Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Jan. 15, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:07:03

They’re Coming For You | Ep. 1174

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	The media swivel from impeachment and attack Republicans across the board.
	The Twitter mob misidentifies a Capitol riot suspect.
	And Politico staff go wild after I write the morning playbook.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show on my birthday.
	Well, happy birthday to me.
	It is indeed my birthday.
	And I am right now, as we speak, achieving the coveted birthday Twitter trend three-peat.
	That's correct.
	Three days in a row I've trended on Twitter because the world is so unbelievably stupid.
	We've had two impeachments in a year.
	We had a riot at the Capitol building.
	And yet I have now trended three separate times in the last three days for three specifically unbelievably stupid reasons.
	I'm gonna explain all of it in just one second.
	First, The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Protect your online privacy today at expressvpn.com.
	Well, I'm looking forward to my birthday gift this year, but if you need to get somebody a birthday gift, let me tell you about an unbelievable birthday gift or a gift for yourself.
	I am talking, of course, about the Presto Dorothy Cold Brew.
	Okay, this thing is just awesome.
	Okay, it's fantastic.
	We have robots that vacuum floors and lamps that respond to commands.
	Waiting 12 to 24 hours for cold brew doesn't make any sense.
	The waiting is now over.
	Let me introduce you to the Presto Dorothy rapid cold brew maker.
	I've been guzzling coffee like nobody's business.
	And now I've gotten very into cold brew coffee.
	Why?
	Well, because it's not as acidic.
	It's not as bitter.
	It's just, it's better.
	And the thing about cold brew is that normally you have to wait for the actual coffee grounds to sort of seep and all this.
	That's not what the Presto Dorothy does.
	The Presto Dorothy is awesome.
	It makes delicious cold brew in minutes.
	Dorothy uses a tornado to spin coffee grounds through water to make cold brew fast.
	The brew is smooth and flavorful because the grounds are never exposed to the high temperatures that extract acids.
	It's those acids that make traditional brewed coffee bitter and irritate stomachs.
	The Dorothy is super easy to use.
	You insert the stirring cup into the carafe, you place the carafe on the power base, you add water to the line, you turn the knob halfway, and then a tornado magically forms.
	My kids are super into this part.
	And then you just pour in 2 thirds of a cup of medium ground coffee.
	Let the coffee swirl to the desired strength.
	It's like 10 minutes for a flavorful, lighter brew.
	20 minutes for full strength.
	30 minutes for ultra strong.
	Then you turn it off and you let the coffee rest for 5 minutes.
	Then you just attach the plunger with the filter.
	You press down slowly and evenly.
	You filter the coffee.
	You pour it over ice, you add milk or cream, you sweeten the taste, and you enjoy that over-the-rainbow moment.
	You see, it's called the Dorothy because of the tornado.
	The coffee is just awesome.
	My brother-in-law, Jacob, who is a big coffee aficionado, I had him try out this machine.
	He was raving about it.
	This is a fantastic, awesome product.
	Head on over to www.getdorothy.com.
	That is G-E-T Dorothy dot com.
	Click buy now, add to cart, enter promo code Ben to get 10% off and free shipping.
	That's www.getdorothy.com.
	Promo code Ben at checkout.
	Go check them out right now.
	Okay, so I have been arguing for a week at this point, much longer than that more broadly speaking, but certainly since the Capitol riot, that the country could come together around a few common propositions.
	Propositions like political violence is bad.
	Propositions like you shouldn't tell lies about what Congress can and cannot do.
	Propositions like if you're going to make a broad scale argument about the United States or about the American system, you should have evidence to back those suggestions.
	And arguments like if there are people on the other side who do really bad things, Then, typically, you should assume that most of the people on the other side are not in favor of those bad things, unless they remain silent in the face of those bad things, or unless they express support for those bad things, right?
	These seem like these should be fairly common, well-accepted bipartisan principles, except they're not.
	Except they're not.
	Because what has happened in the aftermath of the Capitol riot is a wide-scale attempt by many on the left, particularly in the media, to lump together every single person on the right with the Capitol rioters.
	And a lot of that is driving the sort of drive for impeachment.
	See, the thing is that you can make the argument that Trump did something impeachable here.
	I have a lot of friends on the right who have made that argument.
	There are people in Congress ranging from Liz Cheney to certain senators like Pat Toomey who have made that argument.
	I don't find the argument completely unconvincing.
	I have friends in the commentariat ranging from the folks over at the Wall Street Journal to Commentary Magazine to National Review who have argued in some detail why they think that Trump's conduct over the past couple of months has been impeachable.
	And while I may disagree with some of their analysis, I can't pretend that there is no basis for the ire or for the outrage or even for the argument itself.
	But here is the thing.
	What we are seeing on the left is an attempt to broaden out the argument about impeachment so that it broadly applies.
	It applies too broadly.
	When I was in law school.
	There's a professor in contract, and he used to use a phrase over and over and over again, which was, an argument proves too much.
	An argument that proves too much.
	What an argument that proves too much means is that there are certain arguments that you make that are specific to the circumstance, and then there are arguments that you make that actually are so broad that they encompass a bunch of stuff that you don't intend.
	So, if you were to make the argument, for example, that President Trump does bad things and bad things are impeachable.
	That was your entire argument.
	You'd say it's an argument that proves too much, because everybody does bad things, and you can't impeach everybody.
	Right, so whenever you set a standard, the standard should be equally applicable, it should be neutral, and it should be applied really only to the situations where it is in effect.
	Okay, the problem for the left is they are now making arguments that prove too much.
	What they are saying is that not only is what happened at the Capitol riot awful and evil, true, Not only is it that President Trump was saying untrue things about what Congress could do or about voter fraud or about the stolen election.
	True.
	What they are saying is that it was perfectly foreseeable that what happened at the Capitol riot was going to happen from the moment that Trump got on the escalator and that every Republican, every single Republican, whoever participated in anything, with Trump is responsible for this, and not only responsible for it, knew it was coming and looked the other way because anyone of intelligence and good heart could tell that this was going to end with bloodshed at the Capitol building.
	Now, first of all, that's just nonsense.
	It's nonsense.
	It was a very, very unlikely scenario what happened last week, which is why everyone, including Capitol Police, was taken by surprise.
	That is not to minimize the evil.
	That's to point out what an abject evil it is.
	I think that the most expected outcome of the election after Trump lost, in terms of his behavior based on his character, was that he was going to bitch and moan about it for a couple of months, that he was going to continually suggest that the election was not properly settled based on information that was not true, some people were going to buy into it, and then he would leave.
	Right?
	I think that the institutions had hemmed him in for four years.
	I think most people, right, left, and center, actually believed that that's what was going to go on.
	And that basically was what had been happening up until the moment that the Capitol was breached.
	Does that relieve Trump of responsibility for his bad comments?
	No.
	Does it mean that he is responsible for incitement?
	Also no.
	I have a very strict standard when it comes to incitement.
	Unless you are telling people to go into acts of violence, because I'm trying to be as tailored as possible here so we can have a neutral standard like I discussed.
	Well, then it's not incitement.
	It can be bad language that raises the temperature.
	It can be something ugly.
	Okay, but again, the argument that the left is making, the argument Democrats are making, members of the media are making, is that this was the natural culmination of four years of Trumpism, and thus anyone who was even tangentially linked to Trump in any way must be cast aside, must be thrown out of the body politic.
	And so when Republicans are being asked what they feel about impeachment, they are being asked essentially in their interpretation, which I think doubting the motives of the left in this case is probably good practice, Their interpretation is signing their own political death warrant because they're being asked not about Trump's specific behavior.
	They're being asked to pass a referendum on themselves.
	They're being asked to admit that they knew this was going to happen and didn't care if this happened.
	And that is a lie.
	It is not true.
	Now, there's a lot of support for this particular position that I'm taking, this sort of analysis.
	First of all, I talk to Republicans on a daily basis, literally millions of them on a daily basis with this show.
	I hear from thousands of you every single week and hundreds of you every single day on topics like this.
	So I feel like I have a pretty good window into what the right is thinking on this.
	And if I want a window into what the left is thinking, all I have to do is flip on MSNBC or CNN.
	And the media have been repeating this argument ad nauseum, right?
	This is the media's argument.
	It is that.
	This was never just about Trump, you see.
	This is about a deep and abiding phenomenon inside the Republican Party, inside conservative circles, and that everybody who is even slightly right of center is complicit in all of this.
	So here is just a mashup by our friends over at Grabien of a variety of media figures who essentially are blaming every conservative, every person who voted for Trump, every Trump supporter for what happened at the Capitol riots.
	This is a huge problem.
	If you're looking to end political polarization, you have to assume that people on the other side aren't inherently bad.
