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Feb. 11, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:07
We Are All Gina Carano | Ep. 1193
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Gina Carano gets fired from Disney Plus for posting a Holocaust comparison on social media.
House impeachment managers show tape from inside the Capitol building on January 6th.
And then they try to blame Trump's language for the riot.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Okay, so we're gonna get to everything impeachment related in just a few minutes here.
But honestly, the story that I think is more indicative for more Americans today than impeachment is actually a story that seems rather minor on the surface.
It seems rather minor on the surface, except that we have literally tens of millions of people in the United States who are afraid that the cancel culture is coming up for them.
And cancel culture does exist.
OK, the culture of we are going to get you fired because we don't like your social media posts, not even social media posts that are extraordinarily horrific.
You know, the kind of stuff that would get you shunned in polite society, just stuff that is a little edgy, right?
That kind of stuff that has impact.
on hundreds of millions of Americans.
And because we have in the United States an iron triangle between the Democratic Party and the media and corporations.
Okay, that iron triangle goes something like this.
The media and the Democrats agree on virtually everything.
Democrats have an agenda.
The media push that agenda.
And then the media and Democrats pressure corporations to do their bidding in order so that they can foster that agenda.
So unofficially, they're allowed to use threats in order to make clear what exactly they want to happen.
Okay, so what this results in very, very often is corporations looking to cram down a particular viewpoint on you and then cancel you.
Right, that is what many Americans are feeling today.
There are polls out there that show that a vast majority of Americans in every single political group, including liberals, except for people on the hard left, feel like they cannot say what they want to say in public because they're afraid that they are going to be cancelled, fired.
Cast out from polite society.
Hey, that is a real phenomenon.
It's taking place every single day.
And I will say it is amusing to watch as some people on the hard left get cancelled and then they turn around and they're like, why aren't people defending me?
We are.
It's just that you guys created this society.
This actually happened to a socialist moron named Nathan Robinson.
He got cancelled from The Guardian.
And he said he got canceled from The Guardian because he had put up some anti-Israel tweet.
Okay, now I think he's an idiot.
I think that his views on Israel are abhorrent, but I don't think that he should lose his columnist slot over at The Guardian.
He certainly would not defend anybody on the other side who got canceled.
In fact, he has repeatedly said cancel culture does not exist.
Okay, it does exist.
The fact that there are people out there who want you to lose your job for the sin of saying things they don't agree with is extraordinarily real, and it is happening on a moment-by-moment basis.
The latest example of this is Gina Carano.
So, Gina Carano is one of the stars of the Mandalorian.
She plays a character called Cara Dune.
And Gina Carano was a former MMA star, and then she was in a movie called Haywire, in which she sort of made her acting debut.
She's been in a bunch of stuff since then.
And then her biggest role to date was as Cara Dune in the Mandalorian.
So she's sort of the ally of the Mandalorian, who's played by Pedro Pascal.
Now, apparently back in November, according to the Hollywood Reporter, there was talk about giving her her own spinoff show because Disney Plus has decided to move into a bunch of Star Wars spinoffs, right?
Just like the Mandalorian.
Well, then they decided we're not going to do that anymore.
You know, we've decided that we're not going to do that.
Apparently, they had decided that back in November because she had made some social media posts about President Trump.
And this made them very angry.
And so they essentially removed that possibility.
Okay, so again, this is according to The Hollywood Reporter, quote, this is not the first time Carano, who played former Rebel Alliance soldier Cara Dune on The Mandalorian, has been the focus of social media ire for her political comments.
Last November, she issued contentious tweets, one in which she mocked mask wearing amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, another in which she falsely suggested that voter fraud occurred during the 2020 presidential election.
A source with knowledge of Lucasfilm's thinking told The Hollywood Reporter, quote, they've been looking for a reason to fire her for two months.
Today was the final straw.
Okay, so finally, they got Cara Dune.
Right?
They finally got Cara Dune.
They finally got Gina Carano.
By the way, what were those old tweets that were so terrible?
So she apparently tweeted on November 14th, 2020, quote, Okay, that is not something that is cancelable.
quote, Democratic government leaders now recommend we wear blindfolds along with masks so we really can't see what's going on.
Okay, that is not something that is cancelable.
On November 5th, she tweeted out, we need to clean up the election process so we are not left feeling the way we do today.
Put in place laws that protect us against voter fraud.
Investigate every state, film the counting, flush out fake votes, require ID, make voter fraud end in 2020, fix the system.
That's not controversial.
I'm sorry, that is not controversial.
Saying that you have to protect against voter fraud with things like voter ID and filming counting and flushing out fake votes.
That is not controversial.
Okay, so they're saying that they had meant to cancel her all the way back in November for those kinds of posts, which are slightly edgy, but not frankly all that edgy.
Okay, then she posted the final straw.
So what exactly was the final straw?
She posted on Instagram.
It was a picture of a Jewish woman running away from Nazi soldiers.
