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Jan. 12, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:02:23

Ep. 1171 - Democrats Want Unity…With Strings Attached

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Time	Text
	The FBI worries about the possibility of new riots and attacks from fringe Trump supporters.
	Democrats push toward a second impeachment.
	And Democrats say they're all for unity, but there are a few conditions.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Your online activity should not be public.
	Protect yourself at expressvpn.com.
	Slash Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
	First, a quick reminder, things are really bad, and you know what?
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	Okay, so we begin with the big news of the day, which is that the FBI is saying that this very well might not be over.
	All of the chaos that we saw last week, that attempted insurrection inside the Capitol building, which was an attempt to overthrow the results of the election, By a fringe group of nutcases and badly motivated people who decided they were going to invade the Capitol building, some of whom were carrying zip ties.
	It turns out that we found out that there were people outside with vans full of explosive materials, molotov cocktail materials.
	We know that there was a pipe bomb that was left over at the RNC.
	This could have been really, really, really a lot worse.
	I mean, seriously, that's, I think, the big takeaway from all the information that we are now receiving in the aftermath of the attack last week, is that this thing could have been a whole hell of a lot worse.
	For example, I mean, it was bad as it was.
	There's all this new footage that has emerged since last week.
	So if all you saw was sort of the images from outside the building, And those images were mainly just people cheering on the ramparts, sort of.
	That was not the extent of it.
	Cops were literally getting pulled into crowds of people who were beating them with American flags.
	It was disgusting.
	It's disgusting.
	Anybody who did this should go to jail and they should throw away the key.
	Here's a little bit of that footage from last week.
	You can see, in the middle of the footage, people attempting to literally just wail on police officers.
	There's somebody attempting to beat a police officer with an American flag, which of course is one of the worst symbolic sights that I've seen in recent memory.
	Somebody attempting to hit a police officer with a Trump flag.
	Really, really ugly stuff.
	A police officer seriously injured.
	You can see him down there on the ground.
	There was also footage that came out last week of a police officer being crushed as people attempted to force their way into the Capitol building.
	Super disturbing images here as police officers attempt to keep people from invading the seat of democracy.
	And a police officer being crushed in the middle of this melee.
	I mean, this is scary stuff.
	And again, anybody who's identified...
	Ah, there's a police officer.
	Okay, any piece of crap who participated in this, again, should go to jail and they should throw away the key.
	We now have news that a bunch of folks have been arrested because they were identified.
	There were a lot of questions about, why weren't more people arrested?
	The answer is, you don't arrest all that many people at the riot when you are short-staffed.
	The big problem here is that the police didn't have enough people.
	When you arrest somebody, you then have to delegate somebody to actually maintain the arrest.
	You know, the person gets up and they run away.
	You have to make sure that you have enough people on the front lines to prevent more of this and to clear the building.
	Well, now it turns out that a lot of the people who have been identified have been arrested in other areas of the country.
	According to Fox 13 at Memphis, a man in Nashville was charged in connection with the riots at the U.S.
	Capitol on Wednesday.
	Eric Munchel is accused of being one of two men who stormed the U.S.
	Capitol with zip ties, which is scary, scary stuff, obviously.
	The zip ties, when you see those, you have to imagine what he meant to do was actually take hostages.
	Zip tie members of Congress or the vice presidents of the United States.
	He is charged with knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.
	Larry Brock of Texas was also arrested for entering the Capitol during the riot with zip ties.
	He faces similar charges.
	It is alleged that both of these not good people were Invading the Capitol building in order to restrain or detain subjects, and the cases are going to be prosecuted by the federal government.
	We also have many more people arrested, including a man with 11 Molotov cocktails.
	This, again, according to NBCWashington.com.
	Authorities say they've charged several riders who were allegedly captured in photos and videos that went viral in the aftermath, including an Arizona man seen in a horned hat and carrying a spear, and a Florida man accused of carrying through the Capitol a lectern that reportedly is used by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
	Some of these arrests have resulted in some rather grim humor.
	Some of that humor came courtesy of the lawyer for Adam Johnson, who is the guy who stole the podium, who had to admit to the reporters, yeah, you know, I'm a lawyer.
	I'm not a miracle worker.
	There is tape of the man walking through the Capitol building carrying a podium, so I'm not sure what you want from me here.
	Part of what you have to, you know, factor into is, again, you just have to drill down on what actually happened.
	You have a photograph of our client, you know, in a building, you know, unauthorized to be there with, you know, what appears to be a podium or a lectern.
	I'm not exactly sure which one it is called, but that's what we have.
	Obviously, that presents problems for you as a defense attorney in that you have your client in the building at the time of the breaking. Yeah, I don't know how else to explain that, but yeah, that would be a problem. I'm not a magician and neither is Mr. Bigney. So yeah, we've got a photograph of our client who appears to be inside the federal building or inside the Capitol with government property.
	Well, yeah, I mean, sometimes lawyers don't have the greatest jobs.
	In a piece of, another piece of grimly ironic but somewhat humorous news to come out of this, that stupid idiot who was, and dangerous idiot, who invaded the Capitol building dressed like a barbarian, His name is Jacob Chansley, 33, one of the MAGA rioters who turned himself in to the FBI for his part in storming the Capitol building late on Wednesday.
	Apparently, he has been living with his mother since January 2019.
	It's a real man's man over here.
	His mom revealed her son has not eaten since his arrest on Saturday because the jail where he is being held does not offer organic food.
	Does not offer organic food.
	So, yeah.
	Yeah.
	All I can say is, Don't eat to your heart's content, dude.
	Fast to your heart's content.
	Doesn't offer organic food.
	And these people thought that they were saving the republic as opposed to destroying the republic.
	Well done, everybody.
	Well done, everybody.
	Okay, well, all of this is all predicate to the FBI suggesting that they have received information indicating armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitals and the U.S.
	Capitol in Washington, D.C.
	in the days leading up to President-elect Biden's inauguration on January 20th, according to an internal bulletin obtained by CNN.
	The news comes as security measures are being stepped up ahead of Inauguration Day, with federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies preparing for the possibility of more violence after rioters stormed the U.S.
	Capitol last week, leaving five people dead, including a Capitol Police officer.
	Even as federal investigators continue to track down suspects from last week's attack, the bulletin highlights concerns the Capitol siege was perhaps just the beginning of potentially violent actions from Trump supporters who believe that the Election was stolen and that they have the authority, power, and incentive to overturn the democratic election process.
	According to the FBI bulletin, armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitals from January 16th through at least January 20th.
	At the U.S.
	Capitol from 17 January through 20th of January.
