Jeff Bezos of Amazon exposes the National Enquirer as a blackmail racket, the Democratic Green New Deal gets off to a rough start, and we check in on the mailbag with Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro is the host of the podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show" and founder and CEO of The FiveThirtyEight. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and The Huffington Post. His latest book, "The Dark Side of Politics" is out now and it's available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. If you don't already have a Prime membership, you can get a free trial of Prime membership for just $99.99, which includes unlimited access to all Prime Video streaming services, including Amazon Prime Video, Vimeo, and other major streaming services such as Netflix, HBO, Comedy Central, and Comedy Central. You can get all of these by becoming a Prime Member for free, and get access to the entire Prime Video library for as little as $99 a year. Don't be buried in a pauper's grave! Don t be a victim of the P.O.V.P. scam, and don't miss out on the best of what's to come! Check out the links below for all of the best deals on life insurance, including life insurance. and life insurance policies, from the best brokers in the world! Links mentioned in the show: 1) 2) 3) All Previous Podcast Episodes 4) Free Masterclass 5) Free Training 6) Links From Amazon Prime 7) Links From This Episode 8) 9) Books From This Week's Top Podcasts From This Epidemic? 9] 10) Best Podcast Epilog 11) 12) Best Book of the Week? 13) Best Song of the Day? 14) 15) 16) 17) Best Movie of the Decade? 15 16 17 18) 19) Best Bachelorette 15?) Music from This Week s? 16.) Theme Song from Last Week's Best Song from This Epilogue? 17?) Music by Ian Somerhalder 21) Best Week Ever Credits from This Episode of This Week: "The White House Is My House" by Jeff Bezos
00:00:00.000Jeff Bezos of Amazon exposes the National Enquirer as a blackmail racket, the Democratic Green New Deal gets off to a bit of a rough start, and we check the mailbag.
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00:01:42.000So, the big news of yesterday is that Jeff Bezos went to war, went to war with the National Enquirer.
00:01:48.000Now, to be perfectly accurate, The National Enquirer first went to war with Jeff Bezos.
00:01:52.000Now, you'll recall that Jeff Bezos is the owner of both Amazon and the Washington Post, and he has been in a running gun battle with President Trump for legitimately three, four years now over President Trump's politics, President Trump's belief that the Washington Post is a smear machine against him, and so President Trump has reveled in all of the allegations about Jeff Bezos and all of the new information that Bezos was cheating on his wife with his next-door neighbor, and now they're gonna get a divorce and his wife is gonna walk away with $170 billion or something.
00:02:20.000Well, now it turns out that the National Enquirer was trying to blackmail Bezos.
00:02:25.000They had obtained photos and text messages of Bezos' crotch, basically, and then they went to Bezos and they said, we'd like for you to stop using the Washington Post to investigate us, or these photos might unfortunately leak.
00:02:39.000Well, Bezos then just basically said, all right, well, if you want to play this game, here we go.
00:02:45.000And he just unzipped and put everything on the table.
00:02:47.000So yesterday, in a very long post for medium.com, he wrote, no thank you, Mr. Pecker.
00:02:53.000There is something unbelievable about the fact that the owner of the National Enquirer is named Pecker, which led to the headline in the New York Post, as well as the Huffington Post today, Bezos Exposes Pecker, which is a fantastic, fantastic headline.
00:03:09.000He said, so first of all, just word to the wise, don't blackmail a guy worth $170 billion who also has the capacity to create two-day delivery for anything, right?
00:03:20.000And has drones, like squads of drones that work for him.
00:03:32.000Something unusual happened to me yesterday.
00:03:34.000Actually, for me, it wasn't just unusual, it was a first.
00:03:37.000I was made an offer I couldn't refuse, or at least that's what the top people at the National Enquirer thought.
00:03:42.000I'm glad they thought that, because it emboldened them to put it all in writing.
00:03:46.000Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I've decided to publish exactly what they sent me despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten.
00:03:53.000AMI, the owner of the National Enquirer, led by David Pecker, recently entered into an immunity deal with the Department of Justice related to their role in the so-called catch-and-kill process on behalf of President Trump and his election campaign.
00:04:04.000Mr. Pecker and his company have also been investigated for various actions they've taken on behalf of the Saudi government.
00:04:10.000And sometimes Mr. Pecker mixes it all together.
00:04:12.000After Mr. Trump became president, he rewarded Mr. Pecker's loyalty with a White House dinner to which the media executive brought a guest with important ties to the royals in Saudi Arabia.
00:04:21.000At the time, Mr. Pecker was pursuing business there while also hunting for financing for acquisitions.
00:04:29.000Federal investigators and legitimate media have, of course, suspected and proved that Mr. Pecker has used the Inquirer and AMI for political reasons.
00:04:37.000American media emphatically rejects any assertion that its reporting was instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise.
00:04:45.000Of course, legitimate media have been challenging this assertion for a long time.
00:04:52.000He says, I didn't know much about most of that a few weeks ago when intimate text messages from me were published in the National Enquirer.
