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Feb. 4, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:01:54

The Iowa S***show | Ep. 946

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	The Iowa caucuses turn into a total cluster bleep.
	Every Democrat declares victory and President Trump prepares for the State of the Union.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.com.
	Protect your online privacy today, from like the Democrats in Iowa, at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
	Again, that's expressvpn.com slash Ben.
	So, let us begin with the best Iowa caucuses ever!
	These were amazing!
	So, the party that wants to handle your healthcare, that wants to run the economy, that wants to run every aspect of your life.
	And they promise you, government is supremely competent.
	And they are supremely competent.
	They can handle everything.
	Don't you worry.
	Don't you worry.
	There won't be any death panels.
	There won't be any rationing of care.
	They can make sure that all the payments hit the providers exactly when they are supposed to.
	Everything will be hunky-dory.
	They couldn't handle an Iowa caucus last night.
	Now, I will be honest with you.
	Yes, because that's what we do here on the show.
	Yesterday, I was in a really bad mood leading up to the Iowa caucuses.
	The reason I was in a really bad mood is because the horse race Of Democrats is really off putting to me because I think frankly that most of these Democrats are awful.
	I think they're awful.
	I think there are a couple that are sort of palatable and then I think most of them are just garbage.
	So Joe Biden is somewhat palatable in the sense that he's a corpse and he's not going to do too much damage to the country if he's president.
	Not the sort of damage that you'd see from some of the radicals in his own party, mainly because again, he's not an alive person.
	And then there's Amy Klobuchar.
	And Amy Klobuchar wouldn't do tremendous damage to the country in the same way that some of the more radical members of her own party would.
	But the big winners last night were expected to be the people who exactly would do that kind of damage.
	So Bernie Sanders, who's basically a communist.
	I mean, he says he has not changed his views since 1963.
	Well, in 1963, dude was a communist.
	So I'm pretty certain that he's still a commie, considering that he has never actually backtracked on any of his old views from the 1960s and the 1970s.
	I pointed this out on Twitter yesterday.
	The entire left went insane.
	I pointed out that thanks to Andrew Kaczynski at CNN, he uncovered a quote from Bernie Sanders in 1976 when he was 35 years old.
	Okay, for contrast, I am 36.
	Okay, so Bernie Sanders was my age and he was talking about nationalizing every major industry in the United States, including banking and the energy sector.
	All of it.
	OK, and I pointed out that Bernie Sanders had never been asked a serious question about this, that one person had asked him about it one time and his campaign and then said, well, Bernie's been incredibly consistent.
	And then Chris Cuomo asked him about it.
	And then he said, well, I didn't do any of that as mayor of Burlington, Vermont.
	And the answer is right, because as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, what are we going to do?
	Municipalize a national institution?
	Like you don't have the power as a mayor of a city to nationalize anything.
	Also, you have to explain on an ideological level why you were for nationalization then, but you are not for nationalization now.
	Okay, fine.
	So, Bernie was widely perceived to be the frontrunner going into Iowa.
	And then there was Elizabeth Warren, who had a great ground game in Iowa.
	She'd been fading.
	But Elizabeth Warren is a damned liar who spends her entire life lying about her old positions and then lying about her new positions.
	The kind of person who goes out on the campaign trail and explains why her next Secretary of Education will have to be approved by a random trans child.
	Literally a thing that she said.
	Literally a thing that she said, and that she wants to regulate misinformation online, and prosecute people for distributing misinformation online from the lady who claimed that she was a Native American for three decades.
	And then you had Pete Buttigieg, who pretended initially to be a moderate, and then came out as a non-moderate, and suggested that everybody who voted for Donald Trump was actually a brutal, vicious racist, and suggested that everybody who was a Christian who didn't agree with Pete Buttigieg's take on same-sex marriage was somehow a bad Christian, which sort of flies in the face of, you know, the entire Old and New Testament.
	So in any case, This was a bevy of not wonderful people who are going to win the Iowa caucuses last night.
	And one of them was going to end up with a big boost in momentum.
	Now, the way that the Iowa caucuses work is that there'd be a boost in momentum only if he can make a big speech that night.
	So the best case example of this is Barack Obama in 2008 wins the Iowa caucuses.
	John Edwards comes in second.
	Hillary Clinton comes in third.
	And Barack Obama gets up and he makes a very famous speech.
	This is the speech where he says that this is the moment when all the seas began to recede.
	This is the moment when we began to take back the world.
	And all this kind of garbage, right?
	And you got this big bump moving into New Hampshire.
	I believe Hillary Clinton ends up winning New Hampshire in 2008, but Obama ends up with the momentum and he ends up going on to win the nomination.
	In order to seize that momentum, you have to have a clear result in Iowa, or at least clear enough that you get the media boost in the aftermath of Iowa.
	As a counterexample, in 2012, Rick Santorum actually wins Iowa, right?
	He beats Mitt Romney in Iowa, but the early results tabulated show that Romney and show that Romney and Santorum are basically neck and neck.
	And it's a few days until we find out that it was Rick Santorum who actually won, by which point it's over, right?
	Rick Santorum doesn't get to make his big I-won Iowa speech, and so he doesn't get that big boost going into New Hampshire, which was going to be a Romney state anyway.
	Okay, so last night, going in, there are a few stories.
	One is, Democrats are going to have heavy turnout.
	It's going to be massive turnout.
	People are so excited to throw this bastard Trump out of office.
	They want him gone.
	And they're going to show up in huge numbers.
	Huge, huge youth wave.
	Everybody's going to show up.
	Second, it's going to be a competent, well-run, well-executed caucus.
	Three weeks in advance, the Democrats were talking about how well-run, how well-executed this thing was going to be, how we have tested this thing, we are ready for it, and we know it's a little complicated because we're going to report three separate steps here.
	We're going to report first the raw vote total, which they didn't do last time, and that was a sop to Bernie Sanders, because last time Bernie Sanders did well in the raw vote total, and he didn't do quite as well in the actual caucus totals.
	He ended up losing very narrowly to Hillary Clinton in Iowa in 2016.
	So they're going to report the raw vote totals, and then they're going to report the caucus totals, and the caucus totals were a second round of voting.
	Okay, so that was all a sop to Bernie.
	So this was the plan.
	The plan was that Bernie was going to at least win the raw vote totals, and then if he didn't win the caucus, then he could talk about how to lose jobs, and then the media would make a big deal out of it, and Bernie would be the man with the momentum coming out of Iowa.
	Well, none of that happened.
	None of it.
	Because it turns out that apparently, apparently, the Russians hacked Iowa.
	It's amazing.
	I mean, I don't know how this happened.
	And no one knows how it happened.
	But it's incredible.
	I don't know if Joe Biden was in the back room unplugging the app, like the weird guy from Airplane.
	I have no idea how any of this happened.
	I don't know if by shifting Kansas City into Kansas, as opposed to Missouri, President Trump screwed up the magnetic fields in Iowa, which borders Missouri in the north.
	I don't know what happened here, but no one knows what happened.
	There are no results.
	None.
	Zero zip zilch.
	We have no idea.
	There's not been a single tabulated vote in Iowa.
	Maybe later today we get some results.
	The Sanders camp has been releasing its own results of this thing, but we don't know if those results are legitimate.
	And Biden's been like, you can't release results preliminarily, right?