	But unfortunately, the Capitol riots are being used, not surprisingly, as a rationale for castigating everybody you disagree with as morally decrepit and morally defunct.
	This has been going on, by the way, long before Trump.
	I wrote a book called Bullies in 2013, all about how this was the left's argument going back to then, right?
	I mean, that was several years before Trump was even a glint in the public imagination, so far as presidential politics was concerned.
	In any case, here's a brief mashup of just some of the people on cable news who have been making exactly this argument.
	Each of these people should be shamed, and they're going to go back, you know, to the Olive Garden and to the Holiday Inn that they're staying at.
	I wonder if you have thought through kind of how Republicans begin what someone on my team earlier today called debathification.
	Look, I think the challenge is that the rot is from the grassroots all the way to the presidency.
	So the rot is at every layer.
	There are millions of Americans.
	Almost all white, almost all Republicans who somehow need to be deprogrammed.
	They need to be deprogrammed.
	It's debathification, right?
	They're just like the members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party.
	That's the kind of language that Joy Reid is using.
	And this kind of argument is extremely common in the press right now.
	Paul Krugman wrote an entire piece about how this was the natural consequence of 30 years of Republican malfeasance.
	Well, we heard from Thomas Friedman that he's happy that Trump is, quote unquote, breaking apart the Republican Party because it deserves to happen.
	Plus, hey, you know, we might be able to get our Democratic agenda through if the party fragments.
	Right.
	So when Republicans and conservatives look at the impeachment charge, As always, and this has become, when Trump was elected, I said all Democrats had to do was not be crazy.
	That's all they had to do.
	And then they proceeded to be absolutely crazy, right?
	Then they proceeded to, by the way, this is not exculpatory for people in Trump's camp who have also gone crazy.
	There are many people in Trump's camp.
	Not like a few, but not everybody.
	There are many people in Trump's camp who believe things that are simply not true.
	Okay, but the left has also gone insane to the extent that they were pushing Russian collusion, hoax, nonsense for four years, to the extent that they were greenlighting rioting during the summer and pretending that this was some sort of racial reckoning moment for the United States.
	That was a broad, almost universally accepted tautology for nearly everybody on the left.
	And to the extent that now they're trying to label everybody a fellow traveler with rioters in order to excise them from the public debate.
	It's bad and it's ugly.
	And so what it means is that when people look at any single question, they are not being asked to answer the single question.
	I've been saying this for a while.
	There's a lot of polling data.
	Every time Trump would tweet something dumb or something bad, there'd be some snap poll and it'd be like, many Republicans approve of what Trump said.
	And what I kept saying about these polls is that That is certainly a plausible way of reading the poll.
	Here's another plausible way of reading the poll.
	When people snap to a, are asked in a snap poll what they think of what Trump did, what they hear is, you are a bad person if you support Trump in any way, what do you think of you?
	Right?
	And the reason they've done that is because the media have so, it's a reactionary move and people shouldn't do that, but that is how people react.
	And the fact is that when you lump everybody on the right in with every bad thing Trump does, and then you say, This is what you like most.
	What you like most about him is all the bad stuff that he does.
	People on the right go, you know what?
	Middle finger.
	Trump is a giant pulsating middle finger.
	He continues to be that and so long as the left lumps everybody together, this is going to continue.
	Again, this preceded Trump because they did this long before Trump.
	They've been demonizing Republicans as racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes literally as long as I've been in politics, which is since I was 17 years old.
	And I'm sure before then.
	Okay, we're gonna get to more of this in just one second, because this has, again, real ramifications for your life.
	It is the underlying polarization that's tearing away at America, and it was proved in extraordinary colors by our friends, the staff over at Politico.
	We're gonna get to that in just one moment.
	That was the second reason that I trended this week.
	The first reason I trended this week, by the way, in case you were wondering, I hit the coveted birthday three-peat today.
	I trended three times in three days, which I've never heard of that before, so that's pretty fun.
	I trended earlier this week because some reporter for the New York Times was tweeting about zip ties and was like, does anybody even own zip ties?
	Not zip cuffs, not zip cuffs, right?
	Not restraints.
	Zip ties, like who even owns zip ties?
	And I was like, like everybody owns zip ties.
	And so the entire media took this to mean that I was making excuses for people running through the Capitol building with zip ties, trying to hamstring Congress people and take them hot, which is like, have you listened to five seconds of the show?
	Have you read anything I have ever written?
	Okay, so that was reason number one.
	Reason number two is Politico.
	We're gonna get to that in just one second.
	First, let us talk about keeping yourself safe and secure.
	So, if you're feeling insecure these days, it makes a lot of sense to make sure that you know what's happening at your house, what's happening at your doorstep.
	It's also great to keep track of what's happening at your house because Many of us had a lot of activity going on in our house.
	I have three kids under seven, and that means that I have to spend an awful lot of time keeping an eye on them.
	I have two eyes.
	I have three children, and they are basically wildebeest.
	I mean, they just run to and fro, breaking things.
	I need to keep an eye on them.
	This is where Ring comes in.
	So much happens at our house.
	I want Ring devices.
	This is why now is a perfect time to upgrade your doorstep with the Ring Video Doorbell with Ring.
	You can see and speak to whoever's at the door from anywhere right on your phone.
	By the way, for me, this comes in handy, not just in terms of who's at the door, But also, the Ring video doorbell will actually chime every time somebody's on the front door.
	So if one of my kids tries to run out the front door and onto the street, I know what exactly is going on.
	You're not going to miss a visitor, whether it's your neighbor, your dinner, or your groceries, and you can keep the packages and deliveries safe.
	And with motion detection, you'll get notified even if they don't ring the doorbell.
	If somebody stops by or if something is going on, Ring will let you know.
	I love having that Ring video doorbell.
	I've added some Ring security cameras around the house as well.
	No matter your home, Ring has everything you need to protect it.
	See and speak to whoever's at the door from anywhere with video doorbells.
	Keep an eye on every corner of your house with those easy to install indoor and outdoor cams and protect your whole home with Ring Alarm right now.
	Got a special offer on the Ring Welcome Kit at ring.com slash ben.
	It comes with that Ring Video Doorbell 3 and Chime Pro.
	It is the perfect way to upgrade your front door and start your Ring experience.
	Go to ring.com slash ben.
	That is ring.com slash ben.
	Okay, so.
	As I say, the broader media argument that everybody on the right is culpable for what happened in the Capitol riots, and therefore, everybody on the right should be excised, this sort of came to a bizarre culmination with regard to Politico.
	So, a couple of weeks ago, I was approached by somebody in upper management at Politico who shall remain nameless for the safety of their career.
	And they asked me to write the political playbook.
	So for those who are not Washington DC insidery, the political playbook is this thing that's been around since like 2007.
	It's sort of the morning briefing for a lot of people on Capitol Hill.
	I'm not going to say that it's like super widely disseminated.
	Our website Daily Wire has much, much more traffic than the playbook, but it's sort of prestigious, right?
	It's a prestigious thing from Politico.
	Well, The authors of Politico's playbook at the end of last year decided they weren't going to write the political playbook anymore.
	And so they've been trying to figure out who's going to write it.
	And in the meantime, they've been doing this kind of cavalcade of comedy stars.
	Basically, they have a famous person and write the political playbook each day.
	And they rotate it.
	So about three weeks ago, it was before the beginning of the new year, somebody from Politico approached me and they said, would you like to write the political playbook one morning?
	I said, that sounds like fun.
	You know, it's kind of a cool thing.
	Like I've been kind of a fan of the playbook for a long time, because again, inside politics, inside baseball kind of stuff.
	Sounds like a cool thing.
	I sort of consulted internally with other people at the business, and we thought this is kind of a fun, neat thing, and a good way to do a little bipartisan stuff at the beginning of the year.
	So, last week, all hell broke loose, right?
	The world just explodes.
	And I called up the guy at Politico, and I was like, I'm really busy right now.
	I'm not sure that I can actually do this.
	Because, like, things are kind of crazy.
	And he said, no, you know, we already slated you in.
	We really would love for you to do it.
	We hope you'll reconsider.
	On Monday, I thought, you know what, I actually did make the commitment and it's kind of a jerky thing to pull out like, you know, four days, five days in advance.
	So sure, I'll go, I'll go ahead and do that.
	And I warned him, by the way, the first day that I talked to this person at Politico, I warned them, you're going to have a riot on your hands.
	I mean, people, figuratively speaking, you're going to have people inside your staff who are going to get angry at you.
	They're going to yell at you.
	Twitterverse will go insane because the rule on Twitter and on the left is that anybody who talks to me You know, me.
	I'm about as mainstream Republican, mainstream conservative as possible to be, as people can attest who listen to the show.
