush in the latter days.
Here's Joe Biden.
As much as he's trying to destroy me and my family, I hope I've demonstrated I can take a punch.
And if I'm un-nominated, he's gonna understand what punches mean.
Okay, well, that does not sound good when you're slurring your words.
It does not sound like a robust defense of yourself when you're slurring your words.
So right now, it appears that Bernie Sanders has the upper hand in this race.
Now, is he electable?
This is the question that Democrats are now asking themselves.
Has he been vetted?
Is he electable?
If you go on Twitter, the conventional wisdom on Twitter is he's super electable.
And anybody who says he's not electable is crazy.
That's crazy.
Okay, Bernie Sanders has been elected in Vermont, which has seven people.
And he's been elected 1,000 times.
He's basically been living on the public dime since the man was 30 years old.
I mean, he was on unemployment in his 30s.
Like, it's ridiculous.
So, the notion that that makes him broadly electable across the country is silly.
On the one hand, I don't think he's super electable.
On the other hand, he's got a shot, and putting a communist in a position where he might have a shot at the presidency seems like a problem.
We'll get to the electability arguments with regard to Bernie Sanders in just one second.
First, if you know anything about this show, you know this is an extremely pro-life show.
Last year, I spoke at the March for Life, did my podcast live, and gave a speech to hundreds of thousands of people who are marching for the cause.
This caused us an enormous amount of grief from our political adversaries who literally sit there trying to take words out of context on this show just to attack our advertisers.
Last year, we lost a lot of revenue because of that.
That won't be the first time.
When we say pro-life things, when we say true things, there are people on the left who spend their days attempting to take down this show.
And we're not the only targets.
Our friends over at Live Action have been targeted by the folks at social medias.
They've been banned from advertising on Twitter.
They've been banned from posting altogether on Pinterest.
LiveAction is a fantastic pro-life group run by my friend Lila Rose.
I give money to LiveAction personally.
I think they're fantastic.
Well, right now we have a special deal.
If you go to dailywire.com from now until January 31st, you can speak up not only on behalf of conservative positions, you can also help out the pro-life cause when you use promo code LIVEACTION.
So if you go to dailywire.com and you get a membership with promo code LIVEACTION, part of that membership will be donated to LIVEACTION.
So you're giving money to us, but you're also giving money to an explicitly pro-life group that does great educational work about abortion.
Join dailywire.com and make your pro-life voice heard.
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So one of the reasons that Democrats are downplaying the electability problems of Bernie Sanders is because they are in love with the sound of their own voices.
They've come to the conclusion that the people who support Donald Trump are seven, there are seven of them, and that they're all crazy.
And this is the way, truly, this is the way that the media talk about supporters of Donald Trump, not just Trump himself.
Ripping on Trump, look, Trump's the president, you can rip on him as much as you want.
But Hillary Clinton made a bad mistake in the 2016 election when she suggested that everybody who supported Donald Trump was deplorable.
It was a huge mistake.
Same sort of mistake that Barack Obama made in 2008.
The media covered for him, but it was a mistake when he suggested that everyone who was going to vote for his opponent was a bitter clinger.
Well now, members of the media are full-on endorsing this point of view.
I mean, laughing at people who support Trump.
They're all a bunch of toothless hicks from the South.
Now, many of these people, I really doubt, have spent a lot of time in the modern South, but they have this image that the South is basically a bunch of cartoon characters from 1840.
Anyway, Rick Wilson, who used to be a true never-Trump Republican, right?
A guy who not only opposed Trump in 2016, but has determined that Trump is now the font of all evil and must be stopped at any cost, including voting for Democrats, which is just ridiculous in my view.
He was on CNN.
Yucking it up with Don Lemon.
And in the course of this clip, you're going to hear what Democrats actually think of Republicans.
Because they think this, they think that they can actually run a geriatric socialist for the presidency of the United States and win.
Because after all, the Donald Trump supporters are a bunch of toothless morons.
He knows that this is, you know, an administration defined by ignorance of the world.
