Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is back in the 2020 race, and all the old socialist Marxists are up in arms. Well, actually, they can t actually walk, so they're mostly just wheeling around in circles. We'll get to that in a minute. First, let's talk about the fact that not only are a lot of old Bernie Sanders voters nearing their doom, but so are you. We're all approaching death, and that's why you need life insurance. Second, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker get stuck in the Jussie Smollett trap, and a CBS reporter blows the lid off of bias in the media. Third, Bernie Sanders joins the 2020 Democratic race, which means it's time for Bernie's theme song! Ben Shapiro is on The Ben Shapiro Show, wherever you get your news, and wherever you're listening to your favorite podcast. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and tell a friend about the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you can get your free ad-free version of the show. You can also become a supporter of The Weekly Standard by becoming a patron by clicking the link below and making a five-star rating and getting 10% off your first month with discount code BONUS! at bit.ly/support-the-show. Thanks for listening and supporting the show! You'll get access to all kinds of awesome shows and perks, including VIP memberships, massages, mass mailers, personal training, and more personalized gifts, and much more! The ultimate support you can help spread the word out there about the podcast and beyond! - Ben Shapiro's The Shapiro's Unfiltered Podcasts! Thank you for listening to the show and spreading the word to the world. - The Shapiro Show. The Shapiro Team and Ben Shapiro, Ben Shapiro . Thanks Ben Shapiro: "The Ben Shapiro Podcast" is a podcast about all things leftist politics and culture and culture everywhere! Ben's Unprofessionalism is real, authentic, honest, unapologetically progressive politics and everything else that matters. -- Thank you, everyone gets a chance to know the truth about it's not just like that, no matter what's going on in the real world, right or not like it's real, and they're not going to like it, right, right?
00:00:00.000Bernie McFace McSanders joins the 2020 race, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker get stuck in the Jussie Smollett trap, and a CBS reporter blows the lid off of bias in the media.
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00:02:00.000The New York Times says Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent and 2016 Democratic primary runner-up, whose populist policy agenda has helped push the party to the left, announced on Tuesday that he was running for president again, embarking on a bid that would test whether he could retain the anti-establishment appeal he enjoyed with many liberal voters three years ago.
00:02:18.000A self-styled Democratic socialist whose calls for Medicare for all A $15 minimum wage and tuition-free public colleges have become pillars of the party's left wing, Mr. Sanders is among the best-known politicians to join an already crowded Democratic field, and one of the most outspoken against President Trump, whom he has repeatedly called a pathological liar and a racist.
00:02:40.000Three years ago, during our 2016 campaign, when we brought forth our progressive agenda, we were told that our ideas were radical and extreme.
00:02:48.000He said on Tuesday in an early morning email to supporters citing health, economic, and education policies, well, three years have come and gone, and I am merely a little older, and I have a little less hair.
00:02:57.000And as a result of millions of Americans now standing up and fighting back, all of these policies and more are now supported by a majority of Americans.
00:03:07.000If you look at the actual polling with regard to Medicare for all, and then people are told that their taxes will increase...
00:03:13.000Medicare and private insurance will be abolished.
00:03:16.000The support for Medicare for all drops to 27%.
00:03:17.000As far as the idea that people are for free college tuition, depends on if you tell them the cost.
00:03:23.000As far as his beliefs that we should completely regulate and tax the economy out of existence, most people not super interested in that.
00:03:31.000The good news for Bernie Sanders is that, of course, he is very prominent because of 2016, and now he's going to crowd out Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
00:03:40.000Elizabeth Warren was hoping that she could pick up sort of the Bernie mantle.
00:05:00.000His entire platform is centralization of everything in top-down authority.
00:05:05.000What in the world is he even talking about?
00:05:07.000So what he's saying is, lots of people want this, therefore it is ground-up change, not top-down change, but here's the way it works.
00:05:14.000Things grow from the ground up, and then we dictate them from the top down, and then the people on the ground up, if they don't agree with us, we kill them like the Kulaks.
00:05:23.000Anyway, his silly commercial continues.
00:05:27.000Bernie Sanders' healthcare for all idea is gaining steam.
00:05:59.000We have a campaign finance system which is corrupt.
00:06:03.000Brothers and sisters, we have a lot of work in front of us.