	You know, and I've been highly critical of Trump.
	None of that matters.
	None of that matters.
	If you associate with me, if you breathe in the same room that I do, then you are castigated, widely castigated, reviled online.
	The blowback is intense.
	So you can have Nicole Hannah-Jones writing absolute falsehoods for the New York Times.
	I will never be asked to write an op-ed for the op-ed page of the New York Times.
	And that's especially true in an era when you can literally be fired as an op-ed editor of the New York Times running an article from a sitting United States Senator like Tom Cotton.
	So I've had this experience many times before, where somebody from the left wants to get together or do something, and then they end up just blown out by the internet over it.
	Most famously, this happened with an actor named Mark Duplass.
	Mark Duplass You'll recognize from such things as new girl, and he directs his own movies, very talented guy.
	And maybe a few years back, Mark approaches me and he says, I'm making a new film and it's got it's about gun control and gun violence.
	And I wanted to hear like a good pro Second Amendment argument.
	And so I emailed him back.
	I said.
	Feel free to stop on by the studio.
	We'll spend a little time together and I'll sort of explain the right-wing perspective, the conservative perspective, the constitutionalist perspective on what the Second Amendment represents.
	So you don't step into any potholes.
	And I thought this is kind of a good thing to do.
	I mean, it would be great if Hollywood would represent the pro-Second Amendment side of the aisle with some level of veracity.
	So Mark comes in, very nice guy.
	We spend about, we were slated for half an hour.
	I blew off a couple of meetings.
	I spent an hour and a half with him explaining sort of the conservative perspective on the world, the conservative perspective on gun rights.
	Okay, so as he's leaving, I turned to him and I said, listen, you seem like a really nice guy.
	Never tell any of your friends you've been here.
	Like seriously, just don't say anything because you don't understand.
	People on the left, I can say to my heart's content that people on the left hang out with me and people on my side don't care because they understand that there can be such a thing as disagreement.
	But if you even utter my name, it's like Voldemort, if you utter my name, nothing good is going to happen.
	It's about three weeks later, Mark Duplass, this actor, in a fit of decency, decides to tweet something out.
	And what he tweeted out was something really innocuous.
	It was like, you know, I know a lot of you disagree with Ben Shapiro.
	I disagree with Ben Shapiro a lot, too.
	But he once did an act of kindness for me out of nothing but just a sense of decency.
	And he's a person who's worth listening to.
	Maybe give him a follow.
	He got hit so hard from the left that not only did he pull down the tweet, he then put up a tweet apologizing for ever having put the tweet up in the first place and now suggesting that I was a xenophobic, racist, sexist bigot.
	All within like five minutes.
	It was really, really fast.
	By the way, before he even put up the second tweet saying that I was the world's worst person and that he had never even heard of me and he'll have to look into his soul.
	How could he have been in the same room that I was?
	Before he did that, when he even took down the original tweet, I texted him and I said, you know, Mark, I appreciated the original tweet.
	I get why you took it down.
	It's totally cool of me.
	I don't care.
	Didn't matter.
	Still, the next moment, up goes the tweet.
	What a terrible... Okay, so, I told the people at Politico, if you publish Playbook that I write, the blowback's gonna be intense.
	And the folks at Politico were like, you know what, we can handle it.
	It'll be okay.
	I think people will accept it.
	I think people will get that there's an open debate.
	I was like, you do not understand your own side, gang.
	And they were like, no, no, no, no, it'll be fine.
	Like, okay, fine, all right.
	I didn't just warn one editor over there, I warned two editors over there that this is going to happen.
	One of the people who had originally approached me, and then the person who helped me edit the playbook.
	And second, I'm going to read you what I actually wrote in the playbook, because it is sort of relevant to determining what the reaction was.
	And it is so telling.
	This story is very telling, because it does tell you where we are at as a country.
	It tells you where we're at in terms of the new ruling class, members of the elite media who all speak the same woke language and will not abide dissent, and will use any flashpoint of a bad thing happening on, broadly speaking, the other side in order to castigate everybody as complicit in it.
	It's really, really amazing.
	It's amazing.
	And then you wonder why the social fabric is torn.
	Okay, so we're going to get to that in just one second.
	I think it's a good, important story.
	So we'll get to that momentarily.
	First, let us talk about the fact you don't want to be going to the auto parts store today.
	I mean, why would you want to go to the auto parts store?
	Like ever.
	You're just going to stand in line for a while.
	Then you're going to get up to the desk.
	They're totally not going to have the part.
	They're going to have to order it online.
	Then they're going to upcharge you.
	So I have an idea.
	Why not just go to the onlines yourself?
	Just go to the interweb.
	Head on over to rockauto.com.
	It's so much easier than walking into a store and someone demanding quick answers to things like, is your Odyssey an LX or an EX?
	And then again, they have to order that part online anyway.
	So just go to rockauto.com and you're going to be saving because rockauto.com always offers the lowest prices possible rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear like airlines do.
	Why spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
	Like let's say, hypothetically.
	Just coming up with this on the spot because, you know, I'm a car guy.
	You happen to need a Delphi FG 1456 fuel pump assembly for a 2005-2010 Honda Odyssey.
	That costs like $354 at a big chain store.
	That'll cost you $217 at rockauto.com.
	They're a family business.
	They've been serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
	Head on over to rockauto.com, the rockauto.com catalog.
	It's unique.
	It's remarkably easy to navigate.
	Quickly see all the parts available for your vehicle.
	Choose the brands, specifications, prices you prefer.
	They've got amazing selection, reliably low prices.
	All the parts are car.
	Okay, so what I wrote for Politico is pretty much everything that I've been talking about.
	What I wrote about for Politico is why so many Republicans oppose impeachment.
	And I'm going to read it to you so that you see that this is not like a wild right-wing rant or anything like that.
	Here's what I wrote.
	The big news of the day, as yesterday, is the House's impeachment of President Donald J. Trump for the second time in just over a year.
	It was a foregone conclusion that the Democratic House would do so.
	The only question was how many Republicans would vote, along with Democrats, to impeach Trump over his behavior leading up to and surrounding the Capitol riot.
	In the end, ten did, ranging from Representative Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House, who called openly and clearly for impeachment, to Representative Fred Upton, who said he'd prefer censure, but that he'd settle for impeachment.
	The spotlight immediately moved to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who now says he hasn't made up his mind on impeachment and seems he'll leave Republicans to their own devices on the Senate vote when it takes place.
	Many in the media seem bewildered that House Republicans didn't unanimously join Democrats in supporting impeachment.
	Looking at you, playbook readers in the media.
	After all, Republicans were in the building when rioters broke through, seeking to do them grievous physical harm.
	My Republican sources tell me that opposition to impeachment doesn't spring from generalized sanguinity over Trump's behavior.
	I've been receiving calls and texts for more than a week from elected Republicans heartsick over what they saw in the Capitol.
	Opposition to impeachment comes from a deep and abiding conservative belief that members of the opposing political tribe want their destruction, not simply to punish Trump for his behavior.
	Republicans believe that Democrats and the overwhelmingly liberal media see impeachment as an attempt to cudgel them collectively by lumping them in with the Capitol rioters thanks to support for Trump.
	The evidence for that position isn't difficult to find.
	And this is all what I wrote for Politico's playbook.
	Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon suggested this week at NBC News that the only way to prevent a repeat of the Capitol riot was endorsement of a full slate of Democratic agenda items.
	Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez suggested that, quote, Southern states are not red states, they are suppressed states, which means the only way our country is going to heal is through actual liberation of Southern states.
	Paul Krugman of The New York Times placed blame for the Capitol riots on the entire Republican Party infrastructure, quote, this pooch was decades in the making.
	Unity looks a lot like sign onto our agenda or be lumped in with the Capitol rioters.
	Conservatives see the game.
	It doesn't matter whether you held your nose when voting for Trump.
	It doesn't matter if you denounced his prevarications about a stolen election.
	For the record, I was met with great ire when I declared the night of the election that Trump's declaration of victory was deeply irresponsible.
	If you supported Trump in any way, you were at least partially culpable, the argument goes.
	It's not just Trump who deserves vitriol.
	It's all 74 million people who voted for him.
	And that claim, many conservatives believe, will serve as the basis for oppression everywhere from social media to employment.
	Evidence to support that suspicion wasn't in short supply this week.
	Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, was taken off the internet entirely by Amazon Web Services.
	AWS pointed to violent and threatening posts appearing on Parler as the rationale for the takedown.
	But, as the single journalist most targeted by anti-Semitism on Twitter in 2016, as assessed by the ADL, I've got the medal on my shelf.
	I can fairly attest, Twitter is no wonderland.
	And according to the Washington Post, new evidence suggests that Facebook was used by capital rioters to coordinate too.