	None of that has been actually verified.
	So now you're screwing with the process.
	You're screwing with the election integrity.
	And Bernie Sanders's people are like, no, this is all a cheat right now on Twitter.
	C.I.A.
	mayor, or C.I.A.
	Pete is trending, and so his mayor cheats.
	So the Bernie Sanders people are like, Buttigieg screwed this whole thing up!
	If it wasn't for Buttigieg, then we would have walked away with this thing, but somehow he cheated.
	And so there are, it's a circular firing squad of incompetence and idiocy, and these people want to run your healthcare.
	This is their plan.
	These highly competent, technocratic, nationalization-friendly Democrats want to run everything in the world, but they cannot run a simple process where a bunch of people get together in a gym and decide which candidate they like best.
	We're going to bring you all the details because it was spectacular across the board.
	It's so good.
	And listen, is it good for democracy?
	Uh, no.
	I mean, no.
	It's never good for democracy when somebody screws up the process this badly, but the Democrats had it coming, and frankly, it really screws with the democratic process.
	Nate Silver has an analysis of that, too, so we have a lot to get to with regards to these Iowa caucuses, because this is one of the great screw-ups in modern American electoral history.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, Listen, we all get the future wrong.
	We do.
	We all get, like, if you were a Democrat two weeks ago, you'd be like, yeah, we're gonna have a smoothly run Iowa caucus.
	But you know what you should have done?
	You should have purchased insurance for your caucuses.
	And if you don't know what's coming in your life, you should be purchasing life insurance.
	You should be insuring yourself against the possibility of future loss.
	More importantly, insuring your family against the possibility of future loss.
	How do you do this?
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	Get life insurance right now.
	Be a responsible human being.
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	Go over to policygenius.com.
	We will always get the future wrong.
	It's better to get life insurance right.
	And again, get all the rest of your insurance there too.
	Home insurance, auto insurance, disability insurance.
	You can get it bundled.
	Get all the good stuff over at policygenius.com.
	Make sure that you are insured against the future in a way that the Iowa Democratic Party simply was not.
	Policygenius.com.
	Alrighty, so what exactly went down?
	Politico has a great rundown this morning.
	The title is, it's a total meltdown.
	Confusion grips Iowa with no official results in sight.
	Good, good.
	According to Natasha Korecki, Alex Thompson, and David Siders reporting, a technical meltdown in Iowa Monday night set off bedlam in the critical first contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, triggering competing claims of victory and stoking doubts about the legitimacy of the eventual outcome.
	No results have been reported by Midnight Eastern.
	By the way, it is not Midnight Eastern anymore.
	Okay, we are now, like, more than 12 hours removed from this, and we still don't have results.
	No results have been reported by Midnight Eastern, and the Iowa Democratic Party said on Tuesday morning it plans to release caucus results as soon as possible today, while also emphasizing its ultimate goal is to ensure the integrity and accuracy of the process.
	Meanwhile, candidates stepped into the void.
	Every Democrat simultaneously rushed to the microphone to claim victory.
	I mean, it looked like it really looked like a clown car.
	It was like a clown car.
	They opened the doors and every Democrat rushed to the mic.
	They were on split screens like Elizabeth Warren was on a split screen with Joe Biden, both of them claiming some sort of victory.
	But as Politico points out, the biggest winner might've been Joe Biden, because according to the Iowa entrance poll, he was hovering close to the viability threshold of 15% statewide, but he was doing really poorly.
	I mean, according to most of the exit polls, according to most of the reports from precincts, Biden was not performing at all.
	Like Biden, there's a good shot that Biden was gonna come in either fourth or fifth, that he might've even finished behind Amy Klobuchar, which would've been a disastrous finish for Joe Biden, who didn't bother to build an organization on the ground in Iowa, which is unthinkable, Because the only thing that matters in Iowa is your organization, as Pete Buttigieg shows.
	Dude has 7% nationally, but there was a good shot he was gonna win the Iowa caucuses last night.
	He's the one who's hardest hit.
	I mean, if you're just looking at who's hardest hit, big winners, big losers last night, Buttigieg is the hardest hit, because Buttigieg is the one who needed the biggest bounce, right?
	Sanders has a national organization, he has scads of money, he's likely to win New Hampshire.
	Buttigieg really needed the bounce.
	Buttigieg's not gonna get the bounce, because there are no results coming out of Iowa.
	He had spent all of his time and all of his money and all of his organizational ground game in Iowa, He's got to be very disappointed today to have that victory stolen from him.
	So while the Bernie people are bitching about this, the person who really got jacked last night is Pete Buttigieg.
	Okay, Bernie Sanders was going to be a big winner too, and then he was going to claim he had this wave going into New Hampshire.
	That gets swamped.
	It gets stopped.
	Iowa basically gets taken off the table as a state that matters.
	There's some delegates allocated, but No big news, no big headline for Bernie Sanders.
	Elizabeth Warren has a bad night, because there's a good shot that Elizabeth Warren ends up certainly in the top three, maybe in the top two in votes, and maybe in the top two in delegates, once all of that is said.
	And she needed, she really needed that bump going into New Hampshire, because Warren does have to win New Hampshire in order to have a future beyond New Hampshire.
	Right?
	In order for her to do well in these caucuses and in these primaries, she actually does have to be seen as the alternative to Bernie Sanders.
	That only happens if she overperforms in New Hampshire.
	She needed that bump in New Hampshire.
	She's not going to get that bump.
	Not from Iowa, anyway.
	So those are your big three losers, which are all of my favorite candidates.
	All the people who I can't stand the most in the Democratic caucuses really got jacked last night.
	They got jacked hard.
	And this is why they're all claiming that the party establishment did this.
	The party establishment didn't do this.
	The party establishment is scared bleepless of Bernie and his crowd.
	They're scared bleepless of Elizabeth Warren and her crowd.
	The last thing they want is to be seen as the conspiratorial elites cramming down an alternative to Bernie again, because this happened in 2016, then a lot of Bernie voters stayed home.
	So that's the last thing that they want.
	The people who are helped the most, well, Amy Klobuchar was denied a headline, but her headline won't be that great.
	She's going to finish like fourth.
	So she gets sort of the perception that she was doing well or that she was doing OK.
	And so she ends up in fairly decent position for Amy Klobuchar, who really has no national hopes at this point.
	Joe Biden is the one who is saved.
	Joe Biden Again, the man was expected to completely collapse early last night, and the early results were showing that he was in a state of complete and utter disarray, that he was winning.
	Like, the Bernie Sanders team has released these unverified results.
	Their unverified results show Bernie up at, like, 28%, and I believe it was Buttigieg at, like, 24% or 21%, and Warren at, like, 18%, and then it was Joe Biden all the way down there at, like, 12%, and then Klobuchar at, like, 11%.
	So it was just a disastrous night for Joe Biden, except the night never happened.
	It's like the night just disappeared from memory.
	It's like Brigadoon, the Iowa caucuses.
	They appear every four years and then they fade back into the mists of time.
	And so this whole thing falls apart.
	So that's sort of how this thing pays off for the various candidates.
	It is especially good for Joe Biden, according to Nate Silver, because if you were trying to build a forecast of how the future primaries go, the weight you give to Iowa makes a big difference.