	It suggests there are threats of an uprising if Trump is removed via the 25th amendment.
	Before Inauguration Day.
	According to the Bulletin, on January 8th, the FBI received information on an identified group calling for others to join them in storming state, local, and federal government courthouses and administrative buildings in the event the president is removed as president prior to Inauguration Day.
	The identified group is also planning to storm government offices, including D.C.
	and in every state, regardless of whether the state's certified electoral votes for Biden or Trump on January 20th.
	The FBI is, in fact, tracking all of this.
	Meanwhile, the government held continuity of government operations a standard practice in the event that someone tries to disrupt the transition that took on a new urgency in light of everything that has been happening, obviously.
	Meanwhile, security preparations were complicated when the acting director of Homeland Security resigned.
	Wolf, this would be... this would be...
	Chad Wolf, the acting Secretary of Homeland Security.
	He had instructed the U.S. Secret Service to begin the national special security event operations for the inauguration on Wednesday instead of January 19th, the day before Biden was set to be inaugurated.
	But he says that he is done.
	In light of events of the past week and the evolving security landscape leading up to the inauguration, at the recommendation of the Secret Service Director James Murray, Secret Service to begin the national special security events operations for the 2021 inauguration effective on Wednesday, January 13th, instead of on January 19th, Wolf said.
	Meanwhile, many, many officers are being sent to central areas with regard to government.
	The National Guard is now planning to have 15,000 National Guard troops to meet the current and future requests for the inauguration.
	So remember that time when it was really, really bad that Tom Cotton suggested in the pages of the New York Times that the National Guard ought to be called in to quell riots and the entire Democratic Party went nuts?
	And in fact, the editorial staff at the New York Times suggested that this is a threat of violence against them.
	Remember that?
	And then the op-ed editor at the New York Times lost his job for even running that op-ed?
	Well, Democrats are all Tom Cotton now.
	So congratulations for coming around to reality where it turns out that riots should be handled by the National Guard if that is what it requires in order to stop rioting and mass violence.
	The NYPD is going to be sending 200 officers to Washington to assist in the inauguration.
	Also, law enforcement agencies in Virginia, Maryland, and Jersey are going to send officers to D.C.
	for the inauguration as well.
	So that is where things stand right now.
	Now would be an excellent time, by the way, to suggest that you also head over to GoFundMe and donate some money for the family of Brian Sicknick.
	He is the officer who was killed in the middle of this awful riot.
	Pathetic insurrection attempt.
	It is a verified GoFundMe.
	Lindsey Taylor is the leader of the fundraiser.
	They've raised about $600,000 at this point.
	Brian was a veteran and New Jersey native who served in the New Jersey Air National Guard.
	He served his country stateside and in operations overseas.
	As well, he joined the U.S.
	Capitol Police in July 2008.
	The GoFundMe page was created on behalf of Brian's family with their permission.
	It was being managed by a U.S.
	Capitol Police officer who served with Officer Sicknick.
	So, if you have a little bit of extra money lying around, head on over to GoFundMe and donate it to the Brian Sicknick Memorial Fund.
	Okay, now...
	With all of this said, with all of this happening, one of the things that is also happening, perhaps the thing with longer-term ramifications here, is the attempt to lump in every single person who disagrees with the Democratic agenda, of course, of course, of course, you knew this was gonna happen, with the rioters and the insurrectionists and the criminals who invaded the Capitol last week.
	I've been saying this for a week since this happened, that it was fairly obvious where the left, where the media were gonna go with this, and they are indeed going there.
	It is going to make the country more polarized and worse.
	It's going to be a very, very, very bad moment for the country.
	And I think that it is going to have some really long-term ramifications.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so.
	The push now is of course to lump every single person on the right in with the pathetic, disgusting people who decided to invade the Capitol building and threaten American lawmakers in the middle of an attempt to certify a duly held and certified election.
	That's the attempt of the left, and that's the attempt of the media, because never let a good crisis go to waste.
	We have seen it in social media, with the tech bros shutting down Parler.
	We have seen it in the media itself, with calls from members of the media to literally oust anybody who voted for President Trump, suggesting that they were part of the conspiracy, or at least they winked and nodded at all of this, or they knew it was going to happen, that it was entirely foreseeable in every possible way.
	And here, it is not whataboutism to point out that the left has completely looked the other way on Black Lives Matter riots, and so they don't actually get to hold the standard that if you use inflammatory rhetoric, and then some people misuse the rhetoric to go out and do acts of violence, then you are responsible for that.
	Because that literally is not their standard.
	That literally is not their standard.
	And that is especially, it's especially not the standard for broad-scale Republicans, many of whom have not been suggesting that the election was stolen.
	And yesterday, the Washington Post printed a piece in which they openly suggested that I had said the election was stolen.
	That's absurd.
	You know how much flak I've received from people for saying that the election was not stolen from like the very first night of the election, when I literally said on election night, as Trump came out and declared victory, that he did not have evidence to support the idea that he'd won the election?
	The Washington Post had to retract that, but of course, journalism is always done retrospectively at a lot of these places.
	But don't worry, they are the mainstream establishment media who ought to be privileged on social networking sites like Facebook and on Twitter.
	We at The Daily Wire have been pretty circumspect in our coverage, pretty careful in our coverage of all of this stuff.
	Now, we're the untrustworthy source, but the Washington Post that openly gets it wrong, suggesting that number one, I'm an employee of a company I'm not an employee of, and then two, suggesting that I had received a letter I didn't receive, and then three, suggesting that I had been pushing the stolen election line.
	Well done.
	Excellent journalism all around.
	But again, this is all part and parcel of the broader idea, which is that if you're on the right, you're okay with all of this, right?
	Not only were you okay with all of this, you've bought, major swaths of the Republican Party have bought into all of this.
	So, for example, Michael Scherer, as a piece in the politics section of the Washington Post.
	This, of course, is not an op-ed piece.
	Okay, this piece by Scherer is also contributed to by Scott Clement, is in the reporting section of the Washington Post.
	Excellent journalism in here.
	And the question is whether the entire party is QAnon.
	Whether the entire Republican Party is QAnon.
	I'm not kidding.
	The article is titled, War for the Soul.
	Capitol riot elevates GOP power struggle between pro-Trump conspiracy theorists and party establishment.
	Okay, so just gonna point out, if you ask the vast majority of Republicans what QAnon is, they have no idea.
	They have no idea.
	If you ask me for the details on what QAnon is, and I follow this stuff pretty damned closely, I have no idea other than it's a wild conspiracy theory about Trump saving the Republic from child molesters or some such nonsense and cannibalism and weird occult rituals.
