On Monday, a North Carolina jury deadlocked over the question of Officer Michael Slager s guilt in the shooting of an unarmed black man, Walter Scott. The media, of course, went insane. They suggested the missed trial was a result of deep-seated American racism. But the only reason that Slager wasn t convicted in this trial was because one holdout juror was ready to convict for murder. The prosecutor in this case immediately declared her intention to retry the case, as well as she should. Now, thanks to one juror, we're supposed to believe that all of America is systemically racist. Even though the Governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, issued a statement explaining, "It is my understanding that there will be, as quickly as possible, a new trial where the Scott family will hopefully receive the closure a verdict brings." But most of the country is rightly outraged, and Slager will now face trial again. Ben Shapiro on Walter Scott and the media s rush to judgment on the Slager case: "America is racist, and the system is evil." The greatest column in the history of mankind, coming up in just a second, on The Huffington Post's "Best Column in the History of Menstrualism." It really is pretty spectacular, isn t it? Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Podchaser and Subscribe to his new show, Hidden America, wherever you get your news and information? Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's newest podcast on the internet, The Sixteenth Grade. Subscribe to the Ben Shapiro Podcast, wherever he goes! It's pretty funny, isn't it? It s pretty good, right? And it's also pretty funny. And it s pretty smart, too good, too much of it's not good, really really good? It s not bad, really is good, I bet you re gonna be a good thing, right?? So use the code code code: code code at Ben Shapiro is and it s not that s not funny, right sie seeeeeeeeee so you re not gonna have it, right so sie reeeeeeedeedeedeeeeeeeeeeeeedeeeedeee, right he s not gonna be that seeeedeeeee ... . Thanks, Ben Shapiro, right And then you can use that code at checkout it soso, right now?
00:00:00.000On Monday, a North Carolina jury deadlocked over the question of Officer Michael Slater's guilt in the shooting of an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, in the back.
00:00:22.000The prosecutor in this case immediately declared her intention to retry the case, as well as she should.
00:00:26.000Video shows the officer shooting Scott in the back, then sauntering over to Scott's prone body, handcuffing him and dropping an object near the body.
00:00:34.000The prosecutor argued, quote, his first instinct after the shots were fired and he cuffs a dead Walter Scott was to stage, was to stage the scene.
00:00:40.000Slager then lied to the cops about the circumstances surrounding the shooting.
00:00:43.000He claimed that Scott had charged him and he killed Scott in defense of his own life.
00:00:46.000Now, thanks to one juror, we're supposed to believe that all of America is systemically racist, even though the governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, issued a statement explaining, quote, it is my understanding that there will be, as quickly as possible, a new trial where the Scott family and all of South Carolina will hopefully receive the closure a verdict brings.
00:01:02.000Instead of recognizing that the vast majority of Americans are disgusted with this mistrial, and that the justice system has yet to even come to a real conclusion on Slager, the media instead use the Slager case to show America's racist and the system's evil.
00:01:14.000They point to the fact that virtually no officers are convicted for murder, which makes sense, since most officer-involved shootings occur in disputed circumstances with criminals, and it's difficult to prove a murder case against officers absent clear and convincing evidence.
00:01:27.000Statistically speaking, 78 officers have been prosecuted for killings in the United States since 2005.
00:01:32.000Just under 30 were, in fact, convicted of manslaughter.
00:04:06.000And don't worry, we'll get to Donald Trump in Boeing, we'll get to Donald Trump and more on Carrier.
00:04:11.000There's a lot of information that's now coming out.
00:04:14.000We'll get to Donald Trump in the Cabinet.
00:04:16.000Tons of news, but this column deserves all of the attention that I can lavish upon it.
00:04:21.000And so does Stephanie Land, the delightful human being who penned this thing.
00:04:24.000So the title of the column is from the Washington Post, is Trump's election stole my desire to look for a partner.
00:04:33.000Well, first of all, if you ever are going on a date with a woman who wrote something like this, know that this date is going to go extraordinarily poorly.
00:04:41.000It doesn't matter your political perspective.