	Will tech companies dump them as well?
	To conservatives, the deplatforming of Parler looked far more like political retaliation than good housekeeping, especially after social media's decision to downgrade the New York Post's coverage of Hunter Biden in the month leading up to the election.
	GoDaddy kicked AR-15.com, the biggest gun forum in the world, offline.
	Corporations ranging from AT&T to Marriott, from Dow to Airbnb, announced they would cut off all political giving to Republicans who had challenged electors.
	No such consequences ever attended Democrats, who winked and nodded, and sometimes more, at civil unrest around the nation emerging from Black Lives Matter protests and Antifa violence over the summer.
	Furthermore, many conservatives doubt that Democrats are applying any sort of neutral standard toward Trump in pursuing impeachment.
	Is the standard refusal to accept election results?
	Stacey Abrams never accepted her election loss.
	She still claims she was the victim of voter suppression.
	Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, has been appointed one of the Democrats impeachment managers by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but challenged Florida's electors in 2016.
	is the standard incitement.
	Few serious lawyers believe Trump's activities would amount to prosecutable incitement.
	The real impeachment charge against Trump is extraordinarily reckless and inflammatory rhetoric and behavior.
	But that sort of rhetoric is unfortunately commonplace in today's day and age, sometimes even ends with violence.
	See, for example, a Bernie Sanders supporter shooting up a congressional softball game.
	Those on the political left see such questions as whataboutism.
	This is what I wrote in Politico, and then we'll get to the blowback.
	And yes, none of these politicians are the sitting president of the United States and head of the executive branch looking to pressure the legislature to violate the law and overturn a lawful election.
	But it's just as plausible to see such questions as demands for neutral political standards to hold everyone accountable.
	Without such standards, conservatives fear any political flashpoint will be used as a cudgel to cram down social, cultural, even governmental repression.
	Republicans may divide over impeachment.
	There are good prudential arguments against and good principled arguments in favor.
	But one thing is certain.
	If anyone expects Americans to come together once the Trump era is over, that's a pipe dream.
	Our social fabric is torn.
	It was torn before Trump.
	And as it turns out, the incentive structure of modern politics and media cuts directly against stitching it together again.
	Right?
	That's what I wrote for Politico.
	Seems relatively uncontroversial to me.
	Frankly.
	Okay, and we'll get to the blowback in just one second because it absolutely proved my point.
	My contention was the left is going to lump everybody together, call them evil, and then excise them from the public debate.
	So Politico staff was like, conservatives are evil.
	We should excise them from the public debate.
	He's like, oh, thank you for proving my point.
	Really appreciate it.
	We'll get to that in a second.
	First, let us talk about the best pillows on the market.
	I am talking, of course, about MyPillow.
	Mike Lindell, the inventor of MyPillow.
	His stuff is great.
	The pillows, they don't go flat.
	You can wash and dry them as many times as you want.
	They maintain their shape.
	Best of all, they are made in the United States.
	If you don't have a MyPillow, or you know somebody who doesn't, now would be the time.
	For a limited time, Mike is offering his premium MyPillows.
	that is the one that started it all for the lowest price ever.
	You can get a queen size premium MyPillow regularly $69.98 for only $29.98.
	That is 40 bucks in savings.
	Kings are only 5 bucks more.
	Folks, now would be the time to buy.
	Not only are you getting the lowest price ever, they make a great gift.
	$29.98 for a queen size premium MyPillow.
	Buy now.
	Mike will extend his 60 day money back guarantee to March 1st, 2021.
	Go to MyPillow.com, click on the radio listener square.
	There you will find not only this amazing offer, but also deep discounts on all MyPillow products including the Giza Dream bed sheets, the MyPillow mattress topper, the MyPillow towel sets, or call 800-651-1148 and use promo code dailywire to make the magic happen again.
	Head over to MyPillow.com, click on that radio listeners square, and then you can get that $29.98 for that queen-size premium MyPillow.
	You get the lowest price ever on all of the premium MyPillows.
	Can you buy now?
	Mike extends the 60-day money-back guarantee to March 1st, 2021.
	Go check out MyPillow right now.
	Check them out.
	Again, MyPillow.com or 800-651-1148.
	Use promo code DailyWire.
	Okay, so that is the piece that I print in Politico, and the editors worked with me on it.
	They went through their entire editorial process.
	And then all hell breaks loose.
	As absolutely predicted.
	As absolutely predicted.
	Now, to explain how predicted this was and how predictable this was, I need to flashback to 2018.
	So Brian Stelter is the media critic over... He's the...
	Reliable sources guy, right?
	He's the one who's the media analyst over at CNN.
	Well, a couple of years ago, it's 2018, I was on his program and we were talking about the media and bias in the media.
	And I said on his show, he was saying, which media outlets are biased?
	And I was like, well, yours, like CNN.
	Okay.
	And Stelter then said, you know, you keep complaining about media bias.
	Maybe you guys should try to get a job in the media and make it better.
	Here's what that exchange sounded like.
	Part of me thinks that you and your colleagues at the Daily Wire should try to get jobs then at the New York Times.
	If you don't like the coverage, try to be a part of the solution as opposed to complaining about it.
	I mean, I don't know.
	Would you hire me?
	I really doubt that.
	And not only that, I'm not sure you guys can pay me.
	I'll be frank with you.
	I make a lot of money.
	I wanted you as a guest for many months.
	Okay.
	And the answer, of course, is no.
	The answer is no.
	Right?
	Would you hire me?
	No!
	You wouldn't.
	Right?
	Would you hire Kevin Williamson?
	You would.
	Then you'd fire him.
	Would you hire a conservative columnist to do the playbook?
	Sure, but then your staff would go absolutely bat bleep loony.
	By the way, I love some of the media requests for comments on this.
	Some of them were like, how much money was Politico paying you?
	Right, I'm doing it for the money.
	Guys, let me explain something.
	This show is extremely, extremely large.
	If you think that I was writing and spending like a day writing for Politico's playbook out of anything but a sense of fun and an attempt to appeal to broader audiences, you are out of your damn mind.
	Okay, in any case, people lose it.
	Lose it.
	And so all day yesterday, Politico is trending.
	How dare they turn over the sacred space of the Politico playbook to a conservative like Ben Shapiro?
	How could they do such a thing?
	Now, understand that for folks in the media left, they proclaim that they are objective.
	They proclaim that they want to hear all sides, right?
	Freedom of the press, more voices, a thousand voices.
	Yeah, bull.
	What you guys actually want is a monolithic media culture in which everybody agrees with you.
	That's actually what you want.
	Okay, how can I, how do I know this?
	How do I know this?
	Well, let's say, let's say, just for the sake of argument, that Politico's playbook had been handed over to a rotating cast of characters Most of whom were openly allied with the political left.
	And there had been not a peep, not an iota, not a whit of dissent inside Politico.
	Let's say, for example, that literally the day before I wrote the Politico playbook, Chris Hayes, who has gone kind of crazy, It was writing the political playbook.
	When I say he's gone kind of crazy, I mean that within the last 48 hours, Chris Hayes suggested that Amy Coney Barrett should basically resign her Supreme Court seat because Donald Trump appointed her to it because she is somehow complicit in the Capitol riot.
	I mean, like he tweeted out a picture of Amy Coney Barrett with Trump and he's like, well, maybe she has this picture on her wall.
	As though she is responsible for Trump's behavior, or as though you're supposed to turn down a Supreme Court nomination because Donald Trump is Donald Trump.
	So Chris Hayes has not been, I would say, the most responsible or factual actor in all of this.
	Did I call for his deplatforming?
	No.
	Have I ever called for advertisers to drop him?
	Not once.
	Was I upset that Playbook decided to let him edit the playbook?
	Of course not!
	Okay, nor was anyone at Playbook.
	No one was.
	Okay, Ken Burns, who's an open member of the left, he wrote the playbook.
	Yamiche Alcindor, who's an incredibly open member of the anti-Trump left, she wrote the playbook earlier this week.
	Okay, so then I write the playbook.
	And everyone loses it.
	Loses it, right?
	It trends on Twitter.
	And when it trends on Twitter, you have to understand that your elite media guardians, the new ruling class, all the people who went to the same schools and speak the language of vokery, Twitter is like the place they go.
	It's basically like a listserv.
	Twitter.
	is where they go to have their public internal discussions.
	And so you start hearing news that on the Slack channels, at Twitter, at Politico, people are very angry on the Slack channels.
	Ooh, they're typing mean messages about Politico management into Slack.
	Now, let me say this, okay?
	Politico's management, they actually did the right thing.
	I couldn't believe it, honestly.
	Like, good for them.
	Good for them!
	Really, like, they asked me to do it.