	So according to Nate Silver, He says, more specifically, we estimate, based on testing, how much the results in various states have historically changed the candidate's position in national polls that Iowa was the second most important date on the calendar this year, trailing only Super Tuesday.
	It was worth the equivalent of almost 800 delegates, almost 20 times its actual numbers, thanks to that magnitude of the balance that comes out of Iowa.
	And Nate Silver says everything was a little weird in Iowa this year.
	There were already some signs that the Iowa balance, which essentially results from all the favorable media coverage the winning candidates get, might be smaller than normal.
	Iowa was bracketed by an extremely busy news calendar, President Trump's impeachment trial both before and after the caucuses, the Super Bowl on Sunday, the State of the Union address on Tuesday.
	There was not the usual climactic uptick in media coverage around Iowa.
	And the worst news for the Democrats in all of this is that the turnout in Iowa ended up being pretty low.
	Okay, which is a really, really bad indicator for the Democrats.
	Like a seriously bad indicator for the Democrats.
	Originally, the Democrats had suggested that this was going to be the highest turnout ever in Iowa because people were so excited to get rid of Trump.
	Nope.
	Nope.
	The Democrats are now acknowledging that it was on pace for about 172,000 people showing up in Iowa, which by the way, demonstrates how ridiculous this whole system is.
	172,000 people deciding for the rest of the country sort of Who is going to be the frontrunner in Iowa is pretty astonishing.
	The record high was 240,000 in 2008.
	That's when everybody was very enthused about Obama and about Hillary.
	And now it's like 170,000, which means the enthusiasm is really not as high as the Democrats suggested.
	But, says Nate Silver, we weren't prepared for what actually happened, which is that as I'm writing this at 3.15am on Tuesday, the Iowa Democratic Party literally hasn't released any results from its caucuses.
	I'm not going to predict what those numbers will be, although early indications are that Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and perhaps Elizabeth Warren had good results.
	The point is that the lead story around the 2020 Iowa Democratic Caucuses is now, and will forever be, the colossal bleep show around the failure to release results in a timely fashion.
	Maybe there will be eventually a decent-sized Iowa balance despite all this, but there's a good chance all the candidates who did well in Iowa get screwed, and the candidates who did poorly there get a mulligan.
	So who might this help?
	So according to Nate Silver, he says, the presence of Iowa on the map was helpful to Bernie, whose chances of winning the national delegate majority would have been 24% without Iowa, as opposed to the 31% chance he had with Iowa as of Monday afternoon.
	If Bernie had walked out with Iowa, if he had walked out with a big lead in Iowa, then his chance of winning a majority of delegates would have shot from 31% to 58%, who had been the prohibited front runner, if Bernie had won Iowa.
	But there is no winner in Iowa, right?
	Iowa doesn't exist.
	I was just in your mind.
	I was a figment of your imagination.
	And so that means that right now, without Iowa existing, the chances of Biden winning a majority of delegates are now 50% according to Nate Silver, but with Sanders lagging at 24%.
	Because this means that the biggest headline that's coming out now will be New Hampshire.
	Everyone expected Bernie to win New Hampshire.
	He won it last time.
	And that means that Biden gets a reset.
	So right now, if Biden is not expending bajillions of dollars caucusing in Nevada, he's being a moron.
	Right?
	He's got a second shot at this.
	He's got a second bite at the apple.
	Because last night, he was gonna get walloped.
	He was gonna get walloped.
	I mean, we'll get to the Joe Biden problem in just one second.
	And we'll see how the media covered this thing throughout the night.
	It was amazing how this thing morphed throughout the night.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so...
	First, let us begin with the recap of the night.
	So early on in the night, before the extent of these screw-ups became clear, and it is a nightmare for the Democrats, because as it also turns out, the app that failed last night was originally designed, allegedly, and Robby Mook is denying it, but Robby Mook, who is a Hillary Clinton staffer, allegedly designed the app that just failed.
	So if you want conspiracy theories, we shall bring you conspiracy theories.
	Because that is, I mean, what a disaster.
	He's saying, I didn't have anything to do with it, except there were public reports that he was involved in the initial stages of developing the app that was used in Iowa.
	By the way, Democrats who are constantly complaining about Republicans who want to crack down on voter fraud and use voter ID and don't want online voting.
	Yeah, how did online voting go for you last night?
	Go real good?
	Was that a real solid pick for you?
	How's all this working out?
	Your new fancy tech?
	Is it working out great?
	It isn't?
	Oh, sorry to hear that.
	In any case, the early story in the night before any of this started was that Biden was collapsing, right?
	Biden gets saved last night, because the big story last night was Biden collapsing.
	So Jake Tapper was on the ground in Iowa, and he was walking up to Biden supporters, and there were like two of them.
	And they were saying that, don't worry, we're viable, we'll get up to the 15% threshold.
	And Tapper's like, when, next year?
	Because there's like two of you.
	Biden, how are we doing over here?
	This does not look like 56 people.
	So you look like lovely, wonderful people, but it doesn't look like you made the viability threshold.
	Not yet.
	There's time.
	This year?
	I'm not trying to be funny, but I'm trying to be a little funny.
	Okay, so this was the story last night is that Biden was collapsing in on himself like a dying star.
	Chuck Todd was immediately saying last night that Joe Biden was done based on these results because Joe Biden was finishing solo.
	I mean, maybe finishing fifth in the Iowa caucuses.
	Here was Chuck Todd early on in the night before.
	Chuck Todd lost it and declared that Iowa was an effing disaster, a thing that he said on a hot mic.
	Notice Chuck Todd's declaring Biden dead.
	Okay, so that was the story, right?
	Biden, he's it is interesting.
	He's an afterthought in these college towns.
	And that is it only you know, he's the electable guy.
	But Sanders big shot at him is can he get young voters out?
	It's not a good look if you're not even getting threshold.
	OK, so that was the story.
	Right.
	And then Chris Matthews was on MSNBC.
	I know what's going on here.
	Joe Biden.
	I think he's dead.
	I come in here, I roll on in here, come in, I shoo, drink heavily, I'm all rumpled.
	A lot of people in here, so I got to kind of hold it together.
	But look at that crowd for Joe Biden.
	None likes Joe Biden.
	It's like a walking dead man.
	He's a corpse.
	Go, Chris Matthews, go.
	It's the first rule.
	Win Iowa.
	Because nine out of 11 Democratic presidential candidates who won Iowa won the nomination.
	And the only people that didn't were the local guy, Tom Harkin, and the neighbor Dick Gephardt.
	So it has always been a really good leading indicator.
	But this time, I think we've got a lot more game ahead of us, a lot more game ahead of us, with Bernie coming out really strong.
	I believe the first couple contests staying strong for a while.
	Biden, I don't know if he's going to make it.
	We'll see tonight if he makes it on.
	Okay, so they were already declaring Biden dead early on.
	And then Katie Tour at MSNBC was reporting the other big story, which was, of course, turnout was incredibly low.
	They were expecting big turnout and nobody showed up because no one likes these candidates.
	In terms of turnout, in 2016 they had around 767 people here.
	They were prepared for twice that many number, over a thousand they thought, at least at this precinct.
	They had 849, so turnout was not quite as high.
	As they expected here, and I'm not sure if that says what that says about maybe the evening, maybe people were busy, or maybe there were so many candidates they needed someone else to choose for them, but keep that in mind.