00:04:58.000I engaged investigators to learn how those texts were obtained and to determine the motives for the many unusual actions taken by the Enquirer.
00:05:05.000As it turns out, there are now several independent investigations looking into this matter.
00:05:09.000To lead my investigation, I retained Gavin DeBecker.
00:05:11.000I've known Mr. DeBecker for 20 years, his expertise in this arena is excellent, and he's one of the smartest and most capable leaders I know.
00:05:17.000I asked him to prioritize protecting my time, since I have other things I prefer to work on, and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter.
00:05:27.000My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me.
00:05:30.000It's unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.
00:05:36.000President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets.
00:05:40.000Also, the post-essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certain circles.
00:05:48.000Several days ago, an AMI leader advised us that Mr. Pecker is apoplectic about our investigation.
00:05:53.000For reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve.
00:05:57.000A few days after hearing about Mr. Pecker's apoplexy, we were approached verbally at first with an offer.
00:06:02.000They said they had more of my text messages and photos that they would publish if we didn't stop our investigation.
00:06:08.000My lawyers argued that AMI has no right to publish photos, since any person holds the copyright to their own photos, and since the photos in themselves don't add anything newsworthy.
00:06:16.000That is the case, by the way, that Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan made against Gawker, and basically bankrupted Gawker.
00:06:22.000AMI's claim of newsworthiness is that the photos are necessary to show Amazon shareholders that my business judgment is terrible.
00:06:28.000I founded Amazon in my garage 24 years ago and drove all the packages to the post office myself.
00:06:32.000Today, Amazon employs more than 600,000 people.
00:06:35.000I will let those results speak for themselves.
00:06:37.000Okay, back to their threat to publish intimate photos of me.
00:06:39.000I guess we, me, my lawyers, and Gavin DeBecker, didn't react to the generalized threat with enough fear, so they sent this.
00:06:45.000And then the chief content officer, he pasted an email from the chief content officer of AMI to the litigation council for DeBecker about Jeff Bezos.
00:06:53.000And it says, Marty, I am leaving the office for the night.
00:06:56.000However, in the interest of expediating this situation and with the Washington Post poised to publish unsubstantiated rumors of the Washington Inquirer's initial report, I wanted to describe to you the photos obtained during your news gathering.
00:07:07.000In addition to the below the belt selfie, otherwise colloquially known as a bleep pic, the Inquirer obtained a further nine images.
00:07:14.000And then they described the images, including including images from Bezos to his lover, whose name is Sanchez and pictures of his crotch and all the rest.
00:07:25.000Bezos says that got my attention, but not in the way they likely hoped.
00:07:28.000Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a backseat because there's a much more important matter involved here.
00:07:33.000If, in my position, I can't stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?
00:07:37.000On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.
00:07:45.000In the AMI letters I'm making public, you will see the precise details of their extortionate proposal.
00:07:49.000They will publish the personal photos unless Gavin DeBecker and I make the specific false public statement to the press that we have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI's coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.
00:08:02.000If we do not agree to affirmatively publicize that specific lie, they'll say they'll publish the photos and quickly, and there's an associated threat.
00:08:08.000They'll keep the photos on hand and publish them in the future if we ever deviate from the lie.
00:08:12.000Be assured, no real journalists ever propose anything like what is happening here.
00:08:16.000I will not report embarrassing information about you if you do X for me.
00:08:19.000And if you don't do X quickly, I will report the embarrassing information.
00:08:23.000Nothing I might write here could tell the National Enquirer's story as eloquently as their own words below, and then he just dumps out all of their emails.
00:08:33.000Number one, AMI was being used as a go-between by President Trump during the campaign to pay off various women.
00:08:39.000And that, obviously, has been reported on.
00:08:42.000The dot that has yet to be connected and the one the media are jumping on here is the suggestion that President Trump both hates the Washington Post and used AMI as a go-between.
00:08:49.000So maybe the reason that AMI was going after Bezos is because Bezos was going after Trump.
00:08:55.000So basically, AMI was afraid that Bezos was gonna discover some sort of corrupt relationship between the Saudi government and AMI on the one hand and the Saudi government and the Trump administration on the other, and this corrupt triangle colluded together to go after Jeff Bezos, and then AMI tried to blackmail Bezos.
00:09:11.000To that notion, apparently DeBecker has now been telling reporters that he thinks that Bezos' text message were actually obtained, maybe, by a government source, meaning that the phone wasn't hacked Instead, government data gathering allowed the Trump administration to grab these text messages and then hand them off to AMI.
00:09:29.000Obviously, if that's true, Trump gets impeached, right?
00:09:31.000I mean, if that's true, then it's the end of the road for the Trump administration using government resources in order to grab the text messages of your political opposition in the reportorial field.
00:09:41.000And then blackmail, that would be the end of the line for president, I mean, forget about impeachment, he'd go to jail, right?
00:09:45.000I mean, that's an actual crime for a variety of reasons.
00:09:48.000But beyond that, they're trying to now connect dots that have not yet been connected.