	They stood by it.
	They did one thing, which they didn't do for anybody else, which is that in their PM playbook edition, they then ran a letter to the editor essentially from somebody who opposed me.
	They didn't do that for anyone else this week.
	But overall, they stood up and they said, listen, we publish a wide range of views and that's important.
	OK, but what the management did is actually less indicative of what the media are than what the staff did.
	So the staff absolutely rebelled.
	People went insane.
	I was getting messages from people who I know with whom I am friends over in the political stuff.
	Yes, I have friends on the left and I talk with them.
	And so they were giving me live updates on what was going on.
	Apparently somebody on the call compared me to David Duke.
	It was like having David Duke write the political playbook.
	Yes, correct.
	The Orthodox Jew, who's the number one enemy of the alt-right and the number one recipient of anti-Semitism.
	You're right.
	It's just like David Duke, guys.
	100% like David Duke.
	Well done.
	You're not in a bubble at all.
	At all.
	Okay, it got so bad yesterday that 225 pseudo-journalists over at Politico had a staff call.
	225 with the management.
	Now, let me tell you what would happen if we printed a piece and members of our staff came to us and they were like, we are very sad and upset that you printed this piece.
	I'd be like, that's nice.
	Now go back to your cubicle and write.
	That's exactly how that conversation would go.
	Because you know what?
	As the editor of the publication, Don't give a crap.
	But they had to have a little bit of a struggle session because this is how it works in modern media.
	You don't want your upset woke staffers to go on Twitter and say the means about you and quit in despair and undercut you with your base.
	I mean, it was so funny.
	I mean, I was getting calls from people inside Politico yesterday.
	I won't mention names.
	I'm not going to say what positions they held.
	And they were like, I can't believe this is happening.
	I was like, how can you not believe this is happening?
	I told you it was going to happen.
	Okay, in any case, this was reported with breathless anxiety by members of the media, like Eric Wemple from the Washington Post, like Maxwell Tani from the Daily Beast.
	How could they have turned over Politico playbook to that sick guy?
	By the way, just quick note.
	So 225 of the... There's so many things to say about this.
	One, the newsroom was angry.
	Not the people at the editorial side.
	The newsroom.
	So, I was under the impression the newsroom was supposed to be above a bunch of objective, factual-based journalists who are just there to report the news.
	I was not aware that the newsroom could be so upset about a viewpoint on what effectually is an op-ed page.
	If there is a strict divide between news and op-ed, then I'm just wondering, if the newsroom people, they don't have any political angle, why is it that there was universal rage in the newsroom at all this?
	But don't worry, guys, they're so objective, they're so fair-minded.
	And by the way, there were some people at the Politico staff who were like, this is overblown.
	And Eric Wemple, who was reporting all day on this yesterday, he explicitly said they weren't speaking up because they were afraid of the blowback inside the Slack channels, inside the call.
	So people at Politico went nuts.
	Maxwell Taney was reporting that Politico was basically in flames yesterday.
	People, oh my God, the outrage, the insane outrage.
	It was all day trending.
	Politico is facing backlash on Thursday, both internally and externally, for handing over the keys to its signature news product for the day, to Ben Shapiro, an oft-incendiary right-wing commentator.
	Honest to God.
	When they say I am oft-incendiary, Wait, it would behoove them to listen to, like, a episode of the show.
	A episode.
	Okay, well, Matt Kaminski, he, um, good for him.
	Seriously, good for Matt Kaminski.
	Okay, the, the Outlast top editor.
	He said, we published a piece by a very prominent writer, provocateur, and podcaster.
	We stand by every word in there.
	It was very closely edited.
	And then he said, mischief-making has always been a part of Politico's secret sauce.
	We were an upstart.
	Some of that sensibility is always going to be a part of this publication.
	So, again, let me repeat.
	Nothing but plaudits for Politico's editors for doing what is, objectively speaking, the right thing.
	Standing by people that you actually asked to write for you.
	Unlike the coward Jeffrey Goldberg over at The Atlantic with Kevin Williamson.
	Hours later, says the Daily Beast, during a staff-wide Zoom call to address the controversy, staffers were vocally upset and demanded answers for why Company Brass published Shapiro the day after Congress voted to impeach President Trump for the second time.
	Okay, I have a question.
	Number one, we pre-scheduled this thing, like, weeks in advance.
	I did not pick the day.
	They picked the day.
	It was weeks in advance.
	I wouldn't have minded if they moved the day.
	I didn't care.
	Okay, so it actually happened to be coincidence that this is how the calendar fell out.
	It was not like they came to me the day of the impeachment like, would you like to write tomorrow's playbook?
	In any case, just as a factual matter.
	But beyond that, I love the way this is reported at the garbage Daily Beast.
	So I do love that the Daily Beast reports this like, well, it was the day after, especially the day after the impeachment.
	How could you turn over the playbook?
	You're right.
	The rule under the Constitution is that if he's impeached in the House, but then I write the playbook the day after, he's unimpeached in the House.
	That's actually in the Constitution.
	It's Article 57, Clause 2.
	Kaminsky said, we're not going to back away from having published something because some people think it was a mistake to do so.
	And then they point out that lots of people have written the playbook recently.
	By the way, Chuck Todd is doing it.
	There are other conservatives who are slated to do this?
	On Thursday, Politico turned the newsletter over to Shapiro, said the Daily Beast, who used the space for a column making the case that House Republicans who voted against impeaching Trump, despite his repeated lies about the 2020 election and stoking of riders, are right to feel aggrieved.
	Shapiro's guest appearance was not particularly well-received.
	Internally at Politico, several staffers raised concerns about the decision to allow him to guest-write the key newsletter even for one day.
	One staffer pointed out in a company-wide Slack channel, the right-wing pundit has a long history of bigoted and incendiary...
	Sorry, I fell asleep because that is so boring.
	Seriously.
	I have full articles on my own website in which I have talked about my most controversial comments and either apologized for or explained them, which is something no one else in media so far, like literally no one else in media so far, as I am aware, has ever done.
	Okay, if you're going to claim to me that many of the people who are writing Politico's playbook have never said a bad thing ever, that they are all pure as the driven snow, that's nonsense.
	Basically, it was, he wrote something I don't like, and now I'm really, really mad.
	He's conservative, and I'm really, really, really mad.
	The staffer said, it has clearly generated a wave of negative attention.
	First of all, nobody reads the playbook.
	I'll bet you they had better traffic on the playbook yesterday than they have had in five years.
	I'll guarantee it, in fact.
	The staffer said, it has clearly generated a wave of negative attention.
	I fear it's already overshadowing a lot of great work being done by journalists across this newsroom.
	The comment received several dozen upvotes from, wow, upvotes.
	Apparently, there were a bunch of smile emojis also.
	Ooh, the emoji brigade is at it again.
	This is especially confusing given the newsroom's welcome efforts over the last year to cover issues related to race in a more intentional, elevated, thoughtful way, said another staffer.
	Oh, you mean like how the left would like?
	Outside the Beltway-centric outlet, reporters and columnists alike voiced anger and disappointment with Politico's decision.
	Okay, by the way, it's all left-wing.
	They never quote anybody from the right, of course.
	It's all a bunch of left-wing people who hate my guts.
	Apparently, during a heated Zoom call, several employees compared Shapiro to right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
	Are you out of your f***ing minds?
	You're comparing me to Alex Jones and David Duke?
	Are you out of your f***ing minds?
	Like, what is wrong with you?
	What is wrong with you?
	But this was my entire point!
	My entire point was you're going to lump us all together, and then you're going to declare us all deplorable, and then you're going to excise us from the public debate.
	That was literally the point of the piece.
	I read you the entirety of it.
	That was the point of the piece.
	And you all went, you know what?
	You know what?
	Shapiro is wrong, so we're going to do everything he predicted we would do, and we're going to do it in exactly the way we said he was going to do it.
	That's how wrong he is.
	To prove he is wrong, we will do all the things that prove him right.
	Another staffer said the top editor was dismissive of the concerns brought up throughout the chat.
	But some Politico staffers stood by the publication's decision to publish, saying they were too afraid to speak up on the calls out of fear of being criticized by their colleagues.
	That's what an open-minded organization looks like, is that you're super-duper afraid of being criticized by your colleagues.
	Again, I have friends within many of these newsrooms.
	I have friends within many of the editorial boards of many of these websites.
	I talk to lots of people.
	In fact, because it's my birthday, it's time to play one of my favorite birthday games.
	One of my favorite birthday games is when all the people who I'm friends with at leftist publications send me a text that says happy birthday, but will never acknowledge that I have had a birthday publicly, because that would acknowledge I'm a human being born of woman.
	Because then they would get backlash.