	Turnout was not as high as expected, although it did exceed expectations at least in this one precinct.
	Or, alternatively, maybe the entire Democratic theory, which is that people hate Donald Trump with such a fiery passion outside of the major cities, that they're going to show up en masse in order to stop Trump.
	Maybe that's just not true.
	Maybe that's just not true.
	There's a new Gallup poll out today.
	It shows Trump all the way up to a 49% approval rating.
	If his approval rating is 49% the day of the election, he's going to be re-elected.
	And there's no question he's going to be re-elected.
	Because the fact is, he won election with a 41% approval rating last time.
	If he's anywhere close to 50%, this thing is a done deal.
	It's a done deal.
	Okay, maybe the fact is that outside of California and New York, where everybody is morally upset about Donald Trump, the rest of the country is like, okay, yeah, we've all taken it in.
	We know what Trump is.
	And guess what?
	We're not willing to hand the country over to full-fledged socialists right now.
	So, no, we're not all that interested.
	Maybe nobody is up for this stuff.
	The Beltway insiders who are so into impeachment and the Mueller report and every inch of the news cycle, maybe that's not reflective of the middle of the country.
	Because the Democrats in Iowa, who showed up in 2008 because they were excited about both Hillary, they're excited about turning a new page, right?
	Hillary and Barack Obama, a new wave in the Democratic Party.
	Maybe they look at Bernie and they're like, hmm.
	And they look at Biden and they're like, oh, that guy's dead.
	And they look at Pete Buttigieg and they're like, this guy's mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
	Like, really?
	And they look at Trump, they're like, all right, like, don't like him.
	Think he's a doof, but...
	Like I'm not really, like do I really want to get up and go to a gym tonight and like hang out with a bunch of people and pretend like we are doing something important for the country?
	Okay, so those were the early narratives.
	The Biden was done and also the turnout was low.
	And then the evening turned.
	Then the evening turned in a glorious and wondrous way.
	Everything started to fall apart.
	So CNN was the first to start reporting that things were clearly off.
	So last night, CNN reports, yeah, we got a problem here.
	These vote tallies, they are not happening properly.
	We'll get to this in just one second.
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	OK, so CNN begins reporting fairly early in the night that something is clearly off.
	We've got a problem.
	The app isn't working.
	People reporting they were typing things into the app and the app was immediately freezing.
	People reporting data was sort of disappearing.
	People had not fully tabulated results properly.
	Many of the campaigns were complaining that there were problems with the initial tabulations and with the secondary tabulations.
	People didn't understand how the process works.
	They're reporting things wrong because it's all complex and stupid.
	And so here is CNN reporting, uh, we got a problem guys.
	This was not the plan.
	Something is clearly off from the plan that the Iowa Democratic Party had at the start of the night.
	They did not expect to have no vote reporting at 10.30 Eastern at night.
	That is dramatically later than we've seen in the past.
	So Mark is right.
	It's a brand new process in the sense of what they're reporting out.
	Not just the state delegates, but also the popular vote for the first round and final round.
	So I understand that they are doing something brand new.
	Okay, Bernie's people were bitching about this.
	You did this!
	Okay, you're the ones who insisted that the Democratic Party report the initial vote assessments before the caucus tallies.
	That was you.
	So, you know, eat it.
	Really?
	I don't think that the Bernie people have that right to be angry, really.
	I think Buttigieg has the right to be angry.
	Like, Bernie's going to do fine.
	He's going to go on to New Hampshire.
	Bernie's going to be competitive throughout.
	Bernie's going to claim victory and, you know, he did win a lot of votes last night by pretty much every indicator.
	Buttigieg was the one who was going to miss that giant boost that he was going to get, the signal boost that he was going to get after winning Iowa.
	He was going to be able to give his Obama speech.
	By the way, We'll get to the Democratic speeches in just a second because it was delicious.
	But this caused no end, no end of heartburn for Democrats.
	The best clip of the night, best clip of the night.
	So, Wolf Blitzer was interviewing a precinct captain, okay?
	Somebody, well actually he was interviewing somebody at DNC headquarters, okay?
	Oh sorry, he's, I'm wrong.
	He's interviewing a precinct captain on CNN.
	That person was on hold with the DNC headquarters in Iowa.
	Getting ready to report results.
	Wolf is on the line with the precinct captain, and the DNC guy picks up the phone.
	And the precinct captain, who's been waiting an hour to report the results, is busy with Wolf, and he says, hold on a second, Wolf.
	By the time he picks up the phone with the Iowa chair, the guy hangs up on him.
	So because of CNN, a precinct captain is unable to report the results of a caucus.
	It's unbelievably great.
	Here is the clip of the night from CNN.
	This is a real coincidence, Wolf.
	I just got off hold.
	Just now.
	So I've got to get off the phone to report the results.
	Alright, go ahead and report your results.
	Can we listen in as you report them, Sean?
	Yep.
	Alright, let's listen.
	Okay.
	Hi.
	Hello?
	They hung up on me.
	They hung up on me.
	Okay, I've got to get back in line on hold.
	They just hung up.
	Oh, that is spectacular stuff.
	Yes!
	The Democrats, who could not wait for 10 seconds on the line, the guy waited an hour to report the results, and the Democrats were like, hello?
	Hello?
	Click.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	And Wolf was like, can we listen in as you report the results?
	Absolutely, you can, Wolf.
	Excellent, excellent stuff.
	So Chris Matthews has a solution.
	He's like, why are we even starting in Iowa?
	We can't do this anymore.
	I need to get home and drink.
	It's late.
	Why am I even here?
	What the hell's going on?
	Where is Iowa anyway?
	Isn't this like the place where Kevin Costner plays baseball?
	Go, Chris Matthews, go!
	I think the reason they keep, if they go too much to a primary here and it begins to look like every vote counts simply, you go in, you vote, you leave, then they're afraid they won't get first anymore because then there'd be the first primary.
	And New Hampshire's the first primary, so how would they have the right to that?
	I don't know.
	Michael knows a lot about this from the Republican side.
	We got to get Tom Perez in here and beat him up a little bit and make him tell us, why do you still start in Iowa?
	Because it's a strange decision.
	It just is.
	Sorry I'm here.
	I'm here.
	It's cold.
	I'm here.
	It's cold.
	I don't even know why the hell I'm here.
	You see this?
	I've been out here for like three years.
	I don't even have a hot toddy to get me through the evening.
	Come here with my hair brushed with a shoe.
	Don't even bother to put together a show list or any sort of real show.
	Just come here and talk.
	That's how you run a caucus.
	I'm not in charge of the Democratic Party.
	Get Tom Perez in here.
	I want to kick the crap out of him.
	I want to beat him up like Robert De Niro.
	Like Robert De Niro and the Irishman, just gonna kick him off a straight corner.
	Sure, I can't move all that well, just like Robert De Niro and the Irishman.
	Sure, they're gonna have to CGI my face.
	It'll be a brutal scene, a brutal scene as I kick the crap out of Tom Perez.
	Don't feel the tingle up my leg anymore, do you, Tom?
	Do you?
	Spectacular stuff.
	And then, this was also a great clip, and it's being underrated because it was on Fox.
	Donna Brazile.
	Who was innately and inherently involved in trying to skew the primary system last time for Hillary Clinton, right?