00:06:10.000Alrighty, so one of the things I love about Bernie Sanders is that basically he just sits there and complains about the state of things as they are.
00:06:15.000Bernie Sanders was so lazy when he was in a commune in the 1970s that they threw him out of the commune.
00:06:22.000He was spending his days basically sitting around writing weird, erotic columns about women who wish they had been raped.
00:06:40.000And there he is talking about the most prosperous economy in the history of the world, the most powerful economy in the history of the world.
00:06:48.000The fact that you do nothing your entire life, and now you're going to run for president, and in the first three and a half hours of your campaign you raise a million dollars.
00:06:55.000That seems kind of rigged to me, I'll be honest with you.
00:06:58.000It seems to me like if you get to live off the fat of the land as Bernie Sanders has without producing a thing for your entire life, and that guy is as old as my grandparents, that's a pretty amazing life right there.
00:07:09.000So you don't get to whine about how terrible America is when you have done zero things your entire life of use to a human.
00:07:16.000And yet here you are as a frontrunner in a presidential race.
00:07:19.000He also made a public announcement of his run for the presidency in 2020 in front of the press.
00:08:48.000Because it seems to me that Bernie Sanders and a lot of the Democratic Party are spending an awful lot of time actually ratcheting up racism, sexism, bigotry, anti-religious sentiment.
00:08:57.000It seems like they are the ones who are interested in separating Americans from Americans.
00:09:01.000Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign has already been maligned by the left as racist.
00:10:35.000If that's your campaign, and your campaign is that America is rife with racism, sexism, bigotry, and homophobia, you're not a unifier.
00:10:41.000Now, what is Bernie Sanders' path to the nomination?
00:10:44.000His path to the nomination is basically everybody splits the vote and he runs up the left.
00:10:48.000That's basically his path to the nomination.
00:10:50.000He hopes that Beto and Kamala And Cory Booker club each other to death like baby seals, and then he just sort of hobbles his way across the finish line.
00:10:59.000His pollsters are basically suggesting this already at Politico.
00:11:03.000Politico says, when Bernie Sanders was mulling a 2020 campaign last year, he said he would likely pull the trigger if he thought he was the best candidate to defeat President Trump.
00:11:10.000Now that he's officially in the race for the White House, a key element of his argument is that he is, in a way that flies in the face of conventional wisdom.
00:11:17.000His campaign is gearing up to take aim at one of the central cases made against him, that the 77-year-old Democratic Socialist, far from being unable to win a general election, could blaze a non-traditional path to victory on the electoral map unlike any other Democratic candidate.
00:11:30.000This month, Ben Tolchin, who is Sanders' pollster, circulated a memo about an online survey he conducted in late 2017 for progressives who are hoping to flip state legislative seats in West Virginia.
00:11:40.000The poll found that Sanders would beat Trump by two percentage points in the state, despite the fact that Trump won West Virginia 69 to 27, and that no Democratic presidential candidate has carried the state since 1996.
00:11:50.000In a second, I'm going to discuss some more of the polling for Bernie Sanders and why he is a different sort of candidate than Kamala Harris or even Beto O'Rourke.
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00:13:17.000The pollsters are basically saying that Sanders could defeat Trump in a variety of largely white, non-college educated states.
00:13:25.000Some of the Sanders camp, according to Politico, envisioned possibly making a play for Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana, as well as Kansas, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Montana, six states that together have voted for the Democratic nominee just twice in the past half century.
00:13:39.000His pollster says it could radically change the map.
00:13:41.000As Bernie has shown, as Trump has shown, I don't think we are in a binary, two-dimensional, left-right paradigm anymore.
00:13:47.000The truth is that a full 12% of Bernie Sanders' primary voters said they voted for Donald Trump in the general election because they wanted somebody who's anti-establishment, who had that populist feel, and who Actually believe that a lot of these guys who are non-college educated white folks in Ohio and Iowa and variety of these other states, Michigan, Wisconsin, that those people actually had dignity.
00:14:09.000I had a conversation with Arthur Brooks over at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, and in his book that is coming out very soon, you should go check it out, it's called Love Your Enemies, not out for a couple of weeks, but in his book he talks about how he believes the reason that President Trump won the presidency is because Trump granted the feeling of dignity to a lot of non-college educated white folks who had been ignored by the prevailing sentiments in academia and on the coasts that basically these guys were going to be left behind.
