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Feb. 12, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:07:54

Daily Wire And Gina Carano Team Up To Fight The Death Star | Ep. 1194

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	Daily Wire has an enormous and exciting announcement to make.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Okay, so I promised a huge announcement.
	So here is the announcement and we want you to join us in moving this way.
	So here's the deal.
	Disney decided that they were going to drop the actress Gina Carano.
	They decided they were going to drop her from The Mandalorian because she's conservative.
	It is that simple.
	It is not because she did anything that is truly terribly offensive to anybody.
	It's not because she made a comparison to Nazi Germany.
	Because, let's be frank about this, people on the left make comparisons to Hitler and Nazi Germany all the damn time.
	It is perfectly clear that they were looking for an excuse to can her because she is conservative.
	In fact, The Hollywood Reporter said yesterday that they were looking to can her for months because she is conservative.
	According to The Hollywood Reporter, on Wednesday, the hashtag FireGinaCarano was trending, following an Instagram post from the outspoken conservative actor and former mixed martial artist that was met with severe backlash.
	The post has since been deleted, but screenshots were widely shared by users on social media who called for her firing from the hit Disney Plus Star Wars show.
	According to a source with knowledge of Lucasfilm's thinking, they told The Hollywood Reporter they have been looking for a reason to fire her for two months.
	Today was the final straw.
	Why?
	Well, because after the election, she tweeted that voter fraud should be combated with voter ID, which is a mainstream conservative position, and because she had tweeted that people are essentially wearing masks over their eyes because they don't want to see the truth, which, again, fairly mainstream conservative position.
	Well, the other day she put up an Instagram post, the main point of which was that liberals needed to see that if they treated conservatives as an other, that has a dangerous ending.
	Now, as I said on the show, not a big fan of Holocaust analogies generally, but the general point she was making here was certainly not anti-Semitic in any way.
	Certainly not anti-semitic in any way.
	In fact, she was saying, to avoid the evils of the future, you have to stop acting evil in the present.
	That was the main point.
	Don't act like people who are going to cancel your neighbors because you don't know where that's going to end.
	So Disney Plus canceled her.
	Disney decided to cancel her.
	Now again, it has nothing to do with the quote-unquote inappropriateness of the Holocaust analogy.
	The star of The Mandalorian, Pedro Pascal, tweeted out in 2018, Comparing America's treatment of migrant children to the Holocaust.
	He did so using a picture that was not of migrant children at the American border.
	It was a picture of Palestinian children from 2010 at some sort of water and food bank.
	And he said, hashtag, this is America.
	And then he said, Germany 1944, it's a picture of Jewish children in the Holocaust.
	America 2018, the picture isn't even from America and it wasn't in 2018.
	Nothing.
	Nothing.
	Why?
	Well, because Pedro Pascal has the correct woke point of view.
	It's that simple.
	So, according to Hollywood Reporter, Lucasfilm, Disney, they've been looking to dump her for months because she's outspokenly conservative.
	They found an excuse and they dumped her.
	Well, here's the thing.
	We here at the Daily Wire do not stand for this kind of bull****.
	We do not stand for this.
	And so, yesterday, in the immediate aftermath of the decision by Disney and Lucasfilm to dump Gina, I called Gina.
	And we talked.
	And we decided that Daily Wire's next film will be starring and produced by Gina Carano.
	We could not be more excited to work with Gina.
	Gina just sent us a quote.
	Here is what she said.
	The Daily Wire is helping to make one of my dreams to develop and produce my own film come true.
	I cried out and my prayer was answered.
	I'm sending out a direct message of hope to everyone living in fear of cancellation by the totalitarian mob.
	I've only just begun using my voice, which is now more free than ever before.
	I hope it inspires others to do the same.
	They can't cancel us if we don't let them.
	And that's exactly right.
	They cannot cancel us if we band together.
	They cannot cancel us if we don't let them.
	Here's the deal.
	The establishment monolith is the Death Star.
	And we're the folks with the single fighter X-Wing.
	Right, the single-seater X-Wing.
	That's us.
	They're not vulnerable to major attack from the outside, but they are vulnerable to their own cancel culture, which allows us to build X-Wings to take them on.
	And we need your help.
	We need your help.
	This stuff is expensive.
	We need your help because we want to produce this film with Gina.
	Also, Bonfire Legend and our friend Dallas Sonier is going to be co-producing the film.
	We're excited about that.
	He worked with us on Run, Hide, Fight, which is excellent.
	We need your help.
	We need your membership.
	Okay, and so we have for today and for the next couple of days a subscription code for you.
	Subscription code GINA.
	G-I-N-A.
	Subscription code GINA.
	You get 25% off your Daily Wire annual subscription.
	Go check it out right now and join us because what we are doing here is not just providing you an entertainment alternative.
	That's not the mere goal.
	Okay?
	We don't just want to provide you an entertainment alternative.
	We want to provide a safe haven for conservatives to say what they feel.
	For all Americans to say what they feel.
	And not have to live in fear of the cancel culture coming for them.
	Because as Gina says right there, they can't cancel you if you don't let them.
	But we all have to band together here.
	We have to be part of the same team.
	And we have to put our money where our mouths- We here at Daily Wire, we're putting our money where our mouths are.
	Hey, we need your help.
	We want your membership.
	We want you to join us.
	We want you to join Gina.
	I could not be more excited to work with Gina Carano, who certainly could beat me up 87 times over.
	I could not be more excited to bring her on board and work with her here at The Daily Wire.
	We can't wait to keep you updated on the film and what it's going to be.
	And we're working with her to develop the film.
	She is integrally involved in the process.
	We wouldn't have had this opportunity were it not for the cancel culture that is the left.
	We would not have had this opportunity were it not for the authoritarian left mob controlling authoritarian left companies that seek to cancel out dissent and destroy it.
	And again, this should not be a right-left point.
	This is an authoritarian left versus everybody else point.
	Jonathan Chait over at New York Magazine, a man with whom I disagree strenuously, he said, this is no different from McCarthyism.
	That is exactly correct.
	It is no different from McCarthyism.
	And we are not going to be canceled.
	We are not going to allow Gina's cancellation.
	We're not going to allow your cancellation.
	We stand with you, and we're asking you to stand with us.
	We're asking for you to join, become a member.
	You get all sorts of benefits.
	You get to hang out with us.
	You're gonna get to hang out with Gina, too.
	She's gonna be doing all accesses with you.
	You're gonna get to do all of that stuff when you become a member.
	Again, promo code Gina, 25% off.
	And when you become a member, we are building the alternative.
	We are doing it in real time, because these folks cannot be allowed to control the debate.
	They cannot be allowed to control the Overton window.
	They cannot be allowed to control what people can and cannot say within the realm of mainstream ideology.
	They cannot be allowed to do this.
	This is the same Hollywood that tolerated Harvey Weinstein for decades.
	This is the same Disney that's tolerating Joss Whedon right now, and there are open allegations of sexual harassment against Joss Whedon.
	But when it comes to Gina Carano, she could not be allowed to work on The Mandalorian, this very highly successful show.
	They canceled a spinoff for her that they'd been planning in November because it turns out that she was an outspoken Republican.
	Gina's not standing for it, and good for her.
	Good for her.
	Gina's doing something heroic by stepping outside the Hollywood system and doing something with us, and we are so glad and so excited to be helping her pursue that vision and pursue that dream.
	And we're just asking for your help.
	I keep appealing for that, but really, it takes all of us to stand together here because these things are expensive.
	Disney spends billions of dollars making its entertainment content.