	She was working with CNN and she leaked the questions from CNN to Hillary Clinton, allegedly, during the debate, right?
	Donna Brazile was on Fox News going, oh, this is so terrible because now people are going to think that the primary system was rigged.
	You guys have been rigging it!
	It's your fault!
	Your fault!
	You're the former head of the DNC!
	Oh no, they might think that it's rigged.
	Oh no!
	Yeah, well maybe it turns out that when now the Democratic snake has eaten its own tail, we have an Ouroboros on our hands.
	A snake eating its own tail, that's what that means.
	Okay, the Democrats have been claiming that if Donald Trump was not impeached, There would be widespread election problems and loss of trust in institutions.
	And boy, were they right!
	Donald Trump wasn't impeached, and we do have widespread election problems and lack of trust in our elections.
	Here's Donna Brazile, who was complicit in helping Hillary Clinton win the nomination last time, talking about undermining trust in our fundamental institutions.
	I was here in 2012 covering the Republicans, and that night we all left here thinking Mitt Romney was the one, and we learned later.
	You talk about momentum matter, it matters that we get this right.
	Yeah, Rick Santorum was the one.
	You know, I spent a lot of time in those rules and bylaws committees setting up this procedure, which I've done now for more than five cycles.
	You want to get it accurate, because if we don't get it accurate, somebody's going to complain tomorrow that they were rigged or something happened.
	Okay, this all led to the greatest clown show I've ever seen on TV.
	I mean, it was just a clown show.
	It was phenomenal.
	It was great.
	We need the Benny Hill music or something, right?
	We need Yakety Sax.
	Because it's so good.
	So the Democrats suddenly realize, in the middle of the night, they realize, wait, there's not gonna be a winner tonight.
	And Amy Klobuchar's like, so no matter what happens, I'm not gonna get to make a big victory speech.
	And Amy Klobuchar takes a binder and just cracks one of her staffers over the head and runs up on stage, and she's like, I won!
	Guys, I'm here!
	I won!
	It was me!
	I know we don't have results, but I did great!
	Let me tell ya, it was awesome!
	Guys, and if you don't believe me, I will make you eat this salad with a comb.
	So Amy Klobuchar, the senator from Minnesota, she gets up and she gives a victory speech with no results.
	So here is Amy Klobuchar declaring victory and all her fans are like, yay?
	Woo!
	This is at 10 p.m.
	Central Time last night when it became clear there would be no results.
	We know there's delays, but we know one thing.
	We are punching above our weight.
	My heart is full tonight.
	So even in a crowded field of candidates, even during the well-earned impeachment hearing of Donald J. Trump, which kept me bolted to my Senate desk for the last two weeks, we kept fighting.
	And you kept fighting for me.
	Okay, I love this.
	I love that she's giving a victory speech with no result.
	It's spectacular.
	It's spectacular.
	My favorite thing about this is, by the way, if you're Amy Klobuchar and, like, your only shot at the nomination is to do well in Iowa, don't you have a better scripted speech than that?
	Like, why don't you have a barn burner set up?
	Just give a barn burner!
	She was smart to get out there in front of the cameras first, though, and this led to a jailbreak of Democratic candidates.
	They had criminal justice reform in the middle of the Democratic primary, and all of the Democrats rushed from jail directly to the cameras.
	So much so that it turned into an episode of Hollywood Squares.
	Like it was like Joe Biden here, and Elizabeth Warren here, and Amy Klobuchar here, and Pete Buttigieg here.
	And somewhere Tom Steyer was speaking to a camera, but nobody cared.
	It was amazing, like they were all rushing to the cameras.
	It was spectacular.
	I'll show you the rest of this, because believe it or not, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren ended up on a split screen.
	And many of the networks were covering Biden, but not Warren, which led Warren to be like, everybody's a sexist.
	And also they hate Native Americans.
	Oh, wait, I'm not Native American.
	We'll get some more of this in just one second, because all of this, if you're not enjoying this, folks, if you're not enjoying this, then let me recommend that you check your sense of humor, because this is inherently hilarious.
	It is.
	Okay, so it's inherently, it is a comedy of errors.
	It is a near Shakespearean level comedy of errors.
	It is much ado about socialism.
	It's fantastic.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	All right, we're gonna get to more of this.
	The Hollywood squares element of the Iowa caucuses in just one second.
	Plus, Impeachment is coming to an end and Trump is speaking tonight, State of the Union address, the most monarchic, stupid institution in American life.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, if you haven't noticed, 2020 is wild, man.
	It is wild.
	And the election race is just getting started.
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	Okay, so Amy Klobuchar runs to the camera, and this sets off a chain reaction where every Democrat decides to run to the camera simultaneously.
	It's like Kiddush at my show.
	Like, everybody is running to grab the herring.
	Like, boom!
	Brawls, full-on brawls.
	It's like Black Friday at the Walmart.
	Everybody is just piling on top of each other, trying to get to the cameras.
	Like, it's a zombie apocalypse, and we're all trying to get to that last ax.
	It's fan-freaking-tastic.
	So, Bernie then leaps to the microphone.
	He says, when the results come in, we'll have done very well.
	This, of course, is true.
	Bernie did get jacked, not as much as Buttigieg, but he got jacked last night.
	Here was Bernie talking about how when the results come in, we will have won.
	The problem is he didn't get the big moment.
	He didn't get the big moment, right?
	He wanted the big moment, and he needed the big moment to catapult him not just to victory in New Hampshire, but to broad victory in New Hampshire.
	Instead, just seems like a guy who won New Hampshire last time is going to win New Hampshire this time.
	So here's Bernie being robbed of his moment.
	I imagine, have a strong feeling that at some point, The results will be announced.
	And when those results are announced, I have a good feeling we're going to be doing very, very well here in Iowa.
	Just spectacular.
	Just spectacular.
	Really, really great stuff.
	Bernie is like, I don't know where I am.
	Also, we need to nationalize healthcare.
	Sure, we cannot handle a primary.
	Sure, everything here is a crap show, but you know what would be good?
	Is if the changes I recommended that have completely failed here, what if we instituted those on a national level with regard to your healthcare?
	So if you have cancer, you can now go to a caucus in Iowa and you can figure out whether you can convince enough people whether you should have chemotherapy.
	Bernie Sanders, man, the fact that this guy is your Democratic frontrunner and that the media have not vetted him.
	I mean, this is I'm never going to stop saying this.
	The fact the media have not vetted this communist for three decades is beyond insane, beyond insane.
	OK, this man has been in national politics longer than I have been alive on planet Earth.
	And still nobody has seen, and he's now run in two consecutive elections and been very competitive in both, and no one has seen fit to ask him, he has said his views have not changed since the 60s, and no one has seen fit to ask him, okay, so if your views didn't change since the 60s, how about that time you were defending Cuba, Venezuela, and the Soviet Union?
	Did your views on that change at all?
	I mean, the views he holds are not manifestly just wrong.
	They're manifestly evil on a variety of topics.
	And he will not be asked a solid question by the Democrats because he just keeps saying things like, Norway and Denmark.
	It's like, OK, well, yeah, but for decades you were defending the Soviet Union in Cuba.
	So what is your point of differentiation in any case?
	Bernie robbed of his moment.
	The man who's most robbed of his moment is Pete Buttigieg, who was, by most of the data, expected to either win or come in second in Iowa, particularly after the caucuses.