00:09:52.000Nobody really understands why AMI was going after Bezos.
00:10:01.000He calls it the Amazon Washington Post.
00:10:04.000He's been going after Bezos for years on Twitter.
00:10:07.000The idea that AMI was blackmailing Bezos to stop reporting about their connection with the Saudi government, were they doing that on their own?
00:10:14.000If they were doing it on their own, it just demonstrates what we've already known, which is that AMI is basically just a payoff organization and is used by various rich people in order to shut down stories they don't like.
00:10:53.000I was one of the first subscribers to Amazon Prime.
00:10:55.000I've been a member of Amazon since like 1998.
00:10:57.000But putting aside my own business interest in this, journalists blackmailing people, people blackmailing people generally is really disgusting.
00:11:06.000And trying to suggest that you're going to reveal personal information about someone unless they do what you want is not only a violation of law, it is a breach of basic human decency.
00:13:31.000Obviously, it means nothing, but there are other shoes that are going to drop here.
00:13:35.000Here's the statement American media made in response to Jeff Bezos.
00:13:38.000They said, Okay, he's not making claims.
00:13:40.000that it acted lawfully in the reporting of the story of Mr. Bezos.
00:13:42.000Further, at the time of the recent allegations made by Mr. Bezos, it was in good faith negotiations to resolve all matters with him.
00:13:49.000Nonetheless, in light of the nature of the allegations published by Mr. Bezos, the board has convened and determined that it should promptly and thoroughly investigate the claims.
00:13:55.000Upon completion of that investigation, the board will take whatever appropriate action is necessary.
00:14:13.000I am highly amused by the reaction of everyone to AOC's Green New Deal.
00:14:18.000So if you didn't listen to yesterday's show, you should go back and listen to yesterday's show where I broke down in full detail AOC's Green New Deal.
00:14:24.000There was a resolution put forward on the floor of the House that was basically a series of aspirational motions about what we should do with the energy industry in the United States.
00:14:33.000And then AOC had the temerity to put online a six-page summary of all the things the Green New Deal stood for.
00:14:40.000This was a very bad thing as it turns out, because it turns out that AOC and her team have the combined brainwattage of a kumquat.
00:14:46.000It was, I mean, the document is just astonishing.
00:14:49.000It is one of the worst political documents I have ever seen put together by human hands.
00:14:53.000It's, it's incredibly stupid in every, every aspect.
00:14:57.000And yet, and yet, it was endorsed by every single top Democrat running for president of the United States.
00:15:04.000Cory Booker, Spartacus, he said, excited to join AOC and Senator Ed Markey on a historic Green New Deal resolution to address the peril of climate change and worsening inequality.
00:15:15.000Our history is a testimony to the achievement of what some think is impossible.
00:15:27.000Senator Elizabeth Warren says, if we want to live in a world with clean air and water, we have to take real action to combat climate change now.
00:15:33.000I'm proud to join AOC and Senator Markey on a Green New Deal resolution to fight for our planet and our kids' futures because I want to paint with all the colors of the wind.
00:15:45.000And then you had Kamala Harris, the brilliant newcomer from California who spends her days going after the Knights of Columbus and spends her evenings going after gang rape allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.
00:15:57.000She says, I am proud to co-sponsor AOC and Ed Markey's Green New Deal.
00:16:01.000We must aggressively tackle climate change, which poses an existential threat to our nation.
00:16:08.000We also had Kirsten Gillibrand, who said, a Green New Deal is ambitious, it's bold.
00:16:13.000And I'm co-sponsoring this resolution with AOC and Senator Markey because it's exactly the kind of action it will take to conquer the biggest threat of our lifetime.
00:16:20.000Also, I'm against the resolution, but I'm also for the resolution.
00:16:23.000But I'm against the resolution and also for the resolution.
00:16:25.000Kirsten Gillibrand, with her typical savoir-faire and stolidity in support of her ideals.
00:16:31.000So all four senators who are currently running for president on the Democratic side endorse the Green New Deal.
00:16:37.000Bernie Sanders had nothing to say about it.
00:16:39.000He was busy presumably eating pudding.
00:17:00.000None of these Senators have been asked about her proposals to, for example, replace all air travel by rail, including presumably from Hawaii, which led Mazie Hirono, the Senator from Hawaii, who is a Democrat, to say, uh, what now?
00:17:13.000And then the proposal says that we should pay for full benefits, retirement, vacation for anyone unable or unwilling to work She says we should retrofit or replace every building in the United States in the next 10 years.
00:17:27.000She says that we should get rid of cow farts by getting rid of the internal combustion engine.
00:18:57.000The official rollout of the Green New Deal on Thursday was met with a barrage of skepticism from well-intentioned fact-checkers, badly-intentioned climate trolls, and desperate-to-look-savvy pundits, all focusing on the logistical and political impossibilities of transforming the economy as rapidly as the Green New Deal envisions.
00:19:31.000It's a version of AOC put out something so ridiculously stupid that it makes her sound as though she was dropped multiple times on her head as a baby.