And so, that's partly him playing to their base and playing to their audience, you know, the credulous boomer Rube demo that backs Donald Trump, that wants to think that Donald Trump's a smart one and they're all, y'all elitist.
You would lead us with your geography and your maps and your spelling, even though my... Your math and your reading.
Yeah, your reading, you know.
Your geography, knowing other countries, sipping your latte.
All those lines on the map.
Look at that reporting.
That's CNN.
The most trusted name in news.
The most trusted name in news.
Laughing with the southern accent.
Because the only ignorant people in America, as you know, are people with southern accents.
That's not biased in any way.
Also, the notion that everybody who's voting for Donald Trump is a rube and a hick who doesn't know their geography.
I mean, it's this sort of take on politics that could come back to bite Democrats directly in the ass.
Because if they have decided that they're writing off half the country... They did this in 2016.
Half the country are racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes.
They're doing the same thing now, but they've upped the ante because this is how much they hate Trump.
They hate Trump so much that Trump is now a prism for how they view every other human being.
It's not that there are a lot of people who vote for Trump to stop Bernie Sanders, or voted for Trump to stop Hillary Clinton, or that don't like a lot of what Trump says or does, but like a lot of his policies.
No, it's that they're a bunch of hick rubes who don't understand geography and math, who don't know how to add.
Which is weird, because on average, I believe in the last election cycle, on average, Republican voters averaged a higher income level than Democratic voters, I believe, in the last election cycle.
If you do it on a county-by-county level, then the wealthiest counties voted for Hillary Clinton, but if you average the incomes, I believe that the Democrats were actually lower income on average than the Republicans were in the last election cycle.
So this idea that they're a bunch of hick roobs voting for Donald Trump, And that sort of attitude is what's leading them to believe, OK, we can literally run this old badger communist, this old wobbly from 1918, this guy who had a picture of Eugene Debs, an actual honest to God socialist in his Senate office for years.
We can run that guy and we can win because we could run anything and win.
And this is again, this is the view not just of the Don Lemons of the world, who's just a clown.
I mean, Don Lemon's a clown.
And Rick Wilson now makes a living just making these sorts of jokes on MSNBC and CNN.
He hasn't offered anything that approaches a substantive criticism for a while.
He's basically just sort of doing insult comedy for the laughs of the people in the media.
That sort of stuff.
That's a campaign ad for Trump, right?
I mean, they just cut a campaign ad for Trump on CNN, the most trusted name in news.
And I do love it when Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo sit there and tut-tut Donald Trump about how mean he is to people in the media.
How could he be so mean to people?
How could he tweet mean things?
I mean, you can't stop yourself hysterically laughing at hackney jokes about how people in the South don't know how to do math.
I think I'm going to take your high dudgeon with a grain of salt next time.
But again, it's not just the folks on CNN.
It's people like MSNBC's Nicole Wallace, who suggested yesterday that everybody who's defending Donald Trump in this trial is a flat earther.
I've known Chris Wallace my entire career in politics.
This is an unflappable man.
And just the, I mean, I called it the Flat Earth Society.
The Republicans are clinging to this argument that the Earth is flat.
Chris Wallace, obviously, they're trying to cover the same live event we're covering and saying, no, we have a first-hand witness who saw the Earth is round.
And he's just trying to tell these senators before they render a judgment that the facts reveal the Earth is indeed round.
Well, it's flat earthers.
Everything is about a flat earth, and everybody who opposes me is an idiot, and that's why we can run this person who lives in a world of communist fantasy, where the United States is the biggest problem on planet Earth, and we can run him, and he'll win.
Well, maybe it'll work.
Maybe it'll work.
I'm not suggesting that Bernie Sanders can't win.
Obviously, he can win.
But is that the Democrats' strongest line of appeal?
I have serious doubts about all this.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are strategically torn in Iowa, according to the New York Times, as they streamed out of the banquet ballroom.
Following a Scott County fundraiser Saturday night, one after the other Iowa Democrats admitted they still had not decided whom to support just over a week before the state's presidential caucuses.
But by not mentioning his name as they rattled off their shortlist, they made clear whom they would not support, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialist from Vermont who has taken the lead in recent polls.