	Now, he has a controversy of his own going on.
	The controversy is that if you look right behind him in the speech, what you will see is a bunch of people of color.
	Right?
	We found Pete Buttigieg's six black supporters and they were all standing behind him.
	Okay, I'm not making that up.
	According to one of those humans, one of those humans literally said that Pete Buttigieg went out and picked black people from the crowd to put behind him during this speech.
	One of the black women standing behind him said that Pete Buttigieg took her away from her friends and brought her behind him so that it would look like he had a lot of black support.
	So here's Pete Buttigieg giving a speech that nobody saw because it was, again, a clown car last night.
	Tonight, an improbable hope became an undeniable reality.
	By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious!
	An awful lot of skeptics who said, not now, not this time.
	All this talk of belonging and of bridging divides is too naive, too risky.
	So tonight I say with a heart full of gratitude, Iowa, you have proved those skeptics wrong.
	Okay, well, Iowa actually proved that they don't know how to do an election.
	So that's really what they proved last night.
	I also love Mayor Pete doing the hope he change he thing directly after calling 65 million Americans racist, which he did in the last 48 hours.
	That's exciting stuff.
	The best part of the night, though, was when Joe Biden went to the mic at the same time as Elizabeth Warren, and they basically started clawing the mic from one another.
	It was pretty spectacular.
	So Joe Biden gives his speech, which is to say words come out of his face, but they're not quite intelligible.
	And also he may not be alive.
	Here is Joe Biden being a not alive human.
	The Iowa Democratic Party is working to get this result, get them straight.
	And I want to make sure they're very careful in their deliberations.
	And indications are, from our indications, it's going to be close.
	We're going to walk out of here with our shared delegates.
	We don't know exactly what it is yet, but we feel good about where we are.
	And look, so it's on to New Hampshire.
	And I'm going to get on a plane and get the hell out of here because I really underperformed.
	I love that Amy Klobuchar is like, we punched above our weight.
	And Buttigieg is like, we proved everything to the world.
	And Bernie Sanders is like, we did amazing here.
	And Joe Biden's like, and people voted.
	It's spectacular.
	It's so good.
	Every Democrat's like, we did amazing here!
	Pete Buttigieg, we proved all the haters wrong.
	We did, we proved all the haters wrong.
	Giving the, even the, here's the Obama inflection even.
	And Bernie like, and when all of this is said and done, when, when I claw back against the voter redistribution that has happened here, I'm the 1% of the voting contingent.
	And Joe Biden's like, we'll leave with our share of delegates.
	I don't know what the share is, how many people that is.
	But by the rules, we have to leave with our share of delegates because otherwise that's illegal.
	And also, bye!
	And then he just hops on a plane, he's like, going to Jersey!
	See you later!
	And this is the last anyone will ever hear of any of these candidates in Iowa again, because that is Trump territory and Trump's going to win Iowa running away in 2020.
	But as Joe Biden was speaking, Elizabeth Warren, she sent up some smoke signals.
	And then she exited her teepee and she went up and she discussed how she was just getting started, which is to say that she is not just getting started.
	She's in serious trouble because she needed to bump more than any of these other candidates in New Hampshire, because New Hampshire borders Massachusetts.
	She should be competitive for first place.
	She is not competitive for first place.
	Bernie is running away with it in New Hampshire.
	Here is Elizabeth Warren trying to claw back some attention.
	Again, she jumped up there at the same time as Biden.
	So they put them on a split screen.
	It was Hollywood Squares.
	It was the Brady Bunch.
	They're putting Marsha in the corner.
	I mean, it was just amazing.
	Here is here's Elizabeth Warren.
	Together, together, we have built a movement powered by hopeful, courageous people who will do the work to make the change we need.
	No.
	And we're just getting started.
	This race will be decided by people like you.
	Well, and then she just sort of went away.
	So, sad day for Elizabeth Warren, who presumably will have to go back to hunting buffalo as per her declaration of her Native American heritage.
	So, well done, Elizabeth Warren.
	Complete, utter crap show for the Democrats.
	Now, the biggest problem for the Democrats, of course, is not for any of these candidates, because in the end, the candidate's going to be who the candidate's going to be.
	Bernie Sanders still has the leg up.
	Bernie is going to be widely perceived to have won Iowa.
	He's going to win New Hampshire.
	And then we move on to Nevada.
	Joe Biden, if he proves to be as lackluster in New Hampshire as he has proved to be in Iowa, he's in serious trouble.
	Mike Bloomberg somewhere is sitting in his billionaire lair, and he is just sipping a glass of Chianti, and he is Michael Bloomberg is, maybe he's just like a nefarious billionaire from the movies.
	I'm wondering if maybe Michael Bloomberg is sitting there and he's smoking a pack of banned cigarettes and sipping from a 16-ounce can of Coke and oiling up his 12-gauge shotgun and going, everything here is going exactly according to plan.
	Because you know who looks best in all of this?
	Michael Bloomberg, who didn't even compete in Iowa, right?
	All the rest of these Lilliputians are running around in Iowa pretending that any of this matters.
	And then the thing turns out to be a complete cluster.
	So what actually matters here?
	What matters here is the perception that the Democrats don't know what the hell they're doing and can't get their act together.
	So if their claim has been all along that Donald Trump is incompetent, that Donald Trump runs a chaotic bleep show, the best way to prove to Americans that Donald Trump should stay in office is to prove that you run your own chaotic bleep show you can't even run in Iowa caucus.
	And yet you want to run our healthcare, you want to run our energy sector, you want to run our economy, you want to run Wall Street.
	You know best.
	You have a plan.
	Really, you didn't even have a plan to get like 170,000 people's votes tabulated.
	Seriously.
	We have more people listen to this show in like a five minute increment than voted in Iowa last night.
	And they could not handle that.
	They couldn't handle it.
	So well done, everybody on the Democratic side.
	If you want to prove that you're incompetent in the run-up to 2020, you're doing a hell of a job.
	And it's not just they're doing a hell of a job on that.
	They showed that they were completely incompetent when it came to impeachment because impeachment is now sputtering.
	Sort of verdict.
	This is the New York Times word.
	Sputtering toward a verdict.
	Because the Senate was not for, they will not get a single Republican vote.
	Now, let's face it.
	Okay, the Democrats keep saying things like, well, you know, the Clinton impeachment, there was bipartisanship.
	Nope.
	There were five Democrats in the House who voted in favor of Clinton's impeachment and none in the Senate who voted for his removal.
	So this one is about as partisan as the last one.
	Which is to say Democrats voted one way, Republicans voted another.
	The Republicans are going to vote to acquit President Trump, probably tomorrow is the way this is going to go.
	The Democrats pushed that off past the State of the Union so that there would be the awkward spectacle of Trump giving the State of the Union in front of a House that had impeached him and Senate Democrats who wanted to impeach him.
	But honestly, Trump's just going to say, Trump's not going to say anything about it.
	If he does say something about it, it will be, and now I'm about to be acquitted because this is all bullcrap, and then they move on.
	The Democrats really botched this.
	You can tell because Nancy Pelosi is shrieking to the sky that they did not botch this.
	And when Nancy Pelosi has to keep insisting that she did not, in fact, botch this, that she's not owned, she's not owned, she screams as she slowly shrinks into a corncob, Nancy Pelosi Says she always knew impeachment would end this way with the acquittal of President Trump.