00:19:39.000I mean, this proposal is so bad, it can only have been written by somebody who is mentally deficient in some way.
00:19:44.000It is a seriously ridiculous proposal on its face.
00:20:31.000Because if you actually spec out the impact on climate, if the United States were to achieve full zero emissions, you know what would happen?
00:20:39.000Over the course of the next century, it would lower the global temperature, according to the IPCC, by something like 0.2 degrees Celsius.
00:20:47.000Because it turns out that the real threat to the climate, if you believe in climate change, man-made climate change, the real threat to the climate is coming from not industrialized countries at this point, but developing countries like China and India, who have no interest whatsoever in lowering their emissions.
00:22:18.000The nice folks at ExpressVPN have now extended special pricing of less than $7 per month to all of my fans, so visit expressvpn.com slash ben to claim that discount again.
00:22:27.000That is expressvpn.com slash ben to learn more.
00:22:30.000Again, they are consistently rated the world's number one VPN service for a reason, and it operates in the background of your computer seamlessly.
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00:23:24.000With a sweeping resolution intended to redefine the national debate on climate change by calling for the United States to eliminate additional emissions of carbon by 2030.
00:23:32.000The measure, drafted by freshman representative AOC and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, is intended to answer the demand by the party's restive base for a grand strategy that combats climate change, creates jobs, and offers an affirmative response to the challenge to core party values posed by President Trump.
00:23:48.000The resolution has more breadth than detail and is so ambitious that Republicans greeted it with derision.
00:23:53.000Well, no, actually, we greeted it with derision not because it's ambitious, but because it legitimately has no plan for achieving anything that it says it wants to achieve other than completely destroying the United States economy.
00:24:05.000Its legislative prospects are bleak in the foreseeable future.
00:24:08.000Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California has no plan to bring the resolution in its current form to the floor for a vote, according to a Democratic leadership aide.
00:24:48.000Now, what's hilarious is that the New York Times suggests that Ms.
00:24:50.000Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi, is on the wrong side of history.
00:24:52.000People online yesterday, it was delicious.
00:24:54.000I mean, it was so delicious, as Neon Taster put it, that it must be fattening.
00:24:58.000People online, on the left, were suggesting that Nancy Pelosi is now a climate denier because she was not supportive enough of the Green New Deal.
00:25:09.000Pelosi is likely mindful of her own past mistakes.
00:25:11.000A decade ago, she pushed the last major climate change measure hard, an ambitious bill to cap emissions of climate warming pollution.
00:25:17.000She got a cap-and-trade measure through the House.
00:25:19.000The next year, Democrats were swept from power.
00:25:21.000So now she's afraid, but she's letting her critics on the left know about her own past efforts and saying she's making climate change the flagship issue of her first speakership.
00:25:32.000Proponents of the Green New Deal insist that Democrats are unified.
00:25:36.000Ocasio-Cortez said, I think it is a green dream because Pelosi kind of dismissed it yesterday.
00:25:43.000Pelosi said, well, you know, I'm enthusiastic.
00:25:45.000Here's what Nancy Pelosi had to say because she again, she's not a complete dolt when it comes to, you know, running the Congress.
00:25:51.000Here's what she had to say yesterday about the green dream.
00:25:54.000Is the Green New Deal proposal a useful baseline?
00:25:56.000Quite frankly, I haven't seen it, but I do know that it's enthusiastic, and we welcome all the enthusiasms that are out there.
00:26:04.000The Green New Deal points out the fact that the public is much more aware of the challenge that we face, and that is a good proposal.
00:26:13.000The public sentiment will help us pass the most bold common denominator, the bold initiatives.
00:26:20.000I'm very excited about it all, and I welcome the Green New Deal and any other proposals that people have out there.
00:26:26.000Okay, what she actually means there is I don't welcome the Green New Deal.
00:26:29.000This is a very stupid thing, but I'm going to pretend to be enthusiastic because I don't want people yelling at me.
00:26:33.000That's really what she is saying there.
00:26:36.000Now, what's hilarious about all of this, what's hilarious about all of this is that AOC can't even keep herself straight on what exactly this necessitates.
00:26:44.000So yesterday, yesterday morning, she was asked whether, in fact, this Green New Deal would necessitate massive government intervention.
00:26:52.000And again, For all the people out there saying that she is savvy and smart, I don't know what to tell you.
00:26:59.000I mean, if you are of the view that AOC is some sort of brilliant newcomer, I'm gonna play you two clips in a row, and you gotta tell me how exactly she's a genius.
00:27:05.000Here she goes, saying that maybe this might necessitate massive government intervention.
00:27:10.000As you know, Congresswoman, one reason that people who are politically conservative are skeptical of efforts to combat climate change is that it sounds to them like it requires massive government intervention, which they just don't like.
00:27:22.000Are you prepared to put on the table that, yes, actually, they're right.
00:27:26.000What this requires is massive government intervention?