00:14:34.000Well, Bernie Sanders does cater to that crowd in a way that no other Democrat does.
00:14:44.000And Kamala Harris is pursuing a completely different electoral strategy.
00:14:47.000Her electoral strategy is to mimic the Barack Obama coalition, the intersectional coalition, get heavy black turnout, bring along a lot of Hispanics and young people and women.
00:14:56.000Bernie Sanders is more of a throwback.
00:14:59.000The only two candidates in the Democratic field so far who have any appeal really in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, the only two Democrats are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, both old white guys who have sort of a blue collar feel.
00:15:10.000So it is not out of the realm of possibility that Bernie Sanders is dangerous in a general election.
00:15:15.000That's not out of the realm of possibility at all.
00:15:17.000And in a primary, he does well with the progressive wing.
00:15:20.000He does surprisingly well with young people as well.
00:15:45.000I'm going to talk a little bit more about Bernie Sanders in just one second.
00:15:49.000According to an analysis of exit polling in 25 primaries, according to Politico, Bernie Sanders narrowly won black voters under 30 in 2016, but he lost older African Americans by large margins.
00:15:59.000They turned out at higher rates than their younger counterparts.
00:16:02.000To beat Trump, the Democratic nominee will need robust support from black voters, the most loyal part of the party's base.
00:16:08.000Well, that, or he needs to peel off a bunch of those blue-collar white voters again.
00:16:12.000And he does have a problem in these primaries.
00:16:15.000In 2016, he was running against an unlikable old white woman, Hillary Clinton.
00:16:20.000She didn't do well with the black community or as well as Barack Obama did in the party primaries.
00:16:26.000Again, it was Hillary Clinton's weakness with black primary voters in 2008 that led Barack Obama to steal the nomination from her.
00:16:32.000Sanders almost stole the nomination from her again because she was weak among black voters.
00:16:36.000This time you've got two black candidates in Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.
00:16:39.000Both of whom have robust appeal among black voters in the Democratic Party primaries.
00:16:45.000With that said, he is running from behind in those particular areas, but in several recent 2020 surveys, he's actually in first place among Latinos, faring better than even former Vice President Joe Biden.
00:16:59.000Yeah, we can dismiss Bernie Sanders as a has-been, or we can face the reality that the guy has a real shot at the nomination.
00:17:05.000He does have a shot at the nomination.
00:17:07.000And he has pushed the Democratic Party left.
00:17:09.000He can fairly say that he has helped push the Democratic Party far to the left.
00:17:13.000And some of his opponents are making boo-boos.
00:17:54.000I believe that what voters do want is they want to know that whoever is going to lead understands that in America today not everyone has an equal opportunity and access to a path to success and that that has been building up over decades and we've got a correct course.
00:18:11.000OK, I am not a Democratic Socialist is going to be a hard sell with the Democratic Party base.
00:18:15.000Remember, AOC, who's probably the most popular female in the Democratic Party right now, is a self-described Democratic Socialist.
00:18:21.000Bernie Sanders is a self-described Democratic Socialist.
00:18:24.000Hillary Clinton admitted after the 2016 election that it hurt her to say she was pro-capitalism in the Democratic primaries.
00:18:31.000And the Democratic Party has moved significantly to the left even since 2016.
00:18:34.000So if Kamala is going to campaign to the right of Bernie Sanders, that does open a pretty wide lane for Bernie Sanders.
00:18:42.000Plus, as it turns out, there are a lot of holes in Kamala Harris' record.
00:18:45.000So, for example, Kamala Harris, who I think right now has to be seen as the 2020 frontrunner until Joe Biden jumps into the race at least.
00:18:52.000Kamala Harris, she says she was doing a big rally last night in Portsmouth.
00:18:56.000I do love how the media cover these rallies.
00:18:58.000Oh my goodness, 1,500 people showed up for a Kamala Harris rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
00:19:14.000Anyway, Kamala Harris says we haven't put resources into our education system again because of her past as a prosecutor in the state of California.
00:19:22.000It makes her difficult to make arguments like this.
00:19:24.000Let's agree that we have failed to put the resources into our public education system.
00:19:34.000And instead, we are putting tons of money into a system of mass incarceration.