00:04:42.000If your dating life is ruined by the politics of the federal government, then I would suggest that you need new priorities.
00:04:48.000And this is speaking of someone who immerses himself in politics every single day.
00:05:02.000A half decade younger than I. They'd never seriously consider a relationship with me, the column continues, my two children and our needy dog.
00:05:10.000A man who wouldn't feel the need to step in and rescue me.
00:05:13.000I didn't need rescuing, but I knew deep down that was only partially true.
00:05:16.000I often felt the sort of loneliness that settled in my stomach starting from a chaotic afternoon with my children lasting well into the night when I pulled the covers tight around my chin.
00:05:25.000I can't imagine why this woman was having trouble finding Mr. Right.
00:05:29.000As Andrew Klavan is fond of putting it, if you're so confident it's time to find Mr. Right, perhaps you're not Mrs. Right.
00:05:34.000Maybe you actually need to fix yourself first.
00:05:36.000I've been on my own with my kids for most of the past decade.
00:05:39.000I have no idea what a supportive partner would even look like in my house.
00:05:41.000I imagined it as some sort of potluck.
00:05:44.000We'd both bring the things we have to offer and place them on the table.
00:06:52.000Once it was clear that Donald Trump would be president instead of Hillary Clinton, I felt sick to my stomach.
00:06:58.000I wanted to gather my children in bed with me and cling to them like we would if thunder and lightning were raging outside with winds high enough that the power might go out.
00:07:05.000And then we'd sing, and then we would sing the song from Sound of Music about kittens and noodles and such.
00:07:31.000You'll always remember the day you got a tooth pulled with the day we elected our first female president.
00:07:38.000You can't even let your kid have the memory of the tooth-pulling without you, without, I mean, I do think that those two things, by the way, are related.
00:07:45.000That if we had had Hillary Clinton as president and a tooth-pulling on the same day, there is a certain amount of some sense there.
00:07:51.000When I told her Trump had won, she protested, but mom, you said Hillary was going to win.
00:07:55.000A lot of people thought the same thing.
00:07:56.000I said, I hugged her, a little scared to send her to school, out into the big sky country of the red state where we live.
00:08:01.000You think people are just going to go out and start murdering people who are Democrats in red states?
00:08:05.000Sorry, it turns out that the murder rates are largely in this country confined to blue areas, even in red states.
00:08:10.000So, I mean, if you're worried about the safety of your kid, maybe you shouldn't live in a blue area.
00:08:14.00020 minutes later, at a stoplight on the way to drop off my two-year-old at daycare, steam started creeping out from under the hood of my car.
00:09:04.000I not only have the strength to keep it together mentally and emotionally, well that's questionable, but I also have the strength to carry my daughter home.
00:09:09.000I have the strength to carry all of us.
00:09:23.000He too had been feeling a lot of the same emotions I was experiencing.
00:09:26.000Hopelessness, fear, uncertainty about the future, panic over having to talk to my nine-year-old about anything that might come up at school or what to do in the instance of sexual assault.
00:09:34.000So you weren't going to talk to your daughter about sexual assault if the first gentleman actually raped people, but you're definitely going to have to talk about it now because Trump or something.
00:09:46.000But I couldn't reach out to him anymore, this new guy.
00:10:18.000Like, seriously, what's wrong with that nutty guy who wants to date this?
00:10:21.000Goodness gracious, if I went on a date and some woman showed up wearing a political slogan that said Nasty Woman on it, I'd be like, oh my god, get me the hell out of here as fast as possible.
00:10:31.000It makes me want to cry thinking of that, of seeing my oldest in the shirt I bought her in Washington, D.C.
00:11:47.000You don't have to like the outcome of elections.
00:11:49.000I mean, I was very upset when it turned out the two nominees from the parties were people I couldn't stand, but I somehow went on with my life.
00:11:55.000Somehow my wife and I still had date night, somehow we still brought up our kids, somehow I didn't feel the need to tell my two-and-a-half-year-old that her life in America was over, the country was finished.
00:12:05.000It's just amazing, amazing how over-the-top the folks on the left are.