By the way, I love that the media have now resonated to just calling him a Democratic Socialist because he insists on it.
I would like to see Bernie Sanders forcibly disavow communism.
Like explain, what are the ideological problems of communism?
Has anybody asked him to distinguish Democratic Socialism from Socialism?
Like, what's the actual difference?
What do you favor about Democratic Socialism that you do not favor about Socialism itself?
If all you mean is Socialism where people get to vote on the rules of the tyrannical government, then that's just called Socialism because they do have fake elections in one-party states.
So what exactly do you mean?
Because presumably, when he says democratic socialism, he does not mean that the people actually get to decide on their own economic fortunes.
If he actually meant that, then he would not be a socialist, right?
See, here's the thing.
I'm a democratic capitalist.
But what I mean by that is I'm a capitalist.
Okay, because the reality is I believe there are certain fundamental rights that are protected by the United States Constitution, and that democracies cannot overrule those rights.
There are certain rights that are sacrosanct.
I'm a constitutionalist.
There are very few people on planet Earth who are pure Democrats, meaning that they think a majority should decide everything, because if you are a pure Democrat, you...
That's an unsustainable moral position.
There is no one on planet Earth, even the most quote-unquote populist minded people, who believe that pure majorities should simply decide everything in the world.
Because if a pure majority decide to kill the minority, presumably you would not be in favor of democracy at that point.
There are certain sacrosanct principles you care about.
So adding the word democratic to socialist does not change the math.
You have to explain what you mean by socialist.
So what in Marxism does Bernie Sanders, like why has nobody ever asked him?
Explain to me in pure detail why we should not nationalize this particular industry.
Why should we not nationalize an industry?
Explain to me why the free market is good, right?
You say that you're a democratic socialist like Norway.
Well, instead of just using the term democratic socialist, why don't you explain to me What about Norway is good in terms of the free market?
Not the side you always talk about, like the nationalized healthcare.
We get that you want to nationalize healthcare.
The question is why you don't want to nationalize the oil and gas industry in the United States?
Why you don't want to nationalize every other aspect of industry?
Why you don't want to nationalize the stock market?
Like, explain to me why that is.
Why has Bernie never been asked that question?
Why is it that if he just says democratic in front of socialist, we all assume we know what he's talking about?
It's this double game that he plays routinely with regard to the language.
Really.
He plays it all the time.
Because his higher principle is not democracy, because no one's highest principle is pure majoritarian democracy.
And if you say that it is, that's actually immoral.
There are certain principles you hold above democracy.
I hold individual rights above democracy.
I do.
I don't think you get to vote to kill your neighbor.
I don't think you get to vote to steal your neighbor's property.
Bernie Sanders presumably believes that no matter how many people vote in favor of private healthcare, that is still immoral.
And then that should be, that should presumably be overridden by the powers of government.
There are no rights that are protectable from government.
So what exactly does Bernie Sanders mean by democratic socialist that is different in any way from socialist?
In any case, the New York Times is reporting that there are a lot of people who are against Bernie, but are divided on how exactly to approach the situation with regard to Bernie.
And the problem is that the more they're divided, the more Bernie Sanders' core base makes sense.
In 2016, this is exactly what happened to Trump.
There were a lot of people who were not going to vote for Trump in Iowa or New Hampshire.
In fact, Trump lost Iowa.
But Trump's base was strong enough, his core was strong enough that he was able to weather a very fractured field.
Michelle Goldberg, who's been rooting for Bernie all along over at the New York Times, she says it's no longer far-fetched to think Sanders could be the Democratic nominee.
And then she talks about how he's got all the buzz.
Now, just understand, this is Bernie Sanders' actual candidacy, okay?
This is Michelle Goldberg, a fan of Bernie Sanders, describing what happened at his rally the other night.
There was a band that played.
When the band was done, three indigenous women took the stage to pay respects to the Native Americans forced off the land that became Iowa.
The filmmaker Michael Moore came on and described Donald Trump as the end point of a country founded on genocide and built on the backs of slaves.