	Okay, we're gonna get into more of this in just one second, but it just, it demonstrates the complete disconnect, and it's that disconnect that is wrecking the social fabric that's been going on for years.
	It preceded Trump, it brought about Trump, it will post-date Trump, and it's gonna get worse.
	We'll get to this in just one second.
	First, let us talk about how hard it is to stay in shape these days.
	Maybe your gym is shut down because of COVID.
	Maybe it is.
	You're looking at some of these exercise machines and classes and you're like, that's way too expensive.
	Well, I have a solution for you right now.
	When it comes to getting or staying in shape, nothing feels as good as that feeling of accomplishment of hitting your fitness goals, feeling great about yourself.
	Echelon can get you there.
	Echelon offers the next generation of connected fitness bikes, fitness mirrors, rowing machines, their Echelon Stride Smart Treadmill.
	No matter what your favorite fitness activity, Echelon will give you a fun, challenging workout from the comfort of home.
	The EX7S, it's Echelon's latest state-of-the-art innovation that takes cycling to the next level.
	The EX7S Connected Bike is built with performance, flexibility, and durability in mind.
	It's the bike for competitors at heart.
	Their world-class instructors will motivate you with thousands of daily live and on-demand studio-level classes always available when you need them.
	Unlike their competitors, Echelon is affordable for everyone and one membership lets up to five family members all work out at the same time.
	Right now you can try any Echelon fitness equipment at home for 30 days.
	So my wife actually requested that we get some exercise equipment for her during the pandemic.
	And I, like a good husband, got her an Echelon.
	And it didn't cost me a fortune.
	Like, for example, a Peloton would.
	Instead, we got an amazing bike, an amazing exercise bike with all of the fixins from Echelon.
	You can do the same.
	It is awesome.
	Awesome.
	Awesome product.
	Go to echelonfit.com slash Ben.
	That's E-C-H-E-L-O-N fit.com slash Ben.
	If you made a New Year's resolution to get yourself in shape, Echelon's the way to do it.
	Head on over to echelonfit.com slash Ben.
	All right, we're gonna get into more of the politico meltdown and then how this ties into broader trends in American public life that are gonna make things a lot worse in the very near future.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, last night, it was a big, big night for DailyWire.
	Really exciting for us.
	We made our entrance into entertainment content with our first feature film, Run, Hide, Fight.
	If you missed it, head on over to dailywire.com.
	You can watch it right now.
	The movie's awesome.
	Like, it really is excellent.
	I've now watched it twice.
	It is better the second time.
	It is just terrific.
	We've seen the audience reviews.
	We've seen the audience response.
	People are enthused about the film.
	It is great.
	It is tense.
	It is an excellent thriller.
	And it's not going to suck or punch you with leftist garbage.
	Please be aware the film isn't political.
	It is intense.
	It is for mature audiences only.
	I've warned you several times about this.
	The same for the kiddies.
	Okay, it does have language.
	It does have violence.
	It has all the stuff that you would see on Netflix.
	Or Amazon Prime.
	Except it's not going to sucker punch you in the face because you happen to be conservative.
	It stars Isabel May, Thomas Chain, Radha Mitchell.
	Run, hide, fight, it follows Zoe Hall.
	She's a high school student coping with the recent loss of her mother.
	All she wants is to get through the last few weeks of her senior year and leave for college with a fresh start.
	Instead, her high school is attacked by four nihilistic, gun-toting school shooters.
	They plan to make their siege the worst school shooting in history.
	Using her wits and survival skills, Zoe fights back to save her fellow students.
	It really is a glorification of heroism and a and a rip on the evils of the villains.
	It's a very, very moral picture.
	We are excited to bring you great stories Hollywood refuses to tell.
	We hope you will join us.
	Become a member today over at dailywire.com.
	We've been talking for a long time about the culture wars and about how the left is attacking on all fronts.
	If you want to take back the culture, we need your support at dailywire.com to make that happen.
	We need to get into the entertainment sphere.
	We need to offer people on an alternative to the agitprop you see on so many of your favorite entertainment offering channels.
	We're getting into that business.
	It's expensive.
	We need your help.
	Head on over to dailywire.com right now and become a member if you have not already.
	And you can see Run Hyde Fight, which is just an awesome piece of filmmaking.
	you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	So, how out of touch are the folks at Politico?
	So this is my favorite quote.
	So Eric Wemple of the Washington Post, media critic, who of course is biased to the left because he just is.
	I mean, he works for the Washington Post.
	That is not a surprise.
	Here is what he tweeted yesterday.
	One staffer in today's meeting at Politico over Ben Shapiro's guest written playbook argued that the decision to publish his thoughts complicates frequent conversations with Republicans and conservatives.
	Quote is what a person said.
	OK, you ready?
	I'm spending all this time trying to convince them that we're here for them and that there's a difference between what Ben Shapiro is doing and what Alex Jones is doing and what Politico is trying to do.
	And then just to have Ben Shapiro on the top thing that we publish undermines this huge problem in our country right now, which is just people don't even know who to trust.
	People don't know where to go to get information that is correct.
	I don't even know what to do, how to go to tell them not to listen to Ben Shapiro because we published Ben Shapiro, the place that I work for.
	So how can I get back on my soapbox and say there's a difference between news that's trying to give you information and news that is opinion, that is not fact-checked, that is not true?
	How do we separate Ben Shapiro from what we are doing?
	Here's the thing.
	You say that you're trying to separate your news from opinion.
	And your chief complaint is that you are trying deliberately to stop people from hearing opposing points of view.
	Your view of your job is to set up a monopoly on information in which you are the only good source, and anyone who disagrees is akin to Alex Jones.
	So I don't trust you, and people shouldn't trust you.
	So as an award for Politico, demonstrating my point, we sent the Politico staff, or are in the process of sending them, 225.
	There are 225 staffers on this call, which is insane, by the way.
	225 staffers just to complain that I had written a piece, a piece, for Politico.
	And we sent them 225 Leftist Tears tumblers.
	We don't want them to get their desks wet from all of their tears.
	They need something to catch all of the moisture freely flowing from their faces over this horrific, horrific act.
	The fact that they see it as their mission to get people to stop listening to this show.
	Just remember that.
	Remember that.
	It is the mission of so many members of the media to stop people from hearing opposing voices.
	No one on the right is telling you not to read Politico.
	I have never said that you should not read Politico.
	I've said you should read it.
	You should keep their bias in mind.
	Read Politico.
	Read the New York Times.
	Read the Washington Post.
	Read all of these places.
	Do it!
	Don't subscribe if you don't want to actually support them.
	But sure, read them and get their opinions.
	I've told you to go listen to Pod Save America.
	You think they're ever going to say that about me?
	They would love to get me deplatformed.
	They would love to have all my advertisers drop.
	Okay?
	I have been perfectly open about the fact that this is an opinion show.
	I've been perfectly open about my own opinions.
	Nobody is suggesting that I am objective because I am not objective.
	What I do try to do on this show is be honest with you about what is factually based and what is my opinion.
	That is something that the jackasses at the political newsroom don't bother to do.
	Which means, yes, I do look down on them because I am more honest than they are.
	I will give you my opinion.
	I will give you the facts.
	I will tell you the difference.
	Over at Politico, they believe it is literally their mission to stop people from listening to the show.
	And how can they tell their friends and family not to listen to the show after I wrote an opinion piece for Playbook?
	The goal here is not dialogue.
	The goal here is not a better social fabric.
	The goal here is not truth.
	It is not the search for truth.
	The goal here is to silence.
	That is the goal.
	And they're being perfectly open about it now.
	Now it's out in the open.
	We've known this for a long time.
	And then they wonder, and then they wonder why we're not making comment, because I can't.
	I literally cannot.
	It is not possible.
	You are attempting to lump me in with people I have explicitly derided.
	And then you're like, oh yeah, well, but we can't, why won't they make common cause?
	Why aren't they on our side?
	Yeah, I can't imagine.
	I mean, it's almost like I wrote a piece in your publication about this.
	And then you went ahead and just explicitly did what I predicted you would do to prove my point.
	Slow clap for the geniuses at the political newsroom, you idiots.
	Okay, meanwhile, Twitter has announced that they want to make the conversation better by basically shutting down a lot of the conversation.
	So Jack Dorsey, yesterday, he was like, yeah, I feel like we have a problem here because on the one hand, we don't want people to foment violence, and on the other hand, we would like to shut down all the opinions we don't like.
	So what's the middle road?
	What exactly do we do?
	And so yesterday, James O'Keefe got some audio of Jack Dorsey from an internal phone call, I believe, talking about making the conversation better at Twitter.
	He says, banning Trump is just the beginning.
	Now again, you can dislike what Trump has to say.