00:19:40.000Because we are not being smart about investing in the future of our country.
00:19:50.000So NARC Kamala Harris, who spent a lot of time putting a lot of people behind bars in the state of California, and then had her own attorneys arguing that people should not be let out on two-for-one deals because we need to make sure that we have enough cheap labor to clean up wildfire areas.
00:20:04.000That lady is going to be arguing against mass incarceration?
00:20:07.000If you think Bernie ain't going to slap her on that, you are totally wrong.
00:20:10.000He's going to politically slap her around on that.
00:20:13.000And the far left of the party doesn't like Kamala Harris.
00:20:15.000Young people are not thrilled with Kamala Harris.
00:20:20.000By the way, she happens to be completely wrong.
00:20:22.000Prison spending in the states is still a fraction of overall pre-K-12 education spending, according to that noted right-wing source, The Washington Post.
00:20:31.000States spend $71 billion on prisons and $534 billion on schools every year.
00:20:36.000So when she talks about us spending money on prisons and not on schools, that is simply not true.
00:20:42.000By the way, I've always wondered, when people talk about mass incarceration, which people are you going to let out of prison?
00:20:46.000And don't tell me the people who smoke pot and are in prison for smoking pot, because that's no one in prison.
00:20:52.000By percentage, the number of people who are in prison for smoking pot is extraordinarily low, and usually it was bargained down from dealing drugs.
00:20:59.000Now, if you want to end the war on drugs because you think that's bad policy, that's one thing.
00:21:02.000But if you want to suggest that people Haven't broken serious laws and are in prison for no reason?
00:21:08.000If you want to talk about the lowered crime rates over the last 30 years, you're going to have to talk about the massive increase in the number of criminals who have actually been in prison.
00:21:16.000If Kamala actually were to campaign as an open prosecutor, I'm not sure that that doesn't have more crossover appeal than this newfangled far-left shtick that she has been pushing.
00:21:26.000But again, there is a window open here for Bernie Sanders to run to her left.
00:21:30.000And the same is true with regard to Amy Klobuchar.
00:21:32.000So Amy Klobuchar, the senator from Minnesota who threw her hat into the ring in the middle of the snow in Minnesota.
00:21:37.000Do we have some Amy Klobuchar theme music?
00:22:18.000And so I come at it from a little different place than some of my colleagues that are running for this office, in that I always look at every proposal and say, would this hurt my Uncle Dick in the deer stand?
00:22:29.000Um, and I would say that these common sense proposals in front of us do not.
00:22:34.000Um, I don't see banning assault weapons, right?
00:22:37.000I don't think that hurts in the deer stand.
00:22:39.000Okay, banning semi-automatic weapons does in fact hurt in the deer stand, because those are all the hunting weapons.
00:22:45.000Unless you can use a bolt-action rifle from World War II.
00:22:47.000If you're using a semi-automatic rifle in the United States for hunting, that is pretty much all the rifles in the United States, because all that means is every time you pull the trigger, a bullet fires.
00:22:55.000That's all a semi-automatic weapon is.
00:22:56.000Okay, in just a second, we're going to get why Amy Klobuchar is also becoming unpopular with her own base and some holes in her candidacy in just a second.
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00:24:54.000So in any case, what you see is that in the Democratic Party, a lot of the top candidates aren't far enough left to stop Bernie Sanders from racing around the outside.
00:25:04.000And it's driving members of the Democratic Party to be more and more radical, including on issues where they have made fools of themselves.
00:25:10.000The most obvious issue is in the Jussie Smollett case.
00:25:13.000So the Jussie Smollett case, to recap, was an obvious hoax from the very beginning.
00:25:16.000You weren't allowed to say that, but the reality was there were too many holes in the story for it not to have been at least questionable from the very beginning.
00:25:24.000Well, now we know why Empire actor Jussie Smollett, apparently, was trying to make a stink out of a story that never happened.
00:25:33.000on Chicago streets in the middle of a polar vortex, a couple of MAGA fans were walking around, decided to attack him because they watched Empire, which makes perfect sense, and then throw a rope around his neck, throw bleach on him, shout the F and N words at him, and then shout, this is MAGA country, in Chicago, at 2 a.m., in the middle of a polar vortex.