The next day, at a campaign stop in Perry, Moore called women's underrepresentation in Congress a form of gender apartheid.
AOC spoke and said, I'm here because Senator Sanders is actually committed to breaking up ICE.
Is this what Americans are ready for?
Seriously, I don't care how much Americans hate Trump.
You think that that's not going to be a campaign for Trump?
Seriously, you think the American people are ready to declare that America should not exist because of the exploitation of lands seized from Native Americans, because America was a country built on genocide and slavery, because Congress is engaging in gender apartheid, and because it's time to break up immigration enforcement?
I mean, it's unbelievable.
That's an unbelievable standard that you think you're going to be able to overcome here.
So, good luck with that.
Good luck with that.
And that doesn't mean he's not electable.
He is electable.
Because anybody's electable.
Once there's a final two, anybody can win.
And Jeremy Corbyn could have been Prime Minister of Britain, and until the very last minute, when Boris Johnson blew him out, there were people who thought he was gonna win.
Businesses were preparing to leave.
So, it's a very dangerous game to play to make Bernie Sanders the nominee from a Republican point of view.
From a Democratic point of view, however, is he more vulnerable than any other Democratic candidate who's up there?
No question.
No question.
Okay.
Meanwhile, This week marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Allied forces.
And people who experienced the Holocaust are worried about the increase in antisemitism across the world as well they should be.
The New York Times reports, the ceremony at Auschwitz culminated a week of events around the world, including a commemoration in Jerusalem, attended by dozens of world leaders who urged collective vigilance against the resurgence of antisemitism worldwide.
And that is exactly right.
But the problem is that that antisemitism has been mainstreamed into the left.
The left refuses to acknowledge its own anti-semitism.
See, it's very easy to acknowledge and point out the anti-semitism of white supremacist groups who go around shooting up synagogues.
I've been a mile away from a shooting by a white supremacist.
I mean, that shooting that happened near San Diego.
I was very close to that location at the time.
Shuls in my neighborhood have been firebombed before.
So, like, the anti-Semitism of white supremacists has been well-known in America by Jews for a very long time and around the world.
The problem is the mainstreaming of Muslim anti-Semitism, radical Islamic anti-Semitism by the left, is ongoing and wild.
And ignored by the left.
Like, truly ignored.
They don't care about anti-Semitism unless it serves their purposes, which is why Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are on a committee holding a hearing this week in the House about Holocaust Memorial Day.
Rashida Tlaib, who literally pushed a blood libel over the weekend suggesting that Jews kidnapped a Palestinian child and then drowned him in a well.
That woman will be over.
I mean, that is classical anti-Semitism will be overseeing.
Sitting on a committee that discusses Holocaust Memorial Day.
day, Ilhan Omar, who has never missed an opportunity to be a raging anti-Jew, anti-Semite, tweeted out yesterday on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we mourn the lives of six million Jews who were systematically murdered.
Today and every day, we must redouble our efforts to confront anti-Semitism and all forms of religious discrimination and say, hashtag never again, which is insane because Ilhan Omar is a supporter of terror groups.
A year ago, she tried to pass a boycott law comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.
One year ago.
And she's mainstreamed.
She's going to be at that hearing, presumably proclaiming that Donald Trump is the real anti-Semite, while she continues to support the cause of the Palestine Liberation Organization, run by an actual Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Abbas.
It's so funny.
You know, Trump is going to put out his peace plan today.
He's putting out his peace plan today.
And his peace plan basically just acknowledges the realities on the ground.
The realities on the ground are that there are Jewish settlements.
Those Jewish settlements are not going to be uprooted in favor of a terror state.
It's not a thing that's going to happen.
Jerusalem is not going to be divided.
And no, there is no quote-unquote Palestinian right of return.
There has never been in human history a quote-unquote right of return of a population that has left by a majority group that does not wish to retake those people in.
Okay, the fact is that even Zionism was approved by the British mandate.
People were moving in at the behest and with the willingness of the group that was there.
And they were not there to quote-unquote destroy the ruling mandate.
Okay, the fact is the Palestinians have openly stated that they are there in order to destroy the State of Israel.
