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Nov. 20, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:13:31

The Kraken | Ep. 1142

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	As states begin to certify their votes and courts begin to rule on Team Trump's legal challenges, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell hold their big presser.
	But did they actually release the Kraken?
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	Slash Ben, we're gonna get to all the news and plenty there is of it in just one moment.
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	Okay, so.
	There was a big presser yesterday.
	This is the big news of the day.
	Big presser yesterday, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell.
	This is the Team Trump legal team.
	They describe themselves as the elite defense squad or something like that.
	Okay, so they are alleging massive voter fraud and massive voter irregularity.
	We're going to go through their claims in detail.
	We're going to tell you what has been fact-checked and what has not, what is true and what is not, what requires more evidence, and what is sufficient.
	But we have to set the ground rules here first.
	What people say in a press conference is of zero, not just a little, zero consequence to the actual outcome of the elections.
	What happens in court is of outcome to the election.
	That has an impact on the outcome of the elections.
	So, if I say there's not enough evidence at a press conference, that doesn't mean that not enough evidence will be provided in court.
	I don't know what's provided in court.
	Conversely, if somebody makes an outlandish claim at a press conference, that is not in and of itself evidence sufficient to overturn the results of elections in which millions of people have voted.
	You're going to have to provide heavy evidence.
	So, here's my job.
	My job is the same as my job is every day, and that is to try and suss out the difference between speculation and evidence.
	It's to try and tell you the difference between claims that have been verified and claims that have not been verified, and it's to ask for more evidence.
	And this is true for any large-scale claim.
	When people on the left talk about systemic racism and the evils of the American system, I always say I need specific evidence and I need a specific claim so that I can tell you whether it is true or false.
	When people on the left point to a specific instance of a white cop shooting a black man and they say, this is evidence that America is systemically racist, I've asked this question a thousand times.
	I'll say, okay, do you have evidence that that is a racist shooting?
	Do you have evidence that it connects to a broader theme of racism in America?
	What is your data?
	What is your specific evidence?
	Right?
	We go through all of that.
	Asking for evidence does not mean that I'm not concerned about racism.
	It means that I am concerned about racism.
	It means that before we label an entire system racist, or an entire system corrupt, or even an individual corrupt or racist, we need to make sure that we have evidence for the claim.
	The same thing holds true in the realm of voter fraud and voter irregularity.
	If I'm asking for evidence of a claim sufficient to overturn an election, that's because there are serious issues at play.
	And when you're talking about a legal strategy that is largely designed at getting millions of votes thrown out or re-vote done in certain particular states, Or electors selected by the state legislatures, you need to provide outsized evidence of those claims.
	Evidence should be the baseline standard for rational people.
	It should be.
	Anybody who tries to sell you... If they try to sell you a product without evidence, you should doubt them.
	If they try to tell you...
	That they have a big claim to make about the universe without any evidence.
	You should doubt them.
	If you are talking about something as large scale as a claim that maybe tens of millions of votes, but certainly millions of votes were shifted, for example, or that across the land, huge swaths of votes were discarded improperly or counted improperly, well, then you should be asking for the evidence.
	That seems like the baseline, bottom line to me.
	So we're going to go through the claims.
	There are affidavits.
	It's not that there's no evidence.
	It's that we will see whether there's evidence sufficient to support the large scale claims that are being made.
	Now, again, here is the note.
	The press conference that happened with Giuliani and Ellis and Powell yesterday, It has no actual legal bearing and the time frame here is short.
	So we're hearing a lot from Trump, Team Trump, and the Giuliani, Ellis, and Powell legal team that this is just the beginning.
	They're going to be laying all this out in the coming days.
	There's not a lot of time here.
	Okay, the clock is running.
	If you want to see the election results change from what they currently are, right, if you want to see the election results Change because you believe there is serious voter fraud and voter irregularity.
	You need to bring the evidence now.
	You don't have time to wait three weeks.
	You don't have time to wait three months.
	And that is why, if we are going to look at what Team Trump is actually doing, instead of seeing what they are doing in press conferences, we should actually be looking at what they are doing in court.
	And here is where things start to get kind of dicey for Team Trump, because the fact is that states are starting to certify those votes, which means you best expedite this stuff.
	If you're going to release the Kraken, that can't just be a lot of talk at a press conference.
	It actually has to be a lot of evidence that you bring forth in a forum likely to change the outcome.
	Because no matter what you think, or what I think of the election, no matter what anybody thinks of the election, it is going to be certified unless something factually changes on the ground and a lot of evidence is brought in order to change the legal outcome of various elections.
	Right?
	That is just a fact.
	So here is where things stand as of right now in terms of court filings and recounts and everything else.
	In Georgia, Georgia has now completed its hand tally of the presidential race in Georgia.
	Gabriel Sterling released the information to the Associated Press on Thursday.
	They did a hand recount of nearly 5 million votes.
	The state has until today to certify the results that have been certified.
	and submitted by the counties.
	Once the results are certified, the losing campaign can then request another recount if they want one.
	Okay, the fact is that the election numbers have not changed.
	There were about a thousand votes that shifted over the course of the recount because a bunch of votes were found.
	About a thousand votes shifted in the hand recount over into the Trump camp, or at least were added to the Trump camp, which means that right now, the deficit for Trump is about 13,000 votes, or it was about 14,000 votes.
	That's not enough, obviously, to overturn the results of the election.
	And the high likelihood is that the state of Georgia is going to certify those election results, barring some sort of last minute Parachuting in of massive evidence of voter fraud.
	Meanwhile, it is important to note that in Pennsylvania, then in Michigan, the Trump campaign withdrew its Michigan election lawsuit.
	Andy McCarthy writing over at National Review, he says the Washington Times reports the Trump campaign has now dropped a federal lawsuit in Michigan by which it challenged over a million mail-in ballots in the hope of preventing the state government from certifying the election result.
	He says it is clearly a face-saving measure.
	The suit had no chance of success.
	The rationale the campaign has given for dropping the case is inaccurate.
	We talked about this a little bit yesterday, that we've had a little bit of a mix-up, confusion, maybe some pressure brought to bear.
	In the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, there were two Republicans and two Democrats.
	The Republicans initially voted not to certify the election results from Wayne County.
	Then they shifted over and voted with the Democrats to certify the results.
	Then they filed affidavits suggesting that they were pressured into certifying the results.
	All of this was because the poll books didn't line up.
	Poll books are where you sign in to vote, and then the number of votes didn't match the poll books.
	Now, the grand total number of discrepancies there was not in the thousands.
	It was not in the hundreds of thousands.
	Apparently, including all of the discrepancies in the poll books, you were talking about hundreds of votes.
	Okay?
	And they were talking about the possibility of filing a lawsuit on that basis.
	to overturn 1.4 million votes in Wayne County.
	That obviously is not going to be the proper remedy.
	You can't disenfranchise 1.4 million people because the poll books didn't line up for 350 votes.
	The discrepancy there is just too large, and you're talking about a state in which Trump right now trails in the count by about 150,000 votes.
	According to Annie McCarthy, the campaign claimed the lawsuit was being withdrawn as a direct result of achieving the relief they sought with Wayne County not certifying the vote, but of course, Wayne County did certify the vote, so that obviously is not even true.
	Okay, so Team Trump withdrawing the lawsuit in Michigan That was a face-saving measure, as Andy McCarthy says.
	It was not because they actually got what they wanted in Michigan.
	They didn't get what they wanted in Michigan.
	So the vote to certify the Wayne County ballot still under state law is going forward.
	Jim Garrity explained that for the Michigan County certifications to be transmitted to the state cannabis board, that is the next step for full certification.
	The Trump campaign used the purported rescissions as an opportunity to declare an optical victory and then drop the Michigan lawsuit.
	Now, they're not claiming that there weren't voter irregularities.
	They're just sort of recognizing that they weren't going to get the relief that they sought from the courts.
	And so they quietly dropped the lawsuits and then claimed victory, which of course is not going to be effective in actually changing the outcome of everything happening in Michigan.