Okay, and here's what she wrote.
Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers, but by their neighbors, even by children.
Sad face, right?
Sad emoji.
And then it's a quote that says, because history is edited, most people today don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.
How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?
That is not her making light of the Holocaust.
As your official Jewish friend, as an Orthodox Jew, let me just say, I don't like Holocaust comparisons.
I don't.
I think that virtually all of them are overwrought.
I think that very few of them really are accurate.
I think most of them ignore historical context.
I think virtually all of them liken things that are not like the Holocaust to the Holocaust.
I don't think that liberals in the United States are on the verge of rounding Jews up and sending them to concentration camps, for example.
With that said, this post is an overwrought holocaust comparison.
It is not a fireable offense.
It is not even close to a fireable offense.
Her saying that neighbors should treat people decently because if you don't treat your political neighbors decently, you can be roped into doing things that are evil, which is the general point.
That happens to not be a general point that is wrong.
It's just that it ought not be done in the context of a holocaust comparison.
Again, I don't like holocaust comparisons.
Is that a fireable offense?
Okay, so let me give that a little bit of flavor.
Is that a fireable offense?
Are overwrought holocaust comparisons, comparisons that should not be made, that are inappropriately made to the holocaust, are those fireable offenses?
Well, let me just mention that there's another star of the Mandalorian.
His name is Pedro Pascal.
Pedro Pascal has recently trended because he is a leftist on politics and because he has expressed support for transgender rights and all of this.
And so this makes him very popular in the Twitterverse.
Also, he's very progressive on issues like immigration.
Here is a tweet that Pedro Pascal put out on June 20th, 2018.
Hashtag, this is America.
It is a picture on the top of Germany, 1944, a bunch of Jews standing behind barbed wire in a concentration camp.
America, 2018.
It is a picture of a bunch of kids in cages, right?
So the comparison is kids in cages in Germany, 1944.
You know, except for the fact that we are housing and making sure that those kids are okay, as opposed to, you know, gassing them to death, that comparison is perfectly appropriate.
But was there an iota of comment about Pedro Pascal?
Of course not.
Gina Carano just got fired.
She didn't just get fired, she also lost her job at UTA.
So UTA represents her.
So she didn't lose her job, they represent her, right?
UTA is an agency, they represent her, and they dumped her on the side of the road.
Disney Plus has decided that Gina Carano can no longer be associated with Disney Plus because she made an overwrought Holocaust comparison that happens to be of the right.
If you make an overwrought Holocaust comparison, you're of the left.
If you call Trump Hitler, if you suggest that kids who are being kept separate from their parents in accordance with the Flores settlement, by the way, that that is like the Holocaust, you're totally fine.
We're going to get to more of this in just one second, because it is indicative of where we are in the culture, and it is a terrible moment for American culture.
And yes, this is more indicative for more Americans of what is going on in their daily lives than many of the things that are being said in the Capitol building today.
And that is not to make light of the impeachment and is not to make light of what happened on January 6th.
It is to say that social movements have consequences and we are now in the middle of a mass social movement to expel half of the American population from the body politic.
We're getting to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so according to The Hollywood Reporter, I have a question.
Like, really, this is a question.
Mandalorian or the Star Wars galaxy after sharing a post on social media implying that being a Republican today is like being Jewish during the Holocaust.
Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm. There are no plans for her to be in the future, a Lucasfilm spokesperson said in a statement. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable. I have a question. Like, really, this is a question. Who got denigrated based on cultural and religious identity? I don't understand.
Is the suggestion that when you say that people should not treat other people the way that Germans treated Jews prior to the Holocaust, that that is denigrating Jews in some way?
She's saying what happened to Jews is bad.
I don't like the comparison because, again, I don't like overall Holocaust comparisons, but is that denigrating?
I don't feel denigrated.
I'm both culturally and religiously Jewish.
In fact, I'm one of the most Jewish people I know.
Hard to find people more Jewish than I am.
I wear the hat and everything.
I do not feel denigrated by Gina Carano's Instagram post.
I feel, again, like it was overwrought.
Do I think that's a fireable offense?
Okay, also, let's just talk about things that are denigrating and abhorrent and unacceptable.
Okay, so Disney Plus has now canceled Gina Carano for the great sin of an Instagram post that they find inappropriate.
Hey, from the same people who are constantly denigrating conservatives.
I mean, like, on a regular basis.
But in any case, you know what's actually comparable to the Holocaust?
One of the most comparable things happening on planet Earth right now to the Holocaust.
The rounding up of Uighur Muslims in China and sending them to concentration camps and then forcibly sterilizing the women.
As reported by the Associated Press.
That is one of the most similar things you can have to the Holocaust.
What would you say if I told you that Disney Plus, in the credits to Mulan, thanked the Zhangjiang government, which is the province in China where they're currently holding Uighur Muslims in concentration camps.
And they thanked, Disney Plus thanked the Chinese government.