	If we want to compete with them, we have to build the X-Wing.
	And that comes from people like Gina stepping out and taking the hit.
	It comes from folks over at Daily Wire stepping up and trying to back her.
	And it comes really from you because we are just essentially a vessel for you.
	So once more, it's a great deal.
	You get all sorts of great stuff.
	You have all sorts of great stuff coming.
	I have brand new content on my own personally coming to you that I can't wait to show you.
	Really great stuff.
	Candace Owens is coming next month.
	You get all of our all-access stuff.
	You get a second hour of the show.
	You get the tumblers.
	The whole deal.
	Use promo code GINA right now and you get 25% off.
	But mostly, we are so excited to be going up against this monolith.
	This is the first time that somebody has been able to have the option to stand up against the monolith and still have a career.
	We are making that possible because you're making that possible.
	Because you're the folks who are watching the content.
	Because you're the folks who are eager to see us step into an arena of competition with folks who really hate your point of view.
	Who really despise what it is that you stand for and your values.
	So instead of giving them your money, why not instead help us out in fighting the sort of value system that they're promulgating, which is not just a liberal value system.
	Far from it.
	It's not classically liberal in any way.
	It's not even open-minded.
	It is an authoritarian left crammed down mindset.
	So again, you can sense I'm really pumped up about this because I am supremely pumped up about it.
	I'm really excited.
	It is a massive opportunity for us.
	It's a massive opportunity for conservatives to fight back.
	It's a massive opportunity for the entire conservative movement to say, enough!
	You control all the institutions.
	You know what?
	We're building our own.
	We're building our own and we're supporting our own.
	Good for Gina.
	Gina stood up.
	She took the hit.
	And now let's stand by her.
	Let's stand by her.
	So again, I am extremely, extremely excited about all of this.
	So that is the big announcement for today.
	Head on over to dailywire.com.
	Use the promo code Gina for 25% off your annual membership over at Daily Wire.
	The big breaking news of the day is not this impeachment thing.
	We all know where the impeachment thing is going.
	The Republicans are gonna vote to acquit.
	Today represents the beginning of Team Trump's rebuttal to the Democratic case.
	It's only supposed to last about four hours, and it's basically gonna be, you didn't meet the legal level of incitement, and if you think that's incitement, you have a bunch of Democrats to show you.
	So we'll get to that in a little bit.
	Instead, why don't we talk about the fact that somebody probably committed a criminal act, and the media treated this person as an absolute hero for months and months and months at a time.
	This person won an Emmy.
	This person was considered the best governor in America by folks on the left.
	And we knew early on that this was untrue.
	We knew very, very early on that Andrew Cuomo was covering up nursing home deaths.
	As early as May of 2020, there were reports that Andrew Cuomo was covering up nursing home deaths by changing the metrics by which he counted nursing home deaths.
	We talked about it on the show at the time.
	See, here's the thing.
	There are a lot of people who got COVID in nursing homes but died in hospitals.
	Andrew Cuomo did not count those as nursing home deaths because that would have made clear how bad his COVID policy was.
	Instead, he suggested that these were deaths in hospitals as opposed to deaths at nursing homes, which is really silly because a lot of people die in hospitals.
	It is a place where sick people go.
	So, Andrew Cuomo covered this up.
	We have known this for a very long time.
	And then, a couple of weeks ago, finally, Letitia James, the Attorney General of the State of New York, she came out and said, oh yeah, by the way, he covered that up.
	And now, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's aide, one of his top aides, is now privately apologizing to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state's nursing home death toll from COVID-19.
	Apparently, she told them, quote, we froze out of fear that the true numbers would be used against us by federal prosecutors.
	Which would be a crime if you are covering up evidence of bad policy and bad decision-making in order to avoid the tender embrace of federal prosecutors?
	That looks a lot like obstruction, does it not?
	According to the New York Post, the stunning admission of a cover-up was made by Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because, quote, right around the same time, Trump turns this into a giant political football, according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting.
	He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes.
	He starts going after New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy.
	He starts going after California Governor Gavin Newsom.
	He starts going after Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
	In addition to attacking Cuomo's fellow Democratic Governor, DeRosa said, Trump directs the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us.
	And basically, we froze, she told the lawmakers on the call.
	So in other words, because Trump was saying a true thing about their treatment of the nursing homes and because the DOJ was investigating, they just lied about it.
	They covered up the stats.
	Now remember, the media treated this guy not just with kid gloves, but with full-on massage oils.
	And they didn't just treat Cuomo as though he was doing a decent job trying to muscle his way through the pandemic.
	They treated him as the greatest governor.
	He wrote an entire book on what an amazing leader he had been during COVID.
	Chris, his brother, interviewed him nearly nightly on CNN to give him the propaganda hour.
	You remember that famous picture of Chris Cuomo holding up a giant nasal swab to make fun of his brother's nostril size while they did the Smothers Brothers comedy hour over there on CNN?
	It turns out that not only was Cuomo covering up the data, they were covering up the data specifically with an eye toward federal prosecutors, which is really, really bad stuff.
	And again, we knew that he was covering this up for months.
	So where were the media in all this?
	Where were your establishment media in all this?
	They were too busy kissing the guy's ass.
	And that's the reality of the situation.
	The same way that a month before the election, the mainstream media decided simply was not worth covering the Hunter Biden story.
	And then one month after the election, oh, look at that.
	He's under federal prosecution.
	Who could have uncovered that information?
	You guys, if you actually did your job.
	I mean, this story is not just about Cuomo.
	It is about the malpractice, and it is malpractice, by the journalistic establishment, which ignored a story that everyone on the right was reporting on, but it just didn't surface.
	It didn't break into the mainstream.
	There's a reason for that.
	It's because the mainstream did not want it to break into the mainstream.
	They were looking for a foil to Donald Trump.
	Andrew Cuomo is loud.
	Andrew Cuomo is from New York.
	And Andrew Cuomo doesn't like Trump, and so he was a perfect foil, except for the fact that he was garbage at his job.
	And not just garbage at his job, he was covering up his own terrible activity that ended with the deaths of thousands and thousands of seniors who probably didn't need to die.
	And the reason I say they didn't need to die is because you know who didn't do this?
	You know who didn't ship COVID-positive seniors back into nursing homes?
	Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, who is simultaneously receiving the hate and scorn of the entire establishment media.
	We had a story every single day about how Florida was the center of death, how Florida was going to be the place where everyone died.
	Florida is, by a long shot, the oldest state in America.
	It is a hugely old state.
	25% of the population of the state of Florida is over the age of 65.
	You know where Florida ranks in terms of deaths per million?
	Right in the middle of the pack, like number 26.
	You know where New York ranks?
	Number 2.
	You know where New Jersey ranks?
	Number 1.
	Okay, so the entire media, which was committed to the idea that Andrew Cuomo was an amazing governor, they knew full well he wasn't an amazing governor.
	They knew full well that he had botched this thing from here to Sunday.
	But it didn't matter to them, because they were too busy covering for him.
	And Cuomo knew this.
	He knew he could get away with the lie.
	Only now are the media reporting on it, because now it's safe to report on it.
	And this is the pattern for your establishment media.
	It is not just a matter of, will they report on the story?
	It's, when do they report on the story?
	If they report on the story a year after it happened, when it is now politically convenient, For people to know that Andrew Cuomo is a terrible governor?
	Then that is politically motivated.
	If they're reporting on Hunter Biden a month after the election, but shutting it completely down in the month before the election, that makes a difference.