They've never accepted the existence of the State of Israel.
And the idea that you're going to rectify all imbalances by destroying the state of Israel, and that's not anti-Semitic, is bizarre in the extreme.
The idea that Israel has a peace partner is bizarre in the extreme.
Mahmoud Abbas, right, Mahmoud Abbas is an open Holocaust denier.
He literally wrote his thesis, he wrote a college thesis about, it was a doctoral thesis in 1982, questioning the extent of the Nazi genocide.
So, those are the people that Israel is facing down, and we are told that if Israel does not make concessions to those people, then obviously Israel is the problem.
But don't worry, we all hate anti-Semitism and we're all fighting anti-Semitism.
It is anti-Semitism being accepted across the board.
Watch the blowback to the Trump peace plan today, in which the soft bigotry of anti-Semitism is allowed to flourish, in which Palestinians suggest that Jews are only colonial oppressors from the West, and shouldn't be on the land in the first place, and they decide that they're going to protest the idea that there should be a Jewish state in the first place.
But don't worry, it's not anti-Semitism, it's just anti-Zionism.
And not only that, but Palestinians have a right to swamp the Jewish state with populations that weren't even born In those areas in the first place, not just a right of return to quote-unquote the new state of Palestine, but a right to return to their original homes, a right that has never existed in human history so far as I am aware, considering that there are borders that exist.
But nonetheless, the left will continue to pretend that anti-Semitism is a figment of the right-wing imagination when it comes to the left and only exists on the right, and Muslim anti-Semitism, which is the greatest threat to the future of Jews living on planet Earth, that that is not really a problem in the first place.
Alrighty, time for a quick thing I like and then a thing that I hate.
So if you want to know more about the quote-unquote right of return and why the Palestinian right of return has always been a fig leaf, if you want to know, you know, the real facts about why it is that this is such a ridiculous argument that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who either voluntarily left or left in the midst of a war in 1948, that they and their descendants should be allowed to return to their original homes when Jews were forcibly expelled, like hundreds of thousands of them, and absorbed by the nascent state of Israel,
If you want to understand why the right of return was always a bad faith attempt to destroy the state of Israel, all you have to do is read a book by Adi Schwartz and Einat Wolf called The War of Return, How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace.
That is coming out, I believe, very shortly.
I think it's coming out in April.
So you can pre-order it now.
The book is excellent.
And you should know, Adi Schwartz and Einat Wolf are not.
Right-wing activists, both of them, worked for the Labor Party in Israel, which is the far-left party in Israel.
They were both part of the negotiations of Oslo.
And they've recognized that everybody has sort of ignored this.
In every peace deal, when Trump presents his peace plan, you know, everybody on the left is going to go, what about the right of return?
What about the right of return?
Why aren't the Palestinians allowed to go back to their original homes?
Well, the Jews were not allowed to go back to their original homes.
There's, again, never been a record.
Like when we talk about refugees, usually you talk about how refugees cannot be barred They cannot be barred from going somewhere else, right?
But usually when you talk about refugees, there's very little talk about resettling them in the place where they originally came from against the wishes of the ruling government, right?
That is not something that has historically been precedented.
The only exception is this.
Right, so this is the one area where the West has kept this ridiculousness alive, and the reason for that is because this has been pushed by the Palestinian leadership, and the Palestinian leadership has pushed for it because they understand that in swamping the state of Israel with now, what would it be, four million registered Palestinians, according to the UN's RWA?
Something like that, that they would be destroying the state of Israel, which of course is the ultimate goal here.
Now, what's amazing about the Trump peace plan that is gonna be presented today is not only does it recognize realities on the ground, but also, there's a good shot that a lot of the Arab states are basically gonna say, of course, this should be the basis of further negotiation.
Because the truth is that as states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Jordan recognize that the Palestinians just want to destroy the state of Israel, they've always understood that, but they understand that the greater threat now is not the state of Israel, never was the state of Israel, it's actually Iran.
They've started to worry less about the fake claims of the Palestinians that they're going to destroy the state of Israel and wipe all the Jews into the sea.