	Now, meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, something similar has been happening.
	As Annie McCarthy says, the lawsuit that was filed by Team Trump in Pennsylvania was dependent on large-scale claims that voter fraud had basically taken place.
	And then, in the middle of the court hearing, they actually dropped the charge of voter fraud from the lawsuit itself.
	Now, that doesn't mean they didn't say there was voter fraud.
	They still say there's voter fraud.
	They just say that their claim of voter fraud is not enough to sustain the relief they are seeking.
	Namely, To put aside the results of the election as currently constituted in Pennsylvania.
	They realized they couldn't meet the high burden of proof that voter fraud would require, and so they dropped that claim from their Pennsylvania lawsuit.
	So if they're out there claiming voter fraud, not in court, and they're doing it publicly, that does not actually change the outcome of the election.
	It may change public opinion on voter fraud, it's not gonna change the outcome of the election in Pennsylvania, which means the window continues to narrow.
	We're gonna get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so Again, all of this is giving the legal background for where we currently stand, because whatever is said in a press conference is of no impact in a court.
	What is said in court is of impact in a court.
	So, according to Annie McCarthy, the lawsuit in Pennsylvania cannot conceivably change the result in Pennsylvania.
	The court will probably not even rule on the lawsuit.
	The campaign has sort of gotten a bad rap, says Andy McCarthy, for dropping its main counts, which allege that there were gross improprieties amounting to fraud in Pennsylvania's tabulation of the vote.
	Abandoning the counts seemed inexplicable on Sunday, given the campaign was simultaneously alleging massive fraud on TV.
	But there is an explanation.
	On Friday, the U.S.
	Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a ruling that destroyed the viability of those counts.
	The campaign shed the fraud-related counts in response to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling.
	The fault lies in pressing ahead with a narrower suit that can't change the outcome of the race in Pennsylvania, even in the unlikely event the campaign prevails.
	So, here is the problem.
	The claims that are still alive in Pennsylvania are talking about, again, hundreds or maybe low thousands of votes.
	They're not talking about the number of votes significant enough to actually call for an overturning of the election.
	And basically, Team Trump acknowledges that at this point.
	The Third Circuit brings us news of how negligible is the number of votes involved when you're talking about, for example, the claim by Team Trump that a bunch of people had been post-marking their ballots after the actual election date.
	Apparently, this is a very low number of ballots.
	Out of 7 million total ballots cast in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Secretary of State reported to the court only 9,383 votes were received statewide in the three days after November 3rd, even if all of those were Biden votes, which they weren't.
	And if the court voided all of them, which it won't because some of them were in fact postmarked before November 3rd, Trump would still be 73,000 votes short in Pennsylvania.
	Only 655 total lack a legible postmark, which of course is not going to shift the outcome of the election.
	Also, there's a problem between state and federal law.
	The Third Circuit explains there is no judicially cognizable federal right to force state or federal governments to comply with the law.
	Normally, you have to claim that there's a federal right that has been violated.
	If, in fact, the state law allows for something to happen, it's hard to make an equal protection claim on the federal basis.
	They said that there is no equal protection violation because of the state's three-day extension.
	The court noted that in addition to Pennsylvania, 19 states and D.C.
	permit the receipt of votes post-election.
	Voters don't suffer a cognizable harm based on what for them is a formalistic difference between whether post-election receipt is authorized by statute or by a ruling of the state's highest court.
	So they're saying it's not an equal protection case either.
	Okay, so that doesn't mean that's a good ruling.
	It does mean that the Trump legal team's chances in Pennsylvania are basically down to nothing unless they actually come out with serious, robust evidence of serious, large-scale voter fraud.
	That is just the reality of the situation.
	That's not me.
	That's the law.
	I understand that people can be angry at the law.
	They can feel like the law should allow for the overturning of large-scale voting based on the possibility of fraud or based on proof of small-scale voter problems.
	That theoretically could be larger scale voter problems, but you don't have evidence to prove it's hundreds of thousands of votes?
	Okay, but the reality remains that that is not how this is going to work.
	Okay, in the end, if you make outsized claims, like we need to disenfranchise 7 million voters in Pennsylvania, or we need to disenfranchise 5 million voters in Michigan, or we need to disenfranchise 5 million voters in Georgia, you're going to need more than a few hundred votes were shifted here, or there's a possibility that hundreds of thousands of votes were shifted, but we don't actually have proof that these votes were shifted.
	Right?
	Claims, outside, large claims require large levels of proof.
	Okay, so, if you're gonna release the Kraken, now is when you need the tsunami of evidence that demonstrates that hundreds of thousands of votes were shifted, right, across the country.
	And at the very least, that some 13,000 votes were shifted in Georgia, if Trump is supposed to win Georgia, and 13,000 votes were shifted in Arizona, or went missing, or were fraudulently counted in Arizona, or that 150,000 votes were fraudulently counted or shifted in Michigan, or that 80,000 votes were shifted or fraudulently counted in Pennsylvania, right?
	That is what you're going to need to prove in court.
	So that is the predicate.
	It would have to be a Kraken, right?
	You would need to actually have an extraordinary level of evidence.
	Now, I'm not saying that Team Trump doesn't have that extraordinary level of evidence.
	I'm just saying that they need to present it.
	They don't need to present it to me.
	They need to present it to a court.
	But you can't keep coming out publicly and saying you have presented the evidence when you have not yet presented the evidence publicly and then say, okay, well, it's in court and the courts will see all of that evidence.
	Okay, well, now you're where I am, which is okay.
	The court's going to rule and the process is going to move forward.
	Now, sort of the preemptive panic attack that is happening in the media that the election is going to be stolen or that this is really horrible for our democracy.
	There's a legal process, as I've been saying since the beginning.
	The legal process will move forward.
	The legal process will require evidence.
	There will be, if the legal process does not find massive evidence of voter fraud or voter irregularity and does not overturn the current vote counts, there will be an inauguration and there will be a peaceful transfer of power.
	Mitch McConnell has said this.
	Every state legislature has said this.
	And I will say that I don't think that it's a great look that President Trump has, for example, called up people in the Michigan legislature and asked them to come visit the White House in the middle of all of this.
	The implication, theoretically, people are speculating, is that Trump is calling them up because he wants them to come visit, and then he's going to convince them to elect a slate of electors as opposed to simply going along with certifying the vote.
	Now, the Michigan legislature has already said, we're not going to do that.
	We're not going to ignore the votes of our millions of people and just put up a slate of electors based on vague allegations of voter fraud or even specific, but very closely enumerated allegations of voter fraud that don't amount to the difference between Joe Biden's vote and your vote.
	Still, it's not a particularly good look.
	So, once again, here's all I'm saying.
	Here's the predicate.
	What happens in court matters.
	What happens in a presser doesn't.
	Even in a presser, if you're going to make a robust claim to the American public of serious voter fraud and serious voter irregularity, that requires robust evidence, not just Of occasional voter fraud, or occasional voter irregularity, or even the possibility of voter fraud or voter irregularity.
	I mean, there are lots of possibilities out there.
	And I will take, under advisement, all of those possibilities.
	I think there's plenty of ways that we can clean up the system.
	I think mail-in voting, full-scale mail-in voting, has been proved this time around, as always, to be a disaster.
	It is much harder to check.
	I've been in favor of voter ID in person on the day of voting, except for people who literally require an absentee ballot because, for health reasons or any other legit reason, they cannot get to the polling place.
	It turns out millions of people could vote and it didn't spread COVID everywhere.
	So, this was a bad idea.
	It was a bad idea beginning to end.
	That does not mean that the burden of proof has been reached.
	There is indeed a burden of proof in allegations alone, and even affidavits alone, attesting to specific acts do not imply that hundreds of thousands of votes were shifted.
	Now, Sidney Powell is claiming something different.
	Sidney Powell is claiming that the system actually was hacked and millions of votes were shifted.