00:25:53.000While he was holding a Subway sandwich, which he never relinquished.
00:25:56.000So there are a lot of questions about this.
00:25:57.000That did not stop both Cory Booker and Kamala Harris from calling it a modern-day lynching.
00:26:02.000And now we find out that he is basically suspected of paying two of his friends to attack him a week after a letter was sent to him.
00:26:11.000Now, this letter that was sent to him, supposedly, was mailed to Chicago's Cinespace Studios, where the show Empire is filmed.
00:26:18.000The letter prompted a hazmat response.
00:26:20.000Apparently, there was a white substance in the letter, which was determined to be aspirin.
00:26:25.000The note was crafted with letters apparently cut out from magazines to form words, and the pieced-together message contained racial and homophobic threats directed at Smollett.
00:26:32.000Apparently, they are now examining whether or not Smollett was behind the letter as well.
00:26:39.000That did not stop all the Democrats from attempting to leap to the left on this particular issue to prove their bona fides on issues of race.
00:26:45.000So you'll remember that Spartacus, Cory Booker.
00:26:48.000Do we have some Spartacus music for Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey?
00:29:08.000Senator, you're going to need to speak English.
00:29:10.000What I mean to say, what I mean to say, says Kamala Harris, is that we are all part of a greater force, a greater life force that unites you and the rock and the tree.
00:29:34.000But again, one of the beautiful things about Bernie Sanders joining the party is that everybody is now going to be forced to the dramatic left because they have to head him off at the past.
00:29:43.000Now the good news is that they have members of the media who are going to defend them at all costs.
00:29:47.000There's a news article, a news article, not a commentary article, a news article from the New York Times titled Republicans hope to sway voters with labels that demonize Democrats.
00:29:57.000So just to get this straight, you have running for the Democratic presidential nomination, an open democratic socialist who hopes to nationalize vast swaths of American industry in Bernie Sanders.
00:30:07.000You have a Democratic Party that embraces abortion to point of birth.
00:30:12.000And you have a Democratic Party that has embraced open anti-Semites inside its own ranks, but its Republicans are mislabeling.
00:30:30.000Quote, in the 116th Congress, if you're a Democrat, you're either a socialist, a baby killer, or an anti-Semite.
00:30:36.000When I first read that line, I was like, oh good, finally the New York Times is covering the news objectively.
00:30:40.000And then they continued, that at least is what Republicans want voters to think as they seek to demonize Democrats well in advance of the 2020 elections by painting them as left-wing crazies who will destroy the American economy, murder newborn babies, and turn a blind eye to bigotry against Jews.
00:31:29.000But according to the New York Times, the real story is that Republicans are mean to Democrats because Republicans keep pouncing and seizing.
00:31:37.000They seized on a Twitter post by a freshman representative, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, which even some Democrats condemned as anti-Semitic.
00:31:43.000Well, then Republicans didn't seize on it, did they?
00:31:45.000If Democrats also say something is anti-Semitic, and Republicans say something is anti-Semitic, the story is not Republicans seizing, it's the anti-Semitism.
00:31:53.000When they say that President Trump is radical, and when he calls for people to stop adopting socialism in our country, Bernie Sanders, a Democratic frontrunner, is an open Democratic Socialist.
00:32:05.000It's not our fault that the Democratic Party has decided to move radically to the left.
00:32:09.000House Republicans have identified 55 Democrats they regard as vulnerable, including many freshmen.
00:32:14.000Some flipped Republican seats last year.
00:32:16.000Some represent districts carried by Trump in 2016.
00:32:18.000Some are in districts held by Republicans until recently.
00:32:21.000Bruised by their losses last year, Republicans are determined to start earlier and be more aggressive on the offense in 2020 and are hoping to exploit the Democratic presidential candidate's courtship of the left.
00:32:32.000Again, it is wonderful to be a member of the media where every story about Democrats moving to the left is really about the evils of the Republican Party.
00:32:39.000Okay, in just a second, we're going to talk about media bias, writ large, because there are a couple of revelations yesterday that are quite stunning.
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00:33:54.000I want to talk about a pretty amazing revelation from CBS's Laura Logan in just a second, but you're going to have to go and subscribe over at dailywire.com.
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00:34:19.000Also, it is almost time for our next episode of The Conversation.