	If, as we are going to see in a second, they're reporting on the predations of the Lincoln Project, which people knew about for a year, but only a couple of months after the inauguration, well, that is politically motivated.
	The New York Post reports that De Rosa, who is Cuomo's aide, said, we were then in a position where we weren't sure if what we were going to give to the DOJ or what we give to you guys, what we were saying, was gonna be used against us.
	Well, we weren't sure if there was gonna be an investigation.
	That played a very large role in this.
	After dropping that bombshell in which he essentially admitted to covering up a crime potentially, right, the obstruction is the crime in that particular case, De Rosa asked for, quote, a little bit of appreciation of the context and offered what appeared to be the Cuomo administration's first apology, Remember, when Janice Dean talked about this from Fox News, Andrew Cuomo made fun of her, even though she'd had a parent who died in a nursing home.
	Instead of a mea culpa to the grieving family members of more than 13,000 dead seniors or the critics who say the health department spread COVID-19 in the care facilities with a March 25th health department directive that nursing homes admit infected patients, DeRosa tried to make amends with the fellow Democrats because of the political inconvenience it caused them.
	Okay, when people say that it's political partisanship on the right, just let it be known.
	Political partisanship is all the way down on both sides.
	Okay, and this is a perfect example of it.
	The only people receiving apologies today from the Cuomo administration are Democratic lawmakers in the state.
	Not all the old people's families who died in nursing homes.
	Not those people.
	Not all the people in the media who were reporting on this months ago and being mocked by the Cuomo administration.
	No, the Democratic lawmakers, because it made it awkward for them.
	You know, it's a bad thing.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so the top aide to Andrew Cuomo de Rosa, she said, we do apologize.
	I do understand the position you were put in.
	I know it's not fair.
	It was not our intention to put you in that political position with the Republicans.
	Political position with the Republicans.
	Yeah, that's the chief concern.
	When thousands of seniors die for no reason other than bad policy.
	Clearly, the person who deserves the apology is Democrats that life was made a little more politically awkward for.
	Assembly Health Committee Chairman Richard Gottfried, Democrat of Manhattan, immediately rejected DeRosa's expression of remorse.
	He said, I don't have enough time today to explain all the reasons why I don't give that any credit at all.
	He had demanded the death toll data back in August.
	State Senate Aging Committee Chairwoman Rachel May, Democrat of Syracuse, also ripped into DeRosa, saying her former opponent had launched another broadside earlier in the day.
	She said, The issue for me, the biggest issue of all, is feeling like I needed to defend, or at least not attack, an administration that was appearing to be covering something up.
	And in a pandemic, when you want the public to trust the public health officials, and there's a clear feeling they're not coming and being forthcoming with you, that is really hard and it remains difficult.
	Assemblyman Ron Kim, Democrat of Queens.
	Remember, these are all Democrats talking about Cuomo and his team.
	So, I have a question.
	Here's the question.
	Joe Biden is now in the White House.
	The federal DOJ is now under his control.
	to dodge having any incriminating evidence that might put the administration or the health department in further trouble with the DOJ.
	That's how I understand the reasoning of why they were unable to share in real time the data.
	They had to first make sure the state was protected against federal investigation.
	So I have a question.
	Here's the question.
	Joe Biden is now in the White House.
	The federal DOJ is now under his control.
	Will his new attorney general Merrick Garland go after the Cuomo administration?
	It seems to me they should.
	It seems to me an investigation is warranted if they were purposefully covering up material relevant to the state, material that the legislature had requested specifically in order to avoid federal investigation.
	That looks a lot like obstruction.
	It really does.
	Okay, so is there going to be an investigation from the Biden administration?
	My goodness.
	The brazen nature of this is really astonishing.
	It appeared the DOJ was no longer focused on New York's nursing home deaths.
	She said, all signs point to they are not looking at this.
	They've dropped it.
	They never formally opened an investigation.
	They sent a letter asking a number of questions, and then we satisfy those questions.
	It appears they're gone.
	My goodness, the brazen nature of this is really astonishing.
	I mean, that is truly brazen crap.
	OK, meanwhile, the Lincoln Project is now completely falling apart.
	So, again, in the world of journalistic timing, this is yet another example of the journalistic establishment completely refusing to do its job for months on end because the people who they were covering up for were politically useful to Democrats.
	The Lincoln Project was a bunch of grifters.
	It was a bunch of grifters from the beginning.
	There's a bunch of people who are making money from Democrats who believed that the Lincoln Project was going to do serious damage in the election.
	They did not.
	The Lincoln Project had virtually no impact on the election.
	The Lincoln Project was basically just a super PAC to enrich the people who ran the super PAC.
	It was run, or co-founded at least, by a guy who was using his position of power to sexually reach out to young, apparently underage men.
	Okay, and people knew.
	This was not like a giant shock.
	The Lincoln Project, they were paying, the heads of it were paying themselves millions and millions of dollars and raising a bunch of money off of sucker Democrats who believed that these quote-unquote Republicans, by the way, it ain't Republicans who opposed Susan Collins in Maine.
	Whenever you think of Trump, These people were opposing Susan Collins in Maine.
	They were campaigning for Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff in Georgia.
	These people are not Republicans.
	They're just Democrats masquerading as Republicans so that a bunch of Democrats can feel good that here are some Republicans we've turned.
	Well, it turns out now the Lincoln Project was a giant scam.
	Shocker.
	Like many of us were saying.
	According to New York Magazine, John Weaver used his power to get jobs for young men he allegedly harassed.
	His colleagues were warned.
	John Weaver, of course, the co-founder of the Lincoln Project.
	Now everybody at the Lincoln Project is like, who?
	John Weaver?
	Who?
	Some of them co-wrote op-eds with John Weaver and they're like, never heard of the guy.
	Never heard of him.
	He's getting disappeared like somebody who's a top aide for Stalin in some of the old pictures where you see Stalin with his arm around somebody and then next picture you see Stalin just with his arm and there's nobody there.
	That's what's happening to John Weaver right now.
	According to New York Magazine, quote, Alex Johnson was a senior at the University of Texas at Austin.
	Pursuing a career in politics when he first heard from John Weaver, the legendary Republican operative living nearby.
	It started with a direct message on Twitter.
	Johnson told Intelligencer, his New York magazine, but then, you know, his intentions became clear.
	Weaver, who worked on both of Senator John McCain's presidential campaigns, started by discussing politics or college football before asking Johnson about his dating life and sexual interests.
	Weaver wrote in December 2018, I want to see you, Weaver wrote four days later.
	The pattern continued into 2020, when Weaver reached out to Johnson about working for a new political action committee he had co-founded, the Lincoln Project.
	We've restarted the group with some of the biggest names in Republican politics to defeat Donald Trump.
	Joining him was Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protege, during George W. Bush's re-election campaign, known for his no-holds-barred style of attack, who later worked on McCain's 2008 campaign.
	Joining them was another McCain veteran, Reid Galen, and Republican strategist Rick Wilson.
	Other co-founders included Republican super lawyer George Conway, as well as veteran Republican political operatives Mike Madrid, Ron Steslow, and Jennifer Horne.
	Now, Jennifer Horne is gonna become relevant to another Lincoln Project story that is breaking in just one moment.
	We'll get to more of the Lincoln Project's scandalous activities, which we can now report on them.
	Right now it's okay, because we're past the election.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, let us talk about the fact that a lot of people are trafficking on your front door right now.
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	Okay, so the New York Magazine continues.
	It didn't take long for the Lincoln Project to become a haven for never-Trump Republicans and capture the political world's attention with its brutal television ads against the president.