	We'll get to all of these allegations in just one second, because the press conference, on the one hand, is being taken by some as, this is the Kraken.
	The press conference alone is enough for us to overturn the election, which is not correct.
	And then, on the other hand, you have people saying, everything in the press conference is bullcrap, and we should just ignore all of it, and we should not investigate any of these claims, and that, of course, is silly as well.
	All claims of voter fraud and voter irregularity that are legit should be investigated, that are credible should be investigated.
	Also, a burden of proof has to be reached.
	Hey, that's just the way it's going to be.
	The election outcome ain't going to change based on your opinion or my opinion.
	It's going to change based on what is proved in court.
	End of story.
	End of story.
	OK, so we're going to get to the presser in just one second and we'll see whether the whether the Kraken was indeed released first.
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	Okay, so, finally, we got to the Kraken releasing press conference, right?
	We had been promised this.
	Sidney Powell had said she was going to release the Kraken.
	Vast amounts of evidence.
	And she was going to really demonstrate full scale that this election was stolen.
	And so the press conference leads off with Rudy Giuliani.
	And Rudy sort of lays out the preliminary case.
	He says that, you know, it's very weird that on election night, Trump was leading by all of these votes.
	And then by the end of the election, he was not leading in a variety of these states.
	Now, you can call that weird.
	The reality is that that was rather expected because the Democrats were really, really pushing hard.
	I mean, you remember this.
	They were pushing super hard mail-in voting, right?
	Mail-in voting was their thing.
	Trump was saying, well, mail-in voting is bad, which is correct.
	But that did dissuade a lot of Republicans from voting mail-in.
	Instead, they heavily outweighed Democrats on day of voting.
	This was expected, right?
	And then when the mail-in votes started to be tabulated at the end of the night, because they're tabulated after the in-person votes, the in-person votes are tabulated basically on the spot.
	The election happens within an hour.
	You know what has been tabulated in person.
	And in places like Pennsylvania, they were actually not legally allowed to tabulate the mail-in votes.
	As those came in, you started to see this growing wave for Biden in places like Pennsylvania.
	But Rudy says that the timing was weird.
	A lot of people did find it weird.
	Here's Rudy.
	The president way ahead on election night.
	Seven or eight hundred thousand in Pennsylvania.
	Somehow he lost Pennsylvania.
	We have statisticians willing to testify that that's almost statistically impossible to have happened in the period of time that it happened.
	But of course that's just speculation.
	Okay, that is just speculation.
	So, then he gets to the actual specifics.
	Okay, so he says, in Pennsylvania, we have affidavits that suggest that there was mail-in voter fraud.
	Here's the allegation.
	Again, remember, important thing.
	Giuliani represented Team Trump in court in Pennsylvania.
	He was specifically asked if they were making allegations of voter fraud.
	He said, we are not actually going to demonstrate legal allegations of voter fraud because that is a high bar for us to clear.
	That doesn't mean that voter fraud could not have occurred.
	But it means that this is not a claim he's actually making in court.
	Here's Rudy Giuliani.
	So let's start with the specifics.
	Pennsylvania.
	In Pennsylvania, the margin of victory now for Biden, which is not a victory, it's a fraud, is 69,140 votes.
	69,140 votes.
	The reality is that we are now at a count of 682,770 ballots for which we have affidavits that there was no inspection of that ballot at the time that it was entered in the vote.
	It was a mail ballot.
	Mail ballots are particularly prone to fraud.
	So he is not actually making an allegation that fraud happened.
	He is saying that there weren't observers who are close enough to the ballots to be able to see the mail-in ballots when they were tabulated.
	And so theoretically, all of those could be fraud.
	Okay, that is a pretty... If you want to get 700,000 votes thrown out, you're gonna have to show there was some fraud in those 700,000 votes.
	That's a lot of people.
	Remember, each one of those people is a person voting.
	So you have to assume a lot in order to get there.
	Again, is there a possibility of fraud?
	Yeah, that's why you have election observers.
	But is that enough to throw out 700,000 votes?
	You're going to have to prove that in court.
	And again, he didn't claim voter fraud in court.
	It's important to recognize that.
	What you claim in court is what's actually going to be ruled upon, not what gets claimed in press conferences.
	Okay, then Giuliani suggested that the recount being done in Georgia is illegitimate.
	The reason it's illegitimate is because he says that the signature verification that happened in Georgia was inaccurate.
	There was signature matching, and signature matching was done poorly in Georgia because if you have an absentee ballot, then you put it in an envelope.
	You sign the envelope.
	The envelope signature is then matched up to the signature book, right, for your absentee ballot application.
	They're matched up, then you throw away the envelope, and then you count the ballot.
	His suggestion is that there are a bunch of people in Georgia who basically were not matching up the ballot envelope with the actual signature in the book, so they were counting naked ballots, and those naked ballots could have been fraudulent. Here is Giuliani trying to make that claim. So for example, the recount being done in Georgia will tell us nothing, because these fraudulent ballots will just be counted again, because they wouldn't supply the signatures to match the ballots.
	We'll get to the sort of fact check on that in just a second, how the process actually works in Georgia.
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	Okay, so...
	When Giuliani suggests that the recount in Georgia isn't effective because you are actually just tabulating ballots, that the envelope was thrown away on the outside, right?
	It was disconnected, and therefore it was never actually signature verified.
	He's correct.
	You can't re-signature verify the ballots, right?
	I mean, that part is true.
	Once you've thrown away the part that was the signature verification, then theoretically, if you did it wrong the first time, you are retabulating a bunch of ballots that were originally mischecked.
	But Brendan Keefe, the Chief Investigator at Atlanta's WXIA, he says signatures are verified before ballots are counted.
	They can't be checked again in a recount under the Georgia Constitution because that would betray the secrecy of a voter's identity.
	You would then know how the voter voted and you'd be checking their ID at the same time.
	He says these votes actually were verified in 159 Georgia counties overseen by the Republican Georgia Secretary of State.
	Any disputes or questionable signatures went to a three-person adjudication team.
	One Republican, one Democrat, one staffer.
	Okay, so apparently they were checked.
	Giuliani is claiming that they weren't properly checked.
	He's gonna have to provide the evidence of that allegation, obviously, in a Georgia court.
	Okay, the next allegation is he moved on to Pennsylvania.
	And he says that in Pennsylvania, this is a claim that is still part of that Pennsylvania lawsuit.
	And the idea is that in certain areas, you were allowed to cure your ballot more easily than if you cured your ballot in other areas.
	So, you came in, you cast a ballot, you realized you made a mistake on the ballot, you went over, and now you were allowed to cure your ballot.
	Or you sent in an absentee ballot, and then you came in to check it, and you realized you'd screwed it up, and you were allowed to cure the ballot.
	And he says, well, the ballot curing period for different areas was different, and so that's an equal protection violation, meaning that you have two different standards in two different counties.
	Number one, the number of votes in Pennsylvania that this happened to is probably not the 70 or 80, not probably not, almost certainly not, the 80,000 vote discrepancy that you're talking about in Pennsylvania.
	And beyond that, The allegation presumably is that curing the, it's one thing to say curing the ballots a week out is bad because it violates statute.
	It's another to say that the curing the ballot standard at the actual polling place was a little looser in one place and a little less loose in another place.
	And this disenfranchised people, you need evidence that people who are Republican were disenfranchised and the people who are improperly voting were enfranchised.
	That evidence has not yet been provided.
	Presumably that will be provided in court, right?
	I mean, that's gonna have to be part of the court case.
	Here's Giuliani.
	For example, if you've made a mistake in that ballot and you lived in Philadelphia or in Pittsburgh, you were allowed to fix the mistake.
	you But if you lived in the what would be considered more Republican or Trump parts of the state, you were given no such right.
	Okay, so again, that is a claim that is being made in Pennsylvania court and that will be adjudicated.
	He continues, and he talks about provisional ballots, and here again, he's now alleging voter fraud, but he does not actually allege voter fraud in court.