00:27:31.000Fast forward about six hours, here is AOC with Meet the Press' Chuck Todd.
00:27:36.000One way that the right does try to mischaracterize what we're doing as though it's like some kind of massive government takeover.
00:27:44.000Obviously what we're trying to do is, well obviously it's not that because what we're trying to do is release the investments from the federal government to mobilize those resources across the country.
00:27:57.000You know, in the real world, we call that being a damned liar, right?
00:28:01.000I mean, we just call that being a liar.
00:28:02.000Like, within six hours, she goes from, sure, it's a massive government intervention, and then after the blowback, she's like, well, no, these Republicans, they're pouncing.
00:28:09.000They keep characterizing it as a massive government takeover.
00:28:12.000It's not a massive government takeover.
00:28:13.000It's a massive government intervention.
00:28:14.000But, sorry, sorry, I shouldn't say that.
00:28:16.000It's not a massive government intervention.
00:28:20.000So we're all supposed to take her seriously.
00:28:22.000We're all supposed to pretend she's not a damn liar.
00:28:24.000She's a damn liar, because all you have to do is read the words on her own website, which were so stupid that her own campaign had to take them off her website.
00:28:32.000She memory-holed her own six-page proposal yesterday.
00:28:35.000But we're supposed to believe, according to the media, that it's an act of genius, and also, we are not supposed to ask Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, or Kirsten Gillibrand about any of the details in AOC's proposal.
00:28:45.000We're not supposed to ask them about that.
00:28:48.000I very rarely get angry at media bias anymore because it's just a fact of the world.
00:28:52.000It's just like the sun rising every morning.
00:28:54.000But it is absolutely stomach-churning how disgusting the media are at their job.
00:28:58.000I'm talking about the mainstream media who will not ask any one of the top Democratic nominees how they feel about things like partial birth abortion.
00:29:04.000They won't get an answer, a straight answer from any of the top Democratic nominees about what should happen.
00:29:09.000With sexual assault allegations against Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax in Virginia.
00:29:13.000They won't ask anyone of these top Democratic nominees if they believe that those unwilling to work should be paid for unwillingness to work, according to AOC's plan.
00:29:21.000Or why they think AOC's plan is so brilliant.
00:29:23.000They're not going to be asked about a single detail to abolish Air travel?
00:29:27.000They're not going to be asked about any of those things.
00:29:29.000Instead, we'll just get the New York Times assuming that it's a breathtakingly ambitious proposal.
00:29:33.000And if we look at the details, it's because we are not looking closely enough.
00:29:37.000It's because we are not looking closely enough.
00:29:38.000Because if you push away all of the details, if you push away the thickets of details of that six-page proposal, what you get to is a gem, a gem of genius, which is that we should care.
00:30:22.000We had a lot of good fun with our subscribers yesterday during the breaks.
00:30:26.000I take questions during some of the breaks, and it is a blast.
00:30:29.000You're going to want to be part of that.
00:30:30.000Also, you could have asked us questions during the Daily Wire State of the Union backstage.
00:30:34.000We have one coming up for the Oscars as well that's going to be awesome.
00:30:37.000And we have our Sunday special, which allows you to get the—if you're a subscriber, you get the last question of the Sunday special— You can't get it.
00:30:43.000And also you get it a day early, so it becomes the Saturday special for you.
00:30:46.000Our next Sunday special guest is none other than the great Gary Sinise.
00:30:49.000And if you're a subscriber, you and only you can watch that episode a full day early.
00:30:53.000Not only that, all upcoming Sunday special episodes will be available on Saturday, but only if you are a Daily Wire subscriber.
00:31:32.000It feels like... The term gaslighting comes from an actual movie called Gaslight, in which a woman basically is driven mad by her husband.
00:31:45.000And the reason it's called Gaslighting is because what he does to drive her crazy is every evening, he lowers the lights on the lamps, and then he tells her that the lights are not actually lower on the lamps.
00:31:54.000He lowers the lights on the lamps and then she looks around and she's like, why does it seem dark in here?
00:32:57.000So you're going to have to own comments like this.
00:32:59.000Here's AOC yesterday explaining that ICE should be abolished and does not deserve one dime of funding.
00:33:04.000We're here to say that an agency like ICE, which repeatedly and systematically violates human rights, does not deserve a dime.
00:33:15.000They do not deserve a dime until they can prove that they are honoring human rights Until they can make a good faith effort to expand and embrace immigrants, until they can prove good faith to an American ideal, they do not deserve any resources for their radical agenda.
00:34:02.000Which is a full-on La Raza radical argument.
00:34:04.000Here she is making that argument yesterday publicly in front of microphones, but we're all supposed to ignore it because we only pay attention when AOC is on the cover of a magazine smiling or when she's dancing on a rooftop.
00:34:14.000We don't pay any attention to the dumb crap that falls out of her mouth on a regular basis.
00:34:18.000We are standing on native land, and Latino people are descendants of native people, and we cannot be told and criminalized simply for our identity or our status.
00:34:33.000Latino people are not all descendants of native people.