	It's all bizarre.
	It's so crazy that Alex Jones was on air over the past week yelling at the QAnon people.
	Alex Jones.
	And yet the idea here is that the entire Republican Party has bought into this nonsense.
	So Michael Scherer writes this.
	The essay reads like the manifesto of a delusional conspiracy theorist claiming that President Trump would remain in office on January 20th after purging his cabinet and replacing Vice President Pence.
	It predicted a 12-day period of national crisis that would likely involve an internet blackout, the use of the Federal Communication Commission's emergency broadcast system, and high-profile arrests.
	It's 1776 all over again, the tract declared.
	But, says the Washington Post, these were not the ramblings of an anonymous internet troll or some random troublemaker.
	This was an official letter from the chairman of the Nye County Republican Party in Nevada, posted Friday on the organization's official website.
	Well, I mean, if some nut from the Nye County Republican Party in Nevada posted on their little visited website a crazy letter, clearly this implicates the entire Republican base.
	I'll be honest with you, I'd never heard of Nye County until I just said the words Nye County right now.
	But apparently this is representative of like the entirety, the nut picking that goes on with regards to the media and the right, it's wild.
	It's wild.
	Okay, the entire Democratic Party has embraced Black Lives Matter, like fully embraced it and downplayed riots for months on end.
	It's not nut picking to point that out.
	It is certainly nut picking when you go out and you find a letter posted by the Republican Party leader in Nye County, and then you're like, this is probably the entire Republican Party.
	Especially because the Jeremiah ad drew a rebuke from Michael Ahrens, the communications director for the RNC, who called it deranged and wildly irresponsible, according to the Post.
	But as of Monday morning, the Post remained with an update from party chairman Chris Zimmerman, noting that a message intended for his local community had sparked widespread attention online.
	Nothing in this letter was original to me, he wrote.
	The missive by Zimmerman, who did not respond to a request for comment, reflects the extent to which the Trump-inspired mob violence at the U.S.
	Capitol last week has elevated a long, festering struggle within the Republican Party over conspiracy theories, purity tests, and fealty to the rule of law.
	Oh, really?
	That's the highlight for you?
	This is the touchpoint?
	Is some dumbass in Nye County posted a ridiculous piece on their website?
	This obviously implicates the entire Republican Party.
	You can see the pathetic attempt here.
	The pathetic attempt here is that all Republicans are the same.
	They've been doing this since I was a child.
	Every time a Republican says something bizarre, every single elected and unelected Republican is asked, what do you feel about this bizarre thing that this Republican said?
	When Todd Akin said a weird thing about rape and abortion.
	The entire Republican Party was held to account for his bizarre statement.
	When Christine O'Donnell ran for Senate years ago in, I believe, Delaware, and there was some weird stuff about witchcraft or something, this was determined to be an issue of chief importance for every Republican to answer to.
	But when a Democrat does something bad, of course, or when the entire Democratic Party does something bad and greenlights it, then of course it does not implicate the entire Democratic Party.
	When Ilhan Omar says openly anti-Semitic stuff, and the Democratic Congress refuses to censure her, When that happens, it doesn't implicate anything.
	They're still the very tolerant, wonderful, and not anti-Semitic party.
	The double standard here is insane.
	It's insane.
	But of course, it is part of a broader agenda, and the broader agenda is to discredit anybody who happens to be of conservative orientation on the back of ideas they do not share and do not believe in.
	On the back of actions that we all find abhorrent.
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	Okay, so again, the idea here is that all Republicans are tied into this entire thing.
	As the Washington Post reports, the central question now hovering over America's political landscape is whether one of its two major parties will allow itself to function as an extension of QAnon and other online conspiracy theory movements that have taken hold with a vocal segment of the GOP, or if it can emerge from the Trump era as a potential governing coalition built around ideas and some shared agreements on facts.
	Oh, that's the question, is it?
	Yes, because there's a great threat.
	The entire Republican Party is going to be taken over by QAnon.
	Sure.
	I also find it amazing, amazing, that the Washington Post says that the central question is whether one of the two major parties is going to be taken over by conspiracy theories.
	The entire Democratic Party is enthralled to a conspiracy theory about the systemic nature of American evil, about how America systemically discriminates against people of color, against minorities, about how America is not a land of freedom, it is a land of oppression and repression.
	That is a conspiracy theory.
	The idea that cops all around the nation are discriminating against black Americans.
	That is a conspiracy theory unsupported by the available evidence.
	And the entire Democratic Party pushes that.
	But only one party is in thrall to a conspiracy theory, and it's a conspiracy theory you can't show that Republicans even believe, this QAnon crap.
	But this is the idea.
	One political party is super bad, and one political party is super good.
	Why?
	It's almost as though that was a pre-existing narrative that the media had been pushing for a while, and now they have the perfect moment in order to unleash that narrative at full strength.
	And there are consequences.
	There are consequences.
	Right?
	I love this.
	The tensions carry echoes of the Tea Party uprising that powered the Republican takeover of Congress a decade ago, when grassroots activists clashed with establishment leadership and pushed the party to the right.
	But the movement exposed by the Capitol riot and its aftermath has taken a far darker and anti-democratic turn.
	A significant minority of the Republican base supports the deadly siege of the Capitol polls show, while many GOP officials continue to advance Trump's false claims about the election and parrot debunked internet theories associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory that have been spread by the president and his allies.
	Hey listen, should Republicans disassociate from the, the election is stolen nonsense?
	Yes.
	Should they have disassociated from that?
	Like, as soon as it became evidence that the, the evidence was not there for that narrative?
	Of course.
	Is that representative of the broad-based Republican Party?
	No.
	No, it's not.
	But you will see, again, this is just the predicate for the action.
	The basis is Republicans are all QAnon, and they're all supporters of the insurrection, and there's a big battle going on, but virtually everybody is on one side.
	There is no such, right, Mitch McConnell is on the side of the rioters.
	It doesn't matter that it was Mitch McConnell standing up to the rioters.
	Kevin McCarthy is on the side of the rioters, even though Kevin McCarthy is now called for censure of the president of the United States.
	They're all on the side of the rioters.
	They're all on the side of conspiracy theories.
	The goal here is to excise from the public debate anybody who disagrees with the broader Democratic agenda.
	Because the Democrats don't want unity over this stuff.
	What they want is unity with some strings attached.
	And those strings attached will be all of their policy preferences.
	We'll get to this in just one second.
	Okay, so, Ted Lieu.
	This is a perfect example.
