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Alrighty, so.
We begin with President Trump's legal team laying out his defense for the Senate conviction trial that is going to take place over the impeachment charge that was passed in the House with all Democrats and 10 Republicans voting in favor.
According to Joe Kroll writing for Daily Wire, former President Donald Trump, through his lawyers Bruce Castor and David Shane, on Monday responded to the article of impeachment lodged against him by the U.S.
House of Representatives.
Here is their full response.
They say the 45th President of the United States, through his counsel, hereby responds to the article of impeachment lodged against him by the U.S.
House of Representatives by breaking down the allegations out into eight averments and respectfully represents.
One, the Constitution provides that the House of Representatives shall have the sole power of impeachment and the President shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
So answer one is admitted in part, denied in part, it is admitted.
The constitutional provision at Averment 1 is accurately reproduced.
It is denied that the quoted provision currently applies to the 45th president of the United States, since he is no longer president.
The constitutional provision requires a person to actually hold office to be impeached.
So this is the case that you're hearing a lot of congressional Republicans make.
A lot of Senate Republicans are making this case today.
And that case is that the Constitution is designed to remove somebody from office.
It is not designed to go after somebody after they have left office.
Well, the thing is, the Senate conviction is different than the House impeachment.
It would be very weird if the House started to impeach somebody after they had left office, but since the impeachment took place while Trump was in office, and the Senate can convict after the person leaves office, that is the countervailing case, but this is the case that Trump's lawyers are going to make.
The impeachment charge suggests that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits any person who has engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States from holding any office under the United States.
They say that this is, in fact, what the Constitution says, but the President didn't engage in insurrection or rebellion against the United States.
The 45th President believes, and therefore averse, that as a private citizen, the Senate has no jurisdiction over his ability to hold office, and for the Senate to take action on this avertment would constitute a bill of attainder in violation of the Constitution.
In other words, you're now passing a law after the fact in order to go after me for a thing that I didn't do in the first place.
Okay, third, the allegation in the impeachment suggests, in his conduct while president of the United States, 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 that the laws be faithfully executed.
They say, no, that doesn't apply.
They say to the contrary, at all times, Trump fully and faithfully executed his duties as president of the United States.
And at times acted to the best of his ability, at all times acted to the best of his ability to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
He never engaged in any high crimes or misdemeanors, and since, again, he is no longer President, none of this applies.
Okay, fourth, they look at the impeachment charge, and they say, That the impeachment charge with regard to his actual speech on January 6th is overbroad.
According to that impeachment charge, in the months preceding the joint session, 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 or federal officials.
And the impeachment charge also suggests that on January 6th, the Senate met in order to Brecht in order to certify the election, and he interfered with this.
Here's what they say.
They say, it is admitted that on January 6, 2021, a joint session of Congress met with the Vice President, the House, and the Senate to count the votes of the Electoral College.
It is admitted that after the November election, the 45th President exercised his First Amendment right under the Constitution to express his belief that the election results were suspect, since with very few exceptions, under the convenient guise of the COVID-19 pandemic safeguard states, Election laws and procedures were changed by local politicians or judges without the necessary approvals from state legislatures.
Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th president's statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies they were false.
Okay, now this is going to be weak tea, okay?
But here's where they actually have a defense.
Even if it was false, the president can say false things.
Presidents say false things all the time.
Barack Obama was quite fond of doing this.
I know, contrary to public opinion, Barack Obama, the greatest lightbringer who ever was, never lied at all, except when he said that if you liked your doctor, you could keep your doctor.
But it turns out that presidents all the time say things that are factually untrue.
And here is where Trump's lawyers have some room to move.
They say, like all Americans, the 45th president is protected by the First Amendment.
Indeed, he believes, and therefore averse, that the United States is unique on Earth in that its governing documents, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, specifically and intentionally protect unpopular speech from government retaliation.
If the First Amendment protected only speech the government deemed popular in current American culture, it would no longer protect at all.
Since the 45th president is no longer president, he can't be removed anyway.
They keep coming back to this point over and over and over.
OK, then they move on to the next part of the impeachment charge.
That impeachment charge suggests shortly before the joint session commenced, President Trump addressed a crowd at the Capitol Ellipse in Washington, D.C.
There, he reiterated false claims that, quote, we won this election and we won it in a landslide.
Trump's lawyers respond.
They say it is admitted that Trump addressed a crowd at the Capitol Ellipse on January 6th, as is his right, under the First Amendment to the Constitution, and expressed his opinion that the election results were suspect, as is contained in the full recording of the speech.
To the extent that a Vermin 5 alleges his opinion is factually in error, the president denies this allegation.
Trump is going to continue saying that the election was illegitimate.
He's never going to stop saying that the election was illegitimate.
The question is, is that in and of itself impeachable, given, again, the last four years?
And by the way, long before that, I mean, George W. Bush's entire presidency, members of the press, members of the Democratic Party suggested that he was not a legitimate president because, of course, he had lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000.
It is not enough to impeach somebody from public office because they believe, wrongly, that they won an election that they actually lost.
Furthermore, the impeachment allegations suggest that Trump willfully made statements that in context encouraged and foreseeably resulted in lawless action at the Capitol, such as, quote, if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.
Thus, incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the joint session's solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 election.
Unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, etc, etc, etc.
Trump's lawyers say, It is admitted that persons unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, that people were injured and killed, that law enforcement is currently investigating and prosecuting those who were responsible.
Seditious act is a term of art with a legal meaning, and the use of that phrase in the article of impeachment is thus denied in the context in which it was used.
It is denied that Trump incited the crowd to engage in destructive behavior.
It is denied that the phrase, if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore, had anything to do with the action at the Capitol, as it was clearly about the need to fight for election security in general, as evidenced by the recording of the speech.
It is denied that Trump intended to interfere with the counting of electoral votes.
As is customary, members of Congress challenged electoral vote submissions by state under a process written into the congressional rules allowing for the respective houses of Congress to debate whether a state's submitted electoral votes should be counted.