00:12:08.000Okay, so, sorry, I just had to share that with you because it's
00:12:11.000It's too wonderful in every conceivable way.
00:12:20.000So Trump this morning did something that is very smart.
00:12:23.000Now, I think that Republicans are about to run into a pretty significant conundrum, and it's a conundrum that I've been sort of loathe to cover because it's not clear yet if Trump's going to be popular or not.
00:12:31.000But I think he's actually making some very, very smart political moves, moves that are
00:12:35.000To make him more popular than he is now.
00:12:40.000He's a president who cares almost solely about headlines, and that's a pretty good way to become popular, if you're just reactive to the headlines.
00:12:45.000So there's a headline, and it says, Carrier's leaving.
00:12:47.000So the first thing you do is you brandish a club, and you tell Carrier to get back into line, and then you get a good headline.
00:12:52.000So there's a poll out today that shows 60% of Americans are more likely to like Trump after the Carrier deal.
00:12:56.000There's also a headline today, worth noting, that Carrier is raising its prices.
00:13:01.000When you force Carrier to absorb additional costs in the form of work in the United States, their prices will go up.
00:13:06.000Presumably they will lose business, or presumably you'll have to pay more for an AC piece of machinery.
00:13:11.000But in any case, the fact is that that made Trump popular.
00:13:15.000Trump is now carrying that logic forward.
00:13:17.000He's just gonna do a bunch of things that have no real ideological root to them, other than they make Trump popular, and he feels like doing what he wants.
00:13:24.000And this is not something I'm a fan of.
00:13:26.000I talked last week about this philosophy of pragmatism.
00:13:30.000Pragmatism is the basic idea that you are independently, as President of the United States, capable of solving all problems, and therefore we should hand you ultimate power.
00:13:38.000You can't be pragmatic unless you have power.
00:14:00.000And that means that he's actually going to probably be kind of popular because he will solve some problems that are in the headlines while creating new problems that don't see the headlines.
00:14:08.000The problem with the carrier deal, as I said, and the problem with some of the other actions Trump's about to take is that
00:14:13.000These are things that have some very good headlines because there's a clear beneficiary, in this case the people working at Carrier, but there are a lot of diffuse victims.
00:14:22.000So all the people who have to pay additional taxes in order to pay the subsidy, all the other companies who didn't get the subsidy and now have to compete with Carrier, all the people who would be making money in other branches of United Technologies, and now the money has to be delegated to paying these people in Indiana.
00:15:18.000So aside from the kind of hilarity of Donald Trump trying to cancel a federal contract on Twitter, it is a really, really smart political move.
00:15:26.000It is a very smart political move because it looks like he's trying to cut waste and fraud, and it also looks like he's trying to do it even at his own expense.
00:15:33.000See, I'm the president, and I'm giving up my fancy new plane in order to cut waste and fraud.
00:15:37.000Never mind the trillion-dollar infrastructure package I'm pledging.
00:15:40.000I'm trying to cut waste and fraud with regard to Air Force One.
00:15:42.000Now, number one, a couple minor issues.
00:15:47.000Where the waste and fraud is in this particular contract, or even if there is waste and fraud, Air Force One contains an enormous amount of new technology.
00:15:54.000Every time they update it, Air Force One hasn't been updated in 30 years.
00:15:57.000That's not to say this is the best contract or the most necessary contract.
00:16:00.000It's just to point out that I'd like to see the contract that Trump signs to replace this one for the update of Air Force One.
00:16:07.000But this is really smart stuff, and here's what Trump had to say when he was asked about it at Trump Tower today.
00:16:39.000Because now it looks like he's just trying to get rid of bad contracts.
00:16:43.000You know, the general idea that there are a lot of people who are protesting about what he said there, where he says, we want Boeing to make a lot of money, but not that much money.
00:16:49.000There are some people saying, well, that's the equivalent of Obama saying that he doesn't want companies making too much money.
00:16:54.000Not quite the same thing, because here you're talking about a federal contract under the purview of the Trump administration.
00:16:59.000So if he said that broadly, if he said broadly, we don't want people making too much money, then you're in trouble.