	So, Ted Lieu of California, who spent years promoting the active conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was a Russian plant.
	So again, I think there should be an investigation of what some members of Congress did.
	night suggesting that the Russian conspiracy stuff was real.
	So Ted Lieu was on CNN yesterday and he suggested that GOP members should be investigated for inciting insurrection.
	There he was.
	So again, I think there should be an investigation of what some members of Congress did.
	And depending on what they did, I believe if they incited an insurrection, they should be prosecuted.
	My general view is that, look, if I'm working, let's say on an infrastructure bill, I welcome anyone who wants to support the infrastructure bill.
	So I'm not going to prevent members, regardless of what party they're in, from supporting or co-sponsoring good bills.
	OK, so if they work with me, they're good.
	If they did something I don't like, then maybe we shouldn't investigate them for inciting insurrection.
	So there's now a conflation going on between Republicans doing a bad thing and Republicans doing an inciting insurrection thing.
	So there are about 140 Republicans in the House who voted to challenge electoral results in places like Arizona.
	I think that's bad.
	I think it is based on non-evidence.
	I think that it was a sign of loyalty to Trump and political convenience more than it was an act of truth.
	I think all of those things.
	I also don't think that that counts as inciting an insurrection, considering that's an active part of the process.
	They may be misusing the process.
	I don't think that Cruz and Hawley are responsible for inciting an insurrection, even though they were doing a thing that I thought was bad and negative and raised tensions and promoted myth-making to the American public.
	I don't believe that that counts as inciting insurrection.
	But the idea, of course, is that if you incite an insurrection, you can be booted from Congress.
	It's a very convenient way of getting rid of your political opponents.
	Meanwhile, Chris Cuomo, legal moron, was on TV suggesting that if you shout fire in a crowded theater, this is all just like shouting fire in a crowded theater.
	So there's Chris Cuomo on CNN pushing a discredited standard of law that hasn't been true for at least half a century.
	There's Chris Cuomo suggesting that if you disagree with him, you're shouting fire in a crowded theater.
	The First Amendment is not designed to allow you to scream fire in a crowded theater.
	And that's what this is.
	Well, I don't know if it's the equivalent of that.
	Telling them to come down?
	Go after them?
	Don't let them certify?
	You know that you can actually scream fire in a crowded theater.
	That's a misnomer, but we don't want to get into that.
	If you do, and then people get hurt, you're going to jail.
	Meanwhile, the House Homeland Security chair now is suggesting that Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley should be put on the no-fly list.
	The no-fly list!
	Benny Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, raised the issue during a Monday morning appearance on SiriusXM's The Joe Madison Show.
	He said there's no question about it.
	He said, first of all, these folks, in my opinion, can be classified as domestic terrorists.
	He's talking about the rioters.
	He says, under normal circumstances, international terrorists are on the no-fly list.
	These are domestic terrorists.
	Same thing.
	A terrorist is a terrorist, no matter who you are.
	And then he suggested that perhaps, perhaps, the people like Howley and Cruz should be on the no-fly list.
	He says, even a member of Congress that commits a crime, you know, they expel from the body.
	There are ethics charges that can be brought against those individuals.
	And people are looking at all this.
	What Howley did, what Cruz did was horrible.
	What?
	The new member from Colorado who basically tweeted directions and everything that was going on?
	That's not something you do.
	Somebody said, well, she's new.
	Well, the point of ignorance in the law is no excuse.
	If you don't know, you've done something wrong.
	Okay, excellent job.
	So law and crime reporting that Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley should be on the no-fly list.
	Yes, that makes perfect sense.
	We're going to put sitting United States senators on the no-fly list because they did a thing that I don't like and that I think is a perversion of the law, but it's not inciting insurrection and is not a crime.
	And that's not how any of this works.
	But the ramifications are going to be far more dire in the private sphere before it gets to the public sphere.
	In the private sphere, there's a lot of wiggle room.
	There's a lot of ability to create a culture of intolerance and a culture of shutdowns and a culture of cancellation.
	There's extraordinary ability to do that in a free country.
	And that's good, generally, that there's extraordinary ability to do that.
	The big problem is that right now what we are watching is a one-sided takeover of virtually all institutional power in the United States, inside and outside of government.
	We're gonna get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so the ramifications of this narrative, which is that anybody remotely associated with Trump at any point in the past must be disassociated from what we are creating is a climate in which half of Americans are basically banned from the auspices of private business.
	That is the direction in which we are moving extraordinarily fast.
	So, to take an example, according to the Associated Press today, corporate America is quickly distancing itself from President Trump and his Republican allies with many of the biggest names in business, Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola, Ford, and Comcast, suspending political donations after a Trump-inspired mob ransacked the U.S.
	Capitol in a deadly and violent spree last Wednesday.
	For now, the move is about affirming the rule of law and the clear results of an election that will elevate Joe Biden to the presidency, but it also signals that companies are growing skittish.
	about lawmakers who backed Trump's false claims of election fraud, possibly depriving Republicans of public backing from business groups who until recently were at the heart of the GOP's political brand.
	This is spreading like wildfire, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale University's Management School who consults with CEOs.
	The US business community has interest fully in alignment with the American public and not with Trump's autocratic, bigoted wing of the GOP.
	Sounds like Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is definitely an objective source here.
	The pausing of donations announced by many companies, including Marriott, American Express, AT&T, JP Morgan Chase, Dow, American Airlines, and others, was unlikely to deliver a serious blow to Republicans in Congress who voted to overturn Biden's win.
	Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, says these are symbolic pledges.
	But here's the thing.
	The symbolism means something, because what it means is it is saying to its own employees, endorse any Republican at your own risk.
	Okay, now, all of these corporations have the ability to give or not give as they see fit.
	It is indeed a free country.
	Again, I'm just gonna point out that if your standard is that you do not give to politicians who are involved in raising rhetorical temperature to the point of violence, then I don't know how you give to anybody in the Democratic Party either.
	I really don't.
	We saw mass violence all throughout this year.
	We have seen threats of violence Carried out against Trump supporters for years on end.
	We have seen this on nearly every side.
	So if the idea here is that you are not, as a corporation, going to subsidize anybody from a party that has made excuses for or justified violence, then it wouldn't only be to one side.
	But these same corporations, in the middle of rioting that overtook hundreds of cities in the middle of the year, Did these corporations pull their donations from the Democratic Party as many as many members of the Democratic Party continued to remain silent about rioting that was burning down local businesses and shutting down cities and resulting in people being kept inside their homes for in L.A.
	a week?
	Did any of these businesses dissociate from any of that?
	No.