Instead, they have decided That pursuing peace is actually a possibility.
If peace is to be pursued, then the right of return, which was always a talking point and always nonsense, is going to have to be dropped because it is indeed nonsense.
It will have to be dropped.
It was never a reality to begin with.
It was always a fig leaf for attempting to destroy the state of Israel in the first place.
So, check it out.
The War of Return.
Adi Schwartz and Einat Wolff.
And it explains in much fuller detail why the quote-unquote right of return is historically inaccurate, historically foolhardy, is an obstacle to any sort of peace deal in the first place.
By the way, Israel is desperate to make a peace deal.
They would love nothing better than to have a peace partner that they could just hand this off to and be like, okay, we don't want anything to do with this.
Enjoy.
Like, every Israeli prime minister for the last 30 years has wanted to do this.
The problem is that nobody who's running the show over there in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip is trustworthy because they're all Holocaust-denying terrorists who would like to destroy every Jew living in the region, ranging from Tel Aviv to Haifa, not just worrying about, you know, Hebron or any of the other quote-unquote settlements.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so Stephen King made a big boo-boo the other day.
A big, terrible boo-boo.
So he tweeted out, I would never consider diversity in matters of art.
Only quality.
It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.
Oh no, Stephen King, you're not allowed to say that.
So Stephen King, who, I'll admit, I enjoy Stephen King's books.
At least the premises of his books.
He always writes books that have really interesting sort of beginnings, and then mediocre middles, and then the end everything just explodes.
Like that's the end of every one of his books.
Every one of his books is there's a giant explosion.
Really every single one like from the stand to to the shining so like all of them and with just like there's a big explosion you know okay I guess that's a way to end a book okay I suppose in any case Stephen King who is a wild leftist right he hates Trump he He hates conservatives, really hates them.
And if you read any of his books, they are wildly biased against the right.
Every one of his books is about some small town in Maine, where oppressive right-wingers are trying to shut down the local lesbians.
Every single one of his books is like this.
They're all about repressive right-wingers who study the Bible too much.
I don't know what happened to him in his childhood, but clearly, he has a real problem with people who have ever read the Bible, and he believes the same things that Rick Wilson believes about ignorant people and their political beliefs.
Anyway.
He tweets out this highly controversial thing, right?
I would never consider diversity in matters of art, only quality.
It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.
Really, that to do otherwise would be... So he says that.
Correct.
Correct.
When we look at art, we should be looking at the quality of art.
But the blowback was fierce.
And now he has been forced to do a mea culpa struggle session in the pages of the Washington Post.
So now Stephen King, the whitest person in the world, he has a piece called the Oscars are still rigged in favor of He had to have a full-on struggle session.
So after acknowledging that maybe we should, you know, judge art based on its own merits, now he's like, but if it's not made by black people, that's because of racism.
That's because of racism.
So Stephen King writes, discussions of arts and culture, like discussions of politics, have become increasingly acrimonious and polarized in recent years.
Lines of belief are drawn with indelible ink.
And if you step over them, wittingly or unwittingly, you find yourself in the social media version of the stocks and subject to a barrage of electronic turnips and cabbages.
I stepped over one of those lines recently by saying on Twitter something that I thought, mistakenly, was non-controversial.
And then he cites his tweet.
The subject was the Academy Awards.
I also said, in essence, that those judging creative excellence should be blind to questions of race, gender, or sexual orientation.
I did not say that was the case today because nothing could be further from the truth.
So here he is buying it back.
So he's saying, yeah, I think we should probably just, you know, consider art along its own merits.
But then he's like, but the people who actually vote for the Oscars are vicious racists!
See, that's what I was actually saying.
Actually.
I wasn't actually saying that people who are voting at the Oscars are voting on equality.
I'm saying that I'm the only not-racist person, says Stephen King, and everybody else who votes for the Oscars is supes-dupes racist.
They're all super-duper racists.
It says, nor did I say that films, novels, plays, and music focusing on diversity and or inequality cannot be works of creative genius.
They can be, and often are.
And then he cites when they see us ending to Bernie's 2019 Netflix miniseries.