00:17:04.000But if he's just saying, in this federal contract, we think that we're being charged too much, we want to renegotiate the contract, that's not the end of the world.
00:17:46.000Why is Al Gore this hoaxster with regard to climate change?
00:17:49.000And he is, because his solutions, even if you believe,
00:17:52.000In man-made climate change, and there is some evidence to suggest that it's true, there's no proper solution to it.
00:17:56.000And certainly the carbon credit scheme that Al Gore has gotten rich off of is a scam.
00:18:00.000And all of the predictions that Al Gore has made about the climate over the past decade, in an inconvenient truth, all of those have turned out to be exaggerated or false.
00:18:08.000Al Gore goes and he meets with Ivanka, and then he meets with Trump directly.
00:19:19.000And, again, it's popularity as a substitute for principle.
00:19:24.000Donald Trump is doing a lot of things to make himself popular and more broadly appealing, which is smart for him, but I'm not sure that it's smart for Republicans, and it's certainly not smart
00:19:37.000Because Trump is doing all these things that are popular, it's very easy for people to get sucked into the game of mistaking popularity for truth, mistaking popularity for principle.
00:19:46.000Kellyanne Conway tweeted out that poll that I mentioned earlier about the popularity of the carrier move.
00:19:50.000And what I tweeted back was, I was unaware that popularity amounts to doing good, right?
00:19:54.000When Barack Obama did things that were popular, but we didn't like them, we said, those are bad things to do.
00:19:59.000People forget this, but in February 2009, when Obama first took office, he proposed the $800 billion stimulus package.
00:20:55.000Unspoken reasons why he has such loyalty is because people who support him are just like a lot of you in this audience, fed up with being on defense and being on a team that never fought back, much less went on offense.
00:21:10.000But these tweets and this erratic or unpredictable behavior keeps Trump's opponents on defense.
00:21:45.000I'm saying right now, what he's doing right now tactically is actually quite brilliant.
00:21:48.000He's picking issues off the tree, headlines off the tree, and then he's using those headlines in order to boost his own popularity, and then, five in the morning, he sets the agenda for the day with some tweet that drives the press totally insane.
00:21:59.000It's actually quite brilliant what he's doing.
00:22:23.000It's still massively expanding the government.
00:22:26.000However, there will be tangible results.
00:22:32.000And if Trump does this, and if there are witnessable, demonstrable results of modernization at airports, you're going to be hard pressed to get people to find a problem with it.
00:22:43.000Okay, but it's your job to explain why that's a problem, right?
00:22:45.000As a conservative, it's Rush's job to then go on.
00:22:48.000I don't think he's wrong about the political benefits of Trump doing it, but it's his job as a conservative to now explain it, not just as a third-party sort of observer.
00:22:55.000Rush goes, well, you know, some conservatives will find problems with it.
00:23:06.000Mike Pence was asked repeatedly on MSNBC today about Donald Trump's proposal for a 35% tariff on any company that puts a job outside the United States, which, by the way, also encourages companies not to hire up.
00:23:17.000It actually encourages companies to hire fewer people because the last thing you want to do is hire 100 people.
00:23:48.000Do you really believe in those things?
00:23:50.000Well, I believe very much that the American people voted on November 8th for change.
00:23:59.000And change in our domestic policy and in many ways change in our economic relationships around the world.
00:24:05.000I mean, the President-elect ran on a commitment to renegotiate NAFTA, to pull out of the TPP agreement and to deal with countries in the Asian Pacific Rim on an individual basis and negotiate trade agreements with American workers and American jobs.
00:24:22.000You know, I did, but when I first sat down with President-elect, we talked about this.
00:24:27.000He pointed to the fact that whether it's NAFTA or some of these other large agreements, when the United States enters into these agreements with multiple countries, accountability is very difficult and getting out of them is very difficult.
00:24:47.000Because Trump won, and I know that people have voted for Trump.
00:24:49.000Again, this logic didn't hold with Obama, it shouldn't hold for Trump.
00:24:52.000I understand what Trump is doing, and yes, it's brilliant politically, because all he's doing is doing what Democrats have done for 50 years.