Now, which seems more cancelable to you?
Working with a government that is forcibly sterilizing Muslim women on the basis of their religion, which is kind of like the Holocaust, like without the exaggeration or the overwrought of it.
That's really a lot like the Holocaust, actually.
Which is more like that?
That or Gina Carano put out a social media meme that included a Holocaust comparison, just like Pedro Pascal did a couple of years ago.
But Pedro Pascal is good because he's on the left, and Gina Carano is really bad because she's not on the left.
So UTA has now also dropped the actor.
On Wednesday, the hashtag Fire Gina Carano was trending following that Instagram post.
The post has since been deleted.
Screenshots were widely shared by users on social media who called for her firing from the hit Disney Plus Star Wars show.
Now, again, she deleted the post.
So it's not even like she left it up.
She deleted the post.
And that's still not enough, because that's the way that this works.
The minute that you delete the post, it's not as though absolution is granted to you.
It's not as though, oh, you know what?
I was overwrought.
That was a mistake.
I took it down.
Nope.
This is just an excuse to beat the living hell out of you.
According to sources, Lucasfilm planned to unveil Carano as a star of her own Disney Plus series during a December Investors Day presentation, but scrapped those plans following her November tweet, in which she suggested that we ought to protect against voter fraud, and also in which she suggested that the media were essentially blinding you to some things that were true.
Multiple Mandalorian spinoffs are in the works from executive producers Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, including Rangers of the New Republic, which could have potentially starred Carano.
After the latest round of social media posts, the decision to cut ties with the actor came swiftly.
There is a damned shocker.
There is an unbelievable shocker.
So it is not a shocker at all, of course, but it is indicative of the world in which we live.
And everybody knows that they are on the hook for this.
This is the prevailing wind of our culture right now.
If your corporation, the one that hires you, finds out that 10 years ago you posted something that is now out of fashion.
Let's say that back in 2008, for example, you supported traditional marriage in the state of California, and that comes out now in 2021.
You could lose your job.
Why do I say that?
Because that's exactly what happened to Brandon Eich, who is the CEO of Mozilla Firefox.
That happened just a few years ago when he held the exact same position on Proposition 8 that a man named Barack Obama did at the time.
The attempt to cancel anyone and everyone, because the standards are constantly shifting and constantly moving, but really only people on one side of the aisle, is ongoing.
Another person who is currently being canceled, and his apologies are not gonna matter, is Morgan Wallen.
So Morgan Wallen is this country star, this massive country star.
He shared a video on Wednesday in which he apologized for being caught on tape being a drunk, basically, and yelling at one of his friends, the N-word.
Now, was he actually using the n-word as a way of denigrating black people, or was he using it the same way that rappers use the n-word?
I know that we're supposed to strip intent and context from all of these conversations, but, um, he was not actually calling a black person the n-word because that is just blatant racism.
Instead, he was using it the same way that rappers use the n-word.
Right?
He was just saying drunkenly to a friend blah blah blah blah n-word.
Okay, that is not good.
I don't like the use of the n-word.
Period.
End of story.
Right, I don't say it in my life.
I won't accept people in my life who say it to me or with me, in my presence.
That's not something that is cool.
Okay, but is that a cancelable offense?
That he said a thing, a bad word, to a person who was not black in non-racist fashion?
That's not the same thing as calling a black person the N-word.
In any case, he apologized for it.
Is that gonna buy him any sort of love?
Of course not.
By the way, his neighbor who filmed this thing and then put it online for the lols, is a jackass.
And if you're sitting around being the Stasi for the woke culture so that you can just tape people who are drunken celebrities saying things that you don't particularly like so you can get them canceled, this makes you the bad person.
Doesn't mean what he said was appropriate.
It does mean that you are not any arbiter of virtue if your entire life revolves around taking out your phone and taping people doing things in drunken states.
Seriously, this is the culture that we have become.
Okay, so Morgan Wallen issued an apology.
He said, the video you saw was of me on hour 72 of a bender.
That's not something I'm proud of.
Obviously, the natural thing is to apologize further and just continue to apologize, but because you got caught, and that's not what I wanted to do.
And he said he was aware that he had let people down, including his parents and his son.
And then he explained that he has accepted invitations from black organizations, executives, and leaders to have open and honest conversations.
They offered me grace.
They also paired that with an offer to learn and to grow.
You think that's gonna work for Morgan Wallen?
Apparently it only works with people who are of the left, right?
If you're of the left and you say anti-semitic or anti-white, like Nick Cannon still has his job.
Nick Cannon essentially suggested that white people are monsters.
And he still is going to be having his job at the end of the day.
Ice-T has said wildly anti-semitic stuff.
That dude's going to have a job.
So the sort of The willingness to allow people a second chance again only extends to one side of the aisle, not to the other side of the aisle, because presumably, Morgan Wallen is perceived as right-wing even if he is not, because he's a country singer.
That is the way that things work nowadays.