In 2017, Democrats repeatedly challenged the electoral votes submitted from states where Trump prevailed.
In 2021, Republican members of Congress challenged the electoral votes submitted from states where Biden prevailed.
The purpose of the joint sessions in 2017 and in 2021 was for members of Congress to fulfill their duty to be certain the Electoral College votes were properly submitted.
Its duty was to first determine whether certification of the presidential election vote was warranted and permissible under its rules.
Okay, so the actual strong case they have here, and I'm kind of surprised that they didn't actually cite it, is that Trump actively said in that speech he wanted people to peacefully protest.
And by the way, holding some sort of protest on the day that an action is to be taken is not unusual at all, right?
That sort of stuff happens all the time.
There were protests on the day of Trump's inauguration in 2017.
There were protests at the Supreme Court nearly every term, as the court decisions are being read inside, right?
Trump has a pretty strong defense on the idea that just because he held a rally the day of the electoral vote certification, this means that he was actively directing people to storm the Capitol building, especially when he did, in fact, say that he wanted people to peacefully protest.
And I think, frankly, that that's actually what he wanted.
He just, he didn't, what he wanted was not people to storm the Capitol.
What he wanted was the images of thousands of people protesting the results of the election.
Okay, then we'll get to the rest of the Trump defense team brief in just one second.
And then we'll get to the way that Democrats are playing this thing, because it really is not about punishing Trump for anything at this point.
What they actually just want is the continuation of this entire line of narrative for as long as possible.
So of course they can lump everybody they don't like in with it.
And so they can claim that all Republicans were in favor of what happened on January 6th.
This has been the move since January 6th.
I called it that day.
Nothing has changed.
Okay, we're going to get to more of this in just one second first.
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Okay, so.
Continuing with the Trump legal team's response to the impeachment charges.
So the impeachment charges suggest that President Trump's conduct on January 6th followed his prior efforts to subvert the certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election.
These prior efforts included a phone call on January 2nd, 2021, during which Trump urged the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to quote-unquote, find enough votes to overturn the Georgia presidential election results and threatened Secretary Raffensperger if he failed to do so.
Here is what the Trump team responds.
They say it is admitted, Trump spoke on the telephone with Secretary Raffensperger and multiple other parties, including several attorneys for both parties on January 2nd.
Secretary Raffensperger or someone at his direction surreptitiously recorded the call and subsequently made it public.
The recording accurately reflects the contents of the conversation.
It is denied that President Trump made any effort to subvert the certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election.
It is denied that the word find was inappropriate in context as Trump was expressing his opinion that if the evidence was carefully examined, one would quote find that you have many that aren't signed and you have many that are forgeries.
It is denied that Trump threatened Secretary Raffensperger.
It is denied that Trump acted improperly in that telephone call in any way.
That sentence was inserted by President Trump, I think pretty clearly on a personal level.
Okay, so.
I said at the time that the call was inappropriate, it was wrong, Trump shouldn't have done it.
Also, I was struggling to find what exactly the threat was.
He was saying that it's going to be unpopular in Georgia if I don't win the election.
That happens to be true.
He was also saying that he thinks, because he believes every rumor that reaches his ears about voter fraud or voter irregularity, even if they have been disproved 1,000 times, that those votes were actually out there.
Trump believing it does have something to do with whether he was lying or not.
He could be mistaken.
He could be doing something wrong.
But the idea that he was prying votes, that he was encouraging Raffensperger to manufacture votes out of thin air is, I think, a little bit of a stretch.
Although that, again, is the strongest part of the impeachment charge against Trump, for sure.
Okay, finally, the impeachment charge says Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government, etc., etc.
Trump's lawyers respond.
Rather, he performed admirably in his role as president.
The democratic system interfered with the peaceful transition of power and imperiled the co-equal branch of government.
It is denied he betrayed his trust as president to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.
Rather, he performed admirably in his role as president.
Right, this is the part where Trump is sitting over his lawyer's shoulder and being like, No, no.
I was the best president who ever.
Okay.
In any case, the fact is that that Trump's legal defense team has a fairly strong legal response to the impeachment charges, because again, those are overbroad.
They establish principles that are not neutral and cannot be neutrally applied.
Right.
That's the case that I've been making for a while.
Plus, he keeps going back to this case that you really can't impeach me because I'm not in office anymore.
Now, here's the reality.
The proper response to Trump's activity, particularly now that he is out of office, would be a censure from Congress.
So, wouldn't you get bipartisan support for that censure?
The answer is yes.
Our politics is very often about deliberately avoiding the consensus position in favor of the non-consensus position so you can cast your opponents as terrible people.
That is what our politics generally is about.
It is not about finding common ground.
It is about refusing to find the common ground so you can pretend that the other guy is actually crazy or radical or a problem.
So censure would be a well-supported thing on both sides of the aisle, I think.
It would be very difficult for Republicans not to vote to censure Trump.
I think it would be very difficult for them not to do that.
Okay, but Chuck Schumer was asked about this, the Senate Majority Leader, and he said, nope, we're not even going to consider censure.
Not, we should bring up censure and we should bring up impeachment and people can vote for either.
Now, he doesn't want Republicans to have the off-ramp of censure.
He wants to make it a binary choice between the impeachment charges passed in the House and nothing.
And then he can claim that if you don't vote for impeachment, that is not because you have problems with the impeachment charges.
It's because you were totally fine with all of Trump's behavior and you were fine with what happened on January 6th.
So here is Schumer saying, no, no, we're not going to do censure.
Censure should not even be introduced.
I think the president should be tried.
I hope he will vote to be convicted.
Anything past that is something we can discuss.
But he deserves conviction.
the votes that maybe if he's not convicted, do a censure for the president.
Are you open to that as an alternative if he's not convicted?
I think the president should be tried.
I hope he will vote to be convicted.
Anything past that is something we can discuss.
But he deserves conviction.
Nothing less.
Nothing less.
That's what he deserves.
OK, well, in reality, after the impeachment happens, if Democrats then introduce censure, then it's going to be difficult for them to make that case because they tried impeachment.
