All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 14, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:24
Super Bowl Sunday: Where Liberal White People Make Lots Of Money Off Wokeness | Ep. 1433
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The Super Bowl halftime show features rappers with rap sheets kneeling to protest American racism and the NFL clearing oodles of cash.
The Durham investigation reveals that the Clinton campaign paid a tech company to infiltrate Trump Tower and the White House executive office servers to create the Russiagate narrative.
And Ukraine is apparently on the brink.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
Do you like your web history being seen and sold to advertisers?
No?
Me neither.
Get ExpressVPN right now at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
Speaking of which, I mean, why in the world would you not protect your internet activity?
It's like going to the coffee shop and then leaving your laptop open while you run to the bathroom.
Like without your password to protect it.
Is that a smart idea or a very stupid, stupid idea?
Because then you come out and there's just some weird person who's just scrolling through your emails.
You don't want that happening.
And every time you open up the internet in a public place, that's basically what you're doing unless you're using ExpressVPN.
Your ISP knows every single website you visit.
What's worse is they can sell that information to ad companies and tech giants who use that data to target you.
ExpressVPN puts a stop to this.
It creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet.
So your online activity can't be seen by anyone.
I personally use ExpressVPN on all my devices.
My phone, my laptop, my router.
That means everybody who's using my Wi-Fi is now protected as well.
The best part is, using ExpressVPN, it is super simple.
Just fire up the app, you click one button, and now you are magically protected.
ExpressVPN, it's the world's number one rated VPN by Mashable, The Verge, and countless others.
So, if you are like me and you wish to protect your online activity because it's your business, secure yourself.
Visit expressvpn.com slash ben today.
Use my exclusive link.
E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N-D-O-T-C-O-M-S-L-A-S-H-B-E-N.
You can get an extra three months for free.
That's ExpressVPN.com-S-L-A-S-H-B-E-N.
Alrighty, so last night, of course, was the Super Bowl.
And I have to say, the power of capitalism to basically use whatever it can, whatever's at hand to make money is truly astonishing.
It was kind of bizarre to watch the Super Bowl, particularly the halftime show yesterday.
And note that all these people, Who were rebels against the cause.
These were folks who were rebelling against the system.
Systemic racism.
Here they are being paid by the NFL, which is one of the biggest corporations in America, the most powerful entertainment in the country, to sing songs on behalf of these corporate overlords, these rebels against the cause.
And meanwhile, the NFL is happy to make money and make ratings off of a group of people who in any sort of normal circumstances would have been canceled years ago.
There are a lot of criminal convictions on that particular stage.
There are a lot of lyrical violations of sort of social norms on that stage.
I'm not talking about right-wing social norms.
I'm not talking about Tipper Gore saying that we ought to have warnings on lyrics.
I'm talking about left-wing social norms.
But the fact is that capitalism can take the piss and vinegar out of pretty much anything.
And that's what that halftime show was last night.
Honestly, number one, it demonstrates how old our country is because, you know, this is now throwback music for people who are about my age.
I'm 38.
And I was watching some of the Super Bowl with some friends last night who are early 40s and they were bopping out to music that they were listening to in high school because our entire culture now revolves around the artists of 20 years ago.
And these are all a bunch of 50 year old rappers.
I mean, Mary J. Blige is 51 years old, and this is the younger crowd now.
Remember that for the past couple of Super Bowls, they've gone a little younger.
They did Bruno Mars, and then they did The Weeknd, and these are younger folks.
But they went back to kind of the old, right, the classic rap gods of the 1990s and early 2000s.
And I just want to point out once more that the social standards that the left holds when it comes to culture just do not exist.
They do not exist.
Violence against women, apparently, totally okay.
You don't get cancelled over that anymore, depending on who you are and what kind of art you perform.
The lyrics that are overtly anti-gay, totally fine, so long as you also hate Donald Trump.
So long as you are seen as a weapon against the system, the left is willing to take you back in, and, hilariously, corporations are willing to use you as their spokespeople, and you're willing to take their money.
It's this really corrupt and perverse little tie, but you do have to appreciate the power of money-making to really take any sort of power and edge out of the message and just turn it into pap that you pump into elevators.
It really is kind of an amazing thing.
Let me just point out who was on the stage last night during the Super Bowl halftime show, because this really did occur to me while I was watching it, is that the NFL has been attempting to get away from the, you know, we are the league that has a lot of criminal convictions routine.
They've been attempting to get away from this.
And so, on the stage, they had Dr. Dre, who has been accused of multiple instances of violence against women, including assault of Dee Barnes, who's convicted in 1991.
Quote, people talk all this bleep, but you know, somebody F's with me, I'm gonna F with them.
A woman named Michelle, who was the mother of one of his children, accused him of domestic violence.
Another woman named Terry B accused Dre of assaulting her.
He was convicted in 1992 of battery of a police officer.
He apparently allegedly drove drunk in 1994.
Now, he seems to have improved his life pretty dramatically, Dr. Dre, although in 2016, Suge Knight accused Dre of a kill-for-hire plot, but let's just say that these are offenses that, in sort of a normal world, would get cancelled these days, right?
Because time is of no limit.
When we go back 20, 30 years and find stuff about people and destroy them, But Dr. Dre was leading this off as a great hero of the Republic.
And then you had Snoop Dogg, who, of course, has been arrested for everything from cocaine possession to first and second degree murder.