00:34:35.000If by native people she means people who occupied the continental United States.
00:34:39.000There are lots of Latino people, by the way, who are from, you know, like South and Central America, and whose ancestors came from there.
00:34:45.000So the notion that everybody coming up from Honduras is actually a descendant of a person who is living in Arizona in 1722 is obviously untrue.
00:35:02.000One of the great annoyances that I have with the way the media cover these things, if a Republican does something bad, every Republican is asked whether they agree or disagree, and is asked to own it or disown it.
00:35:13.000When a Democrat does something bad, then every Democrat is asked whether they like cheese.
00:35:18.000Just random questions that have nothing to do with the topic.
00:35:21.000And there's never any follow-up questions.
00:35:23.000So yesterday, for example, Kamala Harris, who is the Democratic frontrunner for the 2020 nomination, she was asked about the situation with Justin Fairfax in Virginia, who has now been credibly accused of sexual assault.
00:35:34.000And she says that the accuser is credible, but she does not call for Fairfax's resignation.
00:35:38.000Now, the natural follow-up question would be and should be weird, because you thought that Brett Kavanaugh should be disqualified from the Supreme Court by an accusation alone.
00:35:49.000I think that the letter written by the woman reads as a credible account, and I think there should be an investigation to get to the bottom of it and determine the facts.
00:36:06.000Certainly her letter reads as it's quite detailed and suggests that there's credibility there but there needs to be an investigation to determine what exactly happened.
00:37:48.000It's absolutely frustrating to see some of the dumbest people in the world say some of the dumbest things and then be feeded as the smartest people in the world by some of the dumbest people in the world.
00:37:57.000That's a summary of our current political situation.
00:38:06.000I had a discussion with my professor regarding unconscious bias and discrimination, and I held that affirmative action policies make generalizations based on race that are unnecessary given accessibility to individual information of applicants.
00:38:16.000He directed me to a number of sociological studies that seem to demonstrate racial discrimination in employment hiring, with the disparities in response to white and black applicants being statistically significant over the last couple of decades.
00:38:27.000Well, I can think of some alternative explanations that can explain away some of the relation.
00:38:49.000The sociological studies that are most often cited, things that suggest, for example, That people with black first names get hired less often than people with white first names are ignoring other studies that also suggest that if you use black last names and white last names, there is no discrimination.
00:39:03.000In other words, what people are discriminating against is an assumption that may or may not be justified about culture and not an assumption about race per se.
00:39:13.000In other words, if you were to receive an application from a Jewish person and it were to say on the application, Yechezkel, as a first name, And then you were to receive an application from a Jewish person, just a David.
00:39:25.000You might treat those two applications differently because Yehezkel probably implies the person keeps Sabbath and is not going to be able to work from Friday night to Saturday night, for example.
00:39:33.000That's because one is a Hebrew name and one is a name that also applies in English.
00:39:38.000The same thing can apply to first names.
00:39:39.000So if that's the study you're talking about, that's my response to that study.
00:39:42.000As far as anti-discrimination law, my feeling is that if people are being dumb enough not to hire productive black citizens, then that's a competitive advantage for a lot of businesses that are willing to hire competitive black citizens.
00:39:53.000So I'd like to see the sociological studies, frankly, before I analyze them.
00:39:57.000Again, I don't want to give short shrift to studies that I haven't read.
00:40:02.000And also, again, affirmative action programs would not actually countermand the unwillingness to use individual data.
00:40:09.000Very often people are using generalized data about groups because they are not allowed to ask about individual data.
00:40:14.000So, for example, the Obama administration refused to allow federal contractors to ask about prior criminal status for people they were hiring.
00:40:23.000Because a lot of companies were simply using group data on prison statistics instead of individualized data about whether this person went to jail in the absence of individual data.
00:40:32.000Melissa says, "Mr. Shapiro, my husband and I have very different opinions on how the 2020 election will pan out.
00:40:38.000I think that the Democrats have been united by such loathing for Trump that they will come out in droves to vote in 2020.
00:40:43.000My husband thinks that Trump will defy all odds yet again because that's just what he does.
00:41:15.000There's a new poll out today from Optimist that shows that in the national race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, it is Trump 45, Harris 44.
00:41:24.000All Democrats had to do was not be bat bleep insane, and they just couldn't do it.
00:41:33.000I am writing an essay on common stereotypes of conservatives and how it is harmful to the group.
00:41:37.000I seek your advice on what you believe are those common stereotypes.
00:41:40.000Well, there's one that has been put out by Eric Fromm.
00:41:42.000It's been used for now 60 years, basically suggesting that conservatives are authoritarian, that they have too much respect for authority, and therefore they're big fans of government telling people what to do.
00:42:01.000There are also stereotypes about how conservatives are racist and bigoted and sexist and homophobic.
00:42:05.000Again, those stereotypes are unjustified by the realities, but it is simply a way for the left to suggest that the politics with which they disagree are ill-motivated as opposed to simple disagreements.