	Actually, it was just a sort of media masturbation crew.
	It was basically, all these guys would appear on MSNBC, MSNBC would pump the ads.
	Democrats would love the ads.
	Republicans wouldn't watch the ads.
	Democrats would send money to these guys.
	These guys would go back on MSNBC.
	It was a beautiful grift.
	The buzz led to big business, which raised more than $87 million in the 2020 election cycle, according to the FEC.
	Much of the money was paid to firms run by Lincoln Project's co-founders, including nearly $25 million to Summit Strategic Communications, a firm run by Reid Galen.
	More than $20 million was paid to Tusk Digital, run by Cesslo, which employed people who worked as contractors at the Lincoln Project.
	So that was John Weaver, co-founder of the Lincoln Project.
	Yep, good stuff happening.
	on April 23rd, suggesting he come be an intern.
	15 minutes later, he added, on your walk, think about worshiping a big bleep.
	Bleep is a word for the male genitalia, and having yours worshipped, and you rimmed it till you beg.
	So that was John Weaver, co-founder of the Lincoln Project.
	Yep, good stuff happening, just like Abraham Lincoln would do.
	Solicit dudes while raising a bajillion dollars to spend on useless television ads that you can put in your own pocket.
	Just like Abraham Lincoln, guys.
	The Lincoln Project.
	Weaver also made phone calls to Johnson.
	Once, he said, Weaver called to ask him his thoughts on the Lincoln Project and its ads, then quickly segued into what felt like an attempt at phone sex.
	Johnson said he rarely answered Weaver's calls after that, but despite his discomfort with the Lincoln Project's co-founder, he took the internship there, started in July 2020, working remotely from his home in Texas.
	Weaver continued harassing Johnson at the Lincoln Project.
	Are you top?
	Bottom?
	Versa?
	He wrote in one message shortly after Johnson started.
	His messages never stop, said Johnson.
	And I would play along just to be nice because, I mean, I know he's important.
	He has the strings.
	We operate in the same kind of political culture of being never-Trumpers.
	Johnson said he didn't tell Lincoln Project Management about Weaver fearing retribution.
	Well, Johnson didn't know about it then.
	The Lincoln Project had already been told that Weaver was preying on young men in and outside the company.
	On June 17th, a person working at the Lincoln Project sent an email to co-founder Seslow that reported 10 allegations of Weaver's harassing men, including at least one employee at the Lincoln Project.
	Three people independently described the contents of the email to Intelligencer and said it warned Weaver could be using his position at the company to make promises of career advancement to prey on young men.
	The complaint called Weaver's predatory behavior an immediate threat to the company that if it became public, could render a death blow to the Lincoln Project's reputation.
	In the meantime, the Lincoln Project itself was attacking Trump as a sexual predator.
	Steslow raised the email with the co-founder of Galen and corporate counsel Matthew Sanderson, but Weaver's harassment continued.
	Okay, so they then said, oh, well, it was just chatter.
	It was just chatter.
	But it turns out that Weaver had been sending messages that ranged from provocative to sexually explicit to 21 men going back through the years, including to one recipient who was 14 years old.
	14.
	That's not a young man.
	A 14-year-old is a boy.
	That's pedophilia now.
	No, none worked at the Lincoln Project.
	Four former members of the Lincoln Project called on the company to free them to speak about Weaver.
	So here's the hilarious thing.
	So the Lincoln Project was very angry at Trump for having these non-disclosure agreements, right?
	There are a bunch of women who said, I want to talk freely about Trump, but he's got these NDAs and I can't violate the NDAs.
	And the Lincoln Project was like, he should release them from the NDAs.
	It turns out, half their employees can't speak freely about this stuff because of, wait for it, NDAs.
	Apparently these four former members of the Lincoln Project said, quote, Lincoln Project contractors and employees are calling on the organization to release anyone with knowledge of harassment or who has been harassed by John Weaver from their non-disclosure agreements so they can speak freely about what happened to them or what they know about what happened to others.
	Johnson said, I really wanted to believe everyone that they didn't know the extent of it.
	They made it seem like this was out of the blue.
	It seems like they were just lying.
	They weren't being truthful to me.
	Johnson was not alone among the interns who say they were harassed by Weaver.
	One of them was Charlie Stephens, a 19-year-old rising sophomore at LSU.
	Weaver asked him if he or any of his peers might be interested in an internship to help kick the bleep out of Trump and against Senate Republican incumbents.
	Stephens said he was interested.
	Weaver responded he'd be perfect.
	A week later, Stephens told Weaver he formally applied to the role.
	You are an effing stud, Weaver said.
	When Stephens demurred, saying he was quite the compliment, Weaver responded, take it.
	Hell, you may very well be.
	Hmm.
	Solid stuff here.
	Okay, so it turns out that the Lincoln Project, being filled with terrible people or grifters, didn't stop there.
	It didn't stop there.
	It turns out that not only are they not releasing people from their NDAs, but now the Lincoln Project last night, in order to defend against itself, decided to publish screenshots of private Twitter direct messages belonging to one of its co-founders, Jennifer Horne.
	Remember, I mentioned her earlier.
	Warren left the Lincoln Project last week amid the John Weaver scandal, and she has been spatting with the anti-Trump group ever since her departure, according to Fox News.
	But the Lincoln Project escalated tensions on Thursday night with tweets that appeared to be an exchange she had with 19th News correspondent Amanda Becker.
	So this is illegal.
	So somehow, they got a hold of private messages between an ex-employee and a reporter, and then they pushed those out on Twitter.
	They don't have access to her DMs.
	She did not give them to her, to the Lincoln Project.
	The Lincoln Project began a lengthy thread earlier this evening.
	We became aware that Amanda Becker of 19th News was preparing to publish a smear job on the Lincoln Project with the help of Jennifer Horne.
	You hear a lot of talk about hit jobs in journalism.
	Rarely do you get to see their origin story in joy.
	And meanwhile, George Conway is sitting at home, and he's a lawyer, and he's looking at this and going, um, guys?
	You're violating federal law.
	You can't do that.
	You can't take DMs from people.
	You know, like, there is nothing that allows me to hack into somebody else's emails and then release those to the public.
	That is a federal crime.
	So how exactly did they get a hold of these DMs in the first place?
	Horn said, I didn't give consent for this stuff to be put up.
	So, this raises a few questions.
	One, it seems like a crime was just committed.
	Two, Twitter has not barred the Lincoln Project, as far as I'm aware, from its service.
	This will become relevant in just one second when we get to Project Veritas, which they did bar from their service.
	Remember, they barred the New York Post for publishing quote-unquote, hacked materials, even though there was no evidence that the materials on Hunter Biden were hacked.
	They came from a laptop in Delaware that Hunter Biden had left at a repair shop, apparently.
	So there was no evidence that it was hacked material.
	Twitter took down the story and took down the New York Post account.
	The Lincoln Project apparently is posting material that is not its own.
	The Lincoln Project has not yet been suspended.
	From Twitter, there is a shock.
	According to Fox News, it is unclear how the Lincoln Project obtained screenshots of Horn's private messages or how, if it did, the group gained access to Horn's Twitter account.
	Tablet magazine associate editor Noah Bloom tweeted, this is legitimately outrageous.
	New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said, it's hardly the most important thing happening today amid impeachment, tens of millions of doses of COVID vaccine becoming available, changes coming to Medicaid work requirements, but can't say I've ever seen something like what just happened involving Horn's account. Yeah, my favorite is that we have to make sure that we downplay what's happening with the Lincoln Project, because what it really demonstrates is that the media were engaged in malfeasance for a year, for a solid year.