This is not an argument that people aren't saying things that are wrong.
It's not an argument that Gina Caron's original post was great.
It's not an argument that Morgan Wallen should be using the N-word with his friends.
None of that is true.
The question is, are these offenses that should deprive people of their livelihoods and careers?
And the answer, of course, is no.
It's no.
And if you're part of the culture that suggests that people should lose their livelihood and their career over this, you are part of the problem in the United States, and you're making the country worse.
You're making the country much worse.
You are not going to people quietly and saying, in an effort to better the conversation, you know, maybe you should take that down because that's kind of inappropriate, or maybe that's a bad idea, or maybe that's overwrought.
Instead, you are trying to ruin their lives because they said something that you disagree with.
This is not about bettering the culture.
It is not about making the country a better place.
It is about you and your unearned moral superiority.
Because guess what?
I promise you, I promise you, that if anybody spent half a moment searching the social media feeds of the bosses over at Disney Plus, or the lower downs over at The Mandalorian, or any of the actors over at The Mandalorian, they could come up with stuff that's twice as bad as anything Corona's ever said.
And if they searched all of the recording industry executives' social media feeds and emails over the past few years, they could find stuff that they've said that is significantly worse and more damaging than anything Morgan Wallen said.
That is the way our culture works right now.
Alrighty, in just a second, we're gonna get to more of this than we'll get to everything impeachment-related.
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Here's the thing.
None of this is done in good faith.
None of this is about good faith making the country a better place.
You know how I can tell?
Because every two weeks or so, Chris Pratt trends.
Chris Pratt trends on Twitter every two weeks or so.
Not because he's done anything or said anything.
Every time he trends, I click on it to see, did they finally catch Chris Pratt, right?
That's not what it is.
It's that people are trending Chris Pratt because they know that Chris Pratt is a Christian.
And because he is a Christian, they suspect that he holds unpalatable social issues views.
And this means that if they can preemptively cancel Chris Pratt, they will.
I promise.
It's a real thing.
He trends every couple of weeks on Twitter for no reason other than so they can say that Chris Evans is kind of a jerk, but that Chris Evans is a wonderful, wonderful human being because he holds all the right left-wing views and Chris Pratt is super bad, right?
Chris Pratt is the worst Chris, is the way that they put it.
Why?
Because of his social viewpoint.
There is no honesty here.
They would try to cancel Chris Pratt the same today as they would tomorrow.
It's just a question of whether there is a hook that they can hang their hat on.
They're trying to do the same thing to Tucker Carlson today.
So Tucker Carlson is once again trending on Twitter.
And all of the boycotters are out there trying to cudgel advertisers into dropping his show.
And they're trying to do so on the basis of a monologue in which you discuss George Floyd.
What he said in the monologue is that George Floyd died of a drug overdose.
Now, I don't know whether George Floyd died of a drug overdose.
What I do know is that the Hennepin County Medical Examiner said that he had enough fentanyl in his system to kill a horse, and that if he had died in his house, then rightly it would have been ascribed to drug overdose.
Now, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner said, I'm not saying that the drug overdose killed him, but he did have an extraordinary level of fentanyl in his system.
So Tucker essentially paraphrased the medical report from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner.
That happens to be the same autopsy report, the official autopsy report, being used by the defense in the George Floyd case.
So Tucker cited that, and now people are going nuts online.
Maybe advertisers should pull because he's pushing a conspiracy theory.
Okay, the autopsy is not a conspiracy theory.
The autopsy is an autopsy.
You may disagree with that autopsy.
You should find some medical evidence that George Floyd did not die of a medical overdose, of some sort of drug overdose.
And by the way, even if he died of a drug overdose, that still does not mean that the officer in that particular case would not have been guilty of use of excessive force.
That's also a possibility.
I've said that since the beginning.
If you were going to go for a conviction in the George Floyd case, rather than grandstanding, the easy conviction is probably excessive force, not murder.
Because it's hard to prove causation in terms of murder when the person is suffering from what is pretty clearly excited delirium, begs to be pushed out of the car by the cops, refuses to sit down, they treat him decently for a while, and then finally, when his neck is knelt upon for eight minutes, which is a terrible video.
When that happens, it turns out that he doesn't have any damage to his trachea, for example.
Like there's certain realities of medical science that are going to be taken into account during the trial. So you can say excessive force without having said murder.
But beyond that, do you deserve to have advertisers boycott you because you cited a medical report in a contentious trial?
Is that the way that this works?
No.
Here's the deal.
They don't care what Tucker says on a daily basis.
They don't care what I say on a daily basis.
And they don't care what you say on a daily basis.
If they know what you believe, they're just waiting.
And all that is happening right now is they are just waiting.
They're waiting for the mousetrap to snap on you.
And snap your neck, politically speaking.
That is all they're waiting for.
It is not about an honest attempt to cleanse the culture.
It is not about an honest attempt to have a discussion or a conversation.