He was acquitted on those charges, but arrested for them to drug and firearm possession to implication in a rape case.
He wasn't arrested for that, but there was an implication that he was involved.
He was last arrested in 2012 for possession.
And Snoop Dogg, of course, is now a hero of our culture.
And by the way, in January, he cut a song that included the following lyrics.
And I know it's always a risk when I read lyrics, so we're gonna take this slowly, okay?
This is the following lyric.
It was in January of this year.
Quote, all you N-words out there, take your guns that you're using to shoot each other and start shooting these bitch-ass MF-ing police.
That'll impress a MF-ing N-word like me.
That was like January.
And here he is, in the biggest cultural event in America, in February, Wrapping at the center of the stage.
At the behest of a major American corporation.
We got 50 Cent up there who was arrested in 94 for cocaine trafficking in 2003 for criminal possession of a weapon.
For battery in 2004 for jumping into a crowd to go after a person who threw a water bottle at him.
In 2013 for five criminal charges including one count of domestic abuse, domestic violence.
Normally this stuff sort of gets you, I thought that this was bad.
I thought that even according to the left I thought this stuff was bad.
No?
Not so much?
You have Eminem, right, who famously was sort of pre-canceled because of all of his lyrics, including ones about violence against his ex-wife and about raping his mom and about stabbing gay people.
All of that sort of stuff is in his lyrics.
But then he said that he didn't like Trump and that that, of course, fixes everything.
And of course, he was arrested twice in 2000 on gun charges.
So you have to admire the power of the American capitalist system to ingest all of this radical stuff and then just vomit it back out as commercial selling stuff, as the product that normal Americans will consume.
It really is an amazing, amazing thing.
I thought the best example of this last night was Eminem.
So Eminem, he kneels for a full minute in the middle of this halftime show.
He just kneels and puts his hand on his head for a full minute to demonstrate that he is in touch with Black Lives Matter movement and with the needs of black people.
And it's so funny how the media pretends that this is somehow controversial now.
It's so funny.
So Eminem does this.
And Deadline runs an entire piece.
Deadline Hollywood.
They run this entire piece.
The NFL must have been shocked at this.
Shocked.
And then the NFL came out with a statement.
And their statement was, oh no, he did this during rehearsal.
We knew, like, the whole time that he was gonna do this.
So, just to understand what the NFL did here.
In 2016, Colin Kaepernick, a backup quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers who'd been benched for the immortal Blaine Gabber because he sucks, he knelt for the national anthem.
On the basis, by the way, of a police shooting that apparently was justified.
And this is after he wore socks that compared police to pigs and all of this.
And this created a massive national controversy, right?
The NFL got engulfed in it.
Now, fast forward six years, And Eminem is kneeling for a full minute on the stage to the NFL's approval.
The NFL is making money off the kneeling now.
That's the power of capitalism, guys.
It's so funny.
The left thinks that they own the culture, and to a certain extent they do, because when corporations ingest leftism and then spew it back out in a sort of sanitized form, people still ingest leftism in a sanitized form.
But there is something very, very humorous about the NFL, which was targeted with these protests, now taking the protests, spinning them around and making cash off of them.
There's something really highly hilarious about that.
This is the message, by the way, from, I would say, the mainstream political left.
The mainstream political left will take radical messaging, they will ingest it, they will sanitize it, and then they will spew it back out there for money.
Which is why you saw in the end zone, and the NFL has been doing this for the last year, really, since the Black Lives Matter stuff cropped up over George Floyd's, almost two years.
They started putting at the end zone the words, end racism on one side and it takes all of us on the other, which of course ends racism.
I mean, as we all know, if there's one thing that ends racism in the United States, it is putting the words end racism at the back of the end zone in NFL game, because there are tons of just vicious white racists who are watching the NFL game.
And until now, they're ready to go burn a cross on their black neighbor's lawn.
But now they saw the words end racism at the back of the end zone.
They're like, oh man, F racism.
Racism is the worst now.
I thought it said end racism in the back of the end zone.
Roger Goodell tells me it's time to end racism.
And not only that, it takes all of us.
Racism ended.
Or alternatively, these corporations are playing you.
If you're a radical leftist and you think that these people are your friends, they are playing you.
And by the way, if you're on the right and you think these corporations are your friends, they're not.
They're willing to use whatever is at hand.
If they feel like they can make a buck off the woke by mirroring woke messaging, they will.
They have no principles.
They don't care.
It's all about just making the money for them.
That's all.
And the Democratic Party is the same way.
So, right before the Super Bowl, Joe Biden went on national TV because we have this dumb tradition where the President of the United States hijacks this giant cultural event and does these interviews.
By the way, I love the fact that we are still social distancing.
So we've got Joe Biden sitting 83 feet away from Lester Holt before the Super Bowl.
Both of them octuple vaxxed.
70% of their body weight made up the vax at this point.
And by the way, everybody, I'm asking.
And and Joe Biden then decides that he's going to rip on the NFL.
Now, you think the NFL is upset about this?
The NFL isn't upset about this one iota, because the NFL will find a way to make money off of this, which is why you have Roger Goodell saying, oh, yeah, yeah, of course, racist.
Of course.
Also, if black Americans give us more of your money, in fact, we'll have a halftime show featuring many of your favorite artists.
As long as you keep giving us more of your money, if we say we're racist, will you give us more of your money?