	Many of them gave open donations to the Black Lives Matter group, which is a Marxist group.
	Many of these donations encouraged their employees to post black squares in solidarity with all of these causes.
	Many of these same corporations decided that they were going to cater to the woke.
	It happened in every element of American life.
	If you turned on your TV and you wanted to watch something in the middle of the Black Lives Matter riots, I just want to watch something on entertainment.
	You turn on Amazon Prime, and Amazon Prime was recommending to you a bunch of movies that were centered on racial issues.
	If you turn on Netflix, you'd get some messaging about the systemic nature of American barbaric racism.
	There is no way to escape it.
	So corporations are perfectly willing to mirror the conspiracy theories and violence of the left.
	They're just not willing to cater to it on the right.
	Now, that's fine with me if they don't cater to it on the right.
	They shouldn't cater to it on the right.
	But here's the thing.
	They're going to broaden it out because they know what the blowback is going to be.
	Do you think any of these corporations are going to give to Chip Roy?
	So Chip Roy from Texas has been a frequent guest on the program.
	Chip Roy, in the middle of this, he suggested not only was the election not stolen, he asked fellow Republicans To kind of prove the point, to disassociate from their own elections if they thought the election was stolen because the same people who voted on the ballots for them did not vote for Trump.
	You think any of these corporations are going to be donating to Chip Roy in the near future?
	Who thinks they will?
	Who thinks that corporate America is now going to really discern on the basis of which Republicans thought what, how they give their donations, or are they going to move with the general standard pushed by the left that only the Democratic Party can be given to with a sense of decency, and that any corporation that associates in any remote way with the right must be held to account?
	Because after all, the right is all about incitement and the right is all about violence.
	This is nothing new.
	And we've been dealing with this on the right for a very long time.
	It's now just escalated to insane, insane levels.
	We've been dealing with this on the right with regard to folks on the left pushing for advertisers to not work with our show.
	This has happened to nearly everybody on the right.
	Now, we here on The Ben Shapiro Show, we've never asked for a boycott from people at Ponte of America if they say anything we don't like.
	We don't have somebody who's dedicated full-time to listening to left-wing shows and then pushing companies to boycott those shows based on their support for various causes that we find to be bad for the country.
	The left has been doing this for years with regard to the right.
	Well, now they've escalated it and they feel like this is the opportunity to do it.
	And Big Tech is not only not the exception, Big Tech is leading the way in all this, which provides some pretty serious ramifications for the actual practice of free speech.
	See, there's the legal principle of free speech, which is that you have the ability to speak freely.
	And then there's the actual practice of free speech, which is that if you want to speak freely in the public square, there are really only about three or four ways to do it, realistically speaking.
	There's Facebook, and there's Twitter, and there's YouTube, and that's kinda it.
	There are not tons of other ways for you to speak freely.
	You're still at the mercy of the big corporations.
	You can put a podcast up on Apple Podcasts for as long as Apple will allow you to.
	You can have your website hosted, but only as long as Amazon Web Services allows you to.
	So there are only three or four people in key decision-making positions to decide whether a culture of free speech should be allowed to be promulgated in the United States.
	And a culture of free speech really, really is more important than the law regarding free speech.
	If you've got a culture that says, well sure, you can say what you want, but it has to be mainly in the privacy of your own home.
	If you ever do it in public, we're going to shut you down.
	We're going to remove from you the ability to push your views in public.
	What you're gonna end up with is an attack on general politics, sort of like the attack that you've seen on public expression of religion.
	How many companies have been held enthralled to a corporate American view of religion that has basically pushed religion into the private domain?
	You're gonna see the same thing happen with generalized political viewpoint as well.
	Things are gonna get a lot uglier here.
	You know who's even warning about this stuff?
	Honestly?
	You know things have gotten bad when we're now being warned about a crackdown on free speech?
	By the Germans.
	I'm not kidding.
	Angela Merkel is now sounding off on Twitter's ban against Trump.
	She is not a Trump fan, obviously, but she blasted Twitter.
	She said the right of freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance.
	This is Stefan Siebert, Merkel's chief spokesman, telling reporters in Berlin on Monday.
	Given that the chancellor considers it problematic, the president's accounts have been permanently suspended.
	Siebert said that while Twitter was right to flag Trump's inaccurate tweets, banning his account altogether was a step too far.
	Man, when the Germans are lecturing you about free speech, you've gone wildly, wildly wrong.
	By the way, it is not just Angela Merkel.
	It is also a Putin critic named Alexei Navalny.
	Navalny's been an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, very much in favor of free speech.
	He laid out 11 reasons why Twitter's purging of Trump was a dangerous precedent.
	He said, I think the ban of Trump on Twitter is an unacceptable act of censorship.
	He said, yeah, of course Trump is irresponsible.
	Of course he says irresponsible things.
	But he says, in my opinion, the decision to ban Trump was based on emotions and personal political preferences.
	Don't tell me he was banned for violating Twitter rules.
	I get death threats here every day for many years.
	Twitter doesn't ban anyone.
	Among the people who have Twitter accounts are cold-blooded murderers like Putin and Maduro and liars and thieves like Medvedev.
	For many years, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, they've been used as a base for Putin's troll factory and similar groups from other authoritarian countries.
	He's exactly right about all of this.
	We're now being warned by people outside the United States that the United States is too repressive.
	If that's not depressing, I'm not sure what is.
	Okay, we'll get to more of this in just one moment.
	Because again, the push is hardcore.
	We'll also get to impeachment, which Democrats are pushing for a second time in just one second.
	First, let us talk about the fact that you probably don't want to be going to an auto parts store right now, or probably ever.
	Why would you go to an auto parts store?
	Especially because they're going to ask a bunch of questions you don't know the answer to.
	Then, they're going to order a generic part for you that it's going to take three weeks to come online, and they're going to upcharge you for all of that wonderful service.
	Instead, why not just go get the part yourself, cut out the middleman, head on over to rockauto.com.
	RockAuto.com always offers the lowest prices possible, rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear, like the airlines do.
	Why would you spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
	Let's say, hypothetically, just coming up with this, you know, top of my head, because this is the kind of stuff I'm super into, you need like a Delphi FG-1456 fuel pump assembly for a 2005 to 2010 Honda Odyssey.
	That'll cost you like $354 at a big chain store, but at RockAuto.com, that's going to cost you $217.
	RockAuto.com.
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	Amazing selection.
	Go to RockAuto.com right now.
	See all the parts available for your car or truck.
	Write Shapiro in there.
	How did you hear about us box?
	So they know that we sent you.
	That's RockAuto.com.