	You can think Trump tweets things that are not true.
	In fact, Twitter had been putting on nearly every one of Trump's tweets a fact check, like a little fact check notification.
	That fact check notification did not apply to a wide variety of other falsehoods that were being told on Twitter, so those rules were not being evenly applied.
	But, then they just banned him.
	And they banned him because they were like, yeah, if Trump speaks, people are gonna get violent.
	Which is a hell of a standard to put on anybody.
	That if somebody reads speech that is not calling for violence and then gets violent, that's the fault of the person speaking.
	That is a—then Twitter should—honestly, if that's the case, then Twitter should literally be offline.
	Amazon Web Services should cancel Twitter in the same way they canceled Parler.
	By the way, there is evidence that people were using Twitter in order to coordinate for the capital riots, as well as Facebook.
	So when is Amazon Web Services going to deplatform both of those?
	Anyway, here's Jack Dorsey talking about the new standards on Twitter.
	We are focused on one account right now, but this is going to be much bigger than just one account.
	And it's going to go on for much longer than just this day, this week, in the next few weeks.
	It's going to go on beyond the inauguration.
	The U.S.
	is extremely divided.
	Our platform is showing it.
	We're seeing it.
	And our role is to take the integrity of that conversation and do what we can to make sure that no one is being harmed based off that.
	Okay, so again, the focus for the left is always on how do we quote unquote minimize harm.
	But the way that they define harm always seems a little bit too broad.
	So if they're talking about threats of violence, obviously that stuff should be removed.
	If they're talking about plans for violence, obviously that stuff should be removed.
	But there's a tendency on the left to conflate everything when they call for violence.
	In fact, one of the complaints inside Politico apparently on the call is that I was making people feel unsafe, which is just like, come on.
	Come on, you whiny babies.
	Making you feel unsafe.
	I have like 24-7 security because of death threats, and now I'm making you feel unsafe because I wrote that maybe Republicans feel excised from the public debate?
	I mean, the term snowflakes is overused, but my goodness, it's a blizzard over at Politico.
	Pretty impressive stuff.
	So, You know, that is unfortunately where things stand in the state of the United States media.
	Meanwhile, members of Congress continue to foster this sort of attitude as well.
	The Honorable, Right Honorable, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, D-Twitch.
	She tweeted out yesterday in the middle of the Politico hubbub, and I can only assume that she was subtweeting the situation.
	People really twist themselves into knots, giving platforms to white supremacists and their enablers like, come on everyone, we must listen to both sides equally, fact and fiction.
	Hey, first of all, I find it super ironic hearing from AOC about fact and fiction when she literally said, on tape, on camera, that it does not matter whether you are factually accurate so long as you are morally true.
	And that is a thing that AOC actually said.
	I mean, she prevaricates an awful lot when it comes to politics, but not a particular surprise.
	Everybody who's her opponent is a white supremacist.
	And not only that, they ought to be silenced.
	She's also the same person who suggested, over the course of the past 72 hours, that Congress ought to look into reigning in the media.
	Now, call me crazy.
	I remember there's this thing called the First Amendment that literally says Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or freedom of the press.
	He literally says it.
	Cute gif of dry ramen guy pointing at the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
	Come on, but don't worry.
	AOC says that everybody she doesn't like is a white supremacist and should be de-platformed, but everything is going absolutely great.
	And Twitter, of course, is jumping on the bandwagon.
	By the way, and the media are cheering that.
	The media are absolutely cheering de-platforming as fast as humanly possible.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	Okay, so here is an example.
	The media, the media who are supposed to be pro-free speech, I've been complaining about this for a very long time, is that members of the media have been for a long time cheering on social media censorship.
	They want it.
	They are desperate for it.
	The thing they hate most in the land is the fact that people do listen to shows like this.
	This is what the Politico staffers were saying on their call.
	How can we convince people not to visit Daily Wire after we printed Ben Shapiro?
	How can we stop people from listening to his podcast?
	It's not about freedom of the press.
	They don't care about freedom of the press for you.
	They don't care about freedom of speech for you, you silly.
	They care about freedom of speech for them, so that they can give you their perspective.
	But your perspective is of no consequence, and all elements of distribution of information should be twisted so that only they, they and only they, have a monopoly on the dissemination of information.
	So, here's an article from the technology section of the Washington Post.
	And it's all about how the tech bros had the power all along.
	And isn't that wonderful?
	Craig Timberg writing, During President Trump's first impeachment in December 2019, he tweeted more than 600 times, an average of 58 times a day.
	One of the last said, can you believe I will be impeached today by the radical left, do nothing Democrats, and I did nothing wrong.
	During President Trump's second impeachment this week, he tweeted not once.
	This shift, the silence was momentous, made possible by Twitter's decision Friday to ban him from the platform.
	It may take historians years to grasp the full implications of the social media hurricane that Trump has conjured ever since he announced his intention to run for president five and a half years ago.
	But it took a single week, underscored by a single remarkable day, to appreciate what happened when that storm headed back out to sea.
	This emerging new world, free from Trump's tweets and the kaleidoscope of reactions to Trump's tweets, has dawned suddenly, costing the president his ability to speak directly with 88 million followers, unfiltered by journalists or other traditional gatekeepers, with a few finger taps on his iPhone.
	Trump's ability to shape events has diminished dramatically since he was banned on Friday night.
	Twitter's decision removed an account analysts said helped fuel the rage that consumed the U.S.
	Capitol last week and is threatening to flare again.
	But Twitter's action also removed a bountiful source of ideas and impressions followed avidly by his supporters.
	Joan Donovan, Research Director at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy says this week will echo in history as the moment when Trump was unable to shape reality in real time.
	And the whole article is about the power of the small group of companies.
	Yeah, a small group of companies already with commanding power over the American economy, headquartered in liberal West Coast enclaves, has demonstrated rising corporate power over the national political debate.
	While Twitter is punishing Trump, in the span of a few days, Google, Apple, Amazon also moved against a social media site favored by his supporters, Parler, pushing it out of the app stores.
	All this happened after years in which the same companies studiously avoided challenging Trump and his backers, publicly embracing a high-toned doctrine of free speech, far beyond that required by the First Amendment, which constrains the federal government, not private companies.
	So here it is.
	Here is the media itself, the beneficiary of the First Amendment.
	Democracy dies in darkness, Washington Post.
	These social media companies and their high standards of free speech, they don't need to do that.
	They're private companies.
	Why are they doing that?
	They should stop that.
	The only thing they should publish is the Washington Post.
	Anybody who believes that there's a real commitment to free speech and diversity of thought in the halls of our press?
	Yeah, no, there ain't.
	There just ain't.
	Again, some of us have called for neutral rules of neutral applicability.
	Some of us just want the rules applied against our enemies.
	When the left is in power, they just want the rules applied against their enemies.
	That is all they want.
	The turnabout was abrupt, says the Washington Post, and, as many have noted, timely, given that it came as Democrats took control of the Senate and President-elect Joe Biden's path to the White House, became assured.
	And so, again, the idea from the media over and over and over again is that it's very bad that these social media sites were open, now they are closing, and that's a good thing.
	That's a good thing, because then we can have a left-wing media monopoly again.
	Now, here's one of the problems with a left-wing media monopoly.
	Here's one of the problems.
	They routinely say things that are not true.
	Just patently not true.
	So for months, up to the present day, we had headlines from places like the Washington Post, alleging that in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Jacob Blake, an alleged rapist, who went to his ex-girlfriend's house, the one he had allegedly digitally raped, and then she called the cops, the cops came, he resisted arrest, He threw the cops off his back.
	He refused to obey orders.
	He walked around the other side of the car.
	He reached down to the floorboards and there was a knife and he was shot.
	The Washington Post printed a headline not all that long ago suggesting that the cops had shot an unarmed man.
	This was the going headline for a while, right?
	The tape shows that he was a victim of police brutality.
	How convincing was the narrative put out by the media?
	The narrative was so convincing that Kamala Harris personally called Jacob Blake, an alleged rapist who's resisting arrest, Joe Biden met with Jacob Blake's family to talk about systemic police racism.
	Riots racked Kenosha.
	And now it turns out that Jacob Blake is speaking to ABC News, and he actually is telling the truth about what happened that night.
	And it is not the narrative, as it turns out.
	It turns out that Jacob Blake is, in fact, allegedly, and according to his own admission, a violent criminal.
	Who could have foreseen such an eventuality?
	I mean, we were told by people like Benjamin Crump that he was unarmed and victimized by the cops.
	The only person who's arguing with that assessment is all of the videotape, all of the officers, and the alleged victim himself.
	Here is Jacob Blake on ABC News admitting that he was carrying a knife and going for a knife when he was shot by the cops.