So Joe Biden, is this for the Democratic Party?
His policies can be as bad for black Americans as he wants them to be.
And his policies are indeed crappy for black Americans.
His inflation is hitting black Americans harder than it is hitting white Americans.
The unemployment that will likely follow, an increase in the interest rate, will be worse for black Americans than it will for white Americans.
He doesn't care about that.
He cares about making a buck, which is why he goes around on the road saying that all of his political opponents are people who would have been Jim Crow racists back in the day.
Because just keep if he mirrors the messages you want him to mirror, will you love him?
So here is Joe Biden ripping on the NFL for its supposed racism and not having more black coaches, says Joe Biden, who goes around bragging about how he worked with segregationists in the 60s and 70s.
Like, really, it's amazing stuff.
Here's the president of the United States, Lester Holt.
A league that is made up of so many athletes of color, as well as so diverse, that there's not enough African American qualified coaches to manage these NFL teams.
It just seems to me that it's a standard that they'd want to live up to.
An old white man is telling you that the NFL is super-duper racist.
Yeah, that's great.
By the way, Roger Goodall doesn't care.
He doesn't care.
As long as you keep pumping that money into his pocket, he does not care.
And neither does Joe Biden.
Joe Biden doesn't care about any of this stuff.
Just vote for him and give him your money.
And keep voting for him as 90% black if you're black, and he'll be a happy camper.
He doesn't care about any of these messages.
It's ridiculous.
It's really, really stupid.
By the way, I'm just going to point out this as well.
Remember, Donald Trump was very, very bad.
He was very bad.
He commented on Colin Kaepernick.
He said he shouldn't kneel for the national anthem.
And that made him terrible.
Why would he even comment on cultural events like this?
Why would he get involved in the culture wars, Donald Trump?
Democrats have been there for 50 years in the middle of the culture wars.
There's Joe Biden commenting on the NFL.
No one seems to care.
It's fine.
After all, he's a Democrat.
He's allowed to say whatever he wants about the NFL.
He's allowed to criticize the NFL.
He's allowed to criticize NFL players or NFL coaches.
He can do whatever he wants because he's saying the things that the left wants him to say.
And they know this.
They know this.
Meanwhile, final note on the Super Bowl.
So they still have a mask mandate for children in California.
Every kid in L.A.
County is going to go to school today with a mask on.
Here is a compendium of some of the celebrities at the Super Bowl not wearing masks.
By the way, no one was wearing a mask yesterday at the Super Bowl.
The LA County put out a big list, a big ad, like, you should all put on masks.
Well, there's Jay-Z not wearing a mask.
There's Matt Damon not wearing a mask.
You see, can you spot a single person in any of these?
There's Charlize Theron.
Anyone wearing a mask?
Anyone surrounding these people wearing a mask?
Anything?
There's LeBron.
Is he wearing a mask?
No, of course he's not wearing a mask.
There's JLo and Ben Affleck, the awkwardest celebrity couple of all time.
There they are.
There's Emmitt Smith.
Not a mask.
Anywhere in sight.
Nowhere.
There are no masks.
Because they are the special people.
They are so special.
The science changed magically right before the Super Bowl.
Not for the kids, of course.
The kids are going to go to school today, and they're going to be masked up in L.A.
County.
But at least Jay-Z did not have to wear a mask.
And that's really the important thing, I think.
The elites who create your culture and ingest your messages and spew them back out to you for money and are the richest among us.
Remember, all the people on the stage who have spent their lives rapping about the evils of the American system are some of the richest people in America.
Eminem is worth $230 million by last estimate.
Dr. Dre is worth way the hell more than that.
He's a billionaire, Dr. Dre.
Rapping about the terrors and horrors of evil racist America.
It's all about the Benjamins, you might say.
That's what you might say.
We'll get into an unbelievable story about the special investigation by John Durham in just one second.
He's now revealing new details about the Clinton campaign 2016-2017.
It really is astonishing stuff.
First, let's talk about the fact that it is very hard to hire people these days.
Like, finding good people for your job is really, really difficult.
And here's the thing.
Very often, you make mistakes.
You hire somebody, and then they turn out not to work, and so you have to get rid of them, and you get somebody new, and then they make the exact same mistakes.
You know what won't do that?
ZipRecruiter's AI.
Their AI is always learning and always getting better, hiring better people for you every time.
If you're hiring, their AI gets better and faster at finding the right candidates for all of your roles.
Right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash dailywire.
ZipRecruiter uses its powerful technology to find and match the right candidates up with your job, and then it proactively presents these candidates to you.
You can easily review these recommended candidates, invite your top choices to apply for your job.
That encourages them to apply faster.
No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site in the United States based on G2 ratings.
And now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive web address.
ZipRecruiter.com slash dailywire at ZipRecruiter.com slash D-A-I-L-Y-W-I-R-E.
ZipRecruiter.com slash dailywire.
ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way to hire.
Get started right now.
Meanwhile, an incredible story emerging from the investigation of special counsel John Durham, who's been working on this case, this investigation into the origins of the Russiagate scandal for quite a while.
And people are saying, why is he moving so slow?
Because legal processes move slowly.
If you've ever been involved in a lawsuit, they can take you two, three, four years to work it out.