	So there's a lot of other important stuff happening today.
	Blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And also, here is a group that we promoted for a year and fostered, receiving tens of millions of dollars while its co-founder was harassing young men.
	And also, it turns out they just committed a federal crime.
	But you know what, guys?
	It's like, I should mention it, but it's not really, like, super important in the vast scheme of things.
	Really, really well done.
	Apparently, the reporter also said that did not come from me.
	So, well done, Lincoln Project.
	We're gonna get to Twitter's standards for removing stuff in just one second because, once again, inconsistency being the hobgoblin of large minds, apparently.
	Here we go, we'll get to that in one second.
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	You will sleep Okay, so, as I say, when we speak of inconsistency, so Twitter has apparently not banned the Lincoln Project yet, right, for putting out DMs that do not belong to them, right?
	Who did they ban?
	Okay, so as I say, when we speak of inconsistency, so Twitter has apparently not banned the Lincoln Project yet, right, for putting out DMs that do not belong to them, right?
	Who did they ban?
	Well, they banned Project Veritas.
	So that is not a shock.
	I mean, it's pretty frightening, by the way, that social media will just now ban people.
	And it's pretty explicitly based on political content.
	They'll ban the New York Post account saying that they don't allow people to publish hacked materials based on non-hacked materials when it comes to the Hunter Biden story.
	They won't suspend or ban the Lincoln Project for pushing out what apparently are hacked materials in violation of federal law.
	They will ban Project Veritas.
	According to the New York Post, Twitter on Thursday yanked the accounts of conservative activist group Project Veritas over repeated violations of the company's rules on sharing other people's private information after they posted leaked footage of communications between Facebook executives.
	By the way, I really do enjoy that this is how the standards now work on Twitter.
	So if you just report on what happened in the conversation, like the New York Times does routinely, Anonymous Source reports that Facebook executives were talking about X. That's every Kevin Roos column and every Kara Swisher column at the New York Times.
	Every single one is that.
	Every one of them is.
	Facebook executives were talking about this on an internal Slack channel.
	Is that hacked material?
	No, that's just called reporting.
	Project Veritas gets a hold of some of this material and puts it out there, and Twitter's like, nope, can't have that.
	Not gonna do that.
	A Twitter spokesperson said the Project Veritas account was permanently suspended for breaching its private information policy.
	The ban came after the group had posted leaked clips on Wednesday from a meeting with Facebook executives where they discussed development of censorship tools.
	Vice President of Integrity Guy Rosen can be seen explaining, quote, we have a system that is able to freeze commenting on threads.
	In cases where our systems are detecting, there may be a thread that has hate speech or violence sort of in the comments. In a second video posted by Project Veritas, one of the staffers is seen confronting Rosen about his remarks outside his home as he returned from a jog, quote, when you talk about freezing comments containing hate speech, what do you mean by that?
	How do you define hate speech?
	Is it just speech you hate?
	The numbers on the exec's home address were visible in the clip, but the street name was not.
	License plates on surrounding cars are blurred.
	Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe was also temporarily locked on Thursday for violating the policy.
	O'Keefe told The Wrap he was wrestling with whether to delete the tweets flagged by Twitter in order to regain access to his personal account.
	So what I'm trying to understand is, what about what we did is, quote, posting private information. Reporters with microphones and cameras engage in reporting activities on the streets all the time in residential communities. I'm trying to understand what Twitter considers violating the rules against posting private information. Does Twitter consider reporting information the public has a right to know private information?
	This is quite the Rubicon we're crossing if Twitter wants to ban this particular piece of information.
	O'Keefe said Twitter claimed the video published private information.
	That's false.
	He said Twitter invited Project Veritas 2, and we did appeal that decision with Twitter.
	In an apparent act of retaliation for daring to question their authority, Twitter responded to our appeal by suspending our account, continuing to tell us that Project Veritas could delete the tweet and have our account reinstated.
	Okay, so here's the thing.
	Again, these rules only apply to one side of the political aisle.
	We have people who released, without consent, calls of like Melania Trump and her friend, right?
	Even in two-party consent areas, this sort of stuff will not be banned by Twitter, presumably.
	If there was an internal discussion, a daily wire, revealed by the New York Times, and they just put out the tape, do you think Twitter would ban them?
	I have serious doubts.
	Very, very serious doubts.
	But this is how it works in social media.
	The left is in control of the levers of information, and it is dangerous.
	They're not using them in fulsome ways yet, but they are using them to quash dissemination of information they don't like.
	It's one of the reasons I've been telling you, you need to come subscribe at Daily Wire, you need to go to your favorite conservative outlets, and you need to subscribe now.
	Because these folks in charge of the levers of information are not trustworthy.
	They are not.
	They cannot be trusted.
	When I said that we're all Gina Carano yesterday, that's because we're all Gina Carano.
	We are all living at the mercy of a bunch of people who control the means of distribution and the means of informational dissemination.
	And that is dangerous, dangerous stuff.
	And by the way, they're not gonna be shy in the future about using this sort of stuff.
	In fact, I love this.
	The same people who presumably are cheering the banning of James O'Keefe's Project Veritas from Twitter, those same people are now very angry that there are apps that exist that protect privacy.
	So Poynter, which is a supposed, it's responsible for PolitiFact.
	The Poynter Center is a journalistic center, supposedly.
	They published a piece yesterday, and it's talking about Clubhouse.
	So Clubhouse is a new app where basically you have private calls with multiple people, and there's no tape that is capable of being taken of it, and there's no record that is kept of it, right?
	You know, like a phone call.
	And Poynter is very angry at this.
	Poynter is suggesting that what needs to happen is that we need to be able to record those phone calls and we need to be able to archive those phone calls because there are prominent people who use Clubhouse.
	So we can't have private conversations, says Poynter.
	It's amazing.
	I'd love to see them stick up for James O'Keefe then.
	Here is what Poynter had to say.
	And this is according to Christina Tartaguila and Harrison Montas.
	They say there's a new social media platform trending worldwide.
	It's called Clubhouse.
	It brings together people like Tesla's Elon Musk and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.
	For the moment, it seems to be beyond the reach of the broader fact-checking community.
	But this should change soon.
	I joined Clubhouse this week.
	It was only possible because I own an iPhone.
	The hot new service only runs on iOS.
	To be accepted, I also had to deploy an invitation code.
	Downloading the app isn't enough.
	To be a Clubhouse user, you must know the right people.
	As reported by tech websites and popular newspapers, Clubhouse aims to be the most exclusive social media platform ever launched.
	It offers users the opportunity to enter different chat rooms and clubs and share live audio feeds, not text or images, with thousands of other people.
	Rooms are divided by topic.
	You can even schedule your participation by scrolling through which discussions will be up in the next hours.
	As a fact checker working on the pandemic, I was eager to see if popular misinformation tropes, such as anti-vax content, had already landed at Clubhouse.
	Even though the platform's guidelines clearly say that users, quote, may not spread false information, I thought I'd try to find some.
	Okay, so I joined the club called All Things COVID after typing vaccines into the app's search bar.
	I found scholars from Johns Hopkins University, respected epidemiologists, physicians, and more.
	I moved on to search for misinformation and disinformation about politics.
	I typed in Donald Trump.
	There were no clubs dedicated to the former U.S.
	President.
	The same was true of Jair Bolsonaro.
	This reporter said no COVID-19 falsehoods, no political disinformation.
	This is a weird platform.
	And yes, it is.