	I keep pointing out this discrepancy between what he alleges in court and what he alleges in a presser, because what you allege in a presser is of no legal consequence.
	What you allege in court is what is of legal consequence, if you actually care about the outcome of the election.
	If you care about the sort of PR of this, if you care about, you know, the image that Trump didn't lose, then the pressure matters.
	But if you actually are one of the people who's invested in the outcome of the election and in voter regularity and non-voter fraud, then what happens in court is significantly more impactful.
	What happens in court matters significantly more.
	So here's Giuliani suggesting that people went in and fraudulently cast provisional ballots.
	Now, That is not an allegation that he's made in court in Pennsylvania.
	Again, it's important to note this stuff.
	I don't mean to be a wet blanket and I don't think it's being a wet blanket to say that I would love nothing better than to see Donald Trump inaugurated again on January 20th.
	In order for that to happen, this stuff has to happen in court.
	It can't just be Giuliani throwing things out in a press conference that he then does not allege in court.
	Here's Giuliani.
	Why did it happen 15,000 times that people in Pittsburgh walked in to vote and they Had already voted according to the Democrat election machine.
	Did they forget?
	That many people with bad memories in Pittsburgh?
	Or is the following correct?
	That as witnesses will testify, they were instructed by the Democrat bosses, when they had a ballot in which there was no one registered, just assign it to somebody.
	Just assign it to Rudy Giuliani.
	Okay, so now the idea is that you have random people basically told by the Democratic bosses walking into Pennsylvania polling places and just taking out fraudulently ballots that have not been assigned to anybody yet, right?
	There was an absentee ballot sent out, nobody turned it back in, so you walked in and you basically said you were that person, then you voted.
	That's an allegation of voter fraud.
	Again, he's not making that allegation in court.
	He says he has affidavits to prove it.
	Okay, seriously, good.
	Let's investigate all of those affidavits.
	Let's see all those affidavits.
	That'd be good.
	And I'm not saying I need to see them, but the court certainly is going to need to see them.
	Okay, then Giuliani makes the case that the observers, Republican observers, were not allowed in the room in order to see what was going on.
	Now, what the courts have found is that Republican observers in places like Pennsylvania were allowed in the room, but that they were being put Too far away, in certain cases, since there was this temporary injunction that was put in place to get the observers a little bit closer.
	Here is Giuliani talking about this and then invoking my cousin Vinny.
	This, of course, the media only wanted to focus on a couple things from this press conference because they didn't actually want to cover a lot of the substance of the press conference.
	They focused in on two particular things.
	One, Giuliani doing an entire scene from my cousin Vinny, which he actually did.
	And two, the fact that Giuliani, who dyes his hair, had his hair dyed.
	He was sweating a lot.
	His hair dye started running down his face in the middle of the press conference, which of course is an optical boo-boo, but has no impact on what the man is actually saying.
	Here was Giuliani.
	They weren't just not allowed to do it.
	They were pushed.
	A few cases, they were assaulted.
	In all cases, they were put in a corral.
	So far away, probably the closest they got is from here to the back of that room.
	We could do like a... Did you all watch My Cousin Vinny?
	You know the movie?
	Okay, and then he did a whole scene from My Cousin Vinny about the two fingers versus the three fingers, and they couldn't see exactly what was going on.
	Again, that is a voter irregularity, and that is bad, and there should be lawsuits on that basis.
	Are you going to get the entire state of Pennsylvania their vote tossed?
	Probably not, right?
	I mean, the remedy just there is not there legally.
	Okay, we'll get to Michigan in one second, because there, he makes the most shocking allegation, which is literally that giant busloads of ballots shipped in for Joe Biden were sort of dumped into the vast balloting.
	Okay, we'll get to that in just one second.
	Plus, we'll get to Sidney Powell, who made some very significant allegations about Dominion voting systems and suggests that literally millions of votes were shifted from one side to the other.
	We'll go through that.
	Evidence there would be necessary.
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	Okay, we're gonna get to more of this press conference.
	We haven't even gotten to Sidney Powell and her crackin' release in just one second.
	We'll get to that.
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	Okay, so Rudy then continues the allegations and he talks about, I think, the most shocking allegation.
	He alleges that there are four people who gave affidavits, four, who say that at 4.30 in the morning, a truck pulled up to a Detroit center where they were counting and just started unloading boxes of ballots marked for Joe Biden.
	Now, that one seems like that should be fairly easy for the media to check in on, right?
	I mean, they can read those affidavits, presumably, if those have been filed with the court.
	Now, that's like a real allegation of voter fraud, right?
	And there's only one problem.
	You actually have to file that in a Michigan court.
	I am not clear on whether the Trump team has actually filed that in a Michigan court.
	That's a serious, real allegation.
	You're talking now about JFK, dead people voting in Chicago style stuff from 1960.
	Here's Giuliani alleging that.
	Four affiants here, those are people who give affidavits, report an incident that under any other circumstances would have been on the front page of all your newspapers.
	If it didn't involve the hatred that you have, the irrational, pathological hatred that you have for the president.
	What they swear to is that at 4.30 in the morning, a truck pulled up to the Detroit center where they were counting ballots.
	And here's what they jointly swear to.
	That every ballot that they could see, every thing they could hear, these were ballots for Biden.
	I didn't see that.
	I don't know that, but for the fact that three American citizens are willing to swear to it.
	Okay, well, we need the names of the citizens so we can talk to them.
	We need to know who exactly was counting ballots at these places, right?
	I mean, this is stuff that the media should be able to check into, and certainly stuff that should be able to be investigated.
	I mean, these are actual criminal charges.
	He's now alleging wide-scale voter fraud.
	So, good, that's a real allegation, presumably with real names on that, so that is something that can be checked.
	That at least is a real allegation, and affidavits are in fact evidence.
	Affidavits are somebody testifying that they saw a thing.
	It is not just an allegation.
	At that point, you are swearing under penalty of perjury that you saw a thing.
	It doesn't mean that all affidavits are true.
	It does mean that those are allegations that ought to be investigated.
	So good.
	Okay, there's only one problem, which is I am not sure that all of those affidavits have actually been filed in an ongoing case in Michigan because the other day, the Trump team, as I mentioned, pulled out of their case in Michigan, Trump versus Benson.
	And Giuliani said they dismissed it because the case was attempting to get the Wayne County Board of Supervisors to decertify it, and they did.
	But they didn't, right?
	I mean, that's the problem, is that they actually voted to certify.
	Then they came back out and they said, well, we challenge our own certification, but there's no provision in Michigan law to do that.
	So, herein lies the problem.
	Again, there's a difference between what Giuliani is alleging on the public stage and what is actually being filed in court.
	If you want the election changed, it has to be filed in court.
	It doesn't matter what he says in front of a microphone.
	It doesn't matter what Giuliani says in front of cameras.
	It doesn't matter what he says in interviews.
	It matters what gets filed in court.
	It matters what gets filed in court.
	That is all.
	That is all.
	Okay, so, File it in court.
	Again, he's making serious allegations and apparently he's got affidavits to back it.
	This would be a great time for a lawsuit in Michigan suggesting that all of this needs to be postponed.
	The certification needs to be postponed until the investigation is completed.
	Giuliani concluded by saying that somebody had a plan to shift the election.
	And he sort of concluded with his big wrap up.
	This would be Giuliani clip 12.
	Isn't the logical conclusion that I think any jury would accept if they heard this evidence?
	That somebody had this plan.
	Maybe that was always the plan.
	That's the reason why Hillary Clinton said, don't concede, even if you're losing.
	That's the reason we had a Freudian slip by the candidate.
	And he said he had the best voter fraud team in the country.
	That's the reason why he probably didn't have to go out and campaign.
	He had to have known what they were going to do.
	OK, so then Sidney Powell comes up and Sidney Powell, of course, was the lawyer in the Michael Flynn case.
	She's been well respected.
	She gets up and she starts talking about the Kraken, right?
	This is the release the Kraken moment.
	She's the one who originally started using that phrase that she was going to reveal evidence that literally millions of votes were shifted in the election.