	Go check them out right now.
	Okay, we're gonna get to more of this in just one second.
	I gotta tell you, the actions of Big Tech last week, they've made it perfectly clear.
	They're gonna do everything they can over the coming months and years to silence opposing voices.
	Any excuse, any excuse is going to be used to silence opposing voices.
	They're out of control.
	A lot of people have been asking us how you can help.
	Well, listen, we've been telling you for a while about our ambitious plans, right?
	Investigative news, entertainment content.
	We're bringing out our first movie later this week.
	With the actions of Big Tech this week, it's clear that this cannot stop there.
	Really, I mean, they literally removed the ability of Parler to exist online.
	They took away their web services.
	So it's not enough for you just to subscribe, right?
	Everybody needs to subscribe over at dailywire.com.
	The reason is because we are now going to have to build or buy tech to protect ourselves from the attack that is coming so that we can continue to deliver new content to you and fight back.
	We're exploring all the possibilities to insulate ourselves from the cancellation of all of these big companies that do not care about freedom of speech.
	We're gonna have to look at new data centers and payment gateways, a lot more.
	We have to build a parallel infrastructure now because you can't trust left-leaning corporations on this stuff.
	Our team is hard at work on this.
	We cannot do all of that with our current budget.
	We are talking about building literally the entire infrastructure that people have been spending decades building.
	We're talking about doing that in short order, which means that we need a lot of your support.
	Okay, the reality, again, of the situation is just that all of the things that we thought we could take for granted, our ability to contract with other companies, That we took it for granted, because everybody took it for granted, and now you are seeing that that is a huge, huge, huge mistake.
	Okay, we need, honestly, to pay for all this kind of stuff, we're gonna need to get up to like a million subscribers, a million members.
	Now, that's not impossible.
	The Washington Post has three million subscribers.
	The New York Times has seven million.
	On the entertainment side, Facebook has like 255 million monthly active users.
	Netflix has 73 million subscribers.
	Well, if you want us to challenge them, and if you need us to be able to insulate ourselves so that we actually can challenge them, we need your membership.
	If you believe in what we've done so far, but you just haven't been able to actually get a membership, it's important to step up, if you can, and help us win the fight.
	If you think that your freedoms are at stake as big tech cracks down, and it's gonna get worse over the coming years, okay?
	Because the Democrats are going to use their leverage now to force big tech to do their bidding.
	That's what they've been doing for years.
	They've been threatening it.
	The Republicans stood in their way.
	Now, they control all aspects of the government.
	Well, now is your chance to fight back.
	You have to join Daily Wire to do so.
	We honestly don't know what they're gonna hit us with next, which means we have to prep for all available possibilities.
	Whatever it is, we are going to beat them.
	As long as you stand with us, we are going to win.
	So, go become a member at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	Tell all of your friends to do the same.
	These big tech bros are not our friends.
	They are going to wait until the most plausible possible moment to shut us down.
	We have to prepare for it.
	If you like our content, we need your help.
	Please head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	Tell your friends to do the same.
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	We have a bunch of open positions right now.
	We are looking for an HR manager.
	So head on over to dailywire.com right now.
	You can check that out.
	You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	So by the way, if you thought that all of the censorship stuff was a little bit too on the nose, well now we are in the realm of actual book burn-ins.
	So, over the last 24 hours, Antifa demanded that Powell's Books in Portland shut down the store if they carried Andy Ngo's book on Antifa.
	So there are people in the mainstream media pushing for this.
	I mean, Sarah Zhang of the New York Times, she was pushing for Andy Ngo to be banned from Twitter.
	Why?
	What was his grave crime?
	He would go to these Antifa rallies, he would film the Antifa rallies, he'd put up the tape of the Antifa rallies, and then he would identify with the photos the people who had been arrested at the Antifa rallies.
	And when I say rallies, I mean riots.
	Okay, but now Antifa showed up at this Portland store called Powell's Books, and they demanded that the store stop selling unmasked inside Antifa's radical plan to destroy democracy.
	That's the book by Andy.
	The protests forced the store to close early.
	Powell's then announced it would not carry the book in its physical store, though it would still be available for purchase online.
	The book will not be on our store shelves.
	We will not promote it, said Powell's.
	That said, it will remain in our online catalog.
	We carry books that we find anywhere from Simply Distasteful or Badly Written to Excrable, as well as those we treasure.
	We believe it is the work of bookselling to do so.
	So here are some Antifa protesters outside Powell's books explaining that if they stopped the release of the book, that would be like stopping the release of Mein Kampf.
	Here's some of that footage.
	Stop selling Andy Ngo's book!
	How can you let the O.M. section?
	Stop selling Andy Ngo's book!
	Yeah, nothing quite says anti-fascism like, in fascist fashion, closing a bookstore because someone was writing about how terrible you are.
	bar.
	Go, Fog!
	By the way, it's absolute cowardice for Powell's to remove the book from the actual shelves, right?
	That in and of itself is absolute cowardice on an extraordinary level.
	I mean, it is a bookstore.
	If the idea here is that bookstores can only carry books that the left agrees with, Just like it is the idea here that Facebook is only allowed to allow posts that Facebook agrees with, or Twitter is only allowed to allow posts that Twitter agrees with.
	And not only that, if you are an outlet that does not implement the same standards as Facebook or Twitter does, with regard to its policing of content, that you can have your web service removed, the culture of free speech is dead.
	And then once the culture of free speech is dead, then it's just a question as to when the law changes.
	Because the law always follows the culture.
	The minute that the culture of free speech dies in America, it's really just the Supreme Court standing between the left and the destruction of actual legal free speech in the country.
	And we've had articles from people who are now going to be in the Biden administration talking openly about why we need to adopt European standards with regard to free speech, i.e.
	banning quote-unquote hate speech, meaning stuff that the left doesn't like very often.
	Hate speech encompasses everything from actual horrible speech to things like saying that a transgender man is actually still a biological woman.
	If it were not for the barrier of the First Amendment, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, there's no question the left would be pushing for this stuff incredibly, incredibly hard right now.
	On the basis of, all of this is a danger, all of this is incitement.
	Everything is incitement.
	Remember, this argument is old.
	Just because of what happened at the Capitol does not mean that this is a new argument.
	It's been an old argument.
	People were trying to shut down my speeches at places like Berkeley, requiring 600 police officers because they were suggesting that me standing in favor of free speech was actually fascism, right?
	Because words are violence.
	Words are violence, is literally what they were chanting.
	They were chanting, speech is violence.
	The Punch a Nazi movement that started a few years ago was also completely reliant on the idea that all of your fellow citizens are Nazis if they disagree with you.