According to the Washington Examiner, Special Counsel John Durham says he is building a case to show the technology executive with whom an indicted Democratic lawyer on the payroll of Hillary Clinton's campaign was working to build a Trump-Russia collusion narrative gained access to internet traffic at the White House to try and obtain dirt on former President Donald Trump.
Left-wing lawyer Michael Sussman was indicted last year for allegedly concealing his clients, among them, Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign from the FBI, when he volunteered since debunked claims of a secret backchannel between the Trump Organization and Russia's Alpha Bank.
So there was a left-wing lawyer named Michael Sussman, and he went to the FBI, and he said, you know, there's a backchannel between Trump and Russia, and they're having all sorts of corrupt secret meetings and communiques and all of this.
And he hid from the FBI that he was working for Hillary Clinton at the time.
Durham revealed in a Friday court filing he has evidence that Sussman's other client, dubbed Technology Executive One, but known to be former Newstar Senior Vice President Rodney Joffe, exploited domain name system internet traffic at a particular healthcare provider, likely Spectrum Health, Trump Tower, Trump's Central Park West apartment building, and the Executive Office of the President of the United States.
They continued doing this after Trump was elected president.
The revelations made as part of a motion for the Washington, D.C.
federal court to look into possible conflicts of interest related to Sussman's defense gave allies of Trump more reason to believe the former president was spied upon, as evidenced by an upsurge in tweets about the latest solve in his so-called Russiagate scandal.
They didn't just spy on Donald Trump's campaign.
They spied on Donald Trump as sitting president of the United States.
It was worse than we thought, tweeted Mark Meadows, the Trump White House chief of staff.
Kash Patel, intelligence and defense official in the Trump administration, chief Russiagate investigator under then House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, said the filing shows that the Hillary Clinton campaign directly funded and ordered its lawyers at Perkins Coie to orchestrate a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia.
Durham says that Internet Company One accessed dedicated servers for the executive office of the president as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided DNS resolution services to the EOP and that Jaffe and his associates exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP's DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Trump.
So apparently there was a company that simultaneously was working with Sussman and also working with the EOP The executive office of the president, and was using that arrangement to funnel information from the EOP about the traffic, about their DNS traffic, to Hillary Clinton's team and lawyers.
Jaffe alerted Sussman about the Alpha Bank claims by July 2016, Durham said last year.
Over the ensuing weeks, as part of their lawyer-client relationship, Sussman and Jaffe engaged in efforts with Hillary Clinton's lawyers.
Durham said Friday Sussman provided an updated set of allegations, including the Russia Bank One data and additional allegations relating to Trump, to another U.S.
government agency, which is reportedly the CIA.
Durham said the allegations Sussman passed along during a February 9, 2017 meeting relied partly on the purported DNS traffic Tech Executive One and others had assembled pertaining to Trump Tower, Trump's New York City apartment building, and the EOP.
So he's already been elected president and they're still jitting up this Russiagate narrative by trying to monitor traffic inside the EOP and then hand that over to the FBI and the CIA.
That's full-scale insane.
I mean, if nobody goes to jail over that, I, honest to God, don't know what you would go to jail over.
If you're an internet company and you're using your access to the executive office of the presidency in order to funnel that to the political opponents of the President of the United States, and then funnel that back to the FBI and CIA in order to initiate action that you know is not true against the President of the United States, That's insanity.
I mean, imagine if the situation were reversed.
Imagine if Barack Obama had been elected president, and it turns out that there had been a largely ginned up scandal about how Barack Obama was actually working closely with the Iranians, for example.
How the Iranians were actually backing Barack Obama actively.
They wanted him to win.
And it was important that everybody knew.
And they went to the FBI, and they went to the CIA, and they had a dossier full of false information, and they passed that along to the FBI and the CIA.
And then they had an internet company that was working with the executive office of the presidency.
And it's January 2009.
And they're monitoring the DNS traffic between the EOP and the Iranian government.
And then they're turning that information over to the FBI and CIA, which then initiate a four-year-long quest into the supposed connections between the Obama administration and Iran.
You think that isn't like an earth-shaking scandal?
You think that wouldn't end not only political careers, but some lives of freedom?
People would end up in prison?
Of course they would.
But it's Trump, so of course it's all justified.
Durham's team has charged Sussman with lying to the FBI while pushing the Alphabank claims.
Sussman allegedly told FBI General Counsel James Baker in 2016 he was not working for any particular client despite doing the bidding of Clinton's campaign, billing his services to her as well as working on behalf of Jaffe.
Sussman has pled not guilty.
Durham says Sussman repeated the lie in 2017.
This is all according to the Washington Examiner and filings now by John Durham.
The special counsel said Friday Sussman quote provided data which he claimed reflected purportedly suspicious DNS lookups by these entities of internet protocol addresses affiliated with a Russian mobile phone provider during the February 2017 meeting.
Sussman claimed these lookups demonstrated that Trump and or his associates were supposedly using rare Russian made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.
Durham said this assertion was likely highly misleading or outright false.
He says the special counsel's office has identified no support for these allegations.
Indeed, more complete DNS data that the special counsel's office obtained from a company that assisted Tech Executive One in assembling these allegations reflects that such DNS lookups were far from rare in the United States.
Derm pointed to the indictment of Sussman, which alleged, beginning in July 2016, that Jaffe worked with Sussman and Fusion GPS and numerous cyber researchers and employees at multiple internet companies to put together the Alphabank claims.