	But not exactly for those reasons.
	As noted by Forbes, Clubhouse's design inherently excludes people with certain disabilities.
	There is more.
	Olivia Smith, writing for Grit Daily, warned that on Clubhouse there's no path to accountability because the app doesn't keep old posts or audio files and doesn't allow users to record conversations.
	Smith said there's no way to prove someone said anything controversial at all.
	The lack of features will surely produce barriers for fact-checkers.
	It will not only be hard to choose what club to join, but Clubhouse also requires fact-checkers listen to hours and hours of conversations before selecting what claims should be assessed.
	This is the best part.
	Remember, this is a group dedicated to upholding journalistic integrity.
	Get ready for this.
	You ready?
	With the myriad of other platforms fact-checkers are forced to contend with, would it be best for them to ignore Clubhouse for now?
	Facebook didn't.
	According to the New York Times, it's already building a product to compete with Clubhouse.
	Neither did the Chinese government.
	On Monday, after a rare moment of cross-border dialogue between users from mainland China and others outside the country, Chinese censors moved in.
	If Xi Jinping's administration isn't ignoring Clubhouse, why should fact-checkers?
	Why should you?
	Yeah, you should be just like the Chinese.
	Good answer, journalistic center-pointer.
	Good answer, PolitiFact founders.
	What we really need is for our fact-checkers to be more like the Chinese.
	Well done.
	Man, our journalistic establishment, they are fantastic.
	I have one final journalistic establishment story for you in just one moment.
	First, let us talk about making your business better.
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	Okay, so final journalistic story of the day.
	Remember, the establishment media have just blown themselves out and so have the social media bros.
	The lack of trust in these institutions is absolutely justified.
	100% justified.
	So it turns out, the New York Times recently killed a column from Brett Stevens, one of their columnists.
	Now, the New York Times publishes all sorts of crap.
	Like, absolute garbage.
	They publish the ridiculous musings of Nikole Hannah-Jones, and the insane navel-gazing of Charles Blow, and the ridiculous Solipsism of Michelle Goldberg.
	I mean, their columnist crew is just the dregs.
	It's just, it's an awful, awful New York Times op-ed page.
	Paul Krugman.
	I mean, just the list of horribles goes on.
	But Bret Stephens wanted to publish a column at the New York Times about the firing of Donald McNeil because that was a big story, right?
	Donald McNeil was the science reporter who was fired from the New York Times for the great sin of using the n-word in non-racist fashion.
	Because he was retelling, he was asking a question about how somebody used the n-word to create context and determine whether this was in fact a racist use of the n-word or not.
	This generated a massive blowback inside the New York Times woke staff, and they got him fired.
	And that ended with New York Times editor, executive editor Dean Beckett, who's an idiot, saying that intent is not an element of racism, which is ridiculous.
	I mean, truly insane.
	In order to declare somebody a racist, they should have to have racist intent.
	It's ridiculous.
	I mean, just on its face, it's insane.
	Especially because the New York Times has printed the N-word several times in the past several years.
	They printed it several times this month, in fact.
	Was intent not an element of the crime there, or what?
	Okay, so, Bret Stephens wanted to publish a column at the New York Times on this particular issue.
	So the New York Times killed it.
	In an internal email obtained by the Daily Beast on Thursday, Stevens, a conservative columnist, claimed he wrote a column defending McNeil, but it was put on ice by the Times publisher.
	His claim was first reported by NBC's Dylan Byers.
	If you're still wondering why it wasn't in the paper, it's because AG Sulzberger spiked it, he wrote atop the email.
	Sensitively titled Regardless of Intent, the column draft appeared to zero in on executive editor Dean Baquette's statement about McNeil.
	A copy of the column obtained and published by the New York Post late Thursday showed Stephen singling out Baquette and accusing the Times of hypocrisy, writing, quote, The Times has never previously been shy about citing racial slurs in order to explain a point.
	Stevens wrote, every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system, every ethical organization cares deeply about intention.
	It is the difference between murder and manslaughter.
	It is an aggravating or extenuating factor in judicial settings.
	It is a cardinal consideration and pardons, or at least it was until Trump got in on the act because Stevens has to get his slap in.
	It's an elementary aspect of parenting, friendship, courtship, and marriage.
	The columnist added, a hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention.
	And the New York Times killed it.
	Kathleen Kingsbury, editor of the Times opinion section, disputed Stevens' account, telling Daily Beast that while she consulted with Sulzberger about the column, it was ultimately her decision to nix it.
	She said, I have an especially high bar of running any column that could reflect badly on a colleague.
	I didn't feel this piece rose to that level.
	Oh, um, is that what it is?
	So you guys basically ran Barry Weiss out of town on a rail because she wrote stuff that you didn't like.
	You allowed the Slack channel to be used as a hate board for Barry Weiss.
	But, you know, what we really cannot have is Bret Stephens writing that the New York Times is being ridiculous in firing Donald McNeil.
	The New York Times is a garbage heap, it remains a garbage heap, and it should not have your subscription or your trust.
	It's a ridiculous outlet, and that is being shown every single day.
	Okay, now, finally, we're gonna get to impeachment talk.
	Okay, so we will get to impeachment in just one second.
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	Alrighty, in just a second.
	We're gonna get to all things impeachment related because, finally, the Trump team is going to lay out its defense today.
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	All righty, so today marks the day on which Trump's team is going to lay out his defense to the impeachment charge against him.
	And honestly, the defense is going to be fairly easy for him in the sense that the prosecution really did not prove the case they were seeking to prove.
	Now, if the case that they were proving was that Trump said really bad and dumb stuff between the election and January 20th, case proved, but we all knew that.
	If the case was that the people on January 6th did something evil and criminal, case proved, we already knew that.
	If the case was, we have to show that Trump incited the action Did not prove that because in order to show that Trump incited the action, you have to provide evidence that Trump actively incited, didn't say peacefully and patriotically protest, actively incited the riot.
	If you want to make the case that Trump is impeachable because of his behavior after and during the actual riot, then you have to have actual testimony from people who are in the room with Trump or Trump himself talking about what he did that day, why security forces weren't sent earlier.
	Democrats did not bother to do this because in the end, This is not going anywhere.
	Democrats know this isn't going anywhere.
	Democrats, by the way, have been throwing out wild accusations without evidence since January 6th about the complicity of fellow Republicans.
	Nancy Pelosi, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, this has become a mainstream Democratic talking point, is that Republicans wanted to murder their fellow Congress people.
	Alexander Ocasio-Cortez literally said that Ted Cruz wanted to have her murdered on January 6th, which is nuts.
	I mean, Ted is the Zodiac Killer, but besides that, he has not committed a murder since, last I checked, like 1979.
	It's been a long time for Ted.
	Okay, beyond that, you had Nancy Pelosi suggesting that there were members of Congress who were working with the rioters.
	No evidence has been presented to prove that point at all.
	I've been calling for the evidence since they said it, because that's a pretty outsized allegation.
	So what is this really about?
	In the end, what this is really about is PR, and everybody knows it.
	This is about the idea that every Republican is responsible for this.
	This is why they went for the incitement charge, guys.
	If they had wanted to impeach on the basis of abuse of power, it would have been a lot harder for Republicans to rebut that, frankly, because abuse of power is a vague, non-legal definition.
	It's pretty easy to rebut that.
	I mean, it's rather difficult to rebut that, actually, because, again, if you charge somebody with a crime that is a political crime, but not an actual legal crime, then your opponents aren't going to be able to declare that you haven't fulfilled the elements.