	That is the direction the culture is moving.
	Okay, so let's say that you wished to unify.
	Let's say that you wished to come together and promise unity.
	Well, at that point, wouldn't you say, listen, we should all be on the same page about some fundamental principles.
	Fundamental principles like freedom of speech.
	Fundamental principles like, yes, the truth matters.
	And yes, you should acknowledge when an election has not been stolen.
	And yes, you should not push bad legal analysis.
	You should not do any of that, but this is all under the rubric of free speech.
	And that has to be protected as well.
	And it's our job to speak out more convincingly and more loudly.
	It's amazing to me that folks have said there are no consequences to Trump's prevarications over the past few years.
	There's no consequences to Trump being Trump.
	It seems like there's a pretty major consequence.
	That major consequence would be he's not going to be president January 20th.
	I mean, that's a pretty major consequence, is it not?
	He is the first president of the United States not to win re-election since George H.W.
	Bush in 1992.
	And he's the first president of the United States not to win re-election without a major third-party candidate taking 15 to 20 percent of the vote since Jimmy Carter in 1980.
	Okay, he lost the popular vote by 7 million votes.
	It seems like that's a pretty significant backlash to many of the problems to Trump personally, especially given the fact that Republicans out-balloted Trump nearly everywhere around the country.
	There was almost a personal rebuke to Trump by the American voter.
	But again, the idea here from the left is that we can't have unity unless you do things we want.
	So Joe Biden is now promising unity.
	Joe Biden has announced that that will be his theme.
	America united.
	Which is fine!
	Again, I would like for there to be some unity around some shared principle.
	That would be good.
	And again, I think those shared principles can be broad things, like we believe in freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and we should leave each other alone, and we should basically be nice to each other, right?
	All of these things, I think, are fairly broad.
	How about basic declaration of independence principles?
	Freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, right?
	These are all things that we should be in favor of.
	There is only one problem, which is that there are going to be some strings attached.
	So, Senator Ron Wyden has a piece over at NBC News in which he suggests that the only way for us to come back together is if you do a bunch of stuff that Senator Ron Wyden would like.
	He says that we need to change the law, right?
	That's the key.
	He says that what we need to do is we need a new Voting Rights Act He says that we require the addition of Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.
	as states.
	He says we need universal mail-in balloting.
	This is how we're going to achieve unity.
	He says that the way to combat the violence that we just saw is, wait a second, wait for it, wait for it, all the things he wants to do.
	Shock.
	He says, unless there's a grassroots mobilization, it will be a challenge to get significant Republican support for these proposals.
	But the alternative is to proceed further with a dangerous status quo, one that got us a tyrant in the White House, a violent attack on the Capitol, and an attempt to overturn the will of millions of voters by violence and executive fiat.
	Our democracy is fragile.
	Democrats have an obligation to strengthen it.
	So the way that you stop what happened at the Capitol building is for making Washington, D.C.
	a state, making Puerto Rico a state, universal mail-in balloting, And a new Voting Rights Act that requires pre-clearance for all districts Democrats don't like.
	Oh, so what you mean by unity is shut the hell up.
	What you mean by unity is watch as we rig all the instruments of government in our favor by adding four senators, presumably Democrats, willy-nilly, by ensuring that the federal government now gets to screen red states, predominantly red states, for congressional redistricting.
	And you know, just as like a side matter, if you could like do all these other things we want also, that'd be great.
	Universal mail-in balloting.
	Yeah, it's all unity, except by unity they mean do all the things we want to do, and then we can have unity.
	Right, Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote a piece in the Washington Post arguing exactly this.
	Right, she said that Wednesday's attack on the Capitol was the tragically predictable result of white supremacist grievances fueled by Trump, but his departure from office will not solve the deeper problems exposed by the episode.
	And then she compares what happened to 9-11 proper, right?
	She says, almost 20 years later, we are living through another failure of imagination, the failure to account for the damage that can be done to our nation by a president who incites violence, congressional leaders who fan the flames, and social media platforms that sear conspiracy theories into the minds of Trump supporters.
	So by unity, she means we're gonna have to shut all this stuff down, shut all of it down.
	It's not enough to scrutinize the domestic terrorists.
	We need to do soul searching on a broad American level, and we need to stop anybody who disagrees with Hillary Clinton.
	That sounds like a unifying message, guys.
	Totally unifying.
	Okay, speaking of unifying messages, Democrats are now looking at impeachment, of course.
	So they've proposed a one-article impeachment proposal.
	They're accusing him of incitement of insurrection.
	Here is the resolution, the second impeachment resolution, which presumably will be passed today by a Democratic Congress.
	Resolve that Donald John Trump, President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors and the following article of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate.
	Article of impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States in the name itself and of the people of the United States.
	Article 1.
	The Constitution provides that the House of Representatives shall have the sole power of impeachment and that the president shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery, other high crimes and misdemeanors.
	Further, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits any person who is engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States from holding any office under the United States.
	In his conduct, while President of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional oath, faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States, and to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, defend the Constitution, in violation of his constitutional duty to take care of the laws, be faithfully executed, Donald John Trump engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors by inciting violence against the United States government in that.
	On January 6th, pursuant to the 12th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, the VP, House of Representatives, and Senate met at the United States Capitol for a joint session of Congress to count the votes of the Electoral College.
	This is all the impeachment charge the Democrats are bringing against Trump.
	In the months preceding the joint session, President Trump repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by state and federal officials.
	Shortly before the joint session commenced, President Trump addressing a crowd at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., There, he reiterated false claims that we won this election and we won it by a landslide.
	He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged and foreseeably resulted in lawless action at the Capitol, such as, if you don't fight like hell, you're not gonna have a country anymore.
	Okay, um, that is about the vaguest political statement in the world.
	I mean, like, really.
	You can find Nearly every major American politician talking about fighting for things.
	It's a staple diet of American politics.
	Does that mean that Trump wasn't being irresponsible?
	No.
	Does that mean that he was actively inciting violence, which is the charge here?
	It's going to be very, very difficult to prove that if this ever gets to a Senate trial, which again, I'm doubtful that it will considering the timeline here.
	It's going to be extraordinarily difficult to prove that Trump, who said in the speech that people should peacefully protest outside the Capitol building, meant invade the Capitol building, hogtie the Vice President of the United States, and overthrow the federal government.
	It's going to be a very difficult stretch for proof in the United States Senate.
	So, thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Sessions' solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced members of Congress, the VP, and congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts.