While doing this, Derm said Jaffe exploited his access to non-public and or proprietary internet data.
Apparently.
So this is all deeply damning.
And the fact that the Clinton team was ginning all of this up and then using the FBI and CIA as basically a cutout to air their narratives is totally crazy.
That's totally crazy, and people should end up in jail over this.
No question.
We'll get into President Trump responding to all of this in just one second.
First, as you know, Justice Breyer recently announced that he was retiring from the Supreme Court, handing Joe Biden the opportunity to get the most left-wing person he can find to fill that seat.
What you might not know is there is a lot of money.
Money front unnamed sources put into getting Justice Breyer to retire.
In fact, we talked about this on the show, that there was all sorts of pressure being brought to bear to get Breyer to step down before the 2022 election.
Our friends over at the Judicial Crisis Network are raising the alarm about the role these dark money groups are playing in the effort to get a radical appointed to the Supreme Court.
At the very top is a group called Arabella Advisors.
They fund a lot of far left groups, including Demand Justice.
The New York Post reported that Demand Justice ran a bullying campaign against Breyer, using their considerable resources to force him into retirement.
They even went so far as to drive a mobile billboard around the Supreme Court that said, Breyer, retire.
It's time for a black woman Supreme Court justice.
There's no time to waste.
Well, obviously it worked.
Now they're pouring tons of money into getting a radical leftist Supreme Court nominee who's going to serve as a rubber stamp for their unpopular far left agenda.
The Judicial Crisis Network is calling them out with a big ad campaign designed to shine a light on liberal dark money groups and their plans to transform America.
You can find out more on Twitter at Judicial Network or at JudicialNetwork.com.
Okay, so President Trump has responded to all of this and he put out a statement.
His statement is pure Trump.
He says, the latest pleading from special counsel Robert Durham provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidents who were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia.
Okay, that's true.
He says, this is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate.
Also, by the way, kind of true.
Okay, Watergate was about how Richard Nixon was using the people at the RNC to bug his political opponents.
Here you have Hillary Clinton bugging, apparently, the President of the United States at the EOP, essentially, and monitoring traffic from the EOP for the elected President of the United States, and then funneling that to the intelligence services in order to create an entirely false narrative designed to sink that presidency.
That is worse than Watergate by any objective level.
In a stronger period of time in our country, says Trump, this crime would have been punishable by death.
Well, I mean, now I feel like we've gone in a different direction.
There's an addition.
Reparations should be paid to those in our country who have been damaged by this.
I don't know.
Well, I mean, certainly they should have a legal case against Sussman and against the Hillary Clinton campaign.
But it does go to show you that all the talk about Trump, Russia, Trump so corrupt, Trump so terrible.
Hillary Clinton was corrupt and terrible and deserved to lose the presidency in 2016.
She absolutely did.
No question.
OK, meanwhile, things continue to get uglier and uglier with regard to Ukraine.
U.S.
officials are now saying that Putin could invade Ukraine at any time, according to the New York Times.
Jake Sullivan, President Biden's national security advisor, said on Sunday U.S.
officials still believed that President Vladimir Putin of Russia could invade Ukraine at any time despite continuing diplomatic efforts.
He appeared with Jake Tapper on CNN's State of the Union.
And Tapper, for his part, he did ask him, he was like, you know, you keep saying that there are false flag operations and you keep saying that Russia is going to launch an attack at any time.
Do you have like actual evidence you want to show us about this at any point?
Honestly, points to Jake Tapper for at least some skepticism from the mainstream media, which is usually not what you see here.
You've been warning about the Russians using a false flag operation to justify invading Ukraine.
That's a strong claim to make without presenting a shred of evidence.
Is there anything more you can tell the public, a public that might be justifiably rather skeptical of claims about intelligence?
Well, let me make three points on this.
First, we're not putting forward this intelligence to start a war, which has happened in the past, Jake.
We are putting forward this intelligence to stop a war.
Okay, but you haven't put forward any intelligence.
So a lot of people are still doubtful as to whether the intelligence exists or whether you are just doing this in order to ramp up attention on Ukraine.
Now, I happen to think that the intelligence probably does exist.
And I happen to think that Russia is not putting 130,000 troops around the borders of Ukraine just for fun.
I mean, there are other nations that are responding to this as though the threat is very, very real, obviously.
For example, Israel has now removed all of its diplomats from Ukraine, or is apparently in the process of doing so.
People are evacuating their own citizens.
The United States, for its part, is also evacuating its citizens at this point.
The US has now evacuated most of its embassy staff, according to Breitbart.
And the Associated Press.
The AP says the United States is evacuating almost all of its staff from its embassy in Kiev as Western intelligence officials warn a Russian invasion of Ukraine is increasingly imminent.
A senior State Department official said on Saturday, a very limited number of staff will stay to keep communications open with the government, but all consular options will be suspended, which is a real problem.
Because if you're an American citizen trying to get out, how the hell do you get out at this point?
Because the only people who are there are just to keep options open with the Ukrainian government.
The official, citing security concerns, would not say how many personnel would remain.
As of December, there are about 180 Americans working at the embassy.
Some of those had already left.
The majority will be returning to Washington, according to the official.
The official said the step was taken due to the potential for major Russian attacks on Kiev in the event of an invasion, and repeated the warning that private American citizens should immediately leave.
So again, I'm not one of the folks who tends to think this is a wag the dog scenario in which Joe Biden is attempting to ratchet up tensions with Russia in order to claim victory at the end.