So going right to the wokest series he can think of.
He says, has there been progress in the film community?
Yes, some.
I'm old enough to remember when there were only a handful of African-American directors and about the only female director in Hollywood was Ida Lupina, who made hard-edged noir B-pics in the 1950s and later worked in TV.
Her directing work was never nominated for an Oscar or an Emmy.
For answers as to why some talented artists are nominated in some, such as Greta Gerwig, who helmed the astoundingly good new version of Little Women or Not, you might need to look no further than the demographic makeup of those who voted for the Academy Awards.
Greta Gerwig was nominated for Best Director two years ago for Lady Bird.
Two years ago!
So you're telling me that it was all the sexists in the Academy who nominated her two years ago, but didn't nominate her today.
Same exact people.
But there were sexists today, but not two years ago.
According to Stephen King, it's because there aren't enough women voting in the Academy.
Or alternatively, this is just another malice struggle section from folks on the left who are forced to perform ritual breastbeating, get out the sackcloth and the ashes, and weep over their own unwokeness.
Stephen King trying to earn his way back into woke circles.
He says, only eight years ago, 94% of 5,700 voters were white.
According to the Los Angeles Times, 77% male, 54% more than 60 years old.
This year, women make up 32% of voters, and minority members equal 16% of the total.
Not good enough!
Not even within shouting distance of good enough!
It's weird, because if you read Stephen King's books, they're disproportionately about white characters.
In Maine.
Because Maine is disproportionately white.
Very odd.
Must be that he is a racist.
So this is why he has to write this, because he's a racist.
Then he talks about how we need to change the constituency of the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Scientists.
I love this.
He says, Give them credit for trying to catch up, but not too much credit.
Of the nine films nominated for Best Picture this year, the majority, The Irishman, Ford vs. Ferrari, 1917, Joker, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, are what my sons call man fiction.
There are fights, guns, and many white faces.
Okay, just like to notice, Stephen King's books, fights, guns, many white faces.
Just gonna point that out.
Also going to point out, No one really cares about the white faces so much, but fights and guns have been historically pretty popular in movies, like Going Back, because it's fun to watch.
And also, if he can name which one of those pictures he thinks is really bad, like, I think two of those movies are not very good, right?
I think The Irishman is a terrible movie, by the way, and I think The Joker was wildly overrated, but 1917 is a masterpiece.
Ford vs. Ferrari is a fantastic piece of American film, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Tarantino's best flick.
Like, which one of those things should be thrown out for Little Women?
He's gonna have to explain.
And then he talks about how there are movies that are not in serious contention, they're not in serious competition for the Oscars, like Harriet.
Okay, I saw Harriet.
It's fine.
It's fine.
Is it on the par of any of the other movies that are nominated?
No.
It's like a normal biopic.
And I was really excited about it.
I mean, I've written my own script about the John Brown, about the John Brown raid on Harper's Ferry.
So I'm very into that historical period.
Harriet Tubman's a character in that script.
Like, it would be great if it were produced.
But the fact is that the movie Harriet Tubman, it's like, okay, it's fine.
It's not like unbelievable.
It's not like Oscar worthy.
It says, how many people saw The Last Black Man in San Francisco?
Well, not many, but that's because it wasn't in like huge wide release with huge publicity.
And then he explains that he doesn't care, that in the end, even though a lot of his characters are white, he doesn't really care about race because he didn't mind when Indra's elbow was cast as Roland Deschain, the gunslinger at the center of the Dark Tower books.
And that response reflects my overall attitude that, as with justice, judgments of creative excellence should be blind.
But that would be the case in a perfect world, one where the game isn't rigged in favor of white folks.
So there it is.
In the end, he's actually rejecting his own premise.
Judgments of arts should not be colorblind because we don't live in a colorblind world, and therefore, we certainly should judge the art on the basis of who the artist is.
So he has now performed the ritual breastfeeding, and Stephen King can be welcomed back into the halls of wokeness.
Welcome back, Stephen King, and congratulations on your new conversion.
Really excellent stuff from the brave Stephen King.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
So stick around for that.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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