	President Trump's conduct followed his prior efforts to subvert and obstruct The certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election.
	Those prior efforts included a phone call on January 2nd, 2021, during which Trump urged the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to find enough votes to overturn the Georgia presidential election results and threaten Secretary Raffensperger if he failed to do so.
	We talked about that call at the time.
	It was both a bad call and also he didn't have anything he could threaten Raffensperger with.
	And frankly, it sounds like he was just repeating a bunch of the conspiratorial nonsense about tens of thousands of votes being hidden or fraudulently cast, and he believes his own press when it comes to this sort of stuff.
	So it wasn't about manufacturing votes, it was about quote-unquote finding votes Trump believed existed, even though that happens to be not true in the remotest detail.
	In all this, says the impeachment charge, Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government.
	He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled the co-equal branch of government.
	And so he should be impeached and removed from office.
	That is the article of impeachment, which presumably is going to be passed today by the House Democrats.
	Now, is that going to go anywhere?
	No, it's not going to go anywhere because the fact of the matter is that in order for the Senate to even come back into session, you have to have an agreement from both Schumer and McConnell to do that.
	Second, even if it were to come back into session, you then have to have an actual Senate trial.
	The Senate trial is going to have witnesses.
	It is going to delve into detail about the attempted insurrection and what was the connection to Trump personally.
	Right?
	The consequences to Trump are, forget about impeachment right now, the idea that Trump has suffered no consequences.
	Trump is a pariah, right?
	Okay, politically speaking, he is a pariah.
	What this means is that Trump is basically, I mean, his own party has basically turned on him.
	He has essentially been cast from the public square.
	He has a 33% approval rating right now.
	He lost his election.
	He's not coming back.
	All of that is the consequence of the rhetoric that he has shown over the past couple of months.
	All of that is the consequence of the stuff that he has been saying.
	And by the way, Kevin McCarthy is proposing what I think is probably a better solution to all of this, which is censure.
	A censure is a congressional censure that basically it's a note chiding whomever it is.
	The Democrats didn't pass a note of censure against Ilhan Omar, for example, but that's what a censure is.
	So Kevin McCarthy, who is the House Minority Leader, he put out a letter to his fellow Republicans He says, Having spoken to so many of you, I know we are all taking time to process the events of that day.
	Please know I share your anger and your pain.
	Zip ties were found on staff desks in my office, windows were smashed in, property was stolen.
	Those images will never leave us.
	I thank our men and women in law enforcement who continue to protect us and are working to bring the sick individuals who perpetrated these attacks to justice.
	In the same breath, I've also heard profound resolve from our conference in the face of this evil.
	Personally, I continue to believe that an impeachment at this time would have the opposite effect of bringing the country together when we need to get America back on a path toward unity and civility.
	Notwithstanding the Speaker's push for an impeachment, I have heard from members across our conference who have raised at least four potential avenues to the House to ensure that the events of January 6th are rightfully denounced.
	These include a resolution of censure under the rules of the House, a bipartisan commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding the attack, Reforming the Electoral Counts Act of 1887 to clarify what the process is, and legislation to promote voter confidence in future federal elections.
	That seems to make an awful lot of sense to me.
	A resolution of censure for Trump's behavior I think is perfectly within bounds, I think it is perfectly plausible, and it makes a lot of sense.
	Is impeachment the proper solution, especially given the fact that we are not talking about months until he is out of office, we are talking about literally one week until he is out of office?
	I think that that is likely not only to not be successful, I think it is likely to carry on beyond the election, which is, of course, what many Democrats are proposing.
	Jim Clyburn wants this to carry on for months so that this can continue to be used as sort of a cudgel against Republicans more broadly.
	But bottom line here is that impeachment, if it's urgent enough that it needs to be done right now, then Democrats should have passed this thing, like, as of last Friday.
	Democrats should have pushed this thing to the floor extremely fast.
	Instead, they were waiting until Wednesday to vote on it.
	They wanted to encourage Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment.
	Nancy Pelosi did something that probably is not super constitutional.
	She encouraged the Joint Chiefs of Staff to basically end around Trump in case of some sort of national crisis, which actually amounts to, legally speaking, an infringement of the executive power, obviously.
	Here's the bottom line.
	Is impeachment Is some form of censure of the president merited on the basis of what we have seen?
	Yes, of course.
	Is impeachment the proper solution with one week to go?
	I don't think that it is.
	I don't think you can make the legal case that it is.
	Again, high crimes and misdemeanors requires like a crime or a misdemeanor.
	Trump ain't gonna get charged in a court of law on this stuff.
	Things can be bad without them being fully criminal.
	And for those who keep saying, you know, we need to stop this sort of thing from happening in the future.
	Okay, first of all, this sort of thing happening in the future, I can guarantee you we're never going to have giant riots at the Capitol building again.
	That's not going to happen again, too.
	Trump has been defeated.
	He is leaving.
	Right, we have a week to go.
	So if you actually want unity at this point, here's what we should do.
	We should look at the country as a whole, and we should recognize that our fellow citizens are generally not in favor of rioting at the Capitol or threatening the Vice President of the United States.
	We should recognize that this difficult moment is a difficult moment, that we have some soul-searching to do as a country, but not because all of our fellow citizens are racist or white supremacists or bigots who are awful people.
	The soul-searching we have to do is what are the principles that we wish to hold in common?
	And I think that does require some soul-searching on the right about the willingness to confront confirmation bias, about the willingness to accept facts as they are presented.
	And I think that after that is done, and I think there is an order to this, I think the right has to lead the way because obviously what we saw was an element of the right doing this.
	But I think that the left has some soul-searching to do of its own.
	What is not going to work here is unilateral soul-searching on one side and triumphalism on the other.
	That is not geared toward healing the country in any serious way.
	And in the context of that, in the context of the search for unity, we're all gonna have to recommit ourselves to some first basic principles.
	Yes, on the right, basic principles of fact-finding and belief in fact, and understanding that evidence is necessary for claims.
	On the left, you're gonna have to do the same thing with regard to some of your stuff.
	You're also gonna have to respect the right of people to disagree with you after examining the facts.
	Because if what this comes down to is just stomp your opponents whenever you have an opportunity to do so, this stuff is gonna get a lot worse.
	It is not gonna get better anytime in the near future.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
	In the meantime, head on over to The Ben Shapiro Show.
	He discusses Twitter removing 70,000 QAnon accounts.
	You can hear more details about that story over on Michael's show that is available right now.
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	House Democrats try to impeach President Trump.
	Andrew Cuomo finally promises to open up New York.
	And Kamala graces the cover of Vogue.

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