I don't think Biden can control himself.
I don't think he has that much control over world affairs.
And I don't see what the win is for Vladimir Putin in doing that.
Biden over the weekend did speak with the Ukrainian president As well, Vladimir Zelensky apparently on Sunday told Ukraine's leader the U.S.
and its allies would respond rapidly to any further Russian aggression against his country.
Meanwhile, Russia was deploying some of its most powerful weapons and best trained battalions around Ukraine.
The prospect of imminent war loomed in Europe, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Biden that American support would allow Ukraine to prevent panic among its population, according to a statement from his office.
He also asked for concrete guarantees of Ukraine's security, saying European security is impossible without the security of Ukraine.
He said, we're not yet a member of NATO, so that means that only a strong Ukrainian army ensures the security of our state.
The United States has been shipping weaponry to Ukraine.
If, however, the Russians decide to go in full force, they would crush the Ukrainian military.
It could turn into a guerrilla war, but that'd be best-case scenario for the Ukrainian military at this point.
Sullivan reiterated calls for any Americans in Ukraine to move out by air, rail, or road as rapidly as possible.
Seeking to dispel any notion there would be U.S.
military action to extract anyone in the case of Russian action, Sullivan said there was a big difference between the U.S.
deployment of thousands of soldiers to Afghanistan and its current effort to prevent a war in Ukraine.
So if you thought that abandonment of Americans in Afghanistan was bad, wait until the Russians invade Ukraine and nobody can get out, is basically what he is saying.
Also, flights over Ukraine are now being suspended en masse because everyone is afraid that the Russians are going to invade Ukrainian airspace at this point.
Again, it turns out that there are far reaching consequences to the United States pulling out of Afghanistan and putting its neck out there for the world to see.
When the United States demonstrates that it is a paper tiger, the rest of the world takes notice, and that is what I promise you.
If the United States had not pulled out of Ukraine precipitously, the chances that Russia was now on the scale, on the verge of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine would be a lot lower.
Same thing with China and Taiwan.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Ukrainian officials say that Russia is now stepping up a destabilization campaign involving cyberattacks, economic disruption, and hundreds of fake bomb threats.
Russian forces and their proxies already control portions of Ukraine and frequently skirmish with government forces.
The aim of Moscow's intensifying hybrid campaign, according to Ukrainian officials, is to weaken their country and sow panic, potentially provoking discontent and protests of the kind Russia fomented in eastern Ukraine in 2014 to justify its interventions there.
U.S.
and U.K.
officials said last month they uncovered coup plots intended to install a puppet pro-Russian government.
Oleksii Danilov is the top national security advisor to Ukraine.
He said the number one task for Russia is to undermine us from inside.
So the Ukrainian government is simultaneously trying to keep people from panicking and also basically saying that everybody should kind of be panicking right now because the Russians are just getting deeper and deeper into this.
Meanwhile, the German leaders are warning of serious threats to peace.
This is why, again, there are a lot of people on the right who are very skeptical that anything serious is happening.
All of Europe is basically saying something serious is happening here.
So I really don't think that this is just manufactured.
I don't think it's a manufactured distraction.
I think that the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine is quite real.
And again, America allowing Russia to full-scale invade Ukraine and take it over.
Heightens the chances that China goes after Taiwan pretty dramatically.
Historian Neil Ferguson has been suggesting that China is going to go after Taiwan in the next couple of years pretty much guaranteed just because Joe Biden is president and is that weak.
And that's particularly true given the fact that Joe Biden continues to pretend that everything he did in Afghanistan was right.
Jake Tapper who again did a good job over the weekend on CNN credit where credit is due.
Jake was slamming Biden over his rejection of a new army report that talks about all the flaws in the Afghanistan withdrawal plan.
It's difficult to overstate how insulting Biden's sweeping rejection is to so many service members and veterans.
I don't doubt President Biden cares, but I do not understand why he would not manifest that care into taking this investigation more seriously.
Absorbing the tragic details, contemplating the obvious failures of his administration.
Failures that cost lives.
Isn't that how you demonstrate how much you care?
Otherwise, isn't it just words?
I mean, the answer is, of course, it's just words.
But for the Biden administration, it's always been just words.
And here's the thing, our enemies know it.
And that's the part that actually matters.
And meanwhile, the bridge between the United States and Canada has now been reopened, the Ambassador Bridge.
The police say that it's going to need to be plowed before it can totally reopen.
But they arrested a few truckers who had remained on the bridge.
They sort of saw it coming, a lot of the truckers.
And so they have instead retrenched in Ottawa, where they continue to snarl the traffic in Ottawa in an attempt to get Justin Trudeau, who is definitely, definitely not Fidel Castro's son.
Stop that right now.
Not Fidel Castro's son.
Not Fidel Castro's son continues to maintain that the truckers need to be vaccinated, despite the fact that a huge percentage of Canada's population is vaxxed already.
If you take a look at the actual statistics right now, the population share of vaccination in Canada 84% of the Canadian population has received at least one dose.
79% has received the full vaccination.
And about 40% has received the vaccination with additional booster.
So that is a largely vaccinated country.
And the fact that Justin Trudeau keeps shutting things down is sort of insane.
He should just declare victory and then be done.
But that's not going to happen.