00:42:17.000Steven says, Hey Ben, what do you do to decompress when you're frustrated?
00:43:14.000African-Americans, historically speaking, started to align with the Democratic Party long before the 1960s Civil Rights Act and welfare programs came into effect.
00:43:22.000They started to do so during the FDR administration, and then they continued to do so over the years as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act moved forward, and mainly as a lot of welfare programs began to come online.
00:43:37.000I mean, if you're disproportionately receiving government benefits, then why wouldn't you vote for an increase in those government benefits?
00:43:43.000But, to suggest that that is solely due to the politics of the 1960s is to ignore the trend lines which began in the 1930s of black Americans moving away from the Republican Party and toward the Democratic Party in large numbers.
00:43:55.000Samuel says, Ben, how do you suggest young people get involved in local politics successfully?
00:44:16.000I'm a senior at a private Catholic high school.
00:44:18.000Today we were discussing poverty and its causes, and I, being an outspoken person, brought up your point for how not to stay poor in the United States and how cultures in cyclical poverty-stricken areas have reinforced these bad habits.
00:44:28.000My opponents insinuated I was racist and my generalizations were disrespectful to the poor.
00:44:32.000Any tips on debating this issue and any good sources I could reference?
00:44:35.000Yes, I always reference the Brookings Institute.
00:44:37.000The Census Bureau has numbers that prove that this is the case.
00:44:40.000Every study ever done has shown that single motherhood is linked to intergenerational poverty and crime.
00:44:45.000And, again, when people suggest you're a racist, your first response should be, well, you're a jackass because you have no evidence I'm a racist.
00:44:51.000You just want to ignore the point of my argument.
00:44:55.000It's really a pathetic move by people to say that when you say, you know, people should make responsible decisions to avoid poverty, and then they respond by calling you a racist, that that's somehow okay.
00:45:04.000It is not okay, it is nasty, it is gross, and it is unjustifiable.
00:45:08.000Let's see, Race says, Hey Ben, as a 17-year-old conservative from Vermont, I was wondering how you think Generation Z will affect voting in the country over time, since for our age we are pretty conservative.
00:45:17.000I know also many others my age who are secretly conservative.
00:45:19.000I wonder if you think this would affect polling data.
00:45:22.000I think there's a backlash to the PC SJW culture, mainly because they're so boring and annoying.
00:45:27.000Honestly, are there any less fun people than the SJW class on college campuses and in the media?
00:45:34.000People who make you feel like you have to look over your shoulder every minute of every day so that you have not offended their shifting moral standards, that apparently do not include killing babies up to point of birth, but do include random microaggressions that they just defined in the last two minutes.
00:45:48.000David says, hey Ben, thanks for spending more than six hours of your State of the Union Tuesday in front of a camera for our pleasure.
00:46:07.000I think negotiating with the Taliban is a mistake.
00:46:08.000I think that we should have gone in and we should have Basically installed a dictator and gotten out, because democracy is not going to flourish in Afghanistan.
00:46:16.000Now, you can install a dictator who is friendlier to particular rights that we hold dear.
00:46:20.000This is the case in, for example, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates.
00:46:24.000Those areas of the world are dictatorships that have respect for certain basic rights, like freedom of religion, in a way that a lot of democracies, so-called democracies like Hamasistan in the Gaza Strip, obviously do not.
00:46:36.000No, it's not the ideal, but to pretend that every Culture and every tribal situation is equally prepared for democracy that will end with a neoliberal-style democracy is just foolhardy and untrue.
00:47:00.000So I was already in the workforce and we spent an awful lot of money as we went through with me like paying off her bills we went.
00:47:07.000So she came out of medical school debt-free.
00:47:09.000But that is because we were a couple already.
00:47:12.000As far as taking loans, you know, there are some people like Dave Ramsey who suggest that you shouldn't take loans even for medical school.
00:47:18.000You should go out and work for a few years, build up your nut, basically, and then go out and spend that on medical schooling.
00:47:24.000I'm not of the opinion that that is necessary.
00:47:27.000But, you know, you find the lowest interest loan you can and then don't get behind on the payments.
00:47:31.000If you have to take a side job, you take a side job.
00:47:33.000Avery says, I'm a freshman at James Madison University.
00:47:35.000In multiple classes this year, professors have used the 2008 financial crisis as evidence that the free market must be regulated.
00:47:41.000They say the conservative governance leading up to the crisis and the deregulation of financial markets directly caused the recession.
00:47:47.000Is this characterization of events correct?
00:47:50.000Deregulation of the financial markets combined with massive government intervention in the financial markets is what caused this.
00:47:57.000So the United States does not have a full-scale free market system It has closer to a corporatist system in which government policy skews incentives.
00:48:04.000So, to take an example, the subprime mortgage crisis that melted down beginning in 2007 and then extending into 2008, that was caused largely by the government guaranteeing loans from particular companies because they wanted more minority homeowners to get into houses at subprime mortgage rates.
00:48:22.000Subprime mortgages were created for people with poor credit scores who wanted to get into housing.