	Abuse of power can be interpreted any variety of ways, but it's difficult to imagine that Trump didn't abuse his power when he spent two months railing against the veracity of the election and calling up election officials and all that kind of stuff, right?
	But they didn't go for that charge.
	They went for incitement.
	It's the reason why Jonathan Turley, the law professor from George Washington University, he said that he thinks that basically the Democrats tanked this thing from the beginning.
	He said they went for the incitement charge because they know that they want Republicans, in essence, to vote against impeachment so they can use that as a cudgel against Republicans.
	That is the goal.
	I think Turley happens to be right about this because the reality is you can't prove incitement here.
	You can't.
	And they didn't even bother to take witness testimony as to what Trump did the day of, right?
	What was he doing in the immediate aftermath?
	They didn't talk to anybody.
	They didn't present any evidence.
	All they said was like he was tweeting.
	Okay, well, tweets are tweets.
	Also, do you have evidence that he was called up by the National Guard and they were like, you know, Mr. President, we need to go in.
	He was like, I don't want that to happen.
	I love it.
	If you got evidence, now would be the time to present it.
	They didn't present that.
	So what was the real goal here?
	And this is also one of the secondary goals of using incitement as the standard.
	The goal here is that any time a Republican uses inflammatory language from now on, or even says something that Democrats don't like, that will be considered incitement.
	This is part and parcel of a broader Democratic and leftist attempt to treat everything they do not like as violence.
	So when I spoke in Berkeley a few years back, I will never forget this, I was speaking at Berkeley, 600 police officers required in order so that I could just give a speech about free speech.
	And protesters were outside with signs that said, speech is violence.
	Speech is violence.
	So this is something the left has been pushing for quite a while, is the idea that if you say something with which I disagree, you are doing me harm.
	And that harm is, it should be considered a form of lawbreaking.
	We should change the First Amendment so anything that is considered harmful Is criminal.
	Now, here's the thing.
	It isn't, right?
	We got a First Amendment, and it isn't.
	Incitement, however, is a criminal standard.
	And so if you can establish that Trump's saying inflammatory things like, fight for the country, or you gotta fight, that kind of stuff amounts to incitement, it's pretty easy to go after people you don't like and claim that they are responsible for incitement.
	And this is used against Republicans all the time.
	It's been used going all the way back to Rush Limbaugh being blamed for the Oklahoma City bombing.
	It's been used going all the way back to Sarah Palin being blamed for the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords for no apparent reason and without any available evidence.
	So this is a long-standing kind of trope for the left.
	And to the left, in using incitement, what they're really trying to do is say that it's not just Trump, it's everybody.
	And they're not really making this particularly opaque.
	I mean, they're being pretty clear about this.
	Joy Reid over on MSNBC last night with Adam Schiff, who has not left his green, his green room tent, his pup tent in the green room at MSNBC and CNN for like years at this point.
	And they actually have an official Adam Schiff room over at these cable networks and he sleeps there and he does his laundry and everything.
	So she's with Adam Schiff and she's explaining that the GOP, the entire GOP is a radicalized anti-democratic institution.
	Congressman Schiff, do we need to start having a serious conversation, not just about Donald Trump being a bad guy, but about the Republican Party becoming a radicalized, anti-democratic institution?
	Because you can't have a regular party, like the Democrats who have their flaws and we can have issue with them, and a party that is willing to seize power by force.
	Because that's what that sounded like to me.
	Well, it's a party that's willing to seize power by force.
	Now, again, can you name the Republican who has backed the January 6th riots?
	Which one?
	Anytime now would be good.
	But even the New York Times is recognizing that what this really is about is just the PR.
	So there's a piece by Peter Baker in the New York Times in the analysis section titled, if convicting Trump is out of reach, managers seek a verdict from the public and history.
	I always like when people say history is going to render its verdict.
	Yeah, well, history is like right now.
	That's what's happening now.
	So in 20 years, talk to me.
	to me. Peter Baker says as a day of violence and mayhem at the Capitol slid into evening last month with bloodshed, glass shattered and democracy besieged, President Trump posted a message on Twitter that seemed to celebrate the moment.
	Remember this day forever, he urged. The House Democrats prosecuting him at his Senate impeachment trial barely a month later hopes to make sure everyone does. With conviction in a polarized Senate seemingly out of reach, the House managers, as the prosecutors are known, are aiming their argument at two other audiences beyond the chamber.
	The American people, whose decision to deny Trump a second term was put at risk, and the historians who will one day render their own judgments about the former president and his time in power.
	Okay, well, here's the point.
	Trump lost the election.
	So who are they directing this at?
	They're directing this to 2022 voters.
	That's really what this is about.
	They're directing it at 2022 voters.
	Because the historians already don't like Trump.
	Because the historians, most of them, are on the left.
	They hated Trump before any of this stuff happened.
	They're already ranking him like the worst president ever before the election.
	So it's pretty clear which way they are leaning.
	It's not about that.
	It's about electoral politics.
	It's about power, as always.
	Because politics is generally about power.
	And they know this.
	Carl Rove said the managers had made a persuasive presentation.
	He said not clear if they met the legal definition of incitement and insurrection, but he's effectively tarnished for all time and incapable of running in 2024.
	And that, of course, is one of the goals.
	Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University who testified against impeachment, said the managers this time were just playing to the crowd rather than making a legal argument.
	He said the House is presenting an emotionally charged but legally deficient case in terms of a conviction.
	Indeed, much of the argument seemed designed to enrage rather than to convict.
	The videos are provocative but not probative, he said.
	Correct.
	It is like showing the jury the remnants of a fire.
	It does not prove the accused started the fire.
	This is correct, but that's not the point.
	This was never the point.
	Which is, of course, why they fast-tracked this thing.
	According to the Washington Post, Democratic lawmakers had coalesced behind a plan to force Trump from office within days of the attack on the Capitol building.
	Biden told Pelosi he didn't oppose impeaching Trump, but Biden also made clear he had no intention of letting the prior president's conduct interfere with the early days of his own administration.
	So if they were really truly serious about this, this wouldn't be a wham-bam thank-you-man impeachment, right?
	They'd actually present witnesses.
	They'd go through the whole process.
	They'd try to prove their legal case.
	But they're getting what they're getting out of this, right?
	They showed the video.
	A lot of people watched the video.
	They get to claim that all Republicans for all time who didn't vote for impeachment are complicit in January 6th.
	That was the point of this.
	The point of this was never to reach an impeachment.
	They're not even going through the normal process.
	I mean, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who's supposed to preside over all of this, isn't even there.
	So that's what this impeachment truly is about.
	And that's what the impeachment was always about, realistically speaking.
	Okay, so.
	Yesterday, the Democrats finished their case.
	Jamie Raskin, the House impeachment manager, he made an argument that essentially we have to use common sense.
	Now, here's the thing about using common sense with regard to this.
	Your common sense would tell you, because I've watched Trump for years as have you, that what Trump was doing on January 6th was fairly clear.
	He wanted a photo op of a bunch of angry people outside the Capitol building.
	Because that's what Trump likes.
	Trump likes photo ops.
	He likes images.
	He wanted people to sound off.
	He literally said it peacefully and patriotically.
	I know people want to ignore that or pretend it doesn't matter.
	It does.
	And then people went and they broke into the Capitol.
	Does anyone really think that Trump woke up that morning?
	He's like, you know what I'd love?
	I'd love if there were a bunch of people who ran into the Capitol building and tried to hang Mike Pence.
	I think that'd be amazing.
	Common sense tells you that this is not the case.