According to the New York Times over the weekend, the Canadian authorities appeared to be making inroads Sunday to end the large-scale protests that have roiled the nation for weeks, arresting demonstrators who had blocked a critical border bridge to Detroit, suggesting they had negotiated a deal with the truckers.
By Sunday night, the police in Windsor said they had arrested several people and towed a pair of pickup trucks that had been parked in an intersection leading to the Ambassador Bridge.
The bridge reopened late on Sunday just before midnight.
The protest at the bridge was only one of several that has unsettled the country.
In the capital, a pair of letters released by Jim Watson, the mayor of Ottawa, and Tamara Lich, a protest organizer, suggested the truckers had agreed to a deal in which the truckers would move their vehicles from residential neighborhoods.
Instead, they're going to continue parking in the center of Ottawa near a parliament, snarling traffic, disrupting businesses.
The truckers here in Ottawa have always been about peaceful protests, said the protest organizer.
Many of the citizens and businesses in Ottawa have been cheering us on, but we are also disturbing others.
That was never our intent.
So Ottawa remains a scene of paralysis, and that's going to last presumably as long as Justin Trudeau continues to try and cram all of this down.
This is peaceful protest, by the way.
And what you're watching in Ottawa is... Has there been widespread reports of violence at this point in Ottawa?
Now, listen, I don't like people blocking traffic.
As a general rule, as I've said before, when you block traffic and you stop people from going to work and all of this, that is law violation.
You shouldn't do it.
With that said, peaceful protest is peaceful protest.
And it seems like most of what is happening in Ottawa is in fact peaceful protest.
And what they are protesting for is absolutely correct.
And meanwhile, it is amazing to watch the American left, which is supposedly the party of the workers.
And the American left, they're the people who care the most about the blue collar workers, right?
The Teamsters Union.
You know the Teamsters Union came out against the Ottawa truckers?
The Teamsters Union, which is supposed to stand for the truckers.
They're like, no, no, no, these ones are bad.
Why?
Because as it turns out, the unions actually work for left-wing government actors, not the people who pay their dues.
The people who pay their dues are just a means and methodology for people at the top of these unions to get rich.
And they can't get rich unless they've got the politicians in their pocket.
So the Teamsters Union in Canada has already come out in favor of the government, not in favor of its own truckers.
Which is insane.
Meanwhile, Al Franken, for some reason, is still considered a relevant voice in American politics, despite being ousted years ago.
He was on MSNBC, a repository of all stupidity.
He was on Joy Reid's idiotic show, suggesting it's terrible for Republicans to support the Canadian truckers.
Ah, the power of the party of the people right here.
They're just awful.
And I mean, don't get me started on like Ted Cruz.
He's like encouraging this thing in Canada.
But it's hurting our economy.
So now, you know, the whole point about, oh, well, we don't want these mandates because it hurts our economy to close the economy.
This is really hurting people in Michigan and in the upper Midwest.
And it's really, really hypocritical and awful.
But that's what you expect from these guys.
No, what you expect from them is hypocritical and awful.
I love this.
So the truckers are hurting the economy.
The mass shutdowns that we have had of hundreds of thousands of businesses across the world because of idiotic vax mandates and mask mandates and business shutdown mandates and social distancing mandates, that hasn't hurt the economy or hurt people.
These truckers are the ones who are the real danger.
Where was Al Franken when they were shutting down all the small businesses?
By the way, Joy Reid in that clip is wearing a shirt that says, I'm vaccinated, but I still want you to stay away from me because she's a crazy person.
This, by the way, is the philosophy of the left.
We'll get to more on that in just one second.
First, we are weeks away from seeing the doors close on significant refinance opportunities.
Do not be locked out.
The Fed is already talking about raising rates.
This is going to have an impact on mortgages.
You might already be missing out on hundreds in monthly savings without even realizing it.
So why not take advantage before it is too late?
Check out that free, no-obligation mortgage review from our friends at American Financing.
Let their salary-based mortgage experts tell you about custom loans that might fit your budget better, because rates really are still really low.
And chances are you can benefit.
It could mean a lower house payment, up to $1,000 in monthly savings, tens of thousands in long-term savings.
Think of the difference that can make, then give American Financing a call to learn more.
If you get the process started soon, you could skip two mortgage payments, and you might close in as fast as 10 days.
Just call 866-721-3300.
That's 866-721-3300.
Or, visit AmericanFinancing.net, NMLS182334, NMLSConsumerAccess.org.
Go check them out right now.
Now is the best time to refi.
Do not wait another few months because, honestly, you could miss the opportunity.
Instead, give them a call at 866-721-3300, or visit AmericanFinancing.net.
In a second, we will get to the far left, which will not let go of COVID.
They just won't.
We'll get to that in a second.
First, the opening weekend of our first original production, Shut In, massive success.
Not only did the premiere alone reach over half a million views, the reviews are in.
Shut In has a critic score of 100%, an audience score of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.
That's amazing, because it's a good film.
And making a film is never easy.
But we did it.
We produced a film.
It's really, really good.
That's why if you missed it, you need to head on over right now to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Get a membership today.
The film is now exclusively streaming for DailyWire members.
If you're not one, you are missing out.
This might be our first original production.
It will not be our last.
In fact, we have a bunch coming up.
We released the new trailer for Hyperion, the anti-superhero movie starring Cary Ewells.
That comes out in a few weeks.
And Terror on the Prairie.