It failed.
Now it just looks like you're going back to the well a second time.
In one second, we're going to get to the continued push to suggest that everybody who disagrees with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden on any measure is actually in league with the people of January 6th, the criminals on January 6th.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Okay, so the Democratic Party has decided that they are going to eschew all possibility of unity or agreement on nearly any issue.
And they're going to do so by ignoring their overall positions on a wide variety of things in the past.
Right, so they are very much against political violence, except when members of their side are doing it.
They're very much against inflammatory language, except when Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is accusing Ted Cruz of attempting to murder her and comparing him to her sexual assaulter, her alleged sexual assaulter.
They're all in favor of good things, except when the good things apply to the other side, then they are in favor of the bad things.
So, yesterday, the members of the media were very, very upset because the Brian Sicknick memorial happened at the Capitol, and first of all, I think it's great that they had Brian Sicknick lie in state at the Capitol building.
The guy's a hero.
He's an officer who died in the line of duty protecting members of Congress, elected members of Congress, from a violent mob.
I think it's perfectly appropriate that he should lie in state at the Capitol building.
And Joe Biden went and he visited.
Fox News didn't cover this very much.
They covered it a little bit.
CNN and MSNBC had it on complete streaming coverage.
Now, let me just point out, it's not because CNN and MSNBC are so deeply concerned with the honor of police officers generally that they did this.
CNN and MSNBC have a political axe to grind.
Now, I think that all three networks should have covered this at length.
I do.
I think that they should have all streamed the live coverage because I think that officers who die in the line of duty protecting members of Congress from a violent mob deserve that sort of tribute from everyone.
From everyone.
I also think that members of CNN and MSNBC, if Officer Sicknick had been killed in the line of duty during a BLM riot, I do not think that if Donald Trump had said that person should lie in state, they would have covered it nearly the same way, right?
Then it would have been, well, you know, the police are systemically racist, and it's kind of a tragedy that that happened, but let's be frank about this.
The police, they have a real bad relationship with so many members of the public.
I'm having a tough time swallowing the line from members of the media that they are deeply concerned with the honor of police officers after they have spent years ripping on police officers.
I just have a real problem with that basic idea.
I think that folks like me who have been, I've consistently defended the cops in the face of malign attacks against them by members of the media, in the face of lies told about them by politicians.
I've defended police officers.
The police are the people who stand between us and chaos.
And that's why I'm very happy that they actually did this for Brian Sicknick.
I think it's a good thing.
But when the members of the media suddenly start suggesting that Republicans are not in favor of the police because they won't vote for impeachment, or when it suddenly strikes them that the police are good, but only under certain circumstances, I find it just a little bit hypocritical.
Just a little hypocritical.
In any case, here was a little bit of the footage from the Sicknick Memorial.
Yes, that is Joe Biden, and he's approaching the Brian Sicknick Memorial.
There is a folded flag, obviously, for the officer.
I mean, it's a tragedy, obviously.
This is a man who died in the line of duty, stopping an act of evil, and he deserves every plaudit that he received as Officer Brian Sicknick.
I just wish to God that Democrats were consistent in their respect for police.
They obviously, obviously, obviously are not.
Everybody should be.
Okay, meanwhile, members of the press continue along the lines of, if you disagree with me, then you are responsible for the riot.
Brianna Keillor from CNN, who used to be a lot better as an anchor and she has morphed into a sort of Don Lemon type, very wild-eyed leftist at this point on CNN.
She is now suggesting that Senator Cruz incited the riot.
As Donald Trump's second impeachment trial nears, there is one senator who led the charge to challenge the Electoral College count and enthusiastically threw his weight behind multiple efforts to undermine the Democratic presidential election and is now trying to cleanse himself of the stain of those actions.
Cruz didn't seem to mind the, quote, reckless and irresponsible rhetoric from the president.
In fact, Cruz joined in speaking to voters in Georgia in early January, just days before the Senate runoffs there.
Okay, so again, the idea is that anybody who backed Trump's suggestion that the election results ought to be challenged, they are responsible for the riots.
Now, I think that that was wrong what Cruz did.
I think that it was wrong what Hawley did.
I don't think that any of that is responsible for the riots.
I believe that adults have agency.
There are plenty of adults who came and rallied with Trump and who left in the middle of the riots or before the riots even occurred.
Nonetheless, again, the goal of the press here, I keep saying it over and over and over because people need to see through the veil.
The press are not honest brokers.
They are not even attempting to be honest brokers here.
We all know this.
It is perfectly obvious to everyone who has brain what exactly the press are doing.
These are not folks who are standing up for the institutions of our democracy.
These are folks who are perfectly fine with undermining institutions of our democracy on a fairly regular basis, depending on who is doing the undermining.
These are folks who cheered on violence throughout the summer.
And no, that is not an apples-to-oranges comparison.
That is an apples-to-apples comparison.
It's not whataboutism, because some of us condemned violence all the way through.
And yet here you have Michael Beschloss, the historian, suggesting that America should treat January 6th historically like 9-11.
We should memorialize the date of the Capitol insurrection just like 9-11.
He says it's like the day we almost lost our democracy.
No, actually it was not.
I'm sorry, it didn't even come close to us losing our democracy.
It came close to being an awful, evil, tragic incident like the congressional baseball shooting.
It was a breach of our values for sure.
It was ugly.
I said I think it was the ugliest public spectacle since 9-11 in the United States.
But should we memorialize it the same way that we memorialize the death of 3,000 Americans because a bunch of nuts and violent mob, and a violent mob was stopped by the cops before they could do serious damage?
And let's not, let's be frank about this.
There was no threat to the overall democracy of the United States.
You want to see an overall threat to democracy, take a look at Myanmar.
But right now a military coup is in place.
Okay, that is not the same thing as a bunch of mob idiots storming a Capitol building.
Okay, so never mind the actual history, never mind the actual comparisons.
Here's Michael Beschloss, the historian, suggesting that we should treat January 6th like 9-11.
It's the day we almost lost our democracy.