	This is the biggest allegation.
	Giuliani is talking about specific voter fraud and voter irregularity allegations.
	Some of them have been alleged in court.
	Others have not been alleged in court.
	Some he says he has affidavits for.
	Others he has said he does not have affidavits for.
	All of that is going to get hashed out in courts.
	Powell is the one who is making the biggest claim here.
	So she claims that the voting system of the United States was hacked.
	That is a massive claim.
	Not that there's a possibility of hack, but that there was a hack.
	That in fact the voting systems of the United States were compromised.
	Which means that you can't trust any election result, right?
	I mean, not just the presidential election result.
	Any place that used a Dominion voting system, presumably, would now be in question.
	And in fact, she actually does say that in this press conference.
	So here is Sidney Powell laying forth her theory of what happened here with Dominion voting systems and Smartmatic technology.
	What we are really dealing with here and uncovering more by the day is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States.
	The Dominion voting systems, the Smartmatic technology software, And the software that goes in other computerized voting systems here as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he did not want it to come out.
	Okay, so she is essentially saying that Smartmatic and Dominion are the same, that Smartmatic is a subsidiary of Dominion Voting Systems and that Smartmatic was developed in Venezuela, software was developed in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez, who of course has been dead since 2013, but the idea is that Hugo Chavez's Venezuelan voting system has been sort of taken up into the American voting system and is still significantly vulnerable to hack.
	She continues along these lines, suggesting that the software itself has backdoors that allow people to hack in and then change votes from one party to the other.
	These are the sorts of allegations that, if true, completely blow up voting in the country.
	I mean, that's how large these allegations are.
	If you are alleging that the Dominion voting system, which is used in 24 states, That Dominion voting system is so, not just that there's a possibility of compromise, but that it was so heavily compromised that millions of votes were shifted.
	And you're talking about redoing the entire election, essentially.
	I mean, it's the end.
	I mean, it's the end of this, of trust in elections, period, in the United States, if what Sidney Powell is saying is true.
	So here she is explaining what she thinks happened with the software.
	Now the software itself was created with so many variables and so many back doors that can be hooked up to the internet or a thumb drive stuck in it or whatever, but one of its most characteristic features is its ability to flip votes.
	It can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden, which we might never have uncovered had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system.
	And that's what caused them to have to shut down in the states they shut down in.
	That's when they came in the back door with all the mail-in ballots.
	Okay, so what she's alleging right now is that there's an algorithm that was used in the software from Dominion and that this algorithm...
	was designed to create, from whole cloth, votes for Joe Biden to outweigh the votes from Donald Trump.
	And that Trump's vote was so heavy in a lot of the states where he was doing well early in the night, like Georgia and Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, that the shutdown was not in fact a shutdown.
	What the shutdown was, was the algorithm shut down the machines.
	And now all the people came in the back door with all the fake ballots, right?
	That lines up with what Giuliani is saying about these affidavits suggesting that there were all of these printed out fake ballots for Joe Biden.
	Which is a pretty sophisticated, but also not supremely hard to evidence conspiracy, right?
	I mean, if that is true, you should be able to get a hold of one of the Dominion voting system's machines, and you should be able to check for the algorithm.
	You should be able to identify the algorithm.
	Also, I'm not sure how an algorithm gets broken.
	Like, honestly, I'm not a software person, so I don't know if that is a plausible allegation or if that is not a plausible allegation.
	Powell suggests that these machines were essentially preset, right?
	She says that they were preset to change the ratio of a Biden vote to a Trump vote.
	Here she is continuing along these lines.
	There's an algorithm that runs that automatically flips all the votes and then each operator has the ability to go in, override settings, they can ignore a signature, they can ignore the top line of the ballot, they can go down ballot and select who they want to change the results for.
	The gentleman who founded Smartmatic, there's video of him on the internet explaining that, yes, at at least one occasion, he admits, they changed a million votes with no problem.
	Okay, so the basic idea here is that the algorithm was in the computer.
	It was already being gamed.
	Trump's vote was overwhelming.
	It broke the algorithm, and they brought in a bunch of ballots through the back door, and that Smartmatic was once a Venezuelan technology, and so it was designed exactly for this sort of thing.
	That is the allegation.
	That is an extraordinary allegation.
	That allegation would require extraordinary evidence, because you're talking about the wrecking of the entire American system by Dominion, is what you're talking about right here.
	Maybe it's true.
	Maybe it is.
	Seriously.
	But you'd actually have to provide some evidence of that.
	They were asked in this presser, do you actually have, you know, like, access to a Dominion voting system?
	And they basically said, not really.
	And then they were asked, you know, do you have evidence of how the algorithm worked?
	And they said, well, you know, we have, like, people talking about it.
	Oh, that's fine.
	If this allegation is real, then investigate it down again.
	Trust in the American system requires that allegations be investigated down to the root.
	The allegation is not sufficient to overturn the election, however, and it has to be done in court, right?
	That's what you have a system for.
	And so, you know, now is going to be the time for the actual Kraken to be released.
	So Jenna Ellis came out, right?
	And she sort of acknowledged that there had not been a lot of evidence presented in this press conference specifically.
	She says, this is the opening argument.
	So what you've heard now is basically an opening statement.
	This is what you can expect to see when we get to court to actually have a full trial on the merits to actually show this evidence in court and prove our case.
	Okay, that's fine.
	And I'm hearing a lot of people today saying, you know, you and Tucker Carlson and other people, you keep saying that you want more evidence and the evidence will be shown in court.
	Okay, that's fine with me.
	Show the evidence in court, by all means, right?
	By all means, show the, like, that's what I'm saying.
	Show the evidence in court.
	But I'm also getting a lot of people who are saying, well, the fact that the allegations are made, that demonstrates that this election was completely illegitimate, top to bottom.
	Okay, it's not going to be ruled that way unless this thing actually goes to court.
	I'm repeating myself a lot here to be extremely clear.
	On a political level, Nothing would make me happier than for Donald Trump to retain the Oval Office.
	I voted for him, I supported him.
	In order for that to happen, all of these allegations are gonna need to be supported in court.
	And extraordinary allegations like the Venezuelans created a voting system that was then ingested into Dominion, used in 24 states, and then people were literally paying off people in order to game the system, that's gonna require some evidence.
	Okay, by the way, that's what Sidney Powell suggested.
	Sidney Powell didn't just suggest that Joe Biden had gamed the system, she suggested that candidates all over America had gamed the system.
	Right, she actually claimed that Republicans and Democrats, this is clip 21, Republicans and Democrats paid Dominion, this is how Dominion apparently makes its money, is by people taking bribes in Dominion in order for them to be voted for via this corrupt algorithm.
	I might speak for just a minute.
	In terms of the level of corruption we are looking at here, we have no idea how many Republican or Democratic candidates in any state across the country paid to have the system rigged to work for them.
	These people didn't do this just to take control.
	They make one heck of a lot of money off of it.
	Okay, so the suggestion now is that Dominion doesn't make its money off of being paid by states in order to use their voting system.
	Hundreds of millions of dollars.
	They make their money off of direct bribes from particular parties.
	I mean, this is an extraordinary allegation.
	It's an extraordinary allegation, and it requires extraordinary evidence.
	It does.
	Okay, and it is important to note that at this point, you know, Dominion was used in Georgia.
	The allegations are being made about Dominion.
	The hand count in Georgia matches the Dominion voter tabulation in Georgia.
	So you're going to have to explain how that happened.
	Giuliani's theory is that a bunch of absentee ballots were fraudulently kind of put into the system that matched up directly with the Dominion voting system.
	So it wasn't really the algorithm that did it, it was the fraudulent ballots that did it.
	Okay, evidence in any case is going to need to be presented here.
	As far as Dominion and whether Dominion actually has these sorts of voter fraud backdoor possibilities.
	Listen, any system can be hacked, but beyond that, the question is whether Dominion actually is just an offshoot of Venezuelan technology.