That's our new western starring the amazing, uncancellable Gina Carano.
That comes up this summer.
For those of you who don't know, this weekend was the one year anniversary of Gina getting fired from Disney and us announcing our movie deal with her.
We're very excited to make good on that promise and bring Gina's movie to you.
It's awesome, by the way.
It is just great.
And here's the thing.
We need your help.
I'm just going to say it straight out.
We need your help producing movies, producing entertainment content.
It is really, really expensive.
Hollywood spends hundreds of millions, billions of dollars every year just on the kind of content that slaps you across the face every single day.
We're trying to give you a place where you can watch movies that won't slap you in the face and you'll be entertained.
We're making great movies that aren't just about ideological agendas.
They're just great movies that won't smack you.
And we need your help in order to do that, because they have the billions of dollars in corporate backing, and we have you guys.
So please, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe today, so you can watch Shut In, Hyperions, and Terror on the Prairie, Gina's new movie, out this summer.
Also, as you know, Matt Walsh is a best-selling LGBTQ plus author.
And that's because of his cultural masterpiece, Johnny the Walrus.
It's why he was invited to Dr. Phil to discuss these important issues with experts who could not even tell him what a woman was.
If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend you check it out.
Even more importantly, if you haven't picked up a copy of his best-selling children's book, you should do so right now.
It sold out in 48 hours when it was released.
More copies are now on the way.
Reserve Johnny the Walrus now on Amazon.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Speaking of the continuing radical left's disconnect with the rest of America on COVID issues in particular, again, I point you back to the Super Bowl where the only people who were masked the entire time was the youth orchestra during the national anthem.
All the singers, unmasked.
All the audience, unmasked.
The youth orchestra, the kids, have to be masked because kids always come last.
Meanwhile, You have Mehdi Hassan over at MSNBC, straight from Al Jazeera, who tweeted this out over the weekend.
And honestly, I hope to God that all Democrats run on this quote.
Keep mask mandates, especially in schools.
Keep vaccine mandates where possible.
Bring in a damn vaccine mandate for domestic air travel via executive order.
Send out more high quality masks and rapid tests on a monthly basis.
Tie opening up to booster uptake.
Expand the Supreme Court.
Yeah, go for it, man.
Do all of these things.
Democrats do it.
Do it!
Seriously.
And you know what?
Many of them will.
Many of them will.
That's the part that's incredible.
The media are still pushing this crap.
Now, here is the thing.
All of this is having an impact on Biden.
So I think that this is all basically over by March.
I think that you'll still have the kind of last gaspers, the Joy Reads and Mehdi Hassan screaming about this in a couple of weeks.
But I think Joe Biden has to know that his presidency is basically finished unless this crap stops immediately.
There's brand new polling out from CNN.
Conducted by SSRS over the weekend.
And what it found is that right now, 51% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters want to see a different candidate from Joe Biden in 2024.
Those numbers are unprecedented for a sitting president.
Only 45% of Democrats want Joe Biden to run for re-election in 2024.
A minority, 51%, want to see somewhere else.
Apparently only 52% of voters age 45 and over want to see Biden again, which that's a terrible number for him.
Even old Democrats are like, who's this geezer who can't seem to handle his bowels anymore, who seems to be constantly losing control of himself?
Can he go away?
Apparently there's still support for Biden among voters of color, 55% inside the Democratic Party.
That's actually his best subgroup, which is probably why he's spending his days going on Lester Holt and talking about the racism of the NFL.
As we mentioned before, Joe Biden and the NFL, basically the same.
Bunch of old white people trying to make money off of black people by pandering to the most radical policies.
That's what this is.
Without actually having to, you know, carry anything forward in any serious way.
In other interesting news, actually, the same poll shows that the Republicans are pretty much split.
Same numbers about nominating Trump again.
Only 50% want Trump nominated again.
49% want somebody different.
Those numbers have slipped, particularly For Trump.
And they're very different, by the way, with regard to past presidents.
In March 2018, Republicans were behind Trump 77%, behind his re-nomination.
In 2010, 79% of Democrats wanted Obama re-nominated.
So those numbers are really scary for Joe Biden.
So he has to change tack and he has to change tack really fast.
You're starting to see this from Democrats, by the way, is this attempt to change tack.
Nancy Pelosi, for example, she's attempting to disown and defund the police branch of her party.
And she sort of has to, because if she doesn't, her party is just toast.
Make no mistake, community safety is our responsibility.
And I quote one of my colleagues from New York, Richard Torres, a brand new member of Congress, way on the left, saying that defund the police is dead.
That causes a concern with a few in our caucus.
But public safety is our responsibility.
Uh, yeah.
So, that's fun to watch.
The Democrats running away from their own most radical proposals.
I mean, they're on a knife's edge and they know it.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Knowles Show.
That's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Elliot Felt, executive producer Jeremy Boring, our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our production manager is Pavel Lydowsky, associate producer Bradford Carrington.
Editing is by Adam Sajovic, audio is mixed by Mike Koromina, hair and makeup is by Fabiola Cristina, production assistant Jessica Crand.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2022.
A new DOJ report proves the Democrats' spying on Trump went a lot deeper than anyone thought.
Joe Biden puts a leather-daddy dog fetishist in charge of our nation's nuclear waste.
And Facebook tries to sell the world on perpetual childhood during the Super Bowl.
▲
Export Selection