Again, this is such hyperbolic nonsense.
Conceivably, this could have taken away our democracy.
And this is one reason why I think we have to observe The 6th of January, every single year, is a time that we had a very close call to remind us that we have to be eternally vigilant because democracy is fragile.
You know, Rachel, we observed 9-11.
We remember the fact that there were attacks that landed.
One that almost landed, which was an effort to fly an airplane into the Capitol, kill a lot of members of Congress.
That almost happened.
Here is a terrorist attack that did happen.
Okay.
Wait, is he just calling 9-11 a terrorist attack that didn't happen?
The fact that they didn't hit the Capitol building on 9-11 is one of the things we remember least about 9-11.
The thing we remember most about 9-11 is the images of planes flying into the World Trade Center and taking down both towers, plus another plane flying into the Pentagon and another plane being crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
Those are the things that I remember about 9-11.
The desire to turn January 6th into a referendum On the fragility of our democracy generally is, I think, quite silly.
And again, it really is more tied to what people want to happen next.
It's not about what happened on January 6th.
It's what people want to happen next.
And the media want this more than anything.
The media, more than anything, want a crackdown on people they dislike.
They want to justify any attack of any kind on people they dislike.
The media are just over the moon about Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's comparison between her alleged sexual assaulter and Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, which is, I'm sorry, a morally absurd comparison.
People who disagree with you politically, even if they do stuff that is cynical and that you don't like, are not like people who tried to rape you or who did rape you.
That is not the same thing.
That is not the same thing in any way.
And yet we're told by Monica Hess, the columnist at the Washington Post, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez says she was told that trauma victims should tell their stories as part of their healing, and that is what she did Monday night in the most compelling, heartbreaking, and infuriating 60 minutes available on any screen at any time this week.
She talked about how she found herself questioning the motives of a law enforcement officer who had given her hazy instructions on how to reach an evacuation point.
By the way, I will note that people are ignoring the fact that during that live stream, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez suggested that a police officer who came to help her might have in fact, she was suspicious that he was in fact a white supremacist in disguise because he was white.
Respect for police officers going right out the window on that one.
According to Monica Hess, AOC compared it to a sexual harasser telling his victim the quickest path to normalcy would be her forgiving him, or to parents telling the child they once abused that the mistreatment had happened in the past.
Ocasio-Cortez's whole livestream was brave, but this was the bravest part, when she cried foul on a warped view of reconciliation in which those who stoked the fires of anger and false belief that fueled the attack demand that the victims simply forgive and forget.
Well, that's not all she did, right?
She compared them to rapists and sexual assaulters, but she's gonna receive the plaudits of the media, in the lifestyle section, by the way, of the Washington Post.
Meanwhile, what is this going to lead to?
Well, what this is really going to lead to is the media calling for more crackdowns on people with whom they disagree.
I mean, we can all see which way this is going.
What they would like is a media monopoly.
They also need a new narrative.
I mean, this is the other point here.
In order to Push forward the narrative that January 6th was not an outlier, that the people who stormed the Capitol are actually a mainstream part of the Republican Party.
The media have started to push forward, in very strong fashion, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who again, was a no-name backbencher that no one cared about until five minutes ago, and the media started pushing her extremely hard.
They did some oppo, they found a bunch of bad stuff that she had said in the past, and now it's every Republican is responsible.
The Republican Party is Marjorie Taylor Greene.
We read some of those headlines yesterday.
Headline after headline.
The Republican Party is Marjorie Taylor Greene.
That's what they are.
The new headline, front page of the New York Times, under pressure to rebuke their own GOP leaders face a critical test.
The fates of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Liz Cheney have become a proxy battle for the soul of the party, prompting a clash among top Republicans.
Trump loyalists want to strip Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the number three Republican of her leadership post, as payback for her vote to impeach.
Trump critics want to strip Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia of her committee assignment for endorsing false claims, bigoted language and violent behavior, including calling for the execution of top Democrats.
I'm just wondering.
There are a lot of people who are not.
Who really probably could not be categorized as Trump critics who are in favor of stripping Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments.
Just going to point that out.
But again, the goal here is that the media have to find a new way to push the narrative that they were able to push so successfully during the Trump administration, which was, here is a villain.
This villain represents all of Republicandom.
And so they have settled on Marjorie Taylor Greene.
By the way, they need that narrative in terms of the ratings.
You're seeing a lot of headlines today.
About how CNN was the number one cable network in January.
That's not really a surprise.
They have a lot of reporters on the ground and the news cycle...
was not a pleasant one for conservatives and Republicans, right?
Trump leaves office, the January 6th riots, Trump's behavior, the impeachment.
These were not news cycles that generally are going to make Republicans happy as a general rule, right?
And particularly not when the media have declared that you are in league with all of the bad things that happen.
And so a lot of Republicans tuned out after the election and tuned out after January 6th.
And a lot of Democrats were watching TV with eagerness and anticipation.
I mean, this was like, It was the greatest time ever to be a Democrat, basically between January 15th and January 20th, essentially between the impeachment and when Biden took office.
This was like the best time to be a Democratic TV watcher because you were watching as what you saw as the collapse of the Republican Party was unfolding, the repudiation of everything Trump was happening.
It was just it was great.
Right.
So the ratings spiked for CNN and MSNBC and they declined for Fox News.
So what you're seeing right now is all these headlines saying, well, look at Fox.
Fox is really in trouble.
CNN and MSNBC, they're really on the rise.
Yeah, there's only one problem.
The minute that Joe Biden took office, CNN's ratings tanked.
The minute it happened.
Hey, literally three days after that happened, CNN's ratings plummeted.
They went directly in the toilet.
Fox's, which had declined after the election, stayed pretty much steady.
So here is the headline you're seeing is CNN wins month of January.
Here's the real headline.
Okay, the real headline that matters, because this is going to drive what the media coverage says for the next several years.
Tim Pears of Daily Wire, CNN's ratings tanked 44% the week after Trump left the White House.
44%.