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00:35:12.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:35:16.000So the good news for Democrats, of course, is that the media will always defend everything that they do.
00:35:26.000And what's hilarious about the media is that so many members of the media refuse to acknowledge the bias that exists in their own space.
00:35:34.000Now, this is particularly weird because a lot of prevailing left-wing theory has always been About the notion that ideas are a stand-in for power.
00:35:43.000If you go and listen to any critical studies lecturer on college campuses, what they say is that any system of human interaction is structured based on power hierarchy.
00:35:51.000So for example, folks on the left will argue that the free market in which you and I exchange goods and services is not actually free.
00:35:57.000It's a system of exploitation pressed upon other people By people who happen to have the power in any given society.
00:36:05.000And we can just restructure that system at will.
00:36:07.000They make this argument about free speech.
00:36:09.000There's a philosopher, Marxist, Neo-Marxist philosopher named Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s and 1970s.
00:36:16.000He made the case that essentially free speech itself was a weaponized version of power because the people who are most loud and most likely to be heard were representatives of the power hierarchy.
00:36:26.000And therefore, what would be best for the dispossessed is to shut down certain types of speech in favor of other types of speech.
00:36:32.000So the left is constantly seeing things in terms of power relationships.
00:36:35.000This is why they see every disparity as an example of discrimination.
00:36:38.000This is why folks on the left constantly look at any sort of inequality and they see it as inequity.
00:36:44.000They see one group that is poorer than another group, and instead of them seeing that as maybe that's the outcome based on individual decision-making, maybe that's the result of historical discrimination but not current-day discrimination, instead they say, this must be the result of power hierarchies in place, preventing one group from rising to the level of the other group.
00:37:02.000Now, usually that's not true, but the point I'm making is that the left is constantly seeing human behavior as a reflection of the need to defend some sort of power hierarchy, except when it comes to the leftist media.
00:37:13.000When it comes to the leftist media, then it's just objectivity.
00:37:16.000Then it's just, we're just speaking the truth.
00:37:18.000It is not a reflection of a power hierarchy in which people at the top of the media happen to be Democrats and push a Democrat point of view.
00:37:26.000Their views that they push in the pages of the New York Times and on the airwaves of CNN or CBS or ABC, none of that is a reflection of a power dominance by folks who are on the left.
00:37:37.000Instead, that is just them telling the truth.
00:37:39.000Their opinion is not opinion, it's fact.
00:37:41.000Their power is not power, it's reality.
00:37:43.000And you can see this from folks on the left who ignore their own theories about power that apply everywhere except to them.
00:37:51.000So for example, Jonathan Capehart, over at the, he's a columnist for the Washington Post, an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.
00:37:57.000He said that the reason a lot of people believe the story about Jussie Smollett is because it fit in with reality.
00:38:02.000Well, only if you are of a certain political view.
00:38:06.000But folks in the left media tend to substitute the idea that their opinions are actually fact.
00:38:12.000They believe that fact and their opinions are one and the same.
00:38:15.000So here is Jonathan Capehart saying something that is actually not particularly true, but saying it with the full confidence of fact behind it because, of course, the media is not left and their opinions are not reflections of opinions or reflections of their desire for power.
00:38:28.000Their opinions are reflections of reality.
00:38:30.000The circumstances and the way he told the story and what he said happened to him sort of fit in with not a narrative, but a reality for a lot of people in this country since President Trump was inaugurated.
00:38:47.000That there is an atmosphere of menace and an atmosphere of hate around the country that made it possible for people to either readily believe or want to believe Jussie Smollett.
00:38:59.000There is such a fascinating Freudian slip in the middle of that clip where Jonathan Capehart, this MSNBC contributor columnist for the Washington Post, where Capehart says that this story fit in with a narrative.
00:39:12.000The conflation of a narrative with a reality, the conflation of a story you want to tell about America with the reality of the situation in America, It's really indicative of the fact that for a lot of folks on the left, they believe their opinions are fact, and they believe facts are merely somebody else's opinion.
00:39:28.000And then, they have the temerity to claim that they are the objective truth-tellers when it comes to media dominance.
00:39:33.000That it is not, in fact, that they dominate the power hierarchies in a lot of media companies, and that's why the opinions are what they are at a lot of media companies.