	Dominion is actually owned since 2018 by Staple Street Capital, a New York private equity firm, according to the UK Independent.
	Both Dominion and Smartmatic have released statements saying no ownership relationship exists between the two competing firms.
	In fact, they are in competition.
	Smartmatic makes voting machines, so does Dominion.
	They both make their own voting software.
	Smartmatic is an international company incorporated in Florida by Venezuelan founders.
	Dominion does not have any direct ties to Venezuela.
	They don't have any systematic partnership with Smartmatic.
	Smartmatic technology was used in Venezuelan elections.
	Accusations by government opponents that the company rigged elections there were unsubstantiated.
	In 2017, the company itself, Smartmatic, accused Venezuela's government of electoral fraud.
	Here's how this all worked.
	Smartmatic purchased the voting machine company Sequoia Voting Systems in 2005, then sold it two years later after objections were raised over its partnership with a company in which Venezuela's government had invested.
	And then three years after Smartmatic sold Sequoia, Dominion acquired Sequoia.
	So the accusation is that Sequoia had a bunch of Venezuelan technology in Sequoia, and then Dominion acquired Sequoia, and so all of the Smartmatic technology supposedly corrupted by the Venezuelans was taken up into Sequoia, and then Dominion acquired Sequoia.
	Election security experts say it's difficult to know for certain whether some sequoia code may be used in Dominion's software because of the industry's limited transparency.
	Both Dominion and Smartmatic say they do not use the same software.
	Dominion put out a statement on its website.
	Whether it's true or not, who the hell knows?
	Dominion has no company ownership relationships with any member of the Pelosi family, the Feinstein family, the Clinton Global Initiative, Smartmatic, CITL, or any ties to Venezuela.
	Smartmatic also says that they've never owned any shares or had any financial stake in Dominion Voting Systems.
	Smartmatic has never provided Dominion Voting Systems with any software, hardware, or other technology.
	The two companies are competitors in the marketplace.
	Okay, so that is what the companies claim.
	At the very least, all of this should be susceptible to investigation and will have to be proved in court, obviously.
	So that is where things currently stand.
	Okay, so was the Kraken released?
	Well, it depends on what you mean by Kraken.
	If the allegations are extraordinary, then yeah.
	If what you mean is a wave of evidence sufficient to overturn election results, that's only gonna be done in court.
	It hasn't been done yet.
	And it is not a sin for people to ask for that evidence to be shown in the court of public opinion before I make up my mind on the veracity of the claims themselves.
	When you make an extraordinary claim, I require extraordinary evidence.
	It's just what everybody should do.
	Okay, so that is where things currently stand.
	That is a bevy of allegations that have been put forward.
	The Dominion ones are particularly stunning.
	If they can be substantiated in any way, then that will undermine not only public confidence in our elections, it will undermine elections that have been held using Dominion systems for the last several years.
	It would be a disaster area for the country, but of course, more of a disaster area would be moving forward with a fraudulence election if that could be proved.
	Evidence, evidence, evidence.
	Now, Tucker Carlson said the same thing last night.
	Now, we asked on Sidney Powell this week.
	Sidney Powell did not get back to us on appearing on the show.
	Tucker apparently also asked on Sidney Powell this week, and he said, Powell needs to show us the evidence.
	And in fact, when we asked her for the evidence, she got mad and then cut off communications.
	But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of requests.
	Polite requests.
	Not a page.
	When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.
	When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us Powell has never given them any evidence either.
	Nor did she provide any today at the press conference.
	Powell did say that electronic voting is dangerous.
	And she's right.
	We're with her there.
	But she never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another.
	Not one.
	Okay, and this is correct, right?
	Tucker's not wrong to request evidence.
	You're not wrong to request evidence.
	Everybody should be requesting evidence at this point.
	And this is what the polls show.
	Some 46% of Americans say they think that Trump should concede right away, which means 54% of Americans don't agree.
	And of those 54% of Americans, about 32% of Americans came up with the correct answer to this question, which is, it depends on what the evidence shows.
	Evidence is the standard.
	Evidence should always be the standard in every case.
	For her part, Sidney Powell responded to Tucker by saying, I'm not going to present all the evidence because we're going to do that in court and I'm not busy doing interviews.
	I mean, she kind of is busy doing interviews, obviously.
	She came out yesterday and did an interview, I believe with Lou Dobbs, suggesting that the election results in all the swing states should be overturned.
	Well, if you're going to do an interview suggesting that, then you kind of have to provide the evidence to back that.
	That's a pretty extraordinary ask.
	No, I mean, we are talking about millions of votes across the United States, which does matter regardless of whether you're a Democrat or Republican, you should want all the votes counted.
	Well, yes, Lou, the entire election, frankly, in all the swing states should be overturned and the legislature should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump.
	And it's going to have to follow the constitutional provisions that it go be decided according to the amendment.
	Okay.
	Well, unfortunately, Sidney Powell's team, uh, when it came, she'll do an interview with, with, with Lou Dobbs.
	She wasn't going to do one with Tucker Carlson and her, her team apparently got very angry at Tucker for suggesting that evidence be presented.
	Uh, apparently, uh, the, the, In-house counsel for Sidney Powell PC, Molly McCann, responded to Carlson's demand for transparency by saying that he sounded like a spoiled brat.
	She said the million-dollar question isn't why won't Sidney, who barely has time to sleep or eat, text Tucker the evidence he wants.
	The question is why won't Tucker text her and say, whenever you are ready and if you choose, my platform is at your disposal to present your case to the nation.
	Until then, good luck in the fight.
	Okay, but he actually said that on his show.
	He literally said, I will offer you the full week to take over my show and present the evidence.
	So, that's not on Tucker.
	That's not on Tucker.
	Okay, so that is... present the evidence.
	It's not crazy to say that.
	Joni Ernst, the senator from Iowa, she was commenting on Powell's comment, right?
	Powell's most outrageous comment was that candidates, Republican and Democrat, all over the United States are paying Dominion voting systems in order to rig elections, which is an extraordinary claim, again.
	And Joni Ernst was like, that's kind of crazy.
	I mean, you shouldn't be claiming that candidates are rigging elections all over the place willy-nilly.
	I mean, my goodness.
	Senator, I mean, did you or any of your Republican colleagues in the Senate pay to have their elections rigged?
	No, and that is an offensive comment.
	For those of us that do stand up and represent our states in a dignified manner, we believe in honesty, we believe in the integrity of our election system.
	Okay, so again, for the one millionth time, Big allegations require big evidence.
	End of story.
	If that evidence is not provided, it's going to be very hard for anything to be proved or for allegations that are very large to be taken seriously.
	In 2004, Democrats claimed that Diebold voting machines had been hacked.
	They could not provide any evidence of the Diebold voting machines having been hacked, and so we rightly said we're not going to pay any attention to that.
	Now, we're going to need evidence that this happened because this is the biggest voting scandal in the history of the United States, bar none, if what Sidney Powell is saying is true.
	And the same thing is true if Rudy Giuliani's claims are true.
	And now, yesterday, this all culminated in media members doing what media members do.
	So instead of saying, okay, we'd like to see the evidence.
	Can we see the evidence?
	Instead of saying, let's let the process play out, which is what I'm saying, it's what Tucker's saying, we're all saying the same thing.
	Everyone's saying this.
	Instead of that, your mainstream media members decided it's time to yell at people, right?
	That's really what's important.
	So Mike Pence was doing a presser on COVID-19, which by the way, some good news, Pfizer has now requested emergency authorization to start distributing its vaccine by the end of this month, which is actually real good news.
	So Pence does a presser.
	And the media members lose their bleep, right?
	As Pence is walking off, it just shows you what journalism has basically become, which is performative nonsense for the cameras.
	So Pence didn't take questions.
	He's walking off and media members just start shouting at the top of their lungs at him.
	And they know he's leaving, right?
	He's not turning around.
	He's not answering the questions.
	It's just if I'm caught on camera shouting at him, then I get my scene in the movie to be made about the evils of the Trump administration backlit and with an upshot.