It is about, can we wrong-foot you so that we have an excuse to say that your entire career has been completely and utterly garbage and that you are a bad person?
And so we feel good in excising you from the body politic and Twilight Zone wishing you out into the cornfield.
That's all that's happening right now in the culture, and that is a big deal.
It is a big deal to you.
It is a big deal to me.
It should be a big deal to your company.
It should be a big deal to your friends.
That's the pressure that so many people are feeling.
By the way, right, left, and center.
Liberals feel this way.
There's a reason 150 liberals wrote a letter to Harper's Weekly decrying this sort of stuff.
This is not a right-left issue.
This is a left-versus-everybody-else issue.
This is a hard-left-versus-everybody-else issue, and the hard left is in control, and we are going to have to consolidate and fight back against it because it really is garbage.
It is garbage.
Okay, in just a second we're going to get to the impeachment trial, which continues and is ongoing.
Already here.
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Okay, so while all of this cultural battle is going on, Which, again, is making the country more deeply polarized.
We have this impeachment trial that continues.
So, the Democrats yesterday, they trotted out a bunch of tape, and the tape was essentially designed to elicit an emotional response, which, of course, it should.
It should elicit an emotional response when you see Congress people having to flee for their lives while a baying mob breaks into the Capitol building.
And we should look at that tape, because we should always look evil straight in the face.
It is evil to invade the Capitol building baying for Nancy Pelosi's blood.
It is evil to break into the Capitol building shouting, hanging Mike Pence.
These are evil things to do.
So it is important that Americans always look directly in the face of things that are evil.
Now, of course, what the Democrats were trying to do is make everybody feel a particular way, which you should feel, but make people feel that way not about the protesters and the rioters, really the rioters, not about the people who committed criminal acts, but about everyone on the right.
That's the actual goal here.
The goal here, because they know that they're not going to get an impeachment, the goal here is to actually smear everybody on the right with all of this.
E.J.
Dionne over at the Washington Post makes this absolutely clear.
He said the House impeachment managers moved efficiently on Wednesday to close off the escape hatches and back doors for Senate Republicans.
Quietly but passionately, they put the lie to the sham alibis that weak and cowardly members of the GOP are likely to invoke if they do decide to do Donald Trump's bidding one more time.
Those who vote to acquit the former president will now own it all.
The incendiary speech that made the nation's capital a killing ground, but also the months of incitement and lying that built up to the violence.
They will own the threats against elected officials who refuse to cheat on Trump's behalf, the attacks on black voters in big cities, the savage mendacity of his all-caps tweets.
Voting to acquit will mean joining in Trump's rejection of the democratic obligation to accept the outcome of a free election, and in his declarations, even before the voting began, that this was a rigged and stolen contest.
Okay, so this is the goal, right?
The goal is Everybody who thinks that Trump should not be convicted, after leaving office, by the way, for speaking in inflammatory and false language, which, again, is not a standard that could be applied to anybody in Congress.
People in Congress are constantly using inflammatory false language.
It happens all the damn time.
If you believe that that standard should not be the standard for impeachment, according to EJDL, and this means you agreed with everything Trump did, and that you agreed with the riots, That's the actual goal here.
Like, on a political level, that's what the goal here is.
I'm not saying that for every single congressperson that that is what the goal of impeachment is.
Some congresspeople legitimately feel like Trump abused his power and therefore should pay a legal price for that.
But what the media would like to get out of this is smearing the entire Republican Party and anybody who even tangentially associates as a conservative.
That is the actual goal here.
This is why you see CNN's Don Lemon suggesting that if you stand with Trump in any way, you don't get to say you stand with cops.
By the way, there's great irony in hearing from CNN lecturers on who stands with cops and who does not.
This is the same network that broadcasts Chris Cuomo comparing the riots to the Tea Party and asking if there was anything that suggested that protests had to be nonviolent.
The same network that is constantly suggesting that cops are systemically racist is now very angry at Trump supporters who didn't support the riots and suggest that those Trump supporters who didn't support the riots also hate cops.
Here is Don Lemon.
Blue lives matter, huh?
Law and order!
Law and order!
Blue lives matter!
Respect the flags!
Respect law enforcement!
Don't you dare even say that again!
If you can stand by after that video, if you can do that, I don't ever want to hear that again.
I don't want to hear that from you.
I don't want to hear family values from you.
I don't want to hear respect police officers from you.
Don't want to hear it.
Wow, this is very, very much objective journalisming here from Don Lemon.
The hot, sticky journalism getting everywhere right there.
That's serious journalism, obviously.
He doesn't want to hear it from you.
That's not viewpoint.
That's just journalism right there.
By the way, again, him saying that he doesn't want to hear family values from you if you don't support the riots, but also you think that this impeachment is a bad idea.
He doesn't want to hear family.
Like, I need a lecture on family values from Don Lemon.
A guy who in national print was hitting on waiters?
Okay, like... No.