00:39:41.000Now, as it turns out, none of that is true.
00:39:43.000The reason that many mainstream media institutions are to the left is because the people on top of those institutions are to the left.
00:39:49.000CBS's Laura Logan, who's been a top-line reporter for a very long time at CBS, she basically let this slip.
00:39:56.000She was doing an interview, and it's a pretty scorched-earth interview, actually.
00:40:00.000She was doing the interview with retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland about a variety of topics for his Mic Drop podcast, and she said, listen, The media like to pretend they're objective.
00:40:10.000They are not objective in the slightest.
00:40:12.000Media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just in the US.
00:40:15.000But in this country, 85% of journalists are registered Democrats.
00:40:23.000Because although the media has always been, historically, always been left-leaning, We've abandoned our pretense, or at least the effort, to be objective today.
00:40:37.000That means we've become political activists, in a sense, and some could argue propagandists, right?
00:40:49.000Bernard Goldberg wrote a book, I think it was back in 2001, almost 20 years ago.
00:40:52.000He was also from CBS, a top-line reporter, saying exactly this, that there's massive media bias.
00:40:57.000And she, of course, is not the only one saying this.
00:40:59.000Jill Abramson, who's the New York Times former executive editor, she bashed the paper for its unmistakably anti-Trump editorial direction.
00:41:08.000Apparently, Abramson slammed her successor, Dean Baquet, saying he's endangered the Times' credibility by boosting their readership with constant catering to anti-Trump audiences, according to Mediaite.
00:41:17.000Abramson wrote, quote, The Baquet said publicly he didn't want the Times to be the opposition party.
00:41:21.000His news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump.
00:41:23.000Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.
00:41:28.000It is obvious that the media, in other words, are very much the left.
00:41:32.000Now, there are people like Brian Stelter, and they say, well, why are you using the term the media, broadly speaking?
00:41:38.000People who listen to the show know what I am talking about when I say the media.
00:41:41.000They know that I'm not talking about the minority of media like Fox News or Daily Wire or Daily Caller.
00:41:46.000They know that I'm talking about ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune.
00:41:53.000They know that I'm talking about the vast majority of news organs in the United States.
00:41:58.000Who all share the same editorial slant.
00:42:01.000And they all shared the same editorial slant on Jussie Smollett.
00:42:05.000And they share the same editorial slant when it comes to the coverage of the 2020 presidential race.
00:42:10.000So when Lara Logan breaks the front and she says, guys, like everyone knows what it is that you are.
00:42:16.000When she says that, it's treated by the media with shock and awe.
00:42:20.000Again, this runs directly counter to their own prevailing critical studies theories about literally everything in life.
00:42:25.000The left believes in the area of law that all judicial decisions are actually not based on judicial principles.
00:42:32.000They are based on what the judge's preferred political outcome should be.
00:42:35.000Now, what's amazing about all of this is that if you are going to accuse one side or the other of manipulating law for power purposes, it would have to be the political left that does this on a more frequent basis.
00:42:46.000If you're going to accuse one side of manipulating the facts on a political basis, it would have to be the left.
00:42:52.000In fact, I think there's a lot of projection that goes on on the political left.
00:42:56.000I'm not talking about specific individuals here.
00:42:57.000I'm talking about a generalized mindset that exists in a lot of places, in the legal infrastructure, in the media infrastructure, in the Hollywood infrastructure.
00:43:06.000There's a belief in a lot of these halls of power that it is fine to manipulate facts because, again, if everything is a power relationship, why would we not use our power in order to push views that are good and true and wonderful and convince ourselves in the process that we are doing something positive and good and objectively necessary?
00:43:26.000The reason that President Trump exists, one of the reasons President Trump exists, is because the right began to feel like the left was manipulating the institutions of our public life in order to use their power to cram down certain political opinions, and Trump was a giant middle finger to that.
00:43:40.000That Trump was essentially saying to all of these institutions, you've controlled the narrative for too long, and so I'm just going to ignore whatever narrative it is that you wish to choose.
00:43:50.000And then the left accuses President Trump of being a liar, and they accuse President Trump of manipulating the facts.
00:43:55.000And a lot of people on the right say, well, yeah, you guys have been participating in this too.
00:43:58.000The problem is when both sides tend to agree that there are no more neutral principles.