	This is according to the New York Times.
	Well, except that she claimed that she was going to be able to get bipartisan support and that she should never have a wholly partisan impeachment and then she did exactly that.
	Democrats argue that Ms.
	Pelosi won by losing, setting the stage for an election that is not only about kitchen table issues that carried them to the majority in 2018, but also about exposing the president as unfit for office and Republicans as complicit in his misbehavior.
	In an interview Monday, Pelosi said Democrats had forced Republicans to do what Mr. Trump never has, admit he was wrong to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.
	Well, no, pretty much.
	A large number of Republicans, including yours truly, said from the very outset that the Ukraine call was not perfect, but this was also not impeachable.
	The Democrats accomplished nothing.
	You know what the best proof is that the Democrats accomplished nothing?
	That Trump's approval rating is now at all-time highs.
	According to Gallup, he has now hit his personal best of 49% that poll was taken during the Senate trial.
	He was up 10 points in the Gallup poll since the Ukraine craze in October.
	So, Democrats have proved themselves incompetent in Iowa.
	They've proved themselves incompetent in impeachment.
	It's complete, complete disaster for the Democrats.
	It turns out that not there's a huge backlash to Democrats, but they have shown the world that they are not competent to handle anything.
	And they showed it right at the outset.
	Which of these Democrats looks competent?
	Is it Bernie?
	Does Bernie look like a super competent guy?
	Is it Elizabeth Warren, who's run a complete meltdown of a campaign?
	Is it Joe Biden, who doesn't look like he's alive?
	Is it Nancy Pelosi, who just botched an impeachment hearing by rushing the thing forward without any witnesses and then whining that the Senate wouldn't call the witnesses that she herself had failed to call?
	Where exactly is the level of Democratic competence?
	So the Democrats had a couple of attacks on Trump.
	One was that he was volatile.
	The problem is the American public are used to the volatility at this point.
	I think most Americans knew he was volatile when he was elected.
	Most Americans are no longer shocked by the volatility.
	We get it.
	That's who Trump is.
	And then the Democrats had a secondary line, which was, Trump is deeply immoral and we are deeply moral.
	And I'm sorry, nobody buys that.
	We all know that that's partisan hackery.
	You're the party of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
	Nope.
	Doesn't work.
	Didn't work in 2016 and can work in 2020.
	And then there was the final line of attack, which is Trump is incompetent.
	And here, they at least could point to the chaos inside the administration and the fact that the administration is kind of a mess internally.
	They could point to all of that.
	Except they just demonstrated that they do not know how to punch their way out of a paper bag.
	They demonstrated that they do not know how to play a simple game of chutes and ladders.
	It's incredible.
	I mean, truly amazing.
	So...
	Well done, Democrats.
	You have, in the first week of the actual election, demonstrated your full-scale incapacity to do basic things, and yet you claim that you want to run all of our healthcare.
	Good luck for that.
	President Trump tonight, State of the Union.
	So let me remind you that tonight we have the Backstage Live at 8.30 p.m.
	Eastern, 5.30 p.m.
	Pacific.
	You should subscribe over at Daily Wire and use DW2020 to get 20% off, and then you can ask us questions during the Backstage Live.
	Okay, time for a quick thing I like, and then we'll get to a quick thing that I hate.
	So, things that I like today.
	There is a magnificent article in The Guardian that is just wonderful by Poppy Noor.
	It is titled, Why Liberal White Women Pay a Lot of Money to Learn Over Dinner How They're Racist.
	Now, the short answer is because they're morons.
	The long answer is because they want to demonstrate how woke they are by paying a bunch of people of color to tell them that they are bad, right?
	They're paying for their own malice struggle sessions now, according to The Guardian.
	Freshly made pasta is drying on the wooden banisters lining the hall of a beautiful home in Denver, Colorado.
	Fox hunting photos decorate the walls in a room full of books.
	A fire is burning and downstairs, a group of liberal white women have gathered around a long wooden table to admit how racist they are.
	Recently, I've been driving around seeing a black person and having an assumption they are up to no good, says Allison Goobser.
	Immediately after that, I'm like, that's no good.
	That is human just doing their thing.
	Why do I think that?
	This is Race to Dinner.
	A white woman volunteers to host a dinner in her home for seven other white women, often strangers, perhaps acquaintances.
	Each dinner costs $2,500, which can be covered by a generous host or divided among guests.
	A frank discussion is led by co-founders Regina Jackson, who's black, and Sairai Rao, who identifies as Indian-American.
	They started Race to Dinner to challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious.
	If you did this in a conference room, they'd leave, Rao says, but wealthy white women have been taught never to leave the dinner table.
	Okay, well, if they're already voting the way you want them to vote, then I'm happy that you're guilting them.
	I'm happy you're making them feel bad about themselves.
	I mean, that's exciting stuff.
	And there is something wildly delicious about watching a bunch of socialists pay each other to call each other names.
	Well, if they're already voting the way you want them to vote, then I'm happy that you're guilting them.
	I'm happy you're making them feel bad about themselves.
	I mean, that's exciting stuff.
	And there is something wildly delicious about watching a bunch of socialists pay each other to call each other names.
	That's pretty fun.
	White women are uniquely placed to challenge racism because of their proximity to power and wealth, says Jackson.
	If they don't hold these positions themselves, the white men in power are often their family, friends, and partners.
	It seems unlikely anyone would voluntarily go to a dinner party in which they'd be asked one by one, what was a racist thing you did recently by two women of color before appetizers are served?
	But Jackson and Rao have hardly been able to take a break since they started these dinners in the spring of 2019.
	So far, 15 dinners have been held in big cities across the United States.
	Okay, so let's just calculate that out.
	It costs $2,500 for dinner.
	Let's assume That $500 goes toward the food, because there's only like seven people there.
	So let's assume that $500 goes toward the food.
	So let's say that Jackson and Rao are clearing $2,000 a dinner.
	Okay, so $2,000 a dinner.
	They've cleared $30,000 to have liberal white women genuflect before the altar of intersectionality.
	That's pretty good business.
	That's a pretty solid business.
	Really, capitalism always wins, gang.
	Pretty exciting stuff.
	The women who sign up for these dinners are not who most would see as racist.
	They're well-read and well-meaning.
	They're mostly Democrats.
	Some have adopted black children.
	Many have partners who are people of color.
	Some have been doing work toward inclusivity and diversity for decades, but they acknowledge they also have unchecked biases.
	Aha!
	So what they're doing is preying on women who really are not racist, and then they have to prove they're not racist by claiming that they're racist.
	Right?
	This is the way that this works.
	The counterintuitive way that the intersectional mind works is that if you're not a racist and you say you're not a racist, you're a racist.
	If you are not a racist and you say you are a racist, then we know you are not a racist because you acknowledge your own racism even though you're not a racist.
	So that means you're not racist.
	So if you say you're a racist, you're not a racist.
	If you say you're not a racist, you're a racist.
	You got it?
	That's how all of this works.
	And you can pay $2,000 for the privilege.
	I mean, this is one of the great cons I have ever heard of.
	Seriously.
	I don't know how to get in on this thing, but this is like, I will invest in Jackson and Rao, just as a capitalist proposition.
	I will give them free ads on this program for this thing if they will cut me in on the back end.