	All we had was months of false media coverage on this, but those are the people who should have a monopoly over your ability to access information.
	You shouldn't be able to listen to a podcast like this who is saying since day one that that's what happened.
	Okay, here's Jacob Blake admitting the truth.
	I'm rattled.
	You know, I realized I had dropped my knife.
	That little pocket knife.
	So I picked it up after I got off of him.
	Because they tased me and I fell on top of him.
	With an open knife in hand that Blake says fell out of his pocket, he walks around the front of the vehicle towards the driver's side door.
	What are you thinking at that point?
	I'm not really worried.
	I'm walking away from them, so it's not like they're gonna shoot me.
	I shouldn't have picked it up.
	Yeah, oh, but I was informed you were unarmed, sir.
	That's what I was informed.
	By your attorney, we were informed.
	The world was informed of this alleged fact.
	And this became the cause of destruction of property, destruction of businesses, risk to lives, injury in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
	But those media, you should trust them.
	You should absolutely, to the point where only they, only they should be able to speak.
	Again, the game that the media have been playing with the social media companies, I've been on this for years at this point, the game that members of the media have been playing with social media is social media was designed in order to facilitate broader conversation and broader dissemination of information.
	The media got angry at that.
	And so they decided, you know what?
	We've lost our monopoly.
	Let's reestablish our monopoly by pressuring the social media companies to crack down on the people we don't like by setting up bullcrap fact checkers.
	That the social media companies can use in order to crack down on our competitors, and we can claim that dissemination of false information is only on the other side of the aisle, so the only people you should be able to access are, wait for it, wait for it, us.
	Wow.
	Who could have predicted?
	And then we can promulgate whatever false narrative we want, and you won't have any ability to access the alternative information.
	And you wonder why folks on the right are suspicious of your motives in the media?
	You wonder why we don't trust you?
	We shouldn't trust you, because you're not trustworthy.
	That's why.
	And I'm glad that the editors at Politico had the stones to actually stand by the decision to let me write in their pages.
	I'm grateful for that.
	But the staffers, what they did is much more telling to me about the state of the media than what a couple of editors with spine actually had to say.
	Because here's the truth, most of these editors do not have spine across the broad scale media.
	And they're not policing every single piece that goes out.
	Meanwhile, in other narratives that have been exploded, at least just a little bit.
	So, it happens to be that there's a lot of claim in the aftermath of the Capitol riot that there are some claims by folks on the right that there are a lot of Antifa involved.
	And I said day one, I did not see evidence that a lot of Antifa was involved.
	I still don't see evidence that a lot of Antifa was involved, but there was at least one member of a left-wing group.
	There was a left-wing activist who has now been charged.
	This left-wing activist was interviewed on CNN by Anderson Cooper, unbelievably enough.
	According to the Daily Caller, federal prosecutors on Thursday announced charges against John Sullivan, a self-described left-wing activist who recorded the fatal police shooting of a Trump supporter inside the U.S.
	Capitol last week.
	Sullivan, the founder of a group called Insurgents USA, which formed in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, is charged with illegally entering the Capitol, civil disorder, and violent or disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.
	Sullivan, 26, faces separate charges of rioting and criminal mischief in connection with an incident in Provo, Utah, on June 30, 2020, where a person was shot and injured during a protest against police brutality.
	An FBI affidavit issued against Sullivan on Thursday cites comments he made on video he recorded during the Capitol breach.
	Sullivan told FBI agents as well as members of the media he showed up at the Capitol to document the activities of Trump supporters, but the FBI affidavit indicates Sullivan was acting more as an active participant in the riots than as a journalist.
	There are so many people.
	Let's go.
	This bleep is ours.
	F-yeah, he is heard saying in the video, according to an FBI affidavit from FBI Special Agent Matthew Folger.
	We accomplished this bleep.
	We did this together.
	F-yeah, we are all a part of this history.
	Let's burn this bleep down.
	In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper hours after the fatal shooting, Solomon acknowledged he was not a Trump supporter but denied instigating the rioters who stormed the Capitol.
	I don't want to see people get hurt unnecessarily, he told Cooper.
	Hmm.
	Yeah, so there was that.
	That's a thing.
	The Daily Caller reported that.
	That has not been widely reported yet in the establishment media, which is not exactly a massive shock at this time.
	Okay, well, to close out the week, there is a piece of news.
	It's amazing how, in real time, the narrative has now shifted on COVID.
	It has now become the position of many, many Democratic politicians that, wait a second, it's time to reopen society.
	Amazing.
	Andrew Cuomo in New York, he said, we can't lockdown anymore.
	This is doing economic damage.
	So if you said this as a Republican for months...
	You're trusted.
	Sources in the media informed you that Ron DeSantis is an evil pile of garbage.
	Brian Kemp was doing an experiment in human sacrifice, according to The Atlantic.
	Now, the greatest of all governors, the greatest governor who has ever walked the earth, as we all know, Andrew Cuomo, he came out and he was like, yeah, you know what?
	We probably have to reopen society because this isn't working.
	Now we know that there is a study evaluating COVID-19 responses around the world, is according to Newsweek.
	I found mandatory lockdown orders early in the pandemic did not provide significantly more benefits to slowing the spread of the disease than other voluntary measures, such as social distancing or travel reduction.
	The peer-reviewed study, conducted by a group of Stanford researchers, published in the Wiley Online Library January 5, analyzed coronavirus case growth in 10 countries in early 2020. The study compared cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and the US, all countries that implemented mandatory lockdown orders and business closures to South Korea and Sweden, which implemented less severe voluntary responses. It aimed to analyze the effect that less restrictive or more restrictive measures had on changing individual behavior and curbing virus transmission. The researchers used a
	mathematical model that subtracted the sum of non-pharmaceutical interventions, effects, and epidemic dynamics in countries that did not enact more restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions from the sum of the NPI effects and epidemic dynamics in countries that did.
	In other words, they just looked at human behavior and said, okay, what was the difference in human behavior and transmission rates when there was a mandatory lockdown, when there was not a mandatory lockdown?
	Using that model, the researchers determined there is no clear significant beneficial effort or effect of more restrictive measures on case growth in any country.
	Wow, who could have predicted this?
	Except for anybody who watched the data for any amount of time.
	It's really amazing.
	By the way, President-elect Biden has said he has no intention of implementing a national shutdown when he takes office on January 20th.
	Of course, he had also implied that he might think about a national mask mandate and all the rest.
	So weird how the narrative changes in real time.
	Also weird how the media are not jumping all over Governor Andrew Cuomo.
	So one of Cuomo's spokespeople is ripping on Janis Dean.
	Janis Dean lost a parent in the COVID epidemic in New York.
	She was in a nursing home.
	The nursing homes were ravaged with COVID.
	The statistics, people talk about Florida stats.
	Florida has extremely transparent stats on COVID.
	New York is still hiding the number of deaths in nursing homes by misclassifying deaths in hospitals.
	As non-nursing home deaths, if the person died in a hospital after getting the COVID at a nursing home.
	In any case, Janis Dean has been very, very critical of Andrew Cuomo's response.
	Richard, as a party, a spokesperson for Cuomo, then told the Daily Mail, quote, every state has had issue with vaccine distribution because of lack of federal funds. But we're rapidly ramping up distribution. Currently, we've administered more than 60% of vaccines we have. Last I checked, she's not a credible source on anything except maybe the weather. And way to dismiss somebody who had a parent who died on your watch as not a credible source on anything except the weather.
	Yeah, I definitely believe Andrew.
	I mean, Andrew Cuomo's an Emmy.
	Probably we should believe him.
	Okay, we'll be back here next week.
	As I say every Friday, please try not to wreck the country more.
	Please don't do it.
	I've been begging you.
	It's not working.
	So I'm gonna continue to beg you.
	Treat each other with decency and respect.
	Listen to each other's viewpoints.
	Acknowledge that people may disagree with you, and we can all have a better, brighter world.
	World peace.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show.
	First, be sure to watch The Andrew Klavan Show.
	Andrew is officially back, and better than ever, he is alive, every Friday for 90 minutes.
	That is right, folks, it is a 90-minute show on Fridays only.
	He'll have very special guests, and the first show is today.
	So head on over to dailywire.com this evening, and tune in.
	Also, grab yourself a Daily Wire membership while you are at it, so you can watch our brand new movie, Run, Hide, Fight, only available at Daily Wire.
	For our members, I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
	Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Our Supervising Producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
	Production Manager, Paweł Łajdowski.
	Our Associate Producers are Rebecca Doyle and Savannah Dominguez.
	The show is edited by Adam Sajewicz.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
	Hair and Makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.
	Production Assistant, Jessica Crand.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright 2021.
	Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
	You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
	But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.

▲