	But we are supposed to believe that common sense tells us this is the case, according to Jamie Raskin and the House impeachment managers.
	When Tom Paine wrote Common Sense, The pamphlet that launched the American Revolution.
	He said that common sense really meant two different things.
	One common sense is the understanding that we all have without advanced learning and education.
	Common sense is the sense accessible to everybody.
	But common sense is also the sense that we all have in common as a community.
	Senators, America, we need to exercise our common sense about what happened.
	Well, common sense tells me that Trump's rhetoric was inflammatory and that he was saying things that were not true, and that people who tend to storm Capitol buildings also did not do so at the direction of the President of the United States.
	I guess what common sense tells me, because That seems fairly obvious to me, frankly.
	Now, this is true.
	I mean, you can impeach for any reason.
	You can impeach for the President of the United States clipping his toenails wrong.
	There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents the House from impeaching for literally anything.
	There is a certain irony to Jamie Raskin standing up there A man who literally challenged election electors back in 2016, standing up there and saying that there is no superpower immunity from impeachment for people who do bad things in government.
	It's also kind of ironic considering that there actually is special legislation that has been passed that grants immunity to members of the House who speak on the congressional floor from things like slander.
	You can say anything slanderous you want so long as you're doing it on the floor of Congress.
	So there actually is some special immunity there.
	But in any case, here is Raskin saying that when Trump says that he's using the First Amendment here, that that's not sufficient to defend him.
	I mean, it depends on the standard you're using.
	You are the ones who said that he was inciting to insurrection.
	It's a high legal bar.
	You didn't clear that legal bar.
	So instead, now you're basically charging something that you're not even alleging.
	You're charging that he incited to insurrection and then you are not actually proving the case for incitement or that he facilitated an insurrection.
	He's the president of the United States.
	If he had gone to his military and said, I want you guys to invade the Capitol building right now and take all of those guys hostage.
	That's what a coup looks like, right?
	That would be an insurrection.
	Him saying to a bunch of people, the election was stolen.
	Let's go on a march to the Capitol and show people how angry we are and inject them with a spine.
	That is not incitement, nor is it insurrection.
	That's just political rhetoric.
	It's stuff I don't like.
	It's ugly, it's inflammatory.
	That does not fulfill the charges.
	Here's Raskin trying to make it fulfill the charges.
	The First Amendment does not create some superpower immunity from impeachment for a president who attacks the Constitution in word and deed while rejecting the outcome of an election he happened to lose.
	If anything, President Trump's conduct was an assault on the First Amendment and equal production rights that millions of Americans exercised when they voted last year.
	So, meanwhile, Cory Booker was saying, we don't need more evidence.
	This is one of the most beautiful things about the Democrats is that they say they don't need evidence when they literally didn't provide any evidence other than just tape and tweets.
	That was the entire case.
	Here are Trump's tweets.
	Here's the tape.
	We didn't learn anything new in the course of this.
	We really didn't.
	The only thing that we learned over the course of this, and I watched a fair bit of it, the only thing that we actually learned is that the rioters were close to members of Congress and the Vice President, in terms of proximity.
	Which we already kind of knew, considering that members of Congress had openly talked about this.
	I talked to members of Congress at the time.
	But Cory Booker says, you know, we've presented enough evidence, you know, proving our case, that's not something we have to do.
	It is hard to even venture to say that the commander-in-chief who swore an oath to protect this sacred space did not fail in his duty, did not betray that oath.
	No.
	We do not need more evidence, in my opinion, to come to the conclusion that Donald Trump violated his oath of office.
	Okay, but that was not the question, really.
	Okay, the question is whether he violated his oath of office.
	Did he do so in the fashion alleged by the impeachment document?
	You guys could have gone broader.
	You didn't.
	You did so on purpose.
	That is a simple legal reality here.
	Yeah, I think there are people who are going to vote for impeachment and Republicans, Democrats, and I see the case.
	I do.
	I disagree with the case, but I see the case.
	But Democrats did not fulfill their burden here.
	They really didn't.
	And Trump's campaign is going to say that today.
	Trump's team is going to say that.
	They're going to say, listen, you guys keep saying incitement to insurrection.
	Here's Maxine Waters saying that you should push back, get in people's faces and push back on them.
	Here's Conal Harris tweeting out support for people who are rioting in Minnesota.
	Here are members of Congress talking about how uprisings are generally okay so long as they are in the right political direction.
	Do all these people get impeached or what?
	Here's a bunch of you guys denying that Donald Trump was president for four years.
	Is the standard election denial?
	Like, what exactly is the standard here?
	And there's not going to be a good comeback.
	Rand Paul, the senator from Kentucky, he said, listen, this is pretty easy.
	We should condemn violence and extremism on both sides, but it's pretty obvious that's not what's happening here.
	My take is that we should condemn violence and extremism on both sides.
	For six months, our cities have been on fire because of extreme left-wing anarchists, and now we had right-wing people who have shown that it can be just as crazy.
	But I can tell you that the people creating mayhem would have physically attacked my wife and I, and were, at the very least, disorderly and not obeying commands.
	Not one of them even got a traffic ticket.
	So, you know, let's have the same standard.
	Well, I mean, that is not going to be the standard.
	And that's sort of the point.
	There is no neutral standard that is applied across the aisle.
	And Republicans are right to point that out.
	Republicans are right to point that out.
	And Democrats deliberately set a standard here in order so that it would be divisive.
	It's amazing how many times we can do this in the course of a year.
	There'll be something bad that happens to the country, and it should be very, very uniting.
	When a giant pandemic hits the country, that should be a point of unity.
	We're all gonna get together.
	We're gonna work on this.
	We're gonna use the best science available.
	Everybody's sort of groping their way through this thing, but we're all on the same side, because nobody wants anybody to die.
	Instead, it immediately turns into this political brow-beating, where if you are on the right, then it's because you want grandma to die.
	If you even want to take economic concerns into account in forming COVID policy, it's because you want grandma to die.
	We can cover up material.
	Everything becomes a politically partisan issue immediately.
	January 6th.
	Seems like there's a pretty wide consensus by the polling data.
	Trump was saying things that were not true from the election all the way up through January 20th about the election.
	Also, people rioting in the Capitol building is super bad and evil.
	That is something that is criminal, and those people should be prosecuted.
	End of story.
	In fact, you know who was saying that at the time?
	Mike Pence, on the floor of the Senate.
	Mitch McConnell, on the floor of the Senate.
	Instead, it immediately went to, and also, by the way, even if you oppose the January 6th riots, and even if you opposed Donald Trump's statements about the election, even if you said voter fraud did not decide the election, even if you said all those things, unless you are willing to impeach Trump after he is already out of office, this means you are complicit in all of this.
	There's a deliberate attempt to create division.
	It ain't gonna get any better.
	I was informed there was gonna be a new period of unity.
	I'm not seeing any of it.
	Not one little bit of it.
	Because this was not designed for unity.
	It was designed for division.
	It was not designed to be a perfectly tailored impeachment charge against Trump.
	It was not designed for any of that.
	It was not designed to be a process that elicited evidence that was undeniable.
	It was designed to be a political display.
	And so they succeeded in the political display, but make no mistake, that's exactly what this is.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here today with one additional hour of content for The Ben Shapiro Show.
	First, you cannot forget to end your week by watching The Andrew Klavan Show.
	On tonight's show, Drew will be discussing Christian politics and more, and Gina Carano being canceled.
	So, head on over to dailywire.com this evening at 7 p.m.
	Eastern and tune in.
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