	Because I have a feeling there are a lot of morons out there who are eager to pony up to be absolved of their racism by Jackson and Rao.
	Because now, what do they get to tell their, what's this really about?
	They get to tell all their liberal friends, Yes, you know, I didn't know, I didn't acknowledge my own biases until I went to this dinner.
	Tom Wolfe, the famous writer, he wrote a fantastic, fantastic essay that was back in the 1960s, I believe it's printed in the Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test.
	And the entire essay is about how this is basically what liberals have been doing since the 60s.
	There's a dinner at Leonard Bernstein's house, right?
	Leonard Bernstein, incredibly wild leftist.
	There's a dinner at his apartment.
	And the Black Panthers, right, who at that time were actually like a criminal group, and people who had engaged in criminal activity, like racial criminal activity, showed up at Leonard Bernstein's apartment and these Black Panthers would tell liberal white women about how they wanted to kill Whitey and how Whitey was the problem and all this and the liberal white women would swoon because now they get to go and tell all their friends how they got up close and personal with people who've been victimized by the American system and they know their own complicity.
	They would say as they reached into their Chanel handbags for their For their... cigarette?
	I mean, like, the whole thing was ridiculous, right?
	The essay is one of the great essays in American literary history by Tom Wolfe.
	All about, again, the way that the liberal white world in New York and Manhattan pandered to this.
	So this is just the extension of that circa 2020.
	Campbell Swanson was one of the hosts.
	Jess Campbell Swanson, she says, she comes across as an overly keen college student applying for a prestigious internship.
	She can go for days about her work as a political consultant.
	When it comes to talking about racism, she chokes.
	I want to hire people of color, not because I want to be a white savior.
	I've explored my need for validation.
	I'm working through that.
	Yeah, I'm struggling, she stutters before finally giving up.
	That is wonderful!
	Listen to that quote, it's so good.
	She wants to hire black people, but she can't say that she wants to hire black people to give black people an opportunity, because if she says that, then she's the white savior, and black people don't need a white savior, so she has to give another reason why she wants to hire black people that is not contingent on them being black, but if she makes it non-contingent upon them being black, she's colorblind, which means she's a racist.
	Like, if you think of the decision tree here to not be a racist, at the end of every decision is you're a racist, right?
	So if you say, I'm hiring a black person because I want to help black people, too bad you're a racist, you're a white savior.
	If you say, I want to hire this black person because they're the best qualified, you're colorblind, you're a racist.
	If you say, I want to hire a black woman because I am a racist, then they're like, okay.
	And then everybody else is like, well, but if you're a racist, why do you want to hire a black woman?
	They're like, no, no, because I'm a racist, I want to hire a black woman.
	Ah, but then you're using the black person to absolve yourself of sin, so no, no good.
	Right, so no matter what, the end of every logical proposition in this insane mindset is you're a racist and you get to pay money for the privilege.
	Across from Campbell Swanson, Morgan Richards admits she recently did nothing when someone patronizingly commended her for adopting her two black children as though she had saved them.
	What I went through to be a mother, I don't care if they were black, she said, opening a window for Rao to challenge her.
	So you admit it is stooping low to adopt a black child?
	And Richard's accepts that the undertone of her statement is racist.
	Oh, oh, the wonder, the wonder.
	So a woman adopts two black children, which adopting two children of any color is a good thing.
	Adopting two black children as a white woman sometimes Means something, depending on where the black children came from, right?
	I mean, if you're talking about a white woman adopting white children, then you are accused of racism, because you have to adopt somebody of the same race.
	But if you're adopting cross-racially, then sometimes there are additional sacrifices that are associated with that for the black child and for the white parent.
	Because now you have to face down the reality that there is racism in society, and you're going to have to face that down in a way you wouldn't have had to if you adopted a white kid, right?
	I mean, this is just a reality.
	I have many friends who have adopted black kids.
	Nick Sirisi has a black son.
	David French has a black daughter, right?
	And there are additional challenges associated with that.
	If you point out that it's a good thing to cross-racially adopt, you are secretly a racist even though you gave these black kids who are maybe not even going to be adopted.
	Maybe they were orphans.
	Maybe they were in an orphanage.
	Maybe they were in foster care.
	This woman adopted black kids, therefore she's bad.
	Because she pointed out that she was adopting black kids.
	Even though, again, it is a reality that you are going to experience additional challenges.
	I mean, I thought the premise of the left is that racism is prevalent in American society.
	If that's the premise, then it also happens to be true, presumably, that if you adopt black children, then you're going to face additional challenges in society you wouldn't if you adopted a white kid.
	And that has nothing to do with you being a racist.
	That's a recognition of reality.
	But apparently, if you recognize that reality, you're also a racist.
	As more confessions like this are revealed, Rao and Jackson seem to press those they think can take it, while emphasizing with those who can't.
	Well done for recognizing that, Jackson says to soothe one woman.
	We're all part of the problem.
	We have to get comfortable with that to become part of the solution.
	Amazing, amazing stuff.
	It's just, it's spectacular.
	So, well done, Guardian.
	Well done, liberal white women.
	I'm so glad that you have decided that you are going to shell out thousands of dollars for the privilege of being called a racist.
	Well done.
	Okay, quick thing I hate, and this isn't gonna take long.
	Obviously the news broke yesterday that Rush Limbaugh revealed that he had advanced late stage lung cancer or advanced lung cancer.
	That is horrific.
	Rush is a totemic institution in American politics.
	He has been my entire life.
	Rush mentioned this yesterday on air.
	Here's what Rush said.
	So I have to tell you something today that I wish I didn't have to tell you.
	And it's It's a struggle for me because I had to inform my staff earlier today.
	I can't escape, even though people are telling me it's not the way to look at it.
	I can't help but feel that I'm letting everybody down with this.
	But the upshot is that I have been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.
	Diagnosis confirmed by two medical institutions back on January 20th.
	First realized something was wrong on my birthday weekend, January 12th.
	And I wish I didn't have to tell you this.
	And I thought about not telling anybody.
	I thought about trying to do this without anybody knowing, because I don't Like making things about me.
	Obviously, our prayers are with Rush.
	Rush is the godfather of talk radio, which means that really he's the godfather of podcasting as well.
	Rush is somebody I grew up listening to.
	Every conservative I knew grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh.
	He is going to be seen, no matter what happens, as a historic figure in the history of the republic, really a heavy force behind the contract with America during Newt Gingrich's time, really a force during the Bush administration, a force against the radicalism of Barack Obama, and a force in favor of President Trump, obviously.
	Rush Limbaugh is a person who helped inculcate an entire generation into basic conservative principle, I will admit.
	Freely, and proudly, that I was a graduate of his Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies, as were millions of other Americans, and his impact is going to be felt for generations.
	All of our thoughts and prayers are with Rush and his family.
	His family is wonderful as well.
	And I think that we're all praying for him today, and we all should be praying for him today.
	It was really upsetting news to find that out yesterday.
	You know, Rush, he said he has the best medical care.
	And obviously, we're all behind him.
	And despite the fact that the left is vile and we're tweeting vile things about him, Rush is a good person who has done amazing things for the country.
	All right.
	We'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours and then a backstage live tonight at 8.30 p.m.
	Eastern, 5.30 p.m.
	Pacific.
	We'll see you then.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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