00:44:04.000But when the left, which has decided there are no neutral principles in law, in journalism, there are no neutral principles.
00:44:08.000There is just our opinion, which is fact.
00:44:11.000And then the right decides, well, look, the left believes that, so why shouldn't our opinion also be treated as fact?
00:44:15.000When there are no more neutral principles, this is how a country falls apart.
00:44:19.000Media bias is not dangerous merely because it's propaganda.
00:44:23.000Media bias is not merely dangerous because it pushes a particular political point of view.
00:44:27.000Media bias is dangerous because it undermines the fundamental neutral principles on which the country is based, and on which Western civilization is based.
00:44:35.000Western civilization, science, politics, they're all based on the idea that reason can separate out opinion from fact.
00:44:42.000That we can all agree on a set of facts, and then we can draw our opinions from that set of facts.
00:44:46.000The opinions may vary, but the facts are the same.
00:44:49.000When the left decided in the 1960s that all human interactions were based on power relationships and that even facts themselves were subject to the vagaries of these power dynamics, that you couldn't even say factual things because the factual things themselves were no longer factual.
00:45:08.000Once the left decided that, we lost all common ground.
00:45:11.000We can't even agree on a set of facts anymore.
00:45:12.000So you have one side arguing from one set of opinions, and one side arguing from another set of opinions, and there is no meeting of the minds.
00:45:21.000What's fascinating about all of this is that you see it really play out in the political sphere most.
00:45:25.000And when we actually get together in person, it tends to dissipate.
00:45:57.000And when the right responds by saying the exercise of power is self-justifying, that the left is doing it anyway, the left is just engaged in this cram-down, so we may as well engage in our cram-downs as well, then how are we supposed to have a conversation?
00:46:10.000If every conversation is just a competition in power dynamics, there is no conversation at all.
00:46:15.000We're just arm-wrestling for who gets to control the government and the levers of power in the United States.
00:46:20.000Alrighty, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
00:46:53.000They are risking their lives and Venezuela's future for a man controlled by the Cuban military and protected by a private army of Cuban soldiers.
00:47:37.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:47:43.000The thing I hate, number one, there is a new study out that shows that the vast majority of citizens in the United States could not pass a basic citizenship test.
00:47:50.000The only state in the United States where people passed a U.S.
00:47:53.000citizenship test, a majority passed a U.S.
00:47:56.000citizenship test, the only state in America is Vermont.
00:47:59.000Ironically, the home of Bernie Sanders, who Barely missed being a Soviet citizen, apparently.
00:48:05.000There's some highlights from the survey which was conducted for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation by Lincoln Park Strategies.
00:48:14.000People did relatively well on some basic questions.
00:48:16.0007 out of 10 knew Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and that FDR was president during World War II.
00:48:20.000But only 43% knew that Woodrow Wilson was president during World War I.
00:48:25.000Nearly one in four thought it was Roosevelt.
00:48:26.000Only 56% knew which countries we fought in World War II.
00:48:30.000Fewer than one third could correctly name three of the original states, which is kind of devastating.
00:48:35.000I mean, they're all along the eastern seaboard, guys.
00:48:37.000More than six out of ten incorrectly thought that the Constitution was written in 1776.
00:48:41.000Nearly four out of ten thought Benjamin Franklin invented the light bulb.
00:48:46.000So, I think, look, as Woodrow Wilson said, democracy is the worst system except for all of the others.
00:48:53.000It does show that we have a serious education problem in our country, and that education problem is not about the problems with our history.
00:48:59.000It's about, like, very, very basic things, like what our country is about, and who the people were who founded it, and what year things happened.
00:49:08.000We have a serious disconnect between what people ought to know about their own country and what they actually do know.
00:50:01.000I mean, I'm glad that she's willing to come forward and testify in public.
00:50:03.000I just find it fascinating how, good for the Washington Post for running this, but let's just say that it would be on the front page of every newspaper in America every single day if a prominent Republican official had been twice accused, credibly, of sexual assault, and then Stayed in office without attempting to refute the allegations in any serious way.
00:50:21.000According to the Washington Post op-ed, by the way, Fairfax denied that he raped me, and he denied Tyson's account as well.
00:50:27.000And for many in the public, the media, and the Virginia General Assembly, that was that.