No, I don't think so.
I'm not gonna... By the way, that is not a reference to his sexual orientation at all.
Anybody who hits on people publicly in front of other reporters is doing a bad thing and is gross.
So I think that Don Lemon lectures on family values and loving cops from Don Lemon.
Or ABC's Terry Moran, who says that... Hey, wait a second.
I heard that making Holocaust comparisons is bad.
That's what I heard like five seconds ago.
I heard it's a fireable offense to make Holocaust comparisons.
So ABC's Terry Moran, what do you think of Trump's relationship with the GOP there?
The way that Republicans just aren't going to budge, whatever the nature of this argument, whatever the nature of the facts, is because I think we heard it in these vivid videos that the Democratic House managers are playing.
Fight for Trump.
Not fight for America.
He has the Republican Party as a personalized power like we haven't seen.
It's a Caudillo.
It's a Caesar.
It's a Führer.
We don't see that in this country.
We do now.
Oh, it's like a Führer.
So now you're comparing members of the Republican Party to Nazis.
Wait a second.
I thought that you weren't allowed to compare Democrats to Nazis.
Right.
And I kind of agree with that.
But it's OK on ABC News.
Wait, hold on.
Isn't ABC owned by, wait for it, wait for it, Disney?
Why isn't that fascinating?
There is a newsman, Terry Moran, suggesting that Donald Trump is the Fuhrer, which makes the Republicans the Nazis.
He is on ABC, which is owned by Disney.
Have there been any calls to fire Terry Moran today?
No, I noticed there are not.
I noticed there are not.
How fascinating.
How riveting.
Why, it's almost as though there's no standard at all, except that if you're on the left, you're not canceled, and if you're not on the left, then you have to live in fear that you're gonna be canceled at any damned minute.
And that is the entire goal here.
That's the entire goal.
So in a second, I'm gonna show you the actual footage from the riots that was unveiled yesterday.
Because again, we should look evil in its face when we see it.
Two things can be true at once.
We should look evil in its face when we see it.
And also, there are people who will use any political opportunity in order to cast their political opposition as in league with that evil.
And that is wrong.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, so let's go through some of the footage that Democrats brought forth for the impeachment.
So some of this footage is absolutely stunning.
And it is, thank God, you know, thank God for Capitol Police.
Thank God for law enforcement.
It's a miracle that this didn't get any worse than it actually was.
So for example, there was video that emerged of Officer Eugene Goodman, who is sort of the hero of the day, leading Mitt Romney away from the rioters.
So he was walking down the hall and Officer Goodman, you'll see in this video, actually comes and turns him around.
passes Senator Mitt Romney and directs him to turn around in order to get to safety.
Okay, and then there's video of Chuck Schumer with security avoiding the mob.
That video is being shown by the Democrats as well.
Walking up a ramp.
Going up the ramp with his detail.
He'll soon go out of view.
And you can see, I believe, that one of those officers has their gun unsheathed on a holster.
And then you also have a video of Mike Pence being escorted out of the building.
So he was being escorted down the stairs and out.
He was actually trapped in the building during this thing.
And then they also showed footage of body cam footage of an officer being beaten by the mob.
I mean, it was truly terrible, right?
And we should look again for the fifth time.
Evil in the face.
These people who are beating up cops in the name of conspiratorial nonsense.
This is an act of evil.
What is happening right here?
Now, the case the Democrats have to make is that this is on Trump.
It's not on the people who engaged in the evil.
Really, it is on Trump, personally.
Now, there are two types of causation, as I've explained many times on the show.
There's but-for causation, which is the weakest form of causation.
But for X happening, Y would not have happened.
That sort of causation is very rarely used in legal circles.
It's especially not used with regard to incitement because it is simply too weak.
But for Donald Trump waking up that morning, this wouldn't have happened.
But for Capitol Police not being on the scene in time, this wouldn't have happened.
But for Donald Trump not being elected in 2016, this wouldn't have happened.
But for Barack Obama not being a polarizing president, this wouldn't have happened.
But for causation doesn't mean that you have legal causation that is sufficient to suggest that Trump is responsible for what happened.
So that is the kind of causation that Democrats have been relying on.
Because when it comes to, did Trump actually cause this thing?
In order for you to say that incitement is what caused this thing, you would have to have the normal standard is that he has to say, the normal standard is that you would have to say, go down to the Capitol building and stack it.
That's the normal standard for incitement.
Not, go down to the Capitol building and I will lead you in a march where we will peacefully and patriotically protest what is going on.
And this is the thing.
Do you really, like, I don't actually know whether Democrats think this.
I think some of them do, but I don't know why.
Do they really think that Donald Trump was desperate to watch people mob the Capitol building and try to kill members of Congress?
Like, do they really think that that is what Trump intended?
That was foreseeable?
Again, if that was foreseeable, then why exactly wasn't law enforcement on the scene beforehand?
We now know that the FBI had been briefed on this.