00:48:29.000The government was happy to back a lot of those loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and then all those went belly up.
00:48:36.000It turns out a lot of people were going bankrupt.
00:48:37.000Now, what happened is that while there was still demand that was artificially boosted by the federal government, then the basic assumption made by the market forces was, okay, well, let's say we give a loan, a subprime loan, and somebody doesn't pay off the loan.
00:48:50.000We go back in, we seize the house, we flip it, and then next week we sell it for more.
00:48:53.000So we don't actually lose money on the deal.
00:48:55.000That's only true as long as the market keeps going up.
00:48:57.000So they were slicing and dicing all these subprime mortgages, and they were creating derivative products where they were combining those subprime mortgages with higher value mortgages and then grading all of it A-plus, basically, and selling it on the open market.
00:49:07.000That's why it had ramifications when all the subprime mortgages melted down into the It took down all of these derivatives with them.
00:49:14.000Those derivatives had been used in trades by a variety of financial firms, and those financial firms went bankrupt off the back end.
00:49:21.000So when people say that it was really about Glass-Steagall and hedge funds being able to both invest and also to do banking, it really wasn't about that.
00:49:30.000It was about the government skewing the incentives and creating a false bubble that eventually burst because people were being told that there was no consequence.
00:49:37.000If they put out a mortgage to a person who could not pay back the mortgage.
00:49:41.000It was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac all the way that was really involved in causing the subprime mortgage crisis.
00:49:47.000And then, as far as government interventionism, it is probably true that absent government interventionism, in order to save those financial firms, the fallout from the meltdown is broader and wider.
00:49:57.000It is also true that maybe if that fallout had been a little bit broader and wider, it would have taken down a lot of the irresponsible financial firms, but Again, the problem with a government-involved system is that the solution very often, unfortunately, to prevent further fallout is more government involvement, which is exactly what happened.
00:50:21.000I recently got into an argument with someone regarding the gender pay gap.
00:50:23.000I told her that the statistics she stated didn't include factors like job choice, hours, etc.
00:50:27.000Her rebuttal was that further studies were conducted that included these factors and had the same determination.
00:50:31.000I know this is wrong, but I want solid evidence to prove my point.
00:50:34.000I'm asking for a few good resources I can turn to for this argument.
00:50:36.000Well, Heather McDonald has written extensively about this.
00:50:38.000Christina Hoff Summers has written extensively about this.
00:50:41.000I do not know of a single study that takes into account Gender, gender inequities in, in job taking, in number of hours worked, in time in the workforce.
00:50:52.000I don't really, really, I don't know of a single study that takes into account all of those things that suggest that the gender pay gap is, for example, 23 cents on the dollar, which is the, which is the proposal of many of the folks who are pushing this nonsense.
00:51:02.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:52:52.000I'm old enough to remember when people like me, meaning me, when people like me Suggested that perhaps John Roberts would be a bad pick for the Supreme Court because he did not have an established record on key issues.
00:53:04.000And then there were people like me who suggested that Brett Kavanaugh also may not have been the world's best pick for the Supreme Court because his record was a little bit spotty on certain key issues like, for example, abortion.
00:53:15.000Well, now it turns out that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the left in a key case from Louisiana.
00:53:21.000According to Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air, he says, say, weren't 5-4 decisions supposed to go the other way now?
00:53:26.000Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the four liberals on the Supreme Court to issue a stay on a tough new abortion law in Louisiana.
00:53:34.000A divided Supreme Court stopped Louisiana from enforcing new regulations on abortion clinics in a test of the conservative court's views on abortion rights.
00:53:41.000The justices said, by a 5-4 vote late Thursday, they will not allow the state to put into effect a law that requires abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.
00:53:50.000Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court's four liberals in putting a hold on the law pending a full review of the case.
00:53:56.000And then it turns out that Brett Kavanaugh also wrote in a dissent that the situation was not ripe for the court's scrutiny.
00:54:03.000He said, between us, the case largely turns on the intensely factual question of whether three doctors can obtain admitting privileges.
00:54:09.000If we denied the stay, the question could be readily and quickly answered without disturbing the status quo or causing harm to the parties or the affected women and without this court's further involvement at this time.
00:54:19.000So basically, his logic actually spelled out the same logic as John Roberts, he just dissented.
00:54:26.000But the bottom line is it looks like Roberts and Kavanaugh are the new swing votes on the Supreme Court and that the replacement of Kennedy with Kavanaugh and the replacement of, I'm trying to remember who went down for Roberts to take over.
00:54:40.000But in any case, the putting of John, was it Rehnquist?
00:55:19.000Otherwise, we will see you here next week.
00:55:20.000Make sure to tune in for our Sunday special and subscribe so it becomes a Saturday special with Gary Sinise, a world-famous actor and terrific director.
00:55:35.000The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villarreal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay, our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
00:55:45.000Edited by Adam Sajovic, audio is mixed by Mike Karamina, hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera, production assistant Nick Sheehan.
00:55:51.000The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.