00:24:57.000Watch, I'm going to use a lot of infrastructure in order to pay off all my friends, and I'm going to build a giant dam, and then I'm going to put my name on it, and it's going to say FDR right on the side, and then I'm going to be super popular.
00:25:26.000Barack Obama, a very smart politician, didn't do the right thing.
00:25:28.000There is a danger here beyond the principle.
00:25:30.000There is a danger here beyond the principle.
00:25:32.000And this is a real question for a lot of conservatives.
00:25:35.000It's a real question for a lot of conservatives.
00:25:37.000And that question is, what happens if Donald Trump does his day-to-day pragmatism routine, he generates a lot of good headlines for himself, but his overall policy is not good?
00:25:46.000This is what we call the Obama model, where Obama would do something, get a great headline out of it, people would like him, people would think he's great on Kimmel, and then his overall policy is really unpopular.
00:26:21.000Republicans could face the same conundrum here.
00:26:24.000You got a very popular president in Trump, for example, because he's doing this kind of reactive politics.
00:26:28.000See something on the news, do something about it.
00:26:29.000See something on the news, do something about it.
00:26:32.000But the broad policy strokes stink, right?
00:26:34.00035% tariffs that raise prices on American goods, make consumers pay out through the nose.
00:26:39.000Make American workers pay more because we use inputs from other countries.
00:26:44.000Create an interest for American companies in outsourcing immediately instead of later and not hiring enough now because they don't want to be punished for firing people later.
00:26:53.000What if the broad policy strokes end up with Republicans getting punished in Congress, Republicans getting punished on the state level, Republicans getting punished in gubernatorial offices, because let's say that these policies Trump is pushing, like these 35% tariffs, end up helping lead to a recession.
00:27:09.000But Trump is doing fine, because all of his headlines are about what an activist he is, how he's on top of these things, how he's taking them one by one.
00:27:14.000Republicans on a political level are going to have to actually consider whether that's worthwhile or not.
00:27:19.000And now they're stuck between a rock and a hard place.
00:27:21.000Because let's say that Trump is very popular and pushing a very unpopular policy, but he's pushing it so it's more popular.
00:27:27.000But we know that when it goes into effect, it's going to stink.
00:27:33.000In fact, he's activating Kellyanne Conway, apparently, to create this outside government interest group that is going to just stomp for Trumpism.
00:27:42.000It's going to help primary his opponents, and it's going to punish people who don't agree with him, and it's going to be sort of this large-scale, organizing-for-action-style Barack Obama campaign to continuing campaign organization.
00:27:57.000It's a problem for Republicans and it's something they're going to have to consider.
00:28:00.000Well, before we move on, I have to say hello to our advertisers over at Birch Gold.
00:28:05.000So, again, if you're looking at some of these economic policies and they're worrying you, if you're concerned that we're headed toward some economic policies that are going to damage the economy, that are going to raise prices, that are going to make things more expensive, it would be worthwhile for you to take some of your portfolio and invest it in precious metals.
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00:28:42.000And yes, I do have money invested in precious metals, because everybody should have at least a little bit of money invested in precious metals as a hedge against government interventionism.
00:28:51.000Okay, so the big question for Republicans is going to be, will they stand up to Trump, or should they politically stand up to Trump?
00:28:57.000And this is a sort of strategic question, which is, how do you hope to get the best out of the Trump presidency?
00:29:03.000Do you get the best out of the Trump presidency by calling him out when he makes a mistake, or do you assume he's going to do some bad stuff and some good stuff, and you push him to further power because you hope that the good is going to outweigh the bad?
00:29:16.000All I can say is that trusting a politician too much has never ended well.
00:29:20.000Trusting a politician to do the right things, because he's gonna do more good than bad, comes along with a lot of bad, and calling out politicians for doing the wrong things seems to be a more intellectually coherent and politically advantageous position.
00:29:33.000Now, as we continue, we're gonna continue over at dailywire.com, so if you, uh, we have to let you go on Facebook and YouTube, but go over to dailywire.com right now to subscribe.
00:29:41.000Eight dollars a month will get you a subscription.