	To show my heroism.
	Here are media members just yelling at Mike Pence randomly about what's going on with the election.
	Thank you.
	All right.
	So are you really?
	All of you need to answer.
	What is going on?
	You're not working with the Trump administration.
	You're all part of not recognizing democracy.
	You're all undermining the Democratic election.
	Every one of you.
	Why is this?
	So is that like a good thing?
	And you won't work with the transaction.
	Honestly, there is another point to be made here in all of this, regardless of what the allegations end up being or what evidence it ends up showing.
	There is a systemic distrust of the system that is now set in.
	For tens of millions of Americans.
	Tens of millions of them.
	Who say that they don't trust election outcomes.
	This is true right and left.
	They don't know who to trust when it comes to this stuff because it seems like nobody is telling them the truth.
	And that is because they believe that everybody is badly motivated.
	And in a lot of cases, they are right.
	Now, when Trump supporters look at the journalistic entities who are saying, just dismissing out of hand Giuliani's claims or Powell's claims, When they see that, and these people are not saying, okay, we need to see the evidence, they're just immediately dismissing it.
	Or when they say voter fraud has never happened anywhere.
	Or when they say that the polls are absolutely correct.
	Or when they say it's clear that Russian collusion happened.
	Trump voters are going to respond by saying, we're not going to listen to anything that you have to say.
	Scorn does breed retaliatory scorn and distrust.
	That is just the way that human beings behave and there's a reason for that.
	So it does make a difference.
	It does make a difference when you have columns like one from Wajahat Ali in the New York Times suggesting that reaching out to Trump supporters is a bad idea.
	He has an entire article in the New York Times yesterday in which he talks about how he, after 2016, decided he was going to travel the country and talk to Trump supporters.
	But his entire article is about how he went around, he talked to Trump supporters, and they didn't change their minds, and therefore they are bad and terrible and horrible and racist.
	He says this, in Ohio, I spent 90 minutes on a drive to the airport with a retired Trump supporter.
	We were cordial to each other. We made jokes. We shared stories about our families.
	Neither of us changed our outlook. They'll never take my guns ever, he told me, explaining his Facebook feed was filled with articles about how Hillary Clinton and Democrats would kill the Second Amendment and steal his guns. Although he didn't like some of Mr. Trump's tones and comments, he didn't believe he was a racist in his heart. I'm not a cardiologist, so I wasn't qualified to challenge that. He says, I did my part.
	What was my reward?
	Listening to Mr. Trump's base chant.
	Send her back.
	We cannot help people who refuse to help themselves.
	Mr. Trump is an extension of their id, their culture, their values, their greed.
	He is their defender and savior.
	He is their blunt instrument.
	He is their destructive drug of choice.
	The truest thing Trump has ever said is they don't hate him.
	They don't hate you because they hate him.
	They hate him because they hate you.
	And so people respond to the media simply dismissing all claims out of hand with regard to Trump and the election.
	They regard that as just an extension of the media's scorn for them.
	And honestly, it's hard to blame people for that.
	It may not be correct, but it's certainly justifiable.
	I mean, when you see the way that Democrats on Twitter react to Trump supporters, it's insane.
	For example, California Democratic Regional Director tweeted out this.
	No, seriously, how do you deprogram 75 million people?
	Where do you start?
	Fox?
	Facebook?
	We have to start thinking in terms of post-World War II Germany or Japan, or the failures of Reconstruction in the South.
	That's crazy.
	He says this is not your standard partisan policy disagreement.
	This is a conspiracy theory fueled belligerent death cult against reality and basic decency.
	The only actual policy debate of note are happening within the Democratic coalition between the left and the center left.
	This is what Democrats think of you.
	He says, I know conservatives are upset by some of the responses here, and yeah, many are out of line.
	But what do you expect people to do in self-preservation?
	The right has been running four years on bleep your feelings, my conspiracy theories are valid opinions, and we have more guns.
	Well, no.
	The right has been acknowledging that the left has cultural scorn for them.
	And that is going to breed retaliatory scorn.
	It's going to breed a level of distrust that is endemic to the system.
	And every time you tweet crap like this, you are creating more distrust in the systems that are required.
	When you declare that Barack Obama is the arbiter of truth, and then everybody says, okay, well, I don't trust you anymore.
	What do you think is going to happen?
	Joyce Carol Oates, who is another writer, famous writer.
	And a far lefty who tweets out pictures of her weird feet.
	That is a thing.
	She tweeted out the other day, for many pro-Trump Americans, and she bleeps out Trump because it's a bad word, for many pro-Trump Americans, the pandemic is like the Holocaust to many Germans.
	They knew what was happening but adjusted to living with it in indifference or in some cases profiting from it.
	Only if affected personally do people seem to care.
	So if you are a Trump supporter, And you are disagreeing with Joyce Carol Oates on COVID response.
	It's because you're like a German ignoring the Holocaust.
	And then we're expected to trust these people?
	We're expected to trust that they have a good-hearted search for truth at heart?
	I think not.
	I think not.
	That is what is driving a lot of this.
	I've been saying on a wide variety of issues, there should be bipartisan agreement on how we handle a lot of these issues.
	When it comes to voter fraud, evidence.
	Evidence of voter fraud.
	When it comes to COVID policy, Follow the evidence.
	Don't make it up.
	Don't follow political incentives.
	Follow the evidence.
	When it comes to racism in America, follow the evidence.
	It's all the same standard.
	But when people pretend that they are arbiters of truth, and they only examine evidence in cases they want to examine evidence, and then they sneer at people who disagree with them, the predictable result is that people are going to react by disregarding everything they have to say, and saying, okay, you didn't require evidence for Stacey Abrams.
	You didn't require evidence for four years of Russian collusion bullcrappery.
	You didn't require five minutes of explanation of evidence for that sort of stuff, and we were put through four years of that, and now you expect me to respect your demands for evidence?
	I think not.
	Either there's going to be one standard, or there's going to be no standard.
	There is not going to be a double standard for most Americans.
	Either evidence is required for claims, or evidence is not required for claims.
	So, pick a side.
	Are you on the evidence side, or are you on the not evidence side?
	That is the real question, and that's true for everything.
	It's true for everything, from COVID policy, to election fraud, Okay.
	Well, before we break for the weekend, it's time for a little bit of Bible talk, because let's have some uplift going into the weekend.
	Okay, well before we break for the weekend, it's time for a little bit of Bible talk, because let's have some uplift going into the weekend.
	So this week, the Jews read a portion of the five books of Moses called Todok.
	This is the portion of the Bible that deals with the selling of the birthright from Esau to Jacob and also the blessing that Isaac gives to Jacob instead of Esau, the so-called stealing of the birthright in sort of common biblical parlance.
	And so for folks who don't know the story, Basically, Isaac, who of course is Abraham's son, he now has kids, and he has twins.
	Esau, Esau, and Jacob.
	And Esau is sort of a man of the fields, he's a wild man, he's a hunter.
	He's not a man of soul.
	Jacob is a man of soul who is described as dwelling in tents.
	Esau and Jacob sort of battle for primacy.
	That's sort of the rest of the book of Genesis, is them battling for primacy in various ways.
	Esau is the firstborn.
	Jacob grabs onto his heel, right?
	That is why he's called Yaakov, because the word Ekev in Hebrew means heel.
	He grabs onto Esau's heel.
	And so, now they grow up.
	As they get older, it becomes very clear that Esau spurns the birthright.
	He doesn't actually want the responsibilities of being the firstborn.
	And so, for literally a bowl of lentil soup, he sells his birthright to Jacob.
	What that really means is that, for any rationale whatsoever, he was willing to give away the responsibility of being the firstborn.
	But Isaac has not greenlit this, right?
	Their father has not actually greenlit this switcheroo.
	And Esau, it turns out, actually, he kind of spurns it, but at the same time, he still wants the benefits of the birthright without actually the responsibilities of the birthright.