In the first week of the Biden administration, CNN saw the audiences that had been flooding into primetime recently drop precipitously on January 25th to 29th, compared with the highs of previous weeks.
Meanwhile, rival Fox News Channel saw its own ratings only tip slightly after weeks of registering its own sharp declines.
MSNBC has also seen significant declines.
Nowhere as steep as what has hit CNN.
That makes sense because the most rabid Democrat partisans are still tuning over to MSNBC, particularly that nine o'clock hour.
But CNN, which draws sort of the casual Democrat, those people are like, yeah, you know what?
Biden's president now.
I don't care.
I'm ready to move on with my life.
CNN ended the final week of January with ratings dropping roughly 44% for total audience versus the prior week across all three hours of prime time.
So that's what's driving some of this media coverage.
To pretend that the media coverage is completely disconnected from the ratings is obviously untrue.
And so the new plan for the media is sort of the same as the old plan.
They gotta find a villain.
They have to polarize the country around that villain.
They have to suggest that everybody they don't like is in league with that villain.
And then they have to suggest that the solution to that is the all-powerful, all-good, sword-wielding king on high, Joe Biden.
And that is the way they are doing this.
That's the way this is gonna be.
So we're gonna get nothing but wall-to-wall, non-stop coverage of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, yes, should be stripped of her committee assignments.
That is okay.
She shouldn't be in a position of power on committees.
The Republican Party does not have to give her committee assignments.
But also, Mitch McConnell calls her a cancer within the party.
So the media's narrative, just to point this out, just to point out the hypocrisy and ridiculousness here, among Democrats and the media, their narrative is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is probably going to be stripped of her committee assignments when all this is said and done, is the face of the Republican Party.
However, it is very, very good that the faces of the Democratic Party are people like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
And let me just point out, right now, Rashida Tlaib, an open anti-Semite, serves on the House Committee on Financial Services, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, and she's joined a bunch of powerful caucuses inside the Democratic Party.
Ilhan Omar, who's an open anti-Semite, she serves on the House Budget Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
How in the hell is she on the House Foreign Affairs Committee?
She's a blatant anti-Semite who once wrote in defense of a person trying to join ISIS.
She wrote a judge asking that person get a lower sentence because systemic American racism had created the conditions by which this person felt dispossessed.
That person is sitting on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
When are the Democrats going to strip her of her assignments?
The answer, of course, is never.
But this is the media agenda, and the media agenda, Uber Alice.
It matters more than anything, anything, anything else.
I have a couple other examples of this in just one second.
Some of them are fairly egregious, and some are kind of just hilarious.
We'll get to that in a moment.
First, let us talk about the fact you don't want to be going to the auto parts store right now.
You just don't.
I mean, like, when would you ever want to?
You're gonna overpay, you're gonna get to the front of the line, they're finally gonna find you the part that you need, and then they're going to order it online, and you're just going to have to come back later.
So why not just go to the interwebs, find the part that you need, get it delivered straight to you, and not pay that giant markup that you're gonna get at an auto parts store?
This is where rockauto.com comes in.
They're always going to offer you the lowest prices possible, rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear, like airlines do.
Why would you spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
Rockauto.com, it's a family business, serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
Head on over to rockauto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
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Rate Shapiro.
In there, how did you hear about us, Fox?
So they know that we sent you.
All right, we're gonna get to more content in just one second.
First, Daily Wire, we've entered the cultural fight.
Okay, right now, the culture wars are pretty much everything.
Conservatives have spent decades complaining that there is no conservative culture and that conservatives are thrown out of the culture.
So, we here are getting active and we are creating our own.
Earlier this month, We released our first film, Run, Hide, Fight, exclusively for DailyWire members.
You can catch it over at dailywire.com, on our mobile app, on our streaming apps, at Apple TV and Roku.
If you're not a DailyWire member yet, use promo code RHF to get 25% off.
That is RHF for 25% off.
There's a reason audiences are loving it.
If you head on over to Rotten Tomatoes right now, and you check out Run, Hide, Fight on Rotten Tomatoes, what you will see is one of these enormous critical gaps, right?
25% positive from the critics, 93% positive from our audience.
That's the kind of stuff that we intend on making.
Stuff the critics will hate, but you will love.
You can catch it over at dailywire.com, on our mobile app, or on our streaming apps at Apple TV and Roku.
If you're not a Daily Wire member yet, use promo code RHF to get 25% off.
That is R-H-F.
Ron Heidfeit for 25% off your listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Now, one of the beautiful things, if you're a member of the media about this narrative that you've been pushing, one of the most wonderful things about the opportunity that has presented itself in the wake of the Trump presidency is that you can call for a top-down control on information.
And that's exactly what folks over at the New York Times are doing.
So Kevin Roos, who spends his entire life basically just tracking Facebook traffic, and then if conservatives get too much of it, he tweets out every single day that conservative Facebook pages are getting traffic.
Now, this ignores a bunch of data.
Like, for example, the fact that half of the top publishers on the Facebook platform are of the left.
Many more than that, actually.
If you look at the top Facebook publishers of the top 25, 16 are of the left.
A vast majority are from the left.
But, of course, the idea is that conservatives should not be able to get any Facebook traffic.
And then you have the media pushing out studies that suggest, you know, it's all mythical when conservatives worry about a crackdown on tech freedom.
When conservatives worry about being deplatformed, that's all a myth.
It's all a lie.
They put out a study that was commissioned by a member of, I believe, the Biden transition team, or somebody who was involved with Biden's campaign.
It was commissioned by a business person who supported Biden and quoted media matters in the study.
And then they were like, oh, look at this great study.
Okay, if you're quoting media matters, by definition, it's a crappy study.
Okay, we're done here.
It is that simple.
Okay, but it doesn't just go that far.
It's not just trying to pressure the social tech guys.
It is also how we constitute government.
So Kevin Ruse, who, as I say, at the New York Times, is, along with Kara Swisher, the leader of the activist force big tech to stop the means of dissemination for conservatives movement.
Ruse says, last month, millions of Americans watched as President Biden took the oath of office, and in a high-minded inaugural address, called for a new era of American unity.
But plenty, of other Americans weren't paying attention to Mr. Biden's speech.
They were too busy watching YouTube videos that alleged the inauguration was a pre-recorded hoax that had been filmed on a Hollywood soundstage.
Or they were melting down in QAnon group chats trying to figure out why former President Trump wasn't interrupting Biden's speech to declare martial law and announce the mass arrest of satanic pedophiles.
Or maybe their TVs were tuned to OAN, where an anchor was floating the baseless theory that Biden wasn't actually elected by the people.
Hey, you'll notice something at the very top of this column from Kevin Ruess.
He doesn't give you any numbers.
I thought he's Captain Data over here.
How many people were watching the inauguration versus how many people were participating in those particular activities?
I would suggest it was probably somewhat disproportionate, as in wildly disproportionate, which is a good thing, but he's not gonna tell you that.
The idea is that these people are an existential threat to democracy, and we must stop them.
Okay, so, again, I think that their ideas are bad.
I think their ideas are, in some cases, evil.
I think they're being fed a pack of lies.
But I do not think they're an existential threat to the democracy of the United States sufficient to call for the things that Kevin Roose then calls for, okay?
Hoaxes, lies, and collective delusions aren't news, says Kevin Roose, but the extent to which millions of Americans have embraced them may be.
30% of Republicans have a favorable view of QAnon, according to a recent YouGov poll.
According to other polls, more than 70% of Republicans believe Trump legitimately won the election.
40% of Americans, including plenty of Democrats, believe the baseless theory that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab.
Okay, a few things about this.
One, in the aftermath of the 2016 election, a majority of Democrats believe Trump wasn't rightly elected.
Okay, as far as the QAnon conspiracy theorizing, in the aftermath of 9-11, there were a bunch of, if you'd taken a poll of Democrats, On conspiracy theories about 9-11, a significant percentage of Democrats believe some conspiracy theories about 9-11.
Probably a majority of Democrats believe the Bush lied, people died, war for oil in Iraq conspiracy theorizing.
And as far as the baseless theory COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab, Okay, I'm wondering what is incredibly baseless about that.
I mean, if you mean that it was, like, weaponized by the military and then unleashed on an unsuspecting population, that's baseless.
But there's fairly solid evidence that the COVID-19 virus itself was manipulated in a Chinese lab and then was accidentally released.
I mean, The Atlantic reported on that, like, this month.
In any case, Kevin Roos, who is not up on the best information, he says, And it raises an important question for the Biden administration.
that produces these misguided beliefs doesn't just jeopardize some lofty ideal of national unity.
It actively exacerbates our biggest national problems and creates more work in trying to solve them.
And it raises an important question for the Biden administration.
How do you unite a country in which millions of people have chosen to create their own version of reality?
Okay, so this is where it comes down to what he wants.
Right now is the opportunity for the New York Times and Kevin Ruiz and Kara Swisher to redefine reality for you along the lines of their interpretation of reality.
Now, there are certain things that are said that are just blatantly untrue.
Ain't no Jewish space laser.
Okay, as a charter member of the Jews, I can tell you ain't no Jewish space laser.
That's absolutely false.
However, There are also a bunch of claims that I think are false that are open to contention, such as America is systemically racist and its police are systemically racist, and therefore the disproportionate number of black men going to prison is a reflection of American racism and racist police forces.
I don't think there's data to back that up.
Democrats push it every single day.
There is certainly no data to back the idea that the police are randomly killing black men in the street.
That is not true.
That is not true on its face.
Democrats continue to push that.
Would Kevin Roos silence those views?
No.
He would actually propagate those views, presumably.
But, says Kevin Roose, it's time to crack down on free speech.
This is the direction we are moving.
Quote, I've spent the past several years reporting on our national reality crisis.
And I worry that unless the Biden administration treats conspiracy theories and disinformation as the urgent threats they are, our parallel universes will only drift further apart and the potential for violent unrest and civic dysfunction will only grow.
So I called experts.
Yay.
Yay!
Let's talk to some experts on free speech.
See, I think that we're all experts on free speech because it turns out it's just a value.
And free speech as a value means that you're going to have to rebut bad ideas and that people have a right to speak those bad ideas.
But, says Kevin Roos, no, he's going to call some experts.
So, let's talk about what Kevin Roos says the experts have to say.
He says, assess the damage and avoid the quote-unquote terrorist trap.
The experts agreed that before the Biden administration can tackle disinformation and extremism, it needs to understand the scope of the problem.
William Braniff, a counterterrorism expert and professor at the University of Maryland says, quote, it's really important that we have a holistic understanding of what the spectrum of violent extremism looks in the United States and then allocate resources accordingly.
Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, suggested that the Biden administration could set up a truth commission.
That's not Orwellian in any sense.
A government-run truth commission.
Oh, goody, goody, gumdrops.
The government can determine for you what the truth is via a truth commission.
A truth is not self-evident to people, and so we must have a commission that determines truth.
Mm, this is gonna go well.
She says it'll be similar to the 9-11 commission to investigate the planning and execution of the Capitol siege on January 6th.
Okay, now, I don't know why you would call that a truth commission.
Why would you not just call that the January 6th commission?
The reason you're calling it the truth commission is, of course, because you don't want it to be about the January 6th riot at all.
You want it to be about a broader perception of reality.
How broad?
Well, broad enough that it will encompass all the bad views of your political opponents.
Dr. Donovan says, Dr. Donovan.
Professor Donovan said, quote, there must be accountability for these actions.
My fear is that we will get distracted as a society and focus too much on giving voice to the fringe groups that came out in droves for Trump.
These experts were heartened to see that the Biden administration had already announced a comprehensive threat assessment of domestic extremism, but they cautioned that while categorizing these extremists as domestic terrorists could backfire because counter-terrorism efforts had historically been used to justify expanding state powers in ways that ended up harming religious and ethnic minorities, and that today's domestic extremism crisis doesn't map neatly onto older, more conventional types of terror threats.
Okay, here's where it gets really fun.
Several experts Kevin Ruth spoke to recommended the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a realities are.
Oh, good.
So we've got truth commissions and realities are things are going real hot over the New York Times.
The free speech advocates over at the New York Times are calling for truth commissions and realities R's.
Hmm.
Can't see this being misused in any way.
Kevin Roos even is like, now that it comes out of my mouth, it sounds weird.
He says, it sounds a little dystopian, I'll grant, but let's hear them out.
Or we could not.
I mean, just an idea.
I'm just going to throw this out there.
The government shouldn't have a realities R.
Because that's ridiculous.
And a violation of the First Amendment.
And stupid on its face.
But no, let's hear them out.
Right now, say experts, the federal government's response to disinformation and domestic extremism is haphazard and spread across multiple agencies.
There's a lot of unnecessary overlap.
Rene Dresta, a disinformation researcher at Stanford's Internet Observatory, gave the example of two seemingly unrelated problems, misinformation about COVID-19 and misinformation about election fraud.
Often, she said, the same people and groups are responsible for spreading both types.
So instead of two parallel processes, one at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, aimed at tamping down COVID-related conspiracy theories, and another at the Federal Election Commission, trying to correct voting misinformation, a centralized task force could coordinate a single strategic response.
This task force could meet regularly with tech platforms and push for structural changes that could help these companies tackle their own extremism and misinformation problems.
For example, it could formulate safe harbor exemptions that would allow platforms to share data about QAnon and other conspiracy theories with researchers and government agencies without running afoul of privacy laws.
Oh, that's a great idea!
So the government is going to create backdoors for the tech agencies to pass on information they normally wouldn't be allowed to pass on if you believe kooky things about the world.
Good, this won't be misused in any way.
No way, no way you're gonna ever have a government that sets up back doors that say, does this person believe in smaller government and individual freedom?
Or by the way, if you're on the left, does this person believe the police should be defunded?
Maybe we should have a back door and then the government can have all their personal information and keep tabs on them.
Can't see how this is gonna go wrong in any way, like a mass surveillance state pushed by the government on the basis of their own determination of reality and truth.
A member of the New York Times is saying this in the technology section.
Yeah, you can see what the agenda here is.
Also, they want to audit the algorithms, and they don't just want to stop there.
This is what Kara Swisher and Kevin Roos and Juggla Gumbalgum and all the rest of the activists slash journalists have been saying for a while.
Basically, they want to take control of the algorithms and use the algorithms on the tech platforms in order to downgrade any content they don't like.
So Kevin Ruth says, several experts recommended the Biden administration push for much more transparency into the inner workings of the black box algorithms, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other major platforms used to rank feeds, recommend content, and usher users into private groups, many of which have been responsible for amplifying conspiracy theories and extremist views.
So great!
So great, they should just give their algorithms over to the government, and then the government can control the algorithms.
The fact that these people are so confident in their control of the institutions, never occurs then that maybe when you establish this sort of government power can be used against you It's just demonstration of, again, their own perception of their ascendancy and the fact they're never going to give out power.
So they're just going to cement themselves into power using this sort of stuff.
And the media are complicit in this.
The media Democrat complex is so powerful at this point.
It's truly amazing.
It's truly amazing.
Speaking of which, it's amazing to watch as the Democrats continue to blame Republicans for the school closures.
Lori Lightfoot, who again, cut a video in the immediate aftermath of Joe Biden's election saying that now the science had arrived back on the scene.
She's still blaming Trump for her own schools being closed in her own city because she's caving to the teachers unions who spend money on her election.
Here she is blaming Trump, a person who's been out of office for a while and was pushing for school reopenings for the schools being closed in Chicago.
This is a very difficult situation.
And we're in it still because of the incompetence of the previous administration.
So I think it's important for both sides to come to the table in good faith, recognize that we're both trying to work through a very challenging situation, but we must get a deal done.
Okay, so pretty amazing.
It's still Trump.
It's just going to remain Trump's fault forever, I think, is sort of the idea.
Because when you have Trump in the rearview mirror, then you can just blame everything on him.
And you can move forward with your most world-breaking agenda.
Paul Krugman, who's wrong on nearly everything, he said yesterday, you know what?
Republicans keep talking about the stuff like the national debt.
The national debt just doesn't matter now.
I will admit that Paul Krugman at least has been consistent on this.
He always says the national debt doesn't matter because he's wild when it comes to monetary policy.
He's actually a new devil.
He used to believe that modern monetary theory, which was the idea you can just spend money forever and no one will ever call it in.
He used to believe that was idiotic.
Now he has shifted his opinion because, of course, he is very much in favor of just spending endless amounts of money.
He says the national debt doesn't matter.
Just blow it out, man.
There's been a real sea change in mainstream economic views that says the debt is just not that big of a problem.
Now, if you want to disagree with that, OK, but the Republican Party has no standing to do that because they have been so obviously they didn't care about debt when the Republican, when Bush was president, they suddenly cared about when Obama was president.
They stopped caring when when when Trump came in and now they care about it again with Biden.
So they they just have no credibility.
If someone wants to make a serious argument that isn't so obviously partisan, Fine, but the mainstream economic view now is that the debt that's being incurred is not a problem, whereas failure to provide enough economic relief during this pandemic is a problem.
Okay, so a couple of things.
One, he's actually not wrong that Republicans blew their credibility by not standing up to big spending under Trump.
That actually is true.
But some of us were pretty consistent on this, so we do get to complain about all this.
Meanwhile, Yamiche Alcindor, remember that Yamiche Alcindor is supposed to be a reporter.
Not an opinion journalist, a reporter.
I mean, Shelson's from PBS.
She says Democrats just run right over the Republicans, just boom, run them over.
This is real bipartisan language happening here.
We cannot wait six months to have negotiations.
We can't have the nine month back and forth where Republicans give a little and Democrats give a lot.
That can't be what happens because if that is, then there are going to be millions of Americans who aren't going to get the vaccine, who aren't going to get the booster shots that are needed.
So even if we have enough vaccines for the summer, you're going to have to continuously vaccinate Americans.
I think that's something that maybe is lost on people.
And as a result, what you get is A real sense that there needs to be this push with Democratic power.
Oh yeah, you know, now it's urgent.
Urgent.
Weird how the urgency didn't exist before.
Now it's super urgent.
Speaking of urgency, Joe Biden is now pushing for more executive orders.
We're just going to govern by executive orders.
America's former government has turned into a vestigial legislature that spends extraordinary amounts of your money.
Amounts of your money that do not exist.
I mean, we're going to have to borrow from future generations.
That's all they do.
And meanwhile, we elect, effectively, a dictator every four years to reverse the other guy's executive orders and put in place some new ones.
Here is Joe Biden doing some of that yesterday.
Today I'm going to sign a few executive orders to strengthen the immigration system, building on the executive actions I took on day one to protect DREAMers and to end the Muslim ban and to better manage our borders.
And that's what these three different executive orders are about.
And I want to make it clear.
There's a lot of talk, with good reason, about the number of executive orders that I've signed.
I'm not making new law.
I'm eliminating bad policy.
Oh, so if you're eliminating bad policy, it's not making new law, is I guess the math here.
Okay, but what if you're making new law?
What if that's what you're actually doing?
So here's what's actually in some of the executive orders that he's signing.
So he's overthrowing the Trump administration policy negotiated that allowed people to apply for citizenship from outside the country.
Basically, if you came to the border and you applied for asylum, you had to wait in Mexico while we adjudicated your asylum case.
He is trying to overthrow that, which of course is going to lead to a vast rush up to the border.
Also, another thing that he is going to be doing is he is going to be setting up a review of Trump-era policies on legal immigration.
And we'll streamline the naturalization process and instruct agencies to review the public charge rule, which limited green cards to immigrants who are deemed likely to be reliant on welfare.
Oh, goody, so we can have immigrants who are deemed likely to be on welfare coming to the country in massive numbers.
Great, great stuff here.
That's gonna be all good.
Also, by the way, Joe Biden is unleashing the regulators.
So when he says he's not making law, apparently he's also going to be unleashing the... Wait, quick note on the immigration thing.
Quick note here.
I gotta love this headline from CNN.
You ready for this?
Biden administration prepares to open overflow facility for migrant children.
Overflow facility for migrant children.
Wait, wait, do you mean kids in cages?
Overflow facility for migrant children.
Is that just a euphemism there, gang, over at CNN?
An apple is an apple and not a banana?
According to CNN, the Biden administration is opening an overflow facility for unaccompanied migrant children apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border, the federal agency tasked with the children's care told CNN in a statement.
The Health and Human Services Department will reopen a facility in Carrizo Springs that can accommodate about 700 kids and can be expanded if necessary.
Oh, look, look at that.
They're not being placed in care.
They're being put in an overflow facility for children.
Weird how the language changed from the media that way.
It was kids in cages when it was Trump.
Before that, it was just a bad thing that was happening under Obama, but it was really about Trump.
Now they're doing exactly what Trump was doing, but I guess it's good now.
So that's exciting.
Also, Joe Biden is going to be unleashing the regulators.
Mick Mulvaney and Joe Grogan have a piece in the Wall Street Journal all about this, talking about how a presidential memo was released on January 20th, titled, Modernizing Regulatory Review.
They say regulatory law is arcane and generally boring, but its effects can be monumental.
The new presidential memo tells the Office of Management and Budget how to do the cost-benefit analysis that so much policy is based on.
So, what does the presidential memo do?
It's intended to quote, ensure that the review process promotes policies that reflect new developments in scientific and economic understanding, fully accounts for regulatory benefits that are difficult or impossible to quantify, and does not have harmful anti-regulatory or deregulatory effects.
So what does that mean?
It means that you're supposed to throw out traditional measures of cost-benefit analysis, and you're supposed to take into account feelings.
Oh yay!
We're supposed to take into account things that they legitimately are arguing you cannot measure.
The recommendations should provide concrete suggestions on how the regulatory review process can promote public health and safety, economic growth, social welfare, racial justice, economic stewardship, human dignity, equity, and the interests of future generations.
So says Mick Mulvaney, the applications are almost limitless.
You want to regulate agricultural drainage ditches as navigable water subject to federal rules and restrictions?
Don't worry about whether food costs might rise or farmers might go bankrupt.
You can offset those costs with the societal quote-unquote benefit, an unmeasurable societal benefit of promoting the interests of future generations.
It doesn't matter if it can't be measured.
It serves the desired end.
There's a housing policy.
It turns out it's going to really hurt the economy and it's going to cost a fortune.
It doesn't matter.
You're affording quote-unquote racial justice and equity.
So all this does is it basically removes all limits on the cost-benefit analysis provided to OMB, turning it into a policy-making body rather than what it was supposed to be originally, which was some sort of objective standard by which we measure whether a policy is going to cost money or whether it's going to create prosperity.
So when people say that Joe Biden is a moderate, he's pushing forward moderate bipartisan policies.
No, not for one second is Joe Biden pushing forward moderate bipartisan policies.
Not for one single second of one single day.
So far as we can see, thus far, I'm waiting for bipartisanship.
I've praised Joe Biden on some of the things that he's done so far.
When he sent aircraft carriers into the South China Sea to try and defend against Chinese predations, I said that was a good thing.
I hope that there'll be more good things from the Biden administration.
We're not seeing a lot of them right now.
Alrighty, we're gonna be doing another hour of content coming up.
In the meantime, go check out the Michael Moll's show.
He's discussing BLM being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
And frankly, it's not a shock.
Yasser Arafat once won the Nobel Peace Prize.
You can hear more details about this story over on Michael's show.
It is available everywhere right now.
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 Ciejewicz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and Makeup is by Fabiola Christina.
Production Assistant, Jessica Kranz.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright 2021.
The Senate prepares for the pseudo-impeachment trial of former President Trump, AOC compares Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to rapists, and BLM gets nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.