So, the unforeseeability of the event is what makes the event so shocking in the first place.
Nonetheless, the idea here from Democrats is that Trump is solely responsible for what happened.
Jamie Raskin, who's one of the House impeachment managers, Democrat of Maryland, who, by the way, did vote to, in 2016, challenge electors in the 2016 election.
He says that Trump incited the January 6th attack.
Here was Jamie Raskin making the case.
This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater.
It's more like a case where the town fire chief, who's paid to put out fires, sends a mob, not to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to actually set the theater on fire.
And who then, when the fire alarms go off, and the calls start flooding into the fire department, asking for help does nothing but sit back, encourage the mob to continue its rampage, and watch the fire spread on TV with glee and delight.
Okay, so again, the evidence that he was watching with glee and delight comes secondhand, courtesy of some sort of kind of hearsay reporting.
His argument here, which is that it's more like the case where a town fire chief paid to put out fires, sends a mob not to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to set the theater on fire.
But he didn't send the mob to set the theater on fire.
That's the whole point.
They keep eliding the part of his speech where he said peacefully and patriotically.
That does make a difference.
It does make a difference.
They keep citing the line where he says you have to fight for the country.
Politicians say fight for the country every single speech.
That doesn't mean that he's telling the truth over the past two months before the election.
He was not.
I said that over and over and over.
I said there's no evidence to back the suggestions that he's making.
That is not the same thing as did he tell people to go sack the Capitol building.
And that's the question here.
So really, here's how you can make this question a little more relevant.
Would Trump be impeachable if the Capitol riots had not happened?
Because I think the incitement charge is the weakest thing.
Would Trump be impeachable if all he had done from the election day from November 4th until January 20th is say over and over and over again that the election was fraudulent?
If he had just said that over and over and over again, would that have been sufficient to impeach and remove him from office and stop him from running for office again?
I think it'd be very difficult to make the argument yes.
Really.
I think it would be.
So instead, what you have to do is try and say that he quote-unquote incited the mob Which is, again, a very difficult argument to make in terms of causation.
So instead, what Democrats have tried to do is they try to say, oh, well, you know, the mob thought that he backed them.
That's why they did that.
OK, well, we don't judge whether it was foreseeable that your words are going to cause crazy people to do crazy things based on the word of the crazy people.
That is not the way that that incitement works.
People who go and commit acts of violence in the name of ideologies and people who have not encouraged them to do acts of violence, we don't take their word for it.
That'd be a weird thing to do.
Because I promise you this, if you asked members of Black Lives Matter who were going and burning down businesses whether they believed that Democrats backed them in this pursuit, I'd guarantee you a huge number of them would say yes.
Especially since people like Kamala Harris were tweeting out that you should bail them out of prison.
Bail them out of jail.
Anyway, here's Jamie Raskin trying to quote the rioters to the effect that Trump had incited them.
There were countless social media posts, news stories, and most importantly, credible reports from the FBI and Capitol Police that the thousands gathering for the President's Save America March We're violent, organized with weapons, and we're targeting the Capitol.
This mob got organized so openly because, as they would later scream in these halls, and as they posted on forums before the attack, they were sent here by the President.
They were invited here by the President of the United States of America.
Okay, except that the FBI knew in advance that they were coming to do violence and then the FBI didn't do its damn job, which they were supposed to do in the first place.
Now, if the Democrats have evidence that Trump stymied attempts to help, this is the rumor on the day, that Trump stymied attempts to help, that he actually said, do not send the National Guard, do not send the Capitol Police, let these people run rampage, that would actually be pretty damning evidence.
They haven't presented any of that yet.
And so far, what we have seen is they don't like what Trump said.
They think that what Trump said was inflammatory.
True.
But inflammatory is not the same as incitement.
And so you have people like Ted Lieu, another House impeachment manager, suggesting that essentially Trump tried to violently overthrow the government of the United States because he ran out of nonviolent options.
This is so far beyond what the evidence shows that it's very difficult to credit it.
There's only because all of these people stayed strong and refused President Trump that our republic held fast and the will of the electorate was seen through.
And at this point, President Donald J. Trump ran out of nonviolent options to maintain power.
I began today by raising the question of how we got here.
What you saw was a man so desperate to cling to power that he tried everything he could to keep it.
And when he ran out of non-violent measures, he turned to the violent mob that attacked your Senate chamber on January 6th.
Okay, that is such a wild exaggeration of Trump's actual agenda.
You know what Trump's actual agenda was?
Seriously?
Trump's actual agenda was that he was going to say a bunch of crap.
That was the agenda.
And that he would get a lot of people very riled up, and then he was going to announce, presumably on January 20th, the same day as the inauguration, that he was running for re-election.
That was, in all likelihood, what his plan was.
If you think that Trump unleashed a mob to go kill Mike Pence, that that was his intent, I'm gonna need some actual proof of that.
Like, seriously, some actual proof of that would be good.