	So this brings us to the critical scene in question, one of the most sort of puzzling parts of the Bible.
	So this is Genesis chapter 27.
	It came to pass when Isaac was old, and his eyes were too dim to see, that he called Esau his elder son, and he said to him, my son, and he said to him, here I am.
	And he said, behold, now I have grown old, I do not know the day of my death.
	So now sharpen your implements, your sword and your bow, and go forth to the field and hunt game for me, and make for me tasty foods as I like, and bring them to me, and I will eat in order that my soul will bless you before I die.
	But Rebekah, who is Isaac's wife, overheard when Isaac spoke to Esau his son, and Esau went to the field to hunt game and to bring it.
	And Rebecca said to Jacob her son, saying, Behold, I have heard your father speaking to Esau your brother, saying, Bring me game, and make me tasty foods, and I will eat, and I will bless you before the Lord before my death.
	And now my son hearkens to my voice, to what I am commanding you.
	Go now to the flock, take for me from there two choice kids, I will make them tasty foods for your father as he likes, and you shall bring them to your father that he may eat, in order that he bless you before his death.
	And Jacob said to Rebekah, his mother, Behold, my brother Esau is a hairy man, whereas I am a smooth man.
	Perhaps my father will touch me, and I will appear to him as a deceiver, and I will bring upon myself a curse and not a blessing.
	And his mother said to him, On me is your curse, my son.
	Only hearken to my voice, and go, take them for me.
	So he went, and he took, and he brought them to his mother.
	And his mother made tasty foods, as his father liked.
	And Rebekah took the costly garments of Esau, her elder son, which were with her in the house, and she dressed Jacob, her younger son.
	And the hides of the kids she put on his hands and on the smoothness of his neck, right?
	So she actually takes hair and puts it on Jacob, so that he feels more like his older brother.
	He came to his father and he said, my father, and he said, here I am.
	Who are you, my son?
	And Jacob said to his father, I'm Esau, your firstborn.
	I have done as you have spoken to me.
	Please rise, sit down, eat of my games that your soul will bless me.
	And Isaac said to my son, how is it that you have found it so quickly, my son?
	And he said, because the Lord your God prepared it for me.
	And Isaac said to Jacob, please come closer so that I may feel you, my son, whether you are really my son Esau or not.
	So obviously Isaac suspects something at this point.
	Jacob draws near to Isaac, his father.
	He felt him.
	He said, the voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.
	Right?
	Hakol kol Yaakov, hei daimidei Esau.
	Right?
	In the Hebrew.
	And he didn't recognize him because his hands were hairy, like the hands of his brother Esau, and he blessed him.
	And he says again, are you indeed my son Esau?
	And he said, I am.
	And he said, serve it to me, I may eat of the game of my son, so my soul will bless you.
	He served him, he ate, he brought him wine, and he drank.
	And his father said, come closer and kiss me, right?
	He's constantly like, something, Isaac knows something is up, right?
	He's losing his sight, but he knows something is up.
	He came closer, he kissed him, he smelled like the fragrance of his garments.
	He blessed him, he said, behold, the fragrance of my son is like the fragrance of a field, which the Lord has blessed.
	Okay, and then the story continues with Jacob receiving the blessing, and Esau returns.
	And when Esau returns, he explains to Isaac what has happened, and Isaac shudders, and he says, When Esau heard his father's words, he cried out a great and bitter cry.
	it to me and I ate of everything while you had not yet come and I blessed him he too shall be blessed. When Esau heard his father's words he cried out a great and bitter cry said his father blessed me too oh my father he said your brother came with cunning and took your blessing and and so he doesn't reverse the So it's a really puzzling story, right?
	Because why wouldn't he reverse the blessing?
	If I give you a gift, but I do so under the false premise that you are another person, I can take that gift back.
	As it turns out, the Bible makes it sound like Isaac's on his deathbed.
	Isaac in the Bible lives like another two decades.
	At no point does he reverse his judgment and actually remove the blessing from Jacob, who lied to him, and give it back to Esau, who did not lie to him.
	So what exactly is going on here?
	So the answer, I think, lies in the characters of Esau and Jacob, and it lies in what we should strive for as human beings.
	So Esau is described in the Bible, again, as a ruddy man, which means man of violence.
	He's described as a person who is very capable in the fields, right?
	He can use a sword and he can use a bow.
	But he is not a person who is described as anything but sort of selfish.
	He respects his parents somewhat, but that's pretty much his big quality.
	And so he's a man who is capable of survival, but he is not a moral man.
	Jacob, by contrast, is a moral man, but he's sort of perceived as soft.
	He's not a survivor.
	He's not somebody who can survive.
	And so Isaac has a choice to make, because he is now going to hand on his birthright, which means the future of the Hebrews, the future of the Jewish people, and in his view of his family and his civilization.
	Who's he going to hand that birthright to, to preserve the civilization?
	The survivor without morality, or the moral man without a survival instinct?
	That's the real question.
	So what happens, he tells Esau, I want you, you're the survivor.
	I think you can learn morality.
	Go out to the field, do something for me.
	Instead of just killing an animal and then eating it yourself or killing an animal for fun, go do something that demonstrates honor for a parent and then I will bless you because you will have merited the blessing because you're both a person capable of survival and you're a person who's capable of higher moral thinking.
	And Rebecca, his wife, hears this, and she says, well, I don't think that's right.
	I mean, I know Esau, I know Jacob, I know Esau is not a moral man, and I don't think he's going to develop a moral instinct.
	But I do think that Jacob is capable of developing a survival instinct.
	And so Jacob dons his brother's clothes, he puts on the hair on his hands and on his neck, and he goes and he meets with Isaac.
	And Isaac knows something is wrong, right?
	that sentence where he says, ha-kol kol Yaakov, right?
	The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.
	And he suspects that something is up.
	He's saying, it doesn't matter which one of my sons this is, right?
	This is actually, as it turns out, what is happening.
	It doesn't matter which one of my sons I'm blessing.
	This is the son who deserves the blessing because either this is Esau who has grown a soul, or this is Jacob who's grown a spine.
	This is either Esau who's determined how to become a moral person because he's speaking in respectful ways to me and he's doing what I wanted him to do, or this is Jacob who has actually become a survivor, right?
	He's capable of doing the things necessary for survival in a cruel and unjust world.
	And so he decides that the future of his family line is better placed in the hands of the person who actually did all the things that were needed to be done.
	And that's why he doesn't reverse the blessing, even though he realizes what has happened at that point, right?
	His eyes are open and he realizes what has happened.
	He wanted it to be Esau.
	Esau is his firstborn.
	But Esau had already given away the birthright once because he actually didn't want the responsibility.
	Jacob wanted the responsibility and Jacob was willing to do what it took in order to gain that responsibility, including an act of deception in order to demonstrate to his father that he was in fact capable of survival.
	And that's what it takes to live in the world.
	It does.
	It doesn't mean that you have to act deceptively when you don't have to.
	It does mean that you need to be able to survive.
	You need to be able to act aggressively.
	You need to be able to act in defense of your own family and of your own values.
	But you have to have the values too.
	And it is easier to grow an aggressive streak from a moral center than it is to grow a moral streak from an aggressive center.
	That's the message of the selling of the birthright as well as the blessing that is given by Isaac to Jacob rather than to Esau.
	It's why Isaac doesn't revoke his own blessing.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here next week with much more.
	We'll give you all the updates.
	If the Kraken, the evidentiary Kraken is released, not just the allegations Kraken, the evidentiary Kraken is released, we'll bring you all of it next week.
	Have a wonderful weekend.
	Stay safe out there.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
	Executive Producer Jeremy Boren.
	Our Supervising Producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
	Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky.
	Our Associate Producers are Nick Sheehan and Rebecca Doyle.
	The show is edited by Adam Siavitz.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
	Hair and Makeup is by Nika Geneva.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
	You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
	I think there are enough of those already out there.
	We talk about culture, because culture drives politics, and it drives everything else.
	So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
	Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.

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