Because here's the thing about Trump, he ain't subtle.
Like, in any way.
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So the Democrats continue to make the case that President Trump left them for dead, that President Trump is solely responsible for everything that happened, that the people who invaded the Capitol have no agency, and that they, not that they took his words too far, but that they were actually doing exactly what he wanted them to do.
Here's Representative Joaquin Castro saying Trump left us all for dead.
They were completely and violently overwhelmed by a mob.
and needed help, and our Commander-in-Chief, President Trump, refused to send it.
Senators, you've seen all the evidence so far, and this is clear.
On January 6th, President Trump left everyone in this Capitol For dead.
So what's the actual hard evidence that he did that?
I mean, really, beyond the sort of secondhand reporting that, like, what did Trump actually... I want to know, like, minute by minute, what did Trump actually do to stymie people being sent for help?
Was it his responsibility?
Like, did he call up the Capitol Police and say, don't send any more people?
Did he call up the National Guard or his Department of Defense and say, don't send anybody?
We've seen some reporting on this issue, but we've seen no confirmed reporting or any testimony on this issue, so now would be a great time to call witnesses, right?
I mean, if you're gonna call witnesses, those would be the witnesses that you would call.
But what the presentation was about more than anything else yesterday was rehashing a terrible moment in the history of our republic, an incredibly damaging moment in the history of our republic, The most damaging moment I've seen in 20 years in the history of our Republic, like really a horrible moment for the Republic.
And in doing so, to link everybody who disagrees with the Democrats impeachment agenda with this.
Because again, they could have brought up censure in the House.
Kevin McCarthy wanted them to, would have passed.
They would have, and they would have passed in the Senate.
But that's not what they wanted.
What they wanted was to lump, the goal here is obvious.
The goal here is obvious.
That doesn't mean that there aren't decent Republicans who can think the other way on impeachment from the way that I'm talking right now.
I hear it.
But I will say this.
If you think that the Democrats are in any way evidencing any sort of good intent or honest intent, or that this is about the protection of the legislature from the executive or anything like that, that's not what this is.
That's not what this is.
And we know that.
And we know that for certain.
This isn't, by the way, this is not going anywhere.
And everybody knows this is not going anywhere.
So we're going to pretend that a bunch of Republican senators are going to flip.
They ain't going to flip.
And that is perfectly obvious at this point.
Still, the media will go to people like Lisa Murkowski, who is certainly going to vote for impeachment and ask her what she thinks.
I will look to the evidence that is presented.
The evidence that has been presented thus far is pretty damning.
But I also know that I have an obligation, a responsibility, and one that I accept to listen to what the defense will present.
Okay, so we will see how this all plays out.
Trump's defense begins today, so we're going to see how they fight back against this.
I would assume that Trump's defense is largely going to center on the fact that Democrats are treating inflammatory rhetoric as incitement rhetoric.
And so I would assume that you're going to hear a lot about Democrats' inflammatory rhetoric over the past few years, and that is a perfectly appropriate response.
Because if we are going to have a consistent standard to which we hold people, then that standard ought to be consistently held.
Of course it is not, and that is the entire problem right now in the United States.
There are no consistent standards.
There are only double standards.
That is true on every single issue that I can think of right now.
There's a standard to which the media would hold people on the right, but not people on the left.
There's a standard by which the media would excuse violence, but only for people with whom they agree.
There's a standard by which the media would champion people who use the most inflammatory rhetoric possible, but only if they happen to agree with those people.
And then, they'll castigate anybody on the other side of the aisle for pointing out the double standard.
It's whataboutism.
So if I say, yes, it's very bad that Trump used inflammatory language.
Also, it is very bad, and I've been saying this for years, for Maxine Waters to use that sort of language, or for AOC to use that sort of language, or for Kamala Harris to use that sort of language, or for Ilhan Omar and Rashid Tlaib to use that sort of language.
If I say all of it's bad, somehow that's whataboutism.
No, that's called holding a consistent standard.
But they don't want a consistent standard.
That is the entire point.
It's why it makes my job so easy.
Because all I have to do to point to the hypocrisy of the left on a daily basis is simply point to the fact that they excuse their own when they do something.
But if somebody who disagrees with them does the exact same thing, they look to end their career, they look to bring consequences, they look to lump you in with them, This is not the way that you build social fabric.
I'm not even talking about the impeachment now.
I'm just talking about the general, neutral standards that have to apply in an honest society.
We are not an honest society any longer.
We have moved way beyond that.
We are just a society in which we struggle over power.
And a society in which people just compete for power is a society that is not going to last very long at all.
And it's my fear that every single day, that particular phenomenon is growing worse and worse.
If people don't like it, they're gonna have to get together and they're gonna have to stand up and fight against it.
Yes, fight.
Not physically.
Not physically.
They're gonna have to fight against it because that's the sort of language we use in politics.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
Coming up soon is the Matt Wall